"Well, you sure were taking the long way around. Get out of that car," the deputy said. That was the last thing Cecil Price wanted to do. But he thought the deputy would shoot him and the two Black Muslims right there if they refused. Reluctantly, he obeyed. Perhaps even more reluctantly, Muhammad Shabazz and Tariq Abdul-Rashid followed him.
Men were also getting out of the two cars stopped behind the deputy’s. Price’s heart sank when he saw them. There was the Priest, all right, black as the ace of spades. And there were ten or twelve other Negroes with him. Price recognized some of them as BKV men. He didn’t know for sure that the others were, but what else would they be? Some had guns. Others carried crowbars or tire irons or Louisville Sluggers. They all wore rubber gloves so they wouldn’t leave fingerprints.
"You don’t want to do this," Muhammad Shabazz said earnestly. "I’m telling you the truth-you don’t. It won’t get you what you think it will."
"Shut the fuck up, you goddamn raghead race traitor." The deputy sheriff’s voice was hard and cold as iron. "You get in the back of my car now, you hear?"
"What will you do to us?" Tariq Abdul-Rashid asked.
"Whatever it is, we’ll do it right here and right now if you don’t shut the fuck up and do like you’re told," the deputy answered. "Now stop mouthing off and move, damn you."
Numbly, as if caught in a bad dream, Cecil Price and his companions got into the back of the deputy sheriff’s car. A steel grating walled them off from the front seat. Neither back door had a lock or a door handle on the inside. Once you went in there, you stayed in there till somebody decided to let you out.
The deputy slid behind the wheel again. The men from the Black Knights of Voodoo got back into their cars, too. A couple of them aimed weapons at Cecil Price and the Black Muslims before they did. The deputy sheriff waved the BKV men away. "Not quite time yet," he told them.
"This won’t help you. The country won’t be proud of you. They’ll go after you like you wouldn’t believe," Muhammad Shabazz said. "If you hurt us, you help our side, and that’s nothing but the truth."
"I don’t want to listen to your bullshit, you buckra-lovin’ raghead, and that’s nothin’ but the truth," the deputy said. "So maybe you just better shut the fuck up."
"Why? What difference does it make now?" the Black Muslim asked.
Instead of answering, the deputy sheriff put the car in gear. He made a Y-turn-the road was too narrow for a U-and swung back around the cars full of BKV men. Then he hit the brakes to wait while they turned around, too. Good cooperation in a bad cause, Cecil Price thought. If RACE members worked together as smoothly as these BKV bastards…
"All right," the deputy muttered, and the black-and-white moved forward again. Now that he wasn’t chasing people at top speed, the deputy sheriff acted like a careful driver. He flicked the turn signal before making a left back onto Highway 19. Click! Click! Click! The sound seemed very loud inside the passenger compartment. What went through Price’s mind was, Measuring off the seconds left in my life.
As soon as the deputy finished the turn, of course, the clicking stopped. Price wished his mind had been going in some other direction a moment before. The deputy drove toward Philadelphia for a minute or two, then used the turn signal again. Click! Click! Click! Cecil Price cherished and dreaded the sound of those passing seconds, both at the same time. He grimaced when the deputy finished the new left turn and the indicator fell silent again.
"Where the hell are we?" Muhammad Shabazz muttered.
Before Price could answer him, the deputy did: "This here is Rock Cut Road. Ain’t hardly anything around these parts. That’s how come we’re here."
"Oh, shit," Tariq Abdul-Rashid said. Price couldn’t have put it better himself.
The deputy wasn’t kidding. Looking out the car’s dirty windows, Price saw nothing but a narrow red dirt road and weed-filled fields to either side. Behind the black-and-white, car doors slammed as the Black Knights of Voodoo got out and advanced.
"I’m gonna open the door and let y’all out now," the deputy said. "You don’t want to do anything stupid, you hear?"
"What the hell difference does it make at this stage of things?" Tariq Abdul-Rashid asked.
"Well, some things are gonna happen. They’re gonna, and I don’t reckon anything’ll change that," the deputy sheriff said seriously. "But they can happen easy, you might say, or they can happen not so easy. You won’t like it if they happen not so easy. Believe you me, you won’t, not even a little bit."
He got out of the car. Can we jump him when he opens the door? Price wondered. He shook his head. Not a chance in church. Not a chance in hell.
One more click!: the door opening. Heart racing a mile a minute, legs feather-light with fear, Cecil Price got out of the Neshoba County Sheriff’s Department car. The dirt scraped and crunched under the soles of his shoes. Is that the last thing I’ll ever feel? It didn’t seem like enough.
Two Black Knights of Voodoo grabbed Tariq Abdul-Rashid. Two others seized Muhammad Shabazz, and two more laid hold of Cecil Price. Another BKV man walked up to Tariq Abdul-Rashid, pistol in hand. The headlights of the cars behind the black-and-white picked out the globe and anchor tattooed on his right bicep.
"Go get ‘em, Wayne," somebody said in a low, hoarse voice-the Priest, Cecil Price saw.
"I will, goddammit. I will," answered the BKV man with the pistol. Price happened to know that Wayne Roberts, in spite of the tattoo, had been dishonorably discharged from the Marine Corps. In the Black Knights of Voodoo, though, he could be a big man.
He scowled at Tariq Abdul-Rashid. "No," the Black Muslim whispered. "Please, no."
"Fuck you, man," Roberts said. "You ain’t nothin’ but a stinkin’ buckra in a black skin." He thumbed back the revolver’s hammer and pulled the trigger.
The roar was amazingly loud. The bullet, from point-blank range, caught Tariq Abdul-Rashid in the middle of the forehead. He went limp all at once, as if his bones had turned to water. "Way to go, Wayne!" said one of the men who held him. When his captors let go, he flopped down like a sack of beans, dead before he hit the ground.
"You see?" the black deputy said. "Hard or easy. That there was pretty goddamn easy, wasn’t it?"
The BKV men who had hold of Muhammad Shabazz dragged him forward. Even as they did, he was trying to talk sense to them. "I understand how you feel, but this won’t help you," he said in a calm, reasonable voice. "Killing us won’t do anything for your cause. You-"
"Shut up, asshole." Wayne Roberts cuffed him across the face. "You bet this’ll do us some good. We’ll be rid of you, won’t we? Good riddance to bad rubbish." He shot Muhammad Shabazz the same way he’d killed the other Black Muslim.
"Easy as can be," the deputy sheriff said. "Easier’n he deserved, I reckon. Fucker never knew what hit him." The hot, wet air was thick with the stinks of smokeless powder, of blood, of shit, of fear, of rage.
Easy or not, Cecil Price didn’t want to die. With a sudden shout that even startled him, he broke loose from the men who had hold of him. Shouting-screaming-he ran like a madman down Rock Cut Road.
He didn’t get more than forty or fifty feet before the first bullet slammed into his back. Next thing he knew, he was lying on his face, dirt in his mouth, more dirt in his nose. Something horrible was happening inside him. He felt on fire, only worse. When he tried to get up, he couldn’t.
Big as a mountain, hard as a mountain, the deputy sheriff loomed over him. "All right, white boy," he ground out. "You coulda had it easy, same as your asshole buddies. Now we’re gonna do it the hard way." He crouched down beside Price, grabbed his right arm, and broke it over his thigh like a broomstick. The sound the bones made when they snapped was just about like a breaking broomstick, too. The sound Cecil Price made… How the BKV men laughed!