John Anderson was siting alone in a dim cinderblock room just down the hall from where Nola Langston and Frank Nichols were trying to decide just how much of the truth they wanted to tell.
It was odd, he thought, that he should find himself here, on this side of the fence, when he’d begun his journey on the other side. But here he was. Strange as it seemed, he was willing to accept it.
“How are you, Reverend Anderson?” Lynch asked as he breezed into the room.
“I’m tired,” he said.
“Physically or mentally?”
“Both.”
Lynch sat back and looked into the preacher’s eyes. He saw the fatigue of which John spoke. But he saw something else there as well. John looked like a man at the end of a long struggle, a man who was tired of fighting.
There was at least one more battle for the preacher to fight, Lynch thought as he looked at him. And Lynch was about to draw first blood.
“Why didn’t you tell me that you’d had an affair with Nichols’s girlfriend?” Lynch said.
“I guess I didn’t think it was important.”
“You didn’t think it was important to tell me about someone with intimate knowledge of both you and the man behind your daughter’s disappearance?”
John shrugged. “I thought I could find Nola’s connectiori to all this on my own.”
“Is that why you had that sawed-off in your bag?”
John didn’t answer.
“We had detectives talk to a few people on the scene. They saw you get in the car with the bag.”
“I wasn’t going to—”
“Look,” Lynch said. “All I wanna know is, did you know that Nola was the cause of your daughter being kidnapped, and did you plan to kill her with that gun?”
John didn’t know what to say. So he didn’t say anything.
“Reverend, I like you,” Lynch said. “But here’s the truth, whether you like it or not. Your daughter’s missing, and she’s probably with Frank Nichols’s son because she wants to be. Your marriage is in trouble because you slept with another woman right under your wife’s nose. You’ve got Nola Langston telling people that you’re a murderer. And if you think folks are going to be flocking to your church once they find all that out, you’ve got another think coming.”
Lynch leaned in close to John. “You don’t have a whole lot left to lose by telling me the truth,” he said.
John Anderson sat back in his chair, knowing that the battle that raged inside him was all but over. The man he’d been was
just about dead now. And the voice inside him—the one that had called him to the ministry—was loudly telling him to surrender.
John smiled as he heeded the voice and decided that it was time to let go. It was time to allow the secrets that had held on to him for so long to turn to dust. It was time to throw that dust on the grave of the man he used to be.
The preacher looked into the detective’s eyes. And then he looked past them and stared, red-eyed, into the past he’d avoided for so long.
“There was a small-time dealer named Ben Carter,” John said softly. “He tried to sell heroin near one of my father’s spots. My father didn’t like competition, so he told me to handle it for him. In the summer of ’sixty-five, I did. I shot him down on Diamond Street on a clear August night.”
He shook his head sadly at the memory. “It seems like nothing’s been clear for me since then.”
John rubbed his tired eyes with his fingers.
“I guess I never thought Ben would have a son who loved him as much as I loved my father,” he said. “A son who would have the guts to do what I never did—avenge his father’s death.”
“Are you saying Ishmael Carter is the son of the man you killed?”
“Yes,” John said. “That’s what he told me right before he tried to kill me.”
“Did he tell you anything else?”
“He said that I’d abused Nola—tied her up and burned her and threatened to kill her. He said Nola told him that I was the one who’d killed his father. And he talked about the shooting as if it was yesterday—like he’d been carrying this rage his entire life.”
“The things he accused you of doing,” Lynch said. “Was any of it true?”
“Not the part about me abusing Nola,” he said. “I never did anything like that. But the part about Ben Carter, well, yes, like I said before, I killed him.”
A tear fell from the pastor’s eye, and he quickly wiped it away. “I murdered a man, Lieutenant Lynch. And after all these years, I guess it’s finally time for me to face that.”
Lynch’s face fell as he took in John’s admission, because he knew that the pastor’s punishment was just beginning. Though John had managed to avoid Ishmael’s street justice, he would soon face the wrath of the criminal justice system. And the system wouldn’t be so kind.
John could see the sadness in the detective’s eyes. But he knew that there was more to his plight than what appeared on the surface.
“Lieutenant,” he said, leaning forward in his chair, “there’s a story in the Bible about Paul and Barnabus being jailed. They sang and praised God all night, until their shackles fell off and the bars of the jail swung open.
