Black Light

by Stephen Hunter

  “Who’s that one?” asked Bob, pointing to a kneeling figure at the edge of the photograph, a young man with a certain pugnacious set to his square, blocky head, who looked strong beneath his clothes and had a set of fiercely burning eyes.

  “That guy,” said Preece. “Lord, I remember him. He was from Motorola, I think. He was only on the project for two weeks but it happened to be the two weeks we took the picture. I cannot for the life of me remember the name.”

  “Were all these men shooters?” Russ asked.

  “No, not really. Ben Farrell was a very good shot. Not exceptional, but excellent.”

  “Who did the shooting? Was it a team?”

  “Oh, there was only one shooter,” said the general, exhaling a long flume of smoke like a dragon’s breath. “Me.”

  After they had gone, the general sat very still for a time. His cigar burned out and he didn’t touch it. He didn’t call his girlfriend or his daughter or his divorced wife or his lawyer or any of the men on his board of directors or his head engineer or any of the old boys in his sniper cadre.

  Finally, he got up, opened the cabinet behind his desk, took out a bottle of Wild Turkey and poured himself a tall glass. He sat, looking at it for a time, and then reached for it, noting, as he drew it to his lips, that his hands were still shaking.

  24

  Some dang days a fella couldn’t win. Duane, going on just a few hours’ sleep after having spent all day yesterday bouncing around Polk County on the tail of old Sam, plus answering a few unavoidable police calls, was bushed; but he was up and at it early this morning, on his ordered sweep across all the commercial establishments he could find along the Etheridge Parkway corridor.

  Yet he struck pay dirt early enough.

  Goddamn, he thought, when the Indian day-clerk woman at the Days Inn at Parkway Exit 7 said yes, an older man and a younger man had checked into a room yesterday at around ten. Was there anything wrong?

  Duane puffed and acted like some sort of important investigator, and pretty much bullied the poor woman—she was foreign, with some kind of fucking dot on her head, so what difference did it make?—into giving up the whole story. They’d checked in at ten, the boy disappeared for most of the afternoon, the man made long-distance phone calls all day and they’d left about six in a truck loaded with sleeping bags and, technically, still had a contract on the room, at least until checkout time, noon.

  She remembered, because usually they don’t rent rooms before one, but the tall man had insisted.

  Duane asked to see the phone records, though he didn’t have a subpoena. Fortunately, the woman was too stupid to know or too indifferent to care. In his notebook, he wrote down the numbers in his big silly handwriting, like a child’s.

  He thanked her, helped himself to a free cup of coffee and by ten was on the phone.

  He gave his report to the answering machine, including the numbers, then sat back waiting for praise. It didn’t come.

  The phone rang.

  “Peck, where are you now?”

  “Well, sir, uh, I’m in the parking lot of the Days Inn.”

  “Git back down to Blue Eye. You stay with the old man today, you understand? You let me know what he’s up to.”

  That was it: no nice going, nicely done, good job, just get back on the job.

  Damn, you couldn’t please some folks.

  Red Bama had experts everywhere; that was one of the pleasures of being Red Bama. So he called one, a communications specialist formerly of Southwestern Bell who handled telephone problems for him, and inside half an hour had a make on the phone calls Bob had made.

  One was to the Pentagon, the office of Army Historical Archives. The other was to a firm in Oklahoma, called JFP Technology. It took another couple of calls to get to the product line and meanings of JFP Technology.

  When he did, he whistled.

  Fucking Swagger was smart. He was inside this deal already, and getting closer and closer to secrets so carefully and professionally buried over forty years ago. This was a powerful antagonist, the best that had come against Red in many a year.

  Next, Red made a call to a lawyer he knew in Oklahoma City, a good man who was, as they say, in the life. The lawyer, for a not unsubstantial fee, was quickly able to hire a licensed private detective, and on a crash basis the detective set up a surveillance at JFP after establishing, in the parking lot, the presence of a green Dodge pickup with an odd unpainted fender license number Arizona SCH 2332.

