Ride or Die

by Solomon Jones

But even as they ran and ducked through the small concrete backyards of the houses, moving ever deeper into the projects, it was the past, rather than the present, that gnawed at her.

  Jamal grabbed her hand and led her to a space between two houses. Crouching down, he signaled for her to remain still as he tried desperately to think of a way out.

  Kneeling there, she listened to the sound of traffic on I-95, speeding by in waves from two blocks away, and the sounds of everyday life emanating from the nearby houses in the projects.

  She heard the sound of soap opera drama, talk show mayhem, and television news. She heard babies crying, women on telephones, and children playing rope. And that’s when it hit her. She had, indeed, been there before.

  “Jamal,” she said, pointing to the back of a nearby house. “This way.”

  Staying low to the ground, she jogged across the driveway to the backyard of the house she remembered.

  Jamal hesitated. But when he glanced through a crack between the houses and saw ten police cars surrounding the Neon they’d abandoned five minutes before, he knew that he had to move, because Keisha still had the gun he’d handed her in the car.

  He got up and followed her path across the driveway, and knelt next to her at the back door of the house. She looked at him, saw apprehension in his eyes, and knew that he didn’t trust her completely. Keisha didn’t blame him. But neither of them had much choice now. They needed each other to survive.

  Keisha tapped on the door three times. When there was no answer, she knocked harder.

  The ensuing pause seemed to last an eternity, especially after they saw a police car turn onto the driveway’s cracked concrete.

  Keisha knocked again.

  “Who is it?” an old woman answered in a frail voice.

  “It’s John’s daughter,” Keisha said, just loud enough for the woman to hear.

  Footsteps shuffled toward the door as the two of them watched the slow-moving police car riding down the driveway.

  “Just a minute, honey,” the old woman said sweetly.

  Keisha and Jamal tried to hunker down further, but there was nothing in the small yard to hide them.

  Jamal looked down at Keisha’s purse and the gun that it contained. The police car, now just ten houses away, drew even closer. Jamal was about to reach for the gun when the door creaked open.

  “Keisha?” the old woman said while looking aimlessly over their heads.

  “Aunt Margaret,” a relieved Keisha answered while she and Jamal moved past her and into the kitchen.

  The old woman closed the door behind them and turned around unsteadily.

  “Who’s that with you?” she asked, her eyes sweeping the room, but focusing on nothing.

  “This is my friend André,” Keisha lied. “We were in the neighborhood, so I wanted to stop by, since I haven’t seen you in a while.”

  “I don’t know why you stoppin’ by now,” the old woman said sarcastically. “You don’t stop by no other time. I coulda been layin’ up in here dead or somethin’, and y’all wouldn’t even know.”

  “I’m sorry, Aunt Margaret. I’ll try to do better.”

  “What you say your friend’s name was?”

  “André.”

  “Nice to meet you, André,” the old woman said as she felt along the back of a chair, pulled it out from under the table, and sat down.

  “Nice to meet you, too,” Jamal answered uneasily.

  “Keisha,” the old woman said. “I don’t think I’ve seen you since your Uncle William passed away last year. ’Fraid my cataracts is a lot worse since then. Can’t see like I used to.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Keisha said.

  “Oh, don’t feel sorry for me,” Aunt Margaret said with a wave of her hand. “Sometimes, when you lose your sight, you see things a lot clearer. Now, come on over here and give your aunt a hug.”

  Keisha approached hesitantly and reached down to hug her grandfather’s oldest sister, who was still spry, independent, and sharp, even at the age of ninety.

  The old woman wrapped her arms around her great-niece and squeezed with a strength that belied her age. She felt the warmth of Keisha’s nearly bare breasts against her neck, and smelled the mingled odors of sweat and drugs in her clothing.

  A frown creased Aunt Margaret’s forehead as Keisha moved past the walker that stood folded in the corner of the kitchen and sat down in a nearby chair. The house was silent except for the sound of the television in the living room, until Aunt Margaret spoke.

