by C. J. Lyons
“Winnie, where do you think you’re going?”
“This is all my fault. I’m going to tell them the truth. I don’t care what my dad does—won’t be anything he hasn’t done before.”
“You don’t understand.” Officer Thomson glanced back at the doctor, his face suddenly grown sad. “This has gone beyond that. You need to let me and Dr. Mann handle this. Your job is to take care of his little girl, get her to safety. Can you do that?”
“What about Henry? I’m not leaving him.”
Another look exchanged between the two men. She hated that, the silent language adults used when they thought they knew better than her.
The doctor whispered something to his little girl, stopping her tears, and set her on the ground. He held her hand and together they walked over to Winnie.
“Will you take care of Maybelle?” the doctor asked, crouching down so his eyes met Winnie’s. “I’m trusting you. Can you do that?”
She looked from him to Officer Thomson. Saw that they weren’t angry. They were afraid. This was bad. So much worse than she’d imagined. Nothing in the movies ever went this wrong. But this wasn’t the movies, was it? It took all her courage and a little more for her to meet Dr. Mann’s gaze and nod. “Yes, sir.”
“Thank you,” he said, solemnly transferring Maybelle’s hand from his to hers. The little girl seemed stunned, her gaze as blank as Winnie’s mind. What to do? Where to run?
Officer Thomson had the answers. He pulled his heavy key ring from his belt and selected a key. “The basement storage area is connected to the courthouse’s basement next door. This time of day, courthouse is empty, you can get out through there.” He handed her the key.
“Henry? Is he coming with us?”
“We’ll take care of Henry,” he said as he led her and Maybelle to the door to the basement. “No matter what you hear or see, stay quiet. If everything’s okay, I’ll meet you at Henry’s house. Tell his folks they need to pack up and leave tonight. Can you do that?”
Winnie nodded and wiped her nose with the back of her hand holding the key.
Officer Thomson gripped her shoulders so tight it hurt—but in a good way. Like he was letting her know she was strong enough to bear it. He opened the door.
Maybelle made a sniffling noise. Her father came up behind her and gave her one last hug and kiss.
“Be a good girl now,” he told her. “We’ll get you back to Mommy as soon as we can, but until then you listen to Winnie, okay?”
The little girl nodded. She opened her mouth to say something but it was swallowed by her sobs.
“I love you,” her father whispered as he kissed the top of her head. “Never forget that.”
A gunshot sounded from the front of the building followed by the sound of fists pounding on glass.
“Go. Now.” Officer Thomson said, shoving them onto the landing at the top of the steps and shutting the door behind them.
Then it was just Maybelle and Winnie. Alone in the dark.
Chapter Twenty-Three
TK watched the crowd below the courthouse window. The summer sun sat low on the horizon, and already the numbers of those protesting against the police were thinning as they realized there would be no answers here today. Those who remained behind lit candles and stood quietly, heads bowed.
Were they truly mourning the memory of the man Officer Jefferson had shot? Someone who had beat a woman? Hard to believe a man like that could touch so many lives. More from beyond the grave than when he was alive, she was certain.
More biased thinking. Maybe she had inherited more of her grandfather’s racism than she cared to admit. David wrapped one arm around her shoulder, sensing her turmoil. Instead of bristling at the misguided gesture of gallantry, she rested her hand on his and gave it a squeeze.
Whatever had happened in that alley wasn’t her business; finding the truth of the people who had been left to rot in that quarry were. Now that she had a name for one of her victims, she was certain she could find the rest.
“I need to check on Dr. Madsen and see what she’s found,” she told David, glad of a reason to change the topic. “How about if we pick up some pizza, bring it to her and her students?”
“Lead the way,” he said.
She led him down to the rear entrance that faced onto the narrow alley that ran between the courthouse and police department on one side and the rear of the old Woolworth’s building and municipal warehouse.
As they walked, she filled him in on her case—strictly off the record. He groaned at that, sensing a tasty story behind the few facts that she offered, but offered encouragement that brightened her mood immensely.
They emerged on the far side of the town square and turned down the next block where she’d seen a few restaurants including a sandwich shop and pizza place.
Half an hour later, they emerged carrying a variety of aromatic pies, including her favorite, a meat lovers with extra bacon. As they turned up the street she spotted a familiar group blocking their way. Franklin and his boys.
TK almost laughed as Franklin turned and sauntered toward them, his pack following close behind. Nothing was going to spoil her mood. Not with David here and her case progressing. Especially not a teen-thug wannabe.
“Isn’t it past your bedtime?” she called to the boys in a jovial voice.
“Are these the guys?” David asked, taking the pizzas TK carried and adding them to his own stack. God, how she loved a man with tactical awareness. She had the weapons, she was the one trained in combat, of course she needed her hands free. “The ones from earlier?”
They were maybe a dozen feet from the corner boys. “David, meet Franklin and friends.”
