Flesh and Blood (19 page)

I was still wearing Josh’s uniform, in the pocket of which was the small revolver Keli had been pointing at us just a few minutes ago.

As we had pulled out of the institution, Merrill was walking Josh, in just his underwear, to the front gate. After coming up with a lie about what happened to Josh’s uniform believable enough to convince the control room, and getting Josh securely back inside, Merrill would be providing backup, approaching the farmhouse through the woods that bordered its north side. Hopefully this would be all over by then, Kayla safely back with Keli, and whoever was holding her hostage in the back of a Potter County Sheriff ’s Deputy patrol car. I had called Dad for delayed backup, as well. We didn’t need loud sirens and a lot of excitable small-county deputies right now, but if we failed, they’d be close by.

“Who’s doing this?” I asked. “How many are there?”

“Two guys,” she said. “Young. I haven’t heard them use names yet.”

“What do they want with Josh?”

“Not sure exactly,” she said, “but I gather FDLE reached out to him in connection with some open cases that could really hurt these guys. Possession was the least of what Josh was into, but it’s all he got caught for.”

I thought about how nice and respectful Miles seemed, how dedicated to his family. That was the great disconnect of prison— the vast difference between how inmates appeared and what they were capable of doing. I had hoped Miles was different, but didn’t find it surprising that he wasn’t.

“Must be huge for them to do this,” I said.

“They seem desperate.”

When we neared the house, Keli stopped the car long enough for me to put on an inmate cap, the pair of strap cuffs that Merrill had had on, and climb into the back seat and lay face down.

“Okay,” I said.

“John.”

“Yeah.”

“Two things,” she said. “If it comes down to it, save Kayla, don’t worry about me, and thanks for paying attention and being so observant.”

“Actually I’m told it’s obsessive,” I said, “but you’re welcome.”

Most of what happened next I only heard. I was face down in the backseat, my hands in front of me. Keli pulled into her front yard at an angle, got out, walked around, and opened the back door, so the bottom part of my body could be seen from the house. If she did what we had discussed, she parked far enough away so the two guys couldn’t get a good look at me without coming out into the yard.

“I’M BACK,” Keli yelled from beside the car. “I brought him to you just like you told me to. Come get him and bring me my daughter.”

I didn’t hear anything at first, then a squeaky screen door opening.

The old wooden house had a wrap-a-round porch that held rocking chairs and a swing, and a screen door on a spring that slammed shut loudly unless you held it.

“I did like you said. Just give me my daughter and go.”

One of the men must have said something, but I couldn’t make it out. All I could hear was mumbled words.

“I had to knock him out,” she said. “I gave him a shot. He’s out cold.”

There was another pause. This time I heard a few words, which meant at least one of the men was coming closer.

“Yes,” she said. “I wouldn’t risk my daughter’s life.”

The gun was in my hands beneath me. I thumbed back the hammer, hoping not to accidentally shoot myself and get us all killed.

“
You
roll him over,” Keli was saying. “But I want my daughter first.”

There was a longer pause this time, then the squeaking of the screen door again.

“Get that gun away from her head,” Keli said.

She had said it for my benefit, giving me as much information as she could without being suspicious. I would have to aim for the guy with Kayla on the porch, not the guy closest to me. Keli would have to take care of him. I had no idea how far away the porch was or if I could even get a clean shot off, and he could easily kill her before I could fire a single round. It would all depend on if he hesitated or not.

I found myself wishing Merrill were here or that I had asked Dad to do more than be backup, but whatever was going to happen was imminent, and would be over long before any of them arrived.

I felt large, strong hands grab my ankles and yank. I came flying out of the backseat and onto the ground face first, my head striking the car and the ground. I was disoriented and in pain, but as soon as I hit the ground I started rolling.

I could hear movement behind me, and I knew Keli was jumping the guy who had pulled me out.

“GET DOWN,” Keli yelled to Kayla.

She did, pushing away from the young white man who had her.

Not sure whether to shoot her or me, the man hesitated, and that fraction of time was all I needed.

I squeezed off a round.

It missed completely.

Another.

The second one found flesh.

I had been aiming for his right arm, the one holding the gun, but had missed and hit him in his right pectoral. He dropped the gun as crimson saturated his white Panama City Beach t-shirt.

Kayla scampered away from him on all fours.

Behind me, Keli and the other guy were rolling around on the ground.

As I turned toward them, his gun went off.

By the time I was facing them, the man was standing, Keli, bleeding into her light brown CO shirt, remained on the ground.

I was close to the man, close enough to hit whatever I aimed for, which was his gun hand. I put a round between his wrist and hand and he dropped the gun, yelling out in pain.

He fell to the ground as I jumped up.

A few steps and I was close enough to kick him in the face, which I did. I wasn’t sure if it knocked him out or not, but it was hard enough to encourage him to remain on the ground a little longer. I then kicked the gun away from him, glanced back at the man on the porch who was still down, and knelt beside Keli, Kayla coming up behind me as sirens sounded in the distance.

“What’d I miss?” Merrill said.

He and Anna walked up as two EMTs were loading Keli onto a gurney, while a few others were evaluating the two men under the watchful eye of Dad’s deputies.

“A little gunplay,” I said.

“You must not’ve played fair,” he said. “You the only one didn’t get shot.”

“Kayla remained unleaded as well,” I said.

Merrill laughed.

“Laugh it up,” Keli said, her voice soft and strained. “It’s all fun and games until someone gets shot.”

