River City Read Online Free Page B

were not the first to intervene—others had evicted the crowd from the building and bullied a few individuals outside—but, unaware of what had transpired, they were ill prepared for the impending rampage. Beer-bellied, with a florid complexion, the senior of the two put up a hand to block a group of forty raucous men and youths. He demanded that they get off the street and use the sidewalk. “That’s what it’s there for!” he castigated them, as one might a rascally pack of kids. The men hooted, then charged, and the officer felt both his knees snap before he was trampled underfoot.
    His partner, youthful, more limber and less belligerent, escaped the crush by vaulting over the hood of a parked car and dashing across the sidewalk into a doorway, emerging to help his dazed and bloodied mentor back to his feet after the howling band had pressed on. The older man seemed to be under the impression that he still had a function to pursue, raising a hand to block the progress of the next throng, a gang of about six hundred men, reaching also for his missing pistol—confiscated by a rioter and now indiscriminately being fired in the air.
    The junior officer guided his confused colleague away.
    The first calculated intervention by authorities outside the building resulted in similar dismay. Fifteen officers ran down a side street and cut the mob off as it moved along Ste. Catherine, expecting that the presence of the uniform and the sight of fifteen truncheons would sober the drunks and bring order to the lives of the reckless. The gang failed to be impressed. Having ransacked a corner grocer, depositing the owner and his wife outside the premises while emptying his backroom, they demonstrated their commitment to the furor by hurling full and half-full beer bottles at the cops, and the blue line of fifteen men buckled and ran.
    Their flight charged the atmosphere with conviction. To the men running rampant on the street, they now owned the city.
    Bad news for Captain Armand Touton of the Night Patrol. After the sun went down, the city’s security rested upon his shoulders, but he had made a reasoned deduction. His detectives were not equipped for this type of operation and could offer no useful support beyond logistics and expertise. He didnot find merit in hand-to-hand combat against the rioters.
    “We have a choice,” he maintained to the officer in charge of the patrolmen. Many of his constables had reported in when an appeal went out over the radio. Others had trundled off to bed as soon as news of the riot was broadcast—so great their need for sleep that they disconnected their phones. Still others headed for the nearest neighbourhood tavern in order to miss the call from a station commander to return to work.
    “Is that right?” Captain Réal LeClerc, in charge of police operations, asked him. “What choice would that be?”
    “We can let the rioters break store windows, or we can let them break the noses of our men. I say we let the mob smash glass.”
    LeClerc was visibly astonished. “Never expected that from you, Armand.”
    A former commando and prisoner of war, Touton’s reputation as a tough guy had been earned and proven often. Months earlier, while driving home in the morning after a particularly hard night, he’d come across Captain LeClerc and his men surrounding a home in the East End. Officers squatted behind police cars and civilian automobiles, weapons drawn. Touton had dashed from his car, bent over, his head down, and crept alongside the uniforms until he found LeClerc. “What’s going on?” he asked.
    “One man inside. Young punk with a gun. Already he took a shot at his own mother. He missed. His mom, his dad, they got out, but he’s a lunatic, his parents say. Sick in the head and body both.”
    “If he’s inside, what are you doing outside?”
    The captain had nothing to say to that, managing only a faint shrug.
    “I’m going in,” Touton announced loudly. “Who’s coming with