Pale Horse Coming

by Stephen Hunter

  “But, well, wouldn’t it be safer, just in case—?”

  “Exactly, Leon. Exactly. You read my mind and you help me correct my misjudgment. We must make certain we are not under threat. We have our responsibilities. I have a great charge which must be protected. We have the doctor to think about, our country, our society. I have some latitude in these matters, and know that if one acts, one must act decisively.”

  “I know a fella in N’Awleens who’s very clever at gizmos. The gangsters there and throughout the South used him, and though many knew of him, he was never caught, on the simple reason that whatever acts he engineered by their very nature precluded much in the way of investigation. Hell, how do you investigate a hole in the damn ground?”

  “How, indeed? The answer is, you don’t.”

  “I have the contacts. I could arrange a package be delivered up to Arkansas. It would not be sent from Mississippi at all, and would have nothing to do with Mississippi, much less Thebes. It would look like any other package.”

  “Hmmm, well thought out.”

  “When it is opened by this here lawyer, they won’t be nothing left but smoke and bonemeal floating in the air, and there’ll be a new crater in the middle of Arkansas. This fellow could do that up right good.”

  “Yes, I like that,” said the warden. “That would settle matters nicely, indeed. That would make all of us happy, and I would feel that my responsibilities—Leon, you have no idea the world of weight I carry on my shoulders—would have been well lived up to.”

  “I’ll do it, warden. You are a great man, and I feel ever so good when I can serve you.”

  “There is a great man here, Leon, but it isn’t me. I am but a humble servant. The great man is that doctor who works by the river, where he is saving our country.”

  44

  SAILORS everywhere. Earl did not like sailors. It was nothing personal. It was just that the Navy was always the daddy to the Marine Corps, and was always lording it over the Corps. That unease of relationship came through especially during the war in the Pacific, where Earl believed that no island was bombed or shelled enough before the Marines had to land on it, no ship got in close enough to get the wounded to safety fast enough, no supplies arrived soon enough, and on and on and on, a whole symphony of grudges.

  So Earl did not like Pensacola, for it was full of sailors. They were everywhere, and now and then jets roared overhead or old prop jobs blew by in low formation, for Pensacola was a Navy town, as Navy a town as existed anywhere, and its particular form of the Navy was naval aviation.

  So he bit down on his distaste and went about his business, though it was hard, for in the years before the war, there’d been too many occasions when he and his pals and sailors had found the fit in this or that port city bar too tight, and fists had flown. He’d learned as much about fighting there as he had under the mentorship of the old sergeants who’d coached him when he was fighting for the service in the late thirties in the Pacific fleet.

  Earl knew he wouldn’t get into any fights because he no longer went into bars. Where he went instead was into a bank, where he deposited a large sum and opened a checking account under the name John R. Bogash. Then he went to a real estate agency, and there had an earnest conversation with an agent.

  He was, the story he made up went, looking for a quiet place where he could park a while with his very sick father, so that that old man’s passing could be comfortable in the warmth and sun, rather than in the chill of up North. The father had been in the Navy, and it always cheered him to see the boys in their white uniforms parading down the street; and he liked airplanes, and as he sat on his porch waiting for the end, it would do him good to see the trim Navy aircraft practicing their skills overhead.

  Did Earl want seaside?

  Earl did not want seaside. Too much traffic seaside. People going to the beach and all. Someplace in the country would be nice, possibly with some room, for the dying old man was fond of his dogs, too, and wanted to be with his and watch them roam.

  Well, the real estate agent made some calls, and soon enough he located a series of farms that were available. So off they went. This was always wrong, and that was always wrong, as they ranged ever farther northward, almost to the Alabama line, and the agent thought he’d lose his client to a competitor from Brewton, up in ’bama. But Earl eventually took a particular shine to a certain place, which lay at the end of a mile of dirt road, its fields fallow, its barn in need of paint, its general maintenance feeble. The agent was somewhat baffled as to why Earl made such a big deal about the size of the near field, for he hadn’t got the impression much from Earl that that was necessary. But Earl looked hard at the field, then peered at the location of the place on the map. But it was far and private and exactly what Earl had in mind, and so a check changed hands and in two days, when the check cleared, Earl took over the lease for the next six months.

