Nickel City Crossfire

by Gary Earl Ross

  Keisha’s voice was not as loud as it would have been coming through a cell phone but the receiver was far enough from Mona’s ear that I could still make out her answer: “Not yet, Mom. It’s not safe, but I’m okay.”

  Not wishing to intrude further, I stepped into the corridor and pulled the door shut.

  I waited until I could no longer hear the timbre of Mona’s voice. Then I went back inside to find her shoulders heaving and her cheeks wet but the sound of crying trapped in a throat still too irritated to permit full release. I moved to the bed and put my arms around her as best I could. She turned her face into the strip of pocket near the bottom of my hoodie and wept freely, her vocalizations reduced to measured hums against pain. Afraid I would dislodge the IV tube under her collarbone if I moved, I remained still, the fingers of my left hand lightly patting her shoulder. I kept my eyes on the vital signs monitor for changes that indicated a problem. Temperature, pulsox, and respiration were steady but her heart rate and her already high blood pressure notched up a bit as I stood there. After a few minutes, as her tears began to lessen, her heart rate went down and her blood pressure dropped back to 138/82. At last, with a long throat-clearing attempt, she pulled away from my hoodie. I let go of her and reached for the small tissue box on the nightstand.

  “Hard to talk to her when she’s so scared,” Mona rasped, wiping her eyes with the tissue I gave her.

  “Harder when you’re recovering from lung surgery and getting oxygen.” I pulled one of the chairs closer to the bed and sat. “Don’t try to talk if it’s hard.”

  For a long moment, she looked at me, scowling without speaking. “Somebody forced that drug shit into her, and now they’re trying to kill her. That’s why she ran.” She coughed and pulled another tissue from the box. Then she took a couple steadying breaths before she wiped her lips. “But I guess you knew that already, being a detective and all.”

  “I suspected it.” I put the tissue box back on the nightstand.

  “But you didn’t tell us.”

  “Didn’t know for sure but I thought she might be trying to lead them away from you.”

  A swallowed laugh scraped the inside of her throat. She began to cough again, wincing repeatedly. When she finished she said, “They shot me anyway. To make her come out of hiding.”

  “I’m here to make sure they don’t get a second chance.”

  “She said she was here last night. Winslow never told me.” She gave me a sidelong glance and frowned. “You didn’t either. Maybe I was too out of it to remember anything but you’da thought somebody woulda wanted me to know my only child was alive and well.” Her breathing was more strained now, as if each inhalation had a difficult passage through a nose dried by oxygen and throat raw from coughing. “Sometimes it’s like you men don’t know how to talk at all.”

  Winslow was already standing by the bus and didn’t need me to kick him under it by putting the choice of silence on him. Blame wasn’t the issue but Mona’s feeling that she had been left out.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, leaning forward and resting my forearms on my knees. “Truly. But the way you’re breathing now...”

  Nodding, she said, “I know you thought it was the right thing to do, to keep me from getting too worked up—this worked up—so I thank you.” Closing her eyes, she let out a long sigh and took a few more steadying breaths. “Hard to stay mad at a good man. Winslow is a good man. Your daddy said you’re good-hearted too.”

  “I had a good role model.”

  “Such a smart man. Knows so much about so many things. I could listen to him talk all day.”

  One corner of my brain began formulating a way to tease Bobby for talking so much that she kept falling asleep. “He is a retired English professor, my godfather.”

  “I think he told me that.” She smiled and her eyes brightened a bit, though her voice was weakening. “He married? I mean, I got a friend who—”

  “He’s with somebody,” I said. “Happily.” I had to steer her back to the phone call before she couldn’t talk anymore. “Mona, I need to ask you about your conversation with Keisha. To help me protect her.”

  “Okay.”

  “She was staying at Fatimah’s and then they all left. Did she tell you why?”

  “Somebody kept calling the house in the middle of the night and hanging up.”

  “Did she tell you where she is now?”

  “With Bianca. Did you know her wife’s a cop?”

