The Fraud (35 page)

The foyer was unlit. In front of me there was a staircase heading up. To my left was the sitting room with the semihexagonal bay windows. To the far right was a formal dining room. To my more immediate right was a hallway, perhaps thirty feet long, that extended to the back of the house and my laboring fianc
é
e.

And that, of course, was where I had to go. I brought the shotgun up, letting its barrel lead the way. I was thankful, as I tread on the old hardwood floors, that I wore rubber-sole shoes—a concession to durability and comfort that now seemed prescient.

I had crept perhaps ten feet down when a throaty moan began emanating from the room on the back right. I halted. As soon as the noise started, Zabrina flashed across the hallway, having come from the room on the other side—the kitchen, if I recalled correctly.

Her passage through the hallway was so fleeting and she was moving so fast I didn’t really have time to react. I did have time to look at her, though; and, in particular, look at her gun, which was still tucked in the back of her pants.

The moan built in volume. Tina was having another contraction. It made my heart ache I wasn’t next to her, comforting her, encouraging her, rubbing her back, letting her yell at me—all the things fathers were supposed to do for the mothers of their children.

I used the noise she was making as cover to continue my slink down the hallway. My right finger remained on the shotgun’s trigger. By the time Tina stopped, I was at the end of the hallway, still with no brilliant plan as to what to do next.

“Two minutes thirty seconds that time,” Zabrina said.

“A’ight,” a man replied.

From their voices, I could tell the man was at the edge of the room, just on the other side of the wall from where I now stood. Zabrina was closer to the couch, near Tina.

I could only aim at one of them as I went in. I decided to target the man. He was the one with his firearm in his hand, or at least he had it there when I glimpsed him through the window earlier. He was the greater threat.

The script in my head went something like this: leap into the room, shoot the man, then turn the gun on Zabrina. I would have to pump the shotgun to eject the old cartridge and put a new one in the chamber. That would give her the opportunity to get her own gun out of her waistband and turn it on me.

We’d probably end up firing simultaneously. I’d take a round, but so would she. It was probable neither of us would survive.

But Tina would. She could crawl to one of our corpses, dig out a phone, and call 911. Her contractions were still just barely far enough apart. She would have time to get to the hospital and have the baby safely cut out of her. No prolapsed umbilical cords. No negative outcomes.

But only if I acted now.

And that’s when I realized I had reached that dreaded question, the one all parents hope will never be anything more than hypothetical:

Would you give your life for your kid?

It is, as I said, a question every parent contemplates at some point. But at least in my case, the answer was only worth pondering for some minimal fraction of a second.

Because—even for a child who I never met, even with a full understanding of the consequences, even with all I would be giving up—the answer was so obvious.

Hell yes.

*   *   *

Wanting my enemies to be at least minimally distracted, I waited until Tina’s next contraction to move.

She began with the low moan, just like last time. I counted to three. Then I whirled around the corner.

I suppose the humane, merciful thing to do would have been to yell “freeze” and at least give them a chance to surrender without bloodshed, to let them see that they were not outnumbered but they sure were outgunned. And maybe the guy I thought I once knew—the peace-loving wimp—would have done that.

But he was gone. So was his sense of humanity and mercy. They had been replaced by more brutish impulses, instincts that urged me to protect my own at all costs.

I didn’t even look at the face of the man I was about to shoot or consider that what I was aiming at was a fellow human being. He was just an object at that point. I stared at the middle of his chest, because that’s what I was aiming for.

Then I pulled the trigger.

I felt the gun slam into the crook of my arm. There was heat from gases being propelled at supersonic speed out of the barrel. There was a bright flash of light, followed an imperceptible moment later by a roaring blast.

It is, as I may have mentioned, a misconception that it’s impossible to miss with a shotgun from close range. But it turns out it’s pretty damn easy not to miss.

The buckshot tore into the man’s chest and sent him hurtling back against the wall. But I neither took the time to appreciate my marksmanship or survey its final effects. I was too busy swinging the gun barrel toward Zabrina.

