Streets of Fire Read Free

its tip scurried across the page.
    ‘The body was found buried in a football field off Twenty-third.’
    The flight of the pencil slowed.
    ‘Negro,’ Ben said.
    The pencil stopped. McCorkindale looked up. ‘You mean you got a little Bearmatch girl here?’ he asked.
    ‘That’s right.’
    The pencil dropped to the desk and McCorkindale leaned back in his chair. ‘How old are you, Ben? Thirty-five? Forty?’
    ‘Thirty-seven.’
    ‘And been living in Birmingham all that time?’
    Ben nodded.
    ‘Then you ought to know better than to waste your time on something like this,’ McCorkindale said. ‘They don’t report nobody missing out of Bearmatch.’ He squinted slightly. ‘Haven’t you ever done that beat before?’
    ‘No.’
    McCorkindale shook his head. ‘Well, they got their own way of doing things over there. They don’t come to us with things like this. Right or wrong, they just don’t do it. If they got somebody missing, they do all the looking their own selves.’
    ‘This little girl had to belong to somebody,’ Ben said.
    ‘I’m not saying she didn’t,’ McCorkindale said. ‘But it just don’t matter, because they don’t report nobody missing out of Bearmatch.’ He shifted slightly in his chair, and the springs groaned painfully under his weight. ‘How long you been a detective, Ben?’
    ‘Five years.’
    McCorkindale smiled confidently. ‘Well, I been sitting at this same desk for a lot longer than that, and they’s not ever been a missing person report done for anybody out of Bearmatch. They just don’t come to us with stuff like that.’
    ‘Well, it’s not just a missing person,’ Ben said, ‘it’s a murder case. Somebody shot this little girl in the back of the head.’
    McCorkindale smiled slyly. ‘And the guy that did it, he’ll end up with a bullet in his own head, too, or sliced up like a big old piece of pie.’ He laughed quietly. ‘Don’t worry, Ben, he won’t get away with killing no little girl. Not in Bearmatch. Not for a minute. Because they’ll handle it among themselves, and to tell you the truth, they’ll get the job done a lot faster than we ever could.’
    Ben stared at him, unconvinced.
    ‘I mean it,’ McCorkindale said emphatically. ‘They’ll give the son of a bitch a real fair trial. Probably in some alley somewhere, or in the back of a shothouse. Then they’ll cut his goddamn throat and that’ll be the end of it.’
    ‘All right,’ Ben said wearily. It seemed useless to argue any further. ‘But if anything does come in, let me know.’
    ‘You’ll be the first to hear about it, Ben,’ McCorkindale assured him. ‘The very first.’
    *
    Ben walked back to his own desk, then sat down. Besides McCorkindale, he was entirely alone in the cramped detective bullpen. Several metal cots had been set up to accommodate the increased manpower which had been brought in to deal with the demonstrations. They remained rumpled and unmade, their sheets and blankets spilling over the sides or resting in tangled heaps on the bare mattresses. Outside the dim, unwashed windows, sirens rang continually as one paddy wagon after another made its way down the avenue, then turned abruptly and dove toward the basement of the building. In that dark, concrete cavern, the demonstrators would be hustled out of the sweltering wagons and rushed upstairs to the large holding cells the Chief had set aside for them. It had been going on like this for days, and everyone was exhausted. As the demonstrations had continued, everything had become increasingly on edge. At first there had been some talk of handling King as the police in Albany, Georgia, had, killing him with kindness, ‘filling up the jails, of course,’ as Luther himself had put it one day in the detective bullpen, ‘but doing it politely.’ It was a way of handling things that quite a few people in the department had rallied behind at first. But as the weeks had passed, the better part of that idea had gotten