  “A good cop. She’ll be safe with them.” I leaned forward again. “Does she know the people who hurt her and killed Odell?”

  Mona shook her head. “She’d never seen them before. Two big black men who cut them off and held guns on them and said she was too nosy.” Fresh tears pooled in the corners of her eyes. “She tried to tell people at the hospital but nobody would listen.”

  “Does she know what they meant by nosy?”

  “About something she found by accident. She didn’t say what it was.”

  “She tell you anything else?”

  “Not to trust anybody. Not to tell anybody what she told me. Except you.”

  28

  After visiting hours ended, things were calmer and quieter, but nursing rounds continued as staff changed IV bags, administered scheduled medication, checked monitors, and tended to personal needs. Mona had two bedside visits, both from women: an aide before nine to help her into the bathroom and a nurse around eleven to check a med line as she slept. The nurse reminded me that coffee and snacks were available from a vending machine near the waiting room. By midnight, with most televisions off and most rooms lit by night lights, the corridor slipped into overnight quietude, with hushed voices at the nursing station and fewer audible squeaks of rubber soles on the floor.

  Coffee from the machine sucked but kept me awake, more from a roiling stomach than a caffeine jolt to my nervous system. Having burped enough bitterness as I read through the magazines, I filled two plastic cups with cold water from the bathroom sink and slid my chair to the wall nearest the foot of the bed. There I plugged my charger into an outlet so I could check headlines and play games as my phone juiced up. Seated this way, I sipped water and passed the time, half-obscured by the privacy curtains. The only other light was the dim glow of a plastic panel above the bed

  Mona slept on her back, snoring softly.

  Shortly after one, a small woman in flowery pink scrubs stepped into the room. She had narrow shoulders and brittle-looking auburn hair. I saw her before she noticed me half behind the curtains. There was something familiar about her. But even after watching nursing station personnel go about their duties over the past few hours, I could not place her face. I thought perhaps she had come on during a shift change or was a floater covering for someone on a break. She stood just inside the door for a second and glanced back over her shoulder. Then she approached the bed with tentative steps, passing the wall-mounted box of nitrile gloves without taking a pair. From her pocket, she took out a hypodermic needle, uncapped it, and pulled the plunger. When I got to my feet, she saw me and stopped, her hand shaking. Her eyes widened enough to register both surprise and what I first thought was discomfort.

  “Hello,” she said, voice deeper than it should have been in so narrow a frame. “Just some medicine for her SVC line.” The tremor still visible in her hand, she offered a nervous smile that, even in the diminished light, revealed blackened, crooked teeth and gaps where other teeth once had been. Then I knew why she looked familiar. This woman wasn’t Veronica Surowiec, the fallen physician I had met at Sanctuary Nimbus, but her unsteadiness and dentition suggested she was likely a member of the same methamphetamine sisterhood.

  I moved toward her without speaking, and she shifted her hold on the hypodermic. Backing away, lips curling into a snarl that became a throaty laugh, she held up the needle as if it were a dagger, to frighten me into stopping. But I kept coming, grabbing the pink plastic water pitcher off the nightstand, removing the lid, and throwing the contents at h
er. Stunned by the water, she took another step back before she lunged at me with the needle. I swung the pitcher in an arc as if it were a baton, first connecting with her hand and disarming her and then backhanding her across the face harder than I intended. I heard the plastic crack. She went down, blood pouring from her nose and leaking between the fingers of her right hand as she tried to scoot backward into the corridor with her left. Her eyes glazed over with tears.

  When I got to her and began to reach down toward her, she screamed, “Rape!”

  In the millisecond that the nursing station five rooms away was completely silent, I unholstered my gun and pointed it at the woman still sliding away. “Don’t fucking move!” But she inched backward anyway, so I racked my slide. That stopped her, just as the corridor filled with people in scrubs and lab coats, even a few in hospital gowns. Many crouched or ducked into other rooms once they caught sight of my gun. Others simply froze.

