“What is it?” Nelson said.
“They’ve got a suspect in the Deveraux shooting. He’s a cop. A fuel-truck driver at the airport saw him leave the scene of the shooting.”
“Is there a description?” Nelson asked. But he knew before the detective even responded that it had to be one of two people.
The detective looked down at his notes. “He’s a white male, driving a black unmarked Chrysler with a license tag of UJV-342. His name is Lieutenant Darren Morgan from Internal Af- fairs. Do you want to put his description out over the air, sir?”
“I think it would probably be better to keep this within the department,” Nelson said, the color draining from his face. “I’ve already got one team looking for him. Have each district assign two teams each to join the search.”
As the detective picked up the phone to call in the commissioner’s orders, the news anchor looked into the camera and started to speak.
“ . . . may be related to the murder of freelance reporter Henry Moore, who was found shot to death this morning in what was thought to be a drug-related robbery at Abbottsford Hospital. We take you now to Philadelphia International Airport, where Channel Ten reporter Myung Kim is standing by with information from a police commander who is closely linked to the Podres investigation.”
“Oh no,” Nelson said, placing his head in his hands.
“Thanks, Mike,” the reporter said. “I received a call a few minutes ago from a highly placed police commander who claims to have proof that the late Police Civilian Review Board chief Johnny Podres was having an illicit affair with an unnamed woman shortly before his death. The commander also says that Podres was receiving threats from a pro-police political action committee called Safer Philadelphians, whose members were obviously aware of the affair.”
The reporter paused to allow the anchorman to ask an obvious question.
“So, Myung, what is the significance of this information and where does it come from?”
“Apparently, Mike, Safer Philadelphians was blackmailing Podres with this information, and the group may eventually be implicated in the councilman’s death, according to the police commander, who spoke on condition of anonymity.”
“Has this commander given us any definitive information on Jeanette?” Hansen said.
“Well, Mike, the commander said, and I quote: ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if the deaths of Miss Deveraux, Mr. Yates, and Mr. Moore are all linked to the Podres shooting.’ He wouldn’t elaborate, but he did say that an Internal Affairs officer may have been involved in the shootings.”
“As a suspect?”
“That’s right, Mike. The commander confirmed several minutes ago that an Internal Affairs officer may be implicated in the shootings, and that he has hard evidence to prove that the officer was involved. We are working to find out the identity of the Internal Affairs officer.”
“Get back to us if you get anything further, Myung.”
“Sure, Mike. And let me take this opportunity to express my heartfelt sympathy to the families of Jeanette Deveraux and Michael Yates. They will be sorely missed.”
As Nelson got up and turned off the television, his mind was racing. He knew that the highly placed police source was Sheldon. He just didn’t know how to find him.
“Call Radio and have them try to raise Lieutenant Darren Morgan on the air,” Nelson said, switching into high gear. “If he doesn’t respond within five minutes, put together a GRM saying that he’s wanted for investigation at this time.”
“So now we’re not keeping it in the department, sir?” the detective said.
“We don’t have time for that. I’d rather let the world know what’s going on than have his name and description broadcast on television first.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I also want you to call Homicide,” Nelson said, pressing his lips firmly together in a look of pure rage. “Not that Sheldon’s going to be there. But when you call, and when he fails to answer, try to raise him on the air, then page him. When he doesn’t respond to that, put out a GRM on him, too.”
“Yes, sir,” the detective said, picking up the phone as it rang.
“One more thing,” Nelson said. “Find Ramirez and Hillman, and get them over to the airport as soon as possible.”
“There won’t be any need to do that,” the detective said, hanging up the phone. “That was Ramirez. He’s already there.”
“What about Hillman?”
“Ramirez said that Hillman was on his way back to the hospital to check on the witness.”
“Raise Ramirez on the air and tell him to call here immediately if he finds any new information,” Nelson said.
“Yes, sir. Anything else?”
“Yeah. Pray to God we can find Sheldon before he does any more damage.”
But Nelson knew that it was probably too late for that.
The policeman guarding Butter’s door looked at his watch and wondered when he would be relieved. He had already been there for twelve hours, and the overtime was beginning to look less and less attractive. The only thing he wanted to do was go home, kiss his wife, and lie down for a few minutes.
Getting overtime on a prisoner detail was great, but he needed sleep, too. And at the rate he was going, he wasn’t going to get any because he would have to leave the detail and go straight to the district to work his regular shift.
So when the captain walked up and told him that his relief was on the way, he looked up and thanked God.
“I know you’re tired, son,” Sheldon said. “And I need to talk to Mr. Thomas anyway. So I’ll tell you what. I’ll take over the detail for you so you can knock off a few minutes early.”
