Streets of Fire

SEVEN

During the night, police barricades had been set up at the entrance of the underground garage at headquarters, and several uniformed patrolmen now stood determinedly behind them, nightsticks already drawn, and with their eves squinting menacingly as Ben pulled to a halt.

‘Looks like you boys are getting ready for a rough day,’ Ben said as one of the patrolmen approached his car.

‘We’ve been told to expect anything,’ the patrolman replied. ‘Do you have business here?’

Ben took out his identification.

‘Fine, Sergeant,’ the patrolman said instantly. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you.’ He looked over at the line of patrolmen who stood silently behind the barricade. ‘Open up,’ he called loudly. ‘Sergeant Wellman passing through.’

The other patrolmen pulled back one of the long saw-horse barricades and Ben drove past them, nosing his car downward into the garage. On either side, men were lined up in marching formation, their commanders taking them through the paces of a military drill. At the southern corner of the garage, metal tables had been set up like a subterranean field headquarters, complete with telephones, typewriters, and, at the far end of the table, a cardboard box filled with an assortment of what looked like civilian handguns: thirty-eights, forty-fives, a few puny twenty-twos, and snuggled among them like a nest of sleeping vipers, a. 357 Magnum, a P. 38, and a few other high-powered pistols.

Sammy McCorkindale sat behind the box, routinely cataloging the serial numbers of one pistol at a time.

Ben picked up an old German Luger, shifted it slowly from one hand to the other, then threw open the cartridge clip. It was fully loaded. He shoved the clip back into position, then laid it down on the table in front of McCorkindale.

‘What the hell is this all about?’ he asked.

McCorkindale looked up slowly. ‘What does it look like?’

‘It looks like a lot a firepower,’ Ben said. ‘But what are you doing with it?’

McCorkindale returned to his ledger. ‘Chief wants all confiscated weapons to be put in working order,’ he said casually.

‘Why?’

‘Case we need them, I guess,’ McCorkindale said.

‘Need them for what?’

‘To arm the deputies.’

‘What deputies?’

‘The ones the Chief’s going to swear in if we need them.’

‘You mean civilian deputies?’

‘That’s right,’ McCorkindale said idly. He pulled a forty-five automatic from the box and began to write down its serial number.

Ben glanced to the left. A group of civilian office workers was busily unloading wooden crates filled with tear-gas canisters from a police van with Mississippi license plates and a large Confederate flag festooned across its rear double doors.

‘Looks to me like they’re expecting the shit to hit the fan,’ McCorkindale said. He looked up from the ledger and grinned. ‘They’re even going to put my fat ass on the line.’

Ben drew his eyes back over to McCorkindale. ‘How long’s it been since you fired a gun, Sammy?’

‘You mean my service revolver? You mean in the line of duty? I ain’t never fired it, Ben.’

Ben shook his head irritably, then picked up the Magnum. ‘You think these so-called deputies will know how to use a thing like this?’

McCorkindale smiled cagily. ‘Well, I figure if things really get out of hand, they’ll learn pretty quick,’ he said. ‘And I figure that’s what the boys in the front office are thinking, too.’

Ben placed the Magnum back down on the table. ‘They’ll shoot their own toes off, or they’ll shoot each other, or they’ll shoot one of us, Sammy, and that’s what’s going to happen.’ He looked down at the Magnum, then back up at McCorkindale. ‘You just don’t hand somebody a gun like that and then tell them to go on out and make up the rest.’

‘I’m not saying I agree with it,’ McCorkindale said, almost in a whine, ‘but we can’t just let the whole town go up in smoke.’

Ben’s eyes drifted over to the right, past a line of cement columns to where the Chief’s white tank rested near the garage entrance. Black Cat 13 was parked only a few feet away, and next to it, one of the bright red station wagons the Fire Department used to whisk the Chief from one blaze to another across the city.

‘I mean, I’m just an ordinary dogface in the depart meat, Ben,’ McCorkindale continued. ‘They don’t come to me for the big decisions.’

Ben returned his eyes to McCorkindale. He smiled softly. ‘Sometimes I wish they did, Sammy,’ he said quietly. ‘Sometimes I sure do wish they did.’

Upstairs on the first floor, Ben found the lobby crowded with what looked like a completely new contingent of Alabama highway patrolmen. They wore flat-gray uniforms, Sam Browne holsters and the sort of rounded black hats that Gifford, Ben’s former partner, had called ‘Wyatt Earps.’ Ben didn’t recognize any of them, and after a moment he realized that they must have been brought in from the distant rural counties which surrounded Birmingham. They had the look of country boys who were uneasy in the city, and who had spent most of their lives pulling over the occasional teenage speed-demon on some unpaved backwoods road. It was the sort of half-frightened, half-baffled look that he remembered from the war when a batch of reinforcements would suddenly show up, fresh-faced boys who’d been trained for thirty days, then handed an M-1, shipped to the Pacific, spewed out onto a rocky island and told to kick the hell out of a dug-in, battle-hardened army of suicidal Japanese.

