It Was seven o’lock in the morning, and Homicide lieutenant Kevin Lynch was in his office at police headquarters, drinking bitter coffee and flipping through a file from the night before.
As he leaned back in his chair and moved the file from one side of his battered wooden desk to the other, his shaved head gleamed in the fluorescent light, his strong shoulders slumped, and his tired eyes glazed over.
He was looking at the words on the pages, but he wasn’t really reading them. He already knew that they recounted the shooting death of a seventy-one-year-old woman named Emma Jean Johnson.
Her death marked the twentieth homicide of the summer, and the two hundredth of the year. The numbers were the lowest in a decade.
But the statistics didn’t make it any easier for Lynch.
Whether it was one homicide or a thousand, he privately mourned every victim whose name came across his desk. He was especially dismayed by murders in North Philadelphia, because he’d grown up there.
It didn’t matter if it was east of Broad, where the projects of his youth had been razed and replaced by tidy twin houses on manicured plots of grass, or north of Diamond, where the gleaming halls of Temple University gave way to crumbling row houses and time-worn streets.
To Lynch, North Philadelphia was one neighborhood divided along fabricated lines that did nothing to change the lives of the people who had no choice but to live there.
He was attached to those people, because he was those people. His inability to disconnect from that reality was his greatest strength as an investigator. And it was his greatest weakness as a man.
Though he’d learned to hide his feelings from fellow cops, his wife and daughter had watched the weight of dozens of murder investigations eat away at him over the years. And in some ways, the job had done more harm to him as a father and husband than anything in his life.
Even his wife’s miscarriage some years before, which had brought tears and regret, and healing, and scarring, hadn’t affected them as much as his career. His job required time. And time created distance, a distance that at times seemed insurmountable.
He’d often asked himself if a career of solving other people’s problems had exacerbated his own. Yet the question wasn’t enough to make him walk away from law enforcement. In fact, he’d fought to stay, even as cases like that of Kenya Brown, the nine-year-old who’d been murdered in his childhood home, The Bridge, threatened to destroy his community, his marriage, and his career.
Now, nearly ten years after witnessing the devastation that resulted from Kenya’s death, Lynch was still watching people die for little or nothing, and he was still asking himself why.
Opening the file on his desk, he looked again at the photographs from the Johnson murder scene. There were bullet casings on the ground, along with blood, a handkerchief, and a Bible. And then there was Mrs. Johnson, her eyes fixed on some unseen point in the sky. She looked almost like the woman Lynch had known as his grandmother.
He wondered if the scene the officers described in their report was genuine. Did Emma Jean Johnson’s daughter kneel by her dying mother’s side because she grieved her violent and senseless death? Or did she, like Lynch, mourn her squandered chance to have one last conversation with the woman who’d raised her?
A detective knocked on his door and stirred him from his memories. He was glad, as always, to get back to work. It was the work that prevented the past from consuming him.
“Lieutenant,” the detective said. “We’ve got problems with that shooting from last night.”
Lynch sighed, leaned forward in his chair, and opened the file. “Didn’t Reverend Anderson already give a statement implicating Frank Nichols?”
“Yeah.”
“So bring Nichols in.”
“We sent detectives to get him at six o’clock this morning, but Anderson already had five hundred people outside Nichols’s bar.”
“So move them.”
“We tried, but they’re saying they want Nichols.” The detective leaned across Lynch’s desk. “And we don’t think Nichols is about to go quietly.”
Reverend John Anderson stood atop a car outside Frank Nichols’s bar, his tired, red-rimmed eyes surveying the crowd of hundreds who’d come from congregations all over the city.
After giving his statement to detectives, he’d spent the remainder of the night making phone calls to organize the gathering.
It was a protest that was thus far peaceful. But he didn’t know how long it would stay that way. And he didn’t know if he wanted it to.
The crowd had marched the six blocks from his church on Twentieth and York to the bar at Fifteenth and Dauphin, and now they were leaning forward, watching and waiting as Anderson raised the bullhorn to his lips.
“Last night,” he said, pausing to lock eyes with several men in the crowd, “they tried to rape my daughter.”
There was a shocked silence. Then the crowd pressed closer to the makeshift stage.