“I couldn’t let you do that, sir,” the officer said, praying that the captain would insist.
“Don’t worry. I’m sure a half hour or so won’t kill me.”
“Are you sure, sir?”
“I’m positive. Go home and get some rest.”
“Thank you, sir.”
When the officer got on the elevator, Sheldon opened the door and walked into Butter’s room. “You’ve been relieved,” he said to the second officer on the detail. “You can go.”
The officer didn’t have to be told twice. He got up and hustled toward the door. When he left the room, Sheldon locked the door behind him and smiled at the sleeping Butter.
“You’ve been a bad boy,” Sheldon said as he removed his bracelet from his pocket and fastened it around his wrist.
Butter struggled to wake himself as the sound of the strange voice drifted into his consciousness. There was something in the voice that prodded his sleep-numbed mind and told him that he should be afraid. But before he could open his eyes, the voice was there again.
“I know we all do things that we shouldn’t,” Sheldon said as he walked over to the bed, twisting a silencer onto the end of his gun. “But you broke the rules.”
When Butter finally opened his eyes, he had to squint against the sparkle of the heavy gold link bracelet hanging from Sheldon’s wrist. When he was able to focus, the blond hair was like a yellow blur framing the cold gray steel of the gun.
Butter had known the number-one rule: You never tell. And even as he had broken it, hoping that he could somehow make his sister proud, Butter knew that he would soon have to pay the price. So when he saw the gun and realized that it was time, he closed his eyes and waited patiently for the bullets to strike his skull. And somewhere, deep down inside, he hoped that his only sister could forgive him for a lifetime of pain.
Sheldon looked down at Butter one last time and calmly pumped two bullets into his bandaged head. Then, as Butter’s blood soaked into the pillow, he crept out of the room.
When Reds Hillman walked into the hospital lobby, he could feel that something wasn’t right. Everyone there seemed to stare at him, as if they were looking for some untold truth to be revealed. Patients rolled by him in wheelchairs, their faces fixed with blank stares that foretold of things to come. The air, usually antiseptic, was thick with the smell of death.
Yet Hillman knew that this hospital was where he belonged. There was something there that he had to do. He just didn’t know what it was.
As he got on the elevator, he felt something pulling him closer to itself, comforting him and filling him with reassurance. And when he got off the elevator at Butter’s floor, he knew that he would need all of the strength he gained from that feeling in order to deal with what he saw.
Sheldon was backing out of Butter’s room with his back to the elevator, glancing nervously to his left and right. When he turned around, he was face-to-face with Hillman.
Sheldon stood perfectly still, watching for an outward sign of the detective’s intentions. Hillman’s eyes bored into him, and the whole truth seemed to crawl out from beneath Sheldon’s uniform and stand defiantly in the space between them.
Hillman could see the money changing hands, the deals being made, the promises being broken. He could see drugs and expensive cars and political connections. He could see entire communities laid bare before the insatiable greed that fueled Sheldon’s entire operation. And he could see himself, fighting a useless battle against corruption.
Hillman reached for his gun. Sheldon pushed him into a gurney. An orderly who had stepped into the hallway was caught between Hillman and the wall, and as Hillman fought to untangle himself, Sheldon disappeared into the stairwell.
Hillman got up, his breath already shortened by the exertion, and drew his gun. Several nurses ducked behind their half-moon-shaped enclosure, and two doctors who had watched the confusion erupt stood with their backs against the wall, pointing to the stairway where Sheldon had run.
Hillman saw the stairwell door closing on its hydraulic hinge. In a matter of seconds, Sheldon would be gone. But Hillman refused to let him walk away without a fight.
As Hillman stepped into the stairwell, a pale, fluorescent light washed over him and gave his face the same surreal, flat texture that it gave to everything else.
He looked up and down the stairs, trying to find some sign of Sheldon. But he didn’t hear anything. He didn’t see anything, either: only the gray concrete walls and the dark metal of the railings that led from one flight to another.
Something clicked on the stairwell. From the sound of it, the noise had come from one flight below. Hillman crept toward the sound, the soles of his shoes scraping against the rough cement stairs as he descended them. He slipped and grabbed hold of the railing to keep his body from banging against the rock-hard steps, nearly dropping his gun in the process.
When he regained his footing, Hillman gripped his gun in both hands and held it out in front of him, pointing it as if it were some sort of beacon, leading him through the darkness of the moment. His breath came faster, pushing out of his chest like a baby emerging from the womb. He began to sweat, and his clothes clung to his body, restraining him, warning him, pulling him back from the next step.
