The car in which Charlie Dugan rode had just swung onto South Charlotte Street headed for the Damascus courthouse when a terrible feeling came over him. His attention fixed on the truck racing just ahead through the orange, surreal glow of mercury-vapor lamps, the feeling came like a warning sound—the crack of a twig or a squeaking floorboard—and he actually looked around as if to locate it. It felt to him as though something had shifted, some critical balance in his world had utterly failed and life as he’d known it was over.
Ensconced in the backseat, Dugan took in the shadowy interior of the big silver Dodge. Like the sheer bulk of his body, grown heavy with his years and success as Blackstone County’s sheriff, like the tailored three-piece suits, the custom-made boots from Nacona, Texas, and the Remington automatic twelve-gauge shotgun locked to the dashboard beside Eddie, his driver, the car had become a signature of his authority. And like the street and buildings flying by, they were all familiar, comfortable and utterly unchanged. Dugan was a man superbly in tune with his instincts, and the night, like his career, couldn’t be going better. He dismissed the feeling.
It was spring 1972. He was up for reelection in the fall. It would be his third term, and the election was his to lose. Everybody said so. He’d come a long way in thirteen years.
Ahead, where he knew the courthouse square was, Dugan could see the blue lights from gathering patrol cars flashing off the facades of the downtown buildings, waiting for the truckload of whiskey and Dugan’s arrival. Four cars following him were filled with his deputies and some specials, all jubilant and high, and two Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms federal boys, as well as the three men they had found working the still they’d raided.
The vehicle in front of them, a converted army three-quarter-ton truck, the official seal of the county on its doors, swung suddenly down a side street and sped away in the wrong direction. Eddie, without comment, staying right on its tail. The detour was a familiar time-delaying ritual; the lead actor and his props always came on stage last. The other cars made straight for the courthouse and the jail, and Dugan gave them no further thought.
The truck made another turn and plunged through a tunnel of trees, new leaves glowing a soft lime beneath ordinary street lamps, the porches of houses sleeping in the shadows. Eddie’s window was down—Eddie hadn’t asked, but that was okay this time. A lush, sweet smell filled the car—like a young woman’s, Dugan thought, startled by this new sensation, too. Like life itself is a young woman, all desire and yearning. What the hell is going on?
Then they were flying down a long hill and turning again, back toward South Charlotte Street and the orange glow of downtown, punctuated by the shattered, frenetic blue lights.
The truck ran a red light at South Charlotte, crossed to the farthest of four lanes, then roared the wrong way back up the one-way street, up the hill to the courthouse and the waiting highway patrol, city police and sheriff’s vehicles—all those blue lights—and a Saturday-night crowd of onlookers. Eddie followed. A good crowd, Dugan thought, maybe a hundred people. He experienced the little jolt of excitement tinged with anxiety he always felt approaching crowds, had felt ever since the night years earlier when he’d confronted Martin Pemberton with a collection plate and a cause—Pemberton, who had found Dugan his first job in Blackstone County and since had become his political sponsor and ally.
Its wheels in the gutter, the truck parked directly in front of the crowd spilling off the sloping courthouse lawn onto the sidewalk. Back downhill at the corner and the traffic light, above the same sidewalk, a little neon sign over a window of a square, nondescript building beamed Jail in electric blue.
“It’s going to rain,” Eddie said, easing the car to a stop in the middle of the street, his window humming shut.
“Yes,” Dugan replied. He’d seen the lightning over the tops of the massive oaks that surrounded the courthouse. Opening the door, he smelled the approaching rain. “Soon, I expect.”
With a crash, two deputies released the tailgate of the truck, and Dugan, showing surprising ease for a man his size, climbed onto a rear wheel and swung into the open bed with its load of wooden barrels and plastic gallon jugs. Gathering himself, he took a last glance toward the car with its high rear antenna, the gold star rising on a short shaft above the front bumper its only official marking. Eddie—Captain Edward Lambert—was standing outside the car now, talking with a trooper and ignoring the crowd. It was Dugan’s show, and Eddie had seen it before, many times.
Bending over, Dugan picked up a plastic jug, twisted off the lid, then did the same to another. Exhaling, he rose to his full height, well over six feet, and thrust the jugs, one in each hand, out from his sides, then over his head. Stepping to the back edge of the bed, he looked down at the crowd. A post-movie crowd, he was thinking, some of the boys from the pool hall, taxi drivers and whoever else happens to be downtown on a Saturday night. While people hurried from all directions into the shadows of the courthouse lawn, the crowd below him grew silent.
“C’mon, Charlie!” someone called.
“Yeah, pour out that sin!”
“Give me some, sheriff! I’ll repent later.” Laughter.
It is like a revival, Dugan thought, but so much more fun. The show had never grown old for him. Grinning, he turned the jugs upside down. In silence, they all waited for the splash of the clear liquid and the cloying stench of corn liquor. The crowd broke into a cheer. Two men climbed up and began to hand Dugan jugs as fast as he could dump them and toss them back over his shoulder.
Soon the night was all noise and laughter and whiskey smell, a celebration punctuated by the deepening booms of the approaching storm.
A deputy ran up to the back of the truck. A fire ax sprawled across both hands, he held it up like an offering to the sweating figure looming above him. Dugan snatched the handle with one massive paw, and moments later the contents of the barrels were cascading down the street.
Pausing, wiping his brow with his arm, Dugan looked down at the expectant faces, one moment differentiating among them with a disturbing clarity, then not seeing them at all as he grew quiet, remembering the revival tent years before. This skill of his, this ability to play a crowd—and, worse, his pleasure in it, never unalloyed—actually scared him at times. When people get like this, he thought, they’d die with me. He was untouchable.
Dugan threw his head back into the first cool drops of rain, laughter rushing out of his soul into the night. He would have stopped the laughter if he could. The crowd roared, he feeling more than hearing them, feeling their homage pulse through his body.
His eyes fell, following the stream of liquor down the courthouse hill to where silhouettes of men spilled like ants from the window of the jail basement. For time immemorial, the town drunks had been allowed to take shelter down there. Dugan watched the figures flail across the sidewalk, flop on their bellies and begin to lap the juice out of the gutter.
A great wind rolled down and swept away the stench of whiskey. Tossing the ax on the truck bed behind him, Dugan jumped to the street just as a huge flash split the sky. The gods, it seemed, had seen quite enough, and the night dissolved into rain, drowning the fleeing crowd, the trees and the orange streetlights of Damascus.