Darktown: A Novel

by Thomas Mullen

  “But she was alive and in his car when Boggs and Smith pulled him over that night. Removing a body when the body’s alive isn’t accessory after the fact, it’s murder.”

  “He’d have no reason to lie to me ’bout that.”

  “You’re a cop, and you’re saying someone wouldn’t have reason to lie about a murder?”

  “You’ve changed the subject on me and I ain’t too drunk to notice. What the hell happened to your finger anyway?”

  “A wall mouthed off to me and I hit back.”

  “Then it wouldn’t just be one finger in a splint like that.” Spoken like a man who had punched his share of walls.

  “My hair’s about to catch fire it’s so goddamn hot in here. I’ve heard you out and I thank you for showing me your family heirloom,” and Rake nodded toward the toe, “but I’m going to stand up now and walk home to my wife and kids. I suppose I’m just going to have to hope you don’t choose to shoot me in the back.”

  And with that, Rake stood. He had convinced himself he wasn’t taking an awful chance. He had convinced himself that Dunlow did see him fondly in a way, that Dunlow truly did view him as a younger version of himself, that Dunlow felt more a fatherly need to beat sense into that self and not a homicidal need to turn this shed into a crime scene. Rake was reeling from Dunlow’s story but he also saw that his partner was even smaller than he had thought before, and he was telling himself that smallness equaled weakness and therefore he had nothing to fear by standing up, and turning, and slowly walking toward the shed door. He chose not to think that this simple act constituted a fatal mistake.

  One hand on the doorknob, he turned to look back at Dunlow one last time.

  Dunlow was still sitting but he was holding the gun now, his arm straight and true, the muzzle aimed at Rake’s head.

  Bang.

  32

  THE SIRENS OF the Peacedale squad cars were louder now, the same sounds as the APD squad cars Boggs and Smith had become so accustomed to, but inspiring a very different reaction.

  Boggs had nearly stopped, the first squad car no more than forty yards behind him when Smith said, “Now.”

  They had reached a bend in the road where the blacktop curved sharply to the left. Just before that bend, the road was narrower due to overgrowth of unkempt rhododendron and rose of Sharon shrubs. At Smith’s command, Boggs swung the wheel counterclockwise. The Buick’s wheels squealed and he felt it hydroplane a bit, dirt and gravel scraping beneath, the car swinging until they faced straight into the woods and they were blocking the road.

  Next it was the squad car’s wheels squealing. Boggs didn’t turn to watch them, as Smith had already opened the passenger door and jumped out. Boggs crawled over the seat and did the same, closing the door behind him, so that the Buick stood between them and the cops.

  The second squad car parked behind the first, which was a mere fifteen yards from the two colored officers.

  The driver’s door of the lead squad car was kicked open. The man who hurried outside it was so enraged he could barely stand up, nearly tripping as he exited. He had dark hair and something about one of his eyes looked funny even from this distance. Boggs saw from the stripes that this was the local sheriff.

  “You get the hell back in that automobile, boy!”

  At about this time, as doors from both squad cars were opening to disgorge the sheriff’s fellow officers, the sheriff seemed to notice that one of the Negroes was holding a rifle.

  Smith was not aiming it or even pointing it. He brandished it before him, though, muzzle pointing up at about ten o’clock from the white men’s perspective. Standard infantry-at-guard position. Standard warning-­not-to-consider-crossing-this-point stance. Boggs’s hands were at his sides; the white men couldn’t see his pistol because of the Buick’s obstruction. He would let them imagine it.

  “You’re Sheriff Nayler?” Boggs called out, ignoring the question.

  “You put that goddamn gun away, boy!”

  By now the other cops had noticed the rifle, and quickly they availed themselves of their own weapons.

  “Shit,” Boggs whispered. He held up his left palm in what he hoped looked like mild appeasement, though the other hand he kept hidden.

  “Let’s all stay calm here. We’re just trying to head back home and don’t want any trouble.”

  The white cops weren’t pointing their revolvers at them, yet, since they were apparently awaiting an order from their superior. Beside the sheriff was another cop, big and much younger, staring at his master like a dog impatiently awaiting the command to attack. Behind them, from the second car, were two more white cops. They were too far away, so it was hard to tell how young or hard they were, though that barely mattered. All that was relevant was how good a shot either was, and how many more weapons they had stashed in those cars.

  “Sheriff told you to put that gun away, boy!” the younger cop said. “And put both your damn hands up!”

  All the cars’ engines were still on, purring in the shade like barely stilled predators, waiting.

  “We are police officers from the city of Atlanta,” Boggs said, employing what Sergeant McInnis always referred to as calm but barely restrained power. Do not sound panicked or angry. Sound in control. And possessed of such inner wrath that they will fear the unleashing of it. “We are returning to our precinct and expect you to let us pass.”

  “The hell?” the younger one said to Nayler.

  “You ain’t police out here,” the sheriff said. “You ain’t got no call to be out in my town, son.”

  “We’ll happily leave your town, Sheriff. That’s what we were just trying to do when you pulled us over.”

