Sweet St. Louis

  Sharron thought about all of that herself. “Sounds like couples have lots of decisions to make before they just up and do things, hunh?”

  “I guess so. But we just up and have sex though,” he added with a chuckle.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t even do this then,” she suggested, releasing him under the sheets.

  Anthony laughed, wanting to smack himself in the mouth for being a smart-ass. “Maybe I shouldn’t have said that,” he said.

  “But it’s the truth, though. And it don’t make any sense. It don’t”

  “Now you know why men don’t like to talk much about this kind of thing. So now I guess we won’t have sex tonight,” he stated.

  “Oh yes we will,” Sharron responded to his surprise. “Unless, you don’t want to.”

  “You know that won’t be the case,” he told her.

  Sharron asked, “Would you say that we were close to bonding as a couple yet? Because a lot of couples can’t seem to do that nowadays. And to be honest with you, it doesn’t seem like time matters anymore.”

  Anthony smiled, thinking of his partner Tone.

  “Before we came down here to Memphis, I was kind of unsure about us, you know, how long it would last and stuff. But Tone kept saying from the first time we hooked up at the skating rink that you had my nose open. And at first I was denying it. But the more we hung out with each other, and you kept getting closer to me, it got to the point where I couldn’t …

  “Well, let’s just say that, yeah, I feel that we are bonding,” he answered, cutting himself off from rambling.

  “Mmm-hmm,” Sharron grumbled at him with a grin. “My father told me what you said, too.”

  “What I said about what?”

  “About retiring,” she told him, eye to eye.

  Anthony was shocked. “Your father told you I said that?”

  “You thought that he wouldn’t? He actually sounded proud of you when he said it.”

  “He did?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I guess I wasn’t even thinking about him telling you. You know, with all that manhood stuff he was telling me.”

  “Yeah, but i’m still his little girl. Don’t forget that.”

  “Oh, now I won’t. Believe me,” he responded, grinning.

  Sharron turned off the television with the remote control and slid her right hand under his T-shirt. “I want your undivided attention again, Mr. Retired,” she teased him.

  “I’m not retired with you,” he told her.

  She leaned over and kissed him in the dark. “Good. I don’t want you to be.” He undid her bra and slid off the rest of their clothes under the sheets.

  “Don’t forget the condoms,” she reminded him.

  Anthony chuckled to himself and scrambled for his wallet. And the love they shared got stronger every time, with mind over body, bonding two human souls.

  And bonds are even tested by the unpredictability of nature. But real bonds are strong enough to make it through turbulence. And if not, then how strong was that bond to begin with, if you even had one?

  Less than a week after returning home to St. Louis from visiting Memphis with Sharron, Ant cruised familiar territory on Kingshighway Boulevard on a late Thursday night, singing along with his radio:

  Sweet lay-dee

  would you bee myy

  sweet love for

  ah life-time …

  Oblivious to the activity on the street, while singing to Tyrese’s ballad “Sweet Lady,” Ant didn’t notice his partner Tone scrambling to his car at the red light.

  Tone hollered through the window, “Open the door up, man!”

  Ant then noticed two guys running behind him, two roughnecks from Tone’s mother’s neighborhood. Before Ant had a chance to question what was going on, they had all jumped into his car.

  “What the hell is this?!” he asked them.

  “Drive us the hell out of here, man!” Tone snapped at him.

  Ant hesitated.

  “Drive the fucking car!” one of Tone’s friends hollered from the back seat. A black pistol appeared in his hand, and Ant drove off on instincts, right before he heard the police sirens.

  “What did y’all do, man?” he asked his partner.

  Tone was silent.

  “Just keep driving!” his roughneck friend shouted again from the back. He made sure he kept the gun aimed at Ant’s head, too. Ant continued to drive, praying that the police sirens were not after them, and praying as well that he would live to see another day.

  “This shit reminds me of Cooley High” the third passenger said from the back seat. He was the comedian of the bunch.

  They actually laughed at it, in the heat of a police chase. However, Ant had nothing to laugh about. It wasn’t funny to him. None of it!

  Tone felt guilty and stopped the silliness as the police made chase. It was poor bad luck for Ant. He was at the wrong place at the wrong time for the wrong friend. So if they made it away from the cops, Tone planned to apologize to him profusely.

  I can’t believe this fuckin’ shit! Ant thought to himself. I’m gonna kill this nigga! He finally went and did it, didn’t he? And he dragged me into this crazy shit with him! Just my damn luck! Right when everything was looking beautiful.

  Up ahead, a third police cruiser headed straight for them with two behind.

  “Make a right!” the gun holder yelled at Ant.

  Ant made the right turn much slower than the gun holder wanted.

  “Can you drive or what?!” he snapped.

  Ant would have rather been stopped. He didn’t want to be shot at as some kind of fugitive. And there was no way in the world that he would smash up his car.

  “This car is his pride and joy, man,” Tone responded to his friend in the back seat.

  “Man, fuck this car! I could see if it was a Mercedes,” the gun holder countered. “This is just a fixed-up bomb. He can get another one. Get us the hell out of here!”

  However, the right turn put them behind a slow-moving truck.

