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

I was meeting Phoenix at seven. In the mid-sized Nickel City, I had plenty of time to reach North Buffalo and deliver the phone and computer to LJ then get back downtown to Betty’s Restaurant on Virginia Street. I went to my dark blue Ford Escape and climbed inside, putting everything in the front passenger footwell. I pressed the START button and punched in my favorite satellite jazz station as I pulled away from the curb. With Sonny Rollins as background, I pushed Keisha Simpkins and her parents and Odell Williamson into a corner of my brain where they could wait until I had enough information to immerse them all in a developer bath that would produce clearer pictures.

It wasn’t until I turned onto Main Street that I suspected I was being followed.

Ordinarily, I would have had to concentrate to distinguish one car behind me from another at night. But the large SUV on my tail now had a distinctive pattern of LED daytime running lights that half-cupped the headlamps. I first saw the pattern in my rearview mirror when I turned onto High Street and reached a stop sign. Because LED running lights were increasingly common but still rare enough to be noticed, I thought nothing of them at that moment. Eight blocks later, however, when I made a right onto Main, the lights were still with me, apparently matching my speed. I decided to find out if the driver was tailing me.

A few blocks ahead I passed Sermon on the Mount, the Simpkins family’s church. Then I changed lanes and soon turned left into the Delta Sonic complex across Main Street from Artspace Gallery and Artists’ Lofts. Between Barker and Bryant Streets, Delta Sonic was more than a car wash. It had oil change and detail shops, twenty or so gas pumps, and a convenience store with a Dunkin’ Donuts inside. I slid into an empty gas lane as if intending to fill up. The SUV behind me eased into a well-lighted lane to my right and stopped behind a Chevy Colorado. It was a black Lincoln Navigator with two men obscured by smoked glass. I tried to get a look at the front plate but my line of sight was blocked by waste bins between the pumps. I counted to three. Then I shot forward and swung left past the store and left again toward the driveway. I turned right on Main, right on Barker, and right on Linwood. I parked as far as I could from a streetlight then got out and walked back. Left hand inside my jacket, I peered around a wide tree trunk at Barker and waited.

After a few seconds, the Navigator rolled into view and paused at the intersection as if the occupants were gazing down the street. Then it moved on toward Delaware Avenue. I waited three or four minutes before I returned to my car. My pursuers didn’t return.

Pulling away from the curb, I couldn’t help wondering whether they were looking for me or looking for Keisha.

4

“They were probably looking for Keisha.”

We were in the warm main dining room at Betty’s, at a small table against an exterior wall that held the charcoal drawings of the artist currently on exhibit. The front windows and canopy framework outside were decorated with Christmas lights, and the night beyond them was clear after earlier sporadic snow. The Mediterranean cod had just been set in front of Phoenix, and her first bite was still on the fork in her hand. “Unless there’s something you haven’t told me, you’ve been doing only routine things the past few weeks.”

“Mostly for your law firm.” I cut into my grilled skirt steak and put a piece into my mouth. I worked on it slowly, savoring it, thinking.

“All of it low impact,” she said as she chewed. “I can’t see depositions, background checks, and process serving causing a covert tail. So the question is, why would somebody be looking for your client’s daughter?”

“The first question I’ll ask when I find her.”

Oscar had told Phoenix nothing of what troubled the friend who wanted my help, so when I joined her in the restaurant and she asked how my day had gone, it was with more than casual curiosity. Between the moment we placed our order and the moment the food arrived, I recounted my afternoon with Winslow and Mona Simpkins, and my examination of Keisha’s apartment. There was no question of breaching confidentiality because Landsburgh, Falk, and Trinidad engaged Driftglass Investigations and agreed to represent me if the need arose. In fact, Phoenix had acted as my lawyer before we became lovers, having gotten me released from jail during my interrogation for a murder I hadn’t committed.

In any case, I tried to explain the black Navigator as nonchalantly as I could. Our relationship was still in the probationary stage. We’d been together less than two months, and already she had spent a night sleeping beside my hospital bed as I recovered from gunshot wound surgery. I liked her a lot, perhaps more than I should have, for the limited time we’d been a couple, and didn’t want fear to chase her away. Now I looked at her—oval face framed by medium-length dark hair she untied when she wasn’t working, cinnamon skin glistening in the soft light, espresso eyeshadow and lipstick, tailored burgundy pantsuit—and wondered for the nth time what she saw in a rough-edged combat veteran and ex-Army detective who gazed at the world through lenses framed in stainless steel cynicism.

“Maybe Keisha owes somebody money for drugs and they tried to break in to get it,” Phoenix said. “Maybe she knows too much about how her boyfriend moved his product and his crew wants to make sure she doesn’t talk. Or the guys in the Navigator could be anything from rival dealers who see her as the gateway to Odell’s operation to undercover cops who think she’ll lead them to the next biggest mouth in the food chain.”

“Maybe Odell’s