Black Light

by Stephen Hunter

  But by late in the afternoon, when they reached the end of the research, they still had nothing but speculation which led them to a certain conclusion: that somehow, someway, Earl Lee Swagger had learned something about the old gangster and was therefore targeted for elimination. But nothing in the last weeks of Earl’s life made any sense along those lines: he was a rural state police sergeant, a good one, but not an organized crime investigator or a member, as far as could be determined, of any elite unit of investigators, county, state, federal or otherwise, that could be moving against Ray Bama, then at the start of his burgeoning career.

  And there was no accounting anywhere that suggested any connection to the death of Shirelle Parker, discovered on July 23, 1955, the last day of Earl’s life, by Earl himself.

  At dinner that night, Bob said: “I think we should move against him anyhow. He’ll explain what he’s up to at the point of a gun.”

  “Jesus,” said Russ, “the guy’s sure to be heavily guarded. He’s a gangster, for crying out loud, no matter how civic-minded and philanthropic and visible. You just don’t walk up and point a gun at him.”

  So that seemed to be it.

  “All right,” said Bob, settling down. “We’ve still got more work. We have to find someone in the state police in ’55 and see what my father would have been doing where he could have known or learned something about Ray Bama.”

  Russ shook his head.

  “I think you’re overvaluing your father’s profession. You want him to be some kind of superinvestigator hot on the big case, so that his death will have a lot of meaning. But the truth was, your father was just like my father: a rural state policeman. My father probably hasn’t investigated two things in his life. He’s not an investigator, unless he’s detached to a special unit, and your father clearly hadn’t been detached to a special unit.”

  Bob chewed this over.

  “All right,” he said bitterly, “you’re the expert. What does a state policeman do? That’s the most elementary question. I ain’t ever asked it, I guess. What does a state policeman do? You tell me. Maybe that’s the answer.”

  Russ thought.

  “Well, he goes on patrol, he appears in court, he answers calls, he clears accidents, he reports to his barracks commander, he goes on training, he writes tickets.”

  He stopped, smiled.

  “He writes tickets,” he said. “If my father has done one thing over the past thirty years it’s not hunt down Lamar Pye and his gang, it’s write tickets. He probably wrote ten thousand tickets in his time.”

  The moment hung in the air. Bob had a sense of something before his eyes, something luminous and heavy, something palpable and dense, something big.

  He looked at Russ.

  Russ looked back.

  “Something’s on your face,” said Russ.

  “Ah—” Bob thought. “Tickets,” he finally said. “Tickets.”

  “So? I—”

  Then he too felt the touch of the breeze.

  “In my father’s effects. Remember?” said Bob. “A last book of tickets, half gone. Right to the end: he was giving out tickets.”

  Tickets, he thought: tickets.

  45

  Pull!”

  Incomers. They shot from the trap, a simultaneous pair, and rushed at him as if they were bound to destroy him.

  But Red was together today. The Krieghoff barrel was a black blur as it rose through the lowest—he fired—and then moved, instinctively, a bit right and up through the highest—and fired again. The two birds detonated spectacularly against the green of the forest, powdered, literally obliterated, by the 7½ Remington charges.

  “You are on a tear, Red!” said his companion.

  “I am, I am,” he said, pleased.

  He’d hit thirty-eight straight. He hadn’t missed. The expensive shotgun felt alive and beautiful in his hands, hungry to kill. It sought the birds as if liberated from all restraint, like a purebred, ferocious dog just off the leash, and gunned them out of the sky mercilessly, pounded them to puffs of orange powder.

  “I feel good,” said Red. “Next week, I’m taking the family to Hawaii. All of ’em. Both wives, all the kids, except goddamned Amy, who wouldn’t go across the street to see me hanged, my guards, the whole thing. My first wife’s mother, goddammit. The Runner-up’s worthless brother, for God’s sake. We’ll have a great time.”

  “You’ve been through a lot,” said his companion. “You want to be fresh for the fall.”

  “Yes, I do,” said Red.

