Stephen Hunter - Black Light

“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?”

“I didn’t mean to,” he said. “She started to scream. I had to stop her from screaming. I never meant to.”

Bob lowered the gun.

“My friend is a newspaper reporter,” he said. “We’ll go to the paper and publish this. We’ll get the case reopened. There’s been enough killing.”

He slipped the .45 back into its holster and turned to face Red Bama, who now held the loaded Krieghoff.

Through the lenses, Russ watched Red Bama pick up the shotgun from a hundred yards out. He watched the man raise the shotgun, watched its barrels pivot lazily.

Do something! he told himself.

Involuntarily his fingers closed on a trigger. But there was no trigger. He had no rifle.

Why didn’t you give me a rifle! he screamed to Bob Lee Swagger, his eyes glued in horror to the binoculars. I could have done it!

“Red, thank God,” said Hollis.

“Yes,” said Red, “thank God,” and he fired both barrels, one two, fast as they could be fired.

The No. 7½ shot hit its target; it didn’t have time to open or spread but delivered an impact similar to that of a nineteenth-century elephant gun, a tremendous package of weight and velocity and density; the first charge literally eviscerated the chest, the heart and lungs, the spinal column; the second hit just above the mouth and destroyed the skull, all the facial structures, the features, the hair. The body was punched backwards and came to sprawl in the bushes.

Gun smoke hung in the air.

Russ, watching from a hundred yards away, bent and puked.

“Nice shooting,” said Bob.

“It’ll cost me a million dollars,” Red said, “to straighten this out. And it’s the first fatal accident in the history of sporting clays.” He shook his head. “He would have been Vice President, you know. It was set. He might very well have been President.”

“Everybody has to pay. It was his turn,” Bob said.

“Yes,” said Red, “but do you know why I did it? To save me the trial? To save the humiliation? To save the legal fees? To avenge that poor girl, because he broke the rules and hurt a child? Maybe. But the real reason is that I now realize he not only killed your father, he killed mine. My father must have been the only man alive who wasn’t an Etheridge but who knew the secret. And when Boss Harry died, son Hollis got to worrying about that. So: there you have it. Did we pay our fathers back for what they did for us? Not really. But I’ll say this, Swagger: we sure as hell tried.”

“Damned right,” said Bob.

But Red had a last surprise for him.

He looked up, his eyes narrowed in sly concentration.

“And I know you think you’re much smarter than I am, because you figured all this out and I didn’t. So I give you that. But I have a surprise for you too.”

Bob looked at him.

“When you go home, I want you to say hello to Julie and YKN4 for me.”

There was a long moment.

“My family?” said Bob.

“The pay phone. We tracked your collect call. I had your wife and daughter, Swagger. I could have used them to get at you. You made a mistake.”