This Way Home

by Wes Moore

  He stopped cold at the sound of his phone.

  “Michael?”

  “It’s me,” said a soft, feminine voice. “Kerri. How come you didn’t come to work today? My dad was waiting.”

  “I’m actually on my way to your house.”

  “Okay, but hurry; there’s something I’ve got to show you.”

  Elijah’s mind boomeranged between Kerri’s invitation and his strange, brief conversation with Michael, which carried the possibility of news about Dylan’s killer. There’s something I’ve got to show you. His head reeled with conflicting agendas, but in the end his lips moved and said the words “I’ll be right over.”

  “Wait a second,” said Kerri. “Did you think I meant…”

  “What? No, I didn’t.”

  “You did.” Kerri laughed. “Admit it.”

  “Okay, I did, but so what? Can you blame me?”

  “Listen, there’s no time for flirting,” she said. “I want to show you something on my computer. It’s going to help us find Dylan’s killer.”

  “Okay,” said Elijah. “But first you’ve got to tell me, honestly, why are you so obsessed with this?”

  “I’m not obsessed.” She sounded mildly annoyed.

  “You are. You’ve sent me at least two dozen articles on obscure principles of unconventional warfare. And you sound more interested in finding Dylan’s killer than I am.”

  Kerri sighed. “Okay, but if I tell you, you’ve got to promise not to judge.”

  “I won’t.”

  She took in a deep breath before getting started. “At first it was a way to get my father’s attention. He thought it was cute that I knew more military history than he did. But as I got older, I learned two things. First, he wasn’t an uncaring father; he was doing really important work. Dangerous work. It took everything he had.”

  “And the second thing?” asked Elijah.

  “I learned that I have a good head for military and criminal justice stuff. It’s like it is with you and basketball. It’s my thing. Now get over here.”

  “COME IN, COME IN.” Kerri threw the door open and led him to the kitchen; her laptop and manila folders were spread out on the table.

  “Where’s your father?” asked Elijah. “He’s going to be pissed at me for being late.”

  “Downstairs working on his project,” said Kerri. “And don’t worry about being late; I made up a good excuse for you.”

  Elijah mimicked Banks’s stern tone. “There is no such thing as a good excuse for being late.”

  “Right,” she said, smiling. “But I lied and told him you had an appointment with the local army recruiter.”

  “What?”

  “It was the best thing I could think of,” she said. “Spur of the moment and all. He tried to be gruff about it, but I could tell he was impressed.”

  “You’re scary,” said Elijah. “Terrifying.”

  Kerri turned her laptop around to show the screen. “Look at this. It’s so amazing, you won’t believe it.”

  He bent down to see. “It’s a map of the city. Congratulations. You discovered Google Maps.”

  “Very funny. Keep looking. See the blinking line?”

  On the map, tiny red pinpoints marked out specific locations. A dotted blue line tracked the movements of someone or something.

  “It’s directions or a route. I don’t know. Can you just tell me?”

  “These dots are all the places where Money’s been in the past two days. The blinking line is where he’s going right now. Isn’t this cool?”

  “But how…”

  “Okay, so I pushed the plan ahead a little bit. I’m sorry, but I think it’s working.”

  Elijah stared. He remembered the coffee shop, Kerri turning over the small plastic square in her fingers, raving about how perfect it was. She’d called it elegant, because it was the easiest solution: cheap, reliable, and almost invisible. But still it had been an inert piece of technology; how had she gotten it to work? In the whole of Baltimore, she knew only her father and him.

  “Okay. You told me that you first saw Money at the Battlegrounds, right? So I went there and talked to a few guys.”

  “Why?”

  “To find Money. It was mostly a waste of time. None of the basketball players said they knew him. But there was this one guy who hung out by this old tree…”

  “Jones.”

  “Right,” said Kerri. “A little crazy, terrible dresser. Anyway, he told me where I could find Money, and so I went and found him. It was as simple as that.”

  Elijah started to pace the kitchen. “And what did you do when you found him?”

