Two Letts got Danny by the arms and one of them butted the side of his face. They ran him across the cobblestones into a metal store grate and his nightstick fell from his hands. One of them punched him in the right eye. Danny stomped blindly and hit an ankle, drove his knee up and hit a groin. The breath blew out of the guy and Danny swung him into the grate and pulled one arm free as the other man sank his teeth into his shoulder. Danny spun with the biter draped over him and ran backward into a brick wall, felt the guy’s teeth leave his skin. He took a few steps forward and then ran himself backward again, twice as hard. When the guy fell from his body, Danny turned and scooped up his nightstick and swung it into the guy’s face, heard the cheekbone crack.
He added a final kick to the ribs and turned back to the center of the street. A Lett charged back and forth along the rear of the crowd on one of the police horses, swinging a length of pipe at any domed heads he saw. Several of the other horses roamed riderless. On the far side of the street, two patrolman lifted Francie Stoddard, a sergeant at the One-Oh, onto a loading dock, Stoddard’s mouth wide and gulping, his shirt open at the collar, one palm pressed to the center of his chest.
Shots hit the air and Paul Welch, a sergeant with the Oh-Six, spun and grabbed his hip and then disappeared in the crush of men. Danny heard a scuffle of footsteps and turned in time to duck a Lett charging him with an ice pick. He speared the guy’s solar plexus with his nightstick. The guy gave him a look of self-pity and shame. Spit popped out of his mouth. When he hit the pavement, Danny grabbed his ice pick and hurled it onto the nearest roof.
Someone had gotten a grip on the leg of the Lett on horseback and he vaulted off the animal and into the crowd. The horse galloped up Dudley Street toward the el tracks. Blood poured down Danny’s back and the vision in his right eye blurred as it began to swell. His head felt as if someone had hammered nails through it. The Letts were going to lose the war, Danny had no doubt, but they were winning this battle by a large fucking margin. Cops were down all over the street while burly Letts in their coarse Cossack clothing screamed in triumph as their own heads rose above the throng.
Danny waded into the crowd, swinging his nightstick, trying to tell himself he didn’t love it, he didn’t feel his heart swell because he was bigger and stronger and faster than most and could down a man with one blow from either fist or nightstick. He took out four Letts with six swings and felt the mob turn toward him. He saw a pistol aimed at him, saw the hole in the barrel and the eyes of the young Lett wielding it, a boy really, nineteen, tops. The pistol shook, but he took little comfort from that because the kid was only fifteen feet away, and the crowd opened up a corridor between them to give him a clean shot. Danny didn’t reach for his own revolver; he’d never clear it in time.
The kid’s finger whitened against the trigger. The cylinder turned. Danny considered closing his eyes but then the kid’s arm shot straight up above his head. The pistol discharged into the sky.
Nathan Bishop stood beside the kid, rubbing his wrist where it had made contact with the kid’s elbow. He looked reasonably untarnished by the fighting, his suit a little rumpled but mostly unstained, which was saying something for a cream-colored suit in a sea of black and blue fabric and swinging fists. One of his eyeglass lenses was cracked. He stared at Danny through the good lens, both of them breathing hard. Danny felt relief, of course. And gratitude. But shame larger than all that. Shame more than anything.
A horse burst between them, its great black body trembling, its smooth flank shuddering in the air. Another horse burst through the throng followed by two more, all in full charge with riders astride them. Behind them was an army of blue uniforms, still crisp and unsoiled, and the wall of people around Danny and Nathan Bishop and the boy with the pistol collapsed. Several of the Letts had fought in guerrilla campaigns back in the motherland and knew the benefits of cut-and-run. In the mad-dash dispersal, Danny lost sight of Nathan Bishop. Within a minute, most of the Letts were running past the Opera House, and Dudley Square was suddenly littered with blue uniforms, Danny and the other men looking at one another as if to say: Did any of that just happen?
But men lay crumpled in the street and against walls as the reinforcements used their nightsticks on the few that weren’t brothers of the badge whether the bodies were moving or not. On the far fringes of the crowd, a small group of demonstrators, the last ones out apparently, were cut off by more reinforcements and more horses. Cops had cut heads and cut knees and holes that leaked from their shoulders and hands and thighs and swelling contusions and black eyes and broken arms and fat lips. Danny saw Mark Denton trying to pull himself to his feet, and he crossed to him and gave him his hand. Mark stood and applied weight to his right foot and winced.
“Broken?” Danny said.
“Twisted, I think.” Mark slung his arm around Danny’s shoulder and they walked to the loading dock on the other side of the street, Mark sucking oxygen from the air with a hiss.
“You sure?”
“Might be sprained,” Mark said. “Fuck, Dan, I lost my helmet.”
He had a cut along his hairline that had dried black and he gripped his ribs with his free arm. Danny leaned him against the loading dock and noticed two cops kneeling over Sergeant Francie Stoddard. One of them met his eyes and shook his head.
“What?” Danny said.
“He’s dead. He’s gone,” the cop said.
“He’s what?” Mark said. “No. How the fuck …?”
“He just grabbed his chest,” the cop said. “Right in the middle of it all. Just grabbed his chest and went all red and starting gasping. We got him over here, but …” The cop shrugged. “Fucking heart attack. You believe that? Here? In this?” The cop looked out at the street.
His partner still held Stoddard’s hand. “Fucking guy had less than a year till his thirty, he goes like this?” The cop was crying. “He goes like this, because of them?”
“Jesus Christ,” Mark whispered and touched the top of Stoddard’s shoe. They’d worked together five years at D-10 in Roxbury Crossing.
“They shot Welch in the thigh,” the first cop said. “Shot Armstrong in the hand. Fuckers were stabbing guys with ice picks?”
“There’s going to be some hell to pay,” Mark said.
“You goddamn got that right,” the crying cop said. “You can make goddamn fucking book on that.”
Danny looked away from Stoddard’s body. Ambulances rolled up Dudley Street. Across the square, a cop rose from the pavement on wobbly feet and wiped at the blood in his eyes and then tipped over again. Danny saw a cop empty a metal trash can on a prone Lett, then drop the can on the body for good measure. It was the cream-colored suit that got Danny moving. He walked toward them as the cop delivered a kick so hard it lifted his other foot off the ground.
Nathan Bishop’s face looked like a crushed plum. His teeth littered the ground near his chin. One ear was torn halfway off. The fingers of both hands pointed in all the wrong directions.
Danny put his hand on the shoulder of the cop. It was Henry Temple, a Special Squads goon.
“I think you got him,” Danny said.
Temple looked at Danny for a bit like he was searching for an apt response. Then he shrugged and walked off.
A pair of paramedics were passing and Danny said, “We got one here.”