Lightning Men

by Thomas Mullen

  “Denny.” She sighed. “I know you don’t much like Dale.”

  “That’s not tr—”

  “And I know he says some things about Negroes he shouldn’t. He’s a good man, and he loves those little boys to death. He just . . . was brought up different than us. The way he expends himself might not be right, but his heart is in the right place. If we wait too long, and enough Negroes do move in, then, no matter what’s in their hearts, the value of our house will be less than our mortgage. And we’ll be stuck living next to them. I know you don’t want that, either.”

  “Sue Ellen . . . We’re gonna find a way to keep things the way they’ve been.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Sure, you men and your plans. First it’s trying to buy their houses back, then God knows what. Men in hoods will be next, right?”

  “I would never do that. I can’t speak for Dale.”

  She looked hurt. “I just mean that maybe the better idea, instead of drawing up whatever strategy you want to talk to Dale about, or whatever it is he and his friends are probably talking about right now, maybe the right thing to do here is listen to the wives who have to spend almost every waking minute here. Maybe you should listen to what we’re telling you.”

  He sighed. “Cassie wants to sell, too.”

  “You married a smart gal.”

  He was walking down the short walkway in Dale’s front yard when someone approached from the sidewalk. A very large someone.

  “Dale Simpkins?” the man asked in a thick country drawl.

  “ ’Fraid not. Can I help you with something?”

  “Bullshit,” the man said, and Rake picked up on the movement behind him too late, as something hard hit him in the back of the skull. He went numb and fell to one of his knees, barely catching himself with his hands. The yard was unlit and for a moment his vision grew even yet darker, his head fuzzy. He took a breath and things were slowly, slowly returning to their usual clarity, but with pain attached, when he heard the hammer of a gun being pulled back and saw two very large men looming over him.

  49

  BOGGS COULD HAVE used a smoke, but lighting it would have given him and Smith away. They stood in position, standing in the first floor of an abandoned house in Summerhill. He heard scurrying somewhere behind him, rodent squeaks, and he prayed that they not venture near him while he waited.

  The only thing worse than a dull stakeout was a dull stakeout at a time when you desperately did not want to think about something. Yet he couldn’t banish it from his mind: Julie had killed Isaiah Tanner. He wanted to believe that what Jeremiah told him was a lie tossed there to distract him. But it made too much sense: this was why Julie had never told him the truth about Jeremiah, this explained her defensiveness and raw pain whenever he asked about her past. Lord God, she had been raped by her boyfriend’s older brother, and she had shot him dead. Her boyfriend had helped her evade the law by moving the body, and they’d worked out a story they could tell. Jeremiah had kept the secret for her, but now he was back, and unpredictable, and envious of Boggs. He was a walking potential death sentence for Julie.

  What was Boggs to do? He had been ready to cast Julie aside, but now he saw that she was just a victim of things he could barely fathom. What she’d done was probably self-defense. A Southern jury wouldn’t see it that way, but the Lord would.

  Wouldn’t He?

  If Boggs stayed with her, if he helped her keep that secret, he needed to do something about Jeremiah.

  Boggs wasn’t sure how much Smith had overheard, and how much he’d understood. After leaving the diner together, they had been silent for a charged minute, then Smith had asked, “Are you sure you can still do this tonight?”

  “Of course I can. Why couldn’t I?”

  “I just want to make sure your head’s in the right place.”

  Smith had studied his expression then, as if daring Boggs to explain what had just happened. Boggs hadn’t asked if Smith had understood the conversation, terrified of the sheer possibility that yet another man might know the truth about Julie.

  As planned, they had made their way to the vacant Summerhill storefront that, according to Malcolm, was used as a transfer point by Feck’s smugglers. A few miles away, a freight train would be pulling into the yards, and men disguised as janitors would be showing up here in about an hour, handing tight little bundles of marijuana to Quentin Neale.

  So they waited. Just like they had two weeks ago, outside the telephone factory, stumbling into a mess that had grown more personal than they ever would have expected. What a small town this still was. Despite the new buildings and legions of strangers, despite all the changes the last decade had wrought, Atlanta was still a town where you couldn’t even arrest someone without possibly implicating your own family.

