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  When they reached their destination, the transportation had already arrived, sitting with its motor idling. Earl opened the passenger-side door and sat up front next to the driver while the deputies crowded the rest of the family into the back.

  The Overstreet family leader looked straight ahead, any sign of emotion now missing from his face. No one would have questioned him, though, if he had said he felt as if he and his family were like lambs being led to slaughter. The van’s driver was a young black man, looking to Earl to be in his early twenties. He wore dark, aviator-like sunglasses, which Earl thought strange inside the poorly lit underground garage. Borwinski startled Earl from his thoughts when he tapped on the passenger-door’s window, motioning for the father to roll it down.

  “We don’t have much time before those reporters find out you’re down here. I just want to say good luck, Earl.”

  Swallowing hard, Earl nodded and blinked his eyes in a silent “thank you” to the dedicated deputy.

  Borwinski nodded back, then slapped the windshield, signaling the driver to go. The young driver put the van in gear and the beige Ford Econoline headed up an exit ramp to the street. Once out of the garage, the van merged into Chicago’s late afternoon rush hour. Earl noticed in his large, side view mirror that a Chicago Police car had pulled behind them as soon as they entered into traffic.

  Earl reflected upon Spencer’s instructions to Borwinski’s men that they were not to take the family back to either apartment. They can’t be taking us to Arizona right away. Could they? And why Arizona? Earl asked himself. Was this Spencer’s idea? Did anybody care what his family thought about this choice? Did anybody care what happened to them and where they were going? Did Deputy Borwinski? Judge Parsons? How about the family of Manny Fleischman? Did any of them care what was now going to happen to the family of Earl Overstreet?

  Earl kept asking himself what went wrong, still not wanting to admit that he should have listened to his wife. James had seen the murder with his own eyes and did what he should have: he came forward. Yet, at the conclusion of the bench trial, Judge Parsons said that he “deeply regretted” his decision and that he “had no other choice” but to find Pick and his gang not guilty of the murder of Manny Fleischman.

  What does it take to find justice in this world? How could the guilty beset free and the righteous made to suffer?

  Within minutes, the driver entered the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Expressway and headed out of the city toward O’Hare. The vehicle’s stop-and-go motion bounced the van’s cramped occupants to and fro as the driver alternated between tapping his brake and applying the gas. Eva clung to James in the backseat, sobbing loudly. Her children remained silent as their mother’s sorrowful wails dominated the space.

  James bobbed with the jerking motion of the vehicle, his mind working on comprehending the outcome of the trial. What is going to happen to us now? Like his daddy, he didn’t have any answers. He really didn’t know what emotion to feel the most. Anger? Confusion? Fear? He felt all three, each wrenching his gut. If he had listened to his momma, he wouldn’t have caused all this trouble for his family. Because of him, no Overstreet could ever be safe in Bronzeville again.

  It was because of him now, too, they would all have to move to Arizona. He recalled how he had dreamed of travlin’ to Arizona someday, dreamed of it since Miss Burns told the class all about the Grand Canyon and the “Copper State,” as she called it. But he had never imagined going there like this, against his will, trapped like a prisoner. If anyone should be a prisoner now, he thought, it should be every guilty but free member of the Oakwood Rangers.

  According to the globe in his bedroom and the map Miss Burns had pulled down in front of his classroom’s blackboard, Arizona sat between California and New Mexico. He could hear his teacher’s voice describing it as a mostly hot and dry place—a desert. An “arid” state is what she had called it. Now he silently asked himself, “How could he live in a place with no water?”

  What about Burnham Park and the lakefront? He imagined the cobalt water crashing against the limestone rocks and outrunning the waves as he did so many times. Closing his eyes, he imagined the glorious smell of the freshwater lake and the fragrance of Burnham Park’s newly mowed grass, wafting through the humid, summer air. He imagined the sound of his Ted Williams bicycle whirring away along the park’s asphalt paths, the feeling of its tires gripping the smooth, black pavement.

