Stephen Hunter - Black Light

It didn’t take a long time at the mortuary.

Bob and Russ waited outside, while a funeral procession formed up in one of the viewing rooms and people filed out to cars. The hearse that took Earl to the mortuary took some other poor joker back to the boneyard a half an hour later.

“I feel soaked in death,” said Russ.

Presently the doctor came out. They went over to a little shady remembrance garden tastefully sculpted into the earth near the funeral home. Beautiful day late in the afternoon: the sun was just setting.

“I can put this in writing for you, but it’ll take a day,” he said, lighting a cigarette.

“Writing’s not necessary. The boy’ll take notes.”

“Fine. First of all, then, I found the physical remains of a man in his midforties in a state of some advanced decomposition. What that means is that little tissue remains, which in turn means that some pathological determinations are impossible. Bullet tracks, for example. We can’t tell which directions the bullets went through the body and what damage they did to soft-tissue elements like organs and the central nervous or respiratory system.”

“Damn!” said Bob.

Speak to me, Daddy , he thought. This is your only chance .

“But,” the doctor continued, “the skeletal remains were in good shape and the marks of the wounds were recorded there.”

“Yes,” said Bob. “Go on.”

“I initially noticed two wounds. The first was on the leftside ulna, the outermost bone of the forearm, just down from the thickness of bone we call the olecranon, an inch or so beneath the elbow. I could tell from impact beveling that a bullet struck and shattered that bone; there was a traumatic ovoid indentation visible on some of the fracture segments. This is characteristic of a high-velocity solid-point bullet delivered at close range.”

“Thirty-eight Super.”

“A jacketed .38 Super would get the job done nicely, yes. The bones were in such fragmented disarray that, pending further lengthy examination, I couldn’t rearrange them to get a caliber reading on the damage.”

“Not necessary,” said Bob.

“The second wound resembled the first. The same shattered bone, the same fragment presence, the same ovoid groove in some of the pieces, again characteristic of a smaller-caliber, high-speed bullet. This was observed at the frontal curve of the third rib of the left-hand side of the cadaver.”

Bob mulled this over.

“Could he move, hit like that?”

“If he wanted to.”

“Both wounds were survivable?” he finally asked.

“Well, that’s a subjective judgment, dependent upon the subject’s viability. Given that your father was in extremely robust health, that he’d been hit before and understood that getting hit didn’t automatically equate to death, and given that he stanched his blood flow and that help arrived within a few hours, and given that there were no serious soft-tissue wounds not registered in the skeletal system, then yes, my judgment is that those two wounds were survivable. But there was a third wound.”

“Go on,” Bob said.

“I missed it at first,” said the doctor. “Some tissue remains were present and the condition of the bones was not pristine. Of course I’m not in my lab working under the best conditions.”

“But you found something?”

“Yes, finally, I did. In the sternum, a frontal plate of bone that shields the heart and anchors the ribs. There’s a very neat round hole, or almost round. Ovoid actually, suggestive of a downward angle, that is, a high to low shooting trajectory. There’s impact beveling suggestive of an entry wound. If you extrapolate from the placement of the penetration of the sternum on that angle, you get a real solid heart shot. The bullet path leads straight into the right ventricle where the pulmonary artery pulls the deoxygenated blood in. That artery and the ventricle would have been instantaneously destroyed. Brain death would have followed in, say, ten to twelve seconds.”

“So he couldn’t have been shot in the heart and walked three hundred feet back to where he was found?”

“He couldn’t have moved a step. I doubt he was conscious much more than three seconds after impact.”

Bob nodded and turned to Russ.

“So how’s goddamn Jimmy Pye hit him a hundred yards out in the corn and he walks all the way back to the car?”

Russ just looked at him.

“You measured the hole, I take it,” Bob asked the doctor.

“Yes, I did.”

“I’m guessing it wasn’t .357 or .429, right? It was, what, .311, .312 inches?”

“Good. Actually, .3115.”

“As I understand it, the impact beveling always widens the diameter by a couple of thousandths of an inch?” “Typically,” said the doctor.

“So the bullet that killed my father, it was, say, .308 in diameter? That would make it a .30-caliber rifle bullet?”

“That’s what every indicator says,” the doctor replied.

“I don’t get it,” said Russ. “What’s all this with the numbers?”

“It tells me who killed my father,” Bob said, turning to look at him. “It sure as hell wasn’t no Jimmy Pye.”

“Who killed your father?” asked Russ.

“A sniper,” said Bob.

T he snake rattled again in the corn. The arm hurt. The side had gone to sleep. The legs ached.

Earl, sitting sideways in the front seat of his cruiser, straightened his legs out before him. He was all right. He would make it. A little smile came to him.

If that goddamn snake don’t bite me, I made it again .

His radio crackled.

“Car One Four, this is Blue Eye Sheriff’s Department, Earl, you hang on, goddammit, we are inbound and closing fast and I have an ambulance a minute or so behind. You hang on, son, we are almost home.”

There was always that moment in the islands when it finally occurred to you that you had somehow made it again. It was like a little window opening, and a gust of sweet air floating through the room, and you experienced the simple physical pleasure in having escaped extinction. Other things would come later: the guilt you always felt when you thought of the good men lost forever, the endless dream replays where the bullets that missed you hit you or your own weapon jammed or ran dry. But for now it was okay: it was something God gave to infantrymen, just a moment’s worth of bliss between the total stress of battle and the dark anguish of survivor’s guilt. You just got one moment: Hey. I made it.

Earl thought of the things he had to do. He made a list.

1. Take Bob Lee to that football game. The boy had never been. He himself hadn’t been since 1951, on a visit to Chicago, when he’d seen the Bears play the Rams. It was a lopsided game. He wanted Bob Lee to see a good game.

2. Buy a Remington rifle, Model 740A, the new autoloader, in .30-06. He’d read about it in Field & Stream . Said they were building them even more accurate than the Winchester Model 70s, and you had that second and third shot automatically, without a recock.

3. Kiss his wife. Tell her how much he liked her strawberry pie. Buy her a present. The woman needed a present. Hell, buy her two presents.

4. Face it out with Edie. It had to be dealt with. Do it, put your house in order, clean up your mess.

5. See Sam Vincent. A policeman had to have a will. Sam could recommend a lawyer. Get a will, figure it all out.

6.

But at 6 an odd thing occurred. It seemed like time stopped for a second and Earl’s soul flew out of his body. He imagined himself floating through space. He watched from above as the black Arkansas woods and hills flew by. In the distance, beyond Board Camp, he saw a well-lit little house off by itself. He descended and flew through the window. His wife, June, was there. She was doing something in the kitchen. She was dutiful, erect, a little irritable, in an apron, looking tired as usual, and not saying much. He floated up to her and touched her cheek but his finger had no substance and sank through her. He stroked at her harder, but could make no contact.