Black Light

by Stephen Hunter

  “Ah, could I have a decaf cappuccino and a mocha for my son?” asked Russ. “And the chocolate biscotti.”

  “Shut up, Russ,” Bob said, as Jed’s squirrelly little face fell into anger, “this ain’t no time to be smart.”

  The old man threw down at an oilcloth-covered table, clinging to the shotgun, and Bob sat across from him. There was no place for Russ to sit and there wasn’t enough money in the world to induce him to physical contact with that bed—yccch, he shuddered—so he just sort of leaned against the closest wall.

  “Tell me about that day,” said Bob.

  Jed pulled a pack of Red Man from his pocket and stuffed some of the stringy tobacco in his mouth, did some manipulating with his tongue until he got it lodged between cheek and gum on the right side, where it bulged like a tumor. He smiled, showing brown gums.

  “Ain’t much to goddamn tell. They woke me in the Blue Eye drunk tank along with my brother, Lum, rest his soul, and that fat old deputy Lem tole me he had work detail. I’se so hung over, I didn’t realize where we was until we got there. Let me tell you, Swagger, I wasn’t in no mood to go horsing around in them hot woods lookin’ for no nigger gal.”

  “What happened?” Bob said. “Talk me through it.”

  Jed looked around, spat at an overflowing Maxwell House can on the floor and then narrated a rambling account of the day, of the heat and dust of the forest even high in the mountains, of the agony of picking through the saw brier and the bracken, of the mosquitoes and other things that buzzed and bit, and the stench of the dogs, and the final thing, the girl.

  “Shit,” he said. “She was a ripe one, all blown up like b’loon. You could see her goddamned li’l mouse, tell you what. Just out there in the open. Now they show that stuff in the magazines. In them days, boy, you never saw no mouse. Heh, heh.” He absently chortled in memory of the smoky pleasure of it and Russ saw a flicker of rage play across Bob’s face, then subside.

  “Why did my father belt you?”

  “’Cause he’s a mean sumbitch is why,” said Jed, not meeting Bob’s eyes.

  “My father was many things but he wasn’t a bully. Why’d he hit you, old man?”

  “I didn’t mean no harm. I said a little something about riding the gal is all. Bastard. He had no cause to do that. She was a nigger gal and I was right. A nigger boy kilt her. I said so then and that’s way it turned out. Then that nigger boy’s daddy he go all around pretending to be some kind of big shot. Well, I showed him. I ripped open his skull with a goddamned spade. Best feeling I ever got, yes it was, by God, and worth ever damn day of prison. Niggers tried to kill me in prison, you know. Yeah, look at this.”

  He pulled down the strap of his overall and the bib fell, and Russ saw a long purple crescent of scar tissue, a witless smile of pucker, running from one nipple almost down to the appendix.

  Jed’s eye lit with yellow madness. “Niggers done that. Two hunnert and thirty-five stitches! Doc sewed me up like a burlap sack. But they couldn’t bleed me out. No sir. I got more damn blood in me than a sloat pig on slaughter Friday. By God, not no niggers, not no Earl Mr. Fancy Medal Swagger done got the best of me, by goddamn!”

  He sat back, spent, and awarded himself a recreational gob of tobacco juice which he launched like a missile in an arching parabola until it hit dead center in the can, raising a tiny mushroom cloud. Russ shuddered in revulsion and looked away. But Jed wasn’t done. He looked up.

  “I was right about the niggers too. I said, you give them people anything, next thing you know, they be shooting and fucking and killing all over the goddamned place. And they is too, ain’t they? Niggers is fine in Africa. Bring ’em over here and look what good it done us. Niggers. They’s the end of America, that’s for damned sure.”

  Bob kept still through this tirade, as though he were waiting patiently for a dark storm to blow over. Then he said, “Tell me about my father. What was his mood? What was he doing? How did he act?”

  “He was soft on the niggers, that was his problem,” said Jed. “I could smell it on him. This little missing gal: hell, you’d a thought it was his little gal, not some nigger’s. He was sad. Whole goddamned morning. That is when he weren’t coldcocking me. I could take him in a fair fight.”

