Neon Mirage Read Free

the notorious Colts, but it still chilled me, momentarily, to be gliding through the very black area where the Colts had, back in 1919, started the city’s biggest race riot. It should be kept in mind that one member of the Colts publicly derided the Ku Klux Klan as “nigger lovers.” On this very street, not so many years ago, blacks had been shot on sight, residences had been burned and dynamited, shops looted. That “nice” white neighborhood, a few blocks over, had been the scene of reprisals, as colored world war veterans dug out their service weapons and returned fire, attacked streetcars, turned over autos, destroyed property. In four days, twenty whites died, fourteen colored died, and a thousand-some others of both races were injured. My father, an old union man who had no truck with bigots, had told me the story many times. It was his favorite example of “man’s inhumanity to man.” In my time I’ve seen plenty more.
    This stretch of Bronzeville was so shabby that the riot might have taken place here last week, instead of a few decades ago. Some storefronts were boarded up, as if the depression were still here. For many of these people, it still was, of course. Always would be, probably. An occasional prosperous business—a barber shop, a laundry, a drugstore—seemed the exception, not the rule; the streets were thick with hot, sweating coloreds, men mostly. The curbs were all but empty of parked cars. This was a poor neighborhood. The cars on this street were moving.
    Actually, ours was slowing to a stop; maybe it makes me a bigot, too, but in a neighborhood this colored, this poor, I feel uncomfortable whenever a traffic light insists I stop. For a moment I was glad I had a shotgun in my lap.
    Up ahead, a gray Buick sedan had stopped at the light; a shabby-looking green Ford delivery truck, with a tan tarp covering its skeletal frame, some orange crates visible in the back end, rolled past Walt and me and came to a slow stop in the righthand lane. I sat up.
    “That truck,” I said, pointing.
    We were poised just behind Ragen’s car. I had to speak up, because a train was rumbling by on the nearby El; it was to our left, just back of these ramshackle buildings along State Street.
    “Huh?” Walt said. He was a puffy-looking, heavy-set man of fifty-some, with hooded eyes. Despite all that, despite the “huh” as well, he was a hardnosed, alert dick.
    “No license plates,” I shouted, over the El.
    Walt sat forward. “They’re slowing next to Ragen—”
    They were indeed; rather than pulling up to the intersection of State and Pershing, next to the gray sedan, they had stopped next to the Lincoln.
    And the tan tarp on that same side was parting, down the middle, like theater curtains.
    The barrels of two shotguns slid into view. Shiny black metal caught some dying sun and winked at us.
    “Christ!” I said, and hopped out, shotgun in my hands, feet slapping cement, firing at the truck.
    Or trying to.
    The sawed-off jammed. I didn’t even know the fucking things could jam! But the trigger simply wouldn’t squeeze back. I knew the thing was loaded; it wasn’t mine, it was Bill Tendlar’s, the op I was replacing, but I had checked it and it was loaded when I left the office…
    And now the afternoon was interrupted by shotgun fire, but not mine, not mine, as the two barrels extending like long black snouts from the side of the delivery truck delivered on Ragen’s car, ripping the metal of the front right door, just under the absent rider’s open window, but you could barely hear the blasts, what with the roar of the El. The train made a great silencer.
    Up ahead the traffic light had changed, but the gray sedan before Ragen was keeping its position. Whether the driver had panicked (in which case you’d think the asshole would hit his gas pedal and hightail it away) or was in on the hit, I couldn’t say.
    In fact all I could think to say was, “Shit! You bastards,” as I moved quickly