She had been kneeling next to Tina with her back to me. But she was already rectifying that. She had turned toward me, grabbed the gun from her waistband, and was bringing it forward.

With my right hand, the one that had just pulled the trigger, I grabbed the shotgun’s slide and, with every bit of strength I had, racked it back toward my body. It made that sound, that
chick-chick
noise that I previously had found so terrifying. Now it was positively symphonic.

From there it was a pretty simple race; a race to the death that, in this too-violent country of ours, had been run everywhere from the streets of Newark to the Wild West. And the winner would be determined by one thing: who could aim and pull the trigger faster?

Tina was in midmoan, her eyes closed.

And then she wasn’t. And they weren’t.

I was catching this in my peripheral vision. And in real time, I’m not sure I fully appreciated what was happening. It was only later, when I was able to slow it down, that I really understood what she was doing.

Tina continued moaning, but she had opened her eyes. With an alertness that belied the undertaking her pregnant body was in the midst of, she twisted to the right. With both hands, she grabbed that heavy metal tray, the one that had been holding her ice water.

Then, with a savage yell, she slammed its edge into the side of Zabrina’s head.

Zabrina’s arms went into the air. She toppled over on her left side. My target—her chest—was now on the floor, obscured by the coffee table. Her head was sticking out just beyond the table. I couldn’t tell where the gun had gone but I wasn’t waiting to locate it. I took two long strides, wound up, and kicked her skull as hard as I could.

If Zabrina had any hold on consciousness before my foot met her cranium, it certainly was gone by the time it impacted. I raised up the stock of the shotgun, ready to bludgeon her if she made any move, but her lights were out. Blood was starting to ooze from the contusion Tina had inflicted.

I looked over to the corner of the room. The man I had shot was crumpled in his own rapidly expanding pool of blood. His body had been spun to the side, so I could see that a blue ski mask was sticking out of his pocket.

He was the one whose predilection for murder had started it all, but he wasn’t going to be trouble to me or anyone else; except, perhaps, for the county medical examiner who would have to perform his autopsy.

Zabrina’s gun had dropped harmlessly to the floor. I kicked it out into the hallway, on the off chance she began to stir. Then I grabbed a dish towel that was sitting on the coffee table. I quickly wiped down the shotgun, then set it down in the corner. I was leaving that untraceable gun behind without any fingerprints on it, along with a few shell casings I had never touched. Let the authorities just try to prove who pulled the trigger.

Tina, amazingly, was already standing up. I walked over to her and offered her an arm. She waved me away.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” she said. She was grabbing the sheet she had been using as a cover-up and was wrapping it around her bare bottom half.

I just stared at her. “How the hell did you do that in the middle of a contraction?” I asked, pointing at Zabrina.

“Easy,” she said. “I wasn’t having a contraction. I was faking it.”

I was too surprised to summon a reply, so she continued: “I started faking them the moment they brought me into the house. I thought I could trick them into taking me to the hospital. It didn’t work. But I figured at that point I had to keep up the ruse. I’m still having a real one every eight minutes. I’ve been throwing in two pretend ones for every real one.”

“So, it’s true,” I said, “no one really knows when a woman is faking it.”

She just smiled and began waddling—and, again, this is not a word I would use around her—toward me.

“Come on, Dad,” she said. “Let’s go to the hospital.”

CHAPTER 46

As soon as we were out of the door, I hailed the Sweet Thang Taxi and Limousine Service by calling her on my cell phone.

By the time we had walked down the front steps, she was pulling the Malibu into the driveway. I helped Tina into the passenger seat, hopped in behind her, and asked Sweet Thang to drive with expedient caution toward Saint Barnabas Medical Center.

For the record, my first phone call as we got underway
was
to my parents. A promise is a promise.

“It’s time,” I said as soon as my mother answered.

