Black Hornet lg-3

by James Sallis

  “Brown did say federal agents, am I right?”

  We had our backs to the wall across the street, keeping watch on new arrivals.

  “Word is,” James said, “there’ve been threats.”

  “What kind of threats?”

  “The death kind.”

  “Against Corene Davis.”

  He nodded. “They’ve kept it quiet. One of the regulars I worked with before told me.”

  “Who made the threats? How were they made?”

  “That’s been kept even quieter. Someone said by letter-white ink on black paper. I don’t know. Yoruba’s been mentioned. So has the group that wears purple shirts and berets. The Black Hand seems to be a current favorite.”

  Around the corner to our right came a group of young men, sixteen of them marching in formation, four-by-four. They wore black jeans and shirts and their heads were shaved. The leader, front left, called out the rhythm as they advanced. They executed the turn in finest drill form, at crowd’s edge made a perfectly coordinated right-face and marked time as the leader counted down cadence. Then they stood erect and still, feet slightly apart, hands clasped in the small of their back, eyes forward.

  “Don’t you just love watching the little childrens play soldier?” a voice said to my left. As I turned that way, Leo Tate stepped up grinning, Clifford close behind.

  “Yeah, get themselves some cool hats like yours, they’d really look sharp.”

  “Such a romantic soul, Lewis.”

  “I try. Had no idea you guys were interested in Corene Davis, though.”

  “We’re interested in anyone who tries to tell the truth about being black in this country.”

  “You happen to know anything about threats against her life?”

  The two of them exchanged glances. Clifford shrugged, shoulders moving maybe a quarter-inch. Leo nodded back in kind.

  “We heard that, yeah. Mostly why we’re here.”

  “Any idea who could be behind it?”

  “You want the long list or the short one? Short one’s almost as long as the long one-know what I’m saying?”

  “Of course, there may be nothing to it all,” Clifford said.

  Static crackled on the walkie-talkie, and Leo looked down at my hand.

  “Man, everybody’s playing soldier today. They give you your official decoder badge too?”

  “Friends of yours, I take it,” James said after they had stepped off into the ever-thickening crowd. I looked at him. He just shook his head. “Takes all kinds.”

  I looked around us again. “Which is about what we’ve got here.”

  “For sure.”

  We made our way along the rear of the crowd, which by now had expanded well into the next block. People still streamed in from every direction. James called to report, cupping his hand over the walkie-talkie and all but shouting to be heard against the din.

  We had turned to start back across when a hand fell on my shoulder and someone spoke behind me.

  “Lewis. I can’t help but notice that you seem to be taking a sudden, decided interest in black affairs these days.”

  “Working,” I said. I held up the walkie-talkie.

  Hosie looked at it, back at me. “That may be even more intriguing.”

  “Leaping to conclusions again?”

  “Peering cautiously over the edge of one, anyhow. Go on about your business, Lewis, whatever it is. We can talk later.”

  We started across to check out the other side, noting that a half-dozen hardcases had grouped around the men in black with shaved heads. The hardcases were tossing insults and taunts at them. The sixteen men stood in formation looking straight ahead, making no response.

  I glanced at James. He nodded and bent his head close to the walkie-talkie to call it in.

  Cackles shot from the speakers outside the hall, then a loud, shrill peal before they were again shut down. After a moment a steady sizzling sound came back on. Several taps-of fingers? A clearing throat.

  “Ladies … and … gentlemen.

  “Brothers.

  “Sisters.

  “It is a great honor tonight to be called upon to introduce the young lady sitting here beside me. Rarely has the voice of our black nation, rarer still that of its youth, been heard so clearly, with such honesty and …”

  Static obliterated the voice. There were further thumps. A murmur started through the crowd.

  Momentarily the voice resurfaced: “… testimony to an enduring people.” Then more static and, after a bit, speakers chopping his words into hiccups: “Ladies and gentlemen, please bear with us.”

  Static.

  The crowd’s murmur grew both in pitch and intensity.

  “… a minor technical problem, I’m told, now resolved. And so, with no more preamble or presumption, I present to you: Miss Corene Davis.”

  But apparently the technical problem wasn’t that minor after all. Even as he spoke, speakers were cutting in and out, swallowing words and syllables.

  “I would like to begin tonight,” Corene Davis said once the applause had died down, “by quoting Andre Breton:

  “ ‘Beauty,’ he said, ‘will be convulsive, or it will not exist.’ ”

  It was then that the speakers cut out once and for all.

  The crowd’s murmur built to a roar. I could hear, from every corner, shouts and curses, raised voices, breaking glass. Fists went into the air. Tidelike surges shuddered through the mass of bodies around me. I watched as the sixteen men with shaved heads, as though on order, broke rank all at once and tore into the hardcases who had been heckling them.

  Ten minutes later, we had a full-scale riot on our hands.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “You do have a way of always being there, looking up just as the pigeons fly over.”

  “It’s a gift.”

  “What the hell were you doing there?”

  I told him.

  “And you think there’s a connection between the shooter and SeCure Corps?”

  “This so-called Sentry’s the only other person I’ve come across lately who’s as shy as our sniper.”

