Black Light

by Stephen Hunter

  “I’ll be there,” said Bob.

  He sat on the bed. Paint it black. Hello, darkness. Death was no stranger, he’d seen it come in many forms and shipped it out more than any man ever should. But this one hit him particularly hard. He sat and looked at the wall until the wall went away, replaced by a great nothingness.

  In time, Russ came in from his room, dressed and ready to go, and asked what was wrong and Bob told him, then retreated back into his emptiness.

  Nothing seemed to happen. Bob just sat there, lanky and still and sealed off. Who could tell what was going through his mind? Russ thought of Achilles in his tent, sulking, nursing his anger into a fury so pure nothing could stand before it.

  “The funeral?” Russ finally asked.

  “No,” said Bob. “Not with people hunting us. That’s sure where they’d look.”

  He shook his head. Then he said: “They took my father. Then they took his body, his memory. Now they’ve taken Sam.”

  “You think—”

  “You saw Sam. Whatever he was, he was not infirm. He did not have balance problems. He would not fall down stairs. Someone pushed him. Because again, he found something out. He was looking for that coroner’s report or something, he found it, someone was watching him, he had to be stopped. Some hero sent him flying down those steps.”

  Russ saw where they were: the place called paranoia, deep into the culture of conspiracy, where everything was a part of the plot, evidence of the sinister tendencies of the universe.

  “He could have just fallen. He was an old man.”

  “He didn’t just fall. Some men fall. Not Sam. You think I’m nuts? You think I’m making all this up? Tell me, sonny: they was hired gunmen with submachine guns trying to fry our asses in Oklahoma, wasn’t they?”

  “Yes, it’s true. But to—”

  “Where’d that goddamn deputy who was dogging us go? We was dogged by that deputy. Then he disappears and the gun boys come onto the scene. So where’s the deputy go? We won’t go to the funeral but we will go to the wake. You nosy around, you see if anybody saw that deputy. That’s your job. But he’s just a little man. There’s someone behind this thing, you mark my words, watching us, setting all this up. And I will by God find him and face him down and we’ll see who walks away.”

  “Yes sir,” said Russ, seeing that no headway could be made against the iron of Bob’s rage.

  “But the funeral ain’t till Friday. Today’s Tuesday. Today’s the day you find Connie Longacre. You got that?”

  Russ nodded. Then he said, “All right. I can do that.”

  29

  No sir,” said Duane Peck. “No sir, not at all, sir. I never seen him. I went up there, I got what I could, what I just give you, and I got out. That was it.”

  Like many policemen, he was adept at lying; he had the liar’s best gift: he could absolutely convince himself that what he was saying was the truth, convince his own respiratory system, and come eventually to believe it wholly. He didn’t swallow or tremble, he didn’t breathe raspily, or touch his mouth, he had no difficulty meeting anyone’s eyes, his pupils did not get small and far away, his face color did not change.

  “You had nothing to do with the old man’s death, then?” said Red Bama. They were in the back room behind Nancy’s Flamingo Lounge, where he had summoned Duane when he heard the news.

  “No sir, did not. Hell, I wouldn’t do nothing to a old man. I got respect for the old. That’s what’s destroying this country, sir. Lack of respect.”

  His face was perfectly passive as he spoke. His voice was calm, earnest, under control, his throat unfilled with phlegm. His heart beat dully.

  “You can’t be killing people when you decide to,” said Red. “There’s something called the law of unintended consequences. It brings everything down. Besides, he was such an old man.”

  “I swear to you,” said Duane, “sir, I swear to you I had nothing to do with that.”

  “All right,” said Red, wanting somehow to believe in him, but not quite yet doing so entirely.

  “Sir, he had gone crazy. I told you how he tore his stuff apart. Going back to that office in his wife’s bathrobe, falling down them stairs. Hell, it was a tragedy. The old gentleman needed looking after. It’s a crime his damn family didn’t do nothing for him, all he done give them.”

  Bama nodded.