  Then he recalled the thudding sound his Louisville Slugger bat had made while Pick ferociously pummeled Manny Fleischman’s skull as his friend laid helpless on the ground. James snapped his eyes open as the shuddering memory ran the length of his body. The pain was deeper than anything he could ever imagine.

  As he gazed outward, he saw his own reflection in the tinted windows of the van. At that moment, what became most clear to him was the memory of Manny Fleischman’s desperate look the day their eyes last connected. It had been nearly four months since that dreadful day, the moment he lost the friendship of the old Jew-man forever. Manny had become like a second father to him. He admired and respected the retired teacher, even loved him, he thought. Not having him in his life anymore was, by far, James’s deepest loss of all.

  “Fuckin’ rush hour,” Chicago Police officer Henry Gaston mumbled as he tried to maneuver his squad car closer to the Sheriff’s Department Econoline van. “How do people drive in this shit everyday?”

  Traffic was heavy on the outbound John F. Kennedy Expressway. It was after five and the late afternoon mass exodus of workers from the city to the suburbs was in full swing. The Chicago Police cruiser, shadowing the van, stayed as close as it could, but aggressive drivers furiously tightened even the smallest gap between the busy roadway’s crawling vehicles.

  As the van approached Hubbard’s Cave, a quarter-mile long tunnel the JFK burrows through just north of the Loop, the accompanying blue-and-white fell several car lengths behind. Gaston’s partner, Lou Darcy, perused the sports page of the Chicago Sun Times, head buried in the paper as he sat in the passenger seat. Even the darkness cast upon the car’s interior from being inside the expressway’s man-made cave didn’t deter him from his reading.

  “You think the Bears are gonna win Sunday?” Darcy asked his partner.

  “Quit readin’ the goddam paper wouldja, Lou, and keep your eyes on that fucking van.”

  “That fuckin’ van ain’t goin’ nowhere fast, Henry. Where the hell is he gonna go in this mess?”

  “God, I hate tailing these stupid Cook County assholes,” Gaston complained. “Why the fuck did he take the goddam Kennedy? Procedure is to use the side streets till we get outta the Loop. Now we’re both stuck in this shit.” Gaston slammed his fist against the steering wheel. “And what’s he doing in that right-hand lane? What the fuck kinda moron is this guy driven that van?”

  CRACK. CRACK. The distinct sound of two gunshots echoed against the tunnel’s walls.

  “Fuck! Fuck! Someone just shot at the van!” Gaston roared as he heard the two quick pops. He saw gun flashes come from the passenger’s-side back window of a silver Buick Electra 225 that had pulled beside the driver’s side of the van. Glass from the Econoline’s driver’s-side rear windows shattered, and shiny shards flew onto the pavement.

  Darcy dropped his paper and grabbed the car’s two-way radio.

  “Dispatch. This is twelve-zero-two. We’ve got shots fired in Hubbard’s Cave—shots fired—I repeat—shots fired! Over!”

  Gaston flipped on the squad’s blue Mars lights. He then toggled another dash switch, making his siren blare. Police dispatch did not respond to his partner’s frantic radio call.

  “We never get a signal when we need it in this fuckin’ tunnel!” Darcy yelled. He jumped from the crawling car as Gaston attempted to maneuver his police cruiser closer to the van.

  As his partner ran toward the van, Gaston grabbed the radio. “This is squad twelve-zero-two. Shots fired—repeat—shots fired. Over!”

  Still no response from
main police dispatch at the Central Communications Room.

  “This is car twelve-zero-two—come in dispatch—twelve-zero-two—shots fired in Hubbard’s Cave—come in dispatch!”

  The Cook County Sheriff’s van transporting the Overstreets had come to a halt. The cars ahead of it continued moving, seemingly unaware of what had transpired. The roadway was now empty in front of the stopped van. Drivers in cars behind and to the side of the van came to a complete stop, seeing the police car’s flashing blue lights and hearing the siren’s familiar whooping sound bounce off the tunnel’s white, ceramic-tiled walls.

