Unexpected Dismounts (38 page)

“Why don’t you just get a uniform and show up for roll call everyday?” Detective Kylie said to me.

“I don’t look good in blue,” I said. “Hank, where’s Desmond?”

Hank got up from the couch and started for the stairs. “He said he was going to take a shower.”

“He’s bathing? Did you threaten him?”

Hank’s lips twitched at me from the bottom step. “No, I just informed him that he had an eggshell smashed on the back of his neck. He’s been in there for thirty minutes.”

Detective Kylie looked annoyed. “I just need to ask him some questions.”

Hank headed up the stairs, already calling. “Desmond! Let’s get the lead out.”

I sank back into the red chair and held up my hand to Detective Kylie. I could either talk or breathe, but not both at once.

“What did they say? Broken rib?”

I held up two fingers. “And a messed-up knee. Desmond didn’t even get a scratch, which is all I care about.”

Kylie looked at his notepad. “What you’ve told me is pretty much the same as what we’ve been able to piece together from the first accident.”

“You think it was the same driver.”

“Same driver, same scenario.” Kylie drew his eyebrows in. “Same motorcycle, basically. Same passenger.”

I didn’t want him to say what I already knew. Maybe coming out of my mouth it wouldn’t sound so certain.

“They’re after Desmond,” I said.

“Were. We picked up the driver out on I-95. He was headin’ south.” He shrugged. “We have the DNA from the skin under your fingernails. If you can ID him, he’s done.”

I turned my head and listened. The shower was still running, and Hank was continuing her litany of, “Let’s go! You’re going to shrivel up in there.”

“What about the man in the backseat?” I said.

Kylie shook his head. “No sign of anybody else in the car.”

“He rolled down the window. I saw him.”

“Rydell claimed he was alone. That was right before he lawyered up. Now he’s not saying anything—”

“Rydell?” I said. “Marcus Rydell?”

“I thought you said you didn’t know him.”

“I don’t. I just know
of
him.” My mind was spinning. “He rented the car that Zelda supposedly stole and crashed into a pole.”

“Who’s Zelda?”

I gave Kylie a hard look. “She’s the woman who was obviously set up by the same people who just tried to run me down and take my kid. You need to let her ID him too. ”

“Just for the record, only one person tried to run you down.”

“So … I was hallucinating about the man in the backseat,” I said. “People are lining up to report that I’m crazy.”

Kylie sighed. “Can you describe him?”

“I can do better than that. I can show you his picture. But you have to promise me one thing.”

“Why not? I feel like I’m working for you anyway.”

“Swear that you won’t mention this in front of Desmond. He doesn’t know this person was in the car, and I want to keep it that way.”

Cringing at the pain, I reached under the chair cushion and pulled out Desmond’s drawing. Its days under the weight of my angsting and praying had left it smooth except for the flattened wrinkle-scars of Desmond’s attempt to forget.

I handed the drawing to Kylie, and waited for the smirk, the eye roll, at the very least the patronizing
We’ll look into it
. I didn’t care. I had to take it as far as I could, or Desmond’s nightmare was never going to be over.

But Detective Kylie looked at me with perhaps the first authentic expression I had ever seen on his face.

“This looks like Jude Lowery,” he said.

“Jude Low—
Sultan?”
I moved from Kylie’s startled gaze to the eye patch and the hideous head. “No. No, I’ve seen Sultan. This isn’t him.”

“When did you see him?”

“The night he was killed.”

“Before that?”

“I only saw him the once.”

“Well, I’ve spent most of the last fifteen years of my career studying his face in photographs and staring at him across interrogation tables and watching him in court.” He tapped the drawing with the back of his hand. “He’s looking a little the worse for wear, but—”

“Worse for wear! The man is dead.”

“Do you know that? Because I never saw his body. Neither did the coroner.” He let the drawing drop to the ottoman between us. “Looks like he’s lost an eye. Has some scars he didn’t have before. Typical injuries for a man who’s been shot in the head and lived to get his revenge.”

