Ride or Die

by Solomon Jones

  She looked down at her mother as if she were trash.

  “That’s a lot more than I can say for you.”

  Keisha opened the door, and a ringing sound filtered in from the hallway. Sarah watched her daughter as the ringing grew louder.

  She wanted to ask her to come back. She wanted to ask her for another chance. But somehow, Sarah knew that it was too late for that. And as the sound of the ringing grew louder, Keisha walked through the door and closed it, forever shutting herself off from her mother.

  The ringing became unbearable. Sarah couldn’t listen to it any longer. And when her eyes snapped open and she awakened from her dream, she realized that the ringing was coming from the phone.

  Sarah ran out into the hallway and picked it up.

  “Hello?” she said tensely.

  “Mrs. Anderson, we’re sending a car to pick you up,” a detective said over the phone.

  Sarah waited with baited breath for the other half of the message.

  “It’s about your daughter.”

  Kevin Lynch was walking down the hall with the assistant DA. The two were on their way back to the interrogation room for another round of questions with Nola Langston when one of Lynch’s detectives stopped them.

  “Lieutenant Lynch,” said the curly-haired Detective Hubert. “There’s something I think you ought to see.”

  Lynch knew that the detective who’d captured Frank and Nola wouldn’t have stopped him for anything frivolous. That’s why Lynch was nervous about talking to him.

  “Can it wait?” Lynch said. “I’m about to interview Nola Langston again. We really need to hear what she’s got to say.”

  Hubert looked from the prosecutor to Lynch with a look of grave concern.

  “When you see this,” the detective said, “what Ms. Langston says might not matter a whole lot anymore.”

  Assistant DA Robert Harris was accustomed to being interrupted by now.

  “Go ahead and take a look,” Harris said. “I can wait out here if you want.”

  “No,” Hubert said. “You probably need to see this, too.”

  “It’ll be quick, right?” Lynch said as the two men followed the detective to one of the offices at the far end of the hall.

  “That depends on what you mean by quick,” Hubert said.

  The three of them walked into the darkened room, and Hubert walked over to a laptop hooked up to a monitor on the table.

  “Have a seat, gentlemen,” Hubert said.

  Lynch and Harris sat down in folding chairs as Hubert reached for the mouse and clicked it so that the film could begin.

  “We got a tape in about an hour ago from one of the news stations and downloaded it into the computer,” Hubert said. “The footage is from their chopper. We were able to enhance it a little bit, but not much.”

  Hubert paused the film and directed the mouse across the screen until it was poised over the man on the rooftop.

  “This is the shooter right here,” he said, moving the prompter to another part of the screen. “Over here is the commissioner, working his way through the crowd to get to Anderson. Right in front of Anderson is his daughter, Keisha.”

  Hubert clicked the mouse, allowing the film to play in slow motion.

  “You’ll see the commissioner grab Anderson from the vehicle and start pulling him through the crowd,” Hubert said, moving the prompter until it was next to Lynch’s image.

  “You’re here, Lieutenant,” he said, narrating the action. “Right about here, you run into the alley, and a minute later, we see you running toward the shooter on the roof. There are gunshots, the commissioner is hit, and he falls.”

  Hubert clicked the mouse again, causing the film to play frame by frame.

  “Keisha Anderson has fallen down at this point,” he said, moving the prompter to the middle of the screen. “Here she is, right here.

  “Now, you’ll see Jamal Nichols running into the picture, picking her up and carrying her through the crowd.”

  Hubert stopped the film and walked up to the television screen, pointing his finger at the focal point of the picture.

  “But if you look on the roof, here,” the detective said, “the shooter is still up there, struggling with you, Lieutenant, right as Jamal Nichols takes Keisha Anderson out of the picture.”

  Lynch got up to take a closer look at the screen. It was hard to make out the men’s faces because the film was shot from overhead. But there was no doubt that they shared similar features, hair, and body types.

  “Run it again,” Lynch said quietly.