  “Not on your best day, you old dick. Ask the Japanese. They knew him well,” Bob fired back. “Who did he talk to? What did he say?”

  “Mainly, old Lem. And Pop Dwyer, who run the dogs. He liked Pop but he didn’t like them dogs. I don’t know why, but I could tell. He hung back from them dogs. But mainly, he was fuckin’ around on me. Mr. High and Mighty. He’s on my case like a bastard from the start,” said Jed. “Didn’t your old lady give him none? It was like he hadn’t had nothing in weeks.”

  Bob just glared at him.

  “So he runs us up and down the road and into the woods, goddammit, it was hot nigger work. All the time he’s jawin’ on me, like I say. And when he finds that damn girl, I hears him telling goddamn Lem to order all this fancy equipment. Teams, shit like that, from Little Rock. Like it was goddamned important or something. Hell, it were just a raggedy-ass nigger gal.”

  Bob took all this in evenly, his face drawn and remote.

  “How did he know to look there? What led him to that spot? Do you recall?”

  Jed’s features knitted up in concentration. As if summoning a memory, he summoned up a gob of juice and fired it toward the can, missing by a wide margin. Russ noticed that the gobs were coming closer and closer to him.

  “Something about a lady calling in saying she’d seen a nigger boy acting ‘peculiar’ four days earlier out by the Texaco sign. Yore damn daddy always poking his nose in other people’s business. When he heard the girl was missing, he put ’em together and that’s how he got us out there.”

  Bob nodded. It squared: the black boy, in local lore, would have been Reggie Fuller.

  But it wasn’t Reggie Fuller, because he was driving people home from the meeting in secret. But if it was a black boy who’d killed the girl, someone was doing an elaborate operation to frame Reggie. Why? Why? What possibly could there be to gain?

  “Did he say anything about other investigations or matters?” asked Russ. “Was he consumed with anything else?”

  “He’s tired,” said Jed. “That’s all, tired. He always seemed tired.”

  “From what?” asked Russ of Bob.

  “He didn’t work no regular duty day,” said Bob, recalling. “He’d be gone sometimes fifteen, sixteen hours a shot, sometimes two or three days. He’d work the mornings and the afternoons, maybe come home for a couple of hours at dinner, maybe take a nap. Then he’d go back out on the road, monitor the state police network, look for speeders, mischief, answer calls, that sort of thing. He worked like a goddamned dog.”

  Bob ended, letting it hang quiet in the melancholy air.

  “Is that it, Swagger?” Jed demanded.

  Bob just looked at him.

  “That’s all you wanted? Hah! That ain’t worth no twenny dollar! You ain’t got no more questions and I’m still hotter’n a firecracker.”

  He laughed, as if he’d won some great victory.

  “You boys been here so long it’s dark out! Ha! And what’d you learn? Nary a goddamned thing! Hah! You got my money, Swagger?”

  Bob threw the twenty on the table.

  “Have a party, Posey.”

  It was full dark and Russ felt both exhausted and liberated when at last he sucked in a lungful of air that wasn’t tainted with the odor of bacon fat and stale sweat.

  “We didn’t learn much,” he admitted, as they stepped off the porch.

  “I told you we wouldn’t,” said Bob. “You keep trying to make this link between poor Shirelle and what happened to my father. You keep trying to do that but it don’t work out in time or in logic.”

  “Well—” said Russ. But then he paused. “Consider this. First, coincidence. Is it logical that there would be two elaborate conspiracies engineered within days of each
other in a remote backwater of West Arkansas? I mean, things like that hardly ever happen in real life. Doesn’t it make some kind of sense to presume they were in some way connected, that there was only really one?”

  Bob said nothing.