  “Call security,” someone said above the rising chatter.

  A dark-haired young man in a white coat drew near, his hands at chest level, palms out as if to calm me. He stopped when I looked at him. “Sir, I don’t know what’s going on, but please put down the gun.”

  “Call security!” someone else said.

  “I just did!” came another voice.

  “Does anybody know this woman?” I said.

  Wet and bloody, the woman on the floor looked at everyone frozen near her, made a quick calculation, and took in a lungful of courage. “This motherfucker tried to rape me!”

  “Sir,” the man who had drawn near said, “whatever it is—”

  “Does anybody know this woman!” My shout silenced everyone. Some of them looked at the woman on the floor and then at each other. I heard some ask others who she was and noticed one woman shrug. “Nobody knows her? Then call nine-one-one.”

  “He tried to rape me,” she said again, wiping her eyes. “Fucking bully tried—”

  “You just tried to kill Mrs. Simpkins, in the room behind me.” After gasps, another millisecond of silence. Then I heard someone say, “The gunshot victim,” and someone else, “He’s that bodyguard they were talking about.” I gave a quick nod to the woman on the floor, to let her know that I too could play to the crowd. Her tears stopped, and her eyes—blue, I now saw, and intelligent—met mine with a fury that felt primal. Then she gazed about, her anger giving way to the same fear I hadn’t recognized when I started toward her in the semi-darkness of the room. She angled herself toward the wall so she could sit up.

  I looked at the man with his hands still raised as he took another step closer and said, “I’m working here and I told you to call the police, so don’t be stupid.” He stopped, lowered his hands. “I knocked a syringe out of her hand. She said it was for the SVC line.”

  “The subclavian vein catheter. That’s—”

  “Explain it later,” I said. “The needle’s gotta be on the floor. Why don’t you go find it, so police can figure out what’s in it? Please. And put on gloves. She didn’t grab any when she came into the room. Her fingerprints must be all over the barrel.”

  He turned to look at a tall, middle-aged woman in a pristine white coat with a stethoscope hanging out of one pocket. A supervising physician, I assumed. She nodded her permission. He went into the room and dialed up the lights. I heard Mona say, “What’s going on? Is that Mr. Rimes out there doing all that hollering?” Then the woman in white stepped into the space the man had vacated and looked straight at me.

  “The poor thing’s soaked and bleeding. Can we do something about that?”

  “Toss her a towel. I don’t want anybody close if the ‘poor thing’ has another weapon.”

  A small white towel made its way to the front of the crowd, and the woman now sitting with her back against the wall put it over her nose just as the man returned with the hypodermic in a blue-gloved hand.

  “It’s empty,” he said.

  “Perfect for an air embolism,” I said.

  29

  So, you beating up little girls now?”

  Dark hair half-combed and light brown cheeks dotted with stubble, Rafael Piñero sat behind his desk in the homicide squad room, glaring at me in the interview chair across from him. Instead of his customary suit and tie, he wore jeans and a black BPD sweatshirt. It was half-past three, and I had just finished summarizing my investigation. Earlier, I had refused to accompany the responding officers to nearby B District unless a uniformed cop was posted outside Mona’s hospital room. While one officer seemed ready for a testosterone spray-off with me, his more experienced partner asked the resident who had found the syringe how it could be used to commit murder. After hearing the explanation, he turned to me and asked if I knew anyone on the force who could vouch for me. I told him detectives Chalmers and Piñero. A few phone calls later, the younger uni sat in a chair in the hospital corridor while I took a ride down to headquarters, not B District, beside his partner. Handcuffed, the woman rode in back. Now she was waiting in an interrogation room.

  “She isn’t a little girl,” I said. “She’s a grown woman who tried to stab me with a needle with God knows what on it.” I took a breath. “Didn’t mean to hit her that hard.”

  “A little woman, bro, and you broke her goddamn nose. With a water pitcher.” Piñero let out a low whistle and sat forward, resting his elbows on the desktop and his chin on his hands. “Okay, so you think she was trying to kill this old lady you were guarding. Who is she again?”

