Harry Turtledove: Reincarnations

"What’s the Priest got to say?" asked the man at the front desk.

"It’s all taken care of," the first deputy answered.

"They comin’ here?"

"Nah." The first deputy sounded faintly disappointed. "It’d be too damn raw. We’d end up with the fuckin’ Feds on our case for sure."

"What’s going on, then?"

The first deputy told him. He pitched his voice too low to let Cecil Price make it out. By the way the desk man laughed, he thought it was pretty good. Price was sure he wouldn’t.

Time crawled by on hands and knees. The phone rang once, but it had nothing to do with Price and Muhammad Shabazz and Tariq Abdul-Rashid. It was a woman calling to find out if her no-account husband was sleeping off another binge in the drunk tank. He wasn’t. But it only went to show that, despite the struggle for whites’ civil rights, ordinary life in Philadelphia went on.

Around half past ten, the first deputy came tramping back to the cells again. To Cecil Price’s amazement, he had a jingling bunch of keys on a big brass key ring with him. He opened the door to Price’s cell. "Come on out, boy," he said. "Reckon I’ve got to turn you loose."

Price wanted to stick a finger in his ear to make sure he’d heard right. "You sure?" he blurted.

"Yeah, I’m sure," the deputy said. "I been askin’ around. You weren’t at the church when it went up. Neither were these assholes." He pointed into the cell that held Muhammad Shabazz and Tariq Abdul-Rashid. "Gotta let them go, too, dammit."

"You’ll hear from our lawyers," Muhammad Shabazz promised. "False arrest is false arrest, even if you think twice about it later. This is still a free country, whether you know it or not."

Although Cecil Price agreed with every word he said, he wished the Black Muslim would shut the hell up. Pissing off the deputy right when he was letting them out of jail wasn’t the smartest move in the world, not even close. But Price walked out of his cell. A moment later, Muhammad Shabazz and Tariq Abdul-Rashid walked out of theirs, too.

The deputy with the wrecking-ball belly at the front desk gave them back their wallets and keys and pocket change. "If you’re smart, you’ll get your white ass outa Philadelphia. Go on down to Meridian and never come back," he told Cecil Price. "You cause trouble around here again, you look at a black woman walkin’ down the street around here again, you show your ugly buckra face around here again, you are fuckin’ dead meat. You hear me?"

"Oh, yes, sir. I sure do hear you," Cecil Price said. That was how you played the game in Mississippi. Price hadn’t promised to do one thing the deputy said. But he’d heard him, all right. He couldn’t very well not have heard him.

"Go on, then. Get lost."

The first deputy walked out into the muggy night with the white man and the two Northern blacks. A mosquito buzzed around Price’s ear. Price slapped at it. The deputy laughed. He watched while Price and the Black Muslims got into RACE’s blue Ford wagon. Price started up the car. The deputy went on watching as he put it in gear and drove away. In the rear-view mirror, Price watched him walk back into the Neshoba County Jail.

"Maybe they really are learning they can’t pull crap like that on us," Tariq Abdul-Rashid said.

"Don’t bet on it," was Muhammad Shabazz’s laconic response. "They don’t back up unless they’ve got a reason to back up. Isn’t that right, Cecil?… Cecil?"

Cecil Price didn’t answer, not right away. His eyes were on the rear-view mirror again. He didn’t like what he saw. This time of night, driving out of a little town like Philadelphia, they should have had the road to themselves. They should have, but they didn’t. One, then two, sets of headlights followed them out of town. Price stepped on the gas. If those cars back there weren’t interested in him and his black friends, he’d lose them.

"Hey, man, take it easy," Tariq Abdul-Rashid said. "You don’t want to give the law a chance to run us in for speeding."

"We’ve got company back there," Price said. Speeding up hadn’t shaken those two cars. If anything, they were closer. And a third set of headlights was coming out of Philadelphia, zooming down Highway 19 like a bat out of hell.

Tariq Abdul-Rashid and Muhammad Shabazz looked back over their shoulders. "You think they’re on our tail, Cecil?" Tariq Abdul-Rashid asked.

Before Price could say anything, Muhammad Shabazz said everything that needed saying: "Gun it! Gun it like a son of a bitch!"

The old Ford’s motor should have roared when Cecil Price jammed the pedal to the metal. Instead, it groaned and grunted. Yeah, the wagon went faster, but it didn’t go faster fast enough. The two pairs of headlights behind the Ford got bigger and bigger, brighter and brighter, closer and closer. And the third pair, the set that got the late start, might almost have been flying along Highway 19. That was one souped-up set of wheels, and the rustbucket Price was driving didn’t have a prayer of staying ahead. Before long, whoever was driving that hot machine got right on the wagon’s tail.

Desperate now, Price killed his lights and made a screeching, sliding right onto Highway 492. Only in Mississippi, he thought, would such a miserable chunk of asphalt merit the name of highway. But if it let him shake his pursuers, he would bless its undeserved name forevermore.

Only it didn’t. The lead pursuer, the hopped-up car that had come zooming out of Philadelphia, also made the turn. Even over the growl of his own car’s engine, Cecil Price could hear its brakes screech as it clawed around the corner. Then the pursuer’s siren came on and the red light on top of the roof began to flash.

"Jesus! It’s that damn deputy again!" Price said. "What am I gonna do?"

"Can we outrun him?" Muhammad Shabazz asked as the beat-up Ford bucketed down the road.

"Not a chance in hell," Price answered. "He’s liable to start shooting at us if I don’t stop." If he got hit, or if a tire got hit, the car would fly off the road and burst into flames. That was a bad way to go.

"Maybe you better stop," Tariq Abdul-Rashid said.

"Damned if I do and damned if I don’t," Cecil Price said bitterly, but his foot had already found the brake pedal. The old blue station wagon slowed, stopped.

The deputy sheriff’s car stopped behind it, the same way it had earlier that day. This time, though, the other two cars also stopped. The big black buck of a deputy sheriff got out of his car and strode up to the Ford wagon. "I thought you were going back to Meridian if we let you out of jail."

"We were," Price answered.

"Well, you sure were taking the long way around. Get out of that car," the deputy said. That was the last thing Cecil Price wanted to do. But he thought the deputy would shoot him and the two Black Muslims right there if they refused. Reluctantly, he obeyed. Perhaps even more reluctantly, Muhammad Shabazz and Tariq Abdul-Rashid followed him.

Men were also getting out of the two cars stopped behind the deputy’s. Price’s heart sank when he saw them. There was the Priest, all right, black as the ace of spades. And there were ten or twelve other Negroes with him. Price recognized some of them as BKV men. He didn’t know for sure that the others were, but what else would they be? Some had guns. Others carried crowbars or tire irons or Louisville Sluggers. They all wore rubber gloves so they wouldn’t leave fingerprints.

"You don’t want to do this," Muhammad Shabazz said earnestly. "I’m telling you the truth-you don’t. It won’t get you what you think it will."

"Shut the fuck up, you goddamn raghead race traitor." The deputy sheriff’s voice was hard and cold as iron. "You get in the back of my car now, you hear?"

"What will you do to us?" Tariq Abdul-Rashid asked.