Stephen Hunter - Black Light

“Did that guy seem a little strange?” he asked. “I’ve been around cops all my life and that guy couldn’t keep his eyes off us.”

“You think so?” said Bob. “Seemed like a pretty nice feller to me.”

I t was opening night. A road company Cats , fresh from Little Rock and due in Tulsa in a week, had booked three days in Fort Smith, five performances only. Good seating was available on subsequent nights, but not tonight. It was SRO and the Civic Center seethed with the town’s most raffish and self-assured men—the Rich Boys Club—and their families, the manufacturing, poultry and corn elite of western Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma.

Red Bama sat with his slim beautiful second wife, Miss Arkansas Runner-up, 1986, his two new children and Nick, the youngest of his children from his first marriage. He waved, chatted, took homage calls and genuflections from others as the excitement built and curtain time approached. Then he saw his first wife, still beautiful but not so young and not so slim anymore, sitting with his only daughter on the other aisle.

“Honey,” he said to Beth, “there’s Susie. I’m going by to say hi.”

“Go on, baby,” said Beth, smiling, showing her perfect teeth. Before she was the Miss Arkansas Runner-up, she had been the 1985 Miss Sebastian County.

“You boys and girls, you don’t give your mama no hard time, now,” he warned in his humorous trashy tyrant-father voice.

He rose, said hello to Jerry Flood, regional vice-president of Hoffman-Prieur & Associates, passed between Nick Conway of Harris-Ray Furniture, Bill Donnelly, who ran the Shelter Insurance Companies, and finally made it over to Susie.

“Hi, doll,” he said, leaning to give her a kiss. She wore a diamond necklace that had cost him $52,000 in 1981. “Jeez, don’t let Beth see that. She’ll want the same damn thing. How are you, baby?” he added to his snooty oldest child Amy, who attended Smith and taught tennis at the club during the summer.

“Hi, babe,” Susie said. “That gal of yours just gets prettier every time I see her.”

“She is a peach, I agree, but she ain’t half so much fun in the sack as you were!”

“Daddy, don’t be so gross,” said Amy, making a face of disapproval.

“Amy, when you going to come down to the truck depot? We could get you a nice Peterbilt 16 and give you the Macon run for Tyson’s. You’d like them chickens shitting up the rig!”

“Daddy!” said Amy prissily.

“Red, you shouldn’t tease the girl.”

“I’ve spoiled her, like I’ve spoiled all my children, can’t I have some fun teasing her? Honey, why don’t you quit teaching that silly tennis and come down to the office. We’ll find something useful for you to do.”

“No thank you. You overmanage . That’s why everybody hates you.”

“They don’t hate me. They love me. They only think they hate me. And they fear me, which I like a lot.” “Red!”

He turned from provoking the young woman he loved so much and returned to Susie.

“Well, anyway, I think, no, I know we’re going to get Tyson’s new regional headquarters, plus I have it on good authority that GM is thinking about Greenwood for its new Blazer plant. We’d get that job too.”

“Honey, that’s the best news. And everything else, it’s going—”

“It’s fine, sweetie. Oh, it’s just—”

He felt something like a sting at his hip, jumped a tiny bit, then recognized it as his beeper’s vibrator. But it wasn’t the office beeper, it was the new one. It was the Blue Eye 800 number.

“Red?”

“Just got a message, no big deal,” he said, taking the little cellular out of his pocket. “I’ll call in a sec. Amy, honey, haven’t you had that Rolex three whole weeks? It’s gotten boring, hasn’t it? Why don’t you let Daddy buy you a new one?”

“Daddy, you suck.”

Red laughed. Good-naturedly tormenting his children was one of his deepest delights. Amy knitted her fierce, bright little face up into something like a fist, and if it had been possible, she would have smacked him with it. A wave of deep and uncompromising love poured over and through him. The way a man feels about his favorite daughter who goes her own way, takes nothing and makes good on everything. The watch was presented to her not by Red at all but by Maryvale Prep, for graduating with the highest accum in its history.

The lights began to dim.

“Okay, got to get back to family number two,” Red said cheerily to Susie.

“You’ll bring Nick home tonight?”

“He can stay with us if you want.”

“No, that’s fine. He’s got practice early. I know you won’t get him there.”

“We’ll take him for ice cream after, and bring him by.”

“Great, honey.”

“See you,” he said, as the overture came up, hot and pounding.

But Red didn’t return directly. He walked back to the rear of the house, paying no attention as the curtain opened to tumultuous applause, revealing what looked like a back alley populated by sleek, sinuous feline shapes that one after another began to shimmer to life.

Red dialed his number and listened.

“It’s Duane Peck here,” the voice came, telling him what he already knew and impressing him with nothing. “Anyhows, uh, this kid is in town, and I got him nailed and I’ll stay with him. First stop, old Sam Vincent. Is that a problem? Should I take care of that? Let me know. Also, uh—”

Someone was singing.

“—ah, he ain’t alone. Tall guy, lanky, looks you up and down real fine. I thought it might be. Yeah, it was. The son. The guy in Vietnam, called him Bob the Nailer. He’s along with the kid. Don’t know why, but he’s here too. Bob Lee Swagger, Earl’s boy.”

No emotion showed on Red’s face. He just cleared the call and, standing there in the back of the house, dialed another one.

“Billy, Red here.”

“Hey, Red, what’s on your—”

“Listen here, got me a situation. You put me together a team. Very tough guys, experienced, qualified on full automatic, professionals. I don’t want to use my boys. Got that?”

“Red, what—”

“Shut up, Billy, and listen. I want no less than ten. I want good weapons, good team discipline. I want ’em all to have felony records, preferably as drug enforcers. Get ’em from Dallas, get ’em from New Orleans, get ’em from Miami. Out-of-town boys. I want them to have records, in case we lose a few and bodies start showing up in Polk County, the newspapers will start calling it a drug war.”

“How much you want to go, Red?”

“I want the best. The best costs. You get ’em here, get ’em here fast. Good boys. Shooters. I want the best shooters. I want an A-team.”

“We’ll get working on it right now.”

“Good work, Billy,” Red said, then returned to his seat for the rest of Cats .

I t took three hours, not at all helped by the fact that Sam’s old eyes weren’t as good as they once were and that he had to stop twice to go to the bathroom. Then he got irritable and hungry and they bought him some pancakes at the Waldron exit Denny’s. But there were no more episodes of strangeness, where Sam forgot who they were or who he was.

Then, once, Sam said, “Here, here, I think it’s here!”

“It can’t be here,” Russ, the navigator, exclaimed. “We just passed 23 and the papers say it was south of 23. We’re heading north toward Fort Smith. We must have gone too far!”