Ride or Die (7 page)

Read Ride or Die Online

Authors: Solomon Jones

BOOK: Ride or Die
2.92Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
That's why he didn't question it when she told him what she
wanted him to do. If it meant that they would be together, he was willing to do anything.
Sitting there on the stifling second floor of the storefront church, with police milling about below, seeking to arrest him for a murder that would surely bring the death penalty, he didn't ask himself if he had done too much. He asked himself if he had done enough.
Extracting his cell phone from his pocket, he tried calling her once more. The line rang busy.
He put the phone away and settled back to wait. Soon he would make his move. And then she would finally be his.
 
 
Keisha stared at the bearded driver's thick neck over the Buick's backseat and refused to acknowledge Jamal's frequent glances in her direction, lest her true feelings show in her eyes.
She was determined to play the role he'd asked her to. But as she looked out the tinted window at the ramshackle houses and vast empty lots they were passing on the east side of Glenwood Avenue, she wondered how long it would be before Jamal played his.
Her trust in him eroded with each passing moment. After all, Jamal had the gun and could very well use it against her if things went wrong. But it wasn't the gun that kept her there, waiting for the game to play out. The thing that kept her there was her heart.
The circumstances surrounding their love didn't matter to her. What mattered was that she'd given her heart to him all those years ago. And now she was giving it to him again.
Since seeing him at Strawbridge's three weeks before, she'd spent a portion of each day trying to recapture the innocence of
their secret summer, and a portion of each night attempting to rekindle their love.
For the first few nights, she snuck out of the house and rode with him to Fairmount Park, to laugh and reminisce about the time they'd spent together, and to vow, in the quiet of her heart, not to lose him again.
By the second week she was stealing moments during the day to talk to him on the cell phone he'd given her as a gift. And when they weren't together, she spent her time anticipating the moments when they would be.
Through it all, she ignored the telltale signs of his profession. She saw the fancy car and the seemingly endless amount of time he had to spend with her. She saw the wad of cash that bulged from his pocket, and the jewelry that dangled from his neck.
In truth, she'd known from the time they'd reunited that he was a drug dealer. And though she pretended not to notice or to care, there was something about it that excited her. It pulled at her, even now, as she watched the back of the driver's head and tried not to think of what could happen if things went wrong.
Jamal turned and glanced at her yet again, and wondered what was going through her mind. His thoughts were of her kiss. He could still feel it lingering on his lips and causing warm blood to run to his loins.
He looked away from her, knowing he couldn't allow himself even one moment of fantasy. He had to be patient, as did Keisha.
If he made his move before the hour was up, his father would know that something had gone wrong. And he couldn't chance that.
He knew that she was growing impatient. But he hoped that she could hold on for a few minutes more. A second later, when Keisha broke the silence, it was apparent that she couldn't.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” she said, hoping Jamal would take the cue and do something.
The driver looked at her in the rearview mirror. Then he cut his eyes toward Jamal.
“Shut up,” Jamal said coldly. “It ain't time for you to go to bathroom yet.”
“I have to go
now,
” she said with an attitude.
He looked at her as the driver turned right on Allegheny Avenue and drove them into the heart of North Philadelphia's Badlands.
“You can't always have what you want,” he snapped.
And with that he turned away from her, and waited for the hour to expire.
By nine
o'clock, Lynch had five teams of detectives searching for Keisha Anderson. He didn't plan to lose another girl the way he'd lost nine-year-old Kenya Brown. And he certainly didn't plan to lose his leading suspect, Frank Nichols.
Though his homicide detectives had failed to turn up anything in Nichols's North Philadelphia houses and bars, they were determined not to give up. They would find Nichols within the hour, or they would convince one of his many associates to give him up.
What they didn't realize was that Nichols wasn't running. He'd spent the night at his girlfriend's three-story townhouse in an affluent Center City neighborhood called Rittenhouse Square. And just as he always did when he was there, he cut off contact with the outside world.
