Thomas Cook - Streets of Fire

‘Yes.’

‘I heard it was real bad.’

‘It was.’

‘I hope something can be done about it,’ Lamar added, as if in conclusion. ‘It shouldn’t be left to rest.’

For a moment Ben saw Charlie Breedlove’s ravaged body as it hung lifelessly from the tree, the head slumped forward, concealing the blasted face. ‘It won’t be,’ he said.

THIRTY-FIVE

Ben glanced down at the address Lamar had given him, matching it carefully with the small frame house which faced him from across the street. The house itself looked bleak and untended, and the yard which stretched out in front of it was bare except for occasional clusters of wild onions or crabgrass. A stand of poke salad rose along the sides of the tiny cement porch, but there were no flowers or green shrubbery to relieve the overall feeling of abandonment.

The driveway was little more than two parallel ruts in the muddy ground, but even from his position across the street, Ben could see recently made tire tracks. For a moment he stared at them, as if the pattern of the tread marks might suddenly form itself into a written message. Then, slowly, he settled his eyes once again upon the house.

Despite the heat its windows remained tightly closed with wooden shutters, as if someone were trying to seal off the interior, protect it from prying eyes. For a long time Ben watched the shutters, trying to peer through their bleak, unpainted slats. He was looking for movement, a passing shadow, anything that might signal someone’s presence in the house. Finally he gave up, drew in a long slow breath and got out of his car.

He circled the house once, then again, concentrating on the windows. Shutters had been put up over most of them, but a few had simply had their glass panes covered over with a thick, impenetrable black paint on the inside.

The back door was nailed shut, and the front was secured by what Ben assumed to be a dead bolt. He knew that he would have to batter the door down, that it would not simply spring open if he slammed into it. Once again he circled the house, his eyes searching for some less daunting entrance. But the house had been converted into a wooden fortress, impregnable to the usual means.

He circled the house once again, then shrugged helplessly. He couldn’t simply take the fireman’s ax from the trunk of his car and splinter the door. For a moment he stood silently in the still, dark air and stared at the house, his eyes moving along the tiny porch, then up the front door, and finally over the drooping metal drains to where a short brick chimney sat firmly at the crest of the roof. A dark, smudgy layer surrounded the chimney vents, and Ben realized instantly that the chimney had once been used to draw up the thick, black smoke of a coal stove. Because of that, the house had to have a coal chute somewhere along its foundation.

It took him only a few minutes to find it, a small square which had been cut out of the cement foundation and covered over with a flimsy wooden door. Ben glanced around, hoping that he had not been seen, then crawled quickly through the hole.

In the dank, musty darkness, he could see a square made of thin lines of light He lowered himself onto his belly and slowly pulled himself across the ground until he was directly beneath the light. Then he turned over and pressed upward, his hand flat against the underfloor. The tiny metal hinges of the trapdoor creaked very slightly as it opened, flooding the crawlspace with light.

For a moment he waited, his back pressed against the ground, and listened. Then he pulled himself up slowly, opening the trapdoor further and further until it fell backward and slammed onto the floor.

He got to his feet quickly, hoisted himself up into the house, then closed the trapdoor. A single lamp was burning in the room, and in its faded yellow glow Ben could see a huge blue circle painted on the opposite wall. Inside the circle two black zigzag lines ran parallel to one another and vertically from the lower curve of the circle. Two words had been painted in white, their full letters pressing out against the dark lines. They spelled out the words PURE BLOOD. Two grainy photographs had been taped to the wall on either side of the blue circle. They showed a young white girl being kissed passionately by an old Negro man who stared wickedly at the camera.

Ben turned slowly, allowing his eyes to search the room item by item. Several high-powered hunting rifles leaned together in one corner, along with a scattering of automatic pistols. Boxes of ammunition were stacked beside the guns, arranged by caliber, their tops already opened for immediate access.

A single wooden cot rested just to the left, and beyond it, a small metal desk whose sides were covered with slogans. There was a mail-order catalogue open on the desk. It was from a weapons importer, and it displayed two full-color ads for various foreign-made automatic rifles.

Ben stepped over immediately, picked up the catalogue and looked at the mailing address. It had been sent to Teddy Langley.

The desk’s top drawer was not locked, and Ben opened it. There were pencils, pens, sheets of paper and a stack of twenty or thirty copies of the same picture that hung on the wall. Someone had scrawled a sentence above each photograph: Is this what you want for your children????

The second drawer was also open, and as Ben quickly riffled through it, he found more catalogues of weapons and paramilitary materials, along with messages and memos which appeared to have been written by Teddy Langley to himself or to his brother. They were mostly filled with racial slurs and rabid exhortations to violent action. Ben made a brief effort to comprehend Langley’s mind, so clogged with hatred that it seemed hardly capable of light or air or the simplest of life’s humanities, its small acts of mercy, kindness and generosity. He tried to imagine how Langley, or anyone else, could become so addicted to his own poison that it became his life’s blood. And yet, as Ben continued through the desk, it was clear that this was exactly what had happened to Langley. Without his hatred, he was nothing. It was what gave his life a meaning, a purpose.

The third and final drawer was cluttered with an assortment of unconnected items. A police badge, a belt buckle, several packs of matches, a pair of scissors, tape, paper clips. There was a twenty-two pistol and a half-empty box of shells, a small pocket knife and a bottle of aspirin. A roll of electrical tape was nestled in the left-hand corner of the drawer, and as Ben picked it up, he noticed a small circular ridge on its surface. He peeled the tape back slowly, spooling it over his hands as he unraveled it. The ridge grew more visible until the last strand of tape was peeled from its surface. It was a gold wedding band, and as Ben turned it slowly in his fingers, he could read the inscription plainly: For Charlie. Love Susan.

‘Charlie Breedlove’s ring,’ Ben said as he tossed it onto Luther’s desk.

Luther picked it up and stared at it unbelievingly. ‘How do you know?’

‘His wife told Patterson it was missing,’ Ben said. ‘When I talked to her about it, she told me the inscription.’

Luther continued to roll the ring between his fingers. ‘Where’d you find it?’

‘It was wrapped up in a roll of electrical tape,’ Ben said. ‘I found it in a little house over on Courtland.’

‘Courtland?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Whose house?’

‘There was some mail in a desk. It was all addressed to Teddy Langley.’

Luther’s face grew rigid, and his light-blue eyes seemed to go pure white. ‘Langley?’

‘It’s full of racial stuff,’ Ben said. He handed Luther one of the pictures he’d found in Langley’s desk.