Calumet City by Charlie Newton Read Free Book Online Page A

face flames. "
Lay down?
" Where the hell did that come from?
    I’m not thrilled about this assignment either, mixed up in a backroom mayoral-mob fistfight that may or may not be real. Cops are paranoid by nature and mystery shit like this isn’t good for our digestive systems. Sonny exhales but doesn’t move.
    I push out of the booth and into his face "I’ll do Gibbons. You try to remember who you’re pissing on
after seventeen years
." I bump his shoulder as I walk past, out into a ghetto changing from standard early-morning to Byzantine maze.
     
•  •  •
     
       Some say the Chicago Police Department murdered Fred Hampton.
    Alderman Leslie Gibbons is one of them. He was there in ’69 and says he should know. His version of December 4 had no warning, just the apartment door splintering at 4:30 a.m., then one hundred rounds fired
inside
the Black Panther Party headquarters on West Madison—all but one fired by CPD—seventy-five of them into Fred Hampton’s bedroom.
    Alderman Leslie Gibbons says Fred Hampton was badly wounded in the shoulder but survived the attack only to face two Chicago police officers who stepped to his bed and executed him with a shot to the head. In front of his pregnant wife.
    That’s what she says too.
    For eight years prior to being incarcerated for his role in the Black Panther Party, Alderman Leslie Gibbons marched with Martin Luther King, stood with him in Selma and Birmingham and Marquette Park until King was murdered in Memphis. A major résumé.
    Leslie Gibbons is a hall-of-famer in the ghetto, and pissing on him in District 6 would be the closest thing to suicide any street cop could conjure. Not pissing on him in the dwindling white neighborhoods of the Southside where they refer to him as "the Ayatollah" would cause the same reaction.
    So, that’s what I was doing instead of working. Pissing. My TAC unit is max-shorthanded today with Cisco down and two of our other guys in court. I’m on the street alone. This happens more often than you’d think and more often than any of us prefer to discuss with outsiders, especially those we police.
    I’m asking good guys and bad guys wha-sup. Anybody hear shit? Stuff about the mayor, you know? Why somebody gone shoot him, and like that? That’s how it sounded in my head, but not how I said it; I meant the same thing, just without the Sonny Barrett homey lingo. Asshole.
    Connie Long, CTA bus driver, didn’t know; Auntie I. L. at the Fried Right didn’t know; Shirl-the-girl transvestite hooker knew, knew for damn sure—the white devil wanted the Southside for hisownself. Motherfuckin’ Irish.
    I went where I could, talked to people who knew me, people I’d helped, people I’d arrested and would again. It wasn’t street winter, but it wasn’t hearts and flowers either. See, it’s not like TV where you good- and bad-cop the bad actors. They don’t
have
to talk to you. And they don’t have to be nice or respectful or anything else. They can just not understand, give you slumped shoulders and blank, watery eyes. Or in the afternoon, after the 40s are down, give you the peeled lips, rap-rhythm, "Uh-huh," while they chew gum and check out all the shit around them that they’ve been looking at all day.
    You get that a lot; Sonny thinks there’s a school for it hidden under one of the radio stations the El Rukns or the Vice Lords own: The Post-up, Bad-motherfucker Pimp School of Chicago. Cisco says it’s a shame no one does tours from the colleges and corporations, "live-fire exercises" to go with the textbooks and tuition. Cisco has not yet worn a button-down shirt to work, but he will. If he brings a pipe we’ve decided to shoot him.
    Anyway, that was the morning, most of it interspersed with angry stares—some leery, some not, fifteen or twenty raised chins mumbling insults, and four in-my-face accusations that we/I murdered Robert, Ruth Ann’s boy.
    Lunchtime is better. I share it near Maxwell’s Dumpster with