  There were a hell of a lot of bees in the air, Boggs noticed. They were darting to and fro across the road, as the humans appeared to have stopped in the middle of some vital insect hub. The rose of Sharon were in bloom and nearly every lavender flower was being pillaged.

  “What do you think y’all doing out here, boy?” the sheriff demanded. He hadn’t asked them to show a badge, which they didn’t have with them anyway. Even asking to see such a badge would have been to acknowledge the unmentionable, that these Negroes thought themselves worthy of the station.

  “We were just expressing our condolences to the Ellsworths,” Boggs said.

  “That’s a family of nigger thieves and you’d best stay away from them.”

  “I read your report, Sheriff,” Boggs said, “but I didn’t see anything about evidence of them committing theft, or any other crime.”

  “You’re goddamn shifty niggers, ain’t you? You may have tricked some pantywaist city folk over there, but you ain’t tricking us.”

  Boggs said, “You’d know about tricking people, wouldn’t you, Sheriff ?”

  The big cop whispered something to the sheriff, who nodded. Then the big one turned his head—slowly—and called something to the men behind him, though Boggs couldn’t hear what. One of the rear cops nodded and opened his squad car door again.

  “Y’all best stay out where I can see you,” Smith commanded, trying to sound in control despite a growing sense of helplessness.

  Hopefully these were the only two squad cars in Peacedale. If a third should happen to come from the other direction, they were doomed. The man in the other car may have been radioing for help, either in town or from another jurisdiction.

  “Y’all are messing in affairs that don’t concern you,” Nayler said.

  The cop who had reached into the back squad car now emerged with a rifle in his hands.

  “Shit,” Smith whispered.

  No one had aimed a weapon yet. Everyone but Smith was pointing their guns at the ground as if trying to hold the earth prisoner. Smith’s rifle was still held before him, aimed at the canopy of pines.

  The two cops from the back started walking toward their fellows. The one with th
e rifle was in the center of the road, the other brushing up against the shrubbery to the right, bees everywhere.

  “We can’t let them spread out no more,” Smith whispered. “They try and flank out and we’ll have to start shooting.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “I’m experienced. We let them draw a perimeter through the woods and we’re dead.”

  Boggs called out, “My partner’s a twice-decorated army sniper. You’d best not lift that rifle any higher.”

  “What do you think is stopping us, son, from just shooting you all right here and now?”

  A bee landed on Boggs’s shirt. He was tempted to brush it off, but he was afraid the movement would cause one of the whites to aim and fire.

  “You outnumber us right here,” Boggs said. “But our police outnumbers yours about a hundred to one.”

  “They ain’t coming to your rescue, boy,” the cop with the rifle spoke for the first time.

  “You already got away with murder, Sheriff,” Boggs recapped. “That and theft of his truck and his cash. You have a lot to lose if you call more attention to yourself. I think letting a couple of city cops drive home so they can just complain about you from fifty miles away is an awfully good deal for you.”

  Nayler was staring straight at Boggs. They were shaded from the worst of the summer sun yet still sweat was pouring down Boggs’s back and he could smell his own stink, could hear his own heartbeat in his ears. His entire body was tense, arteries and veins compressed and loud.

  “You tell your boys to start shooting, though,” he said, “and you’ll get a whole lot of attention.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, boy,” Nayler said. “And if you even consider trying to besmirch my good name, you will deeply regret ever having heard of me.”

  Smith’s palms were sweaty and he was worried that if he had to aim the rifle hurriedly, he’d mishandle it. The Buick might not be thick enough to deflect many bullets. He was judging angles and who he’d shoot second, thinking of making his body thin, hiding behind the wheels, wondering which white man would panic first.

  “We have no jurisdiction out here, like you said,” Boggs said. “We just want to get back home.”

  The sheriff waited. “Then get your black asses in that car and get the hell back to Atlanta.”

  Boggs could breathe just the slightest bit easier, even though the big cop’s head swiveled the sheriff’s way, his eyes wide with shock and betrayal.

  “Slowly,” Smith whispered.

  With his left hand, Boggs opened the passenger door, still gripping his revolver with his right. He climbed into the car, eyes on the white cops. Realizing that he now had less protection from them. Fearing that this was the sheriff’s ruse and the command to fire was coming.

  Smith put his left foot into the car and stood with his right on the running board, though this model seemed to be fading out the gangster-­style boards and he could barely manage to stand upright, leaning with his chest against the roof of the car, the rifle pinned there but still in the white cops’ view.

  Because the car was perpendicular to the road, Boggs had to shift to reverse to give himself some space, backing ever closer to the white cops. They did not back up. Nor did they holster their weapons. There were even bees in the goddamn car. Boggs had to take his eyes from the whites for a moment as he shifted the car again—three-point turns were not something he had much experience with, let alone one-handed and with firearms involved.

  Smith kept his eyes trained on the white cop with the rifle. Keeping all of them in his vision but focusing on that one. He wanted to give the sheriff one last glance, but it wasn’t worth the risk.

  The white cops were motionless as Boggs pressed the gas and the white men receded like two-dimensional props, Western-style shooting range targets looking more flat and lifeless with every second.