  Hubert went back to the laptop and ran the film again, this time without interruption. The result was the same. Clearly, the man on the roof and the man who’d taken Keisha Anderson were two different people. That could only mean one thing.

  “Looks like Jamal Nichols didn’t shoot the commissioner,” Lynch said, almost to himself.

  “But we’ve still got every cop in the city thinking he did,” Hubert said. “The question is, do we do anything differently, or do we just focus on catching him, and sort it all out later?”

  For the first time in the investigation, Lynch wasn’t sure what to do. Jamal Nichols could have been involved, even if someone else did the shooting. But if he wasn’t involved and he was cornered by police who believed that he was, the results could be deadly.

  “Has Ballistics gotten anything back yet from that shooting in the Twenty-fifth?” Lynch asked.

  “No,” the detective said. “But that’s the other thing I wanted to talk with you about. We got prints on the gun they found near the body of the alleged shooter, Joseph Barnes.”

  “Is that Nichols’s guy they found dead in the alley?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good,” Lynch said. “If Ballistics matches the bullets with the gun and the Crime Lab guys find powder burns on his hands, we got him.”

  “Maybe that’s where Nola’s testimony comes into play. Because if we can make a case that Frank Nichols gave an order that led to the girl’s kidnapping, and Jamal Nichols was an accomplice to that officer’s murder while carrying out that order, maybe we can get a jury to connect the dots.”

  “That’s a long stretch,” Lynch said to Harris.

  “You haven’t seen me work a jury.”

  “It might be a moot question,” Hubert said.

  “Why?” Lynch asked.

  “They found someone else’s prints on the gun, too.”

  “Were they Jamal’s prints?” Lynch asked, although he already knew the answer.

  “No,” the detective said gravely. “Whoever these prints belong to doesn’t have a record, so we don’t have a match in the system.”

  “I see,” Lynch said. “So the shooting takes place in an alley where prostitutes hang out, and the only other people there are Jamal Nichols, Joseph Barnes, and Keisha Anderson.”

  “Let me guess which one doesn’t have a record,” the assistant DA said.

  Lynch sighed and sat back down in the folding chair. “Our little girl just grew up,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Hubert said. “I guess she did.”

  “Well,” Lynch said with a sigh, “we’ll just have to see what happens when the stuff comes back on the bullets.”

  “That could take weeks,” Hubert said.

  “I know,” Lynch said. “In the meantime, we keep looking for them. Jamal’s still wanted for investigation in connection with that shooting in the Twenty-fifth, and we want to ask him some questions about the shootings of Emma Jean Johnson and Commissioner Freeman.”

  “What about the girl?” the detective said.

  “She’s wanted for questioning, too. But we have to make it clear to the guys on the street that it’s just that—questioning.”

  “Okay,” Hubert said. “I’ll pass that on to the district commanders.”

  “No, I’ll pass it on to the commissioner and let him give the order,” Lynch said. “They’ll take it a lot more seriously if it comes from the top.”


  “Okay,” Hubert said. “But there’s still one thing we haven’t addressed.”

  He reached down for the mouse and moved the prompter across the screen.

  “Who’s he?” Hubert said, pointing the prompter at the man on the rooftop.

  No one in the room had an answer.

  17

  Breaking into the car was easy. It was the waiting that was difficult.

  Ishmael had been hunkered down in the back seat of John’s car for the better part of twenty minutes. He’d spent the time repeatedly imagining what it would be like to kill him.

  He wanted to put John’s head on a plate for his queen, just like the Bible stories he’d heard as a child. But this would provide more than just the queen’s satisfaction.

  Ishmael looked up to see if the preacher was within sight. When he didn’t see him, he pulled out his cell phone and dialed his lover once again. Her voice mail came on, and he refused to leave another message.

  He would tell her about it in person, when he met her that evening at the safe house. He would take her in his arms and describe the look on John’s face, the words from his mouth, the sound of his heart beating against his chest and fading, slowly, to nothing.

