Weapons of choice

Buster had been on the job for twenty-three years, eighteen of them in Chicago, and if he'd learned anything it was that once you had your boot on somebody's throat, you didn't take it off. They were liable to come at you with a knife or a gun. Your niggers and your spics and dagos and so on, they needed keeping down. They bred quicker than white folk. They had no respect. And if they got wind of the idea that a bunch of superniggers had somehow grabbed the keys to the kingdom, there'd be no stopping them. They'd come roaring out of the ghetto demanding a piece of the action for themselves.

Buster was certain of it, even if his thinking was a little slowed down by the three bourbons he'd taken after the autopsy. Not that he was squeamish, mind you. He'd eaten his lunch during postmortems in the past.

No, he was just shook up by that ship full of freaks.

He was so shook up that rather than heading back to the station he drove down to Hotel Street, and walked into the Black Dog, where he ran a tab that was probably larger than his annual wage. He'd never bothered to keep track, and the owners were never going to ask him about it.

As soon as the barkeep saw Detective Sergeant Cherry force his way through the crush of humanity, a shot glass and bottle of Old Fitzgerald appeared on the bar. Buster knocked down the first two shots without much of a gap between them. But he took his time over the third. He was used to the jostle and chaos of places like the Black Dog. It felt more like home than his own miserable apartment. He nursed the drink and tried to calm down. Two or three times, he'd been tempted to pop that Francois bitch right on the hooter. She was a goddamn ball breaker, and she looked at him like he was something nasty she'd found on her shoe.

Old Doc Brumm and ADA Crew, they weren't much help. Not that he could blame them. There was a ton of pressure coming down from above on this case. The chief himself had called Buster and told him to break as many arms as it took to wrap the fucking thing up as quickly as possible. He was taking heat from the military, no doubt about it. And that heat was being applied directly to Buster, like a blowtorch to the belly.

Well, fuck them.

If they couldn't see how dangerous these fuckers were, they were gonna get swept under. Buster recognized power when he saw it. And those half-breeds and dykes out on that ship thought they had it. You could see they were used to getting their own way at home, and he'd pay a thousand to one that they were already trying it on here. Otherwise, why would the chief be on his ass about a couple of dead colored fuckers? That sort of shit was what his old Ma used to call "an everyday happystance." You didn't waste time breaking arms over it.

Buster hunched his giant shoulders against the seething press of the crowd. Hundreds of men were crammed into the Dog. They were mostly drunk and stupid. They stank. They roared. They shoved and pushed and elbowed each other. But they were mostly good guys when you got down to it. They were going off to die, a lot of them. And for what? A country that was gonna turn itself into a fucking ghetto.

Buster threw down the last of his drink and was just about to pour another when the roaring bedlam of the crowd dipped unexpectedly. He turned away from the bar as a general push toward the doors began. There must be a fight outside. He would have ignored it. After all, it was none of his goddamn business, and he'd seen enough ignorant fucking drunks beating on each other over the years that the prospect held no interest for him, now.

But the tidal flow surging out of the door, and the increasingly furious sounds coming back in from the street, told him this was no ordinary brawl. It sounded more like a riot.

Buster checked his gun and the heavy leather blackjack he carried in a back pocket, and then he headed out.

He was right.

It seemed to him that the dusty, sunbaked street was choked with thousands of brawling men, most of them in uniform, but not all. The sound was deafening, like the blast of a huge crowd at a sports stadium when you emerged into the open, having gone to get a beer and a hot dog. Smoke and fire poured from the upper windows of two buildings across the street. A thick mass of struggling men surged around two jeeps in the middle of the street. Buster saw a flash of white helmets in the center of the melee. Normally he would have walked away. A man can get himself killed very easily in a shit fight like that. But the bourbon and the resentment he felt toward that snooty fucking lady doctor lit his fuse, which was admittedly short at the best of times.