“On Desmond? He had nothing to do with Sultan being shot.”

“No,” Kylie said, “but you did.”

I gripped the back of my neck. “This is absurd. There was enough blood in that parking lot to prove he couldn’t possibly have lived.”

“And yet his biological son drew
this.”

“From the nightmares he’s been having, yes.”

“Sultan didn’t look like this before he was shot. You said that yourself.”

“You’re saying he’s
seen
him?”

“How else would he know what he looked like now?”

“But if Sultan wanted to get back at me, why not just shoot me in the alley? Why try to take Desmond?”

He didn’t have to answer. I knew from the place in my soul that wouldn’t have survived if that car had driven off with my son in it.

I reached across the ottoman, ribs on fire, tendons screaming, and grabbed the detective by the rolled-up sleeve of his shirt.

“You cannot breathe a word of this to Desmond. Please. He can’t know.”

He paused for too long. I tightened my grip.

“I’d like to know where he saw Sultan,” Kylie said. “We could get some kind of clue to where he’s staying, how he’s operating.”

“I can tell you that,” I said. “I admit it’s a guess, but just hear me out.”

Kylie nodded me on.

I closed my eyes and watched the pieces move together, forming the picture Desmond had been drawing for us. Then I opened my mouth and shaped it into words.

Desmond coming back more than once from lunch recess to Miss O’Hare’s class, shaken and distracted, one day too terrified to take his history test. Desmond doing a caricature to manage the fear of a man in a car with tinted windows, a man whose threats were spoken in the screams of his nightmares. Desmond being far less frightened of being taken by Priscilla Sanborn than by this man who had come back from the dead.

Until the day he and Chief set out on my bike. Until he thought the accident was his fault, not because he distracted Chief but because he knew the black car with the tinted windows. Because he knew it was after him.

How had he survived these last weeks? Afraid Chief would remember, afraid to go to school because the car might be there at recess, afraid to get on a motorcycle because it might come after him again?

“Today he wasn’t afraid to ride with me, though.”

“The stalking must have stopped as long as your bike wasn’t on the road,” Kylie said. “But he didn’t put that together.”

“Sultan knows where I live. He could have come in here and kidnapped Desmond any time, right out from under my nose.”

Detective Kylie fanned the pages of his notepad.

“What?” I said.

“This guy is a psychopath. He wants it his way or no way, and his way is so twisted you and I can never understand it, much less come up with it. He wanted it the way it was supposed to go down this morning.”

I pulled my good leg up to my chest. “They were waiting for us in that alley,” I said. “How did Sultan know that was where we were going?”

“Have you been there before?” he said.

“Yeah, a few times.”

“Were you ever followed there?”

I caught my breath.

“I’ll venture to say they watched you. When you headed out in that direction today, on your bike, with Desmond, all the conditions were right. They probably took an educated guess and got there before you. If you hadn’t shown up, no problem. They could try again later.”

“What if they do try again later? What’s to keep Sultan from getting another driver?”

“Best-case scenario? Word gets out that we’re onto him and he’ll be hard put to find somebody to chauffeur him around. He’s powerful, but he’s getting less so all the time. If he can’t get out there and muscle people anymore, no one’s going to put their life on the line for him. Especially the caliber of the loser we picked up today. Rydell didn’t have the brains to tell the difference between you and Jack Ellington on a motorcycle. I’m thinking now they would have grabbed Desmond the day of the accident if they hadn’t realized you weren’t there.”

I searched Kylie’s face. “Do you really believe that? Because if you don’t, I have to take Desmond and move somewhere else.”

I shook my head and buried it between my hands as I choked on the pain.

“I believe it,” he said. The gruffness softened. “I think you ought to tell him, so he can report to you if he sees anything. He’s going to need protection until we nab Lowery.”