“My only child came to me with blood on her dress and tears in her eyes and said, ‘Daddy, they tried to hurt me.’
“I turned to my wife, and she said, ‘John, turn to the Lord.’”
Reverend Anderson paused and looked down at his daughter, who was standing directly in front of him, trying not to allow her divided allegiance to show on her face.
“But when I looked in my baby’s eyes and saw hurt,” John continued, “I wasn’t a pastor anymore, I wasn’t a preacher anymore, I wasn’t a teacher anymore. I was just a father. A father whose child was in pain.”
There was a smattering of amens as heads began to nod in agreement.
“I grabbed the nearest thing I could get my hands on,” the pastor said, pointing to the bar on the corner. “And I came here, and told Frank Nichols that if one hair on my baby’s head was ever harmed on these streets, there would be hell to pay!”
The crowd began to clap wildly as Anderson’s jaw jutted out defiantly.
He suddenly grew solemn. “And through it all, Mother Johnson was praying,” he said, his voice beginning to rise. “Praying that these drugs, and these rapists, and these thieves, and these murderers, would be wiped from our community!”
The clapping resumed in earnest, and as Lieutenant Kevin Lynch’s black Mercury Marquis pulled onto the sidewalk across the street from the spot where Anderson was speaking, the pastor found his stride.
“Mother Emma Jean Johnson laid down her life so that God could answer her prayer!” he shouted to thunderous applause. “She was cut down like a dog in the street so that we could come here today and say, ‘No more!’”
As the crowd worked itself into a frenzy, Lieutenant Lynch looked up at a three-story abandoned house that stood just a few feet behind Anderson. He saw a man walk to the edge of the rooftop and lie down. There was something in his hands. But it wasn’t until he pointed it that Lynch realized what it was.
He grabbed his handheld radio. “Dan two-five, we’ve got a gun on the roof.”
Voices exploded over the radio as Lynch pushed through the crowd.
Plainclothes officers from Civil Affairs moved rapidly toward the building where the gunman crouched on the roof. Uniformed officers removed barricades. Command officers called for additional units.
And Anderson called for Nichols to come outside.
“Frank Nichols!” he screamed into the megaphone. “It’s judgment day!”
At that, two of Nichols’s men emerged from the bar: Raheem, who ran Colorado Street, and an older man who ran Fifteenth Street. They closed a steel door behind them to prevent the increasingly hostile crowd from storming the place.
“Murderers!” someone yelled, and the crowd took up the taunt.
As the chant grew louder, Keisha looked over at Nichols’s underlings, then scanned the crowd and saw Jamal standing about twenty feet to her left. They locked eyes, and Keisha’s heart fluttered as she stood between the two men she loved.
Her feet were rooted to the spot as Lynch came within a yard of her father. The police commissioner and several commanders who’d just arrived on the scene were also pushing toward him.
“Get him down!” the commissioner screamed into his radio. “Get Reverend Anderson down!”
Lynch, who was now standing directly behind Keisha, looked up at the roof and took out his weapon just as Keisha tore her gaze away from Jamal.
“Daddy, get down!” Keisha yelled as Lynch’s gun went off near her ear.
A second later, Dauphin Street disintegrated into bedlam.
The crowd that had pressed itself together to hear Anderson was now trying to tear itself apart. Old women were trampled. Children were separated from their parents. Men were trapped against cars. And the police were powerless to maintain order.
Keisha saw her father one minute, and the next minute she was knocked to her knees and swallowed up in the panicking mass of people. There was screaming, then several gunshots, and
suddenly someone hit the ground just a few feet away from her. She looked over and saw one of the protestors—an older man with bloodstained gray hair. He was struggling to breathe, and blood leaked like tears from the corners of his eyes.
Keisha screamed and tried to rise to her feet. But someone ran past and kicked her in the head. As she began to lose consciousness, she felt an arm reach down and grab her.
Then everything went black.
Keisha awakened on a couch in a dimly lit, dank basement, squinting to adjust to the light as a man sat perched in front of her on a barstool.
She tried to speak, but her tongue was thick in her mouth. She attempted to rise, but her head swam. She sank back into the couch, which sat against a crumbling cement wall on a dirt floor.