  While Boggs and Smith waited in this abandoned building, Dewey and Champ stood in an alley that cut alongside the store, watching its side door. One block away, in a dirt lot behind a vacant bungalow, McInnis sat in his squad car.

  Had white cops been handling this, they no doubt would have had more than five men. But McInnis couldn’t send his entire precinct to one spot, and he’d wanted to keep quiet, lest word reach Slater. So they would go with five and hope it was enough.

  At a quarter ’til midnight, a yellow Chevrolet convertible with its top up parked in front of the store. It made a point of backing into the space, all the better for a quick getaway. A man in a brown fedora got out, looked down the street both ways, then keyed into the front door.

  “That’s Neale,” Smith whispered.

  Flattened cardboard boxes had been taped inside the store’s windows, but they could tell from the faint glow that Neale had turned the lights on.

  Another thirty minutes ticked slowly past. Smith relieved himself against the back wall. Boggs’s feet were sore but he didn’t want to sit on the layers of grime.

  At half past midnight a tan GMC pickup with a canvas top drove past the store. The street had almost no traffic at this hour. Five minutes later the same truck drove up again, this time backing into the spot beside the Chevy.

  “Here we go,” Smith said just as Boggs felt his heart rate quicken.

  Smith gently swung open the door they’d earlier broken into, careful not to let it bang. Knees bent in a crouch, they quickly ran across the street as two men in janitor’s uniforms left the GMC and carried metal trash barrels toward the store, where Neale stood in the open doorway.

  “Police, freeze!” Smith hollered. They could hear footsteps coming from the alley. They heard the roar of an engine—McInnis, hopefully, having spotted the truck driving past twice.

  The two janitors froze as commanded. Then one of them dropped his trash barrel and ran, darting behind his accomplice.

  Boggs saw that the second janitor was Jeremiah.

  Then gunshots called his attention elsewhere.

  Neale had retreated back inside but poked his gun out, firing blind. Smith and Boggs both dropped, Smith hiding behind the front of the truck and Boggs crouching beside the dropped trash barrel. A third shot, fourth, fifth.

  When Boggs looked up, Jeremiah, too, had dropped his barrel and was running behind his accomplice. Boggs stepped forward, the truck now blocking him from any more bullets that Neale might fire, and aimed his weapon at the two retreating “janitors.” The one who wasn’t Jeremiah turned at that moment, aiming a weapon at Boggs—not aiming so much as pointing randomly, about to fire.

  Boggs pulled his trigger. Aiming more purposefully than his adversary. Two shots, and the man dropped from thirty feet away.

  More shots, other weapons. Something happening inside the store. Shouting now, the voices of Dewey and Champ, “Police!” and a cry of pain.

  McInnis’s car pulled up behind them as Jeremiah turned an alley corner and vanished. The sergeant kicked open his door and leaped out, hollering, “Get after him!”

  They ran down the alley, Boggs carefully holding the pistol facing up as he ran, then stopping
just before the alley corner and aiming it forward again, then glancing around the corner quickly. A body disappearing around yet another corner.

  Running again, Smith right beside him, splashing through a puddle of God knows what, shoes wet now, don’t slip, the alley’s brick floor slick and uneven. The silhouette of a cat vanished as suddenly as it had appeared.

  How had Jeremiah let this happen?

  As he ran and the blood in his head pounded and his chest ached, he realized that he was doomed, he had been doomed all along and somehow had convinced himself this wasn’t so.

  Boggs’s confronting him in the diner earlier—that had been his last chance, and he hadn’t realized it. Boggs had given him the opportunity to walk away, to flee this life that only seemed to punish him. Instead of taking the advice, he’d all but spat in the man’s face. The thought of that confident, enragingly superior Officer Boggs banishing Jeremiah so that he could keep Julie all to himself, that had been too much, so with malicious pleasure Jeremiah had shattered the man’s illusions. He had smiled at the sight of Boggs staggering away from the table, realizing that the girl he worshipped was not as pure as the preacher’s son had wished.

