Pipe Dream (22 page)

Ramirez and Hillman tried to convince Nelson that fear, not guilt, motivated the suspects’ flight. But Nelson would not be moved. So Hillman and Ramirez set out to find the suspects, knowing that if someone else found them first, the results would be catastrophic.

As they rode away from the Command Center, Ramirez fought against the cloud of disillusionment that formed in his mind, and wondered if he’d ever look at the department the same way again.

Nelson’s words haunted him: What matters is that the system works. Not whether some piper pulled the trigger.

“Thinking about Nelson?” Hillman said, rousing Ramirez from his thoughts.

Ramirez pursed his lips angrily. “Do you believe that guy?”

“I’ve been on the force almost as long as you’ve been alive,” Hillman said. “There’s not much I can’t believe. But I learned a long time ago that you’ve got to go along to get along.”

Ramirez looked at him sharply.

“Not that I always go along,” Hillman added quickly, sensing that Ramirez misunderstood what he was trying to say. “I guess what I’m saying is, when the job goes against what I believe—and there have been a few times over the years—I do what I have to do. But I do it quietly.”

“Well, you didn’t do it quietly in there,” Ramirez said.

“I’ve only got six months to go,” Hillman said. “I don’t have a whole lot to lose now. But Nelson does, and I think he knows it.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve got to put yourself in Nelson’s shoes,” Hillman said. “If you’re him, you’ve been presiding over a corrupt department for the last two or three years. It’s impossible that all the corruption has gone on without your knowledge. You know it, and everybody else knows it.

“So after a while, you get nervous and you try to distance yourself from it. You stop letting things go on as much and you stop turning the other way as much. You even crack down a little bit. But then the Police Civilian Review Board starts to get a little too powerful. With each investigation it conducts, they get closer to the top of the department. And now, if you’re Nelson, you’re really scared, because you know you were right in the thick of things about six months ago, even if you’re not doing anything now. Then the head of the board gets smoked.

“At first, you’re happy. I mean, you’re really happy. And then the news coverage starts, and you’re even more scared than you were before, because you know how it looks. So what do you do? You close ranks. You get everybody in the department in lockstep. You latch on to a suspect or two you can convict, conduct a quick investigation, get a quick trial date, and you do it all knowing that if this thing doesn’t go over just right, it’s your ass.

“So if anybody stands in your way, you remove them. Because as long as it’s the little guys getting caught with their hands in the cookie jar, it’s okay. They’re supposed to get caught. But not you. You’d rather die than get caught.”

“So what does arresting the wrong people have to do with them getting caught?” Ramirez said.

“A quick investigation means less media coverage. Less media coverage means less scrutiny. Less scrutiny means less chance of their little extracurricular activities coming out.”

“Maybe it’s more than that,” Ramirez said. “Maybe Nelson is the one who set Podres up to be murdered in the first place.”

“I doubt it,” Hillman said. “Nelson’s one of those guys who’ll cut your throat politically, but he’s not a killer. Whatever Sheldon and Morgan were doing, Nelson wasn’t getting a piece of it. If he was, this whole thing would have went down a whole lot smoother than it did.”

Ramirez was silent as he considered the truth in Hillman’s words.

“Can I tell you something?” Ramirez said.

“Sure.”

“I never pegged you to be the type of guy to stand up to Nelson. To tell you the truth, I’ve never known quite how to take you.”

“Join the crowd,” Hillman said.

“I mean, you give off this vibe like you just want to be left alone.”

Hillman took a moment to think about what Ramirez had said.

“When you’ve been around as long as I have,” Hillman said, “your life is full of memories. And memories are like diamonds: Each one is precious in its own way. Some of them are round and brilliant, and you can look at them all day long and never get tired of them. But some of them are ugly and damaged, and you can’t stand the sight of them, because you know that you made bad investments when you bought them.”

Ramirez glanced over at him.

“I guess I’ve spent too many years trying not to look at the bad memories,” Hillman said.

“You can’t live in the past,” Ramirez said.

“I’m getting old now,” Hillman said. “I’ve got a lot more past than future. The future belongs to guys like you, Ramirez. If you just learn to listen, I think you’ll probably be all right.”

Ramirez smiled. Then the radio crackled to life.

