James Sallis - Black Hornet

When I told LaVerne that Janie and I were getting married, she just said, very quietly: Good luck, honey. I didn’t see her for a long time then. Janie and I had a son. I got busy drinking and using the marriage to do things to myself that my anger and self-disgust alone couldn’t accomplish. LaVerne wasn’t all I didn’t see back then.

Years went by and David, my son, was gone.

More years, and LaVerne was gone.

We began moving again, past a cop directing traffic, over scatters of gemlike glass.

“Maybe later, Lewis. Further along,” Weaver said.

“Yeah. Maybe.”

Further along we’ll know all the answers, further along we’ll understand why.

We eased down Airline past ramshackle bars, hole-in-the-wall eateries and blocky abandoned factories with grids of punched-out windows, to the Pelican Motor Hotel. Refrigerated air was painted on the office window. An overgrown drive-in movie lot sat across from the motel.

Time for the transfer, the hand-off. Always the weakest point.

As rehearsed back at SeCure, I got out of the car, leaving Weaver, another guard and the driver inside, and stood several paces away. After a moment Louis Creech stepped from the motel office to join me. He nodded curtly to me as he glanced toward the drive-in across the street. From the corner of my eye I caught a brief flash of light at the top of the screen over there. Could have been a reflection from a passing car. Gone as quickly as it came.

I had known the Sentry was on this job.

Now I knew where he was.

The game plan called for me to fall away at this point, passing Weaver on to Louis Creech. Meanwhile I’d circle around back, check the periphery.

I started around, and when everyone’s attention seemed taken, sprinted down an alley behind the motel and a cut-rate furniture store, back up by the store’s delivery docks, and across Airline.

Just as I hit the other side I looked back. Creech’s head turned toward me. He lifted the walkie-talkie.

Beside the drive-in was what had probably been an automobile showroom, with walls intact but the windows that had spanned the whole storefront, and most of the roof, gone. I dove in there and raced through its junkyard floor: stacks of ancient tires, carcasses of small animals, fast-food containers, remains of campfires. At first I saw no way out. But an emergency exit finally gave way on the fourth kick.

I came back out into sunlight and open air and saw the screen only ten, twelve yards away.

Someone was scrambling away from its base toward the stand of trees behind.

Scrambling as once before he’d scrambled over a Dumpster and through a delivery door.

He was almost to the trees when his foot caught in something-weeds, a tangle of roots, a sinkhole-and he fell.

He got up, looked down, looked behind to see me advancing, and shot off into the trees.

Where I lost him.

I plunged on for some time-thrashing about, turning this way and that, stopping to listen-but there was little doubt my bucket had sprung a terminal leak.

At last I found my way back out. Traffic on Airline was picking up fast. More cars and pickups than trucks now, as people started home from work.

Sam Brown said, “Little ways off your post aren’t you, Lewis?” So much for my bright future with SeCure.

I shrugged and walked over to where my pursuee had stumbled. No doubt about it. A professional’s piece, assembled by hand or made to order. Winchester bolt action, with a Zeiss 10x scope. The rifle’s original barrel appeared to have been replaced. Only the receiver was attached to the stock. The new barrel was free-floating. I’d seen snipers carry similar hot rods.

Sam Brown had followed me.

“Who is he?” I said, looking up.

“ You’re the one has trouble, Lewis.”

“Sam.” I stood. “Now, I can’t be absolutely sure, of course, but I think we can both assume this weapon is loaded. Since it hasn’t been fired yet.”

I was careful to avoid touching trigger and guard, places on the stock where fingerprints might be, though I knew there wouldn’t be any.

“People know your shooter was on the job, Sam. You go down here, under his rifle, he’s the one did it. No one will say different.”

He started to raise the walkie-talkie and stopped himself. “You’re crazy, Griffin. Crazy as everyone says you are.”

I shrugged. “America. I’ll yield to the majority opinion. What are you going to do?”

Moments shouldered by. Twenty or thirty cars, pickups, service vehicles.

“I authentically don’t know who he is, Griffin.”

“How’d he get on the SeCure roster?”

“Again: I don’t know. You’d have to go higher up on the chain. But my feeling is, he got in touch with us .”

“Everything okay across the street? Weaver handed on safely?”

He nodded.

“Good. I need one of your men to drop me-and this-off downtown, at the central police station. That all right with you?”

He shrugged. “Sure. Why not?” Then as I started away he said: “Lewis.”

I turned back.

“This is what you were after all along, right?”

I told him it was and he said he had wondered.

Never as invisible as we think. Us or our motives.

“It’s a Winchester, all right. Model 70, 308 caliber, two or three years old. A real hot rod. The new barrel’s a Douglas Premium, floats free for maximum accuracy. Fires a 173-grain, boat-tail bullet in a metal jacket that the ballistics boys tell me can travel at close to 2,250 feet per second.”

“Not the kind of thing you pick up at your local Sears.”

“Not hardly.”

“And it’s the gun used in the shootings?”

“Probably so. They’re still playing with it. And trying to track down sources. Where the Winchester came from, the barrel, scope. But usually we don’t have much luck with this kind of thing. Lot of it’s strictly underground.”

“What about the ammunition?”

“We know where that came from: Lake City, Missouri. There’s no other source. But when we go looking it’ll have passed through eighteen hands and a couple of blinds and there won’t be any way in hell we can trace it.”

“So what do we do?”

“Hope we get lucky. That’s mostly what cops do.”

“You’ve talked to the good folks at SeCure.”

“And to at least three of their lawyers. The company has no official connection with this alleged shooter, knows nothing of his identity or whereabouts, and perhaps it would be best if we did not return for any further chats without a court order.”

“I almost had him, Don.”

“So did I.”

“Oh yeah? That’s not the way I remember it. But thanks, man. Talk to you soon.”

I hung up the phone, went over and sat at the bar. Place called Bob’s I’d never been before, a few blocks town and lakeside of Tulane and Carrollton. Lots of Bobbie Blue Bland and Jimmy Reed on the jukebox.

The bartender stepped up and looked at me without saying anything. One of those places.

“Bourbon,” I said. “Preferably from a bottle with some kind of label on it.”

He grabbed one out of the well (yes, it had a label) and up-ended it over a shot glass. Put the bottle back with one hand as he set the shot glass before me with the other.

“Been a long walk,” someone said from the open door behind me. “I could do with one of those myself.” I knew it was open because the bar had flooded with light. And since the whole place was maybe ten feet square, I didn’t have to squint too hard to see who it was once I turned around.

“Is there a bar anywhere in New Orleans you don’t frequent?”

“Course there is. Way bars are apt to come and go, sometimes they don’t stay around long enough to become in-co-operated in my i-tinery.”