Sandhill parked at the end of Nike’s block and strode to a restless crowd surrounding Reverend Damon Turnbull. High in the bed of a pickup with a bullhorn to his lips, he was condemning a white power structure treating black children as throw-aways. The words were inflammatory and, at least as far as Sandhill had seen in his career, untrue. He muttered under his breath. A black man sucking from a brown paper bag looked over the top of his sunglasses.
“What you say?”
“Talking to myself,” Sandhill said, passing by.
“White muthafucker,” the man spat at Sandhill’s back.
Sandhill felt ugliness in the hot air, a smog of hatred and anger. He saw Ryder on the high stoop outside the entrance to Nike’s apartment building. Beside him was Roland Zemain, his uniform traded for paint-stained sweat pants and a tee shirt proclaiming, ROLL TIDE. Zemain had
brought two fellow street cops, black guys taut with energy beneath street clothes. They were doing a decent job of looking unobtrusive, homies hanging on the stoop, listening to Turnbull.
Sandhill checked the far end of the block. He knew there’d be cruisers positioned around the corner, waiting for trouble. He hoped they stayed out of sight; gasoline on coals if they showed up. A potential nightmare.
Ryder glanced at Nike. She was sitting on the couch, her eyes rimmed with red, fingertips shaking. He looked away, thinking his problems were petty in comparison.
She said, “Thanks for coming, Detective Ryder; I can’t take this right now.”
“We’ll go to Sandhill’s place. He says Marie’ll be finished at seven. You ready?”
Ryder gave Nike his hand as she stood. She felt weightless, Ryder thought, a woman stripped of everything but breath. She walked to the window and looked down at the crowd.
“Look at the anger and betrayal in their eyes, Detective Ryder, and how skilled Turnbull is at feeding that anger.”
“Non sequiturs glued together with misconceptions,” Ryder said. He watched the minister stop chanting to pluck a cellphone from the jacket of his black suit. Turnbull listened without speaking, concern clouding his face. He dropped the phone
in his pocket and begin climbing from the bed of the pickup.
Ryder turned to Nike. “We’ll just walk to the car. It’ll be a noisy walk, but don’t pay anyone any mind.”
“Is Conner coming?”
“He’s checking if anyone in the crowd looks suspicious. Sometimes…the people who do these things, they like to…”
“To watch. To feed off of pain. I know.” Nike Charlane stood and took a deep breath. “Let’s go.”
When they opened the door to the street, the crowd went quiet. “Trouble,” Ryder said.
“What?” Zemain asked from behind.
“Turnbull’s gone.”
A Channel
5
news van now stood in place of Turnbull’s truck. A videographer stood on the roof of the van, his camera a glass eye studying Ryder. A half-dozen women wearing nametags proclaiming
New Morning A.M.E.
Church stepped to the top of the stoop.
“We’re on your side, Miz Charlane,” said an elderly woman in a floral bonnet. “We want to make the police go find your Jacy.”
Nike spoke quietly. “Thank you for your concern. But please, just go home.”
The crowd drew tighter, listening. A woman from the church handed Nike a candle. “For your baby. We’re praying for your little girl.” The woman spun to Ryder. “Why don’t you find this poor woman’s baby, Mr Po-liceman? Why you not
doing anything but axin’ peoples the same questions over and over?”
Ryder kept his voice low. “The chief explained all this, ma’am. He’s been on TV, radio. We’re doing our best. Now please stand aside.”
“Your best just ain’t muthafuckin’ good enough, is it now?” a man yelled from below on the pavement. He seemed drunk, eyes wet, words slushy at the edges. He waved a paper-bagged bottle as punctuation. The churchwoman’s eyebrows lifted slightly, as if the man had spoken her true words.
Ryder said, “Clear a path. We’re coming through.”
The man waved a fist. “I said your best ain’t good enough. What you say to that?”
Ryder ignored him. Another man, his arms bulging like a dockworker’s, pointed to Nike Charlane and yelled, “Where you taking her?”
Nike herself wheeled to face the man, her eyes hard. “He’s taking me to a friend’s house. Leave us alone.”
“You trusting the po-lice? You crazy, girl.”
Nike threw the candle and it bounced off the man’s chest. “Go away, dammit!” The man’s eyes filled with embarrassment and he retreated into a crowd growing thicker and tighter with each passing second.
