Race

  A Black Lives Matter Thriller

  SLMN

  Kingston Imperial

  Race Copyright © 2021 by Kingston Imperial, LLC

  Printed in the USA

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  All Rights Reserved, including the rights to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Kingston Imperial, LLC

  Rights Department, 144 North 7th Street, #255 Brooklyn N.Y. 11249

  First Edition:

  Book and Jacket Design: Damion Scott & PiXiLL Designs

  Cataloging in Publication data is on file with the library of Congress

  Trade Paperback: ISBN 9781954220140

  EBook: ISBN 9781954220157

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Kingston Imperial

  1

  If you'd asked me that August morning if I was surprised, I'd have looked you square in the eye, shook my head, and told you, “Why the fuck would I be surprised? Look around you, we live in a nation that always chooses hate.” Thing is, as much as I’d like to pretend, I’ve become inured to the subtle racism as much as the not-so-subtle shit, truth is I didn’t really have a clue. But I was going to learn, real fast.

  Maybe it was down to the heat. It had been unbearable for the better part of two weeks. Humid, sticky heat. The kind of heat that gets under your skin and into your brain and makes you do stupid shit because your brain’s fried. Around the office we called it short circuit heat. The amount of brains that melted during these short circuit weeks was frankly frightening. And it didn’t help the tension that had been building all summer long. That stuff has been on the simmer for a long time, pressure building and building until something had to blow. It was always going to be a mess when it did, the only question was what sort of mess. Looking back, we call it the inciting incident. That’s a fancy way of saying when the story of the cops shooting a kid and his dog broke there was no going back for this place. And I hold my hand up, I must shoulder some of the blame. The piece I wrote for the paper the next day didn’t help diffuse things. My only defense, that’s not my job. I’m a watcher. I watch. I tell you what I see. I don’t put myself into the story.

  Or I didn’t before now.

  The boy and his dog changed the way I thought about myself and my place in this world—and more importantly my responsibility as a voice.

  “You got something for me, Caleb?”

  “Still working on it, Phil. I want to get this right. It’s important.”

  Phil leaned in over my shoulder. That was his management style—hot breath on the back of the neck. He was doing his rounds, which usually meant barking out at anyone running things close to the wire. He was a born worrier. He wanted everything in place well ahead of print deadlines. The closer drop-dead came, the more stressed he became about every square inch of white space that needed to be filled.

  The truth is I was done, and had been for half an hour, but I was second guessing myself. It wasn’t like I hadn’t done this a thousand times before, but this one felt different.

  I felt Phil nodding along behind me, then stop cold.

  I knew what he was going to say before he said it.

  “What the fuck’s that?” He jabbed a fat finger at the third paragraph.

  “It’s about the boy’s dog.”

  “I can see it’s about the fucking dog. Lose it. We don’t do dead pets.”

  “But it’s important.”

  “Really? You’ve got a dead kid. What flavor does a dead dog add? It’s just a fucking dog. The cops shot it because it threatened their safety. Animals are unpredictable. They’re all instinct. In a situation like that, they want to protect their masters. They might as well be rabid junkyard dogs.”

  “It was a Bichon Frise,” I said, pointing out the obvious flaw in his reasoning.

  “A what?” he snapped, like thin ice cracking under my feet. But there’s a time to retreat and a time when you just have to put your full weight on the ice and trust it will hold you.

  Maybe I should have hit delete on the paragraph and left it at that, the tragedy of the boy and his dog cut down to the tragedy of the boy. That was enough.

  But—and ain’t that one of the most powerful words in the language? —it wasn’t right. And it was important to say exactly what I knew, not some watered down, more palatable version of it. Because the truth has to mean something if we’re ever going to escape this Post-Truth world.

  “The dog that three armed cops were so fucking frightened of?” I shook my head. “Small enough to fit in Stacy’s purse.”

  Stacy paused at the sound of her name and looked over at us. She had a bag slung over her shoulder. Phil’s eyes went to the bag, running whatever mental calculations he needed to realize that we weren’t talking Cujo here. The moment dragged out, surrounded by the sound of keys and the low-level hum of computer fans. Phil had no words. I couldn’t remember the last time he’d been struck dumb?

  Even so, part of me thought he was still going to insist that I still cut the paragraph, that we couldn’t afford to upset the local cops. That’s the small-town trade-off. We feed off each other, pilot fish and shark. One can’t exist without the other. Well, it can, but life is worse. We needed each other to keep the peace, that was the usual argument. Hell, it wouldn’t have been the first time he’d backed down. but not this time. He nodded, and just said, “Good job. Run it and be damned. A fucking toy dog. Bastards.”

