Staking out a suspected transfer point for reefer and shine was beyond their typical duties. They would need to bend the truth with McInnis, make like they’d simply stumbled into the delivery. Had they done things by the book, they immediately would have reported what their informant told them, then they would have gone about their typical nightly duties, hoping the Department would send some vice detectives to stake out the area. But they knew that wouldn’t happen. No white officers would have felt the need to stake out a drop in what they still referred to as “Darktown.”
Boggs and Smith had known for a while that, if they wanted to stop the flow of drugs and moonshine into their community, they would have to do it themselves. Yet they were denied many of the powers white cops took for granted. They still could not drive squad cars or patrol outside of the Negro neighborhoods that constituted their beat. Even so, that geographic restriction left them with more than enough turf to patrol, and then some: more than a third of Atlantans were Negro, yet they were crowded into only a fifth of the land.
And only ten Negro officers patrolled those thousands of souls.
They still could not wear their uniforms to or from work, and therefore had to change in the basement of the Butler Street Y, their extremely insufficient, mildewed, rodent-infested home base. They still heard the white cops refer to other Negroes as “niggers.” They still felt that their hold on their jobs was very tenuous indeed. They lived with the fear the other shoe would drop, that one of the Negro officers would make some horrible mistake, or more likely some horrible mistake would be invented by the white cops and pinned on them, and then Mayor Hartsfield or his successor would have the necessary ammunition to end this odd experiment, at which point Boggs and his fellows would be back to their old jobs, as insurance salesmen and elementary school teachers, butchers and janitors.
Boggs heard the sound of a heavy truck approaching.
He peered over the fender of the telephone factory truck he was hiding behind and saw a green canvas-topped six-wheeler pull into the lot. It looked like an old military vehicle that had been sold at auction after the war. The passenger door read Cherokee Flooring and listed an address in Dalton, ninety miles north. The door opened and out jumped a stocky Negro, tweed newsboy cap pulled low. The engine still running.
“Let’s go, let’s go,” someone said. Boggs heard what he thought were two sets of feet, then more, coming from various directions. The rev of an engine and now another vehicle was pulling into the lot. He crept forward until he was leaning just past the front edge of the Phelps truck. In addition to the passenger he’d spotted, two other men, both Negroes, were standing at the back of the flooring truck. The second new vehicle was a green Dodge pickup, idling at the back of the flooring truck. Two other men, both white, joined them, everyone hurriedly unloading crates from the flooring truck into the Dodge.
Two white men. Still, Boggs had expected this. Most moonshine was made far outside city limits, in the North Georgia mountains or across state lines in the Carolinas and Tennessee. They’d been hearing rumors that moonshiners were planting marijuana as well, to make up for the fact that shine didn’t bring them what it once did. Pretty much all of those mountain folk were white, driving down from their Smoky Mountain hollers.
Atlanta’s Negro officers were not allowed to arrest white people. They were barely even supposed to interact with white people. But Boggs and Smith were tiring of their powerlessness.
Boggs crept until he was nearly at the back of the truck, loosening the billy club from his belt. He heard what sounded like the clinking of full glass containers. He heard someone say “let’s go” again and could hear crates landing heavily.
Just as a man was emerging from the truck, Boggs stepped behind its rear and swung his club into the back of his skull. The man dropped.
Boggs found himself staring into the eyes of the next part of the assembly line, a white man in a black derby hat and wrinkled gray jacket, struggling under the weight of two stacked crates, his eyes wide at the sight of a Negro in a policeman’s uniform.
“Police! Put that down and put your hands up!”
After a frozen second, the man tipped the crates forward. Boggs leaped back as glass exploded all around him, heavy jars landing on his feet, shards and alcohol everywhere.
“Police! Everyone down!” Smith yelled, emerging from his hiding spot on the other end of the lot.
Boggs saw a dirty, clay-caked boot stepping out of the rear of the flooring truck, and then the rest of the body appeared, but what Boggs’s eyes fixed upon was the shotgun and he pretty much didn’t see the rest.
