Stephen Hunter - Black Light

It’s a beautiful office, some say the most beautiful in Fort Smith. It displays on one wall civic awards and family mementos, pictures of visiting dignitaries and political figures, examples of philanthropy and civic involvement, all signifying a solid career and a solider place in the community. Yet the office is almost always empty.

Rather, Randall T. “Red” Bama prefers to spend his time in the back room of Nancy’s Flamingo Lounge, on Midland Boulevard in north Fort Smith, on an uneasy tribal border where the black district spills into a poor white one, where the city’s surprisingly large Thai population has begun to contest its more lengthily settled Vietnamese one, where a workingman can get an honest but tough game of pool and a shot and a beer, all for under five dollars, and a stranger can get a steely look that tells him to get lost fast. Perhaps such quarters are an unnecessary indulgence. To keep his empire running—or at least that part of the empire which the newspapers so regularly chronicle—Red must make dozens of calls a day to his middle managers, for of course he makes all decisions himself. It helps that he has a supremely organized mind and a special gift for numbers. It’s said he can add as many as eight three-digit numbers accurately in less than ten seconds, which qualifies him not quite as a prodigy but certainly as a man with a flair for integers.

Red arrives at ten, parking his gray Mercedes S-600 on the street where it will not be molested, stolen, ticketed or even touched. He always drives himself, enjoying the time alone on his spin down from his family’s complex on Cliff Drive above Fort Smith, clearing his mind for the day’s tasks. But he’s preceded by two extremely professional men in a black Chevy Caprice who are authorized by the state of Arkansas to carry the SIG-Sauer P229 .40-caliber semiautomatics they wear in shoulder holsters under their jackets. They are tough, calm and decisive, excellent shots. Each wears Kevlar Second Chance body armor, capable of defeating all handgun and most shotgun ammunition. They are never far from Red.

Red doesn’t say hello to Nancy because there is no Nancy and nobody can remember or cares much if there ever was. He makes his way to the back room, where he hangs up his expensive suit coat, sits at a navy-surplus desk and begins to drink black coffee out of Styrofoam cups from the bar while a continual stream of supplicants, acolytes, gofers, errand boys, emissaries and the summoned go before him for judgment or assignment. It is here that he receives reports on his nineteen pawnshops, his seven porno stores in the greater Fort Smith area, on his heroin dealerships and his crack franchises, mostly located in the black section of town, his six brothels and his seven rural gambling cribs, located across the river in Oklahoma, and the jewel of his night empire, the Choctaw Gentleman’s Club, in Holden, Oklahoma, five miles west on Route 64, where rubes pay five dollars admission and sit there drinking overpriced beer and slipping one-dollar bills between the plastic-engorged breasts of the strippers, who must give forty-five cents on the dollar to the boss man.

His enforcers and district captains report in, with good news or bad, usually good. Occasionally, Red must order severe consequences for an infraction, not a pleasant task but a necessary one and one from which he has never and will never shrink. It is here that he conducts meetings when necessary with Armand Gilenti, the crime boss of Little Rock and Hot Springs, or with Jack Deegan, who runs Kansas City these days, and sometimes with Carmen St. Angelo, of the New Orleans organization and sometimes Tex Westwood, of Dallas.

It is said that Red sticks to the old room in the back of the old bar and billiard parlor because that is where his father, Ray Bama, did his business and built, on a smaller scale, the brilliant organization which Red inherited upon his father’s death (car bomb, culprit uncaught, 1975) and so vigorously expanded upon.

Perhaps, perhaps not. Red in other ways does not seem a man given to sentiment, being noted far and wide for shrewdness, sagacity, persistence and toughness, though he indulges his three children from his first marriage and his two from his second grotesquely. Yet his father is something of a holy relic to him, that brilliant, tough man who fought his way up from the mud of Polk County to the heights of Fort Smith in a single generation, building an empire but, more important, creating a vision which would sustain the empire. Red has called him, to each of his wives, “the redneck Joe Kennedy.”

“Well, you ain’t no JFK,” his first wife shot back, “except when it comes to screwing around.”

“Never said I was,” said Red. “Just said I wouldn’t let my daddy down.”

At fifty-one, he’s short and powerfully built, with a faint spray of freckles, stubby fingers, deep blue eyes that are said to be able to see through anybody’s lies and a bald spot that he vainly tries to minimize by wearing his reddish-blond hair crew-cut. He favors gray suits with pinstripes, blue button-down shirts, red ties (Brooks Brothers, usually) and black Italian loafers. He wears a gold Rolex and never carries less than $5,000 on him in small bills but other than the watch wears no jewelry. He doesn’t carry a gun, never has. He loved his first wife, and loves her still, even though he divorced her when she got a little too old. She was the third runner-up in the Miss Arkansas contest of 1972. He loves his new wife, who is thirty-seven and blond and was the authentic runner-up in the Miss Arkansas contest of 1986. And that was back in the days when beauty contestants had real tits and beauty contests were about beauty, not about saving the whales and feeling the pain of the homeless and all the other feeble liberal do-goodisms that were ruining America. Ask Red about this one: he’ll tell you all about it. It’s a real sore spot.

He loves his children. He loves his wives. He gives his wives and his children and himself anything he wants.

On this day, a sullen man sits before him in the uniform of the Polk County Sheriff’s Department, as Red’s eyes hungrily eat up data from the gambling chits before him.

Finally, Red looks over. What he sees is what he was, what he escaped from, what his father heroically rose against and conquered. But Red knows it well. Some would call it white trash: dead eyes, a narrow, ferrety face, a lanky, still body, too much hair, the whole radiating both danger and craftiness and best of all, stupidity. Red knew that men with gifts for the larger issues were seldom any good in getting the nitty-gritty work done.

“So, Duane,” he finally said, “I got reports here both good and bad on you.”

Duane Peck said nothing, but made a small clicking sound, tonguing his dentures so that they crackled and snapped. It was a nervous habit, disgusting, but no one had ever had the nerve to straight up tell him about it.

“You do like to gamble, don’t you, Duane, and Lady Luck hasn’t been holding your hand of late.”

“Don’t suppose she has,” Duane said.

“I see you got paper out in most of the cribs in eastern Oklahoma. You owe Ben Kelly twenty-one thousand. Keno, Duane? That your weakness?”

“No sir,” said Duane. “More to any card game.”

“Duane, you got a card imagination?”

Duane’s narrow eyes squinted as he contemplated this notion, failed to get a grip on it and then emptied of emotion as he dispensed with any more thought on the issue.

“I mean,” said Red, “do the numbers or the faces stick in your mind? Are the suits very vivid? Do you sense the deck charging up or closing down? A feeling that what’s left is in your odds or against them. Not counting cards, that’s only for the pros, but just good card instincts. A feeling. Most good card players have a gift for that sort of thing. They also may have a good head for numbers. Duane, what’s 153 plus 241 plus 304?”