Nickel City Crossfire Read online

  Nickel City Crossfire

  Gideon Rimes Book Two

  Gary Earl Ross

  Contents

  Gideon Rimes Series

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Gideon Rimes Series

  Gideon Rimes Series

  Nickel City Blues

  Nickel City Crossfire

  Nickel City Storm Warning

  SEG Publishing invites you to visit our site!

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  Copyright © Gary Earl Ross 2020

  * * *

  The right of Gary Earl Ross to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted per the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1976. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real people, alive or dead, is purely coincidental.

  * * *

  Cover design by Steven Novak

  * * *

  Published by SEG Publishing

  For

  Colleen, Timothy (Robin), David (Rebecca), Cody,

  and Madelynne (Brian)

  From Dad with Love

  and

  In Memory of Amrom Chodos,

  supportive early reader, honest critic, wonderful friend.

  1

  Balding and brown-skinned, the Reverend Oscar Edgerton was a big man who dwarfed the client chair facing my desk. A chaplain twice retired, once from the army and once from the Georgia department of corrections, he had massive hands with well-kept nails. Beneath his thick salty mustache was a genial smile born of self-assurance. I had met him in October through Phoenix Trinidad, before Phoenix and I became lovers. The Friday before Thanksgiving we had seen him and his wife Louisa at a fund-raiser for Hope’s Haven, the women’s center where Oscar worked part-time as a security guard and where Phoenix served as legal counsel. She had called me last night—Wednesday—to tell me that Oscar would be bringing a friend in need of help to my office in the Elmwood Village this afternoon.

  “I don’t know what his friend needs,” Phoenix said, “but Oscar thinks you’re good people so be nice if you have to turn them down.”

  The man in my other client’s chair was half Oscar’s size but appeared to be around the same age, in his early to mid-sixties. His name was Winslow Simpkins. He was caramel-colored, with loose skin below his chin and thick gray hair in an arc above his forehead. He wore horn-rimmed glasses that did nothing to hide the sadness in his eyes and a topcoat that looked decades old. He had begun to tell me about his daughter Keisha, thirty-four, a nurse who served as the secretary for Sermon on the Mount, one of the city’s most prominent black churches. Lower lip trembling, he had stopped when he came to the event that led to her disappearance. For a time, the only sound was the distant hum of washers and dryers in the laundromat downstairs.

  “It’s okay, Win,” Oscar said finally, patting his friend’s arm, trying to smooth the gravel in his own voice. “Take your time. Better you tell it, the better Brother Rimes can help you.”

  Winslow nodded, his eyes filling. “I didn’t even know she was usin’ drugs. I mean, I wouldn’ta been surprised if she smoked a little weed now and then. Lot of us did that back in the day, y’know.” He glanced at Oscar, who nodded. “But me and Mona—that’s her mama—we never seen nothin’ to say she was even doin’ that.” He dropped his right foot to the carpet and tilted his head. “Her supervisin’ nurses and all, the last thing we woulda expected was heroin.”

  “Heroin,” I said, no surprise in my voice. As I took notes in my small leather-covered notebook, I leaned forward on my left elbow to relieve my right shoulder from the pressure of the chair’s back. I’d had a small-caliber bullet removed six weeks earlier and was nearing the end of physical therapy. My shoulder still throbbed from time to time. “You had no idea?”

  He shook his head. “Didn’t know nothin’ ‘bout it till they called from the hospital in the middle of the night.” Winslow closed his eyes and was quiet for a time, maybe trying to organize his memories of that night, maybe just reliving it. “Friday after Thanksgiving. She was out with the man she been seein’ for almost a year, Odell Williamson. Nice fella, I thought. Taught sixth grade. Somebody found them in a car on Jefferson, outside Wylie. Tried to get high together and they both OD’d. The cops used that nasal spray—”

  “Narcan,” I said, recalling a Buffalo News photo of a Mazda SUV at the edge of the Johnnie B. Wiley Pavilion. At the corner of Jefferson and Best, Wylie was the inner-city high school athletic field built over the remains of the Rockpile—War Memorial Stadium—where the early Bills and Bisons had played and where Robert Redford had filmed The Natural. I had read about the double overdose over breakfast one morning. Over several days, the initial surprise that a much-loved teacher had died of a heroin overdose was gradually replaced by outrage and calls for greater scrutiny in the hiring of teachers after three informants stepped forward to reveal that Odell Williamson had been a mid-level dealer who laced his product with fentanyl.

