Nickel City Crossfire, Gary Ross [ebook reader for pc and android txt] 📗

“You don’t believe that.” Phoenix’s smile was one of her best qualities—wide and engaging, full of beautiful teeth. “It’s possible but you’ll be disappointed if it’s true.”

“You know that how?”

“The hint of a lilt in your voice when you talk about Keisha. You’re impressed by all she’s accomplished. Maybe you even have a bit of a crush. You’ll understand if somehow she resorted to drugs because of career pressure or if recreational use got out of hand. Deep down you don’t see her as a drug dealer. That would break your heart.”

“A little. But it’s not so much a crush as my being protective by nature.”

“One of the qualities that makes you special and makes me care for you, but you have to realize it can also get you into trouble.”

“I do. It has.”

“She wouldn’t be the first medical professional to go down that road. Lucas Tucker?”

Tucker was a suburban Buffalo dentist now languishing in a Nigerian prison. His story had stretched across three news cycles last summer and fall, before Phoenix and I had met. First, it was reported he’d been taken into custody without cause, and his wife made a tearful public appeal for his release. Then the State Department waded into the affair, only to find that in his semi-annual trips to provide free dental care to impoverished Ogoni villagers, Tucker transported sizable quantities of cocaine from Nigeria to London, where he always stopped on the way home to visit relatives. His arrest and that of the Colombian dentist who worked alongside him to treat the unsuspecting Ogoni barely made a dent in the Africa-to-Europe pipeline, but neither man would see the sun for many years to come.

“Tucker was a transporter, never a user,” I said. “Keisha got a nose full of Narcan.”

“She also wouldn’t be the first to get high on her own supply.”

“Lesson number two,” I said, remembering Scarface. “But you’re right. This woman did impress me, and not just with her achievements. I got a sense of how she lived and how she worked. Look, I know everybody’s got secrets. I’m sure she’s hiding more than the three emergency hundred dollar bills in the lining of her jewelry box and the vibrator in the back of her nightstand drawer. But nothing about her place indicated the type of personality that would be into dealing.”

Phoenix put down her fork and looked at me for a long time. “You have good instincts about things like this. If you don’t think she was dealing, most likely she wasn’t.” She reached across the table and took hold of my left hand. “Which takes us back to why someone would be looking for her—if they weren’t looking for you.” She smiled. “Maybe you can change the game and look for them. You have some good cred with the police right now. Maybe Rafael would do a vehicle search as a favor.”

Long before we met, Phoenix had had a brief relationship with homicide detective Rafael Piñero. Recently, I had crossed paths with him and his partner Terry Chalmers at the start of an investigation that ended with their extending to me a grudging respect. “Too many possibilities,” I said. “I couldn’t get a look at the plate, not even the state. Black Navigators made in the last year or two and sold all over America? A longshot, not to mention Canada and Mexico, which compounds the complications.”

She nodded. “But I know you’ll figure it out. You’re relentless like that, as long as you have a place to start.”

I nodded. “The names of friends and co-workers.”

“Anybody on the list you want to talk about?”

“Not yet.” I drank some water. “We’ve talked enough about what I’m doing. Let’s talk about something else.”

“Bobby and Kayla get off okay?”

Almost two months ago, my godfather and landlord, Professor Emeritus Bobby Chance, had lost a bet to his lover, Judge Kayla Baker McQueen. The payment was a long theater weekend in New York City but my getting shot had delayed their departure. “I took them to the airport at six this morning,” I said. “He texted me when they got in and reminded me that they get back Sunday night. But I’d rather hear about what you’re up to.”

For the rest of the meal we discussed her day—morning in court to finalize a divorce she felt could have been avoided with early counseling, an afternoon spent researching the particulars of an auto accident that had left a long-time client in a wheelchair, and a late-in-the-day partners’ meeting to discuss the feasibility of a class-action lawsuit against a chain store whose policy of placing bulky items on high shelves had resulted in at least five serious injuries to customers in three area stores. “They cut back on staff to save money,” Phoenix said. “Customers who don’t want to wait for help jump and jiggle and try to pull these things down when other people are walking by and bam! Head injury. Facial reconstruction. In one case a lamp put a woman in a coma. In another, a guy tore off his finger when he jumped up and his wedding ring caught on the edge of a shelf.”

“Ouch!”

“If we go class action, we’ll need some serious investigating. A lot of billable hours.”

“So when are we heading to Ponce? I can finally meet Tia Rosita.”

Phoenix’s aunt in Puerto Rico was her only living family. Some months earlier she had survived a major hurricane. Phoenix had offered to fly her to Buffalo, but with damage to her apartment minimal and electricity back on within a few days, Tia had declined. Buffalo was too cold year-round, she insisted, despite her niece’s assurances to the contrary.

“They still need help with hurricane clean-up. You willing to put your back into that?”

“Of course,” I said. “It’s rough here in January and February. Last winter?” I shivered. “I wouldn’t mind cleaning up debris in a warmer climate if the Weather Channel