Fighting to correct her blurry vision, she blinked, and the man’s face came into focus. When it did, she saw black skin framed by long, thin dreadlocks. And perched above his chiseled nose and thick lips were dark, intense eyes, staring tenderly into hers.
She was dizzy, floating as if in a dream, and reached out to steady herself. As she did so, her fingertips grazed the fine, shiny stubble that covered his face. She traced his cheekbones, which rose at sharp angles. Then she followed the path of his jaw and ran her fingers down to his chin, and up to his lips.
“What happened, Jamal?” she asked, trying hard to regain her equilibrium.
“You bumped your head,” he said, leaning forward to stroke her hair. “They was ’bout to run over you, so I brought you in here.”
She couldn’t understand everything he was saying, but she
knew that his touch caused something to go through her. Something that was exhilarating and frightening, just like the muffled sounds of screaming and pounding that she heard coming from somewhere above her head.
Her thoughts were still muddled. But when she forced herself to look away from Jamal’s hypnotic gaze, one thought jumped to the fore.
“Where’s my father?” she asked anxiously.
“The cops scooped him up. He all right.”
“I need to see him,” she said, leaping off the couch and trying to push past him.
He placed his arm in front of her. “Not yet,” he said quickly.
“Let me go!” she said, pushing more violently. “I have to see my father!”
“If I let you go,” he said, his tender gaze hardening, “you might not ever see him again.”
She suddenly stopped struggling as her face clouded with a mix of anger and realization.
“You knew!” she shouted while punching and slapping at him. “That’s why you told me my father might be in trouble last night. You knew they were gonna try to kill him!”
He grabbed her hands and tried to calm her down. “Listen to me, Keisha.”
“No!” she said, kicking wildly in an effort to get away from him. “You knew!”
“Keisha, stop!” He took her by her arms and forced her down onto the couch, then knelt on top of her and held her there.
The two of them sat there for a moment, gulping air as they tried to recover from the brief struggle.
“I didn’t know,” he said, staring into her eyes. “I just know they told me to get your pop to stop gettin’ in our business.”
“You’re lying,” she said.
“Keisha, listen to me,” Jamal said earnestly. “I don’t know who tryin’ to kill your father. All I know is, it ain’t me. Did my father get somebody else to do it? I don’t know. But I do know this. My pop kills people. He don’t care no more about me than he do about you or anybody else. And if he find out what I’m ’bout to do, he’ll kill me, too.”
Keisha looked into his eyes, searching them for the lie she believed was there. She couldn’t find it.
“And what are you about to do?” she asked.
He reached out and held her fingers between his own. “I’m leavin’, Keisha,” he said gravely. “I’m walkin’ away from my father’s business.”
Keisha could hear in his voice that he was serious.
“Why would you do that?” she asked, hoping he would give her the answer that she wanted.
Jamal’s eyes took on a faraway look as he tried to find the right words.
“My mother hated me ‘cause I was too much like my father,” he whispered. “My father couldn’t love me ’cause he ain’t know how. So if I gotta choose between love and hate—between them and you—I’m takin’ you, and I ain’t lookin’ back.”
He took her chin in his hand and turned her face toward his own.
“I’m makin’ my choice, Keisha,” he said earnestly. “I need to know if you gon’ make yours, too.”
There was a lull in the shooting, and John Anderson felt like he was in the midst of a dream.
As the police officers’ hands guided him away from the car
where he’d given his speech and he listened to the garbled sounds of shouting voices all around him, he could feel that he was in the eye of a storm. And it was troubling, because he knew in his spirit that the thunder and lightning were about to begin anew.
Earlier, he had come there in the belief that trouble was what he wanted. But he wasn’t so sure anymore. He was, after all, a man of peace, he thought as the officers pushed him through the crowd. But as the moments stretched out, allowing him to see things clearly through the mounting confusion, he realized that he hadn’t known peace in forty years.
As he absorbed the various sights around him—a woman running with a baby, an injured man lying on the asphalt, one car crushed against another, police officers shouting into radios—he saw the same type of confusion that often raged in his mind.
