Bad Break: A Novel

Epilogue

Sadly, Jaquisse Morgan's parents divorced after his death, unable to move forward together given one leg of their three-legged stool had broken and couldn't be repaired.

Trenton Daniel's mother completed the bachelor's degree she had promised for years to finish. When he was in fourth grade, she'd taken him to Asheville, North Carolina, to visit her sister, a sculptor. Kenya Daniels landed her first accounting job with a renowned furniture maker in Asheville and moved there to join her sister. She regretted not having Trenton cremated so that she could bring him with her. But she said his heart had been in Chicago and his gravesite would give her reason to visit the city frequently.

Reverend and Mrs. Trotter? Perhaps they should have felt more pain than the other parents. All had lost their only children. But the Trotters were the embodiment of having loved and lost. They had experienced it three times with no relief, no hope that their second and then their last child would be spared.

But unlike Jaquisse's parents, the Trotters decided that while the third leg of their stool couldn't be repaired, it could be replaced. They would never have another Isaiah. But the toddler they adopted six months after Isaiah's death would grow to fill their souls.

Free and confident that she was finally safe, Tasha Stone no longer looked or acted like a hardened street fighter.

She was a teenager again. In another life, or at least in a different time in this life, I think she may have hit it off with Agamemnon Jefferson I, the Chicago teenager and alleged former drug kingpin who had recently made headlines for enrolling as a freshman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, in spite of being a high school dropout.

They were both strong-willed. They were both brilliant. And in their own way, they were both fighting "righteous," if ethically challenged, battles against institutions and bad perceptions.

I paused for effect and then closed the cover on The Change-Up, my newly released "true crime" book about the sagas of three murdered boys and the Stone and Jefferson families and how two of those families intersected.

This was my fourth public reading, and I had grown accustomed to both the settings and the questions.

Do I keep in touch with the Stones or Trotters? I do. Bessie and I meet for coffee at least once a month. And I recently met with Tasha to help her fill out early admission applications for college. The Trotters have asked me to be godfather to their son. I haven't given them an answer.

What was the deal with Tasha disappearing initially - was it because she was kidnapped or was she hiding? First, the latter and then former, after two crooked cops who had been looking for her for unrelated reasons realized she might have seen them after the boys were killed in that abandoned candy factory.

So, they forced her into prostitution, then, or she volunteered to do it? Neither. Lucky for her, they ultimately decided she was too sullen to make a good prostitute and would be better as a runner in their heroin venture on the assumption they were able to start a street war and reap the benefits. She was on her second deal for those cops the night that Backstrom, Freeman, and I saw her in the Satin Room. Backstrom correctly guessed the contents of her cup were heroin. And knowing that the heroin trade in Chicago was controlled at the top by four "friendly" rivals, he was able to press them and their former boss Bright Star into helping him figure out which of their soldiers might have been allied with cops. She ran from us that night 'cause she simply didn't know who we were. We could've been killers from a rival crew. Fortunately, Tasha's in counseling, and again, she's doing well. Also, they decided she was a terrible drug dealer too and after her two trial runs, they hid her in that abandoned school to await the next steps. Her "bad" performance as both a prostitute and peddler probably saved her life.