For all intents and purposes, I was a free man. Agamemnon Jefferson, I told me I could go and even stood aside and waved magnanimously when his Man Friday opened the door for me, blasting me with the last-stand glow of a setting sun.
My nerves said to run without looking back. But my conscience led me to Jefferson's car and ultimately a cream city brick building in Schaumburg, IL, just northwest of O'Hare Airport.
I rang the bell, glancing over my shoulder at Devante squeezed like a stuffed animal behind the steering wheel and Jefferson in the backseat. It was 1999 all over again but with these jokers instead of my folks watching from the curb while I tried to make Boy Scouts door-to-door candy bar sales.
The background Jefferson had shared about the kidnapping of two of his soldiers and the shooting of a third left me certain that if we found that perpetrator, we'd end the whole crisis.
This wasn't about sex trafficking at all. Kidnappings and similar disappearances in the 'hood happen statistically more often than in higher-end communities. The national tragedy isn't so much that they happen but that they're not given the same urgent attention by the news media as the kidnappings of, say, little white girls in the suburbs.
I promise you that Anthony Lue being snatched off the curb in front of Jefferson's mother's house will garner about thirty seconds of broadcast news and maybe last three days in the news cycle.
"I'll help you if you help me," I told him.
Jefferson, again seated in his straight-backed chair in the middle of his warehouse, gave me an odd look.
"What makes you think I need any more of your help? Weren't you honest with me?"
"You do, and I was. And trust me, you don't want the blame for what's been happening. There's no juice to be gained. Three boys are dead. Your boys are missing. A girl who might have seen it all is missing."
He nodded slowly, then rose abruptly and gestured for me to follow.
Now, I wondered if I'd aligned myself with the wrong team as the yowling doorbell like a sick alley cat rang out for the third time.
I turned to go but the door opened a crack, then an inch or two, and then wide, as Abigail "Twin" Tentacion answered, her head ironically illuminated like a halo by a neon sign that read "Welcome to Angel House."
"Are you the man who called? Mr. Wilson?"
I nodded and extended my hand. Twin didn't take it but did move aside and allow me to step in.
YOU ARE READING
Bad Break: A Novel
Mystery / ThrillerBlake Wilson is accustomed to plucking nerves. He's young. He's Black. He rarely bites his tongue. And he's a dogged newspaper reporter who lives by the mantra of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. But when he catches a brutal...
