Darktown

by Thomas Mullen

  Jesus Christ. In his months on the force, he had not yet drawn his weapon in the line of duty. For target practice at the firing range, sure. And he had many years of awful experience firing weapons of various sizes in Europe. But this was the first time he had to reach into the holster and draw, to say nothing of doing so while also taking a step back, then putting all his weight into a lunging kick at the door just beside its knob.

  The door-kicking part he excelled at: it was busted clean from its hinges. The drawing part, though, he hesitated at. Because as he entered the small kitchen he saw the figure, now an actual person, a thin, tall Negress with her hair pulled in a bun. Her eyes were large, the kind of large that weren’t usually that large but were now because a man had just charged into her house and someone else had fired a gun. There was, of course, a sharp knife in her hand. She was standing at a chopping block, diced tomatoes glistening in their juices.

  His fingers were touching the handle of his revolver. But he hadn’t drawn it yet, despite the gunshot. Signals were competing in his brain, and the thought of drawing on a cook seemed wrong. He would regret this decision.

  “Put your hands up!” he yelled.

  She dropped the knife—didn’t put it on the counter but actually clean dropped it to the floor—and grabbed from the counter what appeared to be a revolver.

  He hadn’t seen it. Now it was aimed at his heart. His fingers closed around the handle of his own gun and he began to slowly pull it out, even as he felt something cold place fingers around his heart.

  “I need you to put that down,” he managed to say.

  She managed to shake her head.

  “Let go of that!” she said, glancing at his gun, still mostly holstered.

  Many a weapon had been trained on him in Europe but never from this close, and never with eye contact. They stared at each other and breathed.

  It was actually a good thing this was happening so quickly. He would be much more nervous later. Now, though, he said with a miraculously unshaking voice, “Belle, you need to put that down.”

  She shook her head. Sweet Jesus she looked scared.

  “Don’t make me!” she yelled.

  He slowly lifted his hands, palms out, just keep very calm, girl. He didn’t raise them very high, though, his elbows bent. Putting his life at even greater risk, mainly because he still didn’t quite believe this was happening. And because he knew he wouldn’t have been able to draw fast enough anyway, with her already aimed at him. It was a small room, potential shooter and potential victim maybe seven feet from each other. Seven feet was awfully close to miss completely.

  “You haven’t been in any trouble, and you don’t want to be now.” His throat had become parched in an instant. “This is about your brother, not you.”

  A pot was on the stove. He smelled garlic. He could hear the water in the pot hissing from the pressure.

  “Leave us alone.” Gritted teeth. She had backed up a step, but now she was against the wall with nowhere else to go.

  The lid of the pot started doing that jitterbug thing.

  Rake could hear sounds of a scuffle from the other room. Whoever might have been shot was still putting up a fight. But if Dunlow had pulled the trigger, there wouldn’t be any scuffling.

  “Don’t come no closer! You aren’t going to do me like you done James!”

  “Please put it down and let’s talk.”

  Another shot from the other room. It made Rake jump, not sky-high but a quick twitch like an infielder as the pitcher releases.

  It also made Belle’s finger twitch.

  The gun in her hand fired.

  He heard it twice, or maybe she fired twice, he wasn’t sure. All he knew was that it was very, very loud in here and that he didn’t seem to have been hit by anything.

  She’d not expected the kickback, and her arms jolted at the elbows, the pistol no longer aimed at him but at the ceiling.

  He grabbed the pot handle and threw.

  The pot hit her and she screamed, or the boiling water hit her and she screamed, or both. Her hands were raised to her face and she was bent half over now and she’d dropped the gun. The wall behind her was a different color than before, dripping with something, and she kept screaming, the worst screams Rake had heard in a long while.

  He unholstered his gun and scrambled forward for hers. It was coated in hot, gummy grits and he had to shake the damn stuff off.