  “Shit! Go around ’em!”

  Ant had enough of that guy already, but what could he do about it? He tried to drive around the truck and nearly wrecked his car with the oncoming traffic.

  BURRNNMP!

  Horns blew and tires skidded as Ant saved his car and maneuvered away from an accident and the police in one big yank of the wheel.

  “Shit! His ass can drive!” the comedian celebrated. He was enjoying the ride as if they were at Six Flags amusement park. Maybe the kid was on drugs.

  By the time they traveled up the street and whipped around two corners, Ant came up with a quick suggestion.

  “If y’all jump out right here, I can keep driving, and they’ll just chase after me.”

  Tone looked at his partner and said, “That’s a good plan.” And it was. A good plan to get his friend out of Dodge, and an opportunity for them to escape as well.

  “For what? So he can stop the car as soon as the police catch up to him? They know how many of us it is,” the gun holder contested.

  Tone argued, “Look, man, if he drives for another two miles with them after him, we in the wind before they know what happened.” He even initiated the jump by opening the passenger-side door, sending Ant’s heart rate skyrocketing.

  Don’t fuck up my damn door! he snapped to himself.

  “Let’s do it, man!” the comedian agreed from the back. And with one last hesitation, the gun holder followed their lead and hopped out of the car behind them. Ant took off up the street and made another right turn, just as the police rounded the corner.

  “Now how long do I drive before I give this shit up?” he immediately asked himself. He was relieved that he no longer had a gun to his head and fugitives in his car. He still, however, had police cruisers on his tail: three behind him, and no telling how many on the way for backup.

  He thought about his loyalty to Tone, but shook it off. “Fuck that! I’m not going to jail for his ass!”

  H
e made it to Hampton Avenue, a big enough street to be seen by onlookers, and pulled over. Inside the car, he immediately raised his hands to the roof and kept them there as four St. Louis police cruisers surrounded his car.

  “Step slowly out of the car,” they told him with guns pulled from every angle. Three more cruisers arrived as they shot high beams and flashlights into Ant’s Chevy for better vision.

  “Where are your friends?”

  “I didn’t know those guys,” Ant told them, stepping away from the car with his hands still up.

  “Shit! They jumped!”

  Three of the cruisers took off into the street with their sirens blaring. The remaining officers slapped cold, steel handcuffs on Ant’s wrists and forcefully brought him to the ground.

  “Where did they jump out?” he was asked.

  “About four blocks from here. I would have turned myself in then, but I didn’t want y’all to shoot me,” Ant explained.

  “Shoot you for what? You’re innocent, right? Stand up,” they told them. Some of them were white and some of them were black. But what difference did it make when they had no reason to believe your story?

  “You guys had it all planned out, hunh?”

  Ant said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. They pulled a gun on me at the red light and told me to drive. That’s all I know.”

  “No one asked you if you knew anything.”

  Shit! Ant thought. Just stay calm.

  “It sounds like he knows something to me,” another officer commented. They searched his car and came up with nothing.

  “Let me get this right. They just picked you out at a red light to be the getaway driver? Is that it? Out of a possible ten cars that were at that same intersection?”

  “That’s what happened,” Ant told them straight-faced.

  The remaining officers were radioed by the others.

  “They got ’em?” the officers reported.

  “Well, let’s take this one down to join them, and see if he’s telling us the truth.” They grabbed Ant by the arm and led him to a squad car.

  Fuck! he panicked. How are they gonna act? My story is still true though. Most of it. I guess it depends on Tone. Damn! I gotta give his ass a clue or something.

  “I guess if you don’t know these guys, we can set you free,” the officer teased on the way to the southside precinct. “Then again, you drove a little too well there to be a random carjack.”

  “I didn’t want to wreck my car,” Ant commented truthfully.

  “Is that your car?”

  “I got my registration and insurance on it. I’ve had it for four years now.”

  “Is that right?”

  Ant’s heart was pounding out of his chest! The handcuffs were the worse feeling in the world, pressing into the flesh of his wrists, while bending his arms uncomfortably backwards against the back seat of the cruiser. Handcuffs were not made to be a pleasant experience.

  I don’t believe this shit! he continued to tell himself. If I get out of this shit here, I will never deal with Tone’s ass again. And I mean that shit!

  “I guess you’re the next unlucky guy tonight, aren’t ya?” the officer continued to tease him. ’You got caught. That’s always unlucky.”

  They pulled up to the southside precinct, which definitely had more white officers than the other precincts in St. Louis. The fact that it was so close to Ant’s job at Paul’s Fix It Shop didn’t help his nerves much either.

  “Well, let’s go in here and see if they know you,” the officer joked again.

  Ant’s heart could not beat any faster! You wouldn’t know it from the outside. He was too busy thinking about his choice of words in the ensuing interrogation.

  All three fugitives were handcuffed and sitting in chairs with their backs up against the wall when Ant walked in on them.

  “Hey, guys. Say hi to your friend,” the officer addressed them.

  Ant looked only at the gun holder, who scowled at him and remained speechless.

  “You got nothing at all to say to your friend?” the officer instigated. The other officers watched and listened, planning to interrogate them separately.