  The lawyer reported back to Red, who took a bit of a moment to appreciate what he’d brought off—I found you, you tricky bastard! and then issued further, and very specific, orders.

  “I want one thing and one thing only. Just the time they leave that office as determined from an observation site as far away as possible. I do not want, and let me say that again because I love the sound of my own damn voice, I do not want any tail jobs or moving surveillance. Nobody’s to follow. This boy is too tricky,” he told the lawyer. “I don’t know what kind of men you got in Oklahoma City—”

  “Good men, Mr. Bama.”

  “Yeah, well, not that good. This boy is very, very smart and he has instincts for aggression you would not believe. I guarantee you: he will see any kind of tail you put on and if he does, every damn thing upcoming will fall apart. Is that understood?”

  “Yes sir,” said the lawyer.

  “The time is very important. Meanwhile, I will think this thing through,” said Bama, “and if I need your services I’ll call you back. I will expect you to be available.”

  “Mr. Bama, you’ve never talked to a more available man.”

  “They do grow ’em good in Oklahoma City, then,” Bama said.

  He put down the phone in his little office, took another sip of rancid bar coffee and then felt something very strange upon his face.

  By God, it was a smile.

  He was happy. He was as happy as he’d been in, say, years. Other than the success of his children, nothing filled him with more delight than a good challenge. And, oh boy, was this Bob Lee Swagger proving out.

  He tried to apply his purest intelligence to the problem.

  The key was what time they left that visit to JFP. If they left soon, they could easily make it back to Blue Eye before dark, which was not good, because he didn’t think he could manipulate his elements and set up what he had in mind fast enough. And everything had to be in place. If they came back later, it would be a night drive. He didn’t like that at all. He did not want to set up an after-dark hit. Too tricky on the open road. In the city was a different matter, but on the open highway, in the country, at night with a tricky bastard like Bob Lee Swagger, it got real iffy and if the thing fell apart, who knew when he’d get another chance?

  So: hope they spend another night in Okie City and come back in the morning. That gets them into the area around midafternoon, which would give him plenty of time.

  So: assume they’ll come back to Blue Eye from Oklahoma City tomorrow. Next question: which route would they take? Any normal man would do the normal thing, the dogleg: take U.S. 40 like a shot over to Fort Smith, then veer south on the parkway that Hollis had named for his daddy down to Blue Eye. Or maybe, out of sentimentality, Bob would pass up on the new road and choose the slower, more awkward Route 71; his father had died on that road, maybe he would too. But he doubted Bob would feel that sentimental. Bob’s nature was essentially practical; sentiment was for late at night, when the day was done.

  Red wished he knew how they’d got there in the first place; Swagger wasn’t the kind of man to come the same way twice. He pored over the map, wishing he had something more expressive, more revealing. He wanted data, information, numbers, facts, he wanted to drown himself in them.

  He saw quickly enough that there were really only two other routes into Blue Eye. Both were more or less direct east-west roads, though much smaller than the Fort Smith route. Both involved dropping down from U.S. 40 to McAlester, then heading east on a two-lane b
lacktop to Talihina. Shortly thereafter, they diverged: One, Oklahoma 1, followed the crest of the Ouachitas from Talihina fifty-seven miles into Arkansas, where it turned into Arkansas 88. It would be a high road, a couple of thousand feet up, with plenty of visibility. It was called, combining the names of the towns on either of its ends, the Taliblue Trail, and the state had designated it as a beautiful road, with mountain vistas on either side. He had driven it himself in a Porsche he once owned and had a goddamned great old time.

  The other road, Oklahoma 59, crossed Oklahoma 1 at about the halfway point, then became Route 270 as it cut east and ran parallel to 1/88 on the valley floor beneath it, eventually linking up with 71 a little above Blue Eye. He realized that was the road off of which Bob’s Blue Eye property lay, where the man now had his trailer. Maybe he’d go that way and set up again at his trailer. That was the logical way. Or was it?

  He looked at it: very simple. High road or low road. He didn’t have enough people to play it both ways, at least not under the mandate of maximum firepower.

