Short Stories by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online

a hand. If the law spotted this much too spottable car...
    Cecil Price wished he hadn’t had that thought right then, in the instant before he saw the flashing red light in his rear-view mirror, in the instant before he heard the siren’s scream. Panic stabbed at him. “What do I do?” he said hoarsely. He wanted to floor the gas pedal. He wanted to, but he didn’t. The main thing that held him back was the certain knowledge that the old wagon couldn’t break sixty unless you flung it off a cliff.
    “Pull over.” Muhammad Shabazz’s voice was calm. “Don’t let ‘em get us for evading arrest or any real charge. We haven’t done anything wrong, so they can’t do anything to us.”
    “You sure of that, man?” Tariq Abdul-Rashid sounded nervous.
    “This is all about the rule of law,” Muhammad Shabazz said patiently. “For us, for them, for everybody.”
    He respected the rule of law. It meant more to him than anything else. Cecil Price could only hope it meant something to the man in the car with the light and the siren. He could hope so, yeah. Could he believe it? That was a different story.
    But Price didn’t see that he had any choice here. He pulled off onto the shoulder. The brakes squeaked as he brought the blue Ford to a stop. Pebbles rattled against the car’s underpanels. Red dust swirled up around it.
    The black-and-white pulled up behind the Ford. A great big Negro in a deputy sheriff’s uniform got out and swaggered up toward the station wagon. Cecil Price watched him in the mirror, not wanting to turn around. That arrogant strut—and the pistol in the lawman’s hand—spoke volumes about the way things in
Mississippi
had been since time out of mind.
    Coming up to the driver’s-side door, the sheriff peered in through sunglasses that made him look more like a machine, a hate-driven machine, than a man. “Son of a bitch!” he exploded. “ You ain’t Larry Rainey!”
    “No, sir,” Price said. Part of that deference was RACE training—don’t give the authorities an excuse to beat on you. And part of it was drilled into whites in the South from the time they could toddle and lisp. If they didn’t show respect, they often didn’t live to get a whole lot older than that.
    Larry Rainey was older than Cecil Price and smarter than Cecil and tougher than Cecil, too. He’d been in RACE a lot longer than Cecil had. The Black Knights of Voodoo probably hated him more than any other white man from this part of the state.
    But the way they hated Larry Rainey was like nothing next to the way they hated what they called the black agitators from the North. Even behind the deputy sheriff’s shades, Cecil could see his eyes widen when he got a look at Muhammad Shabazz and Tariq Abdul-Rashid. “Well, well!” he boomed, the way a man with a shotgun will when a couple of big, fat ducks fly right over his blind. “Looky what we got here! We got us a couple of buckra-lovin’ ragheads!”
    “Sheriff,” Muhammad Shabazz said tightly. He didn’t wear a turban, and never had. Neither did Tariq Abdul-Rashid, who nodded like somebody trying hard not to show how scared he was. Cecil Price was scared, too, damn near scared shitless, and hoped the black man with the the gun and the Smokey-the-Bear hat couldn’t tell.
    The deputy went on as if the Black Muslim hadn’t spoken: “We got us a couple of Northern radicals who reckon they’re better’n other folks their color, so they can hop on a bus and come down here and tell us how to live. And we got us one uppity buckra, too, sneakin’ around and stirrin’ up what oughta be damn well left alone. Well, I got news for y’all. That don’t fly, not in
Neshoba
County
it don’t. What the hell you doin’ here, anyway?”
    “We were looking at what’s left of
Mount
Zion
Church
in Longdale,” Muhammad Shabazz answered.
    “Yeah, I just bet you were. Fat lot your kind cares about churches,” the big black deputy jeered.
    “We care about justice,