The Given Day (75 page)

THE GIVEN DAY"Nigger fight," someone called.

Old Byron landed on the bare floor and the glass shards popped all over him and all around him and he tried to cover up with his arms but the glass hit him anyway, one shard taking off a cheek, another carving a steak off his outer thigh.

"You going to kill him, boy?"

Luther turned and looked at three white men to his left. They were swimming in booze.

"Might could," he said.

He climbed through the window and into the store and the broken glass and Old Byron Jackson.

"What kinda debts?"

Old Byron huffed his breath and then hissed it and grabbed his thigh in his hands and let out a low moan.

"I asked you a question."

Behind him one of the white men chuckled. "You hear? He axed him a question."

"What kinda debts?"

"What kind you think?" Old Byron ground his head back into the glass and arched his back.

"You using, I take it."

"Used my whole life. Opium, not heroin," Old Byron said. "Who you think supplied Jessie Tell, fool?"

Luther stepped on Old Byron's ankle and the old man gritted his teeth.

"Don't say his name," Luther said. "He was my friend. You ain't." One of the white men called, "Hey! You going to kill him, shine, or what?"

Luther shook his head and heard the men groan and then scuttle off.

"Ain't going to save you, though, Old Byron. You die, you die. Came all the way up here just to kill one of your own for that shit you put in you?" Luther spit on the glass pebbles.

Old Byron spit blood up at Luther, but all it did was land on his own shirt. "Never liked your ass, Luther. You think you special."

624DENNIS LEHANE

Luther shrugged. "I am special. Any day aboveground that I ain't you or I ain't that?" He jerked his thumb behind him. "You're goddamned fucking correct I'm special. Ain't afraid of them anymore, ain't afraid of you, ain't afraid of this here color of my skin. Fuck all that forever."

Old Byron rolled his eyes. "Like you even less."

"Good." Luther smiled. He crouched by Old Byron. "I 'spect you'll live, old man. You get back on that train to Tulsa. Hear? And when you get off it, you go run your sad ass right to Smoke and tell him you missed me. Tell him it don't matter none, though, because he ain't going to have to look hard for me from now on." Luther lowered his face until he was close enough to kiss Old Byron Jackson. "You tell Smoke I'm coming for him." He slapped his good cheek once, hard. "I'm coming home, Old Byron. You tell Smoke that. You don't?" Luther shrugged. "I'll tell him myself."

He stood and crossed the broken glass and stepped through the window. He never looked back at Old Byron. He worked his way through the feverish white folk and the screams and the rain and the storm of the hive and knew he was done with every lie he'd ever allowed himself to believe, every lie he'd ever lived, every lie.

Scollay Square. Court Square. The North End. Newspaper Row. Roxbury Crossing. Pope's Hill. Codman and Eggleston Squares.

The calls came in from all over the city, but nowhere more voluminously than in Thomas Coughlin's precinct. South Boston was blowing up.

The mobs had emptied the stores along Broadway and thrown the goods to the street. Thomas couldn't find even the strayest hair of logic in that--at least use what you looted. From the inner harbor to Andrew Square, from the Fort Point Channel to Farragut Road--not a single window in a single business stood intact. Hundreds of homes had suffered similar fates. East and West Broadway swelled with the worst of the populace, ten thousand strong and growing. Rapes--rapes, Thomas thought with clenched teeth--had occurred in public view, three on

THE GIVEN DAYWest Broadway, one on East Fourth, another at one of the piers along Northern Avenue.

And the calls kept coming in:

The manager of Mully's Diner beaten unconscious when a roomful of patrons decided not to pay their bills. The poor sod at Haymarket Relief now with a broken nose, a shattered eardrum, and half a dozen missing teeth.

At Broadway and E, some fun-loving fellas drove a stolen buggy over the sidewalk and into the front window of O'Donnell's Bakery. That wasn't enough revelry, however--they had to set it afire. In the process, they torched the bakery and burned seventeen years of Declan O'Donnell's dreams to soot.

Budnick Creamery--destroyed. Connor & O'Keefe's--ash. Up and down Broadway, haberdashers, tailors, pawnshops, produce stores, even a bicycle shop--all gone. Either burned to the ground or smashed beyond salvage.