  “ ‘Sniper twice decorated?’ ” Smith said when he got back in the car. “I spent the war in a goddamn tank.”

  “It scared ’em, though.”

  “Just drive, and faster.”

  Silence for a good ten minutes when Boggs finally said, “We need to warn them.”

  “When we’re a hell of a lot safer than this. Back in Atlanta.”

  Boggs hated himself for agreeing with his partner. They needed to get out of the country. There was no telling where other white cops might have set up a roadblock, or just have a squad car ready to chase them down with more firepower and gunmen than Peacedale had mustered. Any minute they wasted by pulling over and making a phone call could make all the difference.

  But what was happening to what was left of the Ellsworths? What would those Peacedale cops do next, after feeling like they’d been one-upped by a pair of Negro cops? What would happen to all that unquenched bloodlust, that sense that the order of their universe had been threatened?

  He drove on.

  After another twenty minutes, he couldn’t take it. He pulled over into a filling station.

  “Not yet!” Smith snapped. “We got longer to go.”

  “I’m not waiting any more.” Boggs left the car.

  Smith cursed under his breath and cradled a pistol in his lap. He scanned the area. Damn little to see: the filling station had two spigots, a long window, and a lone door. The pay phone was on the rear wall, and Boggs hurried toward it. Across the street was a ramshackle white house that looked abandoned but that possibly housed some unfortunates. Beyond that was nothing but peach trees baking in the late-afternoon sun.

  Boggs dropped a coin down the slot, hoping a redneck wouldn’t emerge from the building and tell him the phone was for whites only.

  He hadn’t seen any telephone poles out by the Ellsworths’ place, and he didn’t know which Peacedale Negroes, if any, owned phones. But he remembered one of the churches they’d passed on the south side of the tracks. “In Peacedale, Second Baptist Church of the Lord, please.”

  After a pause, the operator said, “Yes, sir,” and connected him.

  A woman answered on the second ring.

  “Yes, ma’am, I’m calling from out of town and I have an urgent message I need to get to the Ellsworth residence.”

  Silence for so long he feared she’d hung up on him. “Who is this?” She was old, either a preacher’s wife or a spinster so dedicated to the Lord that she spent her time helping around the office. He’d known such women all his life.

  “Ma’am, I’d rather not say, but I’m very concerned the Ellsworths are in danger right now and need to get out of their house as soon as possible. Can you please see about getting that message to them somehow?”

  She made a sound, like a sigh but more disgusted.

  “You’re too late. Fire trucks already done headed over there. Their place is on fire.”

  33

  AFTERWARD, WHEN DUNLOW woke in his bedroom with a mouth so sandpaper dry that water wasn’t so much something he craved but something that didn’t even exist, couldn’t exist, and his head was pounding and he felt nearly ill enough to roll over and empty his insides then and there, he closed his eyes again and waited and waited for the awfulness to pass and eventually just enough of it did for him to raise himself out of bed.

  What the hell had he done?

  Tonight was his off night so at least he had that to be thankful for, but here it was five o’clock in the evening and he was waking up with a hangover from all he’d done that morning. The house was quiet, which meant his sons weren’t home, thank God, though his wife was probably in the kitchen or sitting on the front porch.

  He sat there a while, trying to return to life. The phone rang.

  “Yeah?”

  “Hey, it’s Bo.”

  “Hey.”

  “Listen, I thought you’d want to hear it from me first. There ain’t gonna be no charges against the nigger cops, not murder anyh
ow. Homicide got someone else to confess to killing Poe.”

  “What?”

  “Some moonshiner. Name Illinois Richard mean anything to you?”

  Dunlow thought, which was hard. “Former boxer. Got here from Birmingham maybe three years ago.”

  “Well, he and Poe had a rivalry and were fighting over territory and he says he just happened to be walking down the street one night and there’s Poe all beat up. So he used his knife to finish the job, then dumped him in that creek on the other side of town. Boggs and Smith may have roughed Poe up, like your witness said, but they didn’t kill him.”

  Dunlow was standing now, pacing despite his headache and the short length of the cord. “Bullshit! Why the hell would the nigger confess to that?”

  “Two beat cops caught him this morning at the scene of another homicide. His girlfriend. No question on that one, and I guess he figured he’d be all manly and let us know about the other big deeds he’s done.”

  “Hellfire. Smith and Boggs put him up to it. Had to.”

  “Lionel.” Peterson paused. “I don’t like it no more’n you do. But Homicide is certain they got their man for Poe. There’s no way the nigger cops are gonna take no blame for it. They get off scot-free.”

  “They still gotta answer to me, goddammit!”

  Peterson’s voice shrunk in direct proportion to Dunlow’s. “I know.”

  “So get your ass over here and we’ll make our plans.”

  “I’m on shift.”

  “That don’t mean nothing.”

  “Dunlow. I’m calling you from the station.”

  Dunlow didn’t care if some switchboard operator might be overhearing. Let them. Let them know that there were still some men willing to make sacrifices for everyone else.

  “Get your ass over here later, then. I’m off tonight.”

  “Well, that’s the other thing. It doesn’t appear that many other men have the same appetite as you do on this.”

  “What?”