Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel (55 page)

BOOK: Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel

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That shut him up for good.
Laura stopped bitching and we tried to move on.

The world continued its insanity: Black Panther Bobby Seale insisted on his constitutional right to a lawyer of his own choosing
,
and because he kept interrupting court business, asking for something most folks took for granted, Judge Hoffman had Seale bound and gagged during each session.

Finally Hoffman decided that was too big a disruption, and severed Seale’s trial from the others.
The Chicago Eight became the Chicago Seven, and every white person in the area seemed to breathe a sigh of relief.
No one seemed to notice that Seale was shipped off to New Haven to stand on federal charges for a murder he couldn’t have committed
,
since he wasn’t in town when it occurred.

The Weathermen, feeling persecuted, went underground.
The local Panthers, who
were
persecuted, remained above ground and suffered yet another raid to their offices.

The fighting in
Viet
n
am
continued, unabated.
The St
r
ategic Arms Limitations Talks got underway between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R, presumably to make the world safer, although I doubted it.
Apollo 12 landed on the moon and the entire nation acted like it was old hat already, only a few months after the first time.

Thanksgiving seemed outrageously late, even though it fell on the
fourth
Thursday, like it always did.
That day I had a quiet dinner at my apartment with Laura and Jimmy.
After he went to bed, she snuggled in my arms for the first time in months.
She told me she’d been doing some thinking about things I used to say back when we first met.

“Like what?” I asked.

“A family has many different meanings,” she said. “It’s not just blood relatives.
When you first said that, I thought you said that for Jim.”

“I said it because it’s true.
The people who’ve loved me the longest have no blood ties to me at all, yet they’re my parents in all the ways that count.”

“I know,” she said, and burrowed in closer.
“I realized, in my pouty last few months, there are only two people who matter to me.
You and Jim.”

“Laura—”

She put a finger over my lips, stopping me.
“We have a non-traditional relationship.
I don’t want to be traditional.
Do you understand that?”

I did.
It solved a lot.
It left a lot open, but it solved a lot.

And the rift between us closed — at least for a little while.

FIFTY-SEVEN

And now it’s December, December seventh
,
to be exact — a day that shall live in infamy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt said twenty-eight years ago.
That infamy was long gone, defeated, but new infamies have arisen, and I stand in line at one of them, trying not to freeze to death in the mid-morning cold.

Althea is angry at me: I’ve brought the oldest four children here instead of taking them to church.
Jimmy stands beside me.
Lacey is subdued for the first time in months.
Jonathan shifts from foot to foot, his hands shoved in his pockets, and Keith leans against me, frightened by this strange new world.

We’re on the 2300 block of West Monroe, only one street up from the Black Panther offices.
We’re in a line that stretches down this block, around the corner, back to West Madison, and down it as far as the eye can see.

About five houses away from me, Bobby Rush stands on the front porch of 2337 West Monroe, a blue building that I
hadn’t even noticed last year when I was inspecting some houses on this block.
Bobby Rush is now the Illinois Black Panther Party Chairman, because on Thursday morning, December
fourth
, the police murdered Fred Hampton in his sleep.

The police have lied about it.
Their story is what their story is.
They raided his home at
five
in the morning, they say, because they heard he was storing weapons there.
Hampton and his cohorts returned fire, and the police, in self-defense, fired back.
Hampton and another Panther, Mark Clark, died. Four others were injured.

The surviving Panthers say the police showed up while everyone was asleep and came in shooting.

The Panthers have the evidence to back their claim up.

I’ve seen the evidence; it’s grisly. The police failed to close off the crime scene, so the Panthers are giving tours of it.
I went through the apartment yesterday.

Today I came back — this time with Jimmy, Jonathan, Lacey, and Keith.
I wouldn’t have brought them if it weren’t for Tim Minton.

“They have to go, man,” he said to me
,
with that lisp he
’s
developed while his cheekbone is healing.
“They have to know what they’re up against.”

“I’d like to see that they don’t,” I said.

But he was right.
I knew that he was right.

So I’m taking two eleven year-olds, a thirteen-year-old, and a fifteen-year-old on the tour of
a
massacre site.
They’ll walk in the front door and see hundreds of bullet holes.
They’ll go into the second bedroom — the one where Fred Hampton slept through the entire gun battle — and will see a mattress so blood-stained that even an untrained eye knows that the person who bled like that could not have lived.

His girlfriend did.
She had been in bed with him, nine
-
months pregnant, so convinced she was going to die that she clung to him, and somehow the bullets missed her.

The police dragged her out of the room, and then someone said, “He’s still breathing,” and she heard two more shots.

Fred Hampton isn’t breathing any longer.

I want to pull him aside.
I want to take him back into my apartment on that day in October and explain to him the folly of what he was doing.
It was custeristic, I said to him then, using his word, meaning: you’re going to die.

And Hampton, barely twenty-one, didn’t believe me.
He didn’t have the premonition of his own death the way Martin did.
He didn’t have the certainty, even though he knew it was a possibility.

The Panthers are saying he was drugged.
His girlfriend says he fell asleep in the middle of a conversation with his mother the night before.

With his mother.

Such a dangerous revolutionary that he fell asleep talking to his mother, the mother of his own child beside him.

And I have a wager on who drugged him. That bodyguard he brought with him when he visited me.
The only person who could have could
have
tipped off the FBI to our meeting.
O’Neal.
He’d been in the apartment that night.
He’d given Hampton a glass of Kool-Aid.

The police don’t need dumping grounds anymore.

They’re murdering children in their sleep.

And I’m taking my children through this death house.
Because it’s the only thing we can do.
We have to bear witness.

For the past month I’ve taken bodies of people who died without witnesses, without anyone to acknowledge their murders, the injustice, the horrors.
I still can’t prosecute, but I can bring them back to their families.

Fourteen years ago, Emmett Till’s mother opened her son’s funeral to the public.
She left the coffin lid up, showing how her beautiful boy’s face had been destroyed, his eye nearly falling out of his head, his features unrecognizable—so badly beaten, so badly
tortured
, that the undertaker couldn’t repair him.

I’m not even sure he tried.

That act of courage made Rosa Parks remain in her seat on a city bus only a short time later.
Made Martin Luther King support the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
The death of Emmett Till — and the witness people bore to it, seeing what had been done — was the beginning of the end of the Old South.

I’ve told Jimmy and Jonathan and Keith and Lacey that.
I’ve told them that this, the death of a man with so much potential, a man who could’ve led us like Martin did if he
’d
only found his way, might have the same effect.

If they look at what’s been done to him because he stood up for us.

If they look and understand.

If they remember.

And if they don’t ever let it happen again.

About Kris Nelscott

Kris Nelscott is an open pen name used by award-winning bestselling writer Kristine Kathryn Rusch, which she uses for historical mysteries. The first Smokey Dalton novel,
A Dangerous Road,
won the Herodotus Award for Best Historical Mystery and was short-listed for the Edgar Award for Best Novel; the second,
Smoke-Filled Rooms
, was a PNBA Book Award finalist; and the third,
Thin Walls
, was one of the
Chicago Tribune
’s best mysteries of the year.

Kirkus
chose
Days
of Rage
as one of the top ten mysteries of the year.
Entertainment Weekly
says her equals are Walter Mosley and Raymond Chandler.
Booklist
calls the Smokey Dalton books “a high-class crime series” and
Salon
says “
Kris Nelscott can lay claim to the strongest series of detective novels now being written by an American author.”