  They walked through the forest to the next station. It was a beautiful day in West Arkansas and the trees towered majestically, green and dense against the pure blue sky and the surrounding mountains. The path occasionally yielded to openings where they could look out on the humps of the Ouachitas stretched before them, or, in another direction, to the flatter lands of Oklahoma to the west.

  “It’s good to be alive,” said Red.

  Ahead, his trapper scampered into the trap station and Red stood back as his friend took the next cage. Rising teal, far out, a tough one, a single, a following pair and a simo pair. As he set up to shoot, Red absently closed his gun, took out his choke wrench and changed his Improved Cylinder and Skeet I and screwed in Modified and Modified Improved for the longer shot.

  His friend was shooting an expensive Perazzi and was an excellent shot, but not up to Red’s standards today. He fired, took the single, but only one of the following pair.

  “Just relax,” called Red.

  “I’m too relaxed,” he called back.

  “Pull,” he called, and the two birds climbed out of the tree line against the blue sky; he followed and tracked them and fired, but only one vaporized.

  “Damn!” he said.

  “You have too much on your mind,” Red said. “You have to be empty, Zenned out. You have to trust your instincts.”

  His friend laughed.

  “Whenever I trust my instincts,” he said, “I get into trouble.”

  Red went into the shooting cage, a little wooden gazebo that oriented him down a long yellow draw to a clump of bushes between two golden hills, slid a Remington into the lower barrel and set himself.

  “Pull!” he commanded, and the bird announced its own launch with the whang of the trap arm, and soon rocketed into vision. With leisurely aplomb, Red followed it and dusted it.

  Felt so good!

  He ejected the shell, dropped two more into the chambers, reset himself. He gave himself a second to think out the sequence: see it, move, mount, shoot, follow through. He took a breath, looked for little indications of panic or doubt and found none.

  “Pull,” he shouted.

  Whang the bird rose and he waited until it came to a dead rest, that wondrous moment where gravity and acceleration were in total equipoise and blew it away. He dropped the barrel a bit to pick up the rise of the following bird and there it was, there it was, he rose up and through it and squeezed and the bird was vapor.

  Ah, he thought, a warm surge of pleasure. He’d never shot a 50. He’d had seven 49s, dozens of 48s, and hundreds of 47s and 46s, but never a 50. And he’d never been this close. And this teal simo was the last really tough shot. He had to get this shot and then it was downhill.

  He broke the gun, watched the small mushroom of gun smoke rise from the chambers as each shell popped out, and threaded two more in.

  He set himself, but didn’t want to take too much time, because it’s more than possible to think yourself out of a good shooting sequence. He liked where he was: loosey-goosey, ready, hot, fluid, quick and in the zone.

  “Pull!” he called.

  Nothing happened.

  No whang, no birds, nothing.

  Damn. He hated it when that happened. That’s how you lose concentration. He made a mental note to chew out the trapper when the round was finished.

  “Are you ready?” he yelled.

  There was no answer.

  He took the silence as assent, set him
self again, wiped his mind and once again called, “Pull!”

  Again: no birds.

  “Mike,” he called the trapper’s name. “What the hell is going on?”

  There was no reply.

  He looked back to his friend and—

  The vibrator on his pager buzzed against his hip.

  Damn! That meant Peck was calling him. What the hell was this about? He thought about ignoring it, just shooting the round out, but how do you ignore it?

  Call him, get it dealt with, then get back in the round.

  He leaned the shotgun against the gun cage, stepped out.

  “Have to make a call,” he told his companion.

  He dialed the message line, waited for it to connect, heard that he had one new message and then got the message.

  “Call for the birds again,” it said.

  Fine, he thought, stepping back into the cage, picking up the shotgun.

  Then his mind computed the significance.

  A tremendous sense of unfairness came over him. He picked up the shotgun, gripping it tightly, but he could see nothing.

  He set the gun down, looked back at his unconcerned partner and seized the folder off his own belt. He dialed Peck’s number. He heard the phone ring in his ear … and twenty feet away.

