Black Light

by Stephen Hunter

  “Don’t stare at ’em, boy,” said Bob, as he overcame the last impediment and got free what he was pulling at. In his peripheral vision Russ saw that it was the Ruger Mini-14 and the paper bag. He pulled something compact from the bag; Russ realized it was the short .45 automatic, which he quickly stuffed into his belt on his right side, behind his kidney. He groped for something else.

  Russ looked up. The truck drew nearer. It was less than a quarter of a mile away. It would be on them in seconds now.

  “Where is it?” demanded Bob of himself harshly, fear large and raspy in his voice as he clawed through the bag. His fear terrified Russ more powerfully than the approaching vehicles.

  What is he looking for? Russ wondered desperately.

  Red watched as his masterpiece unfolded beneath him with such solemn splendor. It was all in the timing and the timing was exquisite. De la Rivera in the Mike truck, followed by the four men in Charlie, closed from the front at around forty miles per hour. Meanwhile, the Alpha and Baker vehicles, moving at the speed limit, steadily narrowed the distance between themselves and Swagger. They would be fifty or so yards behind him when de la Rivera hit Swagger’s truck and blew it off the road.

  “You’re closing nicely, Alpha and Baker,” he crooned. “You’re looking good there, Mike.”

  They had him!

  It would work!

  Red pulled in his breath, felt his heart inflate and his blood pressure spiral.

  De la Rivera was now taking over.

  “Okay, muchachos, is so very muy bueno, let’s be very, very calm now, let’s stay calm and cool, I see you, Alpha, you’re so very fine, let’s do a quick double check on our pieces, make sure we got our mags seated, our bolts locked, our safeties in the red zone, let’s stay muy glace, icy, icy, very icy, very cool, it’s happening, oh, it’s gonna be so good for all of us.”

  The vehicles were closing.

  They had reached a flat, high section of the road, where the dwarf, ice-pruned white oak lay gnarled and stunted on either side, yielding swiftly to vistas on either side of other ranges.

  “Now you listen,” said Bob fiercely. “This truck’s going to try and whack you. The split second before you pull even to him, I want you to drop to second and gun this motherfucker. That should carry us by his lunge and cut the two boys off behind us. Then I want a hard left, you rap the rear of his follow car, really mess him up, shake up the boys inside; you continue from that into a hard left panic stop, we skid across the road and come to rest in the shoulder on that side, so’s we can fall back and get into them trees and down the side of the mountain if need be. Okay, you’re coming out my side of the vehicle and you’re breaking left to the front wheel well where you’re going to cover. You take the bag. Your job is going to be to feed me magazines from the bag as I need them. You watch; when I pop a mag, you hand me the next one, bullets out so’s I can slap her in and get back to rock and roll.”

  “Yes sir,” said Russ, trying to remember it all, desperate that he would forget it, but amazed somehow that already there was a plan, and somehow also calmed by it. And Bob seemed calm too.

  “You gotta stay calm, you gotta stay cool,” said Bob.

  “I’m okay,” Russ said, and he was.

  “Ah,” said Bob, “here the goddamn thing is.” And with that he withdrew something from the bag and Russ could see that it was a long, curved magazine, different from the others, with a red-tipped cartridge seated in its lips.

  The truck was on them. It was happening right now.

  “What’s that?” Russ had time to ask as the universe unlatched from reality and fell into dreamlike slow motion. He heard Bob seat the magazine and with a clak! let the bolt fly home.

  “Forty rounds M-196 ball tracer,” said Bob. “We’re fixing to light these boys up.”

  Red watched in full anticipation of his precisely choreographed envelopment, simultaneously banking to the left and adding power so that he could hold the spectacle beneath him as he circled around it, gull-like. He watched as the vehicles seemed to combine and it was almost magical the way he’d seen it in his mind and it was working out in reality.

  But there seemed to be something …

  It was happening so fast, there was dust, so much dust, he couldn’t …

  Confusion. He’d never seen a battle before except in the movies but in the movies everything was clear. That was the point of movies. Here nothing was clear, it was a helter-skelter, some new dance, a reinvention.

  He heard them on the radio as it unfolded in microtime.