He dove down to his right, back to where he’d been hiding before. A deafening boom. Chunks of brick and mortar showered down on him and sprayed across the lot.
The shotgun exploded again. Then three smaller-caliber shots, hopefully Smith’s gun.
For only the second time in the line of duty, Boggs drew his sidearm, thumbing back the hammer. Back on his feet, he ran to the front of the truck, stepping around it quickly, his gun held in firing position with both hands, his feet square beneath him, trying to adopt the practiced pose as perfectly as he could in such imperfect conditions.
He didn’t see anyone at whom to point the gun. He could see his partner sprinting toward him, running with his gun pointed as well, and then the scene before him seemed to break apart. The Dodge and the flooring truck both pulled out of the lot. Their engines sounded like they were being taxed to their limits, wheels skidding in the pool of moonshine and then gaining traction, squealing as they raced away.
Another boom as someone fired the shotgun from the rear of the truck. Boggs ducked, heard glass breaking, wood splitting.
He called out to see if his partner was all right but the only reply he received was the sound of Smith’s shoes tapping a sprint as he raced down the street. The two trucks were headed in opposite directions. Smith was chasing the Dodge, so Boggs ran into the street behind the flooring truck, which was already forty yards away and fast disappearing. He glanced at its tags but it was too dark.
He imagined himself firing at the truck. He could see it like in one of the gangster pictures, Cagney firing and hitting one of the back wheels, the tire popping or maybe the wheel springing loose from its axle. Then the entire truck would lean hard to the left, and the driver would panic, try to right it, but that wouldn’t be possible at such a speed, and the entire vehicle would topple over as if in slow motion. Then the explosion, or at the very least a vast crumpling upon itself. The driver would be killed and Boggs would lose his badge for recklessly firing at a fleeing vehicle, would perhaps be indicted for manslaughter, and the city of Atlanta would have one less Negro officer. Which would be a great excuse for letting the other nine go as well.
He holstered his unfired gun as the truck disappeared from view.
He sprinted a block to the nearest call box. Panting, he had to repeat himself for Dispatch, describing the vehicles and explaining the directions in which they were headed. Late on a weeknight, the roads clear, catching one or the other should have been possible, even likely, but he knew this would go nowhere. He could expect no hot pursuit or roadblocks and certainly no arrests. The moonshiners might as well be in the mountains already.
As Boggs called it in, Smith returned from his futile chase, surveying the lot. Smashed bottles, a black Ford that had been parked there riddled with bullets, its windshield shattered, gun smoke lingering in the dry air. Lying in the center of the lot was the white man Boggs had knocked out. He was breathing and his pulse was strong, but Smith could already predict McInnis’s reaction. He cuffed the man’s pale wrists.
Then he saw the other body.
It was lying three feet from the phone truck Boggs had been hiding behind. A Negro, though Smith could only base this on his hands and jaw, as most of the skin atop his head had been blown off, at least on the side that was pointing up. He’d fallen mostly on his back, slightly on his left side. He wore work boots, jeans, and a
tan flannel shirt flecked with dark red.
“You shot him?” Boggs asked, returning out of breath from the call box.
“No. Did you?”
“I didn’t fire a round. You sure you didn’t hit him?”
“I was over there.” Smith pointed to their right. “I fired three shots, up this way. This fella was shot from where you and I are standing now, facing that wall. Unless . . .”
Smith turned around and crossed the street, Boggs following. He walked into the tunnel that cut beneath the train tracks, shined his flashlight. He saw a small puddle of what smelled like fresh tobacco juice. Then he turned around again and faced the factory, imagining a rifle in his hands, squinting to take aim.
“Thought I heard a rifle,” he said. “They had a lookout here. When we popped up, he started firing at us. Must’ve hit his own man.” He looked at Boggs. “That’s some kind of luck, for the dead man and for us.”
Minutes later, the adrenaline rush was making Boggs feel like his feet weren’t quite touching the ground. He kept seeing the shotgun pointed at him. Since swearing his oath, he had been punched, kicked, hit, bit, sliced, driven into, and even kidnapped, but this was the first time a weapon had been fired at him.