  The deuce-and-a-quarter from which Gaston saw the shots fired had swung around the front of the van and made an abrupt, angled stop. Not able to move his car any closer, he threw the car into park, grabbed his scattergun from the dash, and jumped from his vehicle, running after his partner. As he did, the back door of the Electra flipped open. The van’s driver got out and jumped into the sedan’s backseat. Once inside, the four-door deuce-and-a-quarter screeched away, exiting at the Ohio Street ramp just ahead.

  Weapons drawn, Gaston and Darcy finally reached the van, scrambling to the passenger side first. The windows had been shattered on that side, too, as the bullets went straight through the vehicle, missing, Gaston prayed, their intended targets inside.

  Earl jumped out of the van just as the two Chicago cops arrived alongside the shot-up vehicle. “Where the hell were you guys?” he screamed. “They tried to kill my son! Where the hell were you?”

  CHAPTER 21

  A freshly carved-out community in the Arizona desert about thirty miles northeast of Phoenix, the town of Fountain Hills was still in a somewhat secluded part of Maricopa County. Developed as a haven for snowbirds in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Fountain Hills bordered both the Fort McDowell and Salt River-Pima Indian Reservations. On its other sides, the town bumped up against the outreaches of the ever-growing city of Scottsdale.

  If the intent was to become or remain anonymous, then this town fit the bill as the perfect place. Fountain Hills was a place where a person could live and never have to talk to anyone; it was a place where someone could stay distant from his neighbors, and nobody would ever ask why. Holding true to its reputation, when the Overstreets arrived there the night of the last day of the Fleischman murder trial, the town’s less than two thousand residents—still virtually 100 percent white—didn’t pay much attention to the black family’s appearance.

  The first few weeks after they arrived, James read a notice delivered to their mailbox, warning residents to be on the lookout for a black bear that had roamed down from the high country in search of food. The bear’s unwelcome visit brought out the news media as well as excited neighbors into the town’s oft-deserted streets. The surprising result: for the very first time folks met each other, some after spending years of living together as strangers on the same block of homes.

  At night, wild javalina roamed the town’s mostly unpaved streets. Once, his mother found a diamondback rattler huddled inside the front screen door to their house. The family was warned by another flyer that those with swimming pools should be on the lookout for bobcats intruding their secluded, brick-walled yards in search of scarce water from their sparkling pools. Left outside unattended, pet cats or small dogs became easy prey for not only the bobcats but for foraging coyotes and hungry owls.

  James remembered how his teacher, Miss Burns, had described Arizona as being a place that was “sparsely populated” and filled with all types of cactus. He also remembered how his best friend, Clayton, then asked Miss Burns if parsley was the only vegetable that grew there besides the thorny plants, and how the class laughed after Miss Burns explained the definition of sparsely versus parsley.

  On that day back in May, some seven months ago now, she had gone on to tell them during their geography period that the 1970 U.S. Census had counted only 900,000 people residing in Arizona and that the vast majority lived in Maricopa County, home to the state’s capital, Phoenix. Comparatively, she explained, the county they lived in—Cook County, Illinois—boasted a population of over five million. She wrote the large number with all the zeros side by side on the blackboard, and James daydreamed about what it would be like to live somewhere so uncrowded, so distant from your neighbor. It all seemed so unreal to him as Miss Burns described to her class that day long ago all about “our nation’s forty-eighth state.”

  James discovered soon enough that his new home state of Arizona was a place where new people moved into everyday from somewhere else, many folks choosing to go there to begin their lives over again and “get a fresh start” as he would hear them later describe their motives. New neighbors didn’t turn the heads of native “Zoners”—the name used for those born in the arid state.

