Black Hornet by James Sallis

to my right to peer cautiously around the corner. Remembering the periscope, a yellow cardboard tube with two cheap mirrors, I’d bought at Kress’s for ninety-nine cents when I was twelve. One man stood over another. This man, lean, dark, was talking. He held a small revolver loosely alongside one leg, in his left hand. The other man lay slumped against the wall, both hands pressed into his groin. A darkish patch of blood beneath him.
    “We all know what’s right. Part of what we’re born with. Body goes against that, it only starts to destroy itself.”
    The man slumped against the wall said something I couldn’t make out.
    “I know,” the other one said, raising the gun. “I’m sorry. Never was any good with these things. I didn’t intend to hurt you, it should have been quick.”
    Holding the .38 two-handed, I stepped into the mouth of the cul-de-sac.
    “Don’t do it!” I said, just as someone behind me said, “What the fuck!”
    Reflexively I turned. A middle-aged man stood there in the street holding a baseball bat.
    “Don’t guess you were the guys called a cab, huh?”
    I spun back around in time to see the shooter scrambling over a dumpster and through a delivery door behind it. I got off a couple of rounds before I even realized I was firing. One of them rang against the dumpster’s steel. The other hit the door just as it closed.
    Then everything went black.
    Someone stood over me. Something struck at my back, something thudded into a kidney, deflected off an elbow. Someone said “God-dam niggers … Used to be a fine city … Teach this one a lesson anyway.” I knew it was happening, but I didn’t feel the blows. I’d gone away. I was floating above it all, looking down.
    Fragments drifted up to me.
    It. Down. Now.
    Can’t. A white man. Got to.
    Don’t be. Deep. Enough.
    A broad face loomed above mine. Curly dark-blond hair. Face ashine with sweat. I was pretty sure it was the guy who’d been slumped against the wall. I could smell garlic on his breath.
    “Hang on,” he said. “You’re okay. There’s an ambulance on the way.”
    “You the one’s been whacking at me?” I said.
    “No. He’s taken care of.”
    “Glad to hear it. You okay? Looked like a lot of blood.”
    “I’m fine. And alive, thanks to you.”
    “Things gonna get better soon.”
    “We all hope so.”
    “I mean it.” Darkness was closing on me, rushing in like water at the edge of the frame.
    “We all mean it. Meanwhile, better let me have the gun.”
    I didn’t realize I was still holding on to it.
    “I’m a cop,” he said. “Don Walsh.”
    And the water closed over me.

Chapter Nine
    I N M AY OF 1967, ON A DRY , lifeless Sacramento day, members of the Black Panther Party from the San Francisco Bay area converged on the California state legislature with M-1 rifles and 12-gauge shotguns cradled in their arms, .45-caliber pistols and cartridge belts at their waists.
    Newspapers and broadcasts all over the country gave feature coverage to the Sacramento “armed invasion.”
    The Party had come to announce its opposition to a bill severely restricting public carriage of loaded weapons. Since this was not prohibited under current law, the police were impelled to return the weapons they’d begun confiscating from the Panthers in the corridors outside the legislative chamber. Eventually eighteen Party members were arrested on charges of disrupting the state legislature (a misdemeanor) and conspiracy to disrupt the state legislature (a felony). Conspiracy was big back then.
    The Panthers weren’t in fact particularly interested in whether or not the gun bill passed. They’d continue to own and carry weapons, visibly, legally or not. Their real purpose was to direct media attention, people’s attention, to the fact that blacks in ghettos had little recourse but armed self-defense.
    They were expressing the desperation and anger of a people pushed aside and set against themselves, a desperation and anger no