  “Hope you and your daddy are happy out here, Mr. Bogash,” said the agent.

  “This place’ll make Daddy right happy, I guarantee it,” Earl said.

  That done, he spent the next few days setting up. This involved, of course, notifying the phone company to get the phone hooked up, but once that was done, it was mainly rounding up supplies, but never over-buying in a single store. Though if you looked, you might have been surprised to find that in each of ten gun stores in northwest Florida, and in Alabama, in towns such as Brewton and Bluff Spring and Atmore, then all the way over to Crestview and Milton, then as far west as the larger city of Mobile, which had three gun stores and pawnshops, and as far up as Greenville, five boxes of .38–44 high-velocity police cartridges had been sold. The fellows would bring their own rifle ammo, but Earl had to provide for himself, so in each of the stores he picked up something for the long gun he’d determined to carry, which was a .348 Winchester Model 71 that would punch through nearly anything solid. It was the biggest of the American big-game cartridges, and the strongest lever action ever made, and the bruise it left in his shoulder was nothing to the hole it left in what he’d be shooting at.

  In each of the same number of grocery stores, he purchased like-size amounts of Coca-Cola, coffee beans, hamburger meat, cans of green beans, mustard, ketchup, buns, steaks, roasts and chucks, plus plenty of bread and milk were taken up, to say nothing of detergent, soap, toothpaste, toothbrushes, and of course toilet paper. Elsewhere, in department stores: sheets, blankets, pillows. You’d have had to travel a wide circle to catch on to the fact that somebody was caching up for the arrival of a group. Then he made his most astonishing purchase: at a war surplus store in Pensacola, he bought two cases of canteens. Not American, however; rather, these were Italian, from World War I, and they resembled wine bottles. Each had been well maintained, and each had a canvas cover with a strap.

  He worked for a couple of days laying in these supplies and setting up the place for the few days in a week or so when it would be occupied. He had other tasks: he called Los Angeles and arranged for shipment of his cowboy pictures. He also studied maps of the state, the next state, and of course the next state after that, which was Mississippi. He tried to think of everything. Was he missing something? Had he forgotten a detail? He had good men, a plan, and had kept a careful running account of all this for Mr. Trugood, whose advance he hoarded shrewdly and paid out of with a great deal of misery. He couldn’t think of a thing, but he had a nagging suspicion there was a hole in his thinking. What the hell was it?

  But it never came to him, and finally, he had but two last jobs to do. The first was easy: it was sending a cash payment and a letter to the classified ad section of the Pensacola Journal Times, specifying that a certain ad should be run on a certain day. That was the ad that would alert all the arriving boys to his number, so he could get them directions to come on out. But the last was tricky.

  He wrote a letter, addressed to a fellow in government service in Pensacola. He waited. There was nothing to do but wait by the phone for it to ring, and he thought it wou
ld, for the man he’d written to was extremely dutiful about obligations. It could have taken a week; it took a day. Earl answered. They had a brief chat, and agreed to meet the day following in a bar in downtown Pensacola.

  Instead of his slacks and a sports shirt, Earl put on his suit, Brylcreemed his hair, Kiwied his shoes, tied his tie tight, and tried to look as prosperous and solid as possible.

  He then drove by back roads to Pensacola proper, and there he located the naval station. A uniformed shore patrolman stood sentry outside the gate that Earl had figured on, and Earl of course had his usual irritated reaction to such a fellow. They’d been the bane of his young life, but this one simply sat in his little house in his dress whites, saluting and letting folks in and out.

