Nickel City Crossfire

by Gary Earl Ross

  It wasn’t until I turned onto Main Street that I suspected I was being followed.

  Ordinarily, I would have had to concentrate to distinguish one car behind me from another at night. But the large SUV on my tail now had a distinctive pattern of LED daytime running lights that half-cupped the headlamps. I first saw the pattern in my rearview mirror when I turned onto High Street and reached a stop sign. Because LED running lights were increasingly common but still rare enough to be noticed, I thought nothing of them at that moment. Eight blocks later, however, when I made a right onto Main, the lights were still with me, apparently matching my speed. I decided to find out if the driver was tailing me.

  A few blocks ahead I passed Sermon on the Mount, the Simpkins family’s church. Then I changed lanes and soon turned left into the Delta Sonic complex across Main Street from Artspace Gallery and Artists’ Lofts. Between Barker and Bryant Streets, Delta Sonic was more than a car wash. It had oil change and detail shops, twenty or so gas pumps, and a convenience store with a Dunkin’ Donuts inside. I slid into an empty gas lane as if intending to fill up. The SUV behind me eased into a well-lighted lane to my right and stopped behind a Chevy Colorado. It was a black Lincoln Navigator with two men obscured by smoked glass. I tried to get a look at the front plate but my line of sight was blocked by waste bins between the pumps. I counted to three. Then I shot forward and swung left past the store and left again toward the driveway. I turned right on Main, right on Barker, and right on Linwood. I parked as far as I could from a streetlight then got out and walked back. Left hand inside my jacket, I peered around a wide tree trunk at Barker and waited.

  After a few seconds, the Navigator rolled into view and paused at the intersection as if the occupants were gazing down the street. Then it moved on toward Delaware Avenue. I waited three or four minutes before I returned to my car. My pursuers didn’t return.

  Pulling away from the curb, I couldn’t help wondering whether they were looking for me or looking for Keisha.

  4

  “They were probably looking for Keisha.”

  We were in the warm main dining room at Betty’s, at a small table against an exterior wall that held the charcoal drawings of the artist currently on exhibit. The front windows and canopy framework outside were decorated with Christmas lights, and the night beyond them was clear after earlier sporadic snow. The Mediterranean cod had just been set in front of Phoenix, and her first bite was still on the fork in her hand. “Unless there’s something you haven’t told me, you’ve been doing only routine things the past few weeks.”

  “Mostly for your law firm.” I cut into my grilled skirt steak and put a piece into my mouth. I worked on it slowly, savoring it, thinking.

  “All of it low impact,” she said as she chewed. “I can’t see depositions, background checks, and process serving causing a covert tail. So the question is, why would somebody be looking for your client’s daughter?”

  “The first question I’ll ask when I find her.”

  Oscar had told Phoenix nothing of what troubled the friend who wanted my help, so when I joined her in the restaurant and she asked how my day had gone, it was with more than casual curiosity. Between the moment we placed our order and the moment the food arrived, I recounted my afternoon with Winslow and Mona Simpkins, and my examination of Keisha’s apartment. There was no question of breaching confidentiality because Landsburgh, Falk, and Trinidad engaged Driftglass Investigations and agreed to represent me if the need arose. In fact, Phoenix had acted as my lawyer before we became lovers, having gotten me released from jail during my interrogation for a murder I hadn’t committed.

  In any case, I tried to explain the black Navigator as nonchalantly as I could. Our relationship was still in the probationary stage. We’d been together less than two months, and already she had spent a night sleeping beside my hospital bed as I recovered from gunshot wound surgery. I liked her a lot, perhaps more than I should have, for the limited time we’d been a couple, and didn’t want fear to chase her away. Now I looked at her—oval face framed by medium-length dark hair she untied when she wasn’t working, cinnamon skin glistening in the soft light, espresso eyeshadow and lipstick, tailored burgundy pantsuit—and wondered for the nth time what she saw in a rough-edged combat veteran and ex-Army detective who gazed at the world through lenses framed in stainless steel cynicism.