Boys and girls, most younger than Joe, hurled eggs and rocks from the roof of Mohican Market, and the scant few officers Thomas could afford to send reported they were helpless to fire back at children. Responding firemen complained of the same thing.

And the latest report-- a streetcar forced to stop at the corner of Broadway and Dorchester Street because of all the goods piled in the intersection. The mob added boxes, barrels, and mattresses to the pile and then someone brought some gasoline and a box of matches. The occupants of the streetcar were forced to flee the car along with the driver and most were beaten while the crowd rushed onto the car, tore the seats from their metal clamps, and tossed them through the windows.

What was this addiction to broken glass? That's what Thomas wanted to know. How was one to stop this madness? He had a mere twenty-two policemen under his command, most sergeants and lieutenants, most well into their forties, plus a contingent of useless frightened volunteers.

"Captain Coughlin?"

626DENNIS LEHANE

He looked up at Mike Eigen, a recently promoted sergeant, standing in the doorway.

"Jesus, Sergeant, what now?"

"Someone sent a contingent of Metro Park Police in to patrol Southie."

Thomas stood. "No one told me."

"Not sure where the order came from, Cap', but they're pinned down."

"What?"

Eigen nodded. "St. Augustine's Church. Guy's are dropping." "Bullets?"

Eigen shook his head. "Rocks, Cap'."

A church. Brother officers being stoned. At a church. In his precinct.

Thomas Coughlin didn't know he'd overturned his desk until he heard it crack against the floor. Sergeant Eigen took a step back. "Enough," Thomas said. "By God, enough."

Thomas reached for the gun belt he hung on his coat tree every morning.

Sergeant Eigen watched him buckle the gun belt. "I'd say so, Cap'."

Thomas reached for the bottom left drawer of his overturned desk. He lifted the drawer out and propped it on the two upper drawers. He removed a box of .32 shells and stuffed it in his pocket. Found a box of shotgun shells and placed them in the opposite pocket. He looked up at Sergeant Eigen. "Why are you still here?"

"Cap'?"

"Assemble every man still standing in this mausoleum. We've got a donnybrook to attend." Thomas raised his eyebrows. "And we shan't be fooling about in that regard, Sergeant."

Eigen snapped him a salute, a smile blowing wide across his face. Thomas found himself smiling back as he pulled his shotgun off the rack over the file cabinet. "Hop to it now, son."

Eigen ran from the doorway as Thomas loaded his shotgun, loving THE GIVEN DAYthe snick-snick of the shells sliding into the magazine. The sound of it returned his soul to his body for the first time since the walkout at five-forty-five. On the floor lay a picture of Danny the day he'd graduated from the Academy, Thomas himself pinning the badge to his chest. His favorite photograph.

He stepped on it on his way out the door, unable to deny the satisfaction that filled him when he heard the glass crunch.

"You don't want to protect our city, boy?" he said. "Fine. I will."

When they exited the patrol cars at St. Augustine's, the crowd turned toward them. Thomas could see the Metro Park cops trying to hold the mob back with billy clubs and drawn weapons, but they were already bloody, and the piles of rocks littering the white limestone steps gave testament to a pitched battle these coppers had been losing.

What Thomas knew about a mob was simple enough--any change in direction forced it to lose its voice if only for a matter of seconds. If you owned those seconds, you owned the mob. If they owned it, they owned you.

He stepped out of his car and the man nearest him, a Gustie who went by the moniker of Filching Phil Scanlon, laughed and said, "Well, Captain Cough--"

Thomas split his face to the bone with the butt of his shotgun. Filching Phil dropped like a head-shot horse. Thomas laid the muzzle of his shotgun on the shoulder of the Gustie behind him, Big Head Sparks. Thomas tilted the muzzle toward the sky and fired and Big Head lost the hearing in his left ear. Big Head Sparks wavered, his eyes instantly glazed, and Thomas said to Eigen, "Do the honors, Sergeant."

Eigen hit Big Head Sparks in the face with his service revolver, and that was the last of Big Head for the night.

Thomas pointed his shotgun at the ground and fi red.

The mob backed up.

"I'm Captain Thomas Coughlin," he called and stomped his foot 628DENNIS LEHANE down on Filching Phil's knee. He didn't get the sound he'd been after, so he did it again. This time he got the sweet crack of bone followed by the predictable shriek. He waved his arm and the eleven men he'd been able to pull together spread along the fringe of the crowd.

