Blood Cries; Blood Oath; Blood Work

by Michael Lister

  “Far as I’m concerned, you’re a hero,” he said. “A goddamn hero. You and Agent Morgan.”

  “How is he?”

  Frank had been airlifted to Grady Memorial and rushed into surgery.

  “No word yet,” he said.

  “I’d like to go see him,” I said. “Least be there when he comes out of surgery. Is there anybody here who can give me a ride to my car?”

  “I’ll do it myself,” he said. “But there’s something you should know.”

  “What’s that?”

  “They took those two sick, fat fuckers there too.”

  “The Gibbons? They’re alive?”

  “Unfortunately.”

  We all took a moment to let that sink in.

  “I don’t have to worry about you finishing what you started, do I?” he said.

  “I didn’t start anything to finish,” I said. “Both of their injuries are self-inflicted.”

  “Kiddy diddlers like them,” the detective said, “won’t last long in prison.”

  “You’re being a bit too optimistic,” the sheriff said. “I’m hoping they don’t make it out of surgery.”

  When I was dropped off at my car, I drove directly to Trade Winds, the apartment complex I had lived in until a month or so back, the one where Jordan, Martin, and I had been a family of sorts.

  Parking near the basketball court where Martin and I had spent so much time together, I got out and walked over to it in the driving rain.

  I hadn’t been dry long and now I was getting soaked through all over again.

  I didn’t care.

  I stood beneath the goal where Martin had worked so hard to master the art of the layup, his smallness just too big an impediment.

  In the darkness, the rain water looked like blood on the court, puddling black beneath the rain in the nearly nonexistent moonlight.

  Dropping to the asphalt, I broke down and began to weep.

  I wept for the world, for Martin and Jordan, for Cedric and Bradley, for all the childless mothers, for all the boys who would never grow to be men, but most of all, selfishly, I wept for me—for what I had once had and now had no longer.

  Like the vanishing of everything else that had been lost, my tears disappeared into the falling rain so fast it was as if I weren’t crying at all.

  But I was.

  I knew it.

  The rain knew it.

  And maybe, just maybe, somewhere in the wide, wide world, Martin and Jordan knew it too.

  Later that night, back in my bedroom, I thought about the six missing boys I was looking for—not as missing orpotentially murdered, not as victims but as boys.

  Holding Bradley the way I had tonight had really gotten to me, and I wanted to think of the boys I was looking for not as parts of a case, but as the vibrant, idiosyncratic little human beings they were—or had been that last time they were seen.

  Cedric Porter, Jamal Jackson, Quentin Washington, Jaquez Anderson, Duke Ellis, and Vaughn Smith.

  Jamal was a little jokester, always smiling, laughing, kidding around. Quentin was quiet—a large, mostly silent boy who had an inner strength that was obvious to everyone. Cedric and Vaughn loved movies, would watch them all the time if allowed. Duke adored football. He liked all sports, but adored football and could tell you every single statistic about his favorite players and teams. Jaquez, truly an Atlanta boy, loved all the Atlanta teams and followed them the way only a hometown fan can. Just ask him anything about the Hawks, the Falcons, or the Braves. He could tell you.

  These were children, each one a little bundle of life and potential, each one innocent of what befell him.

  Bradley was back with his mom.

  Now let’s see what we can do about getting the others back home with theirs.

  “Sorry to call so late,” Ida Williams said when I answered the phone, “but you don’t sleep anyway, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Were you asleep?”

  “I wasn’t,” I said.

  “What’s wrong? You don’t sound so good.”

  “Just tired. How are you?”

  “I’m okay, son,” she said. “Considering everything, I’m okay. Callin’ ’cause I had a thought.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “Mickey said y’all’s havin’ a hard time locating the mothers of the victims from over there.”

  “Yeah, I think he is.”

  “Before I tell you my thought, let me tell you somethin’ else.”

  “Okay.”