  “Shy-and high.”

  “Exactly. Well worth checking out even if it weren’t the only lead we had.”

  “Mr. Griffin?”

  We both turned. A low-browed, acned young man in a lab coat stepped through the curtain. He was tall and gangly and looked to be all of sixteen, as though he ought to be mowing lawns and sitting at the movie wondering how to get an arm casually around his date’s shoulder. Instead, here he was patching people back together and trying to save the occasional life.

  “Your X-rays came back. Skulls series and cervical spine are okay, no problems there. That hand looks okay, as far as we can tell. No evidence of fracture. You’re going to have one mother of a bruise, and the hand may swell up till you look like Mickey Mouse. However …”

  The great medical however.

  “… you have three cracked ribs. I don’t think there’s any danger, but we’d like you to stay here overnight for observation.”

  I shook my head. “Tape them.”

  “Mr. Griffin-”

  I stopped him. “Doctor. I appreciate your concern, believe me. But I’ve been through this before.”

  “You don’t understand. With injuries of this kind there’s always the possibility of-”

  “Lung puncture, pneumothorax, atalectasis, pneumonia. I do understand. As I said, this isn’t exactly new territory for me. First time, I went to bed the way I was told and I got so sore it took me two months to get over it all. Next time, because someone was stalking me, I didn’t have a choice, I had to keep moving. By the end of the week I’d almost forgotten it ever happened.”

  “Well … you have a point. All right, Mr. Griffin. We’ll do it your way, on a couple of conditions. One: you let me write a prescription for you in case the pain gets too bad, so you’ll at least be able to rest.”

  “Second?”

  “You come back day af
ter tomorrow and let me take a look at you.”

  “Agreed.” Though I knew there was little chance I’d come back. He probably knew it too.

  “I’m still not clear on this thing with Davis,” Walsh said as the doctor began wrapping me.

  I looked beneath one raised arm.

  “When all hell started breaking loose, I had to wonder if it might be a set-up. If the whole thing, the speaker trouble, the ensuing riot, all of it, hadn’t started out just as a way to provide distraction.”

  “Making it easy for anyone who wanted to take Corene Davis down.”

  I nodded. “Hold still, Mr. Griffin,” the doctor said.

  “There wasn’t anything I could do out on the edge like that. Man could have been standing in moonlight on the roof with a cannon and I wouldn’t have seen him. So I pushed into the crowd. Thinking all the time that if I got in closer to the center, there was at least a chance I’d see something-assuming there was something to see.

  “About this time they brought Corene Davis out a side door, trying to get her away from danger. They came out of the church itself, not the community center, and I just happened to be in the right position and looking that way. Four men pressed close to her, and they were making for a black Lincoln parked in the alley behind.

  “I caught a glimpse, just a flash of motion, from a doorway back there. I wasn’t even sure, afterward, that I really saw it. But I went over the low stone wall between the buildings and along it, crouched as low as I could and still keep my speed up, and just as they reached the car, Corene and her escorts, this guy stepped out of the doorway.”

  “You broke his arm in two places, Lew. Witnesses said it looked like you were trying to tear it off. Then you started in on the rest of him.”

  “I don’t know. I was concentrating on the gun. Funny how fast it came swiveling away from the others and toward me. All I wanted to do once he was down was make sure he stayed down. Man had one hell of a kick to him.”

  “Well, you took him down, all right. Hard. Be a while before he gets back up.”

  “Who is he?”

  “We don’t have much yet. His name’s Titus Kyle, appears to be local. We’ve got his picture and prints on the wire, and feds are running a check for affiliations with subversive organizations, known activist groups and the like.”

  “He’s an old man.”

  Walsh nodded. “Late fifties, anyway.”

  “Not the shooter.”

  “Nope.”

  “How does that feel, Mr. Griffin?” the doctor said.

  I lowered my arms, twisted about, took a deep breath. “Like someone’s sitting on me.”

  “Perfect.” He may even have smiled. “See you day after tomorrow.” He scribbled on a pad, tore off the sheet and gave it to me. “Every four hours if you need it.”

  Walsh handed me my shirt. I managed to get it on without gasping.

  “There’s a line forming outside the ER door, you know. People taking numbers. Your dance card’s filled. Five or six reporters, someone from the mayor’s office. Man from SeCure Corps wants to offer you a full-time position. And Miss Davis is waiting to thank you personally.”

  I tucked the shirt in, put on my coat. “There a back way out of here?”

  “That’s what I thought you’d say. Yeah, there is. And a car waiting in the alley.”

  We made it along narrow corridors smelling of chlorine and through a steel fire door without getting spotted. Walsh started the engine and sat there a moment looking ahead.

  “You know, you probably saved more than one life out there tonight, Lew,” he said.

  Then he slipped the Corvair into gear and headed for Jefferson Highway.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  It takes a while for us to realize that our lives have no plot. At first we imagine ourselves into great struggles of darkness and light, heroes in our Levi’s or pajamas, impervious to the gravity that pulls down all others. Later on we contrive scenes in which the world’s events circle like moons about us-like moths about our porch lights. Then at last, painfully, we begin to understand that the world doesn’t even acknowledge our existence. We are the things that happen to us, the people we’ve known, nothing more.