  High road or low road?

  And then he knew the answer.

  He’s a sniper. He’s a shooter. He works by seeing. His whole life is built on seeing. The input he gets from the world is all visual information, which he processes and from which he makes his decisions. He sees and he likes to see things a long way off. He doesn’t like surprises. He likes to be the surprise.

  The high road.

  A plan formed in his mind. Three cars and a truck, coming from different directions, snaring Bob in the middle, ramming him off the road, burying him with full automatic fire. Ten men firing full automatic in the first second after the crash.

  The phone rang.

  “Hello.”

  “Sir?”

  It was the lawyer in Oklahoma City.

  “Yes?”

  “They just left.”

  Ray looked at his watch. Jesus, it was after five. They weren’t going to drive home tonight. He’d won!

  “Good work.”

  “Sir, we found the rooms they rented. The Holiday Inn, near the airport.”

  “I told you—”

  “Very discreet, Mr. Bama. No direct inquiries were made. We were able to get into the chain hotel computer directories. They reserved their rooms for two nights. Checkout time ten A.M. tomorrow.”

  “Good work,” said Bama. “Are you looking for a job?”

  “Mr. Bama, I’m very happy where I am.”

  “The check is in the mail, then.”

  “I know your word is good.”

  “It’s good in every city in this country,” Red said, hanging up. He quickly dialed Jorge de la Rivera.

  “Yes?”

  “The team is ready?”

  “Yes sir. All stood down, relaxed. The girls you sent over went over real nice. They all been fucked or sucked, they all been fed, their weapons are cleaned.”

  “Here’s how it’s going down. It’ll be tomorrow, midafternoon, on Oklahoma 1, about ten miles east of the 259 crossroads. It’s called the Taliblue Trail. Nice high mountain road, not heavily traveled, should be nice and private and wide open. You site your cars in opposite directions and let him get in the middle, then you close in on him so he’s got no place to run. You’ll want to take him off the road and get the guns working overtime right away. You want to bury him. You’ve got the advantage of both surprise and firepower.”

  “It sounds very good. Muy bueno. Easy to do. We get him for you. But sir—how will we know he’s coming?”

  “Oh, I’ll let you know over the radio. I’ll be watching.”

  “You’re going to get involved in this, Mr. Bama?”

  “You can’t miss me,” he said. “Just look up. I’ll be the one in the airplane.”

  25

  Sam woke in a fog after a dreamless but restless night. He had the nagging feeling that something important was scheduled for today. Was he due in court? Did he have to file a motion? Was some defense lawyer deposing him for an appeal? But nothing snapped into clarity and the goddamned maid had forgotten both the coffee and to pick up. That woman was getting sloppier and sloppier. He had half a mind to fire her, but he couldn’t remember her name. Then he remembered that he did fire her—twelve years ago. Then he remembered Mrs. Parker.

  That was the woman he should have fired. When did the colored get so uppity? They had no respect anymore. It was a case of the rules simply eroding away until nothing was left but chaos and anarchy. Then he remembered little Shirelle.

  He got up, straggled through a shower and got dressed, remembering his undershirt, forgetting his underpants. It went on like that for several hours: he felt a deep and mournful pain that he was not all there, he knew he was not all there, but somehow he could not get out of the track, which was a kind of infantile literal-mindedness, an unwilled concentration on petty things. He wanted to cry: Where did my mind go? Who took my mind?

  Finally, a squall of clarity blew in by midafternoon, and everything popped briefly into place. He felt sane, cool, smart again. Taking advantage, he quickly went to his basement and remembered that he had originally committed to discovering his brief to the Coroner’s Office on the Earl Swagger shooting for Bob Lee Swagger. But that would have to wait. This was so much more interesting. He seized the file that he’d looked at the day before and this time he really bore down, sliding through the documents with a professional’s easy authority, examining the case against Reggie Gerard Fuller.