“Dan 25, take the airport, outside the international terminal,” the dispatcher said. “Meet Southwest Detectives for a founded job. Use caution, an officer may be involved.”

“Dan 25, okay.”

“Sounds like one of our friends made an appearance at the airport,” Ramirez said as he placed the handset back in its cradle.

“If you’re going to check that, why don’t you drop me off at the 39th?” Hillman said.

“For what?”

“I’m going to get a vehicle and take a ride up to the hospital. I’ve got a hunch that Sheldon might show up there.”

Ramirez turned on Hunting Park Avenue and drove toward the 39th District. As he dropped Hillman off and watched him walk into the building, his mind drifted back to the suspects.

If they were still in Philadelphia, it would be that much harder for them to escape from the city with their lives.

Chapter 16

W
hen the cab got down to the Center City exit, which would have taken them to the Broad Street exit and Hahnemann Hospital, Leroy told the cabbie to double back and take I-76 East, which would take them to 30th Street Station. The driver started to protest, but Leroy gave him one of his looks and the driver just turned it around and took them where they wanted to go.

Clarisse toned down the moaning just enough to convince the cabbie that it wasn’t quite as urgent as before, and Pookie and Black sat on either side of her, patting her hand and making soothing sounds. The whole thing looked like something from a movie set. But it was more convincing.

When they pulled Clarisse out of the cab, she pushed against her lower back and arched it like she was carrying a baby that weighed at least ten pounds. It looked so genuine that Black almost dropped her hand and started clapping at her performance. It was all he could do to maintain his composure until they got into the station and walked past the information booth.

“What now?” Pookie said, whispering under her breath as they walked Clarisse past a group of Amtrak police.

Black had to think about it for a minute, because he hadn’t planned that far ahead.

“To the souvenir shop?” he said, making it more a question than a statement.

“To the
souvenir
shop?” Clarisse repeated, making the idea sound really stupid.

“Yeah, we tourists now,” he said, trying hard not to look at the police officers. “And you not in labor no more. You just real pregnant and you havin’ a hard time walkin’ up and down in this big train station. So we just helpin’ you ’cause we love you so much.”

“Yeah, well, you’re going to have to love me enough to let me go to the bathroom right about now.”

“You need to do
somethin’,
” Leroy said. “ ’Cause that blanket look like it’s just about to fall out from underneath that coat.”

They all looked down and saw the bulge beneath her coat dropping lower and lower, as if she were going to have the baby any minute.

“Come on,” Clarisse said, pulling Pookie toward the ladies’ room.

In an instant, Leroy and Black were left standing there, alone and exposed. Leroy looked after Pookie and Clarisse like he expected them to run away. After all, there was really no reason for them to stay.

“They comin’ back,” Black said, reading Leroy’s thoughts and trying to sound reassuring.

“How you know?” he said, looking at Black with skepticism.

“I don’t.”

“Well, shut up then.”

Black was too tired and too wrong to argue his point. Because the truth was, he didn’t have a point. All he had was the money Leroy had given him and a vision of the four of them getting on the train. But he didn’t have what he really needed at that point. He didn’t have any faith.

“We might as well go ’head over here and sit down,” Black said.

“Man, I ain’t sittin’ nowhere waitin’ for five-o to walk up on me.”

“We in a big-ass train station,” Black said. “Ain’t nobody just gon’ instantly recognize you in here with a suit on. You look just like everybody else that’s goin’ outta town.”

“We need to be goin’ over there tryin’ to buy some train tickets,” Leroy said.

“In a minute,” Black said, walking toward the bench in the corner where most of the people were milling back and forth.

It took Leroy about half a minute to decide that it was probably best for him to follow. When Black heard Leroy’s footsteps behind him, he let out a sigh of relief. Because nothing would get them caught faster than standing there in the middle of 30th Street Station looking like they didn’t know where they wanted to go or what they wanted to do. It was better for them to fade into the crowd and sit down. At least that way they could have a few minutes of relative safety to make a good decision. That’s what Black was going to tell Leroy when he came over to the bench to sit down with him. But by the time Black turned around, Leroy had disappeared.