  “Then consider,” Russ said, “that although each conspiracy is different in terms of objective, they share the same mechanism or pattern. In both cases, there’s two levels. The first, seemingly impenetrable, offers a plain and simple crime, complete to motives and very obvious clues. Jimmy and Bub Pye rob a grocery store; ten hours later they’re confronted by Sergeant Swagger, who guns them both down and is killed himself. Open-and-shut. Shirelle Parker is raped and murdered twelve miles outside Blue Eye. Her hand conceals the monogrammed pocket of her killer. At his house, the rest of the shirt, smeared with her blood, is found. Open-and-shut. But in both cases, at the level of the most excruciating detail, the anomalies begin to assert themselves and if you go beyond the open-and-shut, you see that in each case some genius operator set it up—night infrared for your dad, moving the body from the site of the crime in the other case. Don’t you see?”

  “Consider yourself,” said Bob. “The boy that killed Shirelle was black, you dope. Shirelle’s mama told Sam she was raised so she wouldn’t get in no car with no white boy. Now, you got to ask, if he’s a black boy, who the hell in Arkansas in 1955 had the wherewithal to throw together a frame? For a black boy? Don’t make no sense at all. If it were a white boy, maybe. But no: it was a black boy.”

  “Shit,” said Russ.

  “I’m convinced my daddy was investigating a crime and that’s what got him killed. He learned something, something big, that powerful men wanted stopped. How else would they have had the resources? They had the CIA, an army sniper, state-of-the-art gear.”

  In exasperation, Russ shouted, “I am the son of a state police sergeant. My dad couldn’t investigate an outhouse!”

  “Shut up, we just passed our mark.”

  “What?”

  “I’m counting.”

  “What?”

  “Steps. Once we hit two hundred forty steps from that big boulder, we head off this goddamned path, veer to the left and begin our zigzag back. We move in units of two hundred forty of my long steps, hard left, hard right by the compass, and that gets us back to the car.”

  But Russ hadn’t been paying attention. They had now reached the draw where the creek bed, off to the left, cut between the two hills. The trees loomed above them, more felt than seen. The wind gently pressed through them, filling the night with whispers. The dark lay like a blanket, suffocating Russ. A flash of paranoia illuminated a far corner of his mind; he thought of being alone out here with his hyperactive imagination, zero visibility, lost in some maze that wore an ancient cloak, alone completely. He would die.

  Then he heard something terrifying: from close by, it was the raspy, dryly cracking rattle of a poisonous snake; it released an almost archetypal toxin of fear into his system.

  39

  These were difficult days for Red. He could do so much and then had to let go, sit back and trust the others to execute his plan. He couldn’t, as Amy had said of her father, indulge in his capacity to overmanage. He had to trust. Would Bob read the clues correctly? Would he show up as predicted? Would the damned Duane Peck be able to bring off his end or would the man’s stupidity and impetuousness bring them down? Would Jack Preece hit the shots that needed to be hit? Would the old man, the scrofulous, nasty Jed Posey, hold together in a long session with Bob?

  Ironically, of them all, Red trusted Posey the most: he was familiar with the type, the prison rat so hardened by a life lived at the extreme end of existence he’d been turned into some Nietzschean thing, a being so intense and one-pointed he hardly had any other life left him except the life of duty.

  The other irony was that this whole thing even now, as it had for so long, completely delighted him. It was … remarkably fun. Such a clever plot, so astutely calibrated, based on such an intense analysis of Bob’s character. Really, truly a masterpiece.

  “Red, you’re away.”

  That was Jeff Seward, first operating vice-president of Fort Smith Federal. The others in the foursome were Neil James, of Bristow, Freed, Bartholomew and Jeffers, Attorneys-at-Law, and Roger Deacon, of McCone-Carruthers Advertising Agency. It was the weekly golf foursome of the Fort Smith Rich Boys Club, at Hardscrabble Country Club off Cliff Drive.

  And Red was indeed out and Jeff was indeed delighted.

  His ball lay a long fifty-three feet from the pin. Between it and the hole was a wilderness of elevations, switchbacks, slopes and bare spots. It was the eighteenth hole: Red had shot low, standing at a 71, but damned Jeff, who had never beaten him, was standing at a 72 and had hit an uncharacteristically nice approach shot that had deposited him a few feet from the pin. His one-putt would put him out at 73; Red’s two-putt would leave him at 73 also—damn!—and if he three-putted, a distinct possibility, he’d lose. The image of Jeff’s smirk filled him with dark rage, which he enjoyed because it cut through the mesh of anxieties that he otherwise had suffered.