For a moment, Ben simply stood to the side and watched them, trying to figure out what use they could possibly be on the streets of Birmingham, or why they had suddenly appeared in such large numbers, unless it was to make the very idea of resistance to them unthinkable.

He was still considering it all when Luther walked up and leaned against the wall beside him.

‘King’s scheduled for a speech at the Sixteenth Baptist Church late this afternoon,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘I want you to be there.’

Ben nodded.

‘And before that, I want you to follow along with the march down Fourth Avenue,’ Luther added. ‘It starts in about an hour, and we’re hoping there won’t be any trouble, but we want all hands on deck anyway.’ He hurriedly handed Ben a white slip of paper. ‘; This tells you where to be and when to be there. Now as far as King’s speech is concerned, I want you to take down everything he says. If he so much as burps, I want it in your notebook, you understand?’

‘Yes, Captain,’ Ben said.

‘And make sure you’re armed, Ben,’ Luther went on breathlessly. ‘In the next few days, we don’t want any of our people hurt. And remember what the Chief said yesterday. Keep control of yourself, but don’t take any shit.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Got that?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Good.’

Ben pointed to the crowd of patrolmen. ‘What are they here for?’

‘Relief,’ Luther said. ‘For the time being, they’ll be taking over some of our more routine duties. Traffic control, that sort of thing.’

‘McCorkindale said something about civilian deputies,’ Ben said.

‘That’s just a contingency,’ Luther told him. ‘In a situation like this, you can’t be caught without a plan.’

‘McCorkindale’s downstairs getting ready to distribute handguns.’

Luther looked at him sternly. ‘You got a problem with that?’

Ben said nothing.

‘This is not a department for little girls,’ Luther added coldly. ‘You feeling like a little girl, Ben?’

‘No.’

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ Luther said. ‘Now you just go on about your business, and leave policy to the people who know how to make it. Do you read me, Sergeant?’

‘Yes, Captain.’

‘Good,’ Luther said. ‘Now get on with your assignments.’

Ben walked back to the detective bullpen immediately. At his desk, he found a note from Leon Patterson telling him that he planned to have the girl buried in Gracehill Cemetery at around six in the evening. For a moment he tried to think if there was any reason to delay the burial, decided that there was none, crumpled the note in his fist and tossed it into the wastebasket beside his desk.

‘Giving up on something, Ben?’ Breedlove asked as he sat down at his own desk only a few feet from Ben.

‘They’re going to be burying that little girl this afternoon,’ Ben said.

‘You got something on that case?’

Ben shook his head. ‘Nothing much. A few things that seem a little funny.’

Breedlove leaned toward him slightly. ‘Like what?’

‘Well, Patterson found a ring in her pocket, but it didn’t fit her. There was blood on her skirt, but none on her collar. She wasn’t wearing any panties.’

Breedlove laughed. ‘These Bearmatch girls, they don’t always wear panties.’

Ben’s eyes shot over to him. ‘She was about twelve years old, Charlie,’ he said.

‘So what?’

Ben turned away and idly glanced at the slip of paper Luther had handed him.

‘How about the Langleys,’ Breedlove said. ‘Did you talk to them?’

Ben continued to stare at the paper. ‘Yeah.’

‘They know anything about it?’

Ben shook his head.

‘Then I guess you better just fold it up and drop it in the shitter,’ Breedlove said, ‘because if the Black Cat boys don’t know, nobody knows.’ He stood up. ‘Well, I got to go pick up Harry. We’re going to have a little talk with that Coggins kid.’

‘Who?’

‘The little shit that’s organizing the school kids for the march today,’ Breedlove said. He pulled out his service revolver, threw open the chamber and checked that it was fully loaded. ‘You want to come along?’

‘No.’

‘Could be fun,’ Breedlove said with a narrow, mocking smile.

Ben shook his head. ‘I’m just supposed to follow along with the line of march,’ he said.

Breedlove shrugged. ‘Hell, Ben, these days that amounts to a goddamn desk job.’ He slipped the pistol back into his holster. ‘Sure you don’t want to come along with me and Harry?’

‘Not today,’ Ben said.

Breedlove shrugged. ‘Suit yourself,’ he said, ‘but hell, anything’s better than sitting around here.’

Ben leaned back in his chair and watched as Breedlove quickly checked inside the cartridge pouch that hung at his side, then walked briskly out of the bullpen.

With Breedlove gone, Ben was now entirely alone in the large, desk-littered room. All the other detectives had already gone to take up their positions. By now, as Ben knew, many of them were laboriously mounting the stairs to the roofs of the squat brick buildings that fronted Fourth Avenue, while others were hunkering down behind the windows just below, their telescopic rifles cradled in their sweating arms. Still others were simply standing on the corners in their rumpled brown suits, staring nervously left and right, searching for that one face that did not go with all the others, the wilder, meaner, more desperate face of one who was armed as they were armed, and just as willing to meet them on the common ground of sudden and annihilating violence. For a moment he saw them as the comrades they still were, men with bills to pay, children to feed, men in cheap Robert Hall suits, who smoked five-cent cigars and drank their iced tea out of old jelly jars, men in the midst of engulfing circumstances who suddenly seemed almost as fully helpless as the dead.