CHAPTER SIX THE CONFESSIONS
The seventh day was the day the Boulevard gave up its secrets.
Men who had not spoken a true word in years walked into the Zone Four precinct and spoke.
Antoine had gone first, on the fifth, with his three shootings.
On the seventh, a dozen more followed. They came alone and in pairs.
They came in the morning and they came at night.
They came because the inside of their heads had become a place where a dead man stood at the foot of the bed and a floor breathed and a girl cried in a room where no girl was, and the precinct, they had decided, was the only building in the city where the dead man could not reach them, because they believed, wrongly, that the dead respect the walls of a police station.
Royce was in the precinct on the seventh day, and Royce did not know what to do.
Royce had spent years building a machine that ran on silence, on the code, on the understanding that the Boulevard does not talk to the police and the police do not look too hard at the Boulevard, and the machine was breaking down around him in a single morning.
Men were confessing to shootings Royce had closed as unsolved.
Men were giving up addresses of stash houses Royce had been paid to not raid.
A man walked in and told Royce, to his face, where a girl named Tasha was buried, and Royce had to send a car to the house on the Boulevard, and the car found her, and the finding was a thing that could not be un-found, and the city was going to want to know why the police had not found her a year ago, and Royce’s gold watch was very heavy on his wrist.
Royce did what men like Royce do when the machine breaks.
He tried to find the leak. He thought one of the crews had flipped.
He called Darnell’s number and the number was disconnected.
He sent a car to Darnell’s house and the house was empty, the safe open, the money gone.
He sent a car to the Jackals’ spots and the spots were empty, the houses dark, the product left on the tables like a dinner abandoned mid-bite.
Royce sat in his office on the seventh night and he tried to make the pieces fit, and the pieces did not fit, because the pieces were not the kind of pieces Royce believed in.
Royce believed in money and in silence and in the weakness of men who could be bought.
Royce did not believe in the dead, and the dead were the only piece that made the picture make sense, and so Royce sat and he did not understand, and the not understanding was the beginning of the end for Royce, though Royce did not know it yet.
The men who did not confess left. A car full of Jackals drove east on I-twenty at midnight on the seventh day and did not come back.
A Saint who had been one of Darnell’s shooters bought a bus ticket to Birmingham and was on it by morning, with a single bag and a look on his face that the driver, a man who had driven that route for twenty years, had never seen on a young man, a look that said the thing behind me is worse than the thing ahead of me, and the driver did not ask, because the driver had eyes.
By the end of the seventh day, the Glenwood Saints and the Candler Road Jackals, between them, did not exist. There were a few men in jail, a few in the hospital, a few on buses to other cities, a few on their knees in churches, and a few, like Big Carl and Man-Man, who had decided that the only way out of the life was through it, and they walked out of it and they did not look back, and the Boulevard, for the first time in twenty years, did not have a crew on its corners.
The police called it a miracle. The captain of Zone Four went on the local news on the eighth morning and said that a combination of increased patrols and community cooperation had led to a significant disruption of gang activity on the Boulevard, and the news anchor nodded, and the people of the Boulevard who were watching at home laughed, because the people of the Boulevard knew that the police had not done a single thing, and they knew who had done it, and they were not going to tell the police, because the police had not earned the telling, and the dead man had.
The Boulevard had a new name for what had happened.
The people did not say it out loud, not where the police could hear, but in the barbershops and the laundromats and over the fences in the backyards, they said it: the man came back.
They did not mean me, not only me. They meant the idea of me.
The idea that a man could be taken off the Boulevard for no reason and the Boulevard itself could decide that the taking was not allowed, and that the men who had done the taking would answer, not to the police, who had failed, but to the street, which had not.
The streets were clean. The corners were empty.
The money was in the box. And Curtis Hargrove, who was the last man on the Boulevard who still did not believe, was alone in his mother’s house on the south side, because Curtis had gone to his mother’s house when the men started turning themselves in, because Curtis believed that a man’s mother’s house was a place the dead could not enter, and Curtis was about to learn that the dead do not respect the thresholds of the living, and that a mother’s house, when the man inside it has done what Curtis has done, is not a refuge, it is a room with the door closed and the dead man already inside.