Stephen Hunter - Black Light

Then the beeper in his bathrobe pocket began to vibrate. Red checked the number and saw that it wasn’t goddamned Duane Peck at all but instead the number of Jorge de la Rivera’s phone. Quickly he dialed.

“So?”

“Sir, ain’t got nothing. Goddamn been up, down and around this place. Left a man at his trailer, just picked him up, ain’t seen nothing all day. Maybe they gone.”

Red thought a bit.

“You want us to book time in a hotel, sir?”

“No, no, that would look odd, ten men in three cars and a truck pulling into a Holiday Inn all at once. No, head back up here, get back to the farmhouse. What, by the parkway that’s only an hour.”

“Yes sir. We hunt again tomorrow?”

“Ah, let’s wait on that. Get ’em some good sleep. No fucking around. When we need ’em, we’ll need ’em fresh and fast.”

“Yes sir.”

Red waited a second, then called Duane Peck’s number.

“Hello? Who is …”

“Who do you think this is?”

“Yes sir.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m outside the old man’s house, just like you said. He did the craziest things today. I swear, this old man’s lost it. He—”

“Make a report after I’m off the phone. Listen, Duane, tomorrow, first thing, you go in uniform to every motel, every restaurant, every gas station, every camp store there around Blue Eye and you see if anyone’s seen Swagger and the boy. They’ve disappeared. We have to find them, fast.”

“Yes sir. Instead of the old man?”

“For now, yes. Then you call me. You get something, you call me immediately, you understand?”

“Yes sir.”

Red hung up, finished the bourbon and went to bed in a foul mood.

S am woke in a fury, but he couldn’t remember about what.

His anger, unmoored, floated about blackly in his mind, looking for a target.

“Mabel!” he screamed. “Where’s my goddamned coffee?”

Then he remembered that Mabel had been his secretary in 1967, for seven months, before she quit and went off to have a nice, quiet nervous breakdown. He thought she’d died sometime in the eighties, but he wasn’t sure.

Mabel’s untimely death did, however, mean one thing: no coffee. So he got up, struggled to find his glasses—nope, they hadn’t taken them yet—and straggled through the house until he found the kitchen. Somehow he got some coffee going; some things a man never forgets. The coffee perking, he bumbled back to his room, got himself showered and dressed, though he had to wear a white sock and a blue sock, and headed back for the coffee.

Fortunately, the mail had come. Unfortunately, it was from 1957. He struggled to put two and two together for a while, unable to comprehend why this letter was lying out here on the dining room table, blue, in neat, precise womanly penmanship. He looked at the signature. Lucille Parker. Who the hell was Lucille Parker?

Then, of course, he had it: it blasted into his mind.

“Goddamn woman!” he bellowed. “Goddamned woman!”

He grabbed his car keys, there on the vestibule right next to his meerschaum pipe and his sunglasses and—

His meerschaum pipe!

Where the hell did that come from?

Anyhow, he grabbed it and raced out to his Cadillac in the garage. He fired her up and backed out. Evidently, his neighbors had mischievously placed their garbage cans in his driveway, for there came a clatter and he looked up in his rearview mirror to see them rolling in the street, spewing their contents everywhere. Why would they do such a stupid thing?

He drove toward Niggertown.

West Blue Eye, it was now called. You couldn’t say nigger anymore. You couldn’t even say Nigra. It wasn’t allowed.

The streets seemed to fill. People were staring at him and he wasn’t sure why. He felt like the Queen of the May on some float in a parade. Horns were honking, children screaming. What the hell was going on?

Suddenly a patrol car, its siren blaring, its flasher pulsing, shot by him, in pursuit of some miscreant. But oddly, the car forced him to the side of the road.

A tall, lanky, pale-eyed man got out, spat a wad on the ground and approached.

“What’s the story, Mr. Sam?”

“Who the hell are you?” Sam wanted to know. He read the plaque on the pocket: PECK, it said.

“Duane Peck, Mr. Sam. You know me as well as you know your own name.”

“I don’t know no such goddamned thing. What the hell do you want?”

“Mr. Sam, that was a traffic light you went through back there and you almost hit two cars, and some people had to run to get out of the way. You must have been doing sixty.”

“I’m in a hurry, goddammit. What is this all about?”

“Well, sir, I’m just a little worried about your safety and the safety of the public.”

“You gonna give me a ticket?”

“No sir, no need. If you tell me where you’re going, I’d be happy to follow you, make sure you keep your speed down and all. Or maybe you’d best let me drive you. That’s all.”

“Why, I never heard of such a thing. Peck, get out of my goddamned way or I’ll call the sheriff and you’ll spend the rest of your life on night shift. Do you know who I am?”

“Everybody knows who you are, Mr. Sam. Sir, I guess you can go on now, but I am going to follow you, so there ain’t no problems, all right? You make sure you obey them traffic lights, do you hear?”

Sam muttered something black but Peck had already headed back to his car. Arrogant sumbitch! Sam remembered when all deputies treated him like a Caesar.

Peck finally pulled away and Sam started up again. He was very careful not to drive fast and to obey all the traffic signs. No one honked at him, although he did honk at one goddamned lady who took her goddamned time getting across the street with her baby. What did she think, she had the entire right of way for as long as she wanted?

He rolled over the tracks and down the dusty streets of Nig—… of west Blue Eye. These people still lived like Bantus. Why didn’t they clean up? They wanted to be full citizens, they could at least keep their grass trimmed. No excuse for it, none at all.

But in his anger he also felt sadness: they were so sad. Who would take care of them? Who would direct them? Why did they always misbehave? Couldn’t they see that wasn’t the way. He shook his head.

He passed the church and the shell of mansion that had once housed Fuller’s Funeral Parlor but was now a ruin, and in time he came to the house of the address, which was still trim and nice and had flowers on the trellis. He parked in the street and two little Negro children came up and watched him with those big eyes they had.

“Go on, shoo, get out of here!” he waved them aside, and stepped up the wooden steps to the porch.

He banged hard on the door.

A woman in her forties answered, looked at him quizzically.

“Did you write this?” he demanded.

She took it and looked at it.

“Sir, I was five years old when this was written. It’s from Mrs. Parker.”

“Let me talk to her.”

“Sir, she does not live here. Who are you?”

“You don’t know me? Everybody knows me. I’m Sam Vincent, the county prosecutor.”

“No sir, I do not know you.”

“You must be new in town.”

“I have lived here for five years.”

“Damn! I can’t believe you don’t know me.”

The woman shook her head, and a certain expression came across her eyes. He knew the thoughts that ran through her head began with the words “White folks” and went on to chronicle something that she found utterly unknowable about Caucasians. But he didn’t care.

“Well, where is she?”