Chapter 4

By the time Hank got back to the site of the accident, Jean had called 911 to ask for an ambulance and a policeman. One of the first things she said was “This is a call from the Silver Knights.” The dispatcher had been warned of a possible call from one of the kids, and that she was to take any such call seriously. She had no trouble taking seriously a call about a Hit-and-Run accident and a child with a compound fracture in one leg and a simple fracture in the other leg.

Jean had already applied a tourniquet from her first-aid kit to stop the bleeding at the compound fracture. Hank was standing in the middle of the street to warn cars of the accident, and that was the way the medics, the cops, and the news reporter found them.

Hank talked to the cop and gave him the information on the car while Jean talked to the reporter about how they happened to be at the park and what she had done to help the boy before the medics arrived. One of the medics said that Jean had done all of the proper things, and she should be proud of herself.

Jean talked to the cop while Hank talked to the reporter. He said how he had chased the car until it got away from him, but he had gotten the necessary details to make it easy to find the car. This was a newspaper reporter who was proud of his exclusive over the TV rivals, so there was a long writeup of the whole situation in the next day’s paper. Included was a very laudatory report on the action of the two members of the Silver Knights. Mayor Watson even got a few positive remarks because he had made possible the volunteer work of the Silver Knights.

The favorable publicity was especially helpful for the Silver Knights because there were photos of Hank and Jean wearing their full SK outfits and even photos of their authorization cards signed by the Chief of Police. Everybody came out sounding great, especially since the driver of the car was caught that afternoon when she tried to have her car repainted as a rush job. All of this had happened because she was late for an appointment at her beauty salon to have her hair cut.

This report turned out to be a great boon for the Silver Knights. Even many of those people who had poo-pooed the Silver Knights and what they could do for public safety were converted, and now everybody was anxiously waiting for what might be the next emergency that they might handle.

That was a month away, and the initial stir about the Silver Knights was fading, but then something spectacular happened. Despite the formal demise of segregation, it still existed on a de facto basis in the far South. It was not so much a deliberate thing as it was a kind of inertia on all sides. Not only that, but Black people still distrusted the police out of habit and did not want them in the Black neighborhoods. Even Black policemen were not welcome.

However, Jack was an arch foe of segregation, though for no specific reason, he just was. Anyway, a Black gang had started to make itself known as the Greenlow gang in one of the Black neighborhoods. The Greenlows, as they were called, were pushing drugs and prostitution. The prostitutes were mostly young Black teens, and they were known as not being gentle when they recruited new prostitutes.

In this case, Jack and Nell were patrolling a route that ran along the edge of the Greenlow neighborhood. They were just passing a cross-street when a young Black woman who was absolutely naked came running toward them. She was screaming for help, and she was being chased by five Black men of various ages.

The Black woman gasped out, “Please help me. Those bastards were trying to rape me. Please call 911 if you have a cellphone.”

Nell snatched out her cellphone and called 911. Meanwhile, Jack pulled his blanket from his first-aid supplies and handed it to the woman. “Wrap yourself in this. I don’t have anything else with me.”

Just at that moment, the first of the chasing Black men came up. “Give us our girl, Honky!” He grabbed the edge of the blanket and tried to pull it off the woman who was still trying to wrap it around herself.

The rest of the Black men chasing the young woman finally arrived, and one of them tried to grab the arm of the Black woman. He was successful on his second try. This was all that Jack could stand. He drew his baton and said, “Turn the woman loose, or I will have to defend her.”

“Ha! You are just a kid! What can you do against five real men?”

Jack answered, not with words, but with a quick snap of his wrist. The result was a broken forearm belonging to the man holding the woman’s arm. He screamed and jumped back out of reach, turning loose the woman’s arm in the process.

The original Black man pulled out a wicked-looking knife and said, “Okay, Honky, I’m gonna (going to) take your balls (testicles) and pecker (penis) for that.”

Jack punched him in the solar plexus at that, and the man leaned over. Jack hit him in the face with his raised knee and broke a rather large nose. The man collapsed to the ground, and another man charged at Jack with a knife. He slashed at Jack somewhat wildly and did manage to cut the skin on Jack’s wrist. It was not a serious wound, but it did bleed rather freely.

The Black woman who had caused all of the trouble seemed frozen in place, but Nell grabbed her shoulder and pulled her between the two parallel bicycles. Nell also pulled her baton and poked a Black man who was coming at her in the solar plexus. Her bicycle was in the way, so she could not knee him in the face. However, she did hit him in the throat with a pulled punch that knocked him to the ground.

The fifth man pulled a pistol, of all things, a snub-nosed .38 revolver of the kind sometimes shown in movies. He aimed at Nell, and she was too far away to hit him with her baton while she was holding it. However, out of desperation, she threw it at him and hit him in the chest with the end of the baton.

The Black man certainly did not expect that, and he was knocked down just as he pulled the trigger. The bullet went flying who knew where, but that was enough of a distraction to let Nell push aside her bicycle and leap upon him literally with both feet. Her hard-soled shoes hit him in the face and did monumental damage. Not only did she break his nose, but she also broke his lower jaw and cracked the bone around his right eye. When she fell, she landed on his chest and broke a number of ribs. None caused him fatal damage, but he was due for an extended stay in the hospital.

Jack was helping her to her feet when the first cop arrived. He glanced around and called for backup just as the first ambulance arrived. They, too, called for backup. In all, it was over an hour before the situation was cleared up, and John had been called to the scene. Along the way, the mayor came to see the carnage, and so did newspaper and TV reporters. The TV station did not want to be scooped again.

This time, the reporters were not to be denied, and they got the full story as the mayor and the cops did. This was shaping up into a major news event, and the mayor wanted to make sure that he was mentioned several times in the news reports. Probably, race had a lot to do with it, but the kids were never assumed to be to blame for the damage. They were well known to the investigating detective by then, so he just got their statement pretty much as he would have taken the statement of an eye-witness.

The naked Black woman, now wearing a coat provided by an ambulance driver, was photographed from every angle as she gave a glowing report of how the kids had saved her from the five thugs who were members of the Greenlows. She had been picked up the night before at a dive frequented by Blacks; later investigation showed that the Ebony Lounge had no liquor license.

Her last drink had been spiked, and she had been rendered unconscious. Members of the Greenlows had taken her to a nearby house where she had been allowed to sleep off the effects of the drug. Once she was awake, she was stripped; undoubtedly that time had been chosen to prove to her that she was completely in the gang’s power. Somehow, she had managed to escape, and that was why she was running down the street when she ran into the twins.

This went well beyond what anybody had anticipated that the Silver Knights would get involved in, and their story was splashed over the entire country. The story was even made into a big deal in Europe by some newspapers who were notoriously anti-USA. Before the story was replaced by more exciting news, there was some talk of making it into a movie, but that died before it went anywhere.