Hillman peeped around the edge of the railing and something smacked into the bridge of his nose, knocking him backward. His gun flew from his hands, tumbling into the space between the railing and falling four stories to the basement. Instinctively, he swung in the direction of the blow, hitting Sheldon in the groin and knocking his head into the railing.
Sheldon wrapped his arms around Hillman’s knees, pulled them together, and wrestled him to the ground. Then he reached into the small of his back and pulled a gun. By the time Hillman made it to his feet, Sheldon had chambered a round.
The last thing Hillman saw was a bright flash of light, exploding in his face like a thousand suns looming over the horizon. And then the feeling washed over him again, pulling him into its bosom, enclosing him in its warmth. He gave himself over to the sensation. He had done all that he could.
He had kept the promise he’d made to himself, to Latoya Thomas, to his badge. He had found Podres’s killer. And now, after thirty years and countless nights of sloe gin, sad songs, and dreams, Reds Hillman could finally rest.
Sheldon walked back up the stairs and looked into the faces of the terrified hospital staff. As he made his way to the nurses’ station, people backed away from him, their faces twisted into fear-filled grimaces.
“It’s all right,” he said. “I’m a police officer. Get a doctor down to the stairwell and call 911. Tell them there’s an officer down.”
As the confused nurses followed his orders, Sheldon went down to the hospital lobby. He took an envelope out of his inside pocket and dropped it into the hospital’s mail slot. Inside, there was a detailed explanation of the money-laundering scheme and a contrived plot implicating Morgan as Podres’s killer.
When Sheldon was done, he walked out into the parking lot, climbed into a rental car, and set off for somewhere—anywhere except Philadelphia.
Chapter 17
B
lack and Clarisse boarded the train like they owned it. They had to act that way, because they were running for their lives. If they didn’t at least look like they knew what they were doing, the two of them would end up dead.
So when the conductor asked them what section they were looking for, Black jumped right in and told him they were looking for the sleeper compartment. The conductor didn’t glance at them twice. He just told them that the sleeper compartment was three cars down.
“What time should we expect the train to leave?” Clarisse asked.
“Well, we’re having a little engine trouble, ma’am,” the conductor said. “We’ve got mechanics checking into it now, but we should be under way shortly.”
“Thank you,” she said, and they moved past him unhurriedly, walking toward the sleeper car as if they belonged there, like their lives had been nothing more than a prelude to that moment.
Clarisse strode in front of Black, leading him to whatever it was that awaited them in that compartment. A trap? Maybe. Freedom? Perhaps. Black couldn’t concentrate on that anymore.
Walking through the cars, pulling back the sliding doors, and feeling the dank, cold air brushing against him like cold autumn kisses, he could think of nothing but Clarisse. He watched her walking in front of him, her gait a slight bounce that swayed provocatively, like a pendulum keeping time. He realized for the first time in a long time that something, someone, was beautiful. He watched her and admired her, and the only thing he could think about was how quickly the crack would suck the life from her body. For once, for the first time since he’d been out there, he allowed himself to think of someone else, and that someone was Clarisse.
“Are you okay, Everett?” she asked as she walked into one of the compartments.
“Huh?”
Black looked up and saw that she was sitting on a bunk, watching him with a worried sort of curiosity. He was so absorbed in his thoughts of her that he hadn’t even noticed that they weren’t in the aisle of the train anymore.
“I asked if you were okay.”
“Yeah, I’m cool. I was just thinkin’.”
“About what?”
“About you.”
“You need to be thinking about something other than me right now.”
“Is that what you do?” Black said, staring down at her as he walked over to the bunk.
“What do you mean is that what I do?”
“I mean is that how you deal with all this—by thinkin’ about somethin’ else?”
“No.”
“How do you deal with it then?”
“By thinking about you.”
Black looked down at her and he knew that she was telling the truth. There was no reason for her to be there with him. It couldn’t have been the money, because there wasn’t much left. It couldn’t have been the dope. That was almost gone, and they weren’t going to get any more until they reached their destination. So there was really only one reason for her to be there. She had to be there for him.
“What you thinkin’ about me for?” Black said, a slight smile playing on his lips as he sat down next to her on the bunk.
“Remember what you said in the shower about the first time I walked in Miss Shaw’s class wearing that yellow sundress and those black Mary Janes?”
“You mean the first day of school in sixth grade?” Black said, touching her face. “You was the finest thing in there.”
She smiled and her eyes lit up, the same way they used to light up when she was a little girl.
“I’ve been trying to remember if I even saw you that day,” she said.