  He grabbed the gun and ran out of the cage, off to the left, and saw Peck’s phone hanging from the limb of a tree, ringing.

  “Peck didn’t make it,” said somebody.

  He turned and saw his nightmare: the sniper, in full camouflage regalia, an ancient god of vengeance, his face not even human but a warrior’s face lost in the swirling colors of the woods, his hair wrapped tight in a camouflaged bandanna, his eyes narrow and dark. He had simply stepped from invisibility into Red’s life. He lifted a .45 automatic and pointed it straight at Red’s face.

  “Set the shotgun down, Bama, or I will kill you and you know I will.”

  Red set the shotgun down.

  “Guards,” he screamed. “Guards!”

  “They’re tied up two stations back,” said the man. “It wasn’t their day.”

  Red turned.

  “Swagger,” he said, because it was all he could think to say.

  “In person,” said Bob, then pivoted to point the gun at Red’s friend.

  “This has nothing to do with me,” said the man. “I don’t see a thing. I’m not involved in this at all.”

  “Then drop that gun or I will drop you, sir. I am not here to fuck around.”

  The Perazzi fell to the ground.

  “You may think I’m frightened of you, Swagger,” said Red, his face narrowing in fury. “But I’m not. Guys have come at me before. And if this is the day I check out, fuck you, because my family is taken care of and my children love me. So fuck you, Swagger, you do what you have to.”

  “You got some balls, Red, that I’ll say,” said Swagger.

  “Talk to him!” screamed the companion. “Negotiate with him. Make him an offer. This doesn’t have to happen.”

  “You shut up,” said Bob to the man. “I have a boy a hundred yards out there with a .308 right on your chest. You shut up and sit still until I talk to you.”

  The man went silent as if struck. The idea of the rifle on him chilled him out and he sat as if to move one inch in one direction would earn him a bullet.

  “Now, Red,” said Bob, “I do want you to talk to me. Why’d your father kill my father back in 1955?”

  “Fuck you and the horse you came in on, Swagger. I have allies. I have people who know I was gunning for you. If you kill me, they’ll hunt you down and take you out.”

  “Well, maybe that’s a fact. But it won’t mean no never mind to you, Red, that I guarantee you. Now, you going to answer me or do I have to shoot a kneecap off?”

  “Who’s kidding whom?” said Red furiously. “You don’t have it in you to shoot my kneecap off. You’re a soldier, not a goddamn torturer.”

  “Talk to him!” screamed the terrified companion. “Tell him what he wants to know. Make him a deal. A cash deal.”

  “Fuck cash,” said Red. “He’s not a cash boy.” He looked at Swagger, his eyes burning with furious contempt and rage.

  Finally, he said, “All right. I’ll tell it once. Then it’s over. Then you do what you have to do.”

  “Talk,” said Swagger.

  “Your father was looking to buy some land. He had been examining plots in the Polk County Deeds and Claims Office and he’d learned that something called the Southland Group had bought up most of the land in Polk County. Because he was curious, he’d investigated and found out what nobody was supposed to know: that Southland was a dummy corporation owned by my father and a man named Harry Etheridge, a U.S. congressman. They’d funneled thousands into it, with the idea that Etheridge would push through a parkway or highway and open up that part of the country for development. It would be worth millions. Your father bumbled into the information. He was the only one who knew of the secret, powerful, very profitable link between the Etheridge and the Bama men. It was the linchpin of my father’s power and position. Your father had to be stopped. So the congressman and my father put together a plan that turned on some contacts we had in prison and they recruited a kid named Jimmy Pye, just due out. They told him if he did it, they’d set him up in Hollywood. He wanted to be the next Jimmy Dean. But we were worried he wasn’t good enough, so Harry Etheridge, who was on the Intelligence Oversight Committee, called in a CIA chit and got a case officer named Frenchy Short to ramrod a secondary plan through. The backup shooter nailed your dad and nobody was the wiser. End of story. Sorry, but business is business.”

  “And that’s the truth?”

  “As I live and die. Now fuck you, do what you want.”