“
It’s time?
” she screamed. But I hung up before the rest of what would likely be a very loud, very prolonged exclamation shattered my eardrums or blew out the speaker on my phone.

Tina’s parents came next. They live in Florida and had already planned to come up the next week, when the C-section had been scheduled. As I hung up on them, they were making noises about changing plane tickets.

I was about to call Buster Hays when Tina went into a contraction—a real one this time. I knew this for sure because when I asked if there was anything I could do to help, she said she preferred silence. Only she said it with a lot more profanity than that.

When she came out of the contraction, I was about to get back on my phone when she said, “By the way, there’s something I want to tell you before I forget,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“They want me to run the paper.”

“What do you—”

“Brodie is going on a three-month medical leave,” she said. “Corporate wants me to serve as executive editor in his absence.”

“Oh. Wow. Congratulations.”

“He’s probably going to retire. No one wants to rush him into it, but that’s how it looks. I get the sense this is my tryout. I’ve got three months to show corporate I can do this job.”

“So how are you going to—”

“Carter,” she said sharply.

“Yes?”

“I really don’t want to talk about this in detail right now.”

“Okay,” I said.

And, really, it was. We could sort out the intricacies of being executive editor and mom at some later time.

My final phone call during our ride was to Buster Hays. I told him he might want to alert his task force buddy to send detectives to Zabrina’s address, where they would discover the Rotary president behind the wave of carjackings in her club and a dead man whose firearm would likely be linked to the shooting deaths of Kevin Tiemeyer and Joseph Okeke.

Later, I would learn the man with the blue ski mask was Zabrina Coleman-Webster’s brother, recently paroled from prison. He had gotten involved in his sister’s scheme and, for reasons only his twisted brain would understand, started killing the cars’ owners. In addition to Tiemeyer and Okeke, he was also believed to be behind the disappearance of his great-aunt, whose house was found empty except for a very hungry cat. The cat had found a place at a no-kill shelter, where he was awaiting adoption. I had a lot on my plate, of course, but I planned to check in a few weeks to see if he found a home. If not, maybe Deadline needed a brother.

I would also learn that Hakeem Kuti had quickly gone to work on the man in the black ski mask, convincing him of the merits of being the first member of a criminal enterprise to turn into a cooperating witness. And it’s true: the first person to make a deal always gets the best one.

Certainly, no such offer would be made to Zabrina Coleman-Webster, who took most of the weight and faced a raft of charges. She ended up pleading guilty anyway, not that it helped her much. At her sentencing, she talked about why she did it. The short version was that “Zabrina From The ’Hood,” as she called herself, got tired of waiting to collect what she felt the world owed her. She saw this as her shortcut. She expressed profound remorse it had gotten out of control. I’m not sure if her apologies helped the families who would never get their loved ones back. But at least it was something.

Zabrina’s cooperation gave Kuti the evidence he needed to uncover a fraud involving policyholders from Obatala and a half dozen other underwriters, all of whom happily paid Kuti a retainer for his assistance. Altogether, more than a dozen of Zabrina’s associates—both from Rotary and the firm of Lacks & Ragland—ended up serving jail time for availing themselves of her illicit offer to cash in on their replacement policies with staged carjackings.

My story on the subject was stripped across the top of the Sunday paper a week and a half later. By that point, Doc Fierro had been sufficiently mollified by my long and self-flagellating apology that he dropped his threat to get an injunction against us. That, in turn, had resulted in my being reinstated to my position as a staff writer at the
Eagle-Examiner
.

The only other fallout from the story—or, rather, from the dramatic events that took place during its reporting—was that its writer suffered a minor case of post-traumatic stress disorder. There are people, apparently, who can shoot someone and not feel much remorse. I learned I am not one of those people. I replayed the events of that evening many times, including in a series of therapy sessions. Even though it was clear to all the target in question dearly deserved to be shot, I never really did convince myself to like how it all turned out. Then again, there was never anything I could do to change it. I accepted that, slowly. I suspected it would still haunt me.