  “You sure have changed since the last time I saw you, Keisha,” she said sternly.

  “What do you mean, Aunt Margaret?” Keisha asked nervously.

  The old woman leaned back in her chair and pursed her lips in a look of disappointment.

  “I’m old, but I ain’t stupid, honey,” the old woman said. “And I ain’t much for games, either. So I‘ma give it to you straight. I been hearin’ your name on the news all mornin’. You and your friend Jamal here. I know they lookin’ for him for shootin’ Commissioner Freeman, and they said he kidnapped you, too.”

  Keisha and Jamal exchanged a worried look as the old woman leaned forward in her seat and placed both hands on her kitchen table.

  “Now, I guess the news musta got somethin’ wrong,” she said, “since y’all came in here together like you did. But I heard the sirens on Frankford Avenue a few minutes before you got here. So I know they gon’ come knockin’ pretty soon.”

  “Aunt Margaret, let me explain,” Keisha began.

  “Ain’t nothin’ to explain,” the old woman said, cutting her off. “’Cause evidently, if you runnin’ with him, you musta did somethin’, too. But lemme tell you somethin’, Keisha. Your grandfather got swallowed up in these streets, and so did your father.

  “So before the police come to my door lookin’ for you, I want you to tell me somethin’,” she said, folding her arms defiantly. “Why the hell would you wanna get swallowed up, too?”

  Jamal watched them sitting there, and for the first time, he saw the resemblance between them. It wasn’t purely physical, though their faces held some similarities. Their likeness was in their fire.

  Jamal wanted to extinguish it, to snatch the gun from Keisha and force the old woman into a closet. He needed Keisha to believe that they could make the impossible escape. In truth, he needed to believe it, too.

  “Answer me, Keisha!” the old woman said, interrupting Jamal’s racing thoughts.

  Keisha began to weep. It was a sound that tore through Jamal like a jagged blade. Thankfully, her tears stopped as quickly as they had begun. And when she finally spoke, she spat her words like venom.

  “Aunt Margaret, the streets can’t swallow me up, ‘cause my family already did that,” she said bitterly. “All my life, y’all wanted me to be the perfect little girl—the good reverend’s faithful daughter. But I can’t be that, and I’m tired of trying.

  “I don’t know why things happened the way they did in the past. And I don’t want to know. But I do know this. I love Jamal. I’ve loved him since the first time I met him five years ago. He was the first boy I kissed, the first boy I dreamed about, the first boy I wanted. And I’m gonna be with him, no matter what you or anybody else in the family thinks.”

  “And what about his father?” Aunt Margaret said.

  “What about him?” Jamal said angrily.

  “You shut up, boy! I’m not talkin’ to you!”

  Jamal moved toward the old woman, but Keisha held up her hand and stopped him.

  “Whatever happened between Frank Nichols and my father is between them,” she said defiantly. “And whatever happens with me and Jamal is between us.”

  The old woman grunted in response. Then she slowly stood up and walked toward the front of the house, lightly touching furniture to guide her from one room to the other, as Keisha and Jamal watched silently.

  “What about your grandfather, Keisha?” the old woman said, speaking over her shoulder as she sat do
wn in a chair in the living room. “Does what Jamal’s father did to him have anything to do with you? Or don’t that matter, either?”

  The question floated in the air between them like a poisoned mist, threatening to take their breath away.

  But before Keisha could answer, there was a hard knock on the front door. The old woman turned her blind eyes in the direction of the noise and, without a word, got up to answer it.

  Flattening themselves against the wall that separated the living room from the kitchen, Keisha and Jamal stood stock-still, holding their collective breath and waiting nervously for the inevitable.

  11

  Lieutenant KevinLynch was leaving the commissioner’s office when he got another call. A Highway Patrol officer had spotted Jamal and Keisha in a car on I-95 and lost them on Frankford Avenue.

  From the sketchy information he’d received over the radio, it seemed that the prostitutes back at the abandoned factory were correct in their assertion. Jamal and Keisha were working together.