  “Talked.”

  “Talked. About what? What could you possibly have to talk to him about? Do you know who he is? Do you know what he did?”

  “Relax, Elijah. That’s, like, five questions.” She grinned. “All I did is lean into his car window and make stupid conversation.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said, if someone new in town was going to throw a party and wanted to buy some weed, where would she go?”

  Elijah paced and shook his head. “I can’t believe you. Of all the people in the world to talk to, why him?”

  “Because we need information, right? And it worked. He gave me his card. See? I dropped the chip into the little slot where the window goes—you know, between the two rubber seals—and now we’ve got all kinds of data. In two days we’ll know all his routines, contacts, et cetera.”

  Elijah rubbed his temples and tried to calm himself. He’d never encountered anyone like Kerri before. She was always two steps ahead, and fearless! Worse, she was seriously beautiful, the kind that deepened the more he got to know her. They’d been arguing for twenty minutes, and he couldn’t take his eyes off her, or get over the way she tucked her hair behind her ear, only to have it fall in her face seconds later. Other girls did the exact same thing, but with her it was different. Special. Or was he crazy?

  Kerri smiled. “I think you’re a little bit jealous.”

  “What? That’s not it at all.” Elijah sensed Banks lurking in the next room. He tried to keep his voice down “This guy’s dangerous. He kills people!”

  Banks walked barefoot into the kitchen, clinking ice cubes in an empty beer glass. “Who kills people?”

  “No one, Daddy,” said Kerri. “We’re just talking.”

  “I heard half of what you were saying, you know. You two can’t hide anything from me.”

  Kerri jumped up and kissed him on his stubbly cheek. “Hypotheticals. You know I’m going to be studying criminal justice this year. I’ve created a hypothetical case to solve, involving local gang activity, and Elijah is helping me. Frankly, he’s not very good at it.” She made a frown at Elijah.

  Banks touched the place of his kiss and smiled benignly. “You must really want me gone.”

  “As a matter of fact, we could use your help on this. Have a seat?”

  “I’m retired, remember?” He eyed Elijah suspiciously. “You almost ready to get to work?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “When we’re done, Daddy,” said Kerri.

  “Fine,” said Banks. “I’ll be sitting on the porch. You two be good.”

  —

  AFTER THEY HEARD the front screen door slam shut, Kerri turned to Elijah and pointed a finger at him. “Don’t underestimate me. I know how to take care of myself.”

  “He carries a gun!” said Elijah. “And you’re hanging out with him?”

  Kerri started laughing. “You can’t even say his name, can you?”

  Elijah slapped his hands over his head. “Are you always like this?”

  “Always. Get used to it.” And then, pointing at the laptop screen, she said, “Look, I see your point, but can we set that stuff aside for a moment?”

  He slid his hands down to cover his eyes. “Honestly, I don’t see how.”

  “Just remember our goal and set aside the human factor; that’s how we’ll get to the ne
xt step.”

  “The human factor?”

  “Yeah, you know—people, relationships, feelings. They get in the way and cloud everyone’s judgment.”

  “You’re crazy,” said Elijah

  “Do me a favor, stop overreacting. Go play boot camp with my father, and I’ll call you as soon as we get some useful data.”

  BANKS STOOD IN the backyard over a massive concrete boulder that must have weighed five hundred pounds. It consisted of several of the bigger driveway chunks, bound together with two crisscrossed lengths of welded chain. At the top of the chain was a heavy steel shackle; beside the boulder lay a hatchet-hammer combo, a four-by-four piece of timber, and the coil of black static rope he’d used to tear down the shed.

  “What’s this?” said Elijah, fearing yet another contrived task involving heavy things.

  “Your next challenge,” said Banks.

  “I thought I was doing more yard work,” said Elijah.

  “This here is a problem that needs to be solved.” Banks pulled out a cigar and ran it under his nose, inhaling deeply. “Remember when we ran into those thugs outside the diner?”

  Elijah smiled. “Yes.”