When Black realized that Leroy was no longer there, his head started to swim. But he sat down anyway and tried not to panic. He looked around casually and forced himself not to get up. Then he thought about where Leroy could have gone. When he couldn’t come up with an answer, he began to narrow down his choices and came up with two. He could either go and get his own ticket and go wherever, by himself, or he could sit there and wait for Leroy.

Black realized after a few minutes that he really couldn’t decide what to do. The decision shouldn’t have been that hard. They would have to split up in a few minutes anyway, because it just made sense to do that. But he was afraid. They all were. Black could see it in the way Clarisse looked when she left them to go to the bathroom; in the way Pookie walked away with her without uttering a word; in the way Leroy looked when Black told him they needed to go over to the bench and sit down.

It wasn’t a game anymore. Not that it ever was. But it was almost over. And they all faced the end with both fear and anticipation, wondering when someone would walk up behind them and end it for them. Their lives had been down so much more than they were up that they expected to fail.

Black shuddered and let out a long sigh, then looked over at the ladies’ room and saw a white woman go inside. He was tempted to go over to her and ask her to see if Pookie and Clarisse were in there. But then he thought about the way they’d been saying their names on television and on the radio all night long. He could imagine how the scene would play out.

“Excuse me, white woman, can you tell Pookie and Clarisse that Samuel Everett Jackson, aka Black, is waiting for them outside? Thank you.”

Her face would crinkle into the classic Jamie Lee Curtis expression of horror, like he was the black reincarnation of Michael Myers, and then she would scream and point. No, she wouldn’t even scream. She would make that sound they made in
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
whenever the aliens walked up on a real person: a real bloodcurdling-type scream.

Black smiled to himself at the thought, and just as he looked up again, he felt someone walk up behind him and tap him on the shoulder. All at once, everything became a jumbled mess. The fear, the excitement, and the anticipation joined and became something else, something indescribable. He had visions of guns pointed at the back of his head and police waiting for him to move so they could decorate the bench with his brain. There was nothing for him to do but sit there and wait for them to decide what they were going to do, so that’s what he did.

“Turn around slowly,” a familiar, muffled voice said.

When Black turned around, Leroy was standing there, smiling and holding train tickets in his hand.

“Remind me to hurt you.”

“Remind yourself to get up from there and come on,” Leroy said. “We ain’t got time to be sittin’ around waitin’.”

Black looked over at the bathroom again, and Pookie and Clarisse were just coming out the door, walking toward them. Clarisse had taken off the coat and removed the blanket, and Pookie had on sunglasses.

“Come on, man,” Leroy said. “The trains supposed to leave in like a half hour.”

“Trains?”

“Yeah, trains,” he said. “What you think we all can get on the same train and roll out like that?”

“I think we need to roll out of Philly together, then go wherever we gon’ go when we get to the next stop.”

“Why?”

“ ’Cause that way, if somebody get caught once we get past the first stop, they can’t snitch, ’cause they don’t know where everybody else went.”

“Don’t nobody know now,” he said.

“You know.”

“I ain’t gon’ tell.”

“I don’t know that.”

Leroy looked at Black like he wanted to say something more, but Clarisse and Pookie walked over before he could put it into words.

“Why y’all sittin’ here talkin’?” Pookie said, looking around nervously. “Let’s go.”

Black looked up at Clarisse, who stood there looking down at the floor. Her expression was difficult to read, and so were her actions. She’d walked away and come back. She’d had the chance to just keep going, but she hadn’t, and that confused Black. After they’d taken her car and parked it in a hotel parking lot, caused her to lose a brand-new job, and made the world think that she’d been kidnapped by murderers, she was standing there waiting for them to tell her what to do, like she was one of them.

Then again, Black thought, she was one of them. Not like Patty Hearst when they kidnapped her and had her robbing banks. No. Clarisse was one of them before she even came with them. She just didn’t know it. She probably still didn’t know. Even though she had one foot on the path they’d all traveled and was waiting for the other foot to fall, even though she was suffering from the same rejection, anger, and disappointment they’d all gone through, even though she had no idea where her life was going and had probably lost the ability to care, she still wasn’t certain that she was one of them.

“Why are you looking at me, Everett?” she said loudly. “Come on!”

“Why don’t you just tell everybody my name?”

“Sorry.”

“From now on,” Black said, “we ain’t got no names.”

Everyone nodded their agreement.