Thoughts from his past cropped up on a regular basis, challenging the very essence of who he was. These were the thoughts that mocked him for the sermons he preached, and the service he rendered, and the faith he claimed to hold dear.
These thoughts grew into action. And every day, they caused him to fail when his faith was tested. There were tests of the flesh, and tests of his convictions, tests that repeatedly showed that he, like any man, was driven by his desires.
But while other preachers proclaimed that their desires were in line with God’s, John Anderson knew that the desires that drove him were anything but godly. They were sometimes downright wicked. And if he’d learned anything on this day, it was that wicked desires bred wicked results.
The police moved him past the car, too slowly it seemed, in an effort to get him away before the shooting resumed.
When it did, John turned, and for the first time recognized the police commissioner on his right.
But as John opened his mouth to shout a warning, the sound of his voice was swallowed up by the thud of a bullet, smacking against flesh like the sound of wood against bone.
John watched the police commissioner fall to the ground in a heap, and in the next moment John was pushed down next to him.
As he lay there, behind the open door of a police car, he prayed that there would be no more death today.
Keisha sat on the couch and stared across it into the face of the man she’d fallen in love with as a child. It was a face that had matured over the years.
But the boy she’d known was still there, in that face. He lived in those smoldering eyes. She could see him still, staring at her across the playground and speaking without words.
He was saying that the dreams they’d shared as children were going to live or die based upon what happened in the next few moments. There would be no more playground sunsets or secret kisses. There would be no more childhood laughter or shared innocence.
Right here, right now, in the dank air of a basement, Keisha would have to make a choice that only a woman could. And she didn’t know if she was ready for that.
“What you thinkin’ about?” Jamal asked.
“I’m thinking about the freedom I told you I wanted,” she said thoughtfully. “And I’m wondering why it doesn’t seem that important now.”
“Maybe you just scared,” he said, taking her hand in his.
Keisha looked up into his face. “Why would I be afraid?”
“‘Cause now you gotta do more than just talk about bein’ free. You gotta decide if you really want to.”
“Suppose I’m not ready to decide now?”
“Then I guess you already made your decision,” Jamal said sadly.
Keisha wasn’t sure what she wanted. But she knew what she didn’t want. She didn’t want to watch her parents’ marriage break under the weight of the ministry. She didn’t want to spend the rest of her life wondering what could have been. And most of all, she didn’t want to lose Jamal.
“Why can’t we just stay here and be together?” she said with upturned eyes.
“’Cause people who don’t follow my father’s orders don’t live long.”
“Where will you go?”
“I don’t know,” he said, stroking her hair.
Keisha looked straight ahead and spoke, almost to herself. “How can you live your life, knowing your own father would want to kill you?”
“How can you live in a place where they talk about love, but you never see it?” Jamal retorted.
“How do you know what I see?” she asked saucily.
“’Cause if you saw love, you wouldn’t be tryin’ to get it from me,” Jamal said, matching her tone.
“If you loved me, you wouldn’t talk about my family that way,” Keisha said.
“This ain’t about our families, Keisha. It’s about us.”
Jamal got up slowly from the couch and walked across the basement floor.
“But since you want to make it about families, let me tell you ’bout mine,” he said quietly.
He paused to allow his mind to unlock the memories.
“My mom was a college girl—a good girl who met my pop one night in a club. He told her he was a businessman. She believed him.
“They dated for a minute, and when he got her pregnant, she found out what his business really was. She hated him for how he made his livin’, and she made sure I ain’t see him, ’cause she ain’t want me to turn out like him. Problem was, she hated me, just like she hated him.”
“That summer I spent comin’ down here to see you? I had to sneak down here, ’cause I knew she ain’t want me nowhere near my pop.
“When she heard what I was doing’, she sent me down South. When that ain’t work, she bought me back home. When I got popped the second time for hustlin’, she told me what her eyes had told me all my life. She said I wasn’t shit. She said, if I wanted to be like my father, I could go ’head and do that. Then she put me out her house, and told me to forget I was her son.”
Jamal turned and faced Keisha, and she thought she could see the reflection of his tears.
“You ask me how I know you don’t see no love?” he said quietly. “I know, ’cause I can see it in your eyes. They look just like mine.”
