Streets of Fire

Streets of Fire

Thomas H. Cook

A MysteriousPress.com

Open Road Integrated Media ebook

FOR ROBERT WEST

AND J. WILLIAM BROADWAY

– SOUTHERNERS –

AND FOR

FATIMA GOLDMAN

– CITIZEN OF HER OWN LAND –

The author would like to thank his students,

friends and colleagues at

Packer Collegiate Institute for their kindness,

stimulation and support.

BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA

MAY 1963

ONE

Ben scribbled into his notebook, balancing the radio mike on his shoulder while he wrote.

‘I’m on surveillance,’ he said irritably, ‘and King’s still talking.’ He glanced up toward the church. He could see the crowd shifting excitedly as the people stood packed together tightly on its wide cement steps.

‘I got to pull you off for a minute,’ the dispatcher said. ‘We got a body down in that old football field off Twenty-third Street.’

‘Twenty-third Street?’ Ben asked. ‘Why don’t you let the Langleys handle it?’ He kept his pencil poised on the page.

‘Nobody knows where they are,’ the dispatcher told him. ‘You know what it’s like at headquarters.’

Ben knew exactly what it was like, and as he looked out toward the crowded cement steps of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, they reminded him of the chaos which had overtaken police headquarters as well since the demonstrations had begun. It was a hot May. The jails were already choked with everything from dentists and lawyers to half-blind old women, and every man in the department was on full duty to deal with them. Both uniformed patrolmen and plainclothes detectives slept in their cars or in makeshift dormitories which the department had set up in the hallways and storage rooms of City Hall. Sometimes, as Ben had already complained, the whole place looked more like a skid-row flophouse than a government building.

‘You read me, Ben?’ the dispatcher asked.

‘Yeah, all right,’ Ben said drearily.

‘That old football field off Twenty-third,’ the dispatcher reminded him.

‘I’ll get there as soon as I can,’ Ben said. He clicked off the radio, snapped it back into its cradle and hit the ignition. The engine groaned fitfully in the steamy air, and several of the people who stood crowded together around the old brick church glanced toward him, their brown eyes watching him silently as he pulled away.

It took no more than a few minutes for him to make it all the way across town to the football field. There was almost no traffic, and scarcely anyone on the streets. It was as if all the people who lived in the downtown black district of the city had been drained out of it, so that the whole area now existed only in the ghostly remains of deserted streets and buildings. The sloping wooden porches were empty, along with the weedy yards and plain dirt driveways of the railroad shanties that lined the bumpy, potted streets. Occasionally, an old man would nod to him as he drove past, or a little half-naked child might wave, but it was as if all the rest of them, nearly the whole black population, had been funneled into the few concentrated blocks of the downtown business district. That was where they gathered to block traffic or seize lunch counters or simply march in long dark lines, silently, determinedly, either staring straight ahead or glancing about apprehensively, as if looking for that menacing white tank the Chief had brought in to control the situation.

The football field at Twenty-third Street was as deserted as the surrounding neighborhood. Not even a single uniformed patrolman had been sent on ahead to stand guard over the body, and Ben guessed that someone had simply stumbled onto it and anonymously called in what he’d found, and that everyone but himself, now suddenly appointed as the lone centurion of Bearmatch, had already been far too busy to bother with such a little thing.

He shook his head irritably, then took off his hat and wiped the sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of his jacket. Across the field, the noonday sun struck piercingly toward him, and in its bright glare, he could see only the hazy outline of the goalpost which stood shakily at the opposite end of the field.

For a moment he thought that it might all be a hoax, a prank call, or just some old wino whose imagination had gotten away from him. But as he made his way across the littered ground, his eyes slowly began to focus on what looked like a small dark ball perched motionlessly on the bare red ground beneath the goalpost. As he continued forward, the ball became a tiny fist thrusting out of the dirt, its fingers curled toward the palm as if trying to grab for something which still hung in the air above the ground.