  He examined the exhibits before him—a scrap of a hearing report from 1955, a letter in flowery script from some woman named Lucille Parker, dated 1957, and a yellow tablet faintly inscribed with the impression of writing on a top page now missing—then looked back at Duane.

  “Sir, if you hold that tablet up to the light, you can sort of make out what the hell it’s all about. I see the word—”

  “All right, Peck, that’s enough. I want you back in Blue Eye, but doing nothing. You wait for me to contact you. Is that clear? You do not want to be eyeballing Bob Lee Swagger. You stay away from him for now. He may sniff something out on you. I may need you for him later, if I can figure out a way.”

  “Yes sir. Uh, sir, uh … about my gambling debts—”

  “Forgotten, Duane. You’re no longer working in the red. You’re in the black. Don’t blow it. The pay’s five hundred a week, starters. Full medical benefits. Of course you keep your deputy’s job; that’s why you’re worth anything at all.”

  “I bet I could git Bob Lee for you.”

  “Don’t even think about it,” said Red. “He’ll know and he’ll come for you. There are ten men fried to crisps on a highway who thought he’d be easy. Now go on, get out of here.”

  After Peck left, Red went over and filled a Styrofoam cup with the rancid bar coffee. It was an important time: he had to make some decisions.

  He had to kill Bob Lee Swagger and kill him quickly. But firepower, the best professional killers, a dream team of hit men, had not worked. He realized now that sheer violence wasn’t the answer; stealth was. Cleverness, planning, nerve, execution.

  Again, by God, underneath his melancholy and his acid distaste for Duane Peck, he was oddly happy. Swagger. This guy was brilliant. He was the best that Red had ever come against, smart and brave and calm and resourceful. If many guns couldn’t do it, what could?

  Hmmmmm. Maybe one could. How else to kill a sniper but to snipe him?

  In his orderly mind, he tried to list his advantages. First, though Swagger of course knew he was being hunted, he had no idea by whom or why, other than the general suspicion that it had something serious to do with issues of forty years ago which he was currently investigating. That gave Red the opportunity, really, for any kind of approach. And the more he thought, the more he realized that the key to today lay in yesterday. There had to be a way to put something before Swagger, something which beckoned him and which he could not deny, whose call he would answer even if he knew it might kill him. In that way, the cautious and wary man could be destroyed.

  Red was in a curious state: he throbbed with creativity. He understood the shape, the values, the thrust of the project he was undertaking, he just did not yet know the details, the connections. Yet, really, the details could come later. It was the excitement of creation that overwhelmed him so.

  He set to work. He had to understand everything about forty years ago. The past held the answers.

  With that in mind, he went back into another room where an ancient wall safe lay. It held the treasures and secrets of his own father’s empire. He had a moment here of sentimentality, as his fingers touched the worn old knob of the dial. He knew his father’s fingers had touched it thousands of times. He thought of his father: that shrewd and disciplined man, self-taught and vast of insight, part tyrant, part genius, who came from nowhere. Really, that was the thing. The man came from nowhere. He was born dirt-poor and barefoot in a sharecropper’s shack in Polk County in 1916, amid appalling conditions of nutritional deprivation, impoverishment, brutality and the general coarseness of life in that station and that time. He had been beaten savagely, w
hich is why he never beat his only son. He had been laughed at and called hillbilly and white trash by the quality, who secretly feared him, as they feared all long-boned, pale-eyed members of the rural proletariat.

  Yet he’d come up to Fort Smith in 1930, a fourteen-year-old boy, on his own because he was smart enough to sec nothing could happen in Polk County and if there was a future, it lay in the city; he’d gotten a job as a numbers runner for Colonel Tyree, who ran the town then from a grand suite in the old Ward Hotel. It wasn’t a big job, a comer’s job, just a job running numbers for a criminal organization that would not mourn him for a second if he fell under the wheels of a train or was ground to pulp by the wagon teams that still dominated Garrison Street in those days.