I brought my head up. “I don’t want him living like he has a specter chasing him.”

“Maybe he does.”

“Then, please, let me take it on.”

A door opened upstairs, and Desmond’s voice filled the stairwell.

“I ain’t got time for a buncha questions,” he was saying to Hank. “I got to go get baptized.”

Detective Kylie turned toward the stairs.

“Please,” I whispered.

Desmond appeared, swaggering and working his eyebrows and otherwise thinly veiling the apprehension I saw lurking.

“We got to make this fast,” he said. “They’s stuff I gotta do.”

Please. Please.

Detective Kylie stood up. “Y’know, your mom’s given me everything I need. You’re off the hook.”

Desmond eyed him. “For now?”

“Forever, unless you get yourself in trouble.”

“Oh, now don’t even be thinkin’ that. I don’t do the T-word.”

Kylie looked at me.

“Trouble,” I said. “But I will call you, detective, if I find any more of my Oreos missing.”

“I didn’t eat alla them, now. Miss Rutabagas done ate her share.”

“I’m not even going to ask,” Detective Kylie said.

I must have talked to everyone I knew in the next two hours. Various HOGs called to tell me they’d seen Troy making his statement to the press in front of the police station, saying he had compassion for the disturbed individual who had set out to frame him. India came by with an envelope from Ms. Willa, who couldn’t get it to me when I was surrounded by sirens and paramedics. Ophelia, India said, was vulnerable, but she’d be there to watch the baptism. Lewis phoned to say he had his letter to the editor drafted; George chuckled in the background. Bonner came by on his way to set up for the Sisters’ baptisms—and now Desmond’s.

He had Zelda with him.

We didn’t have much time to talk. They were on a mission to get flowers and I could only get a promise of five minutes out of Bonner as he lured Desmond into the kitchen in search of Pop-Tarts. We spent the first thirty seconds stumbling over each other’s sentences.

“I’m sorry, Miss Angel—”

“Did I push you too hard, Zelda—”

Finally, I grabbed both of her hands and looked as far as I could into that small, straining face.

“We have plenty of time to help each other heal,” I said. “But there are two things I need to know.”

She nodded.

“Did you steal that car?” I said.

She looked away. “I can’t tell you that, Miss Angel.”

“Why?”

“’Cause I don’t wanna go back to jail.”

“You’re not going back to jail. This is between you and me.”

She gave me a long look before she said, “I drove it ’cause Marcus tol’ me to. He said it was his, only I knew it wasn’t, so that’s the same as stealin’ and I know it.”

“You knew Marcus Rydell?”

“Me and him was livin’ together ’fore I come to Sacrament House. He’s the one done throwed me out so I didn’t have no place else to go.”

She tried to pull her hands away but I held on.

“This is your chance to get it out,” I said. “Get it out and give it up or you will wind up back in jail.”

“I knew it was stupid, goin’ back to him when I lef’ the House that day. I didn’t even mean to do it. He just saw me walkin’ down King Street and picked me up. I didn’t even know he still around.”

“And he had those expensive drugs,” I said.

“That’s not why I went with him.” She shook her head, a thin sheen in her eyes that she tried to blink away. “It was that car. I always liked me a fine car.”

“The one you wrecked.”

“No. Not that one. This one a black Lincoln, almost like a limousine.” Zelda shook her head again, this time as if to muddy the thoughts within.

“Keep going,” I said.

“I can’t, Miss Angel! Just like I couldn’t that day at the police station when I did everything I could to get you outta there so you wouldn’t aks me these questions!”

It was my turn to blink.

“I didn’t mean none of what I said. I just wanted you to get outta my face, and that was the only way I knew how.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not working, is it?” I said.

She closed her eyes.

“That’s it. Look at it. You need to do this.”

“I thought Marcus done struck it rich, but he just drivin’ that limo for Satan. That’s who give me the drugs, tol’ me I’d forget all about you and my old life and—”