“Tom, it’s Mike O’Sullivan. You know what’s going on down at city hall?”
The response was weary and wry: “Recall rally’s gettin’ a little out of hand, I hear.”
“Laugh it off if you like, Tom. But they broke into a couple hardware stores and helped themselves to guns and bullets. You’re minutes away from a shooting war.”
“Christ... Well, if you think I’m drivin’ over there to have a little of it, Mike, you’re out of your goddamn mind.”
O’Sullivan’s voice took on an edge. “Tom — did you know what Schriver had in mind for John?”
“Of course not,” the chief growled.
But it wasn’t convincing.
“Tom, if you tell me the truth, I’ll understand. You’re between a rock and a hard place, with your allegiance to John, same time working under Schriver. So just tell me.”
“Mike, I didn’t know.”
Still not sold, O’Sullivan said, “If you lie to me, Tom... I’ll be unhappy.”
A long silence followed.
Then, a sniveling Cox returned to the wire: “I figured they’d just work him over a little, throw a scare into the Old Man. Only, from what my captain down there says, they’ve half-killed the poor sod.”
“If those rioters get inside that building,” O’Sullivan said, slowly, carefully, “and see what Schriver and his bully boys have done to John Looney, they’ll burn the place down.”
“Anarchy. Anarchy. How could it come to this? How could this happen?”
“I have no idea,” O’Sullivan lied.
“Mother of mercy, what can we do?”
“Call your captain and have him let me and Emeal Davis in. We’ll fetch John.”
“Mike, if you haul a bloody and battered John Looney out of there, that crowd’ll blow a gasket!”
“Not if you have a Black Maria waiting in the police garage. We’ll haul the Old Man over to St. Anthony’s. If the rioters do storm your bastille, Tom, well, they won’t find a half-dead John Looney inside, to inflame them further.”
Another long silence followed.
Then Cox said, “No better plan comes to me. Mike, we’ll try it your way. Give me five minutes.”
O’Sullivan exited the booth and the hotel, meeting up with Emeal Davis out front, as they’d prearranged. He filled Davis in, heading across the now all-but-deserted Market Square, scattered with discarded recall brochures, toward the hullabaloo. Traffic had disappeared, as if every vehicle in downtown Rock Island had been sucked into the sky.
As the two Looney soldiers approached city hall, they found Third Avenue and Sixteenth Street clogged with humanity, the full moon conspiring with streetlamps to throw a yellowish ivory glow on a surreal urban landscape, the surrounding buildings black against the gray heavens, looming like giant tombstones. It seemed to O’Sullivan that these men had become less than themselves, and more, swallowed up in the breathing, moving organism that was a mob.
“This thing,” Emeal yelled into Mike’s ear (and yet it was like a whisper), “has got a mind of its own.”
“Nothing to be done but live with it,” O’Sullivan yelled. “And use it... for John.”
From the stormy sea of bobbing heads and upraised fists — holding weapons, bricks, and boards, and handguns and rifles — an ongoing rumble of dissatisfaction erupted every few moments into shouted accusations and yelled admonitions. Eyes were wild, gums bared over teeth; the jungle beneath the skin of civilization was showing through.
At the front of city hall, a short flight of stairs rose on either side to the double doors where Looney, O’Sullivan, and Davis had earlier entered; tucked under the porch-like landing were another set of double doors, leading into the police station. From these poured a contingent of cops in uniform, with riot guns, shotguns, and handguns, streaming out in twin ribbons of blue, fanning out either way across the face of the building.
This did not go over well with the crowd, separated from them by a narrow strip of brick street. Like Apaches, the rioters raised rifles high in clenched fists and filled the night with non-verbal, animal war cries.
Then, finally, some damn fool pulled a trigger.
The rioters began to fire their weapons — into the air, mostly, some firing at city hall itself, high over the heads of the row of cops, who were doing their best not to cower, as slugs dug holes in the brick building, spitting back chunks and slivers and flakes to rain down upon the scared-shitless guardians in blue below.
Through this volatile crowd, gunfire snapping in the air like dozens of whipcracks, O’Sullivan and Davis made their way; it took ten minutes to traverse the few yards. While a sporadic barrage of shots continued to emerge from the mob, the coppers out front aimed their weapons but did not fire — which seemed to O’Sullivan a miracle.
Then he and Davis stepped into the no-man’s land that was about half of Third Avenue, that brick strip between cops and rioters, and held up their hands as they went, turning their backs to the cops. The gunfire abated, as the rioters — many standing on their toes and jumping up, to see what was going on — reacted to the two men in civilian clothes going across that unofficial barrier toward the enemy camp.
Not completely unaware of the irony, O’Sullivan yelled, “We’re Looney men!”
Davis echoed him, and no one from the mob tried to stop them or, better yet, shoot them.
O’Sullivan approached a cop he recognized, Sergeant Bill O’Malley, who was in the midst of the row of armed coppers.
“Bill, your captain’s expecting us,” O’Sullivan yelled, over the war whoops of the crowd. “I’m here at Chief Cox’s behest.”
O’Malley accepted this with a nod, and sent them up the stairs, unaccompanied, where they paused on the landing to look out at the teeming force that O’Sullivan had unleashed.
It was one of the most frightening sights of Michael O’Sullivan’s life — which was no small thing.
Just inside the door, Captain James Doherty met them, a solemn-faced, redheaded, green-eyed uniformed cop, loyal to his chief. Quickly he escorted the two Looney soldiers up to the third-floor hallway, where the two uniformed cops still stood guard.
O’Sullivan let Doherty do the talking.
“We have a full-scale riot out there,” the captain told the two sentries, gesturing toward the muffled popping gunfire. “There’s still a shotgun or two downstairs. Position yourselves on the landing, boys — guard the city hall front gates.”
The older smug cop, who’d threatened the Looney body guards with his nightstick before, frowned and said, “We have orders from the mayor to maintain this post.”
Doherty stepped forward and his face was inches from his subordinate’s. “These orders come straight from Chief Cox — this riot situation has developed subsequent to the mayor’s orders, and supersedes them. Assume your new assignment, or I’ll have you removed and put behind bars.”
In an eyeblink, the two sentries had abandoned this post for their new one.
Captain Doherty turned his seemingly placid green eyes on O’Sullivan and Davis and, very quietly, said, “I have to go down to stand with my men. We have under forty to try to hold back a mob of two thousand... I don’t know what you intend to do in the mayor’s office, and I don’t want to know. Neither does Chief Cox... Understood, gents?”
“Understood. The Black Maria is standing by?”
“Yes. I have a driver posted downstairs.” He handed a slip of paper with a phone number to O’Sullivan. “Call when you’re ready. He’ll bring up a stretcher.”
Then the captain, too, was gone.
O’Sullivan withdrew his .45 Colt automatic, like him a veteran of the Great War. Davis reached under his baby-blue suitcoat for his long-barreled .38, slung under his arm in a handtooled leather holster worthy of Wyatt Earp.