It all had seemed to happen so quickly, and he had no alternatives, and if the Lord had wanted him to do something different, then surely an option would have been revealed, wouldn’t it?
So difficult to avoid temptation when it tenaciously sought you out.
He could do this job for Feckless a few times, he figured. Make some money, show Julie he was a workingman. Prove he could provide for her and the little one. Surely that wasn’t too much to ask of the Lord. But, killing Boggs—could he do that? If that’s what it took to re-win Julie and raise his son? Was this a test from the Lord? What was expected of him?
“Turn left here,” Cyrus said.
“What happened to the fellow who used to drive?” Jeremiah dared ask.
“Don’t worry about it.”
At one in the morning, twenty minutes after the arrival of a certain freight train from New Orleans, Jeremiah drove the truck along a narrow street that cut through two sections of the rail yard. A gangway above allowed for rail workers to walk over the road. Fences topped with barbed wire loomed on either side.
Jeremiah and Cyrus wore gray canvas custodial uniforms. Smelled foul. In their pockets were letters from a fictional employer certifying that these two Negroes had legitimate reasons for being out so late after the city’s unofficial curfew for the colored.
Driving back on the narrow road, this time Jeremiah’s headlights revealed a solitary figure standing on one of the gangways, directly above two Dumpsters. He had dragged behind him several trash cans and four cardboard boxes.
Cyrus reached out the window and flicked his lighter once, the signal, then the man above poured the contents of his barrels and threw the boxes to the Dumpsters below. He aimed well, the boxes landing just outside the Dumpster. Jeremiah pulled alongside it, killed his headlights, and jumped out. He picked up the surprisingly light boxes and carried them to the back of the truck, where Cyrus met him, switchblade in hand. Quickly now, just as they had rehearsed, Cyrus tore the boxes open while Jeremiah took the four trash barrels from the back of the truck. Cyrus poured the boxes’ contents, two packages wrapped tightly in brown paper, into the empty barrels. Jeremiah could barely smell the herb’s aroma. Then Jeremiah, donning gloves, opened one of the trash barrels that actually was filled with garbage, and by hand he redistributed some of the trash so that the bundles of marijuana were covered in it. Should any cops pull them over, they would find two night janitors hauling garbage.
Minutes later, south of downtown in Summerhill, they circled a certain block once, looking for cops, then pulled behind a small brick building, a defunct grocery store. In the back, a door opened and out walked a tall, very light-skinned Negro clad in a white dress shirt, light-gray slacks, and a matching vest. The Rook’s doorman, whom Feck had called Q.
They climbed into the truck, picking up the two barrels in the back.
Q motioned to the door, through which Jeremiah and Cyrus carried the barrels. Q closed the door behind them and hit a light. This had once been a store, but now it was empty—other than a crate in the middle of the floor, Jeremiah saw nothing but dust bunnies and cobwebs.
Cyrus dumped the barrels, garbage spilling everywhere. He tossed it and reached into the trash for the paper-wrapped bundle, which he transferred into the crate. Q watched as Jeremiah did the same. Then he silently handed Cyrus a small envelope and took out a set of keys, apparently anxious to lock the door and usher them out.
“Got an envelope for me?” Jeremiah asked.
“What?” Q stepped closer, staring into Jeremiah. It was the first word he’d spoken. “What in the hell you just say?”
Jeremiah knew he was bad at this. The pecking-order, tough-guy thing. He’d been teased in his brother’s gang, and again at Reidsville. There were rules he didn’t understand, even when the occasional, pitying mentor tried to explain them to him. So he tried not to sound argumentative as he hazarded, “I should get paid, too, right?”
A hand disappeared behind Q’s back, then reappeared so fast Jeremiah barely had time to see the gun before it slammed into his head. Jeremiah hit the ground, pain leveling his world.
“Y’all figure out how you divide that on your own, goddammit!” Q shouted.
“He’s new, Q,” Cyrus said. “He didn’t mean nothing.”