  “Maybe Keisha owes somebody money for drugs and they tried to break in to get it,” Phoenix said. “Maybe she knows too much about how her boyfriend moved his product and his crew wants to make sure she doesn’t talk. Or the guys in the Navigator could be anything from rival dealers who see her as the gateway to Odell’s operation to undercover cops who think she’ll lead them to the next biggest mouth in the food chain.”

  “Maybe Odell’s father is right, and she’s a dealer on the run with her rainy day stash.”

  “You don’t believe that.” Phoenix’s smile was one of her best qualities—wide and engaging, full of beautiful teeth. “It’s possible but you’ll be disappointed if it’s true.”

  “You know that how?”

  “The hint of a lilt in your voice when you talk about Keisha. You’re impressed by all she’s accomplished. Maybe you even have a bit of a crush. You’ll understand if somehow she resorted to drugs because of career pressure or if recreational use got out of hand. Deep down you don’t see her as a drug dealer. That would break your heart.”

  “A little. But it’s not so much a crush as my being protective by nature.”

  “One of the qualities that makes you special and makes me care for you, but you have to realize it can also get you into trouble.”

  “I do. It has.”

  “She wouldn’t be the first medical professional to go down that road. Lucas Tucker?”

  Tucker was a suburban Buffalo dentist now languishing in a Nigerian prison. His story had stretched across three news cycles last summer and fall, before Phoenix and I had met. First, it was reported he’d been taken into custody without cause, and his wife made a tearful public appeal for his release. Then the State Department waded into the affair, only to find that in his semi-annual trips to provide free dental care to impoverished Ogoni villagers, Tucker transported sizable quantities of cocaine from Nigeria to London, where he always stopped on the way home to visit relatives. His arrest and that of the Colombian dentist who worked alongside him to treat the unsuspecting Ogoni barely made a dent in the Africa-to-Europe pipeline, but neither man would see the sun for many years to come.

  “Tucker was a transporter, never a user,” I said. “Keisha got a nose full of Narcan.”

  “She also wouldn’t be the first to get high on her own supply.”

  “Lesson number two,” I said, remembering Scarface. “But you’re right. This woman did impress me, and not just with her achievements. I got a sense of how she lived and how she worked. Look, I know everybody’s got secrets. I’m sure she’s hiding more than the three emergency hundred dollar bills in the lining of her jewelry box and the vibrator in the back of her nightstand drawer. But nothing about her place indicated the type of personality that would be into dealing.”

  Phoenix put down her fork and looked at me for a long time. “You have good instincts about things like this. If you don’t think she was dealing, most likely she wasn’t.” She reached across the table and took hold of my left hand. “Which takes us back to why someone would be looking for her—if they weren’t looking for you.” She smiled. “Maybe you can change the game and look for them. You have some good cred with the police right now. Maybe Rafael would do a vehicle search as a favor.”

  Long before we met, Phoenix had had a brief relationship with homicide detective Rafael Piñero. Recently, I had crossed paths with him and his partner Terry Chalmers at the start of an investigation that ended with their extending to me a grudging respect. “Too many possibilities,” I said. “I couldn’t get a look at the plate, not even the state. Black Navigators made in the last year or two and s
old all over America? A longshot, not to mention Canada and Mexico, which compounds the complications.”

  She nodded. “But I know you’ll figure it out. You’re relentless like that, as long as you have a place to start.”

  I nodded. “The names of friends and co-workers.”

  “Anybody on the list you want to talk about?”

  “Not yet.” I drank some water. “We’ve talked enough about what I’m doing. Let’s talk about something else.”

  “Bobby and Kayla get off okay?”

  Almost two months ago, my godfather and landlord, Professor Emeritus Bobby Chance, had lost a bet to his lover, Judge Kayla Baker McQueen. The payment was a long theater weekend in New York City but my getting shot had delayed their departure. “I took them to the airport at six this morning,” I said. “He texted me when they got in and reminded me that they get back Sunday night. But I’d rather hear about what you’re up to.”

