Mischief 24/7 (16 page)

“Thrust. And now vibrate. You’re going somewhere
with this, Court, aren’t you?” Jade’s voice was even smaller now.

“Yes, and it’s starting. Feel it? Feel the rumble?” His arms tightened around her—he had forgone his seat belt in order to be close to her. “Now close your eyes and feel it build as we accelerate. Hear the engines? It’s time, Jade. There you go, feel that? Feel the throbbing power of the engines as we build speed? Feel the
pull
on your body as your heart beats faster, as we rocket down the runway, trying to defy gravity, to escape it. Up, up into the air, that’s where we want to be. Masters of the universe, Jade, soaring like a sleek, powerful eagle, our wings spread wide as we… There. There it is, liftoff. Now we climb. Here we go. Let the speed take you. Faster. Faster…”

He lifted her chin and crushed his mouth into hers as the engines lifted the jet from the tarmac and they were climbing steeply into the air, their bodies melded more closely together by the pull of that thrust.

Jade clung to him as the plane continued its rapid climb up and over the city of Philadelphia that was now no more than bright lights rapidly disappearing behind them. He imagined that he could taste her fear, even as he could imagine that fear dissolving and a new feeling taking its place. She held on now, but it was because she’d been caught in the exhilaration of the takeoff, the breaking free of the earth and taking wing.

She pushed him back against his seat, leaning over him as she pinched at his chin and held him as she kissed him almost fiercely. Evidently the woman was taking to the notion of flight.

“Cleared, sir. I’ll have the champagne for the young lady in a… well, maybe not,” George said, re-treating to his seat on the other side of the curtain.

Jade let go of Court and settled back in her seat, her head flung back against the headrest, her breasts rising and falling rapidly. “W
ow.
That was incredible!”

“Should I take that as a personal compliment, or do you want to go meet the pilot?” Court asked her, tickled by the beatific expression on her face, the shine in her eyes.

“No, I meant the
wow
for you. Although you almost lost me with that ‘masters of the universe’ line.”

“Too over the top?”

“Trust me.
Way
too over the top. But I’ll say this, I’m up here. And I think I like it. Sort of, anyway.” She looked out the porthole window at the night sky—although Court noticed her hands were white-knuckled as she held tight to both armrests, as if she might otherwise fall out of the plane—and then turned to him. “Thank you. You’re a nice man.”

She then immediately went back to looking out the window, leaving Court to lightly place his hand over hers and watch her as she watched the faraway ground below.

Did she know why she was so excited? He doubted it. But she was escaping, leaving Teddy and her responsibilities behind, lost in the lights below them, most probably for the first time in her life. This beautiful, unique, fascinating, accomplished woman, who looked so sophisticated, yet was still in many ways little more than a child, this beautiful creature who seemed to have been waiting in her safe, snug cocoon, waiting for him to find her, to sweep her up, fly her away, show her a whole new world.

Not a rescue. An awakening.

One that included him.

“I’
M GLAD YOU DIDN ’T
try to come here on your own after Jess asked you to pick up Ernesto,” Court said as he checked the busy cross street at the stop sign. “I like being included when you’re in areas like this.”

His innocent statement raised her hackles. Damn it, and just when they’d been doing so well.

“This is nowhere near the place where I was shot at, Court. And, to be precise, it was
almost
shot at.”

“Let’s be even more precise, all right?” he said quietly, just as stubborn as Jade and not ready to concede his point, not yet. “It’s nowhere near the place where you could have been shot and killed by a cheating husband with a jammed Saturday Night Special and a dislike of being tailed by the female private investigator he did manage to knock around a little—using her own camera on her, instead of his fists—before help arrived. It’s
nowhere near the several circles of living hell I was dropped into when I heard about your injuries from Teddy while I was stuck in Athens and couldn’t get to you for almost one full day. Not that I’m delving into ancient history here or anything.”

“You already have. And Ernesto is sitting right behind us, remember?” Jade put her hand on Court’s arm as he readied to turn left. “Wait, go straight here.”

He did as she asked and then looked to her for an explanation. “You know this neighborhood?”

She shook her head. “No, not really. But if you go another two, no, another three blocks, I think you can turn left and we’ll see the playground where Terrell died.”