When Jeremiah looked up, he saw the gun was pointed at him. “I know who you are. They said you done in your brother. I don’t know why Feck would bring in someone like you, cloud over your head and all. But you give me lip one more time, Cyrus here’ll be taking you out in one of those trash barrels, understand?”
Jeremiah tried to nod, but it hurt too much. “Yeah. I understand.”
“Now get out of here.”
Cyrus helped him up and guided him out by the arm. Once outside, they heard the door lock behind them.
“Who is that?” Jeremiah asked. During his time smuggling cigarettes, tempers had flared on occasion, usually his brother’s. And Isaiah hitting him hadn’t been noteworthy—he’d done that all his life. Out of fear of Isaiah, however, no one else had ever touched Jeremiah.
“That’s Quentin Neale. Or just Q. He don’t usually have much to say, but when he do, you’d best listen real good.”
Jeremiah glanced at one of the empty barrels and tried not to imagine himself stuffed inside one.
36
SMITH CAUGHT A ride from Dewey to Hannah and Malcolm’s, arriving past three in the morning. His sister asleep in the bedroom, Boggs and Malcolm sat watch, grim and in darkness.
They caught him up: a crowd had started gathering at half past midnight, seeming to materialize right after a squad car’s most recent pass. As if the cops’ exit had been a predetermined signal. The crowd had grown to fifty or sixty people, by Boggs’s best guess. Then at about one o’clock the same squad car returned, with a second. To Boggs’s surprise and profound relief, the cops had gotten out and warned people to return to their homes. Much arguing had ensued, yet the cops had stood firm. By two, everyone was back inside.
Then the squad cars had left again. Another hour had passed now, but they wondered when the crowd—or even a single, emboldened person gripping a Molotov cocktail—might emerge next.
Smith thanked Boggs, then he insisted his partner head home to bed.
“You sure?” Boggs asked. “I don’t think it’s over.”
“Get some sleep. I’ll call if things look bad.” Boggs obeyed, and Smith took over his position.
After twenty minutes of uneventful silence, some of the adrenaline drained from Smith, and he noticed a heaviness to Malcolm’s lids, tiring after so many hours of hyped-up vigilance. It felt like the best time to say, “I’m only gonna ask this once. You take that money?”
“Are you serious?” Combination of shock and deep offense.
“Pretend I’m asking as your brother-in-law and not as a cop.”
“Tommy, I did not take that money! Didn’t go anywhere near that man’s house. Can’t believe you’d even ask me that.”
“Just wanted to be sure I was risking my life for a good reason.”
“Oh, if I had stolen some money then I’d deserve to be lynched?”
“I had to ask, all right?” This was already off to a bad start, and he hadn’t gotten to the tough stuff yet. “Blame the cop in me after all.”
A sound, a car door slamming. They checked their windows, saw nothing. Smith scooted to another window, facing south, and saw a figure moving three houses away. A moment later a front light illuminated the man, in overalls and a work shirt, unlocking a front door.
“Nothing,” Smith reported, “just a fella coming home from work real late.”
They settled back into their positions. Smith eyed the rifle Malcolm held. “You a good shot with that Winchester?”
“Good enough.”
“Better’n that, right? Didn’t you get a medal over there?”
“That was for more than marksmanship, but yeah, I can shoot.”
“How ’bout a man across th
e street, maybe forty yards? At night?”
Malcolm glanced out the window, not realizing where Smith was leading him. “Forty wouldn’t be a problem, but the street’s not that wide.”
“That uses .30-.30 bullets, don’t it?”
Malcolm looked at him. Finally catching on. “Yeah. It does.”
Smith maintained the stare. “Last week, when I came by here asking you about the drug trade, you didn’t think there was maybe something you ought to tell me?”
Another car door. Malcolm looked outside but Smith didn’t move. “Tommy, we gotta concentrate.”
Smith glanced out the window and saw just another late-shift worker trudging home.
“Malcolm. I am out here risking my life for you, and you don’t have nothing to say to me?”