  Ishmael looked up again from the back seat and saw John round the corner with the bag swinging from his shoulder. Reaching into his jacket pocket, Ishmael extracted the gun, chambered a round, and tightened his fingers on the butt.

  He heard footsteps approaching the driver’s side of the car and stopping. Keys jangled and pushed into the lock, and then the door opened and the car listed to the side as John got into the driver’s seat.

  Ishmael waited for John to start the car, and before he could put it in gear, Ishmael sprang up and pressed the gun against the back of the preacher’s neck.

  “Don’t move,” he said, reaching around him to adjust the rearview mirror so that they could see each other’s faces.

  John looked at the reflection and recognized Ishmael as the man he’d spotted earlier, in the blue car. His face was filled with a rage unlike anything he’d ever seen before. Reasoning with him would be difficult. But he knew he had to try.

  “Do I know you?” John asked while slowly moving his hand toward the gym bag.

  Ishmael laughed. “Nah, you don’t know me, man. But you ought to.”

  “Why is that?” John asked, his hand edging ever closer to the bag.

  “I’m the one in your dreams, askin’ how you can preach when you worse than the people you preachin’ to.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” John said, reaching into the bag and trying to close his fingers around the sawed-off shotgun.

  “But God knows,” Ishmael said, smiling. “And so do I.”

  “What do you mean?” John asked, though he feared the answer more than he feared the gun the man was holding.

  “Nineteen sixty-five,” Ishmael said. “Fifteenth and Diamond, ’round midnight, you drove around the corner in a Cadillac. You rolled the windows down and pointed a sawed-off out the window.”

  The color drained from John’s face, and his grip loosened on the gun. Tears stung his eyes. And yet his tormentor continued to speak, giving voice to his darkest secret, and weight to his greatest guilt.

  “You ain’t care about nothin’ but doin’ what your father told you to do, did you, John? You wanted to please him, ’cause you thought he loved Frank more than he loved you, didn’t you?”

  “Who are you?” John asked, feeling as if he were falling from a great height, and spinning ever faster toward the ground.

  “You was always scared Frank was gon’ steal your father from you, wasn’t you?” Ishmael asked, happily observing the tortured look on John’s face.

  John let go of the gun as Ishmael spoke, and the tears of thirty-five years began to flow.

  “Who are you?” he asked through grief-stricken sobs.

  “You ain’t care who I was when you pulled that trigger, did you? All you cared about was Frank Nichols bein’ more like a son to your father than you ever coulda been.

  “You was weak,” he spat. “You was nothin’. Just like you is now”

  John wanted him to pull the trigger. He wanted his misery to end, but it wouldn’t. It couldn’t, because Ishmael wouldn’t allow it to.

  “You did everything your father told you to do, and it still wasn’t enough, was it? ’Cause Frank Nichols stole him from you anyway. But he ain’t steal him the way you thought he would. He took him away with bullets.”

  John leaned forward and put his head on the steering wheel. His soul was wracked with pain as the tears continued to fall.

  He sobbed as the grief he’d covered with anger came pouring out of his eyes. He sobbed as the sense of loss overcame his desire for vengeance. He sobbed and waited for God to have mercy,.and end his life with the gun that was leveled at his neck.

  “How did you know?” John cried as the tears soaked his face. “How did you know?”

  Ishmael leaned over the back seat and whispered in John’s ear.

  “I knew because somebody took my father the same way they took yours—with bullets. They took him on a summer night on Diamond Street, with a sawed-off stickin’ out a Cadillac’s window. They took him and they ain’t think twice about the little boy he left behind. They took him and my life was over, ’cause nobody wanted me but him.

  “I waited thirty-five years to find out who killed my father,” Ishmael said with quiet triumph. “Who woulda thought I would hear it from somebody you thought loved you?”

  John looked up from the steering wheel, his eyes red with fatigue and grief, and stared into the mirror at the man who planned to murder him.

