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

Mona smiled. “Keisha keeps everything in her cell phone, but I’m old-fashioned. I have an address book.” She handed me the wire-bound notebook in her left hand. “Under W, Carl and Rhonda. He retired from the post office. She works at Penney’s on the Boulevard.”

I found two entries for Williamson and laid the address book on the coffee table so I could copy the particulars into my notebook. Odell had lived in an apartment on Main Street near Mercer. Carl and Rhonda Williamson lived about two miles away from their son, on University Avenue near the UB South Campus. Odell had no home number—no surprise, given his age—but Mona had his parents’ home phone number and all three Williamson cell phones. That suggested a deeper level of acquaintance than people who had crossed paths because their children were dating. Keisha and Odell had moved beyond casual. I imagined both sets of parents were excited by the prospect of a good union. If Odell had been dealing drugs, his parents likely had no idea but they might provide me with enough scraps to lead me toward someone who would know.

“When was the last time either of you spoke to Carl or Rhonda?”

“Not since the funeral,” Mona said. “Keisha was still in the hospital and couldn’t come.” Her eyes met her husband’s. “Win and Carl had some words after the service.” She turned back to me. “We didn’t go to the cemetery or come back to the church for lunch.”

I turned to Winslow. “What kind of words?”

“He want to know how Keisha was doin’ and I told him she was alive, no thanks to his son.” The bitterness of his tone sounded fresh as if the exchange with Carl had happened half an hour ago and not a few weeks earlier. The tension that had drained away over the past hour left ample space for anger.

“It wasn’t the time, Win,” Mona said. “Not with them standing by the family limo for the trip to Forest Lawn. They were about to put their only child in the ground.”

Winslow leveled his eyes at Mona and shrugged. “I couldn’t help it. I was pissed.”

“How did he respond?” I asked.

“He said Odell wasn’t the drug dealer, no matter what the news said.”

“So he thought Keisha brought Odell to the party instead of the other way around.”

“Yeah.” Winslow crossed his arms tightly.

“Couldn’t have,” Mona said. “I helped her dress after the hospital. Her arms were smooth as glass, not a track mark in sight, except that one puncture.”

Needles weren’t the only way to take heroin but I said nothing.

“Shows what he knows,” Winslow snorted. “Uppity post office motherfucker!”

“Winslow Simpkins!” Mona snapped her gaze toward her husband and her cheeks darkened as if she were embarrassed at his outburst. “There’s no call for you to be rude or crude, especially when we have a guest.” She drew in a deep breath as if gearing up for an argument, and Winslow tensed and pressed his lips together in a tight line as if awaiting the first salvo. “You apologize to Mr. Rimes for showing your ass in this house!”

“It’s all right, ma’am,” I said, placing my hand on her forearm. “Twenty years in the army, I heard a lot worse. And I understand how you feel, Win. If it were my daughter—” I shook my head. “But we can’t let feelings get in the way here or keep you from doing what you have to do.”

Winslow and Mona both looked at me—ashamed, angry, or confused, I could not say—and neither moved.

“You have to tell me about Keisha’s friends, long-time and recent. Classmates, co-workers, old boyfriends. Anybody.” I tapped the address book still open on the coffee table. “You have to give me any numbers you’ve got and take me upstairs so I can spend time going through her things. As I hunt for her I may come across something I need to know more about, so I’ll call you, again and again if I have to. You have to keep your heads clear and focused at all times, both of you, to help me find your daughter. Can you do that?”

They exchanged a brief, apologetic glance and nodded. Then Keisha’s mother and father both began to cry, loudly, chests heaving and shoulders shaking. Giving Winslow as much sympathy as I could with my face, I encircled Mona with my arms and held her.

3

Keisha’s apartment was smaller than her parents’ flat downstairs and painted in warm colors, mainly yellow and orange. Beside the entry door stood a wooden coat tree that held two coats and two jackets, one with a fur collar, one without. The vinyl storm door in her living room led to a front porch with wrought iron railings, outdoor furniture draped in heavy plastic, and an undisturbed layer of snow.

For a time after Mona left me in the apartment, I looked out the porch door and the window on either side of it. All the houses I saw up and down the street appeared lived in. Most had Christmas decorations and half-open shades or curtains to admit light. Sidewalks and driveways had been cleared of snow but a hardened crust clung to the pavement. A few driveways held cars. Most had iced-over tire tracks at least to the house, some as far back as the garage. Her parents considered Keisha a victim and believed she had been forced to write the letter they received. Near the end of our discussion, they wondered if she’d been snatched off the street and forced into a car or nearby dwelling, but they could not imagine who among their neighbors would do something like that. Nothing about any of the houses I could see suggested an urban fortress cut off from the world, like the Cleveland house where Ariel Castro had kept three women imprisoned for a decade. Sexual enslavement was, of course, still a possibility, but everything I had