  Now Jeremiah was the one staggering.

  They’d already shot Cyrus, he’d seen it happen, heard the bullets, at least one of them whizzing past Jeremiah’s head like a hornet but another making Cyrus’s body contort, the front of his shirt exploding.

  He’d only fired a gun once before, target practice against some bottles under the watchful eye of his brother, years ago.

  He ran down the alley, hoping and praying as he ran. Please, God. Please don’t let it end this way. I know I’ve let you down this past week and I haven’t treated my freedom as I should have. I tried to do right. I tried to . . .

  To what? And does trying even matter?

  He had allowed the devil to chase him all his life, let it get too close, and now it was right behind him, gaining fast.

  He turned right, and slipped, got back up and ran, and found himself facing a brick wall.

  Boggs pointed his gun around the next corner, poked his head around it, and saw Jeremiah’s back. The ex-convict stood, shoulders heaving, not fifteen feet away.

  Smith stepped out past Boggs, aiming his gun as well.

  “Police!” Smith hollered. “Drop your weapon!”

  Jeremiah, his gun pointed at the ground, turned slowly to face them. Boggs felt the enormity of the fact that he could shoot Jeremiah right then, shoot him for not having already dropped the gun, for turning, for breathing, for doing anything but obeying.

  Smith and Boggs both stepped forward.

  Jeremiah stared at them for a second, what seemed like the longest second imaginable. His eyes wide.

  Boggs was pointing his gun at Jeremiah’s chest. One tiny twitch of the finger was all it would take.

  Jeremiah lowered his right shoulder a bit. He bent down and dropped the gun.

  Held out his hands.

  “I said, drop your weapon!” Smith hollered.

  Jeremiah’s face wrinkled. Confusion, fear. Then understanding, terror.

  Boggs kept his body still but turned his head to look at his partner. Both their guns still pointing at the defenseless subject.

  “Drop it now!” Smith yelled.

  Jeremiah opened his mouth to explain that he already had in fact dropped it. Boggs opened his mouth to tell Smith No, don’t do this, but he didn’t do it fast enough, and what good is mouthing, what good is even talking right then, when your partner won’t even look at you.

  Smith pulled the trigger, twice.

  Boggs didn’t even see Jeremiah fall—Jeremiah was there one moment, flat the next. Blood on the wall behind him, flecks of brick and mortar from where at least one of the bullets had passed clean through him.

  Smith stepped forward, still holding his gun in position. Then much faster steps until he was able to kick Jeremiah’s pistol away, his gun pointed down at Jeremiah’s face, etched now and forever in permanent puzzlement at this world that had been too much for him.

  Boggs walked slowly toward them, the muscles in his arms taut but somehow weightless, as if that gun were the only thing tethering his body to this earth, and maybe if he let go of it he would float up into the sky, reach the heavens. But no, he was here, he was grounded, and it was someone else’s soul that had been set free.

  Footsteps running toward them. Boggs felt dizzy as he turned around, aimed his weapon behind him, and then saw the white man and familiar uniform. He lowered his gun so he wasn’t pointing it at McInnis, who lowered his, too, like a mirror on a delay. McInnis walked toward them, his uniform still a mirror but his face a negative of theirs, and even as he stepped closer to them Boggs felt himself being pushed farther away.

  “I tried not to, Sergeant,” Smith said to McInnis. He was panting—they all were—and his words came out in short bursts, like gunfire. “He wouldn’t listen. Thought he was in a movie, maybe.”

  The smell of cordite in the air, the sound of local dogs asking each other what happened. An engine starting, probably unrelated, a resident fleeing the sounds of violence, a guilty conscience escaping.

  “I know,” McInnis said. With his right forearm he wiped sweat from his forehead. “I heard it.”

  McInnis crept closer to check on the body, and Boggs stared at his partner, took a step in front of him, eyes wide. Smith returned the stare, eyes hard, then looked down at Jeremiah.

  “I’ll be damned,” McInnis said. “That’s Jeremiah Tanner.”