“Their Roman jailer was about to kill himself for allowing them to escape. But they stayed, and they ministered to that man, and they saved him and his family.”
Lynch looked up into the preacher’s face.
“My ministry isn’t in that church on York Street, anymore,” John Anderson said with a smile. “That’s why it doesn’t matter what the world thinks about the things I’ve done.”
John pointed his finger to a point somewhere in the distance. “My ministry is out there, in whatever prison they decide to send me to. That’s God’s purpose in all this, Lieutenant. And I think, after all these years, I finally understand that.”
Lynch sat back in his seat and thought about what John had said.
“Who knows, Reverend Anderson?” he said after a long pause. “He might have a bigger purpose for you than prison.”
John nodded as Lynch regained his bearings and returned to the questions at hand.
“There is one thing that still doesn’t make sense about what Nola told us,” Lynch said.
“What’s that?”
“She said you never told her who the victim was,” Lynch said. “Is that true?”
John remembered mentioning his past involvement with his father’s drug business to Nola. But he didn’t remember giving her names.
“Yes,” John said. “I guess it is.”
“Then how would she know who you’d killed?” Lynch asked. “And how would she track down the man’s son, and put him up to killing you? Better yet, why would she even bother?”
“I don’t know,” John said. “Maybe Frank told her to.”
“Did Frank know that you killed Ben Carter?”
“No,” John said. “No one knew, as far as I could tell. My father gave the order directly to me. He didn’t tell anyone else, and neither did I. I didn’t even know that anyone else knew, until today.”
“That’s the other thing that’s bothering me,” Lynch said. “This guy, Ishmael Carter, pops up and tries to kill you, and he swears on his deathbed that it was Nola who put him up to it. But when I confronted her about it, Nola acted like she’d never heard of Ishmael Carter. I even described him, which wasn’t hard, because he looks like an older version of Jamal Nichols. She still acted like she didn’t know him, and from what I could see, she was telling the truth.”
Anderson smiled. “Nola can be very … convincing, even when she’s telling a lie.”
Lynch grunted in response.
“Are you sure there wasn’t anyone else who knew about you shooting Ben Carter?” he said absently.
Reverend Anderson spent the next few minutes in deep thought. And then realization swept across his face, along with something else. Something infinitely deeper.
“There is one person,” he said, looking up at the detective. “But before I take you there, there’s something I want you to do for me.”
A detective opened the door to the interrogation room where Frank Nichols was waiting with his lawyer.
“Counselor, we’re getting ready to transport your client to a holding cell downstairs,” the detective said.
“Is he being charged?”
“Not yet. But we can’t hold him here any longer. We need this room.
“Okay,” the lawyer said, gathering his papers and walking toward the door. “Frank, you call if you need me.”
Nichols nodded. He wasn’t in the mood to talk anymore. Especially not with the looming threat of being charged with the commissioner’s murder.
But that wasn’t his most pressing problem. His worst problem was on its way into the room.
The door eased open, and Frank looked up from his seat as a detective escorted John Anderson inside. The detective unlocked the pastor’s handcuffs and shot a look at Frank Nichols. Then he closed the door behind him and locked it.
“John,” Nichols said with a stiff smile. “What a surprise.”
The pastor didn’t waste any time. He walked slowly around
the table, the sound of his heavy footsteps filling the room, and stopped in front of Frank Nichols. Towering over him, he asked the question that had haunted him for thirty-five years.
“Why did you kill my father?” he said, staring down into the smaller man’s face.
Frank looked down at his hands and tried to come up with an answer. He couldn’t.
“He took care of you like you were his own son,” John said with quiet anger. “I even thought he loved you more than me. And then you killed him.”
Nichols sighed as he felt the familiar rush of guilt over the only crime he’d ever regretted.
“It wasn’t that simple, John,” he said quietly. “Other people was in it, too. People who thought your father was outta control. When they came to me—”
John Anderson reached down with gigantic hands and snatched him out of his seat.
“I don’t care who came to you!” he said, shaking with rage. “You were like a son to him! You were supposed to protect him, the same way he protected you!”
Frank reached up and pushed John’s hands away from him. Then he looked up into the taller man’s face.