“You had to see me. I had on some Sergios and a sweat-suit jacket with a pair of shell-top Adidas, and—”
“And you were sitting in the back of the class, trying real hard to be a part of that clique.”
“What clique?”
“The back-of-the-room clique. The ones who could hardly read and didn’t care that they could hardly read. The ones that picked on anybody who answered a math problem.”
“Norman and them.”
“Why did you want to be like them?”
Black thought back to his childhood, and all of it came rushing back to him, like he was still sitting there in the back of the room, trying desperately to be accepted. He remembered how important it was to be cool, to be down, to be smart, to be a little bit of everything and everybody except himself.
He wasn’t a nerd. But he wasn’t one of the cool ones, either. He couldn’t play sports—not well, anyway. He didn’t fight all the time—the truth was, he hated to fight. He wasn’t a mack daddy—didn’t even know girls had different parts than boys until about the fourth grade. He was just a regular little boy. He liked school, though. He learned pretty early that it wasn’t a good idea to tell anybody that. He went to church on Sunday with his family, and in some ways he even liked that, but liking church wasn’t something to brag about, either.
Every now and then he would get a girlfriend, but he really didn’t know what to do with a girlfriend. So he just coasted along, pretending to know millions of things that he didn’t have a clue about.
“I don’t know why I wanted to be like them,” he finally said, turning away so she wouldn’t read the lie in his eyes.
“I remember when you answered that question that nobody else could answer. Remember? Miss Shaw asked if anybody knew the value of pi.”
“And I said 3.14. She asked me how I knew that and I said I had read it somewhere.”
“She used to always call on you after that.”
“And Norm and them stopped hangin’ with me after that. They started callin’ me brainiac.”
“You were.”
“I was what?”
“You were probably the smartest kid in the class.”
“Yeah, well, look where bein’ smart got me.”
“Being smart got you me.”
“Crack got me you.”
Before he knew it, she was swinging at him.
“Why do you always have to try to hurt me, Everett?” she said, punching him in the chest and arms as the tears streamed down her cheeks. “Why can’t you just take it for what it’s worth?”
Black grabbed her hands and held them together, but not before she had smacked him hard across the face.
“Take what for what it’s worth?”
“Take me!” she said. “I’m trying to tell you that I want to be with you. I’m trying to tell you that I know you didn’t do anything wrong.”
“How you know? For all you know I could be ready to cut your throat right now.”
He was angry and he didn’t even know why. It was like something inside of him was jumping up and down, demanding that he push her away, although that was the last thing he wanted to do.
“But you’re not going to cut my throat,” she said. “Not if you’re the same little boy who knew the value of pi when nobody else in the class had the slightest idea what the teacher was even talking about.”
“That’s the problem. I’m not the same little boy. I’m a big boy now. I’m a big boy who’s been through more than any boy should ever have to go through.”
“Is that why you keep running away from me?”
“No,” Black said, sighing impatiently. “I ain’t runnin’ away from you.”
“What are you doing then?”
“I’m tryin’ to get you to run away from me. I’m tryin’ to help you.”
“I don’t need your help.”
“You need somebody’s help! You damn sure ain’t tryin’ to help yourself.”
“I know you’re not talking,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Look at you.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Clarisse! Look at me. Take a good, long look at me and tell me what you see.”
She opened her mouth to respond but closed it again after a few seconds and looked down at the edge of the bunk.
“I’ll tell you what you see, Clarisse,” he said, taking her face in his hands and turning it toward him. “You see a man who walked away from everything because he was too scared to live—a man who refused to love anybody or anything as much as he loved this.”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a cap. Then he pulled the top off of it and poured its contents on the floor.
“You see that?” he said, raising his voice, then lowering it in case someone was listening. “I’ll probably be crawlin’ for that in a little while. Diggin’ in corners like a rat lookin’ for crumbs. That’s my life now, Clarisse. And I just don’t want it to be yours. I hurt enough people already.
“You think I want to be out here like this? You think I like smokin’ this shit, hidin’ in alleys and sleepin’ in abandoned houses just so I can keep on killin’ myself? Well, I don’t. I stopped likin’ it the day I started back.”
She looked at him oddly, but said nothing.
“Yeah, I used to do it before,” he said, answering the unasked question. “Ended up damn near the same way I am now. No place to live, no job, no money, no life, no hope. No nothin’. But I stopped. I just got tired of it.
“It wasn’t like it was no big miracle or anything. I just went through a rehab and stayed clean for a little while. Started goin’ to them meetings they be havin’, got me a little piece o’ job, started stackin’ a little bit o’ dough, met a girl, and got married.”