“You won’t give us the time of day,” Franklin said, hands open wide, palms up. But his smile most definitely did not make it all the way to his eyes. “In fact, you’re downright rude when we pay you a compliment. First you run off with that Nazi creep and now you’re hanging with this amigo? Girl, you need to get your eyes checked, see what you missing.” He gestured to his crotch. “Don’t you know, black is beautiful?”
“What I’m missing,” TK matched his tone and expression of mock moral outrage, “is any idea where you misplaced your common sense. The cops are just down the street, in case you missed the men dressed in riot gear.”
“That’s where we’re heading. Figure if they’re stalling on the verdict announcement must mean black men ain’t got no justice. As always. How about we walk with you and you can buy us dinner?” He jerked his chin and one of his guys—one of the two built like a linebacker, TK couldn’t tell them apart in the twilight—helped himself to the top box of pizza from the stack David carried.
David didn’t protest—no surprise, he’d seen TK in action and trusted her to handle herself. But what did surprise her was his scowl. Not aimed at Franklin or his cohorts, but at her. Warning her not to push things too far. She almost rolled her eyes. They were only kids, looking for trouble.
Maybe that was his point. Just because Franklin was looking for trouble didn’t mean she had to give it to him.
“You can have the pizza,” she said, strolling past them as if she’d planned to give them the pie all along. The top one was David’s vegetarian delight, so no great loss. “Least I can do after embarrassing you this morning.”
“Please. You embarrassed yourself. Going along with that Nazi thug. Did he show you his tatts? Came back with them from skinhead summer camp when he was a kid, so proud of them. Tried to parade them down our block, him and his jackboot friends. We showed them. His daddy wasn’t so proud of his little Hitler then, not when our guys sent them back stripped naked, hogtied, superglued and feathered.”
“Our guys?” she asked. “Grayson is what, five, six years older than you? When exactly did this happen?” Sounded more like urban legend than anything that might have actually happened.
“I was still old enough to watch and cheer,” Franklin retorted. “Ain’t anyone ever gonna forget that ski
nny white ass.”
The boys around him jeered in agreement, their menace diminished by the pizza filling their mouths.
“No way in hell will he ever be mayor. Not after that. Folks around here got too long a memory. And if they really do let that cop get away with murder…” His eyes glinted as the street lights came on, their bright glow a counterpoint to the velvet-purple sky. “Well, now, maybe it’ll be time for us to get some justice our way.”
With that, he grabbed his own slice and knocked the box with the remaining pizza away from the boy who held it, hurling it into the gutter. “C’mon, let’s get this party started.”
As one, they turned and left, heading toward the town square.
TK started to follow them, but David lagged behind. She waited. When he caught up with her, his expression was worried, despite the fact that Franklin and his crew had vanished into the night.
“What?” she asked, still a bit jazzed by the encounter. Just like this morning, she’d felt a familiar frisson of anticipation. Being in control but not in control…walking a knife edge…she didn’t have words for it, but whatever it was, it was an adrenaline rush.
“I think that we’re all racist,” David started. The pizza boxes wobbled as he balanced them, obviously frustrated with his inability to adequately communicate without using his hands to gesture for emphasis. “But it has nothing, necessarily, to do with skin color. It’s about fear. Not fear of someone having a different skin color. Not fear of them at all. Fear of the unknown.”
He stopped and turned to her. “Like those boys. You met them this morning when you were alone. Outnumbered, five to one. Were you afraid?”
“No. I was angry, irritated, wondering what the hell right they had to do that, just because I’m a woman. But I wasn’t afraid.” They slowly continued down the street.
“Why not? Most women would be. Isn’t that why men—whether it’s construction workers or kids with nothing better to do—isn’t that really why they catcall and jeer at women? Asserting their dominance over any woman who comes into their circle of influence—they control your attention, hell, the very pavement you put your feet on.”
This she had an answer for—it was something she’d been dealing with all her life, especially after she joined the Corps. “Men like that, they want women to fear what might lie behind those so-called harmless words and whistles. They’re bullies. Like cybertrolls—they aren’t merely annoying, they’re also instilling fear when they publish your intimate details, where you live and work, how to reach you when you’re most vulnerable, and threaten real-life harm.”
“Right. Because they’ve turned words, their right to free speech, into a weapon. Which, for a journalist who has the first amendment tattooed onto his soul, is a very, very difficult thing to say.”
“Terroristic threats—that’s the police term for it,” TK told him.
“But it’s not the actual words or threat that terrifies, is it? It’s the randomness. The uncertainty. Will they follow through? When? Where? Terrorism is an act of dominance, taking over mental territory, more than physical. Doesn’t matter if it’s via intimate partner violence or large-scale ideology instilling fear in the masses. Once you control fear, you can wreak havoc over an entire nation, create chaos.”
“What’s that got to do with corner boys and racism?”
“You weren’t afraid of Franklin or his gang. It didn’t matter that they were black or white or purple, you would have had the same reaction.”
“Because I had a plan. I knew what I could do, would do, to get out of there.”
“Would you have shot them?” He was well aware that she always carried a gun—something that he despised but put up with.
“No. They never laid hands on me, it was only words. And I had other options.”
“Because of your training.”
