Dennis Lehane - The Given Day

Danny waded into the crowd, swinging his nightstick, trying to tell himself he didn’t love it, he didn’t feel his heart swell because he was bigger and stronger and faster than most and could down a man with one blow from either fist or nightstick. He took out four Letts with six swings and felt the mob turn toward him. He saw a pistol aimed at him, saw the hole in the barrel and the eyes of the young Lett wielding it, a boy really, nineteen, tops. The pistol shook, but he took little comfort from that because the kid was only fifteen feet away, and the crowd opened up a corridor between them to give him a clean shot. Danny didn’t reach for his own revolver; he’d never clear it in time.

The kid’s finger whitened against the trigger. The cylinder turned. Danny considered closing his eyes but then the kid’s arm shot straight up above his head. The pistol discharged into the sky.

Nathan Bishop stood beside the kid, rubbing his wrist where it had made contact with the kid’s elbow. He looked reasonably untarnished by the fighting, his suit a little rumpled but mostly unstained, which was saying something for a cream-colored suit in a sea of black and blue fabric and swinging fists. One of his eyeglass lenses was cracked. He stared at Danny through the good lens, both of them breathing hard. Danny felt relief, of course. And gratitude. But shame larger than all that. Shame more than anything.

A horse burst between them, its great black body trembling, its smooth flank shuddering in the air. Another horse burst through the throng followed by two more, all in full charge with riders astride them. Behind them was an army of blue uniforms, still crisp and unsoiled, and the wall of people around Danny and Nathan Bishop and the boy with the pistol collapsed. Several of the Letts had fought in guerrilla campaigns back in the motherland and knew the benefits of cut-and-run. In the mad-dash dispersal, Danny lost sight of Nathan Bishop. Within a minute, most of the Letts were running past the Opera House, and Dudley Square was suddenly littered with blue uniforms, Danny and the other men looking at one another as if to say: Did any of that just happen?

But men lay crumpled in the street and against walls as the reinforcements used their nightsticks on the few that weren’t brothers of the badge whether the bodies were moving or not. On the far fringes of the crowd, a small group of demonstrators, the last ones out apparently, were cut off by more reinforcements and more horses. Cops had cut heads and cut knees and holes that leaked from their shoulders and hands and thighs and swelling contusions and black eyes and broken arms and fat lips. Danny saw Mark Denton trying to pull himself to his feet, and he crossed to him and gave him his hand. Mark stood and applied weight to his right foot and winced.

“Broken?” Danny said.

“Twisted, I think.” Mark slung his arm around Danny’s shoulder and they walked to the loading dock on the other side of the street, Mark sucking oxygen from the air with a hiss.

“You sure?”

“Might be sprained,” Mark said. “Fuck, Dan, I lost my helmet.”

He had a cut along his hairline that had dried black and he gripped his ribs with his free arm. Danny leaned him against the loading dock and noticed two cops kneeling over Sergeant Francie Stoddard. One of them met his eyes and shook his head.

“What?” Danny said.

“He’s dead. He’s gone,” the cop said.

“He’s what?” Mark said. “No. How the fuck …?”

“He just grabbed his chest,” the cop said. “Right in the middle of it all. Just grabbed his chest and went all red and starting gasping. We got him over here, but …” The cop shrugged. “Fucking heart attack. You believe that? Here? In this?” The cop looked out at the street.

His partner still held Stoddard’s hand. “Fucking guy had less than a year till his thirty, he goes like this?” The cop was crying. “He goes like this, because of them ?”

“Jesus Christ,” Mark whispered and touched the top of Stoddard’s shoe. They’d worked together five years at D-10 in Roxbury Crossing.

“They shot Welch in the thigh,” the first cop said. “Shot Armstrong in the hand. Fuckers were stabbing guys with ice picks ?”

“There’s going to be some hell to pay,” Mark said.

“You goddamn got that right,” the crying cop said. “You can make goddamn fucking book on that.”

Danny looked away from Stoddard’s body. Ambulances rolled up Dudley Street. Across the square, a cop rose from the pavement on wobbly feet and wiped at the blood in his eyes and then tipped over again. Danny saw a cop empty a metal trash can on a prone Lett, then drop the can on the body for good measure. It was the cream-colored suit that got Danny moving. He walked toward them as the cop delivered a kick so hard it lifted his other foot off the ground.

Nathan Bishop’s face looked like a crushed plum. His teeth littered the ground near his chin. One ear was torn halfway off. The fingers of both hands pointed in all the wrong directions.

Danny put his hand on the shoulder of the cop. It was Henry Temple, a Special Squads goon.

“I think you got him,” Danny said.

Temple looked at Danny for a bit like he was searching for an apt response. Then he shrugged and walked off.

A pair of paramedics were passing and Danny said, “We got one here.”

One of the paramedics grimaced. “He ain’t wearing a badge? He’ll be lucky we get to him by sundown.” They walked off.

Nathan Bishop opened his left eye. It was startlingly white in the ruin of his face.

Danny opened his mouth. He wanted to say something. He wanted to say, I’m sorry . He wanted to say, Forgive me. Instead, he said nothing.

Nathan’s lips were sectioned into strips, but behind them spread a bitter smile.

“My name’s Nathan Bishop,” he slurred. “What’s yours, eh?”

He closed his eye again, and Danny lowered his head.

Luther had an hour for lunch, and he hustled back across the Dover Street Bridge and over to the Giddreauxs’ house on St. Botolph, which, these days, was the operating headquarters of the Boston NAACP. Mrs. Giddreaux worked there with a dozen other women pretty much every day, and it was in the very basement of the house on St. Botolph where the Crisis was printed and then mailed out to the rest of the country. Luther came home to an empty house, as he knew he would — on fine days, the girls all took their lunch in Union Park a few blocks away, and this was the finest day, thus far, of an often unforgiving spring. He let himself into Mrs. Giddreaux’s office. He sat behind her desk. He opened her drawer. He lifted the ledger out and placed it on the desk and that’s where it was sitting half an hour later when Mrs. Giddreaux came back through the door.

She hung up her coat and her scarf. “Luther, honey, what’re you doing in here?”

Luther tapped the ledger with his finger. “I don’t give this list to a policeman, he’s gonna have my wife arrested, have our baby taken from her soon as it’s born.”

Mrs. Giddreaux’s smile froze and then vanished. “Excuse me?”

Luther repeated himself.

Mrs. Giddreaux sat in the chair across from him. “Tell me all of it.”

Luther told her about everything except the vault he’d built under the kitchen floorboards on Shawmut Avenue. Until he knew what McKenna intended it for, he wasn’t going to speak of it. As he talked, Mrs. Giddreaux’s kind, old face lost its kindness and lost its age, too. It grew as smooth and unmoving as a headstone.

When he finished, she said, “You’ve never given him a thing he could use against us? Never once played the rat?”

Luther stared back at her, his mouth open.