Stephen Hunter - Black Light

Earl listened. Nothing. He edged forward farther.

“Jimmy , come on! I don’t want to have to hurt you.”

Nothing. Then he heard the click of a pistol safety snicking off.

“I got you beat, Earl.”

Earl straightened and turned, the gun at his side.

Jimmy was twenty feet behind him, the Colt automatic out and pointed straight at him.

“I win, Earl.”

“Jimmy, for God’s sake. Put it down. It’s all over.”

“It is all over.”

“Jimmy, it ain’t worth it.”

“Earl, put the gun down and I’ll let you live.”

“I cain’t do that, Jimmy. You know that. This is the end of the line. Another second or two and I can’t cut you no more slack.”

“Earl, I don’t hate you. But it ain’t my fault.”

He pulled the trigger.

The gun flashed and bucked and smoke swirled about.

Earl stood straight as a goddamn rail.

“You missed, Jimmy. It’s too far, you ain’t a good enough shot. Son, you’re overmatched. Put it dow—”

Jimmy fired, sure he’d hit, but astonished at how fast the older man was as he dropped to one knee, the gun rising in a blur. He wasn’t just fast, he was some other kind of fast, his arm a whip, a smear, a flash, and the two shots were almost one, so swiftly did they come.

The next thing he saw was Earl over him in a fog.

“Earl?” he said.

“Yes, Jimmy.”

“Earl, I cain’t see nothing. It hurts.” Something with his head. It was like in a vise or among broken boxes or pieces of glass or something. Fog everywhere. Never seen nothing like it.

“It’s all right, Jimmy. It’s all going to be all right.”

Jimmy breathed the last time and went still. There was no death rattle, final gurgle or twitch, as there sometimes was. It was as if his soul simply departed, leaving only a cask behind.

Earl could see that one shot had torn through his left eye and exited the side of his beautiful head, destroying it. The second had hit him just above the heart. He lay as calm as a young king, soaking in his own blood, utterly motionless, one eye beautiful and blue with its perfect curl of blond lash, the other eye shattered pulp, leaking black jagged streaks into the earth.

Earl looked away and found the strength to rise. He stood on groggy legs, dizzy and unsure. With an act of will, he took a step and then another, and walked back to the car, feeling as old as the mountains. God, he felt so awful. No man should have to kill a boy he’d known for twenty years.

Why hadn’t Jimmy told him what was going on?

What was going on? What got into Jimmy?

I will by God find out.

His arm was still bleeding. It only hurt like the goddamned devil himself was beating away on it. His left side was completely numb and he was sopped with his own blood. He realized he would die if help didn’t get there soon enough.

It all came down to the radio with the broken aerial.

He bent over, retrieved the mike and pushed the send button.

“Any cars, any cars, goddammit, trooper down, ten-thirty-three, please respond, please respond.”

Silence.

He looked up into the sky. Stars, piles of them, against the dark. He felt so goddamned alone. He tried again.

“Any cars, any cars, this is Car One Four, is anybody out there, trooper down, ten-thirty-three, ten-thirty-three, Jesus Christ, I am losing blood.”

So. On a road in a cornfield, bleeding out. After so many chances in the islands. Bleeding out in a cornfield.

“Any police cars, any tow trucks, any band jumpers, please help, trooper down, ten-thirty-three, please acknowledge.”

Nothing.

It ends. It’s over. It’s finished. I didn’t make it. He closed his eyes. His son’s face floated before him, and he felt himself reaching out, but it vanished.

“Ah, Trooper One Four, this is a commercial aviation flight, Delta One Niner Zero up here at twenty-seven five and vectored southbound into New Orleans. I’m hopping the frequencies and I happened to pick up your signal, son, where the hell are you?”

“Delta, Delta, I am eleven miles south of Waldron, Arkansas, just off Route 71 in a cornfield, one hundred yards off the highway. I have been hit twice and I am losing blood.”

“You hang on, son, I am going to shift frequencies and put the squawk onto the Little Rock emergency frequency and the boys on the ground will ASAP it to your local authorities and you will get assistance and if they can’t make it, I will set this buggy down on the goddamn highway and pick you up myself, Trooper.”

“Thank you, Delta One Niner Zero, ain’t you a Good Samaritan?”

“And ain’t you a tub o’ guts, Trooper? Good luck, son.” He signed off.

Earl set the radio mike down and sat in the dark. The world seemed suddenly full of possibility.

Then he heard the sound of death; it chilled him. It was the dry, raspy, spastic crackle that signified the presence of a rattlesnake.

Great, he thought; that’s all I need.

J udge Myers was going to beat him. This was very frustrating for Red because Judge Myers never beat him. Nobody ever beat him, goddammit.

Red was the best sporting clays shooter in West Arkansas, and maybe the whole state; he’d placed high in several national tournaments, including the Big Pig in Maryland, the NSCAs in San Antonio, the Seminole Cup Challenge in Orlando. He had a gift for the game, a natural grace with the shotgun and a kind of geometry-instinctive mind—his arithmetic gift again, perhaps—that let him solve complex problems of deflection with an almost eerie confidence.

But even the good shooters have the odd off day, when the birds come from the trap not as they should but by freakish chance too close, too far, or caught and toyed with in a burst of random wind, lifted oddly or squashed oddly, faster, slower; when, for whatever reason, the eye isn’t seeing with quite the clarity it normally does, or the brain isn’t reading and solving with quite the same power, the hands are slow, the gun never gets mounted right: so many little things that begin to erode at whatever it is that makes you hit. So it was today with Red.

The judge, who had never broken 45, was standing at 45 now on the last station. Red was standing at 43. If he ran five, the best he could do would be to top out at 48, so the judge could beat him with a five or even a pussy four and the man was so confident and feeling so full of himself, the five looked possible, the four positive. “This isn’t my day,” said Red.

No, it wasn’t. He hated the last station, not the two oblique outgoers that came low off the trap, easy for a shooter at his level, but his worst damned shot, a far teal, straight up and way out, first a single then a goddamned simo. He should have it changed; after all, he owned the course.

The judge stepped into the cage. Before them the beauty of the state’s wildness displayed itself, for the course was a good one, with shots hard enough to keep it interesting. The trap was to the left; the first two outgoers sailed low and dropped as they fell into a valley amid dogwoods, crossed a pond and disappeared in the vegetation. The teal were the bitches. They looked like dots, popped straight up from a remote on the other side of the pond, bare against the sky only momentarily, so dark and far you couldn’t even see their orangeness. You wanted to catch them as they paused in equipoise at the cusp of their rise; if instead you tried to take them going down, you’d run out of shot before you could pull the trigger.

“I’m feeling strong today, Red,” said Judge Myers, of the Fort Smith Myerses, who was also chairman of the Sebastian County Party and a close personal friend and campaign fund-raiser of and for Senator Hollis Etheridge, and if Hollis’s campaign ever got into gear, the judge would be headed for a Big Job in Washington, all of which pleased Red no end.