Then I hurried to my car and took off after the ambulance.
“Fuck, I don’t think I can do this,” Ford whispered as he gripped my hand even tighter.
It was a familiar mantra that Ford had been repeating from pretty much the moment I’d handed him the slip of paper with just an address on it a few days after the incident with Jimmy and his mother. He’d looked at it briefly and then handed it back to me. I’d almost taken that as a silent signal that he’d changed his mind about the whole thing until I remembered that those couple of seconds were all he’d needed to memorize the numbers and letters on the paper.
“We can turn around and go home right now if you want,” I offered, though I knew he wouldn’t take me up on it. As scared as he was to do this, we both knew it was the closure he needed.
“Maybe we should just call Walter and Riley again to make sure they’re good.”
“We can do that,” I offered.
Ford looked at me, then the apartment building we were parked in front of. The building wasn’t much to look at. It looked the same as the half-dozen other buildings on the same street. The neighborhood itself was on the outskirts of downtown Minneapolis, but it wasn’t a particularly nice area. There were rusted-out cars parked along the streets and bags of garbage on the sidewalk. A handful of people were walking their kids along the sidewalk or letting them play on the rusty playground equipment between two of the buildings. We’d driven down to the Twin Cities in my personal pickup truck, so fortunately we didn’t stand out like we would have in my police-issued SUV.
Though looking at the rough crowd, maybe that wouldn’t have been a bad thing.
It’d been two weeks since Ford had saved his mother’s life by beating the shit out of Jimmy. Jimmy had ended up with a broken arm and fractured cheekbone, along with dozens of cuts and bruises all over his body. Ford had ended up doing a number on him, but he’d let the asshole live. What he hadn’t done was try to cover for Jimmy in any kind of way. At the hospital he’d told me every time his brother had hit him, stolen money from him, done drugs and more. It’d taken three hours to get his statement down. Then I’d gone to talk separately with Edith, fully expecting the woman to try and downplay what had happened with Jimmy and come up with some outlandish story to protect him. I’d been extremely worried she’d turn on Ford and somehow blame him for everything. But the Edith Sullivan I’d interviewed had been a completely different woman from the one I’d known for so long. She’d clearly been in shock, but hours later after I’d gone to check on her a second time in her hospital room, she’d been staring out the window and this strange calmness had settled over her. I’d gotten a repeat of the same story that Jimmy had been high when he’d stormed into the house and demanded money from her. When she’d refused to give him any, he’d started hitting her. From the injuries he’d inflicted upon her, I had no doubt that if Ford hadn’t shown up at that exact moment, Edith Sullivan wouldn’t have survived Jimmy’s brutality.
I’d had the pleasure of throwing Jimmy’s ass in jail the day after the incident. His high had worn off and he’d been in serious withdrawal. He’d cried like a baby and had begged to see his mom. Shortly after being released from the hospital, Edith had come to see Jimmy. I’d had a front-row seat as Edith had watched her child get on his knees and beg her forgiveness. He’d blamed the whole thing on some bad drugs someone had forced him to take and he’d promised his mother if she got him out, he’d get help. For her part, Edith had barely spoken a word. When she finally had, it’d only been to tell Jimmy that she loved him and she’d pray for God to watch over him. As she’d left, the boy who’d claimed to love her had begun swearing at her and threatening to kill her if she didn’t get him out of there. It had been an ugly scene, but I’d been glad it had happened that way so that Edith hopefully wouldn’t be tempted to post bail for Jimmy or withdraw the assault charges against him.
I’d taken Ford to his mother’s home that night to get his things as planned. While he’d been worried about his mother, it hadn’t been enough to deter him from coming home with me. He hadn’t seen his mother since that day and he hadn’t expressed any interest in contacting her.