“You find out what they wanted with Miles?” Merrill asked.

I shook my head. “They’re not making much sense.”

“Well, hell,” Merrill said, “you shot one, kicked the shit out the other.”

“How’d you get so violent?” Anna asked.

“Cartoons and video games,” I said. “Misspent youth.”

“Guys,” Keli said, “can we get back to the fact that I was SHOT?”

“In a minute,” Merrill said. “Right now I want to know how John knew.”

“Knew what?” I said.

“That Keli was about to commit several felonies and didn’t just have PMS.”

“I didn’t,” I said.

“And if it had been PMS?” he said.

“Things wouldn’t have gone so smoothly,” Anna said.

“Or,” Keli added, her voice even weaker now, “turned out so well.”

I used to be a cop. Of course, that’s like saying I used to be an alcoholic, and though I wasn’t active at either for very long, both are more about who you are than what you do, so I guess you could say I’m a cop in recovery.

The title on my business card these days reads: Prison Chaplain, but in my heart—some part of my heart anyway—I’ll always be a cop, which is why my Florida Department of Corrections co-workers often call on me for services that are other than clerical.

Like today, while I was in the middle of a counseling session with Todd Robbins, a racist inmate whose religion, after being processed through the dark filters of his head and heart, was transformed into a dangerous self-righteous hatred.

“Preacher, you know what the good book says, ‘Do not love the world nor the things in the world.’ Now how you gonna argue with that?”

Todd Robbins not only looked like an inmate—heavy from the starchy diet, muscular from the weight-pile, with short, badly cut hair—he also had the look of a killer. The two pale-green, teardrop tattoos at the corners of his vacant eyes testified to the fact even if his life sentence hadn’t.

“I’m not arguing anything,” I said. “You brought it up. All I’m saying is that the passage you quoted is about oppressive systems—political, economic, religious—not individual people or the planet, both of which God said were good when she created them.”

“SHE?” he yelled, the sharp smell of tobacco burning my nose as his breath shot across my desk. The cheap tobacco sold in the Potter Correctional Institution canteens had stained his tongue and the tips of his fingers so badly they looked jaundiced. “You mean HE, don’t you?”

“That’s just as appropriate,” I said.

“Well, which is it?” he asked.

“Both,” I said. “Or neither, but—”

He shook his head and let out a small, mean laugh. “Now God’s a woman?”

“No,” I said. “That’s not what I’m saying,” my sense of futility registering in my voice.

“That’s what you said.”

“No. God is no more a woman than a man. What I’m saying is that God is both masculine
and
feminine. If not, we wouldn’t be in God’s image.”

When I moved back home to northwest Florida after being a cop and a cleric in Atlanta, I never would’ve imagined I’d become a prison chaplain. But God works in mysterious ways, and when I fell from grace in Atlanta, this is the grace I fell into.

Of course, most people wouldn’t call leaving a wife, a good job, and a nice home in north Atlanta to live alone in a dingy trailer in northwest Florida grace.

“Adam was created in the image of God,” he said. “Not Eve. Eve was created from Adam… . Like a copy of a copy, it’s not as good as the original. That’s why God gave men authority over women.”

His brand of benighted religion was prevalent in prison and I was weary of it, and though it was pointless to do so, I couldn’t resist the temptation to get into it with him.

“Oh?” I said. “I didn’t know she had,” then added with a smile, “and I don’t think they do either.”

“Damn,” he said as he stood. “You’re so full of shit… . Now look what you’ve made me do. I’m talking like the heathen I
used
to be.”

I smiled. Like dryrot seeping through a fresh coat of paint, his true self had once again bled through his carefully constructed facade of religiosity.

“It’s amazing how often that happens, isn’t it?” I said. “If you’re ever interested in figuring out why, there’s a twelve steps group that—”

“That shit’s of the devil—diggin’ around in the past. My past is under the blood of Jesus Christ. It’s as if I never done nothin’.”

I wanted to ask if he thought the same were true for victims and their families, but instead said, “But your past is obviously affecting your present. It’s why you have so much anger in general and toward women in particular.”

He looked at his watch. “Fuck you,” he said, jumping up. “I can’t take any more of this.” He was opening the door to leave when the phone on my desk rang. He stopped.

“Chaplain Jordan,” I said into the receiver.

“Some white boy done gone and gotten hisself killed on the rec yard,” Merrill Monroe said, an underlying amusement in his voice. “Ain’t that some shit? How ’bout gettin’ your crime-solving cracker ass down here ’fore Pete and his fellow fuckups do?”

I stood to leave immediately. I trusted Merrill with my life. He had, in fact, saved my life on more than one occasion. He was the biggest, blackest boy in our class at Pottersville Elementary School, and our friendship, which began then, had continued through the two decades that had followed.

“I’ve got to go,” I said to Todd as I stood and walked around my desk.

He closed the door. “’Fraid I can’t let you do that,” he said.

He smiled as he pulled the small metal object from his pocket. The shank, a screwdriver filed down to resemble an ice pick with bad intentions, gleamed even in the dull greenish light of the fluorescent tubes.

“What’re you going to do to me?” I said, trying to make my voice sound tight and frightened.

“Just relax,” he said, “and say a little prayer for that big nigger you hang around with. For yourself, too, if you don’t do what I tell you.”

I cringed, as I did every time, at the use of the N-word. After living in the South my whole life, a small deep-South town most of it, I still always found it shocking. In addition to making me late, he was also making me mad.