  Jeff was an old friend and enemy; he’d played on the same Razorback football team with Red in the early sixties, and had at least kept up with him in the wife department, trading in an older model on a newer one every fifteen years, though he’d never reached—and never would—the beauty pageant level as had Red. They’d been in and out of business deals a dozen times and made at least four or five million off of each other’s friendship and connection. But … golf was thicker than blood. Red did not want to lose.

  He approached the ball and knelt to read the green. Around him the vivid beauty of the course expressed itself in full vertiginous glory, the most agreeable golf course in West Arkansas and better than all of the courses but one in Little Rock.

  So Red looked across the ball into a treacherous maze of possibilities. He glanced at his watch. It was late. Suddenly, he felt a strange thing, a collapse of will. It was as if his warrior’s spirit, which had sustained him these many years, had suddenly vanished. He didn’t want to putt out. He wanted to lie down.

  I am getting old, he thought.

  He read the putt as a left-to-right crosser and knew it demanded courage above all else. It would seem to die a half dozen times, seem to quit and sputter or slide off into irrelevancy, would live a whole odyssey of adventures before it even got in the neighborhood of the cup. You had to hit it hard. You had to believe. You could not shirk or flinch or whine: go at it like a man and live or die, like a man.

  “That would be a hell of a putt, Red,” said Jeff.

  “You wouldn’t want a side bet, would you, Jeff?”

  “Hmmmmm,” considered Jeff. “Something in the neighborhood of—oh, a grand?”

  “A grand it is, bubba,” said Red, smiling wolfishly and setting himself up. “Did I ever tell you boys about the time I took three grand off Clinton? That’s why he won’t play with me no more!”

  Damn!

  The buzz of the vibrator on his beeper.

  “Scuse me, gents.”

  He stepped off the green and took his folder from his caddie. He punched up the phone mail and heard Duane Peck’s breathless voice: “Call me. Fast.”

  Red punched the number in.

  “Mr. Bama?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s working. I just dropped Preece off. The old man’s got ’em in there. I’m holding now at the fallback point, waiting for Preece to dust them. By God, it’s going to work! They’re here!”

  Red’s heart filled with joy! He was so close and it would all be over: another threat to his empire and its little secrets defeated. Life, its own beautiful self, would go on and on and on: he’d put all his children through college and maybe, in a few years, when the Runner-up wore down, he’d gracefully retire her to some country mansion and get himself the actual thing he wanted more than anything: a true, authentic Miss Arkansas, young, hot and nubile. Wouldn’t that beat all!


  “Duane, you call me the second it is over, do you understand?”

  “Yes sir, I do.”

  Red handed the folder back to the boy and remounted the green.

  “Good news, Red?”

  “The best.”

  “Another million for Mr. Bama,” said Neil James, “and that means another twenty thousand in billing for me.”

  “Boys,” said Red, “when the big dog’s happy, everdamnbody’s happy.”

  He addressed the putt, filled to the eyeballs with blazing confidence.

  “Jeff, you want to make that five grand, even up?”

  “Hell, Red,” said Jeff, “I’se hoping you’d let me off the hook on the grand!”

  Everybody laughed except Red, who bent into the putt and laid the considerable pressure of the Bama concentration against it, until he thought he’d explode. Then, almost reflexively, with a sharp rap, he struck the ball, wrists stiff, head down, shoulders loose, a perfect putt built on courage, iron determination and $100,000 in golf lessons over the years.

  Like Xenophon’s lost Greeks, it wandered across the Persia of the green, this way and that, up mountains and down into lush green valleys, seeming to die at least twice but always getting over the next crest on the apparent delusion that the sea lay ahead. At last it descended, bouncing and gathering speed, and hit the cup, spun with a whiskery sound—and halted.

  “Damn,” said Red.

  “Five grand!” shouted Jeff.

  “It may drop still,” said Neil.

  Red stared at the ball, balanced on the very equipoise between hole and green, seemingly riding on nothing more than the sprig of loam fighting the ball’s weight and preventing Red from achieving yet another triumph.