Stephen Hunter - Black Light

At the airport, Russ himself did the deed. He went into the FAA regional office, pulled his Daily Oklahoman press card and explained that he was doing a big takeout on civil aviation, particularly the conflict between private plane owners and the commercial carriers in crowded aviation corridors. He spent an hour taking notes as a droning administrator explained the government’s position to him, two or three times in case he missed anything. Russ finally told the man that one way to do such a story would be to set it into the context of a single day in the American air (why hadn’t he thought of this before?) and it might be nice to profile who was in the air at a given moment as a kind of cross section of the problem. He seemed to pluck a date out of his memory, which was in fact the date of the shoot-out on the Taliblue. He wondered if he could examine the records of that day and get in touch with some private plane owners who were aloft?

Again, the minutes ground by, but in time he had a thick file of flight plans fetched from the files, and he peeled through them, recognizing nothing, until at last he came to a Cessna 425 Conquest twin-engine job, CN13467, registered to Redline Trucking, whose pilot had filed for Oklahoma City that day, leaving at 10:25 A.M. and landing at 5:20 P.M. That was very interesting, but what really caught Russ’s attention was the phone number that the pilot had listed on the plan: It was 045-1640, only three numbers off the mystery number and it had the strange 0 prefix.

Russ realized that Redline Trucking must lease or own a whole bank of 1600 numbers for its various enterprises, under a private 045 exchange, of which 1643 would have to be one. He looked at the pilot’s name.

“Bama,” he said the name aloud. “Randall Bama.”

The next day, much rested after an eighteen-hour blast of sleep in a Ramada Inn south of Fort Smith, Russ and Bob went to the Fort Smith Municipal Library, where they accessed all the information that was in the record about Randall “Red” Bama of Fort Smith, Bama Construction, Redline Trucking, the Bama Group Real Estate Development, Hardscrabble Country Club, the Chamber of Commerce (president 1991-93 and 1987-88), the Rotary, the Opera Guild, and so forth and so on.

It explained a lot: how three carloads of professional shooters and a deputy sheriff and a world-class sniper could be set up to hunt them down. But did it explain enough?

They went back through the stacks and found as many references to his father, the great and notorious Ray Bama (1916-75), pawn king of Fort Smith, denizen of Nancy’s Flamingo Lounge, known compatriot of the big Little Rock and Hot Springs mob and rumored mob kingpin with ties to Santo Trafficante and Carlos Marcello in New Orleans and Big Jim Westwood in Dallas, whose life was ended in a mysterious car bomb in 1975.

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.

“ 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.