The crowd took another step back as the Metro Park cops extended their arms.

“Cock them!” Thomas shouted.

They did, and the crowd took several more steps back.

“If I see anyone holding a rock,” Thomas called, “we shoot to kill.”

He took five steps forward, the shotgun coming to rest on the chest of a man with a rock in his hand. The man dropped the rock and then urinated down his left leg. Thomas considered mercy and quickly deemed it inappropriate for the atmosphere. He opened the urinator’s forehead with his shotgun butt and stepped over him.

“Run, you wretched curs.” He swept his eyes across them. “RUN!”

No one moved—they looked too shocked—and Thomas turned to Eigen, to the men on the fringe, to the Metro Park cops.

“Fire at will.”

The Metro Park cops stared back at him.

Thomas rolled his eyes. He drew his service revolver, raised it above his head, and fired six times.

The men got the point. They began to discharge their weapons into the air and the crowd exploded like drops from a shattered water bucket. They ran up the street. They ran and ran, darting into alleys and down side streets, banging off overturned cars, falling to the sidewalk, stomping on one another, hurling themselves into storefronts and landing on the broken glass they’d created only an hour before.

Thomas flicked his wrist and emptied his shell casings onto the street. He laid the shotgun at his feet and reloaded his service revolver. The air was sharp with cordite and the echoes of gunfire. The mob continued its desperate flight. Thomas holstered his revolver and reloaded his shotgun. The long summer of impotence and confusion faded from his heart. He felt twenty-five years old.

Tires squealed behind him. Thomas turned as one black Buick and four patrol cars pulled to a stop as a soft rain began to fall. Superintendent Michael Crowley exited the Buick. He carried his own shotgun and wore his service revolver in a shoulder holster. He sported a fresh bandage on his forehead, and his fine dark suit was splattered with egg yolk and bits of shell.

Thomas smiled at him and Crowley gave him a tired smile in return.

“Time for a little law and order, wouldn’t you say, Captain?”

“Indeed, Superintendent.”

They walked up the center of the street as the rest of the men dropped in behind them.

“Like the old days, Tommy, eh?” Crowley said as they started to make out the outer edge of a fresh mob concentrated in Andrew Square two blocks ahead.

“Just what I was thinking, Michael.”

“And when we clear them here?”

When we clear them. Not if. Thomas loved it.

“We take Broadway back.”

Crowley clapped a hand on Thomas’s shoulder.

“Ah, how I missed this.”

“Me, too, Michael. Me, too.”

Mayor Peters’s chauffeur, Horace Russell, glided the Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost along the fringes of the trouble, never once entering a street so strewn with debris or the throngs that they would have been hard-pressed to get back out again. And so, while the populace rioted, its mayor observed them from a remove, but not so much of a remove that he couldn’t hear their terrible war cries, their shrieks and high-pitched laughter, the shock of sudden gunfire, the incessant shattering of glass.