  Once reporters had dispersed, the mayor’s office lost interest in me. Walsh helped convince police and media to conceal my name and identify me only as an employee of SeCure Corps. From Corene Davis, a citizen whose own privacy was fatally compromised and who must therefore have come to cherish that of others, I received three days later a handwritten note of thanks.

  SeCure wasn’t so easy.

  A telegram waited for me, lodged between front door and frame. Please contact us ASAP, it said. When I went in, I found an envelope pushed under the door. Engraved letterhead inside. SeCure Corps wanted me to come to work for them as a field supervisor, overseeing all part-time and contract employees. Stock options were mentioned.

  Good folks, those people down at SeCure. Stuff America’s made of. Excellent management, careful planning, fine strategies. Deserve their $1.5 million net.

  Except that when I got to sleep, one of them came crawling in to drag me out.

  Thuds at the door-like the drums the natives use before the great doors in King Kong. Mystery. Ritual. Wonder. Oh my.

  I was dreaming of drums in Congo Square. I was a child, with no comprehension of the languages rolling about me. I pressed close to my father, afraid. So much to be afraid of. I could feel the strange words gathering like coughs in his chest. Then I was in church humming along (since I didn’t know the words) “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” looking up at stained-glass panels, parable of the prodigal son. The drums went on. At last I surfaced and slouched, not towards Bethlehem, but only the door.

  “You hit that door again, I’ll take your arm off,” I said. Damn it’s bright out there.

  She looked sharply at me, opened her hand, lowered her arm. Then on impulse held the hand out. Slim fingers, narrow wrist. I took it. The world ached anew with possibilities.

  “We’ve been trying to contact you, Mr. Griffin.”

  “We?”

  “SeCure Corps. I’m Bonnie Bitler, executive vice president. Veep, as they say, to make me feel like one of the boys.”

  So much for a world awaft with possibilities. Just business as usual. But she’d have a hell of a time ever passing for one of the boys.

  She wore a silk skirt and matching coat, somewhere between navy and black, with a light-blue blouse, simple strand of pearls. The skirt, cut close, fell just below her knees. She was trim and tall. Only the skin at her hands tipped her age: over forty, maybe closer to fifty.

  “Sounds impressive, no? But the truth of it is that my husband Ephraim started the whole thing. Kick-started it, he used to say. Before he dropped, thirty years old, face-first into a gumbo I’d made from scratch. Four hours, I’d been at it.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I am too. Probably the best gumbo I ever made.” She smiled. “Don’t think I’m harsh. It’s been a long time now.”

  I nodded.

  “All I had to do was pick up where Ephraim left off. And before long we were big enough that all these others started coming around. Looking in the windows, sniffing at the doorsill.”

  “Bonnie Bitler, would you like some coffee?”

  “I would, Mr. Griffin. If it’s not too much trouble.”

  “Lew.”

  “Lew. Yes, please. I’d like that a lot.”

  She followed me out to the kitchen.

  “I have no idea why I’m telling you all this.”

  Setting a pan of water over the burner, I shrugged. “People talk to me. Always have.” I dumped beans into the grinder, worked the handle.

  “I was going to just come here and offer you a job. Things don’t get much simpler. But I seem to have kind of jumped track.”

  “Kind of.” I crimped a paper towel into the plastic cone, dumped in pulverized beans, poured boiling water over. Set a pan of milk on the
stove. “But lots of the time things look better from side roads.”

  “Will you at least consider the job?”

  “Let me think about it.”

  “But you’re not really interested.”

  “Generally I don’t do too well, working for someone else. On the other hand, at this point I have something like ten dollars to my name. Not to mention outstanding hospital bills.”

  “I’m sorry: I thought you realized. Those were taken care of. We have an exemplary medical plan.”

  And I had someone sitting across from me who used words like exemplary in conversation. That didn’t happen often.

  I set a cup of au lait on the table before her. Went back to the stove to pour my own.

  “Ephraim was no great businessman,” she said. “But he liked strong men, men with principles, with integrity, and he had a fine talent for finding them, often in the most unlikely places. I like to think I have something of the same talent.”

  “Thank you.”

  “No need to. But you’ll call? Let me know?”

  I said I would.

  She laughed, richly. “Men always say that, don’t they? They’ll call. And then never do.”

  She paused at the door. “Maybe this time I’ll call, just to talk. Do you think that would be okay? Or that possibly we might meet somewhere, have a drink or coffee?”

  I thought that would be just fine. Oh yes.

  When she was gone, fully awake now, I mixed a drink, pain raking fingernails down the blackboard of every breath, took it outside and sat on what remained of the big house’s front steps.

  In the car Walsh had said, “This guy scares me, Lewis. Not many do. I won’t feel right unless you have this.” He laid my.38 on the flat shelf behind the gearshift.

  He scared me, too. I remembered Esme’s face, her hand clutching at mine. I remembered the shooter scrambling over a Dumpster and through the delivery door. Remembered the cab driver’s baseball bat swacking into me.