“Excuse me, excuse me, ladies and gennulmens, let me through, please and thank you, sirs…”
A black man in his sixties with pewter hair and a wiry body shouldered through the crowd.
He hobbled up the steps, blocking Nike’s path. He turned to the angry faces.
“Come on, ladies and gennulmens, please let these folks go where they need to get. Give this po-liceman some respect. He just doing what he told, that’s all.”
“Who you? Rodney King?” a voice taunted from the crowd, sparking calls of derision.
“Sir—” Ryder said.
“Let these folks through,” the old man called to the crowd. “This woman is sad an’ these policemens just doin’ they job.”
“Get your ass on home, ol’ man,” a voice yelled. The crowd jeered and hooted at the man’s intercession.
“Sir, it’s you that’s in our way,” Ryder said. “Would you please go back down the steps and—”
The man turned to Ryder with his hands high and open. “Them folks is just angry and got nowhere to go with it, sirs. If I could get them to listen—”
The man was cut off by a sudden scream of sirens as four cruisers whipped around the corner, tires screeching, engines roaring.
“What the hell?” Ryder said.
“Shit,” Zemain said. “Not now.”
Ryder ducked his head and started down the stairs. He felt a jolt at his shoulder and lifted his head to see their gray-haired defender tumble from the side of the stoop, arms flailing. He bumped a
heavy woman, sending her spinning, then slammed the pavement face-first.
Ryder stared open-mouthed as the man pushed his head up, thick strands of blood stitching his mouth to the sidewalk. For a split second, everyone went silent. Even the sirens seemed to fade into the distance.
“You see that?” the first voice from the silence yelled. “Cop shoved that old man off the step.”
“An old man and they tried to kill him.”
“Muthafucka cops.”
“Get the bastards!”
A paper-bagged bottle exploded against the wall of the apartment building. “Go!” Zemain yelled, pushing Ryder and Nike ahead. The crowd surged forward. Curses filled the air. Cops spilled from the cruisers, the batons like exclamation marks in their upraised hands.
Ryder said, “I don’t remember even touching the old guy. The crowd was belly to belly and we were trying to get to the vehicle.”
He stared at the faces around him; half the police brass, a captain from Internal affairs, Duckworth and Meyers, Zemain. Bidwell was at a conference in Montgomery. Ryder had sped Nike Charlane to the restaurant, then immediately burned rubber to headquarters for the meeting demanded by Squill. He suspected the meeting was going to be what was called a “barbecue”, and he was the one trussed for the spit.
Squill said, “The old man hit the ground like a goddamn pumpkin. Everyone saw it. More importantly, the cameras saw it.”
“It was an accident.”
Acting Chief Squill dry-washed his face in his hands, nodded to the DVD. “You seen the news, Ryder?”
The video flickered on to the screen. A guy selling campers finished his pitch and an anchor-woman appeared. The scene switched to Ryder walking from the apartment, Nike beside him, Zemain in the rear.
The on-scene reporter’s voice: “…
a crowd was gathering at the front of the building when members of MPD exited with the girl’s mother
…”
The camera opened to a wide shot of the crowd.
“…
crowd growing unruly when an elderly man attempted to defuse the situation
…”
All eyes went to the video: The black guy hobbling up the stoop and facing the crowd to make his plea, then turning to Ryder, hands up, submissive.
“Here it is,” Squill said.
Ryder ducked and pushed forward, the guy suddenly tumbling from the steps like a dropped scarecrow, legs and arms flapping loose, slamming the woman before smacking the pavement.
Someone in the room said, “Ouch.”
Ryder said, “Maybe I tripped him.”
A close-up followed, the man helped to his feet as he wiped blood from his face and staggered against the stoop to brace himself. The reporter’s voice-over: “
The man who fell, asking to not be identified, was in town visiting relatives when he says he found himself in the middle of the disturbance.
”
The screen cut to a shot of the man, dazed and bloody. “…
and I saw that the people was getting,
you know, upset, and I thought I’d try and help, maybe put some calm in things, but
…”
“But what happened next, sir?”
“That po-liceman ran at me like a football player and next thing I know I’m laying on the ground. I don’t know why he want to hurt me, I was just trying to help.”
“What happened to the injured guy?” Myers asked.
Zemain said, “We sent people to check on him, but he’d gone. Told people he wanted to get back to Huntsville where it was safe.”
“He just disappeared?” someone asked.