  “Ain’t no relationship in the world like that of a black mother and her son,” she said.

  I knew that to be true—and not just from what I had read, but what I had seen firsthand. I thought of my best friend back home, Merrill, and his mother, Mama Monroe, and the ferocious way she mothered him.

  “A Southern black woman in America knows all too well what she doin’ when she brings a black male child into this world, into this country, into the part of the country where we live. Our boys will always be perceived as a threat, always eyed with suspicion, always viewed as less than. Many of our boys never get to grow up.”

  I thought of her son LaMarcus, who had died as a child.

  “If they do,” she continued, “they seen as even more of a menace, even more of a threat. Live half-lives on borrowed time. Never know which day it be they don’t come home. Get gunned down, arrested. This makes them extra special to us, makes us love them and care for them in a way we don’t anyone else. Probably ain’t all that good for ’em, but you can see why we do it—baby ’em, spoil ’em. What else can we do?”

  “I understand.”

  I thought about something James Baldwin wrote. A black mama’s instinct is to protect the black male from the devastation that threatens him the moment he declares himself a man.

  Ida was saying it began long before he declared himself a man, and she was right.

  But it wasn’t just black mothers who did it. Homer and Faye Williams had both done it with their only child Wayne, who was more like a grandchild, they had him so late in life. And they had actually gone bankrupt indulging their doughy, daydreaming boy.

  “What if y’all having a hard time findin’ the mamas for the same reason you havin’ a hard time findin’ the boys’ bodies?” she said.

  At first I thought she meant because they were dead too—as if they died protecting their sons, but then I realized what she meant.

  “What if because of the threat—especially at that time—they took their boys and disappeared? I wish to God I had.”

  It was an interesting theory, one we needed to look into—even though Ada Baker had obviously not vanished with her son. Maybe Cedric was some kind of anomaly. Maybe Ada was the exception that proves Ida’s rule. Or maybe Ida was reaching for hope in an essentially hopeless circumstance.

  “That’s a great thought,” I said. “Brilliant, actually.”

  “I’m gonna see ’bout helpin’ Mickey track down the moms,” she said. “See if I can’t disprove or prove my own theory.”

  39

  Just because he had a white kid this time, doesn’t mean he didn’t abduct black kids when he lived here,” Mickey said.

  “True,” I said, “but it does make it far less likely.”

  Two days had passed. Frank was still in a coma.

  I was discouraged, depressed, and in need of a drink—and drink wasn’t far away from where we sat at the old dining table in Second Chances.

  “You don’t think it could be him?” Mickey said, glancing at me briefly, then away again.

  “I’m not ruling it out, but . . .”

  “How about this? His mom helps him snatch the kids.”

  I glanced over at Kenny, who was alternating between coloring and reading comics on the floor not far away.

  Camille had taken Wilbur to the doctor. Mickey was babysitting Kenny and the store.

  I nodded at Kenny and Mickey lowered his voice.

  “Then she also helps him set
up the dads and get rid of the bodies,” he continued. “Two of them working together like that . . . The bodies could be buried in the woods right out back of here.”

  I shrugged. “It’s possible, but I still think it’s unlikely.”

  The front door opened and Miss Ida and Summer Grantham walked in.

  “We came to check on you,” Ida said. “Heard what happened. Why you didn’t say somethin’ the other night on the phone? You okay?”

  “Thank you,” I said, standing to hug them. “I will be once Frank Morgan wakes up.”

  They joined us at the table.

  Today Summer was rocking an old, faded maroon Madonna T-shirt with jeans and matching Keds. She looked like she would fit in better over coloring with Kenny than sitting with the adults at the dining table.

  “What you did,” Summer said, “saving that poor boy the way you did . . .”

  “That poor boy,” Ida said.

  “I’m praying for your friend,” Summer said.

  “Thank you.”

  We were all quiet a beat.

  “Hey Mr. John,” Kenny said, “you ever read Batman: the Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller?”