  “Ah, no, goddamn—”

  Whang! the jarring bang of metal on metal.

  “Jesus, what is—”

  “Look out, he’s firing, he’s—”

  “Oh, fuck, we’re on fire. Christ, we’re burning!”

  “I’m hit, I’m hit, oh, shit, I’m hit—”

  “The flames, the flames.”

  BEOWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW—

  A high-pitched scream pierced Red’s ears as he banked around; he winced, shuddered, wondering what the hell that was, and when he saw the geyserlike surge of blazing gasoline, he knew the microphone had melted.

  It was happening. The truck’s fender with its cyclopslike headlight was as big as a house falling on him, but at that second Russ slammed the gearshift, punched the pedal and with a surprising giddy lightness, his own vehicle shot ahead and the oafish rammer missed, veered to correct and jacked out of control, tumbling savagely backwards amid a sudden huge blast of dust. Bob’s left hand reached for the wheel and wrenched it to the left. With a tremendous jolt the pickup slammed into the follow car, rocked crazily and continued to spin around, hauling up a shroud of dust as it fishtailed, then came to a rest, crazily canted to one side, half in and half out of the roadside gully.

  Through it all, Russ had the ghastly sensation of ghosts, as faces lit up by rage and surprise floated by in the follow car, so close yet so far away. He felt that he was looking at men under ice, in a different world, their mouths working madly, their eyes swollen like his mother’s deviled eggs from so long ago. Then it all went to swirl and blur and vanished in the weird perspective of the canted windshield and the cloud of rolling dust.

  He blinked.

  Wasn’t he supposed to be doing something?

  “Out, goddammit,” barked Bob, and Russ clawed at his safety belt, glad that he’d had it on, felt it fall away and began to slither across the seat after already vanished Bob and out the door. He remembered the bag, and felt the loaded mags rattling around inside as he disengaged from the vehicle, slid fast down the front fender of the truck to the wheel well, where Bob had already set up in a taut, hunched shooter’s position. Russ couldn’t dive for cover. He had to see.

  When he looked over the hood, the spectacle stunned him.

  Upside down, the black pickup had cantilevered onto the shoulder on the other side of the road in its own cloud of dust, cutting off that lane. The two cars following Bob and Russ had slewed to a halt behind it, just coming out of their own panic stops and skids. They appeared to have collided themselves, the rear one smashing into the front one.

  The truck’s follower had also slewed to a halt to avoid smashing into the destroyed truck. It was almost directly across the road from Russ. There was a moment of horrified silence. Inside the cars, men fumbled in confusion, trying not to shoot each other, trying to locate their target, which wasn’t where it should be.

  Then, from just behind Russ, Bob fired.

  Even in the bright light of day, the tracers leaked radiance to mark their passage as they flew across the narrow distance. They were like phenomena in a physics experiment, ropes of incandescence as straight as if drawn by a ruler, unbearably quick, quicker than a heartbeat or a blink, illusions possibly. Bob fired three rounds inside a second low into the car directly across from him; what was he shooting for? Not men, for he was shooting not into the passenger compartment but above the rear tire and Russ—

  Then the car was gone in a
huge flash as the tracers lit up its fuel tank. The noise was a thunderclap, throwing feathers of flame everywhere as it seemed for one delirious second it was raining flame. All around them, the world caught fire; and a wave of crushing heat rolled against Russ. He heard screams in the roar, and a flaming phantasm ran at him but fell under the weight of its own destruction into the roadway.

  Motion struck at Russ’s peripheral vision and he saw that one of the follow cars had gunned from behind the topsyturvy truck.

  “Coming around, coming around,” he screamed.

  But Bob was shooting even as Russ yelled and the tracers flicked quick and nasty like a whipcrack and seemed to liquefy the oncomer’s windshield; it dissolved into a sleet of jewels as the car lost control and went hard into the gully, kicking up a gout of dirt.