  “Guess what, Red?”

  “What?”

  “You’re wrong.”

  There was a long moment of silence. Then Red turned and stared at the sniper.

  “Fuck you.”

  “No, fuck you, because you’re wrong. You been played like a yo-yo and your daddy too.”

  Another long moment.

  “Yesterday,” said Bob, “I’d have believed that. I’d have blown you away and gone home a happy boy. But not today.”

  “What are you talking about?” said Red, his eyes narrowing in concentration.

  “It ain’t about land. I bet if you wanted to you could pull that story apart real easy. I bet the dates don’t match, the money don’t match, it don’t quite work out. It’s what you were told, it’s what got your family involved, but it ain’t quite right. It’s a cover story. Not only because my daddy loved his own land and wasn’t about to move for nothing.”

  “What’s it about, then?” said Red.

  “It’s about a boy who didn’t want to pay his speeding ticket.”

  There was another long pause as Red looked Bob up and down, his rage somewhat tamed by curiosity.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “On July 19, 1955, at 12:28 A.M. my father issued a speeding ticket to a nineteen-year-old kid for traveling eighty-two in a fifty zone near a spot on Route 88 between Blue Eye and a town named Ink called Little Georgia. What my daddy didn’t know was that the reason that boy was speeding was because he had just raped and murdered a little black girl named Shirelle Parker, fifteen years old, at Little Georgia, which was a red clay deposit.

  “He’d picked her up in Blue Eye on the way back from a church meeting. And why’d she git in the car with a white boy when her mama had told her never to get in no car with a white boy? Because that was a civil rights meeting, and she’d met a white person who believed in her and believed in her struggle. So she’d learned not to hate white boys and it got her killed.”

  Red stared at him.

  “Who was the kid?” he asked.

  Bob said, “A Harvard kid. Raised in Washington, D.C. The son of a powerful politician. Himself loaded with ambitions.” Then he turned and pointed at the man on the bench.

  �
��Him,” he said.

  Red turned and faced his friend, the son of his father’s friend.

  “Hollis?”

  Hollis Etheridge stood.

  “Hollis, you? You?”

  “He’s lying,” said Hollis.

  “He went home in a panic and told his father. His father being Congressman Harry Etheridge, Boss Harry Etheridge, and being the sort of man he was, he couldn’t see his boy’s life being ruined by a little mistake with a black gal. So he moved quickly through his sources and came up with Frenchy Short, who moved the girl’s body to get it away from Little Georgia and set up a frame on the lightest-skinned black boy he could find: a boy named Reggie Gerard Fuller, who was executed for the crime.

  “The problem was the state trooper. They could get the ticket out of the court records but they couldn’t get it out of the trooper’s mind and they knew the trooper would put two and two together. They knew from the start they had to kill the trooper, but in some way that didn’t look suspicious and didn’t invite close examination of the trooper’s last days, and for which there was a ready explanation and a convenient killer.

  “That’s how Jimmy Pye, the next Jimmy Dean, and Jack Preece, the sniper, come into it. All for him. For the next Vice President of the United States.”

  “There’s no proof,” said Hollis. “It’s all lies. All political figures are used to rumors like this. You’d be laughed out of court. Red, it’s nonsense. It’s nothing. He doesn’t have a thing.”

  “I have this,” said Bob.

  He held up the old book of tickets.

  “Your signature. The time, the date, the place. Any crime-lab can authenticate the age of the ticket and the age of the ink. It’s just as good now as it was then: it puts you at the site of the murder at the time of the murder. It’ll put you in the chair today just as it would have forty years ago. And this time, your goddamn father ain’t around to pull strings. And if my father’d had another day, he’d have seen the connection and put you on the row.”

  He lifted the gun and pointed it at Hollis’s handsome head.

  Hollis bowed.

  “Please,” he said.

  “You know how much evil came out of that night? You know the people who died? You know the train of destruction you set in motion? You know the lives ruined, the lives ended, the lives embittered because of that night? Why? Why? Did she laugh?”