  But as he rode north on I-95 to meet his detectives at Keisha and Jamal’s last known location, Lynch still couldn’t understand why.

  “Dan two-five,” the dispatcher’s voice came over the radio.

  Lynch picked up the handset. “This is Dan two-five.”

  “Meet Fifteen Command at Frankford and Academy.”

  “I’m at the Academy exit now. I’ll be there in a second.”

  Putting down the handset, Lynch rounded the arcing exit and made the left onto Frankford Avenue. He spotted the blue Dodge Neon, surrounded by officers from Highway Patrol and the Fifteenth District.

  Parking in back of the other cars, Lynch walked over to the dark-haired lieutenant from the Fifteenth District who’d called for him on the radio.

  “Any sign of our suspects?” Lynch asked.

  “Not yet,” he said. “But we’ve got officers checking all the stores, and three teams in the projects going door-to-door.”

  “Good,” Lynch said. “I’ve got some detectives en route, too. In the meantime, I need to talk to the guy they carjacked.”

  “He’s pretty shaken up,” the lieutenant said, pointing to a man sitting in the back of a Highway Patrol vehicle. “But he’s right over there.”

  “Thanks,” Lynch said, walking over to the car and opening the back door.

  “I’m Lieutenant Lynch, Homicide,” he said to the rotund man with the blanket over his shoulders. “How are you?”

  The man looked up at him with a sad smile. “I’ve been better.”

  “That’s understandable,” he said. “I’ve only got a couple of questions.”

  “Sure,” the man said. “Go ahead.”

  “We were under the impression that the girl had been kidnapped by the guy,” Lynch said. “But apparently they were working together. And I’m trying to understand why.”

  The man shivered, though the temperature outside was approaching ninety.

  “It’s funny you should ask that,” he said. “Because I heard the guy ask the girl if she was scared.”

  Lynch took out his notepad and pencil. “And what did the girl say?” he said, with his pencil poised over the page.

  The man sat there for a few moments, trying to recall the words that had filtered into the closed-in space as he lay curled up and sweating in the trunk.

  “She said, ‘I always did what I was supposed to do. Now I wanna see what it’s like not to.’”

  Lynch was aghast. Even after all he’d seen over the years, it was hard for him to believe that the frightened, beautiful woman-child he’d seen at that morning’s protest could be that heartless.

  “Could the voices you heard have been the radio or something?” Lynch asked.

  The man looked over at Lynch with a certainty that was born of fear.

  “I know it was them, I know what they said, and I’ll never forget it,” he whispered. “Because it made me think I’d never see daylight again.”

  Lynch nodded and slowly put his notepad and pencil back into his pocket.

  Closing the door of the car, he waved over two homicide detectives who’d just arrived on the scene.

  Moments later, as the three of them walked together into the projects, Lynch found that he had yet another death to mourn: the death of Keisha Anderson’s innocence.

  The old woman wore a bewildered expression as she opened the door for the white, uniformed police officers. It was the look she always wore when she wanted people to believe that she was fragile.

  “Can I help you, officers?”

  “There’s a murder suspect on the loose in this area,” one of them said.

  She responded with a blank stare.

  “His name is Jamal Nichols,” the other officer said, holding up an old mug shot. “Have you seen him?”

  The old woman smiled. “I ain’t seen nothin’ in a long while. I’m blind.”

  “Oh,” the officer said, looking into her eyes for the first time. “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s okay,” she said as she imagined what must be going through Keisha and Jamal’s minds while they hid in the kitchen.

  “Maybe we should take a look around,” one of the cops said. “Just in case.”

  “That won’t be necessary. But if I hear somethin’, I’ll be sure to call 911.”

  The officers nodded and walked away as she shut the door, returned to her seat, turned off her television, and listened.

  A minute later, Jamal and Keisha meekly came out of hiding, and she held out her withered hand.

  “Y’all come here,” she said quietly.