  “Magazine! Magazine!” Bob screamed, and Russ slapped a twenty-rounder, bullets outward, into his palm and he sunk it into the rifle, freed the bolt to slam forward just as the third car came around, bristling with guns. But Bob took it cleanly, riddling its windshield with a burst of ball ammunition, and then held fire, emptying what remained of the magazine into the windows and doors as the car went by. The car never deviated, but sped by furiously, more as if it hoped to get away than do them any harm, and a hundred yards down the road it noticed that its cargo was dead men and it veered into a gully, lurched out surfing a wave of dirt and grass and came to a broken ending amid splintered white oaks.

  And suddenly it was quiet except for the dry cracking of the wind and the hiss of the flames.

  “Jesus, you got them all,” Russ said in utter astonishment and devotion, but Bob was by him, .45 in hand. He’d seen something. Two men with submachine guns had extricated themselves from the wreckage in the gully just before them, and started up the little embankment. But Bob stood above them and got his pistol into play so fast it was a blur. Did they see him yet? One did, and tried to get his weapon on target but Bob fired so quickly Russ thought for a second he had some kind of machine gun, floating six empties in the air, and the two shooters went down like rag dolls. One was an immense man in an expensive jumpsuit with gold chains on. He lay flat, eyes blinkless and vacant as the blood turned his sweatshirt strawberry and an odd detail leaped out at Russ: he had a necklace of scar tissue as if someone had gone to work on his throat with a chain saw but only got halfway around before thinking the better of it.

  Another moment of silence. Bob used it to change magazines.

  Russ looked around.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said. It reminded him of TV coverage of the Highway of Death out of Kuwait City after the Warthogs and the Blackhawks finished a good day’s killing. Four wrecked vehicles, one on its back, one boiling with black, oily flame of petroleum products oxidizing into the sky, bodies and blood pools and shards of glass and discarded weapons everywhere.

  “What do you think of that, you motherfucker!” Bob suddenly shouted, and Russ saw that he was screaming at a white airplane a half mile out low and banking away to the south.

  “You got them all,” said Russ. “You must have killed twenty men.”

  “More like ten. They were professionals. They took their chances. Now let’s see if we done bagged a trophy.”

  Then he strode across the littered roadway to the ramming truck, upside down and half in the gully. The odor of gasoline was everywhere.

  He opened the door and peered in. Russ looked over his shoulder.

  Inside, in a posture of unbearable discomfort that signaled something important had broken, was a tough-looking Hispanic with creamy silver hair and an expensive suit over an open silk shirt. The angle of his neck suggested that it was broken. Pain lay across his handsome face like a blanket, turning him gray under the olive tones of his skin. His eyes were glazing and his breath was labored.

  Bob pointed the .45.

  The man laughed and his eyes came back into focus. He held a lighter in his left hand.

  “Fuck you, man,” he said. “I’m already dead, you cracker motherfucker.” His voice was a little lilting with Cubano accent, an odd play of ch’s through it. “I flick my Bic and we all going to heaven.”

  “It won’t blow, partner, it’ll only burn.”

  “Fuck you,” said the Cubano.

  “Who’s the man in the plane?” Bob demanded.

  The man laughed again; his teeth were blinding white. He made a little move with his free hand and Russ flinched but Bob didn’t shoot. Instead, both watched as the hand reached his shirt and, pausing only once or twice in pain, ripped it open. The brown chest was latticed with extravagant tattoos.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Bob said.

  “I’m Marisol Cubano, you norteamericano cabrón. You puta! Fucking Castro couldn’t break me in his prisons, man, you think I’m going to talk to some hillbilly homeboy?” He laughed.

  “You are one tough customer,” said Bob, “that I give you.”

  He holstered the .45.

  “Let’s go,” he said to Russ.

  “Hey,” screamed the man in the truck. “I say this to you, motherfucker, you got some balls on you, my friend. You cubano? Maybe Desi Arnez done fucked your mama when your daddy was out fucking the goats.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Bob. “We didn’t have no TV.”

  They turned and were back at their own truck when the Cubano ended his misery; the truck flared as it went and the heat reached Bob and Russ.

  It was nearly dark when Red landed back at Fort Smith. He taxied the Conquest to the hangar and instructed his mechanic to secure it from the flight. He went to the parking lot where his two bodyguards, ever astute, ever loyal, ever dreary, waited in their car. He got into his Mercedes and drove home.