  He headed back into his glass-doored office. Maybe he still had his doubts. Maybe he still feared the consequences. But he’d made his decision and he was going to stick to it and be damned. He was a genuine News Man.

  I sent the file to print and leaned back in my chair, hands behind my head.

  It was done.

  A couple of the others looked my way, then the first of them got up and went over to the subs desk to read about the boy and his dog. One by one, they followed, the sickness they felt plain on their faces.

  Within an hour of the paper hitting the newsstands the whole world had gone mad.

  2

  Less than 24 hours after the kid had taken that bullet, the world had started to change.

  At first it had been a handful of people gathered outside the police station, but within an hour it was thirty easily, within two it was sixty and growing, with spreading. I figured it would be upwards of four or five hundred come dawn, and then more, with a righteous anger sustaining them. I had my orders, get down there and get whatever I could. Phil wasn’t big on the specifics, and it really didn’t matter what the something was, if it made good copy. He’d have done it himself a few years ago, but he’d grown lazy, and liked to chase stories about runaway dogs being found and hero fire fighters. This sort of stuff, not so much. Plus, and he wasn’t about to say it out loud, there was the other thing… the color of my skin.

  I’m not an idiot, he wanted to get something out of the police, and they’d clam up facing a black reporter, closing ranks. They wouldn’t see me as an ally. They’d see me as the enemy. It was racial profiling, but this whole world was constructed around racial profiling. But Phil was smart, I was only the first line of attack, after my story, he’d send Stacy in for the kill. A pretty white woman was going to look like the ally they needed, they’d talk to her differently than they would to me, especially when racial tensions were running high. Like I said, I’m not an idiot. I know how the game works, and luckily for me, so did she. That’s what made us the dream team.

  I arrived to see four officers standing outside, shotguns at the ready.

  It wasn’t exactly a picture of peace and contentment, let’s put it that way.

  There was an edge to the atmosphere that went beyond tension. This was cut it with a knife shit. Pent up violence almost desperate to explode.

  The protesters gathered around the stone steps that rose to the station door, some crushed up on the sidewalk, most spilled out into the road making sure no traffic came or went. But, for now, they weren’t trying to crush in closer. They chanted the kid’s name. They issued cries for justice. There were some hastily made placards, some with misspelled words but bang-on sentiments, and that was what mattered most.

  I looked around the crowd in search of familiar faces and saw a few I kind of recognized, but none of the names leapt to mind. That was the problem with living and working in a place like this; you met plenty of people but knew hardly any of them. Cities, like it or not
, are some of the most crowded, and at the same time loneliest places in the world. It wasn’t about being alone, it was about being cut off, isolated, made to feel like you didn’t belong. The loneliness inflicted by a city was cruel and unusual punishment, end of conversation.

  While I was busy being philosophical, a battered old bus with rust eating into its sides pulled up a block away and at least another couple of dozen people spilled out, already chanting for justice, for the value of a life to mean something. They punched their placards into the air. It didn’t take much for the volume to escalate, these newcomers adding anger and threat. I imagined myself in the place of those four cops on the steps with their rifles, and through their eyes saw a baying mob. It was intimidating, even this close to their home turf, or maybe especially because it was this close to their home turf. Put it this way, it didn’t take long for reinforcements to join them, front of the line, a man that pretty much everyone in the crowd would have recognized.

  Chief of Police Able Dwyer had no problem with being seen. He was that kind of man. He enjoyed publicity. Hell, he milked every ounce of it. There was the inevitable talk of him running for mayor down the line. This was a man going places. Destined. I’m a cynical sort, goes with the territory, but I couldn’t help but wonder if he’d been holding out for a camera crew to catch a glimpse of him in action. That would be his style. I saw at least a dozen camera phones pointed his way. No TV cameras. Yet. But they would come.

  He raised his hands, calling for silence.

  The gesture had zero effect.

  The babble of voices grew louder, angrier. It was virtually impossible to make out what anyone was saying, and I mean anyone, even the guy standing next to me. So many voices had all become one, but their words had lost shape.

  Dwyer remained calm.

  He just stood there, waiting, motionless.

  Behind him the glass doors opened, and a dozen more officers came out.

  These ones were in full riot gear, with plastic shields creating a barrier. Nothing about the move was deescalating the situation, it was inflammatory, surely, he could see that? Right now, it was peaceful, bar the shouting. But deploying riot cops, even if only to hold the line, it projected an expectation of violence. They expected the crowd to turn ugly. Thing is, from where I was standing, any ugliness wasn’t going to come from the protesters.

  On cue another van arrived, this one with broadcast antenna and a huge station logo on the side.