  But like the gift he passed on to his son, Red, Ray Bama had a talent for numbers, for lightning calculation, and understood that the secrets of the universe lay within. (None of Red’s own children had such a thing, but then, bless them, they didn’t need one.) He was wary and shrewd, and his rise was the classic American gangster’s, which mirrored the Horatio Alger myths of the larger population: that in crime, as in industry, the hardest, most tireless worker and the shrewdest, most able calculator ended up the winner. He went from running numbers to running pawnshops to shylocking to managing casinos and cribs to investing; there were always three or four layers between himself and his violence, though three times assassins attempted to nail him. He trafficked in flesh but did not partake of it; he lent money but never borrowed it; he sold drugs but never took them, nor allowed anybody around him to take them. He understood the dynamic of the separate black and white populations. Though he was, even at some remove, a killer, he never committed other crimes, which some would judge more harshly: he was not a racist and did business with black gangsters, eventually taking over their rackets, not out of fear but out of trust; he was not a psychopath, and only killed when it was necessary; he never killed families or siblings; he never killed indiscriminately; he never tortured or brutalized. He was the last thing a redneck pauper should have been, an honorable gang lord, a gentleman.

  But of late Red had been thinking that there was more to his father than his professional triumphs. It wasn’t that he succeeded, eventually; it was that he had the imagination to conceive success in the first place and that the most precious gift he gave his only child wasn’t a business or an inheritance or a network of connection, though all were nice. No, it was his … whole life.

  As Red drove the highways in his Mercedes, he’d sometimes see himself, but in overalls, weighted down by hopelessness, toothless and scrawny, destitute of self-belief. He’d think: Except for Dad, that could be me.

  His father’s single bravest act had been to leave the country and reinvent himself as a city man. On the face of it, quite an accomplishment: no chums, nobody looking out for him, nobody easing the way, a scrawny poor-white-trash hillbilly from the remote Ouachitas, barefoot and unexposed to any kind of culture whatsoever, almost illiterate. Yet in a single generation, he was able to give his son a whole different world: a prep school education, four years at the University of Arkansas, exposure to ideas, possibilities, stimulations. His son never had to wake at four to slop the pigs or wake at five to bring in the wood to light the fire or work in the fields from dark till dark to chop enough cotton or plant enough corn so that the Man would leave a few kernels for the sharecropping family to live on. And his son’s children, they were so far removed from that they couldn’t even imagine it. To them, it was a bad movie called The Beverly Hillbillies, not funny at all, just about crude, backward, stupid trashy people.

  I hope I’m up to you, old man, he thought. I will sure as hell try and be equal to your legacy.

  Red’s father died in a bomb blast out front of Nancy’s in 1975; Red was working as a vice-president of what was then called Bama Trucking, Inc. His immediate response was not to mourn, but to prepare for the assault on his power, his position and his organization that inevitably followed the assassination of a boss. Yet, strangely, it never came, though some years later and some years after that, interlopers moved against him, both easily defeated.

  Thus, the mystery of his father’s death became a prime obsession of his. He had spent over $200,000 on private investigation trying to solve the mystery. Why, when Lieutenant Will Jessop, the Fort Smith homicide dick who had been assigned the case, retired in ’88, Red put him on retainer ($50,000 per annum) to keep up the investigation privately. Red himself had used all his underworld contacts through a variety of subterfuges and come up, after all the time, effort and money, with nothing.

  The problem with the case was simply that it yielded only one answer to cui bono. That is, Red himself. And he didn’t do it (though it had probably been said of him, he knew). Lacking a motive to sustain it, no other explanation made any sense. For example, no lieutenant of the organization benefited and no phone tap or private observation had yielded the slightest smattering of a clue; no out-of-towner gained anything from it. It could only be revenge for some long-ago act, but such deeds are usually messy and emotional, and this one had been accomplished with the most amazing efficiency, control and precision, the work of a true pro in the bomb business, suggesting access to higher levels of craft.

  That’s what Lieutenant Jessop said too.

  “Red, this boy knew what he was doing. This was the best goddamned bomb that anyone ever exploded in Arkansas, that I’ll tell you. He was a goddamned specialist.”