  “Nola told me about what you did to my father,” Ishmael said. “Then she told me about what you did to her. She told me how you beat her and raped her.”

  “That’s not true,” John mumbled as he tried to understand what he was hearing.

  “She told me how you tied her up for days.”

  “No, I didn’t,” said a bewildered John.

  “She told me you would kill her if she told anybody.”

  “That’s a lie,” John said, his voice growing stronger.

  “I told her I would kill you first.”

  Ishmael pressed the gun against the back of John’s head and squeezed the trigger.

  There was the tap of metal against metal. And in that moment, they both realized that the gun had jammed.

  John grabbed the gym bag and swung it, hitting Ishmael in the head with the heavy metal of the sawed-off shotgun. Ishmael fell back against the seat, and John pushed open the driver’s-side door and fell out into the street.

  An approaching car braked hard, and John jumped up to avoid being hit. Ishmael emerged from the back seat and grabbed him from behind, choking off his air with a forearm at the neck.

  John flipped the younger man over his shoulder, dropping the bag in the process. When it hit the ground, the sawed-off discharged, the blast echoing along Ninth Street. Cars came screeching to halt while their drivers watched the two men fight violently in the middle of downtown traffic.

  Ishmael got up and swung wildly at John, who ducked the blow and delivered a vicious hook to Ishmael’s midsection, knocking the breath from his body. Ishmael doubled over, wrapped his arms around John’s knees, and pulled, flipping him onto his back.

  Ishmael jumped on top of him and began flailing wildly, hitting him hard across the jaw, then flush on the nose, before John grabbed his suit jacket and flung him off with a mighty heave.

  Ishmael looked over at the gym bag and spotted the sawed-off sticking halfway out. It was five feet away from both of them, in the middle of the street. John followed his eyes to the gun, and the two of them raced to get it.

  The younger, quicker Ishmael grabbed it first, and pulled the gun from the bag. John froze in his tracks as Ishmael aimed the gun in his direction.

  “Drop it!” said a voice from the post office across the street.

&
nbsp; Ishmael looked over and saw two postal policemen leveling their weapons. Sirens wailed as police cars approached from four blocks away, at police headquarters. Motorists on Ninth Street stared wide-eyed at the spectacle.

  John took it all in—from the anxious looks on the faces of the policemen to the disbelieving stares of cowering passersby. But it wasn’t until he looked into Ishmael’s face that he knew how the standoff would end.

  “Drop the gun now!” the police officer repeated.

  Ishmael’s finger tightened on the trigger as John dived between his car and the one parked in front of it.

  There was a loud blast as Ishmael fired the shotgun. There were dozens of popping sounds as the officers emptied their weapons.

  When the shooting finally stopped and John raised his head, Ishmael lay dying in the street. The officers ran over to him and John ran to his side as well.

  As blood streamed from the wounds in his face and chest, Ishmael uttered one final word.

  “Nola,” he said.

  And then he closed his eyes.

  Keisha got up from the bed, walked over to the window, and peered out between the edge of the shade and the windowsill.

  She could see that the activity on the street below was beginning to increase, especially on the other side of the street, near the Market Frankford el, where a group of transit police were gathering on the platform.

  Keisha’s heart beat faster as she watched them confer with one another. She was sure they were looking for her and Jamal. But then the police disappeared down a stairway, and she calmed down.

  As she closed the shade, Jamal came up behind her and wrapped her in his arms. The warmth of his touch was comforting, as was the sound of his voice in her ear.

  “I don’t think you wanna be all up in the window,” he said. “Ain’t nothin’ out there but trouble.”

  “There’s trouble in here, too,” she said, backing away from the window while wearing a devilish smile.

  “How you figure that?”

  “I’m trouble,” she said, turning to face him.

  “No you not,” he said. “You innocent.”

  “Not as innocent as I used to be,” she said, taking his fingers between hers and placing them in her mouth.