  He lit the cigar and puffed it alive. “You asked if I could teach you some more of those things. That’s what I’m doing. Now listen up, because I’m not going to repeat myself.”

  —

  ELIJAH WALKED AROUND the boulder several times, trying to shift it even the slightest bit. He tugged on the chains. He whacked at it with the hammer, but the hardest blows produced hardly a crack. Next, he looped the rope several times around the nearest tree for mechanical advantage; the rope simply dug into the bark and locked up. Finally, he attempted to make a lever out of the timber, but it was woefully short.

  Think. There’s got to be a way.

  “You giving up?” taunted Banks.

  “No,” said Elijah. It seemed impossible, which may have been the whole point. He’d seen a movie once where a genius kid had stopped a nuclear war by teaching an out-of-control supercomputer to understand the principle of futility. But he wasn’t a genius, and nothing was at stake here, other than his own sense of pride. “Are there any rules?”

  “Just one: using only the tools at hand, move the boulder twenty feet into the painted circle. I’ll be in my workshop when you give up.”

  “Not giving up.”

  It took a full hour of thinking before the idea surfaced. Half an hour later, and he’d managed to chop the timber into four pieces of equal length, each one of which he sharpened into a big, wooden wedge.

  —

  ELIJAH STOOD AT the top of the basement steps looking into a cloud of sawdust and cigar smoke. “I’m done.”

  “Bullshit,” said Banks from somewhere in the cloud. “Show me.”

  They surveyed the boulder, which had been reduced to a massive pile of chunks, the largest of which may have weighed in at fifteen pounds. Every piece, however, fit neatly within the painted circle.

  “How in the hell…” Banks nudged one of the wedges with his boot.

  “I learned it in earth science class,” said Elijah. “Feather and wedge.”

  “Care to explain?”

  “Before dynamite,” said Elijah, “guys used to quarry stone using feathers and wedges.”

  “Skip the history lesson,” said Banks. “Just tell me how you did it.”

  “Basically, they’d drill holes and then tap in long, thin wedges. The stone would split exactly how they wanted it to. I made some wedges and did the same thing.”

  “Okay,” said Banks, “but you couldn’t have drilled holes. No way.”

  “I didn’t need to,” said Elijah. “I found the weak spots and pounded until a crack formed. Then I put the tapered end of the wedge in the crack and pounded more. Three of the wedges split apart, but the last one held.”

  “That’s…” Banks scratched his chin for several moments before finishing. “Damned creative. Good.”

  “How was I supposed to solve it?” asked Elijah.

  “You weren’t,” said Banks. “It was supposed to be impossible.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Elijah.

  “Futility.” Banks crushed his cigar under a boot heel and turned toward the house. “That was the lesson.”

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING Elijah jogged to Banks’s house, surprised at how much he was looking forward to the next chore/challenge. He surveyed the completed driveway, which he thought looked surprisingly good. The joints between the pavers were nice and tight, and the surface was smooth and uniform. There was only one irregularity, the absence of Banks’s Jeep.

  “Where’s your father?” asked Elijah.

  “The cigar store.” Kerri grabbed him by the arm and pulled him inside. “I want to tell you something really important, and you have to promise not to freak out.”

  “I’m not going to freak out.”

  “What if it’s something you don’t want to hear?”

  “About Dylan? You got more data from the GPS tracker?”

  “No, it’s not that. I pretended to go on a date with Money and got some really shocking intel.”

  “What?” said Elijah. “For a moment I thought you said you went on a date with Money, but that’s too crazy to be true.”

  “That’s right,” said Kerri. “But it wasn’t a real date.”

  “Describe what something that isn’t a real date looks like,” said Elijah. “Did you go for a ride in his stupid black Mercedes? I’ll bet you did.”

  “We went for ice cream sundaes,” said Kerri. “But it’s not how it sounds….”

  “Ha.” Elijah’s phone pinged with a text message, but he was too enraged to notice.

  “It was part of the plan.”