“Tommy, I . . .” Malcolm looked down. “That wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“What wasn’t supposed to happen?” Raising his voice more than he should.
Malcolm couldn’t answer, so Smith told the story, one he had just figured out a few hours earlier. “The night me and Boggs broke up that smuggling drop at the telephone factory, somebody got shot dead. Because someone else was stationed across the street, shooting with a Winchester. We assumed the shooter was part of the operation, a lookout, firing at us and accidentally hitting his own man. But no, the shooter wasn’t part of Malley’s gang, was he? He was part of a whole different crew, the crew that’s been trying to take over Malley’s turf. You been working with Quentin Neale, and you were stationed there as a sniper to take Malley’s boys out. Me and Boggs just happened to walk into it.”
“I didn’t know you were going to be there. As soon as I saw you two, I took off.”
“And that makes it okay?” They were sitting on the floor, ten feet apart. The fact that they were both gripping firearms loomed large in Smith’s thinking. He needed to confront Malcolm without threatening him, a tough balance, doubly so given their exhaustion.
“Tommy . . . I didn’t mean for that to happen.”
Smith prided himself on being intuitive and quick, but the truth had eluded him for so long because it hid in his blind spot. His own family.
A week ago, boxer Spark Jones had given Smith and Boggs the name Quentin Neale, a potential rival to Malley. And then today, hours earlier, the final piece of the puzzle: Smith had leaned on an informant who told him Neale was known for bringing his drugs and liquor not from the mountains like Malley, but from New Orleans via freight lines. The rail yards—the same place that Jeremiah had worked back in ’45. Smith had heard rumors that Feckless hadn’t always been a legit businessman, but he’d wanted to believe a fellow could rise from humble and even twisted roots to become respectable.
So when Feck had tried to offer Smith that envelope of cash the other night, Feck had been feeling Smith out, trying to see if he would take a bribe and look the other way, just like Malley had done with the white cops. Feck knew how to exploit the rail yards from his time with Isaiah Tanner, he had money and workers thanks to the Rook, he had an open market now that Malley was dead . . . The only thing he lacked was police protection.
Smith hadn’t put it together until the informant mentioned that one of the men who usually managed Feck’s rail yard deliveries had been beaten to a pulp a few nights back.
“Folks who beat you up, they weren’t angry white neighbors or Klansmen, were they? You remember just fine, I bet. It was someone from Malley’s gang, paying you back for the shooting.”
Malcolm looked down again. “I . . . I didn’t remember at first. Honest. But then, yeah. I took the bus home from the Rook and they must have followed me in a car. Waited ’til I got off and walked to a quiet block, no one around.”
“You were happy to have me running around thinking it was white folks, just to keep me away from what you were up to. You been lying to me the whole time.”
When Malcolm had finally found work at the Rook, Smith had been so relieved for his sister that he hadn’t questioned their newfound prosperity. And when they’d told him they’d bought this house thanks in part to a sudden inheritance from some uncle in North Georgia, Smith had actually believed them.
“I wasn’t trying to kill no one, just shoot out the wheels of their delivery truck. We were gonna show up in force and scare Thunder’s boys off, let ’em know to keep out of our area, that this was Q’s territory now. Then we’d keep the goods. That’s all. But when you showed up out of nowhere, that fellow ran into my line of fire.”
“It’s my fault? All you were doing was firing a rifle across the street, and you’re surprised a man got killed? You know the white cops wanted to charge me with murder?”
“I know it’s bad, all right? And why do you think we bought a place over on this side of town, huh? I been wanting to get away from the business, cut ties with all them. I know a guy does construction out here, helping one of those crews put up new places—he said he could get me a carpentry job once they start building this new complex. I swear, I’m trying to put that stuff behind me.”
“Behind you? It was barely two weeks ago.” Smith was disgusted, and as angry as a sober man can be at half past three in the morning. “Can’t believe you let yourself be muscle for that kind of nonsense.”
Eyes gone cold. “I did a lot worse in the Pacific.”