  “Honey,” said Miss Arkansas Runner-up 1986, “how did it go today?”

  “Oh, it was all right,” he said. “You know. Sort of unsettled, but all right.”

  Then he and his two youngest children watched a videotape of Black Beauty, a favorite of the kids’, and, truth be told, a movie that he himself didn’t find too irritating.

  After the kids were in bed, he watched the news. The big story, of course, was the drug-dealer shoot-out only a hundred miles away in Oklahoma, on the Taliblue Trail. Ten men dead, four pounds of uncut cocaine recovered. An Oklahoma State Police spokesman said authorities were still trying to figure out what had happened, but the un-burned bodies had all been identified as professional criminals tied to Miami, Dallas and New Orleans, with long records of violent felonies, and that conjecture at this time was leading in the direction of some kind of drug shipment ambush that got out of hand and ended up in a flat-out battle on one of Oklahoma’s prettiest highways. “Thank God,” the cop said, “no innocent people were hurt.”

  Only after the news was over and the kids were in bed did he step out of denial and face the reality: he was in big trouble. This guy Swagger was the best who’d ever come at him, and, at least in the ten years after his father had been killed, men came after him regularly and he’d beaten them all.

  Now he knew he had to do something very clever, very subtle and extremely professional, or he would lose it all. He looked around at his house and thought of his kids from this marriage and the kids from his first marriage and wondered what would happen to them if this guy Swagger took him. It terrified him.

  He had a drink and then another, and then the buzzer on his beeper sounded.

  He called his number and got Peck’s report.

  Then he called Peck.

  “He’s gone now?” he asked.

  “Yes sir. What should I do?”

  “Peck, I have to know what he’s onto. Can you get inside that office?”

  “Yes sir,” said Peck.

  “Okay, I want you to break in and make careful notes of his papers. I want to know what he knows, do you understand?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “I don’t need any more surprises,” he said.

  He hung up. He would have gone to bed, but somehow
Miss Arkansas Runner-up 1986, real tits or no, didn’t seem to amuse him tonight.

  Instead, he placed one more phone call and arranged for a quick blow job from a black crack whore. That expressed his mood perfectly.

  27

  He watched as the old man finally turned the light off and then, forty-five seconds later, emerged from the office, still in his wife’s bathrobe, climbed into the Cadillac and drove off with a shaky squeal of brakes and too much acceleration.

  Duane checked his watch. It was 11:45. He decided to give it another fifteen minutes, but only lasted seven before he started to drift off. He knew he was dangerously exhausted. So he got out of the car, walked down the street with his flashlight, throwing beams into crannies just as if he were on patrol investigating a prowler or something, then boldly pushed the door. Naturally, the old man had left it open. He stepped in and followed the flashlight beam up the stairs to the office. Dammit, that door was locked.

  He reached into his wallet and fumbled with a plastic credit card. Like many policemen, he was skilled at some small criminal crafts that he’d picked up over the years, and it didn’t take more than a few seconds’ manipulation of the card and the doorknob before he popped the lock and stepped into the outer office. He strode quickly through it and into the old man’s lair. The odor of pipe smoke still lingered sweetly in the air.

  He went quickly to the safe behind the desk and pulled it gently; sometimes a man will snap his vault closed and not spin the dial and therefore not set the lock. But no, crazy old geezer that he was, old Sam had spun the dial and the lock was solid and beyond Duane’s abilities to penetrate. So instead he went to the windows and pulled the shades. Then he turned on the lights.

  The place was a mess! The old bastard seemed to be on some mission of self-destruction: he was systematically trashing everything he owned or held dear. Papers were strewn about everywhere, one of the file cabinet drawers had been dumped on the old carpet.

  Duane sat at the desk, littered with old files and reports. He paged through them. Hmmmm. Most seemed to have to do with 1955. There was a letter from some woman, which he slipped into his pocket. He shifted papers about and came across a report on a pretrial hearing, dating from July 29, 1955, for the case of Reggie Gerard Fuller on a count of first-degree murder. Hmmmm. What the hell was this all about? It probably had to do with the niggers the old man had been visiting. Why was he visiting niggers? What was he up to? Did it have anything to do with Swagger?