Luther raised the gun again. It should have been easier, the man’s eyes no longer on him, the man probably slipping across the river right at this moment, climbing the dark shore into another world. All it would take was one more pull of the trigger to be sure. He’d had no hesitation with the Deacon. So why now?

The gun shook in his hand and he lowered it again.

Wouldn’t take the people the Deacon associated with long to put all this together, to put him in this room. Whether Smoke lived or died, Luther and Lila’s time in Tulsa was done.

Still…

He raised the gun again, gripped his forearm to stop the shakes and stared down the barrel at Smoke. He stood there a good minute before he finally faced the fact that he could stand there for an hour and he’d still never pull that trigger.

“Ain’t you,” he said.

Luther looked at the blood still leaking out of the man. He took one last look behind him at Jessie. He sighed. He stepped over Dandy’s corpse.

“You simple sons of bitches,” Luther said as he headed for the door. “You brought this on yourselves.”

CHAPTER eight

After the flu had passed on, Danny returned to walking the beat by day and studying to impersonate a radical at night. In terms of the latter duty, Eddie McKenna left packages at his door at least once a week. He’d unwrap them to find stacks of the latest socialist and Communist propaganda rags, as well as copies of Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto, speeches given by Jack Reed, Emma Goldman, Big Bill Haywood, Jim Larkin, Joe Hill, and Pancho Villa. He read thickets of propaganda so dense with rhetoric it may as well have been a structural engineering manual for all it spoke to any common man Danny could imagine. He came across certain words so often—tyranny, imperialism, capitalist oppression, brotherhood, insurrection—that he suspected a knee-jerk vocabulary had become necessary to ensure a dependable shorthand among the workers of the world. But as the words lost individuality, so they lost their power and gradually their meaning. Once the meaning was gone, Danny wondered, how would these noodle heads—and among the Bolshie and anarchist literature, he had yet to find someone who wasn’t a noodle head—as one unified body, successfully cross a street, never mind overthrow a country?

When he wasn’t reading speeches, he read missives from what was commonly referred to as the “front line of the workers’ revolution.” He read about striking coal miners burned in their homes alongside their families, IWW workers tarred and feathered, labor organizers assassinated on the dark streets of small towns, unions broken, unions outlawed, workingmen jailed, beaten, and deported. And always it was they who were painted as the enemies of the great American Way.

To his surprise, Danny felt occasional stirrings of empathy. Not for everyone, of course—he’d always thought anarchists were morons, offering the world nothing but steel-eyed bloodlust, and little in his reading changed his opinion. Communists, too, struck him as hopelessly naïve, pursuing a utopia that failed to take into consideration the most elemental characteristic of the human animal: covetousness. The Bolshies believed it could be cured like an illness, but Danny knew that greed was an organ, like the heart, and to remove it would kill the host. The socialists were the smartest—they acknowledged greed—but their message was constantly entwined with the Communists’ and it was impossible, at least in this country, for it to be heard above the red din.