  Footsteps, rushing. He looked up just as a small Negro was darting into the room, eyes wide with horror. The girl’s husband, no doubt. Unarmed. Rake sprang up and aimed his revolver at him.

  “Don’t move! On the ground, now!”

  The Negro’s eyes were wide, and he obeyed only Rake’s first command. They were no more than a foot apart.

  “Belle! What did you do to her?!”

  Rake could have shot him, or if he’d had a hand free, he could have pushed the man down to the ground, then spun him to cuff him, but he had two guns in his hands. So he swung with the grits-gun and hit the husband crosswise with its butt and down he went.

  Rake kneeled on the man and cuffed his hands behind his back. Then he stuffed Belle’s gun into his pocket.

  Belle was absolutely wailing, half lying on the floor and leaning against the grits-covered wall, her legs kicking out in agony. She was clawing at her face, pulling the stuff off. He couldn’t tell if she was pulling out her own skin, too, and had to look away.

  More gunshots, four of them, not as loud as before. From the front entrance, maybe?

  “Dunlow!?”

  “I’m all right!” Dunlow shouted. Sounding not exactly all right, but not dead either. “He ran out the front!”

  She was still screaming, yelling about her face and the heat and sweet Jesus. The smells of cooking had been replaced by something far worse.

  Rake ran into the hallway.

  After Freddie had coaxed Dunlow’s gun into going off in its damned holster, things got sort of hard for Dunlow to follow.

  He hopped into the air, both in shock and from fear that he’d maybe blown off his foot. He hadn’t, luckily, and the shock of the gunshot had finally been enough to persuade Freddie to let go. Dunlow landed with one of his feet on Freddie, or maybe that came later, but anyway at some point Dunlow stomped the little bastard while attempting to box one-handed with Triple James.

  He took more punches than he could remember ever having taken in one day, indeed more than in most years, but he was so much taller than the punchy little convict that he’d managed to lean on Triple James, then wrap his left arm around the nigger’s neck, trying to choke the fight out of him. He swung Triple James into the wall and probably would have knocked him out if Freddie’s apartment had stronger walls. Instead the convict made a person-sized hole in some cheap wallpapered plywood.

  With his free hand, Dunlow reached for his holster. He was still holding Triple James in a headlock and wondering if he should shoot him point blank or just pistol-whip him when Freddie, whose hands seemed goddamn magnetized to Dunlow’s pistol barrel, knocked the gun from Dunlow’s hand. It hit the floor, firing once more.

  Even in the headlock, Triple James kept swinging at Dunlow, landing a few. But those fists had a lot less juice to them now, so Dunlow released him, pushing out with his knee to knock the convict onto the floor. Dunlow turned to Freddie, hitting him with a roundhouse that literally spun the little man in a circle. Freddie was almost exactly in the same spot when the spin ended as he’d been before, and then he collapsed.

  A crashing sound got Dunlow’s attention. Dunlow turned, looking for Triple James. The apartment door was open. Dunlow’s gun was still on the floor.

  Outside, Triple James was scrambling out of the large azalea bush he’d landed in from his second-floor leap. Dunlow ran back for his gun, returned to the doorway, and saw the convict darting across the street.
He pulled the trigger as many times as the gun would fire. Some asphalt kicked up and the back windshield of an old Ford exploded, but the only effect the shots had on Triple James was to make him run even faster, until he was out of sight around the corner.

  Dunlow was about to give chase when the world spun on him a bit and he leaned against the doorjamb. The adrenaline was kicking in and his heart was doing things it had never done before and perhaps shouldn’t when he finally felt the delayed force of every punch he’d taken.

  He slid to the floor, a woman’s awful screams the only thing that cut through the fog in his mind.

  An hour later, Rake was sitting on the sidewalk in front of the building when Dunlow planted himself there, too.

  Four squad cars blocked off the road in either direction, lights flashing. Neighbors had gathered, been shooed away, and now peered through their windows.