“Until we hear from his lawyer,” Squill said. He turned to Ryder. “Not bad, Ryder. You start out escorting a woman from her apartment and end up inciting a riot. You didn’t finish what you started last week, had to go get it right?”
Zemain said, “We were cool until the cars rolled. The crowd blew up and we had to push our way out. That’s when the old guy went over.” He looked at the faces around the table. “And for the record, I think the guy tripped on his own shoelaces.”
Squill sneered. “I don’t care if he stepped on his dick, Sergeant. The perception is that Ryder didn’t like the guy in his face and gave him the heave-ho.”
“I didn’t try to hurt him. I barely touched him.”
Squill stood. “Detective Ryder, you are officially off this investigation. In fact, until I decide what to do with you, you’re suspended.”
“Sir, I respectfully ask that you review—”
“Get out, Ryder. I’m sick of looking at you.”
Nike lay on Sandhill’s couch, staring at the white of his ceiling. Sandhill had pulled a chair beside her and was holding her hand.
“Jacy’s alive, Conner. I know it. I don’t know how I do, but I can feel it.”
Sandhill closed his eyes. All he could feel was Nike’s hand in his own.
Still, he said, “I feel she is too, Nike. Alive.”
“But that little girl in the house, the one that burned, what happened with—”
“I don’t know. I think something went wrong. Maybe she was…maybe we shouldn’t discuss this now, Nike.”
Nike plucked a tissue from a box on the table, wiped her face. “Let’s talk about it, Conner. I’m scared numb and my insides feel like ice, but I need to talk.”
Talking would probably do her good, Sandhill thought. Since Jacy’s abduction, Nike had been running on fear and guilt and the dark voice behind the heart that ceaselessly whispers,
The worst is yet to come.
He said, “You did an incredible job yesterday, staying away from the bad things.”
“It wasn’t me that kept me straight, it was the cab driver. I wanted to fall into that dark hole and hide. He wouldn’t take me where I wanted to go.”
“You could have gotten out and taken another
cab, right? But you didn’t. TeeShawn Green got you past the moment of craving and you kept yourself safe. That took strength and resolve.”
“I don’t have much left, Conner.”
“Strength isn’t a limited resource, it’s self-renewing. You use it, you get more.”
“I have to know, Conner—are the cops really doing everything? Turnbull’s got me thinking that maybe—”
“Forget that yappy bastard, Nike. Turnbull’s a media junkie, Sharpton Lite. Whoever’s taking the girls is methodical, a planner, someone who selects his targets, then waits for the perfect moment. That’s what’s kept him ahead of us.”
“What makes these people start, Conner? What makes an adult have fantasies about children?”
Sandhill’s eyes tightened with controlled anger. “A mindscape from hell. A shrink might call it some form of psychological stunting, a huge displacement of sexual focus. Most sexual abusers of children were abused themselves.”
Nike shook her head sadly. “Passing on the sickness. It’s…it’s like vampires.”
Sandhill thought a long moment.
“Vampires? Yes, Nike. As close as we truly come to them, I think.”
There was a gentle knock at the door and Marie entered, her face heavy with fear and concern. When she saw Nike standing and talking, Marie managed a smile.
“Nike, you ready to come to my place, get some sleep tonight, child?”
Nike nodded to Marie, then turned to Sandhill. “You planning on getting some rest yourself, Conner?”
“Sure,” Sandhill lied. In a little over an hour he and Ryder were going to the property and records annex to root through the physical evidence on Darla Dumont, the girl abducted last year. Groping at straws.
The women walked to the threshold when Nike paused and turned to Sandhill. Her eyes seemed elsewhere in time, lost in a distant moment.
“Listen, Conner, there’s something I’ve been wanting to say…”
Marie seemed to hold her breath, looking between Sandhill and Nike. Sandhill furrowed his brow.
“What?”
Nike’s eyes suddenly looked no more than simply weary. “No. It’s nothing. We’ll talk about it later.” She turned away and started down the steps, wiping away a tear. Sandhill looked at Marie and raised an eyebrow.
Marie said, “It’s Jacy’s birthday next week, Conner. She going to be nine years old.”
Sandhill nodded; Jacy had spoken about it a couple of times.
“That little girl’s birthday coming up next week,” Marie repeated, then turned to catch up with Nike.
Sandhill closed the door, his brow knit in confusion, feeling as if a huge and indefinable presence had entered the room and licked the back of his neck, disappearing just as he turned.