Her eyes opened wide and she gave him a look that said: Why didn’t you tell me? Black just ignored that and kept on talking.
“For a while things was workin’ out all right. We had a few arguments here and there, just like anybody else, but we told ourselves everything was cool. When we looked around, it looked like everything was goin’ the way it was supposed to. We had a car, a house, we was both workin’ and savin’ up. But somethin’ was missing.
“She didn’t want to do the things I wanted her to do for me, and I didn’t want to do the things she wanted me to do for her. At first, it was just little things. She didn’t want to cook one night or I didn’t want to talk one night. But then the little things started gettin’ bigger. She didn’t want to sleep with me for weeks at a time. I would leave out for work and I wouldn’t come home until two days later.
“I’m not sayin’ it was all her fault, and I’m not sayin’ it was all my fault. I think we was just too different. She wanted to be with me and I just wanted to party. But I always put her first. And I wanted her to do the same thing for me.”
Black looked at Clarisse to see her reaction, and she just kept looking over at the corner of the bunk. He knew by the blank look on her face that the things he was saying were hurting her, but he couldn’t stop. He had to get it out.
“I always put her first,” he said, looking down because he couldn’t stand to look at Clarisse. “In everything, even in my thoughts. It wasn’t like that for her, though. Not after a while.”
Black sighed and tried not to think too hard about the way things were, but it didn’t work.
“We stopped talking to each other for a long time before it all ended,” he said, the sadness creeping over him as his past came roaring into focus. “We really talked at each other. It was like, when you hit somebody—the way you swing and try to hurt them. That’s the way we talked to each other.
“I would call her the worst thing I could think of. Then she would call me the worst thing she could think of. Then I would bring up somethin’ from two years ago. Then she would bring up somethin’ from three years ago. Then I would say I was leavin’. Then she would cry.
“We’d go through that like every three days, until one day, I told her I was leavin’ and she just looked at me. She didn’t yell. She didn’t cry. She just looked at me real cold and said, ‘Go ’head and leave, ’cause I got somebody else anyway.’
“Everything stopped for me when she said that. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to do. I just stood there for the longest time, feelin’ like I ain’t have no reason to live. I wanted to hit her, to just slap her and keep slappin’ her until I couldn’t anymore. But my hands wouldn’t move. My lips wouldn’t move. The only thing that moved was my mind.
“I thought of all the nights she wouldn’t let me touch her. I thought of all the times she told me she was goin’ out with her girlfriends and didn’t come home until four in the mornin’. I thought of somebody else touchin’ my wife, and somethin’ inside me died.”
Black was about to say something else, but the words got stuck in his throat. He leaned against Clarisse’s shoulder and fought against the pain he felt welling up inside.
“Maybe I deserved that,” he said. “I don’t know. It ain’t like I wasn’t cheatin’. But I think it’s different for men. We can’t forgive like y’all can. We don’t look at it like: My woman laid up with the next man. We look at it like somebody took somethin’ from us that was ours.”
He sat up quickly, pretending he had never lost his composure.
“It was never the same after that,” he said. “Even though I told her I forgave her and tried to act like everything was okay, even though she stopped going out with her girlfriends and I stopped staying out all night, it wasn’t the same. We slept together, we ate together, we talked to each other, but not about nothin’ real. We talked about the weather or the news, or somethin’ on television, but never about us.
“We didn’t share nothin’. Not dreams, not hopes, nothin’. We just stood around tellin’ each other, ‘I love you,’ knowin’ it was a lie. I was so miserable I decided to leave, to start over again with somebody else.
“But the day I came home to tell her that I was leavin’, she said she was pregnant. So I kept it to myself, hopin’ that ugly feelin’ I got every time I thought about her with somebody else would just go away.
“It didn’t, though. It got worse. I would look at her sometimes and wonder if the baby was even mine. Jealousy had me crazy. But it wasn’t like I could talk to anybody about it. How do you tell somebody you think your woman might be pregnant by somebody else? You don’t. You hold it in, and it eats at you. ’Cause it ain’t no two ways about it. Either you stay with her and act like it ain’t nothin’ wrong or you leave.
“So I thought about it for a long time. Sometimes I would sit up all night just thinkin’ about it. But you know what? It wasn’t never really a question of what I was gon’ do. Just like it wasn’t never really no question o’ whether the baby was mine. I knew that was my baby. But all that other stuff had me messed up. Livin’ in a house with somebody you don’t trust have you like that. You don’t see nothin’, so you start makin’ up stuff. Then after a while the things you make up start lookin’ real. Sometimes it
is
real.”