Nickel City Crossfire by Gary Ross (popular romance novels .txt) 📗

Dante was supposed to secure. I heard gasps, voices, utterances of gratitude for God’s mercy and goodness. We moved slowly, as I had said we must. To observers it looked as if Keisha had difficulty walking, forcing us to go at her pace. This gave Oscar and me a chance to assess our surroundings, to see what might unfold. As I expected, we commanded so much attention that people rose and came to us, surrounding us and obscuring Keisha as a target.

When we reached the front, Dr. Markham came down the chancery’s two steps and embraced Keisha as if she were his own daughter. Tears squeezed out of his closed eyes and for a moment I felt sorry about what he would soon learn about his wife. Then he shooed the bustling, chattering congregants back to their seats, saying, “We’re gonna let this child tell her story!” and “Hush now!” and “God’s given us this chance, so we must listen!” He put his hand in the small of Keisha’s back, to steer her up to the lectern, but she twisted away from him with a fluid motion that nearly upset his balance, pulled the pistol from her shoulder bag, and pointed it right between Loni Markham’s eyes.

This time the collective gasp and subsequent babbling were so loud I was sure no one heard Keisha say, “Up!” But everyone saw the gun. Everyone saw Loni stand and watched as Keisha twisted her arm in a hammerlock and forced her up the chancery steps—keeping Loni between herself and the door I expected Dante to use, as I had instructed. In the silence that followed, all anyone heard was Dr. Markham say, “Keisha?”

Now Jen was by the closed right side door, hand in her coat, waiting. Oscar moved to the opposite door, his hand holding the closed pocket baton he sometimes used to discourage abusive husbands from trying to see their wives sheltered at Hope’s Haven. I stayed near Keisha but gave her enough room to position Loni up at the lectern.

“Keisha,” Dr. Markham said again. “Child, what has come over you?” He clearly wanted to take a step toward her but dared not move. “What have they done to you?” He looked at me with an uncertainty that was trying to become anger but kept dissolving into fear. “Mr. Rimes, what is this—”

“Must be drugs!” Loni shouted. “She’s on drugs again! Somebody help me!”

“Liar!” Keisha screamed, pushing the gun barrel into the side of Loni’s head, hard.

The door near Jen began to open but stopped partway. She pulled her gun and flashed her badge to the handful of people looking at her. Several crouched down in their pews.

“You’re going to tell them everything,” Keisha said, “or you’re going to die.”

“Keisha, please,” Dr. Markham begged. He looked at Jen and then at me with my hand still inside my jacket. “Please put down your guns. All of you. This is the house of God.”

“If God’s given us this chance to listen, Dr. Markham,” I said, “I think we should.”

The door near Jen eased shut.

Exerting pressure on Loni’s right arm and putting the PPQ against her ribs, Keisha nudged her sideways just enough to put herself behind the lectern’s microphone.

“All of you know me,” she said. “A lot of you have known me since I was a baby. A few weeks ago some of you comforted my folks when I was in the hospital for an overdose. You said you couldn’t believe I was doing drugs. The truth is, I wasn’t. My boyfriend—” Her voice faltered as tears began. “My fiancé Odell and I were cut off by two men and forced to inject heroin at gunpoint.” She paused and took a deep breath. “The person behind it all was a woman I trusted, a woman I looked up to and loved, a woman who was nothing but a she-wolf in clergy clothing. Now Loni Markham is going to tell you why she’s been trying to kill me since I got out of the hospital.” Amid the congregation’s gasps and utterances of denial, Keisha sidestepped enough to jerk Loni to the microphone. “Tell them.”

Loni’s gulp sounded over the public address system. “This is all a misunderstanding.”

“Tell them, you bitch!” Keisha said. “Tell them about the drugs and the money laundering and your brother.”

“Brother?” Dr. Markham’s surprise was underscored by the murmurs that rippled through the crowd. “We’ve been together over twenty years. You said you were an only child.”

“Tell them!” Keisha screamed. “You think I won’t shoot? Remember, I still love the man I saw die.” She released Loni’s arm and stepped back, keeping the gun leveled at her.

I looked at Jen and then at Oscar. So far, no additional movement from either door. Where the hell was Dante? Had he retreated because he couldn’t see the situation? Had he gone through the basement to the front of the building and found QC? Were they starting his Navigator even now?

As the congregation listened in stunned silence and her husband sank onto the piano bench in horror, Loni confirmed the basic details of her foundation’s entanglement with FBF Development, a company headed by a brother she had left behind in Detroit years ago, along with the rest of her dysfunctional family. He had found her some years back, she said, and blackmailed her into cooperating with him. She spun the story with a sincerity that made her an unwitting pawn in a Faustian bargain to increase the wealth and good works of Sermon on the Mount and its foundation. Even as she spoke, however, I saw doubt, disappointment, and anger on enough faces to know she had lost the congregation. Loni too must have seen that any sympathy she hoped to rouse evaporated with each sentence. After saying the decision to kill Keisha had been her brother’s, she stopped speaking and dropped her mask.

If this were Salem in 1692, I thought, she’d already be on her way to Gallows Hill.

Seething, Loni turned to Keisha. “There.