Keisha got up from the couch and threw her arms around his neck. He wrapped his arms around her waist, and the two of them hugged one another in an effort to squeeze away their pain.
Keisha kissed Jamal’s cheek, released her embrace, and turned away from him.
“I want to be with you, Jamal,” she said, biting her lip. “But there’s so much I want to do with my life. I’ve been working with this lady at my job who says I have a good eye, and I could probably work in fashion.”
She turned to him. “I want to do that, Jamal. I want to see the world. I want to make a mark.”
“And you can’t do that with me?” he said with resentment.
“Haven’t you ever wanted anything, Jamal?”
“Yeah,” he said, his voice cracking. “I wanted you.”
The words struck her like lightning, making her forget everything that had come before.
And when she looked into his eyes and saw the depth of his love for her, she knew that her decision had been made. Yes, she wanted the freedom to choose her own path. Yes, she wanted the chance to succeed. But more than any of that, she wanted love. And she knew that she would get that from Jamal.
She kissed him gently on the lips. “I want you, too,” she said tenderly.
Placing her palms against his face, she put her lips against his ear.
“Tell me what I need to do to come with you.”
In the quiet, damp air of the basement, Jamal sat her down on the couch, and began to lay out the plan of escape he’d been formulating since the night before.
“I’ma have to act like I snatched you like my pop told me to.”
He pulled back his shirt to reveal the gun he was carrying in his waistband. “I’ma have to use this.”
She looked at him with a question in her eyes, and he took her hand in an effort to answer it.
“Touch it,” he said, guiding her fingers to the barrel of the gun.
She did, and at once felt something awaken deep inside of her. It was an excitement that was almost sexual.
Her lips parted slightly, and her mouth watered with anticipation. She was finally going to taste the world she’d always seen around her—a world that was reflected in the dim light that played upon the gun’s gray steel.
“I’ma carry this gun,” he said with a sly smile playing on his lips. “But I want you to know my gun belong to you.”
Keisha felt herself blush at the underlying message.
“I want you to understand somethin’ else, too,” he said, stroking her cheek.
“What’s that?”
“No matter what happen in the next few hours, no matter what it look like I’m doin’, I want you to understand that I love you. And I would never let nothin’ happen to you.”
She placed her hand against his, and guided it along her face. “I know.”
Jamal kissed her tenderly. Then he pulled out a cell phone and called one of his father’s people to say he had the girl.
As he spoke, Keisha could hear the shooting outside begin anew. The sound of the bullets made her feel alive.
Lynch crouched behind the car where Reverend Anderson had stood and listened to the high-pitched whine of bullets as they ricocheted off nearby parked cars. From where he was kneeling, it was hard to tell whom the gunman was targeting, or if he was aiming at all.
He knew that the shooter was on a rooftop, and that it was his job to remove him.
He watched as panicked protesters ran one block east and charged onto Philadelphia’s main thoroughfare, Broad Street, stumbling into rush-hour traffic.
He saw cars swerve and crash to avoid fleeing people as screams pierced the air and bodies were flung skyward. And when the crumpled wrecks had filled the intersection and the injured lay moaning in agony, he watched traffic back up in all directions, leaving the crowd trapped between twisted metal and flying lead.
As the gunfire continued, residents of the block shut their doors and huddled inside. Police were pinned down near their vehicles.
Children cried for their mothers. Husbands called to their wives. And Lynch jumped out from behind the car where he’d been hiding. He ran full speed toward an alley on the north side of the street.
Once there, he pulled his weapon and looked down the alley to see if there was clear passage to the other side. But he couldn’t see anything beyond the weeds and trash in front of him.
“Dan two-five!” he yelled into his handheld radio. “Get me some more units on Dauphin Street!”
The sound of sirens filled the air in response to his call. But even if backup could get there, they’d have to abandon their vehicles and make their way to Dauphin Street on foot.
Lynch didn’t have time to wait for that.
Holstering his gun, he covered his face with his arm to shield himself from the tear-shaped leaves that whipped back at him as he pushed through the trash-strewn alley.
As he passed through, he peered to his right, through the man-sized weeds, and saw children staring out at him from a kitchen window. Their faces were etched with the same emotion that pervaded the nearby streets—fear.