He'd driven there himself, without any of his men, in a Volvo station wagon that blended in nicely in the neighborhood.
And the only thing he brought with him was a cell phone, which he didn't answer.
He didn't know that a protest at his bar had gone horribly wrong. And in truth, he didn't care.
Frank Nichols was in the place he'd wanted to be since his girlfriend had taken him to her home for the first time, over a year before. He'd seen what he wanted then. And nothing was going to prevent him from having it.
As the morning sun crept through the slightly open blinds in the master bedroom, casting strips of yellow light across his back, Frank Nichols was on his knees, oblivious to everything but the soft, yielding flesh stretched out before him.
He bent to kiss buttery legs, parting his lips until his tongue was against one and then the other. And as he moved his mouth to the place where her thighs met and felt her lips quivering against his, he thrust out his tongue to taste her, and she gasped.
He reached up to caress her and heard a rumbling deep inside her throat as her nipples grew hard beneath his touch.
He rose up and traced a moist path to her navel, and then to her neck, and finally to her lips. He kissed her, and she greedily sucked her essence from his tongue.
He pulled away to look into her eyes, and he saw what he already knew he would. Everything that she'd been holding onto, waiting to give to someone special, was there for him. All he had to do was take it.
She wrapped her arms and legs around him and pulled him down until he stiffened against her softness. Moaning in spite of himself, he reached around to her ample bottom and held it in his hands as he began to thrust, softly at first, and then more forcefully, taking the virginity she so willingly gave.
She knew she shouldn't be there with him, knew that she shouldn't want it. And as sweat beaded up between them and
their wet bodies slid against one another, she was caught in the throes of their passion.
She bucked her hips as they danced to the rhythm that their bodies demanded. Moans, then squeals, then shouts filled the air as their voices echoed through the house.
Nichols's head swam with the movement of her hips. He felt as if he were about to burst. But the glass at the back door broke first.
He bolted upright when he heard it, and put his hand against his lover's mouth. There was the squeaking sound of the back door easing open, and the thud of running footsteps making their way through the living room.
Nichols knew there wasn't much time.
Taking his lover by the hand, he rolled off the bed and onto the floor, grabbing his clothes and his gun in the process.
She opened her mouth to scream, but he covered it again while pulling her across the floor to the master bathroom and locking the door behind them.
“Don't say nothin',” he whispered as he listened to them creeping up the stairway.
His lover trembled with fear as she heard the footsteps approaching.
Nichols pulled on his pants and gave his shirt to her.
“Button it,” he whispered urgently. “Hurry up.”
He held the gun aloft as the footsteps stopped outside the bedroom door.
Grabbing her by her hair, he pulled her toward the laundry chute that descended from the bathroom to the basement of the century-old brownstone.
He opened the door. “Get in.”
She hesitated as tears streaked down her cheeks.
“I said get yo' ass in there,” Nichols hissed menacingly.
He picked her up and pushed her into the chute, then jumped in behind her.
Her scream faded quickly to silence as the chute's trap door swung back and forth behind them. A moment later the bedroom door crashed open.
“Police!” a burly white man shouted as he rushed into the room with his gun out in front of him.
Two more officers barreled in behind him, pointing their weapons at either side of the room, while a third ran in and checked under the bed.
They searched quickly, bursting open the closet doors and hunting behind furniture, before running into the bathroom as the chute's swinging door came to a standstill.
Kevin Lynch was the last to enter the room. As he did, he heard the sound of a car engine come to life on a side street to the east of the house. He rushed to the window just as the car pulled off with a skid.
“Dan two-five, he's in a white Volvo!” Lynch screamed into his radio as he ran to the steps and descended them. “It's heading north on Twentieth Street!”
The police car in front of the house backed up in an effort to get to Twentieth Street, but a sudden rush of traffic blocked it in.
By the time Lynch and his men got out to their cars, Frank Nichols was gone.
 