  Then Earl saw the man he’d written to and who had called him. He was in civilian clothes and drove a ’50 Dodge convertible, jet black, but even so dressed everything about him looked military: the closeness of his haircut, the stern set of his mouth, and the precision of his head to his body, and the squareness of his shoulders and the erectness of his posture.

  Earl followed him from five car-lengths back in his own car, the point being just security. He wanted to make certain nobody was following him. And nobody was.

  The officer pulled up to the bar he had chosen at exactly the moment he had said he would, and he walked inside.

  Earl lingered outside and made sure the meeting was unobserved, and then he headed in as well.

  He entered, blinked in the darkness, and saw the man. He didn’t know him well, and the man, when he recognized Earl, didn’t smile. He put down his glass, stood, and briefly assumed a position of ramrod posture, a military gesture in an old run-down honky-tonk on the bad side of town.

  The last time Earl had seen him was October of 1942. On that day, he was bleeding from two bullet wounds in the cockpit of a Grumman Wildcat that the Japs had just shot down. The plane was on fire and the Japs were still shooting at it. Earl shot at the Japs, driving them back, and raced under a screen of covering fire to the plane, which incidentally was about to blow up, said to him, when he got there, exactly what he now said in the bar, nine years later: “Sonny, this ain’t no way to meet new friends.”

  “Howdy, Gunny Swagger,” said the officer. “Jesus Christ, nice to see you. I know you got out a first sarge, but you’ll always be ‘gunny’ to me.”

  “Well, sir,” said Earl, taking the firm grip and paying it back with one just as firm, “it don’t matter, ’cause now it’s just plain old Earl. And you may not be so happy when you hear what I got cooked up.”

  “Knowing you, gunny, I’ll bet it’s a wowzer.”

  Earl smiled.

  “It is, Admiral. It is.”

  45

  SAM came home ragged and spent. He was not in the best of moods. He gathered up his mail, poured himself a bourbon, and retired alone to his dark study. Throughout the house, he could hear the echo of kids, which had once filled him with joy. Tonight, it just made his headache greater and his depression heavier.

  He’d spent hours on the phone, tracking fellows from the Harvard Medical School class of ’28, and all that he could find were well established now, deep in prosperous practices or inhabiting prestigious professorships, which meant of course that they were too busy or too important to come to the phone, and when they did, they were usually so pompous and self-adoring that it took a great deal of nudging and apple-polishing to get anywhere with them. And when he finally got someplace, it was no place.

  Some, but by no means all, remembered David Stone, and an even smaller subset of that group were willing to share any insight into him, and even those who did, it quickly turned out, knew only the David Stone that Sam began with: brilliant researcher, selfless humanitarian, hard worker, charmer. Married a beautiful woman. Came from a great family. Never had kids, no, but he was too busy on the frontiers of medicine, doing good in the world. Did something important for the Army during the war. A real tragedy, his loss. There seemed to be something of a physicians’ benevolent protective society in play by informal fiat, by which one doctor agreed never to say anything negative about another doctor.

  The David Stone that Sam had uncovered—a man with secrets, a man obsessed with cleansing the world, a man who in his most intimate letters to his wife was strangely inauthentic, a man with a nervous disposition that might be regarded as clinical madness—only existed in Sam’s knowledge, but there was no other public acknowledgment of such a personality.

  So Sam had the hideous weight on his shoulders that he was simply wasting his time and the money that Davis Trugood would have to pony up for the phone bills of so many long-distance calls. And Sam had to charge him, for he was very low on funds, and no other even small cases were coming to him, as if the men from HUAC, though vanquished and driven off, had still besmirched him in the county imagination.

  So Sam also kept busy living up to his civic responsibilities during this period, to keep himself before the public eye, though his heart was no longer in it. He attended town council meetings and Democratic party meetings (essentially the same, and Sam always wondered why the hell they just didn’t combine them) and continued as a deacon of the church and as recording secretary of the P.T.A. and made the rounds on the Negro churches because he didn’t want to lose that vote, and encouraged the newspaper to continue its chronicles of the various malfeasances of the hapless Feebus Bookins, his scandalous replacement.