  In school, James met kids from families who had migrated for reasons that were innocent enough, such as to get away from harsh Midwest or Northeast winters. He also met kids from California, their parents moving the family because of the Golden State’s outrageous cost of living. He met others whose families simply came to Arizona on a lark, adventure drawing them to one of the country’s last uncluttered regions.

  James would find out much later in his life that Arizona had long been a favorite place for the feds and other law enforcement agencies to send people into witness protection. The U.S. Marshal’s Office monitored all of the country’s witness protection programs, and the Cook County Witness Protection Program, or CCWPP, was no different. With the guidance from this government agency, Assistant Cook County State’s Attorney Ron Spencer had picked the town of Fountain Hills, Arizona, for the new home of the Earl Overstreet family. The Overstreets, of course, had no choice in the matter.

  The CCWPP arranged for Earl Overstreet to fill the newly created position of meter reader for the growing town’s water department. Eva stayed home with the children as she did back in Chicago, and volunteered at the Four Peaks Middle School two days a week. As for James, it was difficult for him to make friends at school because he was anxious about getting too close to anyone, always fearful of being discovered. Perhaps contributing more to this hardship of fitting in was that James and his siblings had the distinction of being the only blacks in the town’s entire school system. This uniqueness, though, would ultimately help them become friends with white kids, since many hadn’t laid eyes on a black person before the Oversteets’s arrival and their curiosity propelled them to reach out to the new black kids.

  The Overstreets, each given a new first and family name, were instructed by the CCWPP to tell everyone they hailed from Gary, Indiana, a city in the northwestern part of the Hoosier State known for its one-time prolific steel-making industry. The premise given to them by CCWPP: they were starting a new life after their father had been laid off from Gary’s U.S. Steel plant.

  James despised his new name but he had no choice but to accept it. Their names had been changed without any of their input, and so, like many other things he disliked about his new life in Arizona, James accepted his, burying his feelings along with sad memories of his loss of his former home. He had to survive, he told himself, so one day he could be free and find justice for the murder of his friend. But surviving in Arizona as a black person would not be an easy task.

  One thing that would help him, though, was the common bond provided by the nation’s pastime, baseball. At the time when the Overstreets arrived in Arizona, the state had no professional baseball team but did host some teams for their spring training seasons. As a result, the kids he met in school who liked baseball—and that was most children—still followed the team from their original hometown.

  “My favorite team is the Chicago White Sox,” James told classmates. Then, he’d deluge them with a litany of player stats from Pale Hose teams from the mid-sixties up to the present day. James knew his baseball. He’d come to find out that most kids were Yankees or Dodgers fans since so many of the early settlers of Fountain Hills had come from either New York or southern California.
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br />   “We gave you Tommy John for Dick Allen,” James told the Dodgers fans. He smirked over that trade, which, at least in the beginning, turned out to be a huge success for Chicago’s South Side ball club and a mistake for the National League team from the City of Angels.

  But talking about his team wasn’t the same as seeing them in person. He missed sitting in the old, green, wooden grandstands at Comiskey Park and wondered if he would ever be able to watch his beloved White Sox again. From this standpoint, the witness relocation move crushed him more than any other, but not as much as his inability to do his travlin’ any longer in Burnham Park along the shores of Lake Michigan.

  “Fountain Hills has a lake you can go to, James,” his mother told him many times during those early days after their arrival. He sensed his mother had hoped visiting this land-locked, recycled wastewater lake could appease him in some way. The thirty-acre body of water, which spewed a geyser every fifteen minutes from a man-made fountain in its center—hence giving the town and the lake its moniker—was to Lake Michigan what a grain of sand was in a child’s play box.

  James never responded to his mother’s urgings. Although he secretly traveled to the quaint lake many times, he considered it a puddle of piss. James knew he couldn’t stay long in a place like Fountain Hills. He dreamed of leaving from the moment he arrived. Maybe the people at the CCWPP thought their make-believe person with a name he despised would live happily ever after in this godforsaken Arizona town with its pathetic lake made out of recycled urine. But James Overstreet never would.