  “Because we needed intelligence, right?”

  “Right. Don’t you want to find out who killed Dylan and make sure they pay for it? I thought that was what you wanted. I thought that was the plan.”

  “That’s your plan, Kerri. I don’t have a plan. Every time I think I’ve got my feet under me, something happens and the ground shifts. So I guess you could say that my plan is to stand steady. That’s it.”

  “Can we argue about this later? Can I tell you what I learned, and then you can get back to being mad at me?”

  “Why him, Kerri? Of all the people in the world you could go out with, why Money?”

  “Oh my God. You think I actually like him, don’t you?”

  “It sure looks like it. First you went and talked to him. And then you two had sundaes. What’s next, a romantic weekend getaway?” He was grateful when his phone pinged again; this time he glanced at it and saw a text from Michael. It said, “Meet me at the Battlegrounds.”

  Kerri’s face hardened. “Watch it.”

  But in a heartbeat, Elijah forgot the entirety of their argument. He pocketed his cell. “I’ve got to go.”

  “Wait,” said Kerri. “Don’t…”

  But he was already gone, the front screen door slamming shut behind him.

  AT THE BATTLEGROUNDS, Elijah sat on the familiar splintered bench and waited. There was no sign of Michael, but he could see Bull playing in a pickup game on one of the far courts. Elijah turned slightly away, hoping to stay off the big man’s radar as long as possible; the last thing he needed was another fight.

  “Come on, Michael,” he muttered. “Where the hell are you?”

  He thought about Mrs. Henderson’s plea to bring her son home. And then there were Elijah’s doubts. Truth be told, he wasn’t sure he could trust Michael. He almost didn’t recognize his friend anymore. Michael now smoked, and did business with Money, whatever business meant. Dealing drugs, and what else?

  After a few more minutes, Jones spotted Elijah and came over to talk. He was wearing a yellow bicycling cap that said “Campagnolo,” and a pair of old-school suede Pumas. You could say what you wanted about Jones—and lots of people did—but he had his own style. Elijah had to give him that.

  “Hey, young
blood,” said Jones. It was his standard greeting to anyone under thirty.

  “What’s up, Jones?”

  He pointed at the empty space on Elijah’s bench. “You mind if I sit for a minute?”

  “Go ahead. I’m waiting for Michael.”

  Jones sat down. “No worries. When your boy comes by, I’ll hit it.”

  “What’s up?” Elijah scanned the sidewalks leading into the Battlegrounds, but they were empty.

  “Oh, you know.” He took off his cap and finger-combed his hair. “A little business here and there.”

  Elijah watched the far court game where Bull had just committed an atrocious foul. His opponent was slow to get up, and limped to the take-back line.

  “That’s some ugly play,” said Jones.

  “Yes.” Elijah looked around at the rest of the park and decided that it was all ugly—the game; the patchy grass littered with cigarette butts and candy wrappers; the bike frames stripped clean of their parts; and the padlocked, graffitied bathrooms. He had loved the place when Dylan was alive, but now…he couldn’t stand it. He wondered if he’d ever play basketball again, and if things would feel any different in Buffalo. “Can I ask you something, Jones?”

  “Still a free country,” said Jones. “Go on and ask.”

  “Haven’t you ever wanted to get out of here?”

  “And do what?”

  “I don’t know. See the world. See how other people live.”

  “Oh, I see. I see. Well, I been out there, man. All over. California. Mexico. Oregon. Hell, I went to Asia once. You believe that?”

  “Really?” Elijah didn’t know if Jones was telling the truth or spouting more bullshit. That was the thing with him. You never knew what was fact or fiction.

  “Yeah, they thought I was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. All these little Japanese people coming up to me wanting to touch my Afro and have their pictures taken.”

  “Did you let them?”

  “Why not? They was just curious. And curious is good, like the way you’re asking this question about other ways to live. That tells me you’re a thinking man. Thinking’s good. Most people try not to think. You know that the human brain is designed to avoid thinking?”