  Dwyer waited for the cameraman, and the on-camera talent, a young woman, to emerge, then raised his hands again, making a show of calling for calm. I’d seen the woman a few times, but never on anything I would have considered high profile. It took me a second to drag her name up from the depths of my memory. Alicia White. Dwyer waited for her to get into position before he launched into his big speech. The whole thing was a set-up.

  “Folks, please,” More placating gestures. “I know you’re all upset, believe me, I get it,” he began, raising his voice to be sure it carried above the rabble. “You’ve lost one of your own, and it is a tragedy. It truly is. When this community hurts, I hurt. When this community bleeds, I bleed,” someone heckled loudly enough that I could hear his bullshit from the other side of the crowd. The mics wouldn’t have missed it, but they’d mute it out in the editorial suite later. “There will be a full investigation into what happened. No whitewash. A full and transparent investigation, and if it turns out there is wrongdoing involved, there will be repercussions. Every officer with me is dedicated to the safety of this city and its citizens. They are one of you. We all are, and this is not an easy time for any of us…”

  He almost had me believing his polished spiel, but there’s this old saying, if you can fake sincerity, you can fake anything, and Dwyer was faking it like Sally meeting Harry in that diner scene. The only thing he wasn’t doing was banging the table.

  The noise began to abate.

  People tried to listen to what he had to say. They wanted to hear it. I had no idea if they believed a word of it, but that’s a whole different thing.

  I turned my attention to Alicia White and her cameraman, more out of professional interest than genuine curiosity. I knew how this worked. She had the camera, she was the one going to blessed with an audience with Dwyer when this was all over, and it was going to be her questions going out on the hour every hour as the studio ate this news story up for the masses. If I was lucky, I might get close enough to listen, meaning I might even get my story in before hers went out, meaning I’d get to look good with Phil.

  Someone pushed me from behind. I caught my balance and turned, realizing the size of the crowd had grown by another couple of hundred protestors in the time I’d been here. No surprise in that. What jarred was the sight of more than a few white faces in the crowd. Allies. They looked like ordinary working Joes, not media representatives, and their voices were just as loud as the brothers and sisters demanding justice.

  It was good to see.

  Together we are strong. It’s a simple creed.

  I half-thought I recognized one of them; he was the kind of guy who’d look more at home in a bar room brawl breaking skulls than a peaceful protest demanding justice be done, but I have to admit, right at that second, I thought little of it. I couldn’t remember where I had seen him before, or what his name was. Jed? Jez? Something like that.

  “But and I can’t stress this enough, what is really important is that you give me the time and space to investigate this properly… I can’t do my job—” Dwyer stopped abruptly, mid-thought process, as something was hurled from within in the crowd. It missed him by maybe a foot but hit one of the officers standing behind him.

  I hadn’t seen who’d thrown it, only the general direction it had come from. However, I didn’t miss the backs of two white guys slinking away from the crowd, neither one of them looking back even for a moment. They’d done what they set out to do, and like the gunshot heard around the world, that glass bottle hurled from the middle of the crowd ensured all hell was let loose.

  Cries went up. Voices raw.

  Another dozen officers emerged from inside the station house, all of them in riot gear. Some carried night sticks, banging them on their plastic shields, others appeared to be wielding tasers.

  There was this horrible feeling that the bottle gave them permission to do what they’d wanted to do from minute one, crack a few black skulls without the risk of comeback.

  The woman in front of me screamed at the swing of the first baton, and by the time the taser was unleashed, its electrified heads anchoring onto the chest of an old guy who’d been foolish enough to dare climb the first steps, still not even close to Dwyer, she was hysterical.

  The man jerked and thrashed as he fell to the ground, the current charging through him making him dance with guilty feet—no rhythm—but I couldn’t tell if he screamed or not, for the rage of the crowd drowned out everything else. He fell backwards. The crowd behind him stepped back, flinching away from the brutal surge of electricity, none of them saving him from the fall. I knew without being able to see or hear that his head had hit the concrete with a sickening thud. I knew there’d be blood, too.

  “Caleb!”

  I heard a woman’s voice calling my name as the wall of riot shields pushed into the crowd. Some of them pushed back but others desperately tried to get out of the crush. The problem was there were too many there, and the crowd behind them wasn’t moving.

  “Caleb!”

  I turned to try to see who was calling my name, and saw a hand raised in the air. It might have been meant for me. It might not. The swell pushed me this way and that. And, I’ll be honest, it was getting frightening in there. So many bodies. The crushing weight, the panic. I have no idea how many hundreds were there now, enough to cause some damage if hysteria kicked in.