“That was always the problem with you, John,” he said, as his eyes bugged out with rage. “You was always worried about the next man.”
“He was my father!” John shouted.
“Yeah, he was,” Frank said, nodding in agreement. “He taught me everything I know. But your father knew the game he was in. He knew somebody was gon’ take him out sooner or later. He probably was glad I had enough heart to do it.”
Enraged, John yelled and swung wildly at Nichols’s jaw.
Frank ducked the right hand and threw a hard left hook and right cross to John’s midsection.
The bigger man doubled over, and Nichols kneed him in his chin. John fell backward and Nichols pounced, landing one punch to John’s jaw before brute strength overcame quickness.
With one hand, John grabbed him by the collar and flung him into the side of the steel table. Then John flipped over and straddled Frank’s chest so that he couldn’t move.
He smashed his fist into the middle of his face. There was the sound of cracking bone and a spurt of blood as Frank’s nose gave way.
“I told you I would see you if anything happened to my daughter, didn’t I?”
John pounded his fist into his temple as Frank tried in vain to fend off the blow.
“Where your guns at now, huh?” John pummeled him, causing his head to bang against the concrete floor. “Who you gonna kill now, Frank?”
He slapped him with the front of his hand. Then he slapped him again with the back.
John raised his fist to punch him again. But there was no use. No matter how many times he hit him, the emptiness was still there. His father was still dead. His daughter was still missing. His life was still in a shambles.
Panting and glaring down at his defeated enemy, John wiped his bloody knuckles on Frank’s shirt and got up off the floor.
“Where’s my daughter?” John said, turning his back on the bloody mess that was Frank Nichols.
Frank pulled himself up from the floor and sat in one of the chairs. “I ain’t seen your daughter.”
John wheeled around. “But you know where she is,” he said earnestly. “Your son’s got her.”
“I ain’t heard nothin’ from my son,” Nichols said, wiping his bloody face with his shirt. “But if your daughter is with him, you might not wanna blame me for that. She just might wanna be there.”
John recognized the truth in Frank’s words, and his anger began to dissipate. The hatred that he’d harbored for years began to ease. And at last, he started to feel a sense of peace.
“If only we’d been like our kids,” John said as he sat down on the other side of the table. “Maybe we could’ve looked past the hate. Maybe all those people wouldn’t be dead.”
John looked across the table at his enemy. “I forgive you for what you did to my family, Frank,” he said with a sigh. “It’s the only way I can ever be free.”
When they emerged from the bar’s back entrance, Jamal was holding Keisha tightly, refusing to let her go for even one moment. Keisha held onto him for dear life, knowing that she had finally found the boy she’d lost so long ago, the boy who’d grown into the man she loved.
Jamal opened the back door, and they both slid into the back seat.
Joe Vega’s old Chevy Malibu was a virtual jalopy, more suited to the occasional trip to the market than it was for the two-hour drive to Newark Liberty International Airport. But they had little choice but to go there. Philadelphia’s airport would be crawling with police, and leaving from there was a risk they weren’t willing to take.
Even now, after leaving Philadelphia and driving for an hour and a half on the New Jersey Turnpike, Keisha and Jamal lay together
in the back seat, covered with a thin sheet.
They lay that way as much for expediency as for comfort, because they knew that New Jersey’s state troopers would be less likely to stop a lone white driver like Joe than they would a car with black passengers.
As the car labored along in the slow lane at fifty miles per hour, Keisha lay on the tattered back seat with her arms around Jamal, watching him as he slept against her bosom.
She marveled at the peace that covered his face, and wondered what was going through his mind. She hoped that his thoughts were of her and the love that they shared. She hoped that his peace came from the knowledge that she would always be his. She hoped, in that space in the back of her mind where doubt continued to linger, that he would always be hers as well.
If there was fear in Keisha’s heart, it came only from the thought of losing Jamal. She was no longer afraid of what the next moment would bring. Nor was she intimidated by the magnitude of their dilemma. She was now just a woman in love, enraptured by her very first lover and giddy with hope for the future.
If they lived modestly in Jamaica, they had enough money to last them for a lifetime. And if they didn’t, they would learn how to make more. But it wasn’t about the money, as far as Keisha was concerned. It was about Jamal.