“Jade…” Court said warningly, not as surprised as maybe he should be, because Jade had always been like a dog with a bone about her assigned Scholar Athlete case. “I know you don’t want to give this up, and I don’t blame you. But we’ve already got a busy evening ahead of us. What good is there in looking at a crime scene over a dozen years old?”

“Yes, Court, but you’ve never seen it, and Ernesto had some pretty good thoughts on the trajectory of the bullet and all that when we all discussed
the case the other night. So why not go there just one last time?”

“I don’t know. Because we’re driving a Mercedes and not wearing flak jackets?” Court said under his breath, and then gave it up. Jade was a bundle of nerves and he knew it. They had to find something to fill the hours before Joshua Brainard’s public appearance that night. “Tell me where to turn.”

Five minutes and one wrong turn quickly corrected by Ernesto later, Court eased the Mercedes close to a crumbling, weed-choked cement curb and they got out of the car, Ernesto carrying Sunny after attaching his leash.

Court slowly turned in a full circle, taking in the four-story, block-long warehouse with all its windows broken out, the row of narrow homes across the street, most of them sprayed with graffiti, many of them with boarded-up windows and doors. The playground next to the warehouse was a stretch of weed-choked macadam behind a sagging chain-link fence, the basketball hoops made out of rusted rims and chain nets.

“Not exactly a testimony to urban renewal, is it?” he said, shaking his head as Sunny did his bit for weed control by lifting his short leg against a thistle that had been left to grow almost three feet high. “I know every neighborhood can’t be
perfect, but getting rid of that warehouse would make a good start.”

Even as he made the comment, two strong and not-so-friendly young men stepped out of the dented steel doors to the building. They stopped, folded their muscular arms across their straining chests and stared at Court and the others. we’ve been noticed,” Jade said quietly. “My bet is that’s a crack warehouse now, and we’ve just stepped on their turf. Come on, let’s go look at the playground.”

“Using the term loosely,” Court muttered, for there were no swings, no slides, no jungle gyms. Just the weeds poking through the macadam and the two basketball hoops. “Ernesto? You don’t come here, do you?”

“Me? What, I look stupid to you? This is gang turf. Tell me again why we’re here? I think I should know that before I die, which will be soon, if we don’t get out of here. Poor Sunny, he’s so young to die.”

“Don’t do that, Ernesto,” Jade warned him, “don’t look frightened. They can smell fear. Come on, we’re just going to go inside the fence and take a look around. Then we’ll leave.”

“She’s not going to quit, Ernesto,” Court said, and then led the way to the opening in the fence.

He walked to the center of the court that might once have had foul lines painted at either end, although he doubted that, and waited for Jade and Ernesto to join him. “About here, Jade?”

She nodded. “Terrell’s body was found in the middle of the court, that’s what Teddy wrote in his notes. So, Ernesto? You said it couldn’t have been a drive-by, even though the street’s right there, right? Tell me why.”

Ernesto stood very close to Court, his eyes directed at the ground, his knees knocking almost audibly. “I told you, Miss Sunshine. Fence is all around, see, three sides of fence, one of the brick wall of the warehouse. No way could any gang member I know aim one shot to the head from a moving car through one of the openings of the chain link. This isn’t the movies, Miss Sunshine, you know? And nobody’d be dumb enough to get close to Terrell one on one by coming inside the fence. You read it in the report, Miss Sunshine, Terrell was one big dude.”

“The shooter wouldn’t necessarily have acted on his own,” Court pointed out reasonably. “Maybe it was the shooter and a bunch of his pals. You know, courage in numbers?”

Ernesto shook his head, still keeping his gaze directed toward his feet. “That’s not the way it
works. One pops, they all pop.
Pop-pop-pop.
That way, nobody flips on the other guys. If there was more than one of them, Terrell would have been full of bullets, not just the one.”

“Not to keep trying to shoot holes in your reasoning, Ernest—pardon the pun—but maybe it was several gang members and one gun.”

Ernesto shrugged. “Same thing. You got a clip, you empty the clip. That way your buddies don’t see that you can’t shoot worth crap, because one of the bullets is sure to make it. That’s why so many little kids sitting on porches minding their own business and old ladies watching some soap opera inside their own houses get shot when gangs fight. Lousy aim, but lots of bullets.”