Just across from them, on the other side of the alley, he found what he was looking for. Removing his gun from its holster, he stepped over knee-high trash and pushed through a dry-rotted wooden gate to an abandoned house.
The back door was gone, so he stepped through the opening and thrust his hand out in front of him, feeling his way through the darkness and hoping that he wouldn’t fall through the creaking floor.
He could smell the charred wood from the fire that had long ago gutted the building. He could feel the dampness from the water that had failed to save it. And as he made his way through the dining room and to the steps that led to the second floor of the
three-story house, he felt something else that he couldn’t quite place.
There was a hiss, a sudden rumbling, and something ran toward him, its claws scratching against the floor before it lunged at him. He ducked sideways and it flew past, landing a few feet behind him and running toward the back door.
“Damn rats,” he muttered.
Moving quickly up the staircase, he jogged to the second floor, then rounded the landing and skipped every other stair until he made it to the third.
Tiptoeing through the hallway, he stepped over missing floorboards on his way to the back window, where he knelt down and listened to the gunshots outside.
He quickly realized that he was just a few houses from the rooftop where the shooter was positioned.
Lynch opened the window and slithered out to the roof. He lay flat, facing the direction of the shooter, whom he could see kneeling behind one of the century-old chimneys that topped the houses on the row.
He was a dark-skinned man with dreadlocks, a muscular build, and a face that was fixed in an enraged expression. With each shot from the AK-47 that he held, his rage seemed to transform into a self-satisfied sneer.
Lynch could see from his demeanor that he wasn’t shooting merely because someone had paid him to do it. No. This was personal.
Lynch aimed his weapon and looked for a clear shot, but the chimney that stood between them prevented it.
Then the shooter stopped to change the banana clip that held his bullets.
Jumping to his feet, Lynch leaped over a large hole in the burned-out roof, charged full speed across the forty feet that separated
them, and unleashed a barrage from his semiautomatic pistol.
The shooter didn’t stop to look for the source of the bullets. He merely ducked behind the chimney and hunkered down. In three seconds, Lynch was upon him.
The shooter didn’t have the time to snap the new banana clip into his rifle. But he didn’t need it.
Popping up from behind the chimney while clenching the barrel of the rifle, the shooter swung the butt and hit Lynch’s arm, knocking Lynch’s gun from his hand. Lynch fell down, and the shooter stood over him and swung the rifle again. This time he missed.
Lynch rolled away and stood to his full six feet. He charged at the shooter, who ducked sideways, causing Lynch to tumble toward the chimney. He turned to avoid hitting the bricks headfirst, and there was a cracking sound as Lynch’s shoulder slammed into the chimney.
The pain blurred his vision as he turned to face his adversary. Then the younger, more agile man grabbed the rifle again and swung it, hitting Lynch in his head.
Lynch saw a flash of light and felt a warm liquid flow down the side of his face. He heard gunshots and approaching voices. And the last sound he heard before losing consciousness was the sound of footsteps running away.
A minute later, Lynch heard words through a velvet haze, but was unable to respond.
“Lieutenant,” a police officer said, kneeling over him.
“Lieutenant Lynch!” the officer shouted, shaking his shoulder.
The pain pierced Lynch’s body like an arrow and snatched him back from the fog that had enveloped him after he was struck with the rifle butt.
“Where’s the shooter?” Lynch said, trying to sit up and wincing
with the pain before two Fire Rescue workers arrived and told him to stay down.
“He’s gone,” the officer said. “But he couldn’t have gotten far.”
“Is anyone hurt besides me?” Lynch asked, trying and failing to laugh, because the pain was just too great.
The cop looked at the Fire Rescue workers, who looked down at Lynch and busied themselves treating his wounds, because they didn’t think it was their place to answer such a question.
“I said, is anyone hurt?” Lynch asked, more forcefully.
“A protestor was shot,” the officer said. “It looks like he’s gonna be okay.”
“Thank God,” Lynch said. “It could’ve been a lot worse.”
“There was one more,” the officer said, dejectedly looking down as he uttered the news.
“Commissioner Freeman was hit. He’s dead.”