  Boggs could only nod, stunned silent.

  McInnis’s eyes seemed to soften at the realization that here was the same man whose brother may have been killed by McInnis’s former partner years ago. Now dead in an alley, at another cop’s hand.

  Smith offered, “Maybe . . . Maybe I should have—”

  “No,” McInnis said. “You did the right thing. Better him than you. Remember that, always.” He moved his eyes from one of his officers to the other, as if he could press the point into their foreheads, brand them with it. “Better him than you.”

  It took far, far too long for Boggs to get Smith alone. First there were the bodies to process—Jeremiah and Cyrus and Quentin Neale, who had run into the store to hide from Smith and Boggs, only to see Dewey and Champ storm in. Neale had dropped his empty pistol and tried to draw a second from behind his belt when Dewey fired three rounds. White cops showed up in force, Vice and Homicide detectives among them, but no Slater, so perhaps McInnis was right and the son of a bitch would back slowly away from the mess.

  Jeremy Toon from the Atlanta Daily News had shown up as well, tipped off somehow, anxious to record for posterity this major scoop: the first time Atlanta’s Negro officers had taken lives. Officially.

  More than an hour had passed when Boggs and Smith were alone together, in one of the alleys they had run through earlier. No other cops in earshot, Boggs leaned forward and asked simply, “Why?”

  “Because I knew you couldn’t.”

  “I never asked you to—”

  “And you wouldn’t have asked. But that little thug would’ve held you in his pocket forever. Him and your girl, and that little boy.”

  So Smith had heard and understood everything at the diner. Boggs struggled with this, still unable to reconcile his image of his partner and their jobs with what Smith had just done, the decision he’d made, the line he’d crossed. One Boggs believed he himself could never cross. Because he’d had that opportunity. He could have done it, but had chosen not to.

  He wanted to hit Smith, wanted to scream, wanted to run past his partner and apologize to the man who would never hear him or anything else again. “That doesn’t mean I wanted—”

  “What? You gonna judge me again? The words you’re looking for are thank you.”

  Then Smith walked away, as if he could leave the weight on his partner’s shoulders.

  50

  RAKE FELT DIZZY when one of the men who’d knocked him do
wn said to the other, “Check his wallet to be sure.”

  A hand removed his wallet from his back pocket. Rake tried to remind his muscles how to flex, wondered when he would be able to stand again, or at least look into the face of the big man in front of him. He managed that last part, saw the gun in his hand.

  “I’m not Dale. I’m a cop.”

  “Shit,” the one behind him said, dropping Rake’s wallet on the ground. “It ain’t him.”

  Then more light, which Rake at first took for his body reacting to some new pain but then he realized it was headlights, from a Hudson driving unusually slowly down the road.

  “Well goddamn,” the man with the gun said. His thick drawl matched the others, South Georgia or Alabama. “Looks like we’ve hit the jackpot.”

  Rake saw it then, a long blue Hudson, pulling over on the other side of the street. Packed inside it was a veritable posse of Klansmen, their white robes and hoods almost glowing from the streetlamps. A back door popped open but the engine was still running.

  “That’s Dale in there, ain’t it?” one of the big men asked Rake.

  He didn’t reply. Something slammed into Rake’s ribs, the second man’s foot kicking him away, maybe. He looked across the street and saw Dale, not wearing a shirt, stagger out of the Hudson’s backseat.

  “Dale Simpkins?” one of the men demanded.

  “Oh Lord, what now?” Dale pleaded.

  Rake heard the sound of a shotgun being pumped, inches away. “Come on outta there, you damn clowns,” one of the big strangers yelled, “and get what’s coming to ya!”

  The driver’s door opened and one of the Klansmen held out his palms. “Hold up, there! This is a misunderstanding, fellas! Lower that weapon!”

  “Y’all are the ones that went up there with him, ain’t you?” one of the big men called out. Rake remembered then that he’d spoken days ago to the coroner about Walter Irons, asking if any family had identified the body, and the mortician had described two very large brothers from Alabama. Jesus, it was them.