  It held together. It might not hold together today, when the evidentiary rules were much tighter and the fact that Reggie’s initials were RGF and that those initials were found on the pocket crumpled in Shirelle’s hand might not constitute probable cause for a search warrant. But it sure as hell did then, as even Judge Harrison confirmed. Sam had a moment of pleasure: I did it by the book, by God. I don’t have to look back and be ashamed that somewhere I took a shortcut, I cut a corner, I faked this or that or lied about the other: no sir. The law was the law. The law was always right.

  And the law looked at the shirt and the blood and Reggie’s absence of an alibi and said: Reggie Gerard Fuller did it.

  He was satisfied. What else could he do? He had no other files. The actual evidence was burned in that damn 1994 fire. Nothing else could be learned.

  But then … oh, little niggle of doubt. Little qualm, little tremor, little twitch.

  He thought back on that night and his actions. What cast the longest shadow over the case was the RGF initials. Once they’d identified RGF—done, really, before he’d put his full concentration on the matter—the case developed a peculiar momentum that could not be stopped. It was such a fat, huge piece of evidence, like a proverbial eight-hundred-pound gorilla, that it sat anyplace it wanted to. It shaped all thought, all interpretation, all investigation; it became the central organizing principle of the case, a perceptual reality that could not be avoided.

  In fact, Sam had even played that one out straight. He’d spent one whole day with Betty Hill, the town’s switchboard operator, going through the phone listings to ascertain if just possibly there wasn’t another RGF, of any color or sex. There wasn’t. He’d gone to the town registry looking for other RGFs who might not be on the phone list. He’d gone to every motel in a hundred square miles looking for another RGF in the area. No such thing.

  That RGF: that was the monster.

  It occurred to Sam: Suppose there was no RGF? Suppose we never found that RGF? Would we have ever tied the killing to Reggie? No, he thought not. If it weren’t for the dying girl’s spasm and the angry boy’s fury, the case might never have been solved.

  But then he thought: Imagine an investigation without the weight of that discovery, that wasn’t misshapen or guided by it, that progressed quite naturally and led where it led, if anywhere. Of course he couldn’t imagine such a thing: RGF made that impossible.

  Little tingle, little tremor, little buzz. Where did it come from?

  What was he feeling?

&nb
sp; He couldn’t pin it down: nothing. Forget it.

  Then he had it.

  Earl.

  Earl Swagger had discovered the body. Earl had investigated the crime scene. Earl took notes. Earl made observations and suggestions. All of it untainted, or untouched, or unseduced by the mighty power of the RGF initials pointing the finger right straight into the heart of Reggie Gerard Fuller. Earl was dead before they ever linked anything to Reggie Gerard Fuller.

  Too bad Earl hadn’t lived long enough to …

  Another bell went off in Sam’s old mind. His son, Bob, had brought Earl’s notebook. And some other effects. With that fool boy, Rusty, Rufus, whatever. The notebook. Whatever was in the notebook was put there without any knowledge of Reggie Gerard Fuller.

  Only trouble was: where the hell was the notebook?

  The old man was on a goddamn toot. Duane had never seen him like this. His gears had slipped or something. He was literally destroying his house from the inside out.

  Duane had worked his way around back of the proud old dwelling on Reinie Street, which sat under a canopy of elms and maples with its stately porch like the house that Andy Hardy lived in, and peered in through the windows. Though it was not yet dark, the old man had turned on all the lights. One by one, he was emptying the insides out of every drawer, every closet, every box, every cupboard, every vase in the house. He had cracked, finally. He was in a frenzy, jabbering insanely to himself.

  After doing the downstairs, he moved upstairs. Though Duane could no longer see him, he took a chance and opened the door. Inside, he could hear crashes and dumpings and things being thrown against the wall and curses.

  “Goddamn sumbitch, where the goddamn hell are you?” came the screams, as from a desperate man, a man close to an attack or something.

  Mr. Bama wasn’t going to have to worry about this old guy. He’d end up doing himself in before the moon rose. A vein would pop, he’d be a lump in a body bag for the Coroner’s Office.