Sitting on the ground and conscious again, hands cuffed behind him, was the man Boggs had bludgeoned. The fact that Boggs had knocked out a white man was altogether too much to comprehend right then.
Officers Dewey Edmunds and Champ Jennings, who had heard the shots from six blocks away, were the first to arrive. They took in the scene. Shards of glass and chunks of the brick wall lay scattered across the lot. Moonshine had mixed with mortar dust to form a viscous alcoholic sludge.
Smith explained what they’d just missed.
“Good fucking Lord, boys!” Dewey holstered his weapon and started laughing. “Should we all just hand in our badges now, or wait ’til the sergeant gets here to make it official?”
“We’ll be all right,” Boggs insisted, his ears still ringing.
Dewey and Champ made for an odd if affable pair. Champ, the biggest of the Negro officers, eschewed a billy club in favor of the handle of what had been his lucky ax. Raised in a small Negro community in South Georgia, he tended to see the good in people. Dewey, the shortest officer in the city but an indomitable former boxer, believed that anything a civilian said was most likely a lie.
Dewey whistled and shook his head at all the exploded glass. “I’m getting drunk just smelling this shit. Don’t nobody light no cigarettes ’round here, got it?”
Champ had actually been reaching for one, and he tried to surreptitiously slide it back into his pocket. He hoped they hadn’t noticed.
Dewey shook his head at four abandoned crates, two that had been left on the ground and two that had apparently fallen out of one of the fleeing trucks. “No wonder my phone bill’s so expensive,” he said. “They be charging me to cover their costs on running this shit.”
“You think the phone company’s really running shine, or the runners just use this spot?” Champ asked. His family hadn’t moved to Atlanta until he was twelve, and he spoke with a thick country accent that endeared him to the few people who weren’t terrified by his size.
“I don’t know. Call an operator and see if she sounds drunk.”
“Nah, white lady operators don’t touch this stuff.”
“Boy, what are you talking about? You think white ladies don’t drink? You think their shit don’t smell?”
Champ folded his arms. “What I mean is, all this here is for Negroes and you know it.”
“Damn right,” Smith said.
“Your turn,” Sergeant McInnis said to Boggs, after speaking to Smith for a few moments on the other end of the lot. Boggs didn’t care for the approach, dividing them to hear their separate answers and see if they were congruent. That was how they spoke to subjects.
The words kind or friendly did not spring to mind when thinking of their white sergeant. McInnis had seemed extremely uncomfortable in their presence back when they started, and they’d wondered how long it would be until he quit, outraged at having been appointed the colored officers’ keeper. Yet McInnis had won Boggs’s respect over the last two years. He had stuck up for his Negro charges during a few disputes with white officers, and he seemed to be taking to his role and the outsider status it lent him within the Department. Perhaps he’d simply learned to accept an untenable situation, because by now it was clear his superiors would not be transferring him elsewhere, and he was stuck as the lone white cop at the Butler Street precinct.
“You fired no shots?”
“No, sir.”
“Give me your sidearm.”
Boggs obeyed. McInnis checked the chamber, smelled the barrel, felt its coolness. The lack of trust stung. McInnis handed his weapon back.
“Where did you catch the dealer?”
“Jackson Street, behind that old holiness church.”
“Which means you passed two call boxes on the way here.” McInnis had very dark hair and equally dark, thin eyebrows. He was squinting despite the fact that it was hardly bright out, as if he had a migraine.
“I’m sorry, sir. We were rushing, to get here in time.”
“You nearly rushed into your grave. Arresting a dealer in an alley is one thing, but you show up at a drop and you can expect to be outgunned. I’m not surprised Smith came out guns blazing, but I thought you were smarter.”
“Yes—”
“Vice will be here in five minutes and for all I know we just scotched a sting they’ve been working on. Hell, the man you knocked out could be an informant. And the dead man—Smith, you’d best hope he was shot with a different-caliber weapon than you’re carrying.”