  The ambulance had come and gone by then, though it hadn’t taken Belle with it. She was being arrested, along with her husband, so treatment for her burns would have to wait. Rake still had the acrid singed scent of her in his nostrils.

  “That’s police work for you,” Dunlow said. “All the work and none of the glory.”

  The sun was hot on their backs, unveiled by the black clouds that must have deposited their wrath nearby but had left this neighborhood unscathed.

  “Who was it?”

  “Timpson. Got him with a single shot. Set up with a Winchester.”

  “Heard he was a sniper in France.”

  “I’d say he just proved it.”

  Rake had run to their squad car to call in a report. He’d wanted to pursue Triple James himself, but Dispatch had told him there were other cars in the area, and he had to stay in the apartment to watch over Freddie and Belle. And Dunlow, who had been on the verge of consciousness. The big fellow had revived somewhat by the time the other cops showed up, and he’d refused medical attention despite the fact that with every passing minute his face looked more and more like some awful melon gone bad.

  Dunlow asked, “You all right?”

  “Fine.” In truth, Rake’s hand hurt like hell. The pot handle had been hot, apparently, and he’d scorched his palm. Hadn’t even noticed until ten, twenty minutes later.

  They sat there for a moment. The rush had long faded and they were mentally exhausted from explaining the series of events to their superiors. The sun, seeming to sear their flesh like a pan, pressed into their necks.

  “I cannot believe I let a woman get the drop on me.”

  “Happens. The grits, though, will be harder to explain.”

  “Story must be halfway across the Department by now.”

  “Don’t sweat it. Hell, we’re the ones found him. Somebody else got to open the jar, but we pried it loose for ’em.”

  Some reporters lingered by the squad cars but they were being kept at bay.

  “You could have lied,” Dunlow said.

  “Couldn’t think of one fast enough.”

  Dunlow laughed. “Need to work on that. It’s an important skill in this line of work.”

  Rake realized his hands were shaking. He hugged them to his chest, not realizing that made him look even more unwound.

  “Fuck,” he breathed, amazed at what was happening to his own body.

  “Just wait on it to pass,” Dunlow said quietly.

  Rake had never been much of a drinker but Lord Jesus he could have used one then. He felt a shiver in his body, but the opposite of the way they usually work, this one starting from his hands and working its effect up until it reached his neck. He swiveled his head a few times as if trying to unscrew it from his neck. His teeth were chattering.

  “Been doing this a long while,” Dunlow said after a minute, “and I’ve only stared down the barrel one time. Long while ago. And he sure as hell never pulled the trigger like she just did.”

  How had she missed? Lord, the luck.

  As amazing as her missed shot, Rake realized, was the fact that, of all the cops in Atlanta, it was Dunlow who’d correctly deduced where the convict would be. Every other officer had been chasing down dead leads and outdated information, but Dunlow knew better. Why hadn’t Rake walked in with his gun drawn? Why hadn’t he shot her? Because he didn’t think Dunlow could possibly have been right about this apartment harboring Triple James. He had believed to his bones that Dunlow simply wanted to bully some poor Negroes, far from the real action. Rake had refused to play along by walking in with his weapon drawn. He did not want to be party to terrorizing innocent people. As a reward for that attitude, he’d wound up grievously injuring a woman instead.

  Dunlow clapped him on the shoulder. Almost hugging him. That bit of human contact, not at all what Rake would have expected from his partner, proved to be exactly what his own body needed. His nerves seemed to stop firing. He took a breath and his rib cage relaxed.

  “You did good,” Dunlow said.

  Later there would be ample time to deconstruct the myriad ways in which they had each fucked up. But for now they sat there, while other cops cleaned up the mess and joked about Triple James’s agility and cleaned grits from the kitchen wall and floor.

  “She’s burned to all hell.” Rake’s jaw started to behave itself again.

  “That she is,” Dunlow said. “Like burnt bacon.”

