Stephen Hunter - Black Light

Puzzled, he flew up the steps. Bob Lee sat in his room, trying to put together a Revell model airplane. It was a Bell P-39 Airacobra, very dangerous-looking, but Earl knew the pilots hated it and that it never flew after 1943. Bob Lee, still wearing that damned coonskin cap and that Crockett T-shirt, was bent earnestly into the effort, trying with clumsy boyish fingers to cement the clear plastic cockpit bubble to the cockpit frame, a tricky operation because too much cement could smear the transparency of the ersatz glass, ruining the entire illusion of reality. Usually, Earl did this job himself, though the boy glued the bigger pieces together and was getting better and better at it. Earl reached to help the boy, but again his fingers were weightless; they touched nothing.

Bob Lee, he called. Bob Lee, Bob Lee, Bob Lee, but Bob Lee didn’t hear him and struggled with the cockpit and somehow got it mounted. Earl watched as his boy’s face knitted in disappointment and fury, and he beat a single tear away. But Earl knew too the model was ruined. He ached now to take the boy into his arms, and say, now, that’s all right, maybe you didn’t do so good this time, but there’ll be other times. But when he reached he touched nothing.

7. Stop vomiting blood.

The blood was everywhere. What was happening? It spread across his chest and poured from his absolute center. When had this happened? It must have occurred in that split second when Earl went out of his body. It occurred to him that he had been shot and he looked out into the goddamned darkness and heard only the hooting of the owls and the stirring of other animals. It was so dark.

He had the consciousness of it all slipping away. He thought of a drain, of being whirled down a drain. His mind grew logy and stupid. He yearned to see his son again and his wife and his father; he yearned but it did no good.

R ed was at an executive meeting for Redline Trucking when the call came, and he was almost happy, because Thewell Blackwell II, of Blackwell, Collins, Bisbee, over from Little Rock, was halfway through his briefing on potential complications if Interstate Commerce Regulatory Bill H.355 got out of the House Interstate Commerce Committee without serious reconfiguration, namely that the requirement for weight inspections at interstate borders be open on weekends as well as during the week, which had a long-term downsizing application in terms of routes serviced for out-of-state clients. It was all very interesting but Thewell was hardly the world’s most commanding speaker arid somewhere in paragraph 13, subsection II, subpoint C, Red began trying to decide whether he should go to a No. 8 shot for the long floater at Cherokee Ridge, where next year’s nationals were slated.

The buzz against his hip shook him from his reverie. He leaned over to Brad Pauley, his vice-president for legal affairs and liaison with Blackwell, Collins, Bisbee, and whispered, “Be back in a sec.”

Brad nodded, and Red smiled tightly and slipped out of the meeting, walking through the quiet hush of the suite that everyone assumed was the hub of his empire. He knew the name of everyone and everyone knew his name and as he moved toward the executive washroom just outside his fabulous corner office, he nodded and exchanged pleasantries with his employees.

But at last he was alone and punched in the number on his folder.

“Uh, sir, uh, I don’t know what this means,” the dull voice of Duane Peck, spy and idiot, reported, “but, um, I found out early this morning that Bob and that kid done reapplied for a Motion of Exhumation. I got to the cemetery and found out that they removed the body they wanted and it went to Devilin mortuary. They had that doctor come on down from Fayetteville to look at it. Don’t know what he told them, but he told them something. I don’t rightly know where they went. I drove by Bob’s place just a few minutes ago, but it was deserted, though the truck was there. Maybe they was out in the woods out back or something. So anyway: that’s what it is. I’ll spin on by the old man’s place later and see what’s going on.”

Red didn’t curse or stomp or do anything demonstrative: he was too disciplined and professional for such exhibitionism. But now he knew he had a serious problem and it must be dealt with swiftly, or the time would pass when it could be dealt with at all.

His first call was back to Duane.

“Yes sir?”

“Where are you?”

“Uh, I’se headed back to town.”

“All right. I want you to back off from Swagger and the boy. You’ll have no more business with them, for now.”

“Yes sir,” said Duane.

“Someone else will deal with them. Now, you concentrate on the old man. I have to know what he’s up to. You find that out, do you understand? But you have to do it easily; you can’t carry on like a goddamn hog with a corncob up its ass.”

“Yes sir,” said Duane. “I’ll be gittin’ right on it.”

Red disconnected. He didn’t like what came next. This business was tricky and always involved the immutable law of unintended consequences but thank God he’d thought ahead and had good people in place and it could be done neatly and professionally, with maximized chances of success. He thought his father would be proud, for this was an old Ray Bama trick: Avoid violence, avoid force, always negotiate. But when violence is unavoidable, strike fast, unexpectedly and with total commitment and willpower.

He dialed a number. A man answered.

“Yeah?”

“Do you know who this is?”

“Yes sir.” The voice had a familiar Spanish accent to it, Cuban probably. “The team is ready?”

“The guys are all in. It’s a good team. Steady guys. Been around. Solid, tough, know their stuff. Some are—”

“I don’t want names or details. But it has to be done. You do it. I’ll get you the intelligence, the routes, and you clear everything through this number. When you’re ready to move, you let me know. I’ll want a look at the plan, I’ll want on-site reports. No slipups. You’re being paid too much, all of you, for slipups.”

“There won’t be no slipups,” the man said.

The man on the other end of the phone, in a farmhouse just outside Greenwood in far Sebastian County, let the dial tone come up and then he consulted a card and began to dial pager numbers.

Nine pagers rang. Two, one right after another, went off at the Blood, Sweat and Tears Gymnasium on Griffin Park Road in Fort Smith, where two immense men with necks the size of lampshades were hoisting what appeared to be tons of dead weight at separate Nautilus stations. Each was olive in skin tone, with glistening black hair and dark, deep, watchful eyes, identical even to the tattoos that festooned their gigantic arms, though one had a crescent of puckered, bruise-purple scar tissue that ran halfway around his neck, evidence of some grotesque encounter about which it would probably be better not to ask. They had bodies of truly immense mass, not the beautifully proportioned, narcissistic sculptured flesh of bodybuilders, but the huge, densely muscled bodies of men who needed strength professionally, like interior linemen or New Orleans mob drug enforcers and hit men.

Another pager rang in the back room of a crib just across the state line in Sequoyah County, Oklahoma, where a sleek black man was enjoying an act of oral sex being committed on him by a blond-haired woman of about thirty. He knew that she was really a man, but he didn’t care; a mouth was a mouth.

Another pager buzzed on the firing line at On Target Indoor Firearms range over in Van Buren, as its owner stood with a customized Para-Ordnance P-16 in .40 S&W, calm and steady as a rock, blowing an ever-widening tattery hole in the head of a B-27 silhouette hanging from a pulley-mounted wire twenty-five yards out. He finished the sixteen-round clip, pulled in the target and examined the orifice he’d opened. Then he smiled, returned the gun to its case and checked out. In the parking lot, he made a show of putting the case in the trunk, but adeptly slid the .40 into an Alessi inside-the-pants holster, after, of course, inserting a fresh sixteen-round clip and cocking and locking.