“Sergeant,” Smith said, “there is no way I shot that man.”
“Maybe I believe you, but how do you think the cops in Homicide are going to feel?” He switched his gaze between them. “Not only did Smith kill a man, but Boggs knocked out a white man.”
From there McInnis found plenty of other issues to vent about, everything from Smith now needing to fill out a Weapon Discharge Report to dealing with the imminent arrival of an Atlanta Daily Times reporter; the city’s only Negro daily was always hungry for examples of its colored heroes in action. His voice rising, he ended with, “Not to mention the fact that we’re in a white goddamn neighborhood.”
Yes and no, Boggs thought. The factory was a few blocks beyond their official beat, but the color line was blurring here; postwar crowding was pushing Negroes into areas formerly considered whites-only. Boggs and the others weren’t given new maps to reflect changing demographics; they’d merely been given cryptic advice from McInnis about “staying in your area.”
Boggs glanced at the arrested white man, whose head hung low, as if asleep. Would the white cops confront Boggs for having hit a white man, even one who was committing a crime? It was absurd to think it, which probably meant it was so.
“Are they going to question Mr. Phelps?” Smith asked. Champ and Dewey stood by the abandoned crates, inventorying the jars of moonshine and bales of dried marijuana buried beneath larger bales of pine straw.
“Who?” McInnis asked.
Boggs motioned to the sign ten feet away from them, “Phelps Telephone, Connecting You To The Future!”
“The owner,” Boggs said. “Maybe he knows something about it.”
“No, I do not think the detectives are going to accuse one of the richest men in Atlanta of selling moonshine and marijuana. Though I do expect they’ll let him know his wall got shot up and his lot’s been turned into a crime scene.”
“Rich folks don’t break laws?” Smith asked.
McInnis folded his arms. “I’m not saying it would shock me if a fellow like that was in on it. But he wouldn’t be stupid enough to use his legitimate business as the staging area. And the larger point is, it’s not ours to worry about.”
Smith had read the tags of the fleeing Dodge, but odds were it was a stolen car, or at least s
tolen tags. He motioned to the man they’d arrested. “Can we question him now?”
“No. You cannot. Detectives will do that.”
Smith opened his mouth to say something, then closed it. Then opened it again. “Sergeant, just a few questions. Please. He’s right there.”
“As you very well know, that is not your job, Officer Smith.” He pointed at the two squad cars pulling up, lights flashing and sirens blaring, white cops inside. “It’s theirs.”
2
THE FIRST TIME Denny Rakestraw had seen Terminal Station, he’d thought it was a castle.
His German-born mother had been fond of reading him folktales and adventures of warring dukes and counts, Visigoths and Romans. Perhaps his predilection for violence had started with his first wooden knight’s sword, with which he had accidentally broken his mother’s favorite rocking chair, whose right arm had not been able to withstand one of his mighty swings. He’d been four or five, yet his parents had held on to that one-armed rocking chair for years, as if to commemorate their son’s destructive ways.
He still recalled his first trip to the train station, tagging along with his parents to pick up some visiting aunt or uncle or great-someone. Definitely castlelike, with its two turretlike spires surveying the city from some seven flights up, its wide expanse covering a full city block, and the black smoke emanating behind it as if witches’ cauldrons were boiling or perhaps peasants were burning their belongings to hinder the advance of rampaging marauders. Rake’s eyes had been wide with excitement. His parents had expected the lad to be thrilled at the sight of so many trains, but when they took him inside and he saw no knights, no dragons, not a single mace or coat of arms, he’d been crushed. His parents had misconstrued his tears as panic at the crowd: people everywhere, Georgians from outside the city taking the day train in for an afternoon of shopping at Rich’s, Northerners on layover enjoying lunch before boarding the train to Florida, resplendently dressed matrons holding the suited arms of important Washington husbands as they prepared for the bacchanalias of New Orleans, and, even then, bedraggled Negro families making their way to the fabled colored-friendly jobs in places like Chicago, Milwaukee, New York. All this sundry humanity, but no knights.
Lightning Men Page 3