She ran her fingers along his face, tracing the shape of his lips, his eyes, and his nose.
He awakened slowly and looked into her eyes, and his whole being brightened in a smile.
“What you lookin’ at?” he whispered.
“Us,” Keisha said with a grin.
“I thought you was just lookin’ at me,” Jamal said.
“When I look at you, I see us,” she said seductively. “Swimming in clear ocean water in Jamaica.”
“Can you swim?” Jamal asked.
“No.”
“Neither can I.”
“All right,” Keisha said with a grin. “How ’bout we just stick our feet in the ocean instead?”
They smiled and looked into each other’s eyes, trying to see their futures as they were, rather than seeing them as they wished them to be.
Neither of them wanted to face the reality of their plight. They were on the run for a growing list of crimes, and though they seemed to hold their destiny in their hands, both of them were increasingly aware of the net that was closing around them.
“Jamal, we’re almost there,” Joe said, speaking over his shoulder. “I’m gonna take you to the terminal for Air Jamaica. You’ve got e-tickets. Just go to the desk and give ’em the confirmation number. You should be all right from there.”
“Thanks for everything, Joe,” Jamal said. “I’ll never forget it.”
“You two just take care of each other,” Joe said as he took the airport exit from the turnpike. “You do that, and everything else will take care of itself.”
Keisha smiled, knowing that Joe was right. But Jamal knew that things could go wrong. So he told her what he wanted her to do if things didn’t go as planned.
“Keisha,” he said, stroking her hair. “I want to you to promise me somethin’.”
“What?”
“If anything happens to me—”
“Stop right there,” she said, putting a finger against his lips. “Nothing’s going to happen to you, Jamal. I won’t let it.”
He gently removed her hand from his lips.
“I know you won’t, baby,” he said with a reassuring smile. “But just in case it does, I want you to promise me somethin’.”
“What?”
“I want you to promise that you’ll take this money and disappear—start a life on your own someplace where nobody knows you.”
Keisha took a deep breath. She didn’t want to think about anything happening to Jamal, because it would be just like having something happen to herself.
“If you love me, Keisha, you’ll promise me that,” Jamal said, staring into her eyes.
She kissed him gently on the lips.
“Nothing is going to happen to you, Jamal,” she said firmly. “But if it makes you feel better, I promise I’ll do what you said.”
“Good,” Jamal said, leaping out from beneath the sheet as the car pulled to a stop at Terminal B. “Let’s go.”
The two of them stepped out of the car and watched as Joe pulled away. Then they entered the airport and walked cautiously to the check-in desk while fighting the urge to look around them to see if anyone was watching.
Because it was midafternoon, well after the morning rush, things were moving slowly. There was no line at the desk, so they were able to get their boarding passes without having to wait. Their flight would begin boarding in fifteen minutes, which gave them plenty of time to catch the Airtrain to Gate B40.
The security checks were easy as well. They went through without incident, largely because they had virtually nothing. They’d left the gun in Joe’s car, knowing that they’d be checked for weapons. And neither of them had keys, carry-on bags, or even wallets.
Keisha had the cash-filled envelope stuffed down the front of her pants. If anyone asked, she was prepared to say that the money was a wedding present and that she was keeping it there for fear of being robbed.
But no one asked, so she didn’t have to offer any explanations. It was all so easy that even Jamal was beginning to relax a bit.
He spotted a gift shop in the terminal and smiled.
“Keisha, I want to go over here and get somethin’,” he said. “I’ll meet you at the gate.”
“You’re not meeting me anywhere,” Keisha said with an attitude. “I’m coming with you.”
Jamal sighed. “I can’t even buy you a little gift without you bein’ right there next to me? Suppose I wanna surprise you?”
“I don’t like surprises,” Keisha said seriously.
“Well, you’ll like this one,” he said. “Go to the bathroom or somethin’. I’ll meet you right there in front o’ the gift shop.”
Keisha crossed the concourse and went into the bathroom, thinking all the while of what kind of surprise Jamal would find for her.
He was enough of a surprise, she thought as she washed her hands and splashed water against her face. She’d always expected that love would somehow appear and wrap its arms around her. She’d never expected that it would be someone from another world—someone with whom the only thing she had in common was love.