  “I haven’t, Kenny,” I said. “Is it good?”

  “It’s great. You can borrow when I’m done . . . or we can read it together.”

  “I’d like that, thank you.”

  “Speaking of superpowers,” Mickey said to Summer, “use yours and tell us if Creepy Gibbons is responsible for what happened to Cedric, Jamal and the others.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Doesn’t work that way. And it’s not a superpower.”

  “Whatta you think?” Ida asked me.

  “I think it is a superpower,” I said. “She’s just being modest.”

  “I meant about the boys and Daryl Lee.”

  “Not ruling anything out, but . . . predators like him usually hunt within their same race and don’t usually change their MO.”

  “But maybe for a short while when he was here,” Mickey said, “he didn’t have a choice. Maybe what he did here, what they did, was opportunistic, more to do with who was here than his preference.”

  Something Wayne Williams said to me when I first encountered him at the Omni’s arcade six years ago echoed inside me.

  Just ’cause I prefer chocolate, don’t mean I couldn’t go for some vanilla.

  Summer nodded, but I couldn’t tell if it was to what I had said or Mickey.

  “And one more thing,” Mickey said, “and this is the biggest of all as far as I’m concerned.” He paused for effect, but didn’t make eye contact with any of us, which undermined it. “If it was Daryl Lee, it would explain why they stopped,” he said. “They stopped here ’cause he moved. They continued somewhere else ’cause that’s where he moved to.”

  I nodded. “You’re right,” I said. “That is the best argument of all.”

  “Somebody need to see where all else he lived,” Ida said. “See how many missing children there are in those areas.”

  “I’ll talk to Remy Boss about it,” I said.

  “If it turns out he took any black boys in any of the other places, it would strengthen the case for him doing it here,” Summer said.

  We nodded our agreement and fell silent for a moment again.

  “Has Ada agreed to the tap yet?” Mickey asked Ida.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head, “and she ain’t gonna.”

  “It’s like she doesn’t want to know,” he said.

  “Maybe she doesn’t,” Ida said, “but not for the reason you think. Once you know, you can’t unknow. You can’t lie to yourself anymore. No matter how hard you try or how good at it you are.”

  “Are girls allowed to read Batman too?” Summer asked.

  Kenny and I were on the floor in the little toy area. I was reading to him. We both looked up, but I waited for him to answer.

  “Sure,” he said. “Come on. You can read the girl parts.”

  She and I smiled at each other at the thought of girl parts.

  “Is it okay?” she asked me.

  “Of course,” I said.

  She sat down beside us, tucking her feet beneath her legs. As she did, Kenny slid toward me, then eased into my lap.

  In that moment, I realized a few things. First, how closed I had been to Kenny, how completely my experience with Martin Fisher had shut me down—and not just Martin but every victim I had encountered—how much loss and pain, death and devastation I had seen. I had been in self-preservation mode—still was, and it had caused me to give far less to Kenny than I otherwise would have. I realized too just how much Kenny was looking for and in need of the attention and affection of a man, a father figure. It was that very vulnerability that most likely led to the capture of many of the victims. Finally, I felt funny with him on my lap—something I never would have before. After what I had seen in the original case and then at Daryl Lee Gibbons’s house, I felt awkward having Kenny so close—not for anything having to do with him or me, but how it might appear to others in the light of all we had been dealing with.

  “Ooh,” Summer said. “This is good.”

  She slid over next to me, which made me feel better about how this looked. Before long, Kenny was in her lap, which made me feel better still.

  40

  You actually sat across from Wayne Williams,” Susan said.

  “I did.”

  I was sitting across from her now—at a table in the back corner of Scarlett’s drinking coffee. I found it easier not to drink anything but coffee when I didn’t sit at the bar.

  Remy Boss had said he would do his best to swing by to talk to me if he could. I was waiting for him and reviewing my notes on the cases—while sipping coffee and talking to Susan.