“Now,” Black said, getting up from the bench and walking slowly toward the gift shop, “the first thing we gotta do is go get some little corny Philadelphia baseball caps and some little cheap travel bags from the gift shop, so we look like tourists. ’Cause if we gettin’ on the trains with nothin’, people gon’ be lookin’ at us like: Where they goin’ with no luggage?”

“I told you we ain’t got time for all that,” Leroy said, reluctantly following Black with Pookie and Clarisse. “The trains roll out in twenty minutes.”

“You got time to spend the rest o’ your life on lockdown?”

“Look,” Pookie said impatiently, “I don’t care what we do. Just do somethin’.”

Black tapped Leroy on the shoulder. “I hope you got tickets for the sleeper compartment so we don’t have to sit around everybody else and wait for five-o to walk up on us.”

“I ain’t know they had a sleeper compartment.”

“All right, that’s problem number one. We gotta find a way to get in the sleeper compartment.”

“What’s problem number two?” Clarisse said as they walked into the gift shop.

“Figurin’ out why you still here.”

Everyone looked at her, waiting for her answer.

“I guess,” Clarisse said, pausing as she walked up the first aisle and took two garment bags from the shelf, “I guess it’s because I really don’t have anywhere else to go.”

“Girl, you know that ain’t the only reason,” Pookie said. “So you need to go ’head and stop frontin’.”

Clarisse looked at Pookie with an irritation that bordered on hostility, but said nothing. Leroy and Black ignored their little display and walked over to the souvenir shirts and hats, pretending that they weren’t with them. When Clarisse and Pookie paid for their bags and walked out of the store, Leroy and Black walked up to the counter and paid for theirs. Then they all met outside the store.

“What now?” Pookie said.

“Now we get on the train,” Black said.

“What train?” Clarisse said.

Black looked at Leroy, waiting for him to tell them which trains they were going to catch.

“The twelve-fifteen to Atlanta,” Leroy said.

“I thought you said it was two different trains,” Black said.

“I thought you said you was gon’ get us outta Philly,” Leroy said.

“What it look like I’m doin’?”

“Look like you standin’ there runnin’ your mouth. And this damn sure still look like Philly to me.”

“Dig this,” Black said, walking toward the steps that led down to the train platforms at 30th Street Station. “We can talk about all that once we get up outta here. But right now, what you need to do is give everybody they tickets so we can get on the train. ’Cause all this standin’ around together ain’t even cool.”

Leroy puffed up, angry that Black had ignored his remarks. But he handed out the tickets anyway.

“Come on,” Black said, grabbing Clarisse by the hand and pulling her behind him.

“Hold up,” Leroy said.

Black stopped and turned around.

He looked down and shuffled his feet uncomfortably, then sighed and looked around him before looking Black in the eye.

“Be safe,” he said.

Black looked at Pookie, who stood silently behind him. Then he looked at Leroy and wondered if he’d ever see him again. Black was used to him, and not having him around would mean that things had changed. Black didn’t like change. He liked for things to stay the same as much as possible. That’s why he went to such lengths to keep smoking crack, even though he hated it. He was afraid to try to go back to the life he’d had before. He knew it would be different. He knew there would be change.

“Be safe,” he said to Leroy.

But even as the words left his mouth, Black wondered how safe they could be in a world where the police could say or do just about anything and never worry about being questioned.

Commissioner Nelson turned on the television in the Command Center and hoped that he wouldn’t see anything about Sheldon or Morgan. But as soon as the picture came into focus, Nelson knew that he had hoped for too much.

Anchorman Mike Hansen was wiping tears from his eyes and apologizing to the viewers for his outburst. Coanchor Lorraine Anderson was patting his shoulder and fighting past tears of her own.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, pausing to take a deep breath. “Channel Ten reporter Jeanette Deveraux and cameraman Michael Yates have been found in a field at Philadelphia International Airport. Both were pronounced dead at the scene with gunshot wounds to the head. Details are sketchy, but . . .”

As the reporter spoke, the phone at the Command Center rang. A detective answered it and listened to the supervisor on the scene of the Deveraux shooting. After a few minutes, he picked up a pencil and started to jot down some information.

“Thank you, Lieutenant,” he said, placing the pencil carefully on the table. “I’ll consult the commissioner about that and get right back to you.”