Court ran this information through his head until he thought he’d translated it correctly. “All right, so it was one shooter. One lucky shooter, inside the fence. Which, it would seem to me, would be someone Terrell knew?”

Ernesto sighed, at last lifted his head as he sighed in exasperation. “People, people, we can’t know that for sure. But we can say that the cops got it wrong all those years ago, and that’s
all
I’m saying. Okay, that, and nobody looked too hard because gang shootings are hardly ever solved and the cops know they’d just be busting their rumps for nothing.

Besides, back then? It’s not like there wouldn’t have been another gang shooting the next day to keep them busy. This was no drive-by, and I don’t think it was a gang thing, either. But what do I know? I only grew up here. Not that I come here, I mean, not right
here.
Not that I want to be here right now.”

Court looked at Jade, who sighed and nodded her head.

“Just one more thing,” she said, taking Court’s hand. “Something maybe Ernesto has seen, but you haven’t.”

“Me? I told you, Miss Sunshine, I don’t come here. You stay on your own blocks, that’s the way it is. Maybe the guys on your own blocks beat you up once in a while, but they’re at least your own guys, on your own blocks. They don’t beat you up so bad you don’t get better so they can beat you up again, you see what I’m saying?”

“Sort of like fraternity hazing,” Court said, “that goes on forever. All right, Jade, what did you really bring us here to see?”

“That,” she said, pointing toward the warehouse wall. And then she dropped her hand and jogged toward the wall. “Damn it! What’s the
matter
with people?” she asked as she dug in her purse for a tissue.

Court and Ernesto exchanged looks, Ernesto
shrugging his ignorance, and the two of them, after checking to make sure they weren’t soon about to get company, walked over to the wall to watch as Jade tried to clean something off a bronze plaque attached to it.

“I never saw that,” Ernesto said, impressed. “That gum on there, Miss Sunshine?”

“Yes, that’s gum on here,” Jade grumbled as the tissue she’d tried to use to pluck the gum from the bronze-relief face of Terrell Johnson just made things worse, the warmth of the day keeping the gum soft enough that the tissue only stuck to it. “If Teddy could see this…”

“Teddy put up this plaque?” Court shook his head. Teddy Sunshine had been the most complicated man he’d ever known, and just when you wanted to hate him, he pulled a stunt like this.

Court read the inscription—Terrell’s name, the fact that he’d been All-State first term the year he’d died. “The gum is lousy, Jade, but with the price of brass these days, and people actually taking apart rest-room toilets to steal the brass fittings, I’m just surprised this plaque is still here. And that makes me a cynic, right?”

She wasn’t listening. She’d managed to pull off the worst of the large pink wad of bubble gum, but had dropped the tissue. Reaching down into the
collected leaves, candy wrappers and God knew what else that had been blown up against the building, she came up holding a small bouquet of dead roses tied with a blue bow. “Who…?”

It was rapidly becoming a day of surprises. Court shoved his hands into his pockets. “Jermayne?” he suggested. “The grandmother is dead. I can’t think of anyone else who’d still bring flowers after all these years. Hell. I don’t mind saying, Jade, that gets to me. The plaque, the flowers, the good kid dead and the young brother left to fend for himself—I can see why Teddy kept pushing for answers all these years.”

She dropped the flowers, dragged a fresh tissue out of her purse and wiped at her eyes. “I’ve tried so hard, Court. But Jermayne keeps insisting he doesn’t want our help. Sometimes I think I’m getting close, you know, and then he pulls away again.”

“I know, sweetheart. Ernesto, what are you doing?”

The teenager was dancing on one foot, or so it seemed, and making faces at Court. “You know those two guys we saw standing in front of the warehouse?”

“Yes,” Court answered, realizing he’d forgotten them, which had been stupid of him.

“Well, they’re not standing in front of the warehouse anymore. Can we, like,
get out of here?”
Without waiting for an answer, he scooped up Sunny and took off for the Mercedes with enough speed to make Court wonder if he couldn’t have gotten a track scholarship to Penn State if the logistics thing hadn’t worked out for him.

“Come on, Jade, time to go. Unless you want to stick around and talk to our new friends, that is.”