“That’s different.”
Malcolm looked away, out the window again. “So, you gonna arrest me, Tommy? Is that it?”
This was the question Smith had been asking himself for hours.
He took a breath, then said, “You need to get rid of that rifle. Immediately. It can link you to murder.”
Understanding what this meant, Malcolm nodded. “Tommy, thank you. I’ll get rid of it, first thing tomorrow.”
Smith would have preferred he do it right then, but that was out of the question. Tonight it might save Malcolm’s life, but if he did indeed have to use it, he’d produce shell casings that could get him sent to the electric chair.
“Get yourself another weapon, in case we have to do this again tomorrow.”
Malcolm closed his eyes, either in relief he wasn’t being arrested, or in horror at realizing that, even if he survived this night, the sun would set again tomorrow. He opened his eyes. “I’m sorry, Tommy. I tried to keep you out of it.”
“Sorry don’t cut it.”
“What would you have me do? You know how long I looked for work? All them skills I came back with from the war didn’t matter to nobody. Couldn’t even get a damned janitor job. Feckless took a chance on me, and the one skill that I could make money with, it worked out for both of us. It ain’t what I wanted, all right? But it’s all I could get.”
They heard another car door and checked the windows again. It seemed an unusual amount of doors opening and closing given the hour.
“Malcolm, you want to stay a free man, you want me to keep quiet about this? You’re going to have to give me two things. One is your word that you will not set foot in Feckless’s place or talk to him or Quentin Neale ever again. You’re done with them.”
A longer pause than Smith would have liked. “All right. I’m done with them. What’s the second thing?”
“You hand those sons of bitches over to me.”
37
“DENNY, WE NEED to consider leaving the neighborhood.”
“Are you serious?” He and Cassie sat at the kitchen table while, below, Denny Jr. played with his train and Maggie gummed a toy on a blanket. In the midst of this rare peaceful moment with the kids, Cassie’s comment was a thunderclap.
“Don’t be stubborn. You see what’s happening. Maybe you’re used to this sort of thing because you have to see it all day, but we shouldn’t have it in our own neighborhood.”
He was still trying to make sense of the previous evening. The mood of the crowd had been close to violence, he’d felt it, that need to lash out against the forces that had struck them first. Rake had successfully kept Thames from telling the neighbors what had been sto
len, but how long could he hold out? A day? Once they found out, a sense of unjust victimhood would overpower them, forcing them to do whatever was necessary to restore order.
He’d called the Department first thing in the morning. One of the officers responsible for Hanford Park, an older fellow who sounded annoyed that a cop from another beat was bothering him, assured Rake they were working on it, hanging up quickly.
He wasn’t sure how much to tell Cassie. He knew she had been raised differently, had heard her parents drop the N-word as natural as drinking sweet tea, knew the way her brothers felt about shiftless Negroes perpetually on the verge of taking their property, their jobs, their women. For the most part, he and his wife had avoided conflict on race matters. Yet the events of the last couple weeks were bringing it to the forefront.
“Our neighborhood is damn near rioting,” he said. “I’d like to hear a more rational opinion within my own house.”
“You want rational? Here’s rational: three Negro houses will turn into six, then twelve, and each time that number goes up, our home value goes down. A Realtor was here the other day asking if we wanted to sell, and the number he offered was less than it should have been.”
She explained that a young, well-dressed Realtor (“a white one, at least”) had come armed with documents describing what had happened in an Atlanta neighborhood that had turned Negro a year ago. It had been white for generations, yet, like a lunar eclipse, it had gone completely black mere months after the first Negroes moved in. Whites had to sell against their wishes as the blocks were besieged with Negro families, multiple generations piled into bungalows, broken-down cars parked on the front lawn, livestock in the back. Those who’d sold first had escaped with close to what their houses should have been worth, the Realtor had warned, but the ones who’d waited too long lost up to half the value of their home. She retrieved from the kitchen some paperwork that backed the man’s claims and handed it to Rake.
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