“Right. And practice and experience.” Where was he going with this?
“See. I saw something different. I was frightened. When I read their body language, I didn’t see a boy and his friends acting out. I saw a situation that could have changed in an instant. I felt choked by the possibilities. How volatile things were, how any one of those boys—or you or I for that matter—could have sent things spiraling out of control.”
It was a long speech for him. Long enough that she swallowed her reflex reaction of dismissing his concern, that she had it all under control, and really considered his words. Because of his disability, David was an expert at reading body language, practically a human lie detector.
Could she have been wrong? Both this morning and now? “Which of us was right? Were they dangerous or not?”
“I’m not sure. That’s my point. I mean, think about it. What if you’re a police officer in a city where most of the crime in the area you patrol is black on black? Where the times when you are forced to react, when you fear for the lives of the public or yourself, when things happen so fast that however you react, right or wrong, becomes the practiced experience…”
“Okay, I see what you’re saying. It’s not necessarily prejudice. It’s not consciously discriminating or making the assumption that every black man you see is someone capable of violence, but rather it’s been ingrained through repeated exposure to violence.” Train how you fight, fight how you train.
“Even if it’s not actual violence, any pattern of behavior that occurs during a flight or fight adrenaline response is going to be programmed into the brain like a reflex—so the next time an encounter triggers those same feelings, you won’t think of your training or of options or diplomacy.”
“You’ll be reacting, reflexively.”
“Basic physiology.”
She’d seen guys operate like that in battle, had felt it herself. Which is why soldiers spent so many hours trying to turn training into reflex, muscle memory. But the real goal was emotional memory—the short-cut that bypassed the brain’s higher thinking areas and saved time when immediate action was needed.
Cops only received a small fraction of combat training and even less time to use it in the real world to reinforce it. A good thing—no one wanted the streets of Pittsburgh or Greer to turn into Fallujah.
But understanding the physiology of the problem did nothing to change the real-world consequences. “What’s the solution? How do you fight subconscious reflexes? The problem goes too deep.”
“Never said it was easy. But it is possible. There’s new training that the DOJ is trying in places like Gary, Indiana and Stockton, California that shows real promise in mitigating innate bias. Keeping police safe as well as increasing their effectiveness in the community.”
An experiment in a few cities seemed like an inadequate solution, but at least it was a start. Although it missed the bigger problem.
“Even if bias explains some of the blue on black violence, what about everything else going on?” She stood still, waving her hand toward the people milling behind the police barricades, now bathed in the harsh glow of streetlights. “Some of those people—no matter the color of their skin, on both sides—they don’t care about peaceful solutions or better training or even justice or the truth. They want blood.”
He leaned close, pressing his arm against hers, the pizza boxes still balanced between his hands, as if sensing the agitation that buzzed through her like an unexploded IED. She hated that sometimes she felt the same as that angry mob—out of control, wanting to use her fists, wanting to hit, to burn, to destroy. Anything to purge this awful, uncontrollable rage that had the power to overwhelm her.
“I hate this.” She lowered her head to his shoulder. “Feeling like this. Angry all the time.”
“Where does anger come from?” He whispered the words as if they were a poem. “Fear. You’re afraid of losing control. That crowd, they’re afraid of never getting it back. Of being powerless, terrorized, their lives stolen by fear instilled by others.”
“Of being enslaved.” It was a bitter word—especially coming from her, a white woman, but it
felt honest and true. It resonated through her, and she understood something deeper than words, she understood that same primal terror. She’d felt it herself—had been made to feel it. What was the other word he’d used earlier when he was talking about heckling? Dominance.
Yes. She remembered the power that had sparked in a man’s eyes as she lay at his mercy, powerless to fight, no control over what happened to her—what he did to her.
It didn’t last centuries, wasn’t a wholesale subjugation of generations, ingrained into their memories, their traditions, their very souls. She’d only felt it for the better part of an hour, but it had been long enough to sear her psyche, to change who she was, right down to her DNA.
The memories hit her so hard she sagged against him. Immediately felt ashamed, relying on his strength instead of her own. But, for once, not afraid to let someone else get close enough to help her. To trust that a man would not betray.
That he saw her as human. Equal. Cherished.
Wasn’t that what everyone, man, woman, child, deserved? Not as a right granted to them, but merely by the fact that they were born?
And if that basic, inalienable right was threatened, who wouldn’t fight with everything they had to reclaim it?
David set the now-cold pizza down on the pavement and ignored it to take her into his arms. TK let him hold her. Tight. So tight she barely felt the ground beneath her feet. She had no idea what the answer was—maybe she never would. But she understood the problem.
More than a problem. A threat. One that could undermine more than neighborhoods or cities… It was at once both overwhelming in its universal, primal nature and still felt uniquely personal, private.
She had no idea how to explain it to David. Did the words even exist to describe this feeling? More than fear, less than fury…a sickening twist of her guts as if her belly had been ripped open and flooded with ice water.
But she understood. And with understanding came the realization that the people beyond those barricades were as vulnerable as they were powerful.