As she checked her hair in the mirror, she noticed a woman in a security guard’s uniform out of the corner of her eye. She was standing near the entrance to the bathroom and looking out into the terminal while whispering something into her hand held radio.
A few seconds later, the area of the terminal she’d just come from with Jamal erupted in bedlam.
Keisha ran out of the bathroom to see security guards and police running toward the area directly outside the gift shop. She could hear them screaming something about a security breach as she watched them converge on someone in the hallway. She saw
sticks flailing and fists flying as five police officers and security personnel tried to subdue a single person.
As she watched other officers join the mêlée, she realized with mounting horror that Jamal was nowhere in sight. That could only mean one thing. He was the man they were trying to subdue.
“Final boarding call for Air Jamaica Flight eleven thirty-six, at gate B-forty,” a voice said over the public address system.
Keisha watched helplessly as dozens more officers ran past her to join those already locked in battle near the gift shop.
Tears streamed down her face as she listened to the voice over the PA system as it once again announced the final boarding call for her flight.
She looked around once more, hoping that Jamal would somehow emerge and join her at the gate. But she knew in her heart that he wouldn’t, just as she knew in her heart that she would have to keep her promise to him.
She turned and ran to the gate just as the flight attendant was about to close the door, and showed her boarding pass and identification.
Keisha ran through the portable tunnel to the plane, her tears nearly blinding her as she made her way to her seat.
She sat in her seat with her face in a pillow, and cried for the love she’d lost. She cried for the memories she’d left behind. And as the plane took off fifteen minutes later, she cried for the family she’d been so anxious to forget.
Kevin Lynch was physically and emotionally drained when he walked out of the interrogation room and into his office. He’d seen too much destruction take place in a single day. Now he just wanted it to be over.
Although he believed that finding Jamal and Keisha would now be alll but impossible, he was somewhat comforted by the facts laid out in the preliminary Internal Affairs report he found on his desk regarding the Twenty-fifth District police shooting.
According to the report, Officers MacAleer and Hickey had raped a prostitute in their wagon just prior to Hickey’s shooting death, which occurred while MacAleer was still in the wagon with the prostitute.
The rape was consistent with the officers’ behavior over the past two years, the report said. They had previously been under investigation for stealing drugs from addicts, sexually assaulting prostitutes, and robbing drug dealers. No charges had been brought to that point, though charges against MacAleer were still being considered.
The fact that they were dirty didn’t make it right, Lynch thought as he closed the report. But it certainly made the whole thing easier to swallow.
There was a knock as Lynch unlocked his drawer and grabbed his gun.
“Come in,” he said.
Detective Hubert walked in. “I went through Ishmael Carter’s personal effects,” the detective said.
“And”
“Ishmael dialed one number on his cell phone all day long,” he said gravely. “And it wasn’t Nola Langston’s.”
“So whose was it?”
“I called the phone company, and it looks like the number belongs to Jamal Nichols,” Hubert said. “Of course, that makes no sense at all, since Carter apparently had no contact with the Nichols organization.”
“What’s the number?” Lynch said.
“It’s 215-555-8708.”
Lynch opened his drawer and retrieved his file on the case. He was halfway down the list of numbers called and received by Nola and Frank when he found a match.
“Looks like that’s one of the numbers that called Frank Nichols’s phone this morning,” Lynch said.
“So, do you think Jamal had two cell phones on him?”
“Apparently all the cell phones they used were in Jamal’s name,” Lynch said. “But as far as I can tell, he only had one of them.”
“So who had the other?” Hubert said.
“That’s what I was going to find out,” Lynch said. “Come on.”
Lynch put on his jacket and the two of them walked out into the hallway just as two detectives led Reverend Anderson out of the interrogation room.
“I’ll take him,” Lynch said as he and Hubert met them in the hallway. “You two follow us.”
“Okay, Lieutenant,” one of the detectives said.
As Lynch took John’s arm, the preacher whispered, “Thank you for letting me handle that.”
“It’s okay, Reverend,” Lynch said quietly. “Are you ready to handle this, too?”
John nodded as he walked to the elevators with the four detectives. They rode down to the first floor, moved into the parking lot, and got into the unmarked police cars for the last ride Reverend Anderson would know as a free man.