  Hesitantly, they both walked over to the chair. The old woman reached up and ran her hand over Keisha’s face.

  “You see what I just did, child?” she asked softly. “That’s what you do when you love somebody. You look out for ’em.”

  She turned her head toward Jamal, and though he knew she couldn’t see him, he could feel her looking through him with something that went far beyond sight.

  “Your grandfather looked out for this boy’s father,” she said, pointing an accusing finger in his direction. “Looked out for him when he ain’t have - else to go. Treated him like a son. Three years later, Frank set him up. Killed your grandfather and took over what he built.”

  Jamal and Keisha looked at one another uneasily. Neither of them had ever heard the history that had put their families at odds. And both of them were sorry to hear it now.

  “You say you don’t care why your father feel the way he do about Frank Nichols, Keisha. But you should. ’Cause wise folks learn from other people mistakes, and fools don’t even learn from their own.”

  The room was deadly still as the old woman sat back in her chair and pursed her lips, satisfied that she’d done what was right. She’d warned Keisha. The rest was up to her.

  Keisha looked at Jamal, her eyes filled with the same uncertainty that she’d felt in the moments after saving his life. Only now her fear was anchored by the reality that had split their families all those years before.

  Jamal saw the look in her eyes. And he knew that he couldn’t allow it to remain there. So he turned to the old woman and spoke from his heart.

  “I ain’t my pop,” he said with conviction. “And she ain’t her grandfather. This ain’t forty years ago, either. This is now. And right here, right now, it’s only two things in this world I know. I know I wouldn’t be alive without Keisha. And I know I wouldn’t want to.”

  He looked at Keisha.

  “You rollin’ with me or not?” he said, holding out his hand.

  She looked down at her great-aunt, then turned her gaze on Jamal. Releasing the old woman’s tired grip, she gave her hand to him. And she gave him her heart as well.

  “Ride or die,” Keisha whispered.

  It was a line from a song she’d heard in passing—one that she’d never fully understood until that moment. As she stood there looking into Jamal’s eyes, she pledged her loyalty and her life to him. She was going to ride with him
until the end of their journey, or she was going to die trying.

  Aunt Margaret felt the message in their silence, and leaned back in her chair. If she’d learned anything in her ninety years, it was that you can’t tell a person whom to love. You can only try to soften the hurt that love inevitably brings.

  “Well, Keisha,” she said softly. “If you willin’ to live with that decision, I guess I am, too. It’s only one thing I wanna know. Did Jamal really kill Commissioner Freeman?”

  Keisha opened her mouth and was about to answer.

  “I can speak for myself,” Jamal said. “The answer is no.”

  There was a long silence as Aunt Margaret contemplated his answer.

  “Okay, then,” the old woman said, getting up from her chair and walking into the kitchen.

  “Only thing I can tell you is, don’t get caught,” she said, speaking over her shoulder. “‘Cause if you do, they gon’ kill you. And ain’t no comin’ back from that.”

  She opened a kitchen drawer, pulled out a pair of scissors, and walked back to the living room.

  “First thing they talk about on the news is them dreadlocks, or whatever you call ‘em,” she said, handing the scissors to Jamal. “Cut ’em off.”

  Keisha glanced at Jamal, who didn’t hesitate before taking the old woman’s advice. He held his locks up, three or four at a time, and cut as close to the roots as possible. He would have done more, but he knew that they didn’t have time.

  The old woman turned toward Keisha.

  “You know you gotta find the truth, don’t you?” she asked.

  “The truth about what?”

  “Who killed the commissioner, and why.”

  “We’re just trying to make it to another day, Aunt Margaret,” Keisha said. “We don’t have time to find the truth.”

  “If you ever wanna live your life without lookin’ over your shoulder, you better find it,” she said, reaching back for her chair and sitting down.

  “You can only spend so much time runnin’. After a while, you gotta stop, turn around, and fight.”

  Aunt Margaret’s words reverberated in Keisha’s ears as the last of Jamal’s dreadlocks fell to the floor.