Short Stories by Harry Turtledove

were there? Were there, smartass?”
    “No, but—” Muhammad Shabazz broke off.
    “Constitutional right, my ass,” the deputy sheriff said. “You got a Constitutional right to get what’s comin’ to you, and you will. You just bet you will.” He lumbered back to the desk.
    In a low voice, Cecil Price said, “We’re in deep now.”
    “No kidding.” Muhammad Shabazz sounded like a man who wanted to make a joke but was too worried to bring it off.
    “They aren’t gonna let us out of here,” Tariq Abdul-Rashid said. “Not in one piece, they aren’t.”
    “We’ll see what happens, that’s all,” Muhammad Shabazz said. “They can’t think they’ll get away with it.” To Cecil Price, that only proved the man who’d come down from the North didn’t understand how things really worked in
Mississippi
. Of course the deputy sheriffs thought they’d get away with it. Why wouldn’t they? Blacks had been getting away with things against whites who stepped out of line ever since slavery days. Times were starting to change; Negroes of goodwill like Muhammad Shabazz and Tariq Abdul-Rashid were helping to make them change. But they hadn’t changed yet—and the deputies and their pals were determined they wouldn’t change no matter what. And so...
    And so we’re in deep for sure , Cecil Price thought, fighting despair.
    * * * *
    The first deputy sheriff, the one who’d arrested them, returned to the jail not long after the sun went down. He walked back to the cells to look at the prisoners, laughed a gloating laugh, and then went up front again.
    “What’s the Priest got to say?” asked the man at the front desk.
    “It’s all taken care of,” the first deputy answered.
    “They comin’ here?”
    “Nah.” The first deputy sounded faintly disappointed. “It’d be too damn raw. We’d end up with the fuckin’ Feds on our case for sure.”
    “What’s going on, then?”
    The first deputy told him. He pitched his voice too low to let Cecil Price make it out. By the way the desk man laughed, he thought it was pretty good. Price was sure he wouldn’t.
    Time crawled by on hands and knees. The phone rang once, but it had nothing to do with Price and Muhammad Shabazz and Tariq Abdul-Rashid. It was a woman calling to find out if her no-account husband was sleeping off another binge in the drunk tank. He wasn’t. But it only went to show that, despite the struggle for whites’ civil rights, ordinary life in
Philadelphia went on.
    Around half past ten, the first deputy came tramping back to the cells again. To Cecil Price’s amazement, he had a jingling bunch of keys on a big brass key ring with him. He opened the door to Price’s cell. “Come on out, boy,” he said. “Reckon I’ve got to turn you loose.”
    Price wanted to stick a finger in his ear to make sure he’d heard right. “You sure?” he blurted.
    “Yeah, I’m sure,” the deputy said. “I been askin’ around. You weren’t at the church when it went up. Neither were these assholes.” He pointed into the cell that held Muhammad Shabazz and Tariq Abdul-Rashid. “Gotta let them go, too, dammit.”
    “You’ll hear from our lawyers,” Muhammad Shabazz promised. “False arrest is false arrest, even if you think twice about it later. This is still a free country, whether you know it or not.”
    Although Cecil Price agreed with every word he said, he wished the Black Muslim would shut the hell up. Pissing off the deputy right when he was letting them out of jail wasn’t the smartest move in the world, not even close. But Price walked out of his cell. A moment later, Muhammad Shabazz and Tariq Abdul-Rashid walked out of theirs, too.
    The deputy with the wrecking-ball belly at the front desk gave them back their wallets and keys and pocket change. “If you’re smart, you’ll get your white ass outa
Philadelphia . Go on down to
Meridian and never come back,” he told Cecil Price. “You cause trouble around here again, you look at a