As he bent to get into the back of the car, he thought of the day that he got saved, the way that he’d crawled out of the pew after the sermon, preached from John 3:16, had touched him like nothing ever had. He thought of the tears he’d shed on that day—the first time he’d ever cried in public—and the freedom that those tears represented.
He was free from the things he’d done; free from the prison of his guilt, free from the shame of his past, free from the legacy of his father. But he didn’t know how to handle his freedom.
Perhaps now, with his guilt out in the open, he could finally be truly free. There was just one more thing that he had to do, he thought as Detective Hubert slowed down and Lynch dialed the number.
Reverend Anderson watched helplessly, hoping that the call would go unanswered. When it didn’t, he was heartbroken, because he knew that what he’d suspected was true.
Lynch turned to him and nodded.
Reverend Anderson got out of the car, trotting across the street to the stretch of sidewalk in front of his church.
The woman dropped the cell phone she was carrying and turned just as he approached her from the rear. Her beautifully made-up face was practically glowing with hatred.
Her hair fell just past her shoulders in long, sweeping curls. Her tight knit dress dipped low at her breasts and rode high against her thighs. Her curvaceous body was on display for all to see, and all John could do was stand there, aghast, and stare at this woman he didn’t know.
“Surprised, John?” his wife said.
“Sarah, I—”
“You what?” she snapped as the detectives jumped from their car and leveled their weapons.
“Where’d you get the phone, Sarah?” John asked.
“From Keisha. She left it lying around one day and I just picked it up. I used it to track down Ben Carter’s son. I even used it to call Frank Nichols.”
Sarah saw that the detectives were aiming at her, and she pulled a gun from her purse. John moved toward her, and she pointed it at his head.
She saw him looking at her in disbelief, and she laughed.
“This is what you wanted, right?” she asked him with a madness playing in her eyes. “You wanted a woman who looked like this. A woman who would do all the things you wanted her to do, whenever you wanted her to do them.”
“Mrs. Anderson, drop the gun,” Lynch said as he approached her slowly from the street.
“No, you drop the gun!” she said maniacally.
The neighbors began to gather along the street, watching with open mouths as the preacher’s wife held a gun at his head.
“John, I knew,” she said, shaking her head. “Every time you went downtown to meet her, I knew.”
“But it’s over, Sarah,” John said earnestly.
“It’s not over ’til I say it’s over!” she screamed.
Lynch walked onto the sidewalk to try to get a clear shot while Hubert circled around the other way. Sarah saw them and moved around her husband until his body shielded hers.
“Even Keisha taught me things about Nola,” Sarah said with a chuckle. “Keisha and I would have our little lunches, and she’d just chat all about this lady at work named Ms. Nola. Ms. Nola thought she was talented, and Ms. Nola was so pretty. That’s the only thing she ever talked to me about was Nola.
“I told Ishmael my name was Nola. I told him how you killed his father, and it hurt him so bad that I slept with him to make the pain go away. Then I told him I would be all his if he would just make you stop abusing me.”
Sarah laughed derisively. “I figured I could get Ishmael to kill you and say Nola made him do it. But it didn’t work out that way.”
Sarah raised the gun.
“Drop it, Sarah,” Lynch said in a warning tone.
“I guess I have to do it myself,” she said, ignoring the detectives.
She cocked the hammer on the pistol and started to squeeze the trigger.
A single shot rang out, and Sarah fell to the ground in front of the church.
Seconds later, Mother Wallace and the others who’d talked with Sarah earlier came stumbling out the church on unsteady legs. With their hands over their mouths and their eyes stretched wide, they watched her blood soak into the sidewalk.
As Sarah’s eyes stared vacantly toward heaven, John knelt over her and brushed her hair away from her face. He kissed her lips and whispered in her ear.
“I’m sorry, Sarah,” he said, looking into her dead eyes through tears. “I’m so sorry for what I did to you.”
The neighbors walked silently to the spot where Sarah had fallen. The church folks did the same. And in that moment, the two worlds came together to encircle John as he looked up to heaven and yelled out the only prayer he had left.
“Forgive me!” he shouted over and over as tears streaked down his cheeks. “Forgive me!”