  “Narcan,” Winslow said, nodding. “Yeah. It worked on her, thank God, but it was too late for him. She went to the ER at ECMC. He went to the morgue.” He swallowed audibly and tried to steady himself. “He was the one got my Keisha into that shit, I can’t say I’m sorry he gone.”

  “Easy, Win,” Oscar said.

  “I understand,” I said, continuing to take notes. “What happened to Keisha when she got out of the hospital? Did police file charges against her? That’s happening more and more to the surviving partner of a double overdose.”

  He shook his head. “The DA said he was the dealer, so she came home to us. We got a double on Orange Street. Keisha live upstairs, but Mona made up the guest room for her so we could keep her downstairs with us while she got better.”

  “What was she like?”

  He snorted bitterly. “A total stranger, like the person who got out the hospital wasn’t the same one who went in.” For a moment he covered his mouth with his hand, as if afraid to let his next words out. “She was
moody all the time, fidgety, like the least little noise would make her jump clean out her own skin. Her job made her take a leave of absence to go into rehab, and we thought that would help but it didn’t.”

  “Where is she a nurse? ECMC or another hospital?”

  “Neither. Keisha one of them itinerant nurses at the Humanitas Institute of Buffalo.” His pronunciation of the final Latin syllable rhymed with ass. “They send her and her people all over the area—schools, clinics, homeless shelters, wherever they need her.”

  “So rehab didn’t help?”

  Another shake of his head. “It was a day treatment program because they didn’t consider her hardcore enough, if you know what I mean. She went there for about a week and didn’t talk much about it when she came home. Then one evenin’—” His voice cracked. “One evenin’ not two weeks ago she just didn’t come home. I mean, she was there long enough to leave her car in the garage, but she never came inside. Musta got a ride but we don’t know from who. We went to the police but—”

  “She wasn’t gone long enough to be a missing person,” I said. “Later, because of the overdose, no one took you seriously. Now she was hardcore enough.”

  He nodded and bit his lip. “Talked about her like she was a criminal and the word sure went ‘round the local precinct. A few days later, when somebody tried to break in and the alarm scared ‘em off, one of the cops said it might be our daughter trying to get money for drugs. Didn’t listen when I said she knew the alarm code.” He sucked his teeth. “Black folks do drugs a few blocks from they home, we got a crime wave. White folks from out in the suburbs come into town and overdose, we got a opioid epidemic and need all kinds of rehab and everyday folk supposed to carry that Narcan shit in they pocket.”

  “For black folks, it’s a moral failure, not a disease,” Oscar said. “Damn shame.”

  “So when we got her letter, they said there wasn’t nothin’ they could do.”

  “Tell me about the letter.”

  “Got it right here.” His right hand slid inside his topcoat and returned with a white envelope. “She sent this to us after she took off.” He leaned forward to pass it to me.

  It was a business-size security envelope with a patterned interior to distort contents if held up to the light. The exterior had printed block letters and the same address in Orange in both the TO and FROM spaces, as well as a Buffalo postmark dated eight days earlier. Inside was a single sheet of lined paper half-filled with small, precise blue handwriting:

  Dear Mom and Dad,

  God knows what you must think of me right now. Whatever it is, I can’t blame you. Know this, though. It can’t be any worse than what I think of myself. You have loved me and cared for me my whole life and I have repaid you in unforgivable ways. I’ve put you through hell the past couple weeks and I am so sorry. I am sorry for being such a disappointment, to you and our family and our church family. But mostly I am sorry for disappointing myself. This shame wasn’t what I planned for myself. I am going away for a while, to think and try to get control again of my once beautiful life. Right now my being with you will do you more harm than good, so please don’t try to look for me. Just know that I love you both. Always.

  K.

  The writing was very tight, very controlled. I thought about that and took out my still new cell phone. I took a couple pictures of the letter before I returned it to Winslow.

  “Do you have a recent cell phone picture of your daughter you can text to me?”

  Winslow shook his head. “Just this.” He handed me a wallet-sized headshot. “I ain’t up on all the new stuff.”

  I straightened my stainless steel glasses and studied the woman in the photo: a wide smile, stylish eyeglasses, curled black hair framing a face made more attractive by the glint of playful intelligence in her eyes. What made you inject heroin, Keisha? I thought. What made you run? “If I take this case, there are lots of things I’ll need to know.”

  “Anything,” Winslow said. “Mona and me, we got no secrets we wouldn’t trade for our baby girl.”

