Nickel City Crossfire by Gary Ross (children's books read aloud TXT) 📕

“Thank you, Tito,” Mrs. Markham said as she slid her arms into the sleeves. Then she turned to her husband. “I’ll see you later.”

Nodding, the minister shook my hand. “Old building like this...”

“I understand.” I gave him a Driftglass card and passed one to his wife. “You remember something or hear something, either of you, please call me. Thank you for your time.”

Dr. Markham followed Tito out as Mrs. Markham zipped up and tugged on a knit hat she pulled from a pocket. Then she worked her hands into a pair of thin leather gloves as she led me out of the office and toward the door.

As we emerged into sunlight, I glanced at the F-150 that must be Tito’s and then looked again to memorize the plate. “Tito is a big guy,” I said. “Looks like he played some serious ball in his day.”

“He did for a little while,” she said.

“I’m not surprised.”

“About eight years ago he got a full ride to Eastern Michigan U—a real win for the son of a humble church janitor who never made it to eighth grade.”

Zipping my jacket, I thought of my own father, a janitor who had finished only high school. A tireless reader, he had become best friends with the professor whose office he cleaned, who would raise me after my parents’ deaths. When I was younger, Bobby made a point of telling me how much my mother and especially my father would have appreciated each milestone in my life. “His father must have been proud,” I said now.

“We all were,” Mrs. Markham said. “The congregation gave him a huge send-off party. There was talk he was a shoo-in for the NFL. But then—” She let out a long sigh. “Let’s just say he was better at catching passes than passing classes.”

I pulled my watch cap over my ears and adjusted the stems of my glasses as I thought about how easily that line had rolled off her tongue as if she had said it before. Often.

“He worked hard and scraped through freshman year only by the skin of his teeth,” she continued. “When his father died at the start of sophomore year, he kind of lost the will to try. So he came home, settled into his father’s job, and that was that.”

She unlocked the Camry with her remote and got inside when I opened the door.

“Good luck, Mr. Rimes,” she said. “Sorry if I seemed a little short with you before but this whole thing has been so very unsettling.”

“I understand.”

She looked at me for a long moment. “I believe you do,” she said at last. “In the end, we all want the same thing, to find Keisha.”

Alive, I thought.

Still in the church parking lot and waiting for my car to warm, I punched Sonny Tyler’s cell number into the Bluetooth display. The call took an unusually long time to connect. I asked for him by name when a man answered.

“Speaking. Who’s calling?” The voice was crisp and dispassionate.

“Mr. Tyler, my name is Rimes. I’m a detective working a missing persons case. I’d like to ask you a few questions about Keisha Simpkins.”

“Keisha?” His voice faltered before rising with concern. “Keisha’s missing?”

“Yes. When was the last time you saw her?”

“Last time I saw—what the fuck is this, man?”

“I understand you dated briefly.”

“That was a long time ago. Years. I ain’t seen Keisha since we broke up.”

“Why’d you break up?”

“I was young and stupid and needed to straighten out. I talked to her a couple times since then. We didn’t say all that much but we stayed on friendly terms.” He took a breath, and his tone changed. “Where you get my name from?”

“Her apartment.”

“She disappeared in Buffalo?”

“Yes.”

“How the hell she get lost in her own back yard?”

“One day she just didn’t come back home. I’m—”

“Look, detective, I ain’t been to Buffalo in almost four years. I talked to Keisha maybe eight or nine times since I left. I don’t know what else to tell you.”

“So where are you?”

“Stuttgart, in Germany.”

That explained why the call had taken so long to connect. “You at the USAG there?”

“Nine months in, with the five-fifty-fourth.”

“You’re an MP?”

“Yes, sir.” He sounded surprised. “You know your company designations.”

I had been an MP in Iraq before transferring into the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. I shook my head at the irony but said nothing about my service. “When was the last time you were stateside?”

“About six months ago, for my grandmother’s funeral, in Dallas.”

I glanced at my watch and did a quick calculation. “What time is it there?”

“Stuttgart? Seventeen hundred hours and change. What, you don’t believe me?” As if annoyed, he rattled off a name and contact number for his commanding officer.

“I believe you,” I said, without adding that I would call both his commander and friends I still had in the CID. “Sorry to have troubled you but your number was on my list and I have to check everything.”

“I understand.” He was quiet a moment. It sounded as though he swallowed a couple of times. “Detective, will you please call me back and let me know when you find her? Let me know she’s okay? Better still, have her call me—if that’s possible.”

I promised I would.

8

The florist shop was a small green clapboard storefront on Kensington Avenue near Bailey. It had once been a two-family house, with an upstairs porch and big two-car garage, but now the downstairs had plate glass windows flanking a center entrance. Neon tubing in the left window said, in pink: Flowers by Fatimah. The window on the right said: For All Occasions.

I opened the front door and stepped inside. To my left was a solid steel security door that looked fresh out of the box—to the upstairs flat, I thought. An open wooden door was on my right. As I climbed three steps and went through the doorway, I heard an old-fashioned shop bell ring, likely triggered by the electric eye