  And of course he worried.

  This was his natural condition. He had given Earl a conditional blessing, and thought he meant it. But a certain part of him was not convinced, and that part of him continued its campaign of undermining all that he enjoyed and poisoning his life.

  It is not right.

  It was not right. You cannot lead armed men against legally sanctioned civil authority and commit violence. That is murder, it is insurrection, it is a form of treason. It does not matter how corrupt and despicable your antagonists are; if you do that, you become them, and once you become them, you have lost your soul.

  He picked up his mail, found the usual accumulation of bills, circulars and advertisements, then came across something new. It was a personal letter from one Harold E. Perkins, of Washington, D.C.

  Sam searched his memory. The search revealed no record of a Harold E. Perkins, which Sam took to mean either he was losing IQ points fast in his quest, or that Harold E. Perkins was a complete stranger writing for money.

  Sam opened the envelope, found a small, handwritten note card.

  “Dear Mr. Vincent,” it began,

  I don’t know if you remember me, but I am, or was formerly, the member of Congressman Etheridge’s staff that his chief aide Mel Brasher sent to look for information on a David Stone, M.D., for you. I ascertained that none was available via Army Medical Service.

  Since then I’ve left the congressman’s employ and am now working for the Department of Atomic Energy in a clerk’s capacity while going to George Washington University Law School at night.

  I write you because of a small item I encountered in my duties of no import to anyone but which I thought you should hear about. I was examining records of nuclear material shipments from the Los Alamos Plutonium Laboratory to a facility in Maryland, called Fort Dietrich. I have no information on Ft. Dietrich, or what was being done there in conjunction with plutonium experiments, but I note that the information was cc-ed to a doctor at Thebes State Penal Farm, Thebes, Mississippi. I don’t remember the name, but it was definitely not Dr. Stone. I only noticed it because for some reason the word “Thebes” leaped out at me, being somewhat unusual. The more I thought about it, the more I thought you should know about it.

  I would like to ask a counter favor, if you don’t mind. I think Mr. Brasher got the wrong idea about me owing to certain events in the men’s room, in which the Capitol Police apprehended me. I never really had a chance to explain the misunderstanding. I wonder if you’d drop him a line, telling him how much I’ve helped you o
ut. Thanks so much.

  Harold E. Perkins.

  Sam turned this new information over in his head. Fort Dietrich again! What on earth was going on at this obscure post in Maryland that now involved some form of nuclear materials from Los Alamos, and why on earth would all of this be reported to an unknown doctor in Thebes, Mississippi?

  “Daddy?”

  It was Caroline, his seven-year-old daughter, an adorable child who had her mother’s blond hair and freckles and her father’s serious intelligence, but also, from neither of them, a sense of humor and amazement.

  “Honey, Daddy’s busy now,” he said, too cruelly and too quickly.

  “But the man said you had to sign,” she said.

  “What?”

  “The present. Someone sent you a present.”

  “Oh, Lord,” said Sam. “Who in hell would send me a present?”

  “It’s from New Orleans. From the Scott’s Department Store.”

  “Hmmm,” said Sam.

  He rose wearily and followed his daughter out through a roomful of children, some his own, some his neighbors’. A delivery man stood patiently in the doorway, with a package under his arm and a clipboard with a form on it.

  “Can I help you, sir?”

  “Mr. Samuel Vincent, sir? That would be you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, sir, I have a package on special delivery for you all the way from New Orleans’s finest department store. Someone must think highly of you.”

  “Not likely,” said Sam, quickly signing the form. Outside he saw the delivery truck, brown, part of the famous fleet of such trucks that worked faster and better than the U.S. mail.

  “Very good, sir,” said the man. “Here it is, and enjoy it.”

  “Thanks.”

  The children were excited. To them, packages were automatically a festive occasion, associated with celebrations such as Christmas or a birthday. Happiness was a package.