  “I told you, I don’t know anything,” Ant repeated.

  “You also told us that you don’t know them?”

  The officers watched and waited for everything to unravel. Ant felt more confident about his story by the minute. They were playing right into his hands.

  He said, “And I told you I had no choice,” and looked away.

  The gun holder caught on and said, “Why you lying on us, Ant. You know us, man. It was your idea, to have us jump out the car and separate.”

  “Yeah, man,” the comedian added. “That was your idea, Ant.”

  Shit! They know my name.

  “So, which one had the gun to your head, Ant? Or did they all have a gun?” the officers asked him. “We didn’t find any guns.”

  He must have tossed it when they ran, Ant thought.

  “I want a lawyer,” he said, mimicking a thousand television shows.

  “Of course you do,” they told him. They began the interrogation process with the gun holder. “Let’s see who gets the lawyer first.”

  They took him into a separate small room where he was joined by a detective. Ironically, the detective was a black man in his midthirties. What a surprise! He was damn good at what he did, too.

  “Do you have something to tell me?” he asked, cool, calm, and collected.

  “It was all his idea, man. We hop out of the car, and he keeps driving to give us time to get away. We know Ant. He lives around the way. He’s Tone’s boy.”

  Guilty, the detective thought. He’s just trying to take everybody down with him.

  Next he brought in Tone.

  “Do you have something to tell me?”

  Tone shook his head.

  “You have nothing at all to tell me, Tone?” the detective asked him again.

  Tone just stared at him.

  Okay, I have something to work with here, the detective pondered.

  “Do you know Ant?” he asked.

  “Who’s that?” Tone said.

  Okay, we have some loyalty here. “Your getaway driver.”

  Tone shook his head again. “Like he said, he had a gun to his head.”

  “Your friend Bryant said that Ant was your boy.”

  “My friend Bryant was the one who held the gun on him.”

  Hmmm. Interesting. “So where is the gun now?”

  “He threw it in the street.”

  “And what about the house that you robbed? Was Ant in on that?”

  Tone frowned and asked, “What house?” How much did Bryant tell him? he pondered.

  “What were you running from?” the detective asked.

  Tone was stuck.

  In his silence, the officer added, “By the way, we found the truck you had.”

  “What truck?”

  Guilty.

  Then he brought in the comedian, who was considerably younger than the other guys.

  “How old are you?” the detective asked him.

  “Nineteen.”

  The brother had pity in his eyes. Poor kid. Another one bites the dust.

  “You have something you want to tell me?” he asked him.

  “I don’t think so. You have something you want to tell me?”

  The detective shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe. Maybe not. But I will tell you this. You’re looking at doing anywhere from seven to twenty years of your life for burglary, resisting arrest, carjacking, and assault with a firearm,” he ran down to him.

  “Assault with a firearm?” the younger fugitive questioned. He was turning twenty in October. Unfortunately, he had picked the wrong company to brainstorm with.

  “Ant said that one of you held a gun to his head.”

  The kid was speechless, but his nervous energy told everything.

  “I didn’t have no gun, man,” he coughed up.

  “Wha
t about the burglary?”

  He paused. “It wasn’t my idea. I was just there, man.”

  Shit! the detective thought to himself. I pity this fool. He won’t last two weeks in prison. Maybe I can try and get his charges dropped down and a sentence of a year or two.

  He saved Ant for last.

  “You have something you want to tell me?”

  Ant had his story all together. “I was driving home from my girl’s house. I had my windows down, blasting music on Kingshighway. I stopped at a red light. These three guys run up to my car and one points a gun at me, talking about ‘Open the fuckin’ door!’ So I panic and let them in. And the guy with the gun gets in the back, and points it right at my head, telling me to drive.

  “So I start driving and I hear police cars behind us. Then another police car ends up in front of us, coming from the opposite direction. So he tells me to make a right turn.

  “I make a right turn, and a truck is in front of us. He tells me to go around the truck. As soon as I do that, I almost crash my car in traffic, but I made it around anyway, and that’s when we separated from the police cars.

  “So at that point, I tell them that if they jump out of my car, I’ll keep driving and lead the police away from them, so they could get away. And when they agreed to do that and jumped out, I drove to Hampton Avenue because I didn’t want no Rodney King shit to happen to me on a small street with no witnesses. Then I stopped the car on Hampton, put my hands up, and let the police catch up to me, so I could tell them what happened.”

  He looked the detective right in his eyes and said, “And that’s what happened.”

  The detective nodded. That’s a good one, he mused with a grin. But how much of it is true? I guess we’ll have to find out. That’s why I love my job. The intrigue keeps me motivated.

  “That’s what happened?” he asked, deadpan.

  “That’s what happened,” Ant repeated.

  “So which guy had the gun?”

  Ant said, “Sometimes, the guy who talks the most tough talk had the gun. So when you find it, you match up the fingerprints. But I think you already know who had the gun. You talked to everybody before me, right? Who do you think had it?”

  The detective nodded. He’s smart, too, he thought. Do I mix him up with these other guys? … Probably not. But just to make sure …