"I'm Captain Thomas Coughlin," he repeated, "and be of no illusion-- we intend to spill blood." He swept his eyes across the faces in the mob. "Your blood." He turned to the Metro Park Police officers on the stairs of the church. There were ten of them, and they seemed to have shrunk into themselves. "Level your weapons or stop calling yourselves officers of the law."

The crowd took another step back as the Metro Park cops extended their arms.

"Cock them!" Thomas shouted.

They did, and the crowd took several more steps back.

"If I see anyone holding a rock," Thomas called, "we shoot to kill."

He took five steps forward, the shotgun coming to rest on the chest of a man with a rock in his hand. The man dropped the rock and then urinated down his left leg. Thomas considered mercy and quickly deemed it inappropriate for the atmosphere. He opened the urinator's forehead with his shotgun butt and stepped over him.

"Run, you wretched curs." He swept his eyes across them. "RUN!" No one moved--they looked too shocked--and Thomas turned to Eigen, to the men on the fringe, to the Metro Park cops.

"Fire at will."

The Metro Park cops stared back at him.

Thomas rolled his eyes. He drew his service revolver, raised it above his head, and fired six times.

The men got the point. They began to discharge their weapons into the air and the crowd exploded like drops from a shattered water bucket. They ran up the street. They ran and ran, darting into alleys and down side streets, banging off overturned cars, falling to the sidewalk, stomping on one another, hurling themselves into storefronts and landing on the broken glass they'd created only an hour before.

Thomas flicked his wrist and emptied his shell casings onto the THE GIVEN DAYstreet. He laid the shotgun at his feet and reloaded his service revolver. The air was sharp with cordite and the echoes of gunfire. The mob continued its desperate flight. Thomas holstered his revolver and reloaded his shotgun. The long summer of impotence and confusion faded from his heart. He felt twenty-five years old.

Tires squealed behind him. Thomas turned as one black Buick and four patrol cars pulled to a stop as a soft rain began to fall. Superintendent Michael Crowley exited the Buick. He carried his own shotgun and wore his service revolver in a shoulder holster. He sported a fresh bandage on his forehead, and his fine dark suit was splattered with egg yolk and bits of shell.

Thomas smiled at him and Crowley gave him a tired smile in return.

"Time for a little law and order, wouldn't you say, Captain?" "Indeed, Superintendent."

They walked up the center of the street as the rest of the men dropped in behind them.

"Like the old days, Tommy, eh?" Crowley said as they started to make out the outer edge of a fresh mob concentrated in Andrew Square two blocks ahead.

"Just what I was thinking, Michael."

"And when we clear them here?"

When we clear them. Not if. Thomas loved it.

"We take Broadway back."

Crowley clapped a hand on Thomas's shoulder.

"Ah, how I missed this."

"Me, too, Michael. Me, too."

Mayor Peters's chauffeur, Horace Russell, glided the Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost along the fringes of the trouble, never once entering a street so strewn with debris or the throngs that they would have been hard-pressed to get back out again. And so, while the populace rioted, its mayor observed them from a remove, but not so much of a remove that he couldn't hear their terrible war cries, their shrieks and 630DENNIS LEHANE high-pitched laughter, the shock of sudden gunfire, the incessant shattering of glass.

Once he'd toured Scollay Square, he thought he'd seen the worst of it, but then he saw the North End, and not long thereafter, South Boston. He realized that nightmares so bad he'd never dared dream them had come to fruition.

The voters had handed him a city of peerless reputation. The Athens of America, the birthplace of the American Revolution and two presidents, seat to more higher education than any other city in the nation, the Hub of the universe.

And on his watch, it was disassembling itself brick by brick.

They crossed back over the Broadway Bridge, leaving behind the flames and screams of the South Boston slum. Andrew Peters told Horace Russell to take him to the nearest phone. They found one at the Castle Square Hotel in the South End, which was, for the moment, the only quiet neighborhood they'd passed through tonight.

With the bell staff and the manager conspicuously watching, Mayor Peters called the Commonwealth Armory. He informed the soldier who answered who he was and told him to get Major Dallup to the phone on the double "Dallup here."

"Major. Mayor Peters."