  For the rest of the meal we discussed her day—morning in court to finalize a divorce she felt could have been avoided with early counseling, an afternoon spent researching the particulars of an auto accident that had left a long-time client in a wheelchair, and a late-in-the-day partners’ meeting to discuss the feasibility of a class-action lawsuit against a chain store whose policy of placing bulky items on high shelves had resulted in at least five serious injuries to customers in three area stores. “They cut back on staff to save money,” Phoenix said. “Customers who don’t want to wait for help jump and jiggle and try to pull these things down when other people are walking by and bam! Head injury. Facial reconstruction. In one case a lamp put a woman in a coma. In another, a guy tore off his finger when he jumped up and his wedding ring caught on the edge of a shelf.”

  “Ouch!”

  “If we go class action, we’ll need some serious investigating. A lot of billable hours.”

  “So when are we heading to Ponce? I can finally meet Tia Rosita.”

  Phoenix’s aunt in Puerto Rico was her only living family. Some months earlier she had survived a major hurricane. Phoenix had offered to fly her to Buffalo, but with damage to her apartment minimal and electricity back on within a few days, Tia had declined. Buffalo was too cold year-round, she insisted, despite her niece’s assurances to the contrary.

  “They still need help with hurricane clean-up. You willing to put your back into that?”

  “Of course,” I said. “It’s rough here in January and February. Last winter?” I shivered. “I wouldn’t mind cleaning up debris in a warmer climate if the Weather Channel sniffs anything close to that one.”

  Phoenix chuckled. “The airfare won’t come from this case. It’s a long way off, but I think I can get away from things near the end of next month.” She cocked her head and studied me a moment. Then she smiled. “Of course, I could be making a mistake. Tia Rosita likes younger men, especially dark, good-looking men with broad shoulders.”

  “A cougar,” I said. “As long as you’re with me I can be strong.”

  “More like a snow leopard since her hairstylist died.” She leaned forward on her elbows and locked eyes with me. “But Tia’s still pretty hot for a woman in her seventies.”

  “No surprise if she shares DNA with you.”

  “Think Rita Moreno.”

  “Oh.” I shrugged. “That’s different. Can she cook?”

  Laughing, Phoenix kicked me under the table.

  Later, after we had made love in the elevated queen-sized bed that occupied the front left corner of her Pearl Street loft, I lay awake, thinking. Naked, I was on my left side, facing the tall window that Phoenix seldom covered because she so enjoyed the eleventh-floor view and pulsing lights of downtown. Though I usually preferred total darkness for sleep, I’d come to appreciate the way outside lights played off the hues of our bodies during lovemaking, especially the way they caught the colors of Phoenix’s mythical namesake rising from the ashes in the tattoo that masked her mastectomy scars. But tonight, as she drifted off to sleep while spooning me, her right arm around my torso, the lights were the last thing on my mind.

  I remained still to keep from waking her, but my mind was bouncing off the walls of my skull. The more I thought about the men in the Navigator, the more convinced I was they were looking for Keisha—why, I thought I would learn soon enough. What Phoenix hadn’t asked, and what I hadn’t even wondered till I was lying there within spitting distance of sleep but unable to reach it, was why they had followed me in the hope of finding her. Whoever they were, they knew I had been hired to investigate her disappearance. Figuring out how they had come by that information might be the key to everything.

  Minutes earlier Phoenix had jerked as if stumbling in her sleep and shifted onto her back. Now I felt her fingertips on my shoulder at the exact spot where scar tissue from my recent gunshot wound surgery was building layer upon layer.

  “Is this still tender?” she asked, her voice barely a whisper.

  “A bit, and it itches.” Turning onto my back, I twisted to see her face in the light. Lower lip caught between her teeth, she looked distressed. I felt for her hand, squeezed it. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

  “You didn’t. I was dreaming, about a man with a gun jumping out of the shadows.”

  “As if he were waiting for you to get close to him.”

  “Yes.”

  “So you thought about me getting shot.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re concerned it could happen again.”

