Stephen Hunter - Black Light

The odor of electrification reached Sam when the warden, two guards and a doctor entered the chamber. It wasn’t the smell of burned meat or hair, but rather connected with Sam’s memories of Christmas, when he’d given various of his boys Lionel train sets and usually set them up and ran them for a bit, until the kids tired of them: but they had an odd, metallic odor to them, heavy and pungent at once.

Sam flashed back from Christmas: in the room the doctor took out a stethoscope and pressed its cup to Reggie’s chest, bare because the buttons had been ripped off his shirt. He stood and shook his head. The four retreated so that the executioner could hit Reggie again. It took five charges before the heart finally stopped beating.

“That boy just didn’t want to die,” said somebody.

The last official document in the file was the certificate of execution, meant to close the file out, mark it as justice delivered. Sam stared at it numbly.

Reggie, boy, why did you do it?

It was one of the great mysteries of the human heart, why one person will up and kill another. Sometimes it’s money, sometimes sex, sometimes anger, sometimes simple meanness. Sam had studied it for most of his life and didn’t know, not really. In this one, it seemed so simple: He figured Reggie must have picked the girl up after the church meeting and asked her for a kiss. She gave him the kiss. A young buck, a kiss, maybe he’d had a bit to drink at an Oklahoma Nigra crib, though no evidence as such was ever produced, and off he went. The more she fought, the more he wanted it. Finally, he did it and once he did it he was afraid she’d tell. So he drove her out Route 71 and smashed her over the head with a rock, just not noticing she was ripping at his shirt while he was smashing her. That simple. Usually when a Negro killed a Negro in those days, nobody much cared. Under usual circumstances he would have gotten away with it. It just happened to be Earl’s last case and that made it important to white people like himself, nothing else.

The remaining documents in the file were the letters crazy Mrs. Fuller had written him until her death. They arrived, sometimes three and four a week, as the woman fought so desperately for her son’s life before a brain aneurysm killed her. He had stopped reading them quite early and evidently a forgotten secretary along the line—he could never remember his secretaries’ names—had just taken to dumping them unopened in the file. Fool woman! What was the point? If she were here and he could remember her name, he’d yell at her, like he did all his secretaries, which is why he had so damned many of them over the years! Most hardly lasted a year.

Sam looked at the letters. Now they seemed strange to him. He was on his knees in his basement looking through an old file. Why? He couldn’t remember. Goddamn, it was happening again!

He looked at the file name. Parker. Parker. Oh, yes, the girl, Reggie, now it came back. Earl’s last case.

All the letters from Reggie’s mama, on their pink stationery. But why was one of them on blue stationery? Hmmmm? He plucked it from the stack, saw that it was in different handwriting. He had no memory of ever seeing it before. The date was September 5, 1957.

He turned it over and looked at the signature.

Lucille Parker.

It took him a second to realize that it was the dead girl’s mama.

Thirty-nine years late, he opened the letter at last and started to read.

S o who would have moved your father’s body?” asked Russ.

“Stupid question,” said Bob.

He stood up. They were bunked in Bob’s old trailer on land he still owned seven miles out of Blue Eye on U.S. 270, abutting Black Fork Mountain. In the years since he’d left, the souvenir hunters had taken their toll and so had the graffiti writers, but his keys still opened the padlocks. In just a little time they’d restored the place to livability, though of course there was no phone and no electricity. But a fire kept the water hot and Coleman lanterns kept the place lit at night. It was a hell of a lot better than camping and a hell of a lot cheaper than staying in the Days Inn.

It was dark outside and the drive back from the cemetery was bleak and silent. Bob wasn’t talking. He’d paid the laborers, and the doctor said he’d bill him for expenses but not for professional services. They’d stopped at a diner and eaten and now they were back.

“Why is it stupid?” Russ asked.

“Don’t they teach you nothing at that fancy university? I thought you were supposed to be smart.”

“I didn’t say I was smart,” said Russ. “I said I wanted to be a writer. Different things.”

“I guess so. You can’t ask who until you first find out if, and then how. Who don’t have no meaning until you have figured out that there was a who. Got it?”

“Well—”

“Well, yourself. Think about it. How could it have happened?”

“Could the ground have shifted in some way?”

“No. The earth doesn’t work like that. I thought you grew up in Oklahoma, not New York City.”

“I did, but not on a farm. Anyway, they could have come at night and made an exchange with another body somewhere in the cemetery and—”

Russ paused.

“You saw for yourself how hard it was to excavate a body,” said Bob. “It took three strong men the best part of a morning to uncover one. We didn’t even get to the moving. It would involve block and tackles, a hearse or some kind of cart or something. Then you need the same thing with the other body. Then you got to patch up all that dirt so nobody would notice. Couldn’t get all that done in a single night. Too much to do. So they’d have to do it in the day, under some kind of legal guise. But that wouldn’t do ’em no good neither. You’d have to have lawyers, you’d have to concoct some kind of legal justification, it would end up doing exactly what maybe it was trying to avoid, and that is draw a lot of attention to itself.”

Russ nodded.

“So what do you do?” asked Bob. “Think , son. Either come up with it or call that Princeton place and get back the half million or so your poor dad spent to get you educated.”

“He didn’t spend a cent,” said Russ.

“Oh, that’s right, I forgot your dad was such a bastard. Anyhow, think . Think!”

“I can’t—”

It came from nowhere. Hooray, humiliation momentarily avoided!

“The stones. They move the gravestones! Two men could do it in a few hours under the dark of night. No problem. Especially since the original records have long since disappeared and whenever they did it, no one was there to give a damn.”

“Not bad,” said Bob. “But you are ahead of yourself. Maybe some night in the sixties a bunch of high school kids got drunk and went gravestone tipping. And maybe they was caught and maybe some judge made ’em replant the stones. But they were kids, they didn’t give two shits. So they just stuck ’em in any which way. So what does that leave us?”

“Fucked,” said Russ.

“Yes, it does. On the other hand—well, well, lookie here.”

Russ saw headlight beams sweep across the windows and heard the car engine.

Bob opened the door.

“Howdy, Deputy,” he called. “Come on in.”

He stepped back and Duane Peck entered. Without his sunglasses, his eyes were small and dark.

“Mr. Swagger, I just wanted to tell you something. Remember I told you I’d see about getting the sheriff’s records?”

“Why sure, Duane. You want a cup of coffee? Russ, put some coffee on.”

“No, no,” said Duane, then paused quickly to look around and up and down the room. “I’m on duty, got some patrol patterns to run. I just wanted to say they moved them records over to the courthouse basement. That’s where most of the municipal records was stored. You know, it burned down in 1994.”