Short Stories by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online Page B

arson,” the first deputy answered. “I reckon they must’ve had somethin’ to do with torchin’ the white folks’ church over by Longdale.”
    “That’s the—” What was the man behind the desk about to say? That’s the silliest goddamn thing I ever heard ? Something like that—Cecil Price was sure of it. But then the other Negro’s eyes narrowed. “Fuck me,” he said, and pointed first to Muhammad Shabazz and then to Tariq Abdul-Rashid. “Ain’t these the raghead bastards who came down from the North to raise trouble?”
    “That’s them, all right,” said the deputy who’d arrested them. “And this here buckra’s Cecil Price. I thought at first I got me Larry Rainey—you know how all these white folks look alike. But what the hell? If you can’t grab a big fish, a little fish’ll do.”
    “That’s a fact,” said the deputy behind the desk. “That sure as hell is a fact, all right. Yeah, lock ‘em up. We can figure out what to do with ‘em later.”
    “You betcha.” The first deputy marched his prisoners to the cells farther back in the jail. “In here, you two,” he told Muhammad Shabazz and Tariq Abdul-Rashid, and herded them into the first cell on the right. He stuck Cecil Price in the second cell on the right. Even at a time like this, even in a situation like this, he never thought to put a white man in with Negroes. That was part of what was wrong in
Philadelphia, right there.
    After Price and Muhammad Shabazz and Tariq Abdul-Rashid were safely locked away, the man who’d arrested them clumped up the corridor and then out the front door. “Where you goin’?” called the man behind the desk.
    “Got to see the Priest,” the first deputy answered. “Anybody asks after those assholes, you never seen ‘em, you never heard nothin’ about ‘em. You got that?”
    “All right by me,” the other deputy said. The first one slammed the door after him as he went out. He seemed to have to slam any door he came to.
    Cecil Price had only thought he was scared shitless before. Not letting anybody know he and his friends were in jail was bad. Going to see the Priest was a hell of a lot worse. The Priest was a tall, scrawny, bald black man who hated whites with a fierce and simple passion. He was also the chief
Neshoba
County
recruiting officer for the Black Knights of Voodoo. Trouble followed him the way thunder followed lightning.
    Price wondered whether Muhammad Shabazz and Tariq Abdul-Rashid knew enough to be as frightened as he was. The Priest had been trouble for years, while they’d been down here only a couple of months. The Priest would still be trouble long after they went back to the North ... if they ever got the chance to go North again.
    It must have been about half past five when the phone at the front desk jangled loudly. “Neshoba County Jail,” the deputy there said. He paused to listen, then went on, “No, I ain’t seen ‘em. Jesus Christ! You lose your garbage, you expect me to go pickin’ it up for you?” He slammed the phone down again.
    “Deputy!” Muhammad Shabazz called through the bars of his cell. “Deputy, can I speak to you for a minute?”
    A scrape of chair legs against cheap linoleum. Slow, heavy, arrogant footsteps. A deep, angry voice: “What the hell you want?”
    “I’d like to make a telephone call, please.”
    A pause. Cecil Price looked out of his cell just in time to see the deputy sheriff shake his head. His big, round belly shook, too, but it didn’t remind Price of a bowlful of jelly—more of a wrecking ball that would smash anything in its way. “No, I don’t reckon so,” he said. “You ain’t callin’ nobody.”
    “I have a Constitutional right to make a telephone call,” Muhammad Shabazz insisted, politely but firmly.
    “Don’t you give me none of your Northern bullshit,” the Negro deputy said. “Constitution doesn’t say jack shit about telephone calls. How could it? No telephones when they wrote the damn thing,