  “The mother of the woman I was hired to find.”

  “The woman who overdosed.”

  “The woman forced to overdose.”

  “Okay, forced. But you still haven’t figured out why.”

  “When we find out who this woman is, maybe then we’ll know why.”

  “Takes time. We got no idea what Jane Doe’s real name is. She’s not talking. Hasn’t even lawyered up. We can put her face and prints in the system and wait for hits. But she’s gotta be charged with something for anything we do to matter. So far you got nothing. The cops who answered the call found her bloody on the floor because you put her there.”

  “Somebody shot her—the mother, I mean. I was sure they’d try to finish her so I was there.” I smiled at him. “Thanks at least for putting in a good word. I’ll sleep better knowing Mrs. Simpkins has police protection.”

  “Hold the fucking phone a minute, okay? I called in a favor and got you brought here instead of B District. To homicide. But nobody died tonight. Your private-eye-who-brought-in-a-cop-killer shit only goes so far, you know? This is probably the last hole-punch for that particular card.”

  I figured it was true and said nothing.

  Piñero pursed his lips. “So, we got the lady covered for the moment, but I don’t know yet if we can do round-the-clock, especially if that dipshit walks outta here uncharged. That call is above my grade. You will have to convince the brass to spend the money. Good luck with that.” He leaned back, folded his arms across his chest, and surprised himself with a yawn. “Woke me the fuck up. Woke up my girl when we were both wiped out—and don’t even look like you want to ask why. Man, they coulda called Terry. He’s chickless right now and probably snoring out to the sidewalk.”

  “Sorry.” I spread my hands in a mea culpa. “I gave the guy both your names.”

  “Prick probably turned his phone off ‘cause he had a premonition you would get into some shit tonight.” He drummed his fingers on the desktop. “Why is everything so twisty-turnaround with you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “First, that shooting is not my case, and neither was the overdose. Frankly—”

  “I know. Survive an overdose or a shooting, your priority drops.”

  “Not just that. Maybe there is an upstart gang trying to challenge Lorenzo Quick’s operations—foolish, you ask me. Maybe these two big black dudes did off this teacher and try to kill his girl on Jefferson. Maybe they shot up her folks in the middle of Orange Street. That doesn’t ex
plain why a little white meth mama tries to kill an old black church lady. Until they run in the same circles...” He pushed everything away with a wave of his hand. “Too many hypotheticals. Be easier if the assailant in the hospital was a big black guy.” He grinned. “If you broke her nose, you probably would’ve iced him.”

  “Might’ve had no choice.”

  “At least I could investigate then. This still isn’t a major case. At best you stopped a tweaker from assaulting somebody. But you’d be hard-pressed to prove even that much. The idea someone sent her to do it is a lot to swallow. The narcotics overdose, the shooting—you gotta connect the dots, show this is all one case. Then I can get the guys working each end to share information.”

  “Can I talk to her? You got her in the box.”

  “Hell, no! Civilian! Some guys I’d risk my pension for. You ain’t one of them. Yet.” He shook his head. “Sooner or later she’ll get a lawyer. Once he got wind a private citizen did an interrogation—in homicide, no less, when nobody died and his client might’ve been coming down from a meth binge—he’d think it’s his birthday.”

  “Can I watch?”

  “The detective sergeant on duty, the guy who put her in Interview One, is good people. Before you got here I told him what you told me on the phone. You can join him at the window. A professional courtesy. Off the record, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “Never to be fucking mentioned.”

  “Okay, I got it.”

  “The whole night will be off the record unless I get something to give the detectives.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Piñero stood, stretched. “I’m going to the break room for coffee. Want some?”

  “Sure. Black.”

  He returned with a small cardboard tray that held four Styrofoam cups of coffee. He set one cup in front of me. Then he picked up a legal pad from his desk and motioned for me to follow him. Wrapping tissue from the box on his desk around the hot cup, I sipped as I went.