  I nodded. “First you need to know you’re hiring me to find her, not bring her home. The police won’t look for her because she’s a grown woman who’s chosen to cut ties to her parents. If I locate her and she doesn’t want to see you, I will report on her condition and her temperament, but I will not try to bring her to you or give you her location. Can you live with knowing she’s alive and well but that you may never see her again?”

  Winslow pulled off his glasses and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. Finally, he nodded. “More than anything we want to know she okay.” There was a flutter of pain in his voice. “But what if she ain’t okay? What if she in trouble, or worse? What then?”

  “If she’s in an environment where she’s not okay or in danger, like a shooting gallery, I will remove her and get her whatever help she needs. I’ll try to do so the safest and most reasonable way I can. Sometimes people get hurt in places like that, but I promise I’ll do my best to make sure she’s the last and least hurt that day. What I said stands. I’ll report on her condition, but I won’t reveal her whereabouts without her permission.”

  “She’s grown, Win,” Oscar said. “Legally, Rimes can’t make her come home.”

  “I know,” Winslow said. “What do you need from me?”

  “First I need to interview you and your wife together. Then I’ll need the names and addresses or phone numbers of her friends, co-workers, supervisors, old boyfriends, Odell Williamson’s family—anybody you can think of.”

  “Done talked to her friends and people she work with. Nobody know where she at.”

  “Sometimes people know things they don’t realize they know.” I took a breath. “I’ll need more than her picture. I have to spend time in Keisha’s apartment. A lot of time. If she has a computer, I need to give it to my tech guy. Can you deal with all that?”

  “If it means you’ll look for my daughter, yes.”

  I took a couple of cell phone photos of Keisha’s picture and slid the original back to her father. Then I closed my notebook and stuck it in my shirt pocket. “All right, Mr. Simpkins. I will do my level best to find her.”

  2

  Winslow and Mona Simpkins lived in an old brown house with cream trim and a two-car garage in the heart of the Fruit Belt, a neighborhood on the edge of downtown. With streets named after fruits and trees—Grape, Cherry, Mulberry, Locust—the Fruit Belt had long been largely black and low income, but its proximity to the still-developing medical corridor had given birth to a new name to underscore its gentrification, the Medical Park Neighborhood. While upscale apartments had come to other areas of downtown, much of the development in the Belt was limited to a marked increase in parked cars as hospital, med school, and medical device manufacturing personnel chose not to ride the subway to work and sought free on-street parking three or four blocks away to avoid metered parking and exorbitant ramp fees.

  The Simpkins home was on a stretch of Orange not close enough to medical sites to be a front in the parking wars. A two-story clapboard frame dwelling, it sat between a new vinyl-sided ranch with an attached garage and an overgrown lot. Having followed Oscar’s old green Lincoln, I parked behind him as Winslow Simpkins got out on the passenger side and started up the front steps. I went to the driver’s side, and the window hummed down.

  “Thanks for doing this, Rimes,” Oscar said. “Win is good people. Folks at church’ll be more than willing to help with your fees.”

  “Don’t sweat it.”

  “Your army pension can’t be that good. Mine ain’t.” He was quiet for a moment, gloved fingers drumming the wheel. “If you need somebody to ride along with you—”

  “Thanks,” I said. “If the trail goes somewhere nasty, I’ll call you for back-up.” I meant it. I didn’t know him well yet but from our first meeting, I had sensed Oscar was the kind of man who would have my back and cover it well, despite his age. “First let’s see if I can find a trail. Judging by her
letter, maybe her guilt makes facing the folks too hard.”

  He nodded. “Well, I’ll be around if you need me, and the church will do what it can.”

  Outer door open, Simpkins was waiting for me on the porch. I joined him as Oscar drove away, and we wiped our feet on a thick brown mat. He left his boots on a plastic tray between the inside doors. I followed suit, stuffing my gloves and watch cap into my jacket pockets. Then he led me through the downstairs door into a living room with faded flowered wallpaper, a small fake fireplace, a pale brown sectional sofa, and beige carpeting so worn that fibers poked through my socks and irritated my soles.

  “Make y’self at home,” he said, draping his coat on a tree. “Lemme go find Mona.”

  As he disappeared toward the back of the house, I slipped off my leather coat and tugged my sweater down as far as I could. With my right shoulder still recovering, I kept my Glock 26 on my belt in a cross-draw holster instead of in a shoulder rig so I could reach it with my left hand. I didn’t want Simpkins or his wife to focus on my gun. When I was sure it would remain covered, I gazed about to examine my surroundings more closely.