  “How was it?”

  “Surreal,” I said.

  She nodded. “I bet. Did he say anything that made you believe he was . . . innocent? Or guilty or anything?”

  “I’m still processing everything he said, so . . . maybe. I’m not sure.”

  “Look at this,” Margaret said from behind the bar. “They say we got snow coming.”

  She turned up the TV and we all listened.

  “Metro Atlanta may see its earliest snowfall on record,” a local weather man was saying.

  An afternoon regular at the bar said, “Please tell us you’re not going to close down, Margaret. Even if it’s the storm of the century.”

  “It’s not gonna snow,” she said. “It’s not, but if it does . . . whole city shuts down. You know that. At the slightest dusting of white powder. Hell, a Martha White Flour truck turned over on 285 and all the commuters stopped and hunkered down in their cars ’cause they thought the white dust was the first sign of flurries.”

  “Southerners, am I right?” the patron, who had lived here his entire life, said.

  “We should have a snow pool,” she said. “Bet on whether it’s gonna snow or not.”

  “Yeah,” the patron said. “Let’s do it. Put me in for twenty for it not to. I don’t think it’s gonna happen. Or maybe I just don’t want it to. Either way . . . Puttin’ my money where my heart is.”

  “You believe this?” Susan said, jerking her head back toward the conversation at the bar.

  I smiled. “I’ve never been in snow before,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “Unless I’m blocking out some family trip from childhood.”

  “It’s not gonna snow,” she said. “But . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  “How long you been sober?” Susan asked.

  “I’ve lost track,” I said. “A while.”

  “I thought AA was all about keeping track.”

  “I’m not a very good member,” I said. “And I’m not convinced what Lonnie and those guys do in his little room is actually AA. Why?”

  “Just thought . . . if you keep it up . . . and if it does snow—two very big ifs—maybe we can hunker down during the snowstorm together. Rent a couple of movies, eat some
pizza. Make out.”

  “Really? How much sobriety would that require?” I asked. “Just so I know.”

  Later in the afternoon, right on time, Lonnie came in and Margaret poured him his usual—the shot of bourbon to stare at.

  Today, he stared at the drink much longer than he did other days.

  Sensing something was wrong, I stood and started walking over toward him.

  Instead of sliding the glass back toward Margaret, he lifted it and started to take a drink.

  “Wait,” I yelled and rushed over to him.

  I grabbed the glass just as it reached his lips, knocking it over, it bouncing down the bar and careening off of it onto the floor behind.

  “What’re you doin’?” I said.

  He shook his head. “I just . . .”

  “Come over here with me,” I said. “Come on.”

  I grabbed him by the arm and led him over to my table as Susan wiped down the bar and Margaret cleaned up the glass on the floor behind it.

  “Can we get another coffee over here?” I said.

  “Sure thing,” Susan said. “Coming up.”

  She had it on the table in front of him by the time we sat down.

  “What’s going on man?” I said. “Want to go to a meeting?”

  He shook his head. “Just can’t take it anymore. It’s too much. I’ve held it together so long.”

  I nodded. “I know you have. You’ve done great. You really have.”

  “Losing my business . . . is really gettin’ to me. Got nothing else. No idea what I’m gonna do. Then stirring everything up around Cedric and those others . . . Takes me back to such a bad time. So tired of fighting.”

  “I know,” I said. “I know you are.”

  “I know you think you do,” he said, “but you don’t. Think about how long you been doin’ it. That’s nothing. Hell, I been drinking longer than you been alive. Been sober longer than you’ve been drinking.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “I been so strong so long. Been holdin’ it all together—for Cedric, for Ada, for my store, for . . . What’s the use? Cedric ain’t ever comin’ back. My store’s a lost cause. Ada’s got her phone calls, found religion. Don’t need me no more. I got nothin’. I’m done fighting. Can’t do it no more.”