  “If I’d walked in with my gun in my hand, she never would have picked hers up.”

  “Or she would have tried it and she’d be dead now and you’d be sitting here feeling guilty for killing a nigger girl instead of just maiming her.”

  The phrase maiming her, the finality of it, was not what Rake wanted to hear. He sat there and tried not to fixate on the images of her head, the smell of skin burned liquid.

  Dunlow hit Rake in the muscle of the shoulder. Hard enough to snap someone out of a coma. “Hey. Don’t you feel guilty for a thing. You might be dead if you’d done different, or she might be, or both. This ain’t on you. This is on Triple James and them that harbored him. You hear me?”

  Rake nodded.

  “Say it.”

  “It’s on them.”

  Dunlow’s eyes had been focused and intense, probably the same way they were whenever he told his linebacker sons during halftime to hit harder goddammit. Then they softened, and he gave Rake another shoulder clap.

  “You did good, kid. You lived to tell about it, and every bad joke another cop tells about you maiming her is one more bad joke you wouldn’t have gotten to hear if you were dead.”

  Rake tried to untangle that sentence while he looked at the palm of his right hand, the blister already forming, a bunched whiteness emerging from all that red.

  3

  SUMMER WEATHER IN Atlanta came in one size: big. There were big storms and big winds when those storms came and sometimes a big tornado afterward, then big floods. Or it was big heat, as though the sun had veered out of orbit and was pressing closer and closer, determined to exert itself on the personal space of everyone in the city, get right up next to you, breathe in your face, and laugh at your inability to do anything about it. The one fortunate thing about being on the night shift, Boggs figured, was that it was slightly less grueling to be walking around the city in the dark.

  He and Smith were walking the beat on a quiet Tuesday night. Lightning occasionally streaked the sky like a distant, silent warning.

  Then another flash, closer still, and the sound was not thunder.

  “Gunshot.” Smith said what Boggs was thinking. Then a second shot, and glass breaking, and a woman’s scream.

  They stood at the intersection of Edgewood and Howell, and the sounds were coming from the south. They unholstered their pistols and raced down the street, where in the distance they could see a figure escaping into the night. They heard shouting closer by, and as they ran they saw two people standing on the front porch of a two-story bri
ck apartment building. A man leaned on the porch railing, a woman holding something to his forehead.

  “Were you shot?” Smith called out at them, stopping.

  “Mind your own business,” the woman hollered back, not even looking at them.

  “Police!” Smith tried again. “Have you been shot?”

  She looked up now, surprised. “No. We fine.”

  “Stay there,” Boggs instructed them, then he and his partner continued to run down Howell, but that brief pause was enough: whoever they were chasing was gone.

  Five minutes later they returned to the couple on the porch. They said their names were Wilma and Raymond Moore, they appeared to be in their late thirties, and they seemed more annoyed than alarmed at whatever had just occurred. She wore a loose gray dress and her hair was pulled back in a bun with a red kerchief that matched the one she was pressing into his forehead. He wore a janitor’s blue uniform shirt and tan pants, and his forehead was giving out more blood than his wife could clean right then. They claimed someone had been trying to climb into their first-floor bedroom, where she had been sleeping, when Raymond, who was returning from work, happened upon the would-be burglar. He’d wrestled the man from behind, taken an elbow to the forehead, and at some point the assailant had fired the errant shots and escaped. This scant information came from them grudgingly, and the officers could sense there was more they weren’t being told. Plus, Wilma appeared to have some makeup on—she did not look like a woman who had been asleep a moment ago—and Raymond had liquor on his breath.

  “Did you see his face?” Smith asked.

  “Look, we’re fine now,” Raymond said. “We’re okay.”

  “Why you even bothering about any of this?” she asked.

  “Because we’re police officers,” Smith replied. “It’s what we do.”

  “We didn’t call you here,” Raymond said.

  “We heard the gunshots.”

  “Whyn’t you mind your business?” she asked.