  “Not concerned. Afraid. Afraid for you.” The fingers of her free hand slid through my chest hair as if making sure I were real and not a trick of the outside lights.

  “While Bobby’s away, I’m in charge of the apartment building.”

  “Stop that.” She twisted my nipple, lightly.

  “Ow! Stop what?”

  “You know.” She took a breath. “So, those men in that SUV. How did they know you were looking for Keisha?”

  “I was just wondering that myself. It’s amazing how our minds—”

  “Gideon, don’t.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t deflect. A joke about Bobby being away. A cute comment about how alike we are. I know we’re alike in a lot of ways and we’re good together but that’s not the issue.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Nothing to be sorry about, but I wonder if I should worry while you’re looking for this woman.” She swallowed audibly. “We’re just starting, and I don’t—”

  “I worry about you all the time,” I said.

  “But I don’t do the work you do.”

  “Doesn’t matter. You’ve become a constant in my life. Life is full of unexpected kicks in the groin.” I almost added and nipple twists but figured another try at humor would just fail. “Worry is part of the deal. But I’ll be careful if you’ll be careful. That’s part of the deal too. I promise I’ll look over my shoulder if you promise to stop talking on your cell when you cross the street.”

  She caught a few of my chest hairs between her fingers and pulled. “It’s not the same.”

  “No, it’s not. I think you stand a better chance of getting hit by a turning car than I do of getting shot again.”

  “Gideon, I look before crossing.”

  “I know you do. Just as you should know I always try to be aware of my surroundings and any people nearby. I’m not ready to clock out yet. I like breathing as much as the next guy, and I look forward to more nights like this with you. So trust me to be alert.”

  She was quiet for a few seconds. “I like how you breathe.”

  “Now who’s being cute?”

  She threw a leg over my legs, tightened her arm around my chest, and kissed me. “I am.”

  5

  Friday morning we made love again and showered together before we took the elevator down to the underground parking garage, where our cars were side by side. Kissing me goodbye and opening the door of her white RAV4, Phoenix said she would see me Saturday night when I picked her up
for the county bar association holiday party.

  I got home a few minutes past eight and popped a K-cup into the Keurig on my kitchen counter. Then I set out the file folder I’d taken from Keisha’s place and my pocket notebook. A few minutes later, seated on a bistro chair and sipping from a BuffaloPlace mug, I opened the notebook to the pages with the names of Keisha’s friends and associates. The question was who to interview first. At the top of the list were Odell’s parents, Carl and Rhonda Williamson, but I decided to save them for last in the first round. I needed space between visits with grieving parents. The next name was Ileana Tassiopulos, whose job title at Humanitas neither Winslow nor Mona knew. She was followed by Fatimah Howze-Kelly and Bianca Dawkins, Keisha’s two best friends since sixth grade. Fatimah was a florist with a shop in the Kensington-Bailey area, and Bianca was a manager at Hunnicutt Jewelers in the Walden Galleria. The last two names were Sonny Tyler, a former boyfriend for whom Mona had only a cell number, and the Reverend Dr. Felton Markham of Sermon on the Mount Church.

  I planned to call Tassiopulos, Tyler, the minister, and the Williamsons before I went to see them, but I would introduce myself unannounced to the two best friends. If Keisha had gathered her stash and fled, she might have been in contact with one or both of them. Caught in an unguarded moment, they might reveal something important. But it was too early for the flower shop or the mall to be open, too early even to begin making phone calls.

  I opened the file folder and began to look through the papers I’d stuck inside. The articles and memos painted a picture of the Humanitas Institute as an independently funded agency that provided health and human services for the public good. Humanitas maintained both formal and informal partnerships with the public schools and selected charter schools, soup kitchens, homeless shelters, women’s shelters, clinics, substance abuse treatment and counseling centers, immigrant and refugee assistance centers, housing assistance centers, daycare centers, senior citizen centers, and employment agencies. They offered supplementary vaccination services, home health visits and emergency room follow-up, after-school tutoring, individual and family counseling, and job placement.