 
The Andersons sat in Lynch's office at the Homicide Division, watching a small television perched above the lieutenant's desk and searching for some clue about their daughter's whereabouts. The uncertainty was unnerving. But watching the pictures from the morning's shootout as they were played over and over again, that was almost unbearable.
Channel 3 was on its fifth consecutive replay when Sarah Anderson got up from her hard wooden chair and turned to the local cable channel in the hopes of escaping the round-the-clock coverage. But even Comcast had a reporter on the scene.
Sarah went back to her seat and sat down. John, sitting in a chair next to hers, looked at her and tried to speak. But instead of allowing her husband to comfort her, as he'd tried to do countless times since they'd found out that Keisha was missing, Sarah turned away, because in her mind there was only one person who could be blamed for Keisha's disappearance. And it wasn't Frank Nichols.
Glancing up at the television, she watched as the reporter took up station across the street from Nichols's bar on Dauphin Street, holding a notepad and staring into the camera with his clean-shaven brown face creased in a grave expression.
She tried to tune out what he was saying. But no matter how hard she tried, she still caught snippets of his report.
“Alleged longtime drug dealer Frank Nichols … protest … gunman on a nearby rooftop.”
Sarah's mind drifted to her daughter. She wondered if Keisha could survive in the midst of so much death.
“Police Commissioner Darrell Freeman … shot in the face … died instantly … dozens of protesters injured.”
Sarah pictured Keisha's smiling face, and then thought of her tears the night before. Tears that she'd cried because of men who'd tried to hurt her. Sarah knew those kinds of tears. She'd always hoped that her daughter would escape them. But that hope, like most other hopes she'd had, was gone now.
“Gunman … still at large … armed and dangerous.”
At this, Sarah was snatched back to the moment. She listened intently as the reporter described the man who'd gotten away.
“Black male, in his early twenties, about six feet tall with
dreadlocks. Police are asking that you call nine-one-one immediately if you have any information concerning this case. This is Greg Connors, reporting live from—”
Sarah had heard enough. She turned off the television. Then she turned around to face her husband.
He hadn't been listening. He was past that. And he wasn't going to try to comfort her anymore. Instead, he was sitting there with his eyes closed, his body rocking slightly, and his lips moving almost imperceptibly. He was doing the only thing that could give him comfort. He was praying.
Sarah watched him for a moment, the way his clenched eyes and closed lips quivered. She almost felt sorry for him. Almost.
Sarah felt more pity for herself. She had, after all, spent years trying to be the woman that the Lord wanted her to be, and the wife that her husband wanted her to be. She'd covered her still-smooth cocoa-colored skin and round, voluptuous curves. She'd worn frumpy glasses over her large, glistening eyes. She'd submitted to her own husband as the Word commanded her to do. And in all this, she'd given away her happiness and her freedom.
They'd settled into a relationship that was steady, but not passionate; stable, but unexciting. It was a marriage filled with fake smiles and empty reassurances. There was nothing in it that was theirs alone. He was, after all, a pastor, and so he belonged to everyone and everything but her.
His identity was in his flock, and his cause, and his cross. They received his passion. Just like her father had given his passion to his ministry, rather than his home. She'd hated it then, just as she hated it now.
“What are you doing?” she asked impatiently.
He opened his weary eyes and looked at her. “What does it look like I'm doing?”
“Don't pray now,” she said, her tone mocking. “You shoulda
prayed before you went out there in that street last night, like you were gonna do something to Frank Nichols.”
“Sarah, listen—”
“No,
you
listen. I've been by your side, John. I've watched you do right, and I've watched you do wrong. But I always told myself that whatever you did, you were doing it because you loved the people you were supposed to be serving.”
“What do you mean, ‘supposed to be'?”
“You strut around talking about how God delivered you from your past,” she said, making his testimony sound like some cruel joke. “You talk about how you could've been what your father was, how you could've ended up a drug dealer, how you—”
“Sarah, this isn't the time to get into this,” he said, his voice laced with an unspoken warning.
“Well, when is the time for this, John? Huh? When is it time for us to step back and look at what our lives are really like—what
my
life is really like?”
“Our lives are fine, Sarah,” he said, his voice weakening, as if he didn't believe his own words. “We've been blessed.”
“And we've been cursed, too, John. Cursed because you sit up in that church, day after day, week after week, solving everybody else's problems, when you can't even solve your own. Cursed because you can't see anything beyond your precious ministry. Cursed because you're so caught up in what the Lord did for you thirtysomething years ago that you can't even see what you need Him to do for us now.
“I'm lonely, John,” she said, trembling with quiet rage. “I cry myself to sleep at night, waiting for you to come home and be a husband. And Keisha, she's starving for your attention, too. But you can't even see it, because you spend so much time down at that church.”
“You wanna blame me for Keisha?” he shouted, standing up. “Go ahead, blame me! Blame God! Blame everybody but yourself!”
“I didn't take her out there to that protest,” she snapped. “You did!”
“I was trying to teach her how to care about somebody other than herself,” he said. “But you wouldn't know anything about that, would you?”
“I don't go out to those protests because there are better ways to make a difference,” she said defensively.
“You don't go out to those protests because you don't care!”
“I care about one thing, John,” she said evenly. “Our daughter's missing. And if they don't find her, I will never forgive you.”
“That's not biblical,” he said quickly.
“Since when do you care about what's biblical?” she shot back. “If you cared about what's biblical, you wouldn't have put our daughter in harm's way just to make yourself look like more than you really are.
“That's in the Bible, John. Don't think more highly of yourself than you ought to.”
She paused before she threw his own words back in his face. “You wouldn't know anything about
that
, now, would you?”
The pastor's mouth dropped open as his wife walked across the small office and snatched open the door to leave.

Other books

Murder in Halruaa by Meyers, Richard
My Soul to Save by Rachel Vincent
Alena: A Novel by Pastan, Rachel
East of Time by Jacob Rosenberg
The Kabbalist by Katz, Yoram
Good Sensations by S. L. Scott
Falling Idols by Brian Hodge
Cottage Daze by James Ross
Razing the Dead by Sheila Connolly