Stephen Hunter - Black Light

“Sure,” said Bob.

“And I assume all the county paperwork is in order? Sam said he’d take care of it.”

“Yes sir,” said Bob. “Here, you want to look?”

“Yes, I do. The state is very particular what can and cannot be done with remains. It has more to do with the funeral industry lobby than anything. For example, the remains must be transported via hearse, you’re aware of that?”

“Sam told us. I called and set one up. It should be here shortly.”

The doctor took the papers and made a quick appraisal of them. They seemed to satisfy him.

“All right, everything’s in order. I suppose you’ll want to go to the mortuary with me?”

“Yes sir. He was my father.”

“Look, let me be frank with you. I know you’re an experienced man, been in combat.”

“Some,” said Bob.

“So you’ve seen what high explosives and machine-gun fire can do to bodies?”

“Yes sir.”

“Well, there’s nothing that you’ve seen that can prepare you for the effects of time upon a cadaver. Forty years after the fact, what comes out of the ground is unrecognizable. That’s why it’s fine for you to come along, but I want you nowhere near the actual work. I can’t let what his body has become represent what your father is to you. When I do these private jobs, that’s my rule. It’s my neck of the woods. You let me do the navigating.”

“Sure, Doctor,” said Bob.

“Okay, we’re all set.”

“Mr. Swagger?”

It was Mr. Coggins, who stood by the grave, gleaming with sweat. He was wiping his forehead with a red bandanna.

“Mr. Swagger, we’re ready. He was a long way down.” The doctor went to the edge of the grave and looked into it.

“Mr. Coggins, you’ll rig the block and tackle next?” he asked.

“Yes sir,” said Coggins.

Bob and Russ went to look into the grave. The men had done an excellent job in the excavation; the grave’s walls were hard and straight and black, the dirt heaped in perfect mountains. Russ looked down, unnerved. But it was only a long wooden box, caked with mud, completely exposed, five long feet down.

The doctor turned to them.

“A cedar coffin? That’s very interesting. I’m going to have to ask you to leave. I have to check something out. Mr. Coggins, you help me down.”

The two young black men, gleaming with sweat as well, helped the doctor into the grave. There was just enough room for him at one end. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a surgical mask, which he donned. He asked the black men to leave the hole too.

Bob and Russ wandered away. They heard the sound of wood being pried.

“Mr. Swagger,” called Dr. Phillips.

“Yes sir.”

“I’m afraid I have bad news for you.”

Bob and Russ looked at each other.

“Yes sir?” said Bob.

“This man was killed by gunshot wound, I can see it clearly in the remains. But from what I can tell from the condition, it happened in around 1865.”

“Damn!” said Duane Peck. “Don’t that beat all?”

T he old man was on a goddamned rampage. Where the hell was it?

Sam had torn his office apart in the morning and now he was at his home, tearing it apart.

Goddamned sonofabitching bastards had done it again on him!

They’d hidden something. They were doing it more and more these days. They’d sneak in, late, while he slept, and hide things, steal things, move things. They’d rearrange his drawers, so that one day his socks would be in the third one and the next in the top one. Sometimes his hairbrush and razor were on the left side of the sink and sometimes on the right.

The fury was like smoke, hot and bright, and it seemed to fill his veins so that a ropy blue Y stood out on his forehead and his temple throbbed strangely.

The other day they hid his pipe. His pipe, his meerschaum, picked up in Germany after the war, he’d smoked it every night for close to fifty years and it was gone. It had vanished. They changed the names of his grandchildren on him and they even mixed up two of his surviving daughters.

They moved his car when he drove to the store. They changed the stoplight on him as he accelerated through an intersection and then they honked or yelled rudely to him. Sometimes they confused him as to what side of the road he was supposed to drive on.

It was enough to make a man seriously angry, but this one, their last prank, was the worst.

For so long he had been such a methodical man. He was the kind of American who believed not in law and order but that order was law. Thus he carefully cataloged or recorded his materials, he took infinitely detailed notes, he went over testimony forward and backwards, he mastered evidence forward and backwards and he never, ever asked a question twice or to which he did not know the answer.

He had outargued them all, until these new invisible devils had come gunning for him.

But he wouldn’t let them win, or if, by chance, they won, if someone finally beat him, by God they’d know they’d been in a fight.

He looked around the carnage of his basement. Someone had literally dumped his files out of their cardboard boxes onto the floor in a frenzy. Who would do such a thing? Then he remembered: he had done such a thing. Just a few minutes ago.

What was I looking for?

Yes: a copy of the report to the coroner he had put together in 1955 on a wrongful death hearing in the case of Earl Swagger. He knew he had it. He had to have it. It was in here somewhere. But where?

The box marked 1955 was empty and he’d emptied 1953 to 1957 as well, in the thought that maybe sometime when he left office and was transferring these boxes to his home, he or one of his secretaries—he’d buried more secretaries than he could even remember—had misfiled it.

Or maybe he didn’t even have a copy. It was a report on an investigation, but it didn’t lead to a prosecution or a decision not to prosecute, but only to a dead end in the Coroner’s Office, so possibly even back then he didn’t file it with his regular case files but in some other file, some annex or something.

It wasn’t like he couldn’t remember now. It wasn’t his memory that was going. No sir, not him. It was instead a sense of fog drifting through his mind. The memory was still there. It was a vision problem: he still had all his books organized just so in the library of his mind, but for some reason he had trouble reading the names on the spines and he couldn’t get them out without groping. It made him furious!

He hated the idea of going to that smug kid Rusty or whatever his goddamned name was and saying, “You know, I can’t find that document. I told you I could, but I can’t. I must have misremembered.”

Rusty would look at him as a few of his grandchildren did: their eyes would behold a relic, a living fossil, something that belonged behind glass in a museum.

Well, goddamn him anyway! Sam felt an eruption of anger so intense it was physical; his knotty old hand formed into a fist and he imagined smashing Rusty or whatever his name was in the mouth. That would satisfy him so.

He bent, but discovered his back too stiff to allow him to stay in such a position. So he knelt, and began to scrape the files up, to try and get them into some semblance of order.

A name leaped out at him.

It was like a musical tone or something, soft and vague but oddly familiar. What was it? What did it connect with? What could it mean?

Nothing. He had it, it tantalized him, then it was gone.

Goddamn them, they were doing it to him again!

He got the files together and saw from the dates they were all 1955s, and so again he slipped through them one more time and by God no, no Earl Swagger anywhere. Where did it go? Where had it—