  In time all investigations run down, and Red’s into his father’s death did itself after a hard decade and a half. Red finally gave it up and tried to make peace with the gaping hole in his life, the fact that whoever killed his father, for whatever reasons, had gone unpunished and was laughing even now.

  I tried, Daddy, he’d think, when the bourbon got to him late at night and all the kids were down, and Miss Arkansas Runner-up 1986 snoozed contentedly in her $500 peignoir, I tried so hard.

  With that recalled melancholy heavy on his shoulders, he spun the dial and opened the old vault. The past was broken down by years in ledgers, long lines of figures recording inflow and outflow, all costs noted, all sums accounted for. Every third page or so was covered with notes of explanation. His father wrote in small, perfect hand, dispassionately recording details. In that way, in very short order, Red learned all there was to know—or all his father wanted known and recorded—about the last two weeks in the month of July 1955. He met remarkable people: a Frenchy Short, for one, and a young army first lieutenant at Camp Chaffee named Jack Preece, but others too, a whole slew of clever, fast operators, men of zeal and commitment. Jimmy Pye was there, as well as boss cons and screws from the Bama organization in the Sebastian County Jail. And of course, Earl Swagger was there, and as he examined what lay before him, Red saw the logic behind what he had taken on faith, and marveled at the professionalism of all involved.

  Of course one name was missing. It had to be, for it was not and could not be committed to paper; but Red realized instinctively what the ledger documented: the key moment in Bama family history, when the Bama gang ceased to be a gang and his father ceased to be a gangster, but in which it began its climb toward legitimacy, public power and glory and the bastions of respect and admiration it—he—now commanded.

  Red poured himself another cup of coffee. He called the office, checked his voice mail, talked to his secretary. He called the Runner-up and told her he’d be late and she reminded him that his son Nick had a swimming meet that night and he said he’d go directly. He thought he’d get there by Nick’s event, the 100-meter backstroke, as that probably wouldn’t run until 9:30 and they could stop on the way back for barbecue.

  Then he cleared his mind and began to study the documents that Duane Peck had procured. It seemed clear that they related to some other event of 1955, occurring almost in the same time period as the murder of Earl Swagger. What was the connection? No, wait: that wasn’t important. What, rather, did Bob Lee Swagger and the boy think was the con
nection, for what they thought would guide how they behaved.

  The one document was a preliminary report from the Polk County Prosecutor’s Office on a bail hearing for one Reggie Gerard Fuller, Negro, seventeen, of such and such an address, Blue Eye, on a charge of murder in the first degree against one Shirelle Parker, Negro, fifteen, of such and such an address, Blue Eye. Shirelle must have been Lucille’s, the letter writer’s, daughter. The prosecutor, Sam Vincent—Red winced, thinking of Sam on those steps, an old man whose time was up—Sam was arguing that the crime was so serious that no bail be set and the defense lawyer, one James Alton of the County Public Defender’s Office, pled nolo contendere to the prosecution request, so of course the suspect was held in lieu of bail.

  So: a murder, presumably of a black child by a young black man, July 1955.

  Then he read the letter itself: two years later, the mother of the murdered girl pleads with Sam to reopen the case because she claims that this Reggie could not have done it.

  Strange? You’d think a mother would want vengeance, not justice.

  Perplexed, Red consulted his Rolodex and came up with the name of assistant city editor of the Southwest Times Record and put in the call. He got voice mail, left a message and got a call back in seven minutes.

  “Mr. Bama, what can I do for you?”

  “Jerry, don’t y’all keep all your old papers on file?”

  “Yes sir. On computers since 1993, and over in the library before then on microfilm rolls.”

  “Good scout. Now, can you do me a half an hour’s worth of digging?”

  “Yes sir. You know I can.”

  “The kids okay, Jerry?”

  “Just fine, sir.”

  “Where you going on vacation this year?”

  “Ah, well, sir, we’re thinking about Florida. Daytona Beach.”

  “Oh, Jerry, you know I own part of the Blue Diamond Resort on Sanibel Island. Very nice place.”