Stephen Hunter - Black Light

“Mr. Sam, you the smartest man in this county. You smarter even than old Ray Bama or Harry Etheridge and his son, you smarter than Mr. Earl. You got his boy, Bob Lee, off when the whole U.S. govmint say he was a killer. You got Jed Posey to spend his black evil days in prison. Now you a old man and I a old woman. We both be gone soon. Cain’t you please just look at that case again? Just so’s when you goes you knows you done your job as hard at the end as you done it through the middle.”

“Well—”

He thought about it. His was a life of certitude. He was an absolute believer. He hated revisionism, hindsight, detached examination, the whole spirit of equivocation and ironic ambivalence which had become the American style in the nineties. He hated it. Goddamn Nigra woman wanted him to become what he hated.

But … there was time. She was right. It was not technically impossible. Why anyone would do such a thing was beyond his imagining, but it was, in the technical sense, by the laws of the physical world, possible. And the bit about the black man being the one who did it—that was so interesting.

As pure mystery, as pure problem of the intellect, it goaded him powerfully.

“My mind ain’t what it once was. It gits foggy. It clouds up with anger. I can’t find my socks. Seems like people hide things on me. But if I git another clear day like today, I will look at the case records again, or what of them remain. I will look, but don’t you expect nothing. I can’t have you expecting nothing, Mrs. Parker.”

“God bless you, sir.”

“Now, don’t call me sir. Call me Sam. Everybody else does.”

I t was the football dream, a late variant. Lamar Pye and Russ’s father, Bud, were at his football game. It was 1981 and Russ was eight; he was not a very good football player. In fact he’d only played that one year.

Lamar said, “I think that damn boy’s got too much gal in him.”

“He ain’t no athlete, that’s for sure,” agreed Bud. “You should see his younger brother. That little sucker’s a studpuppy. You can’t hardly git him to quit.”

“I like that in a man and in a boy. When they don’t quit. Old Russ here,” Lamar explained, “not only do he got too much quit, he don’t even got no start.”

The two old boys laughed raucously on the sideline, and it seemed that everybody there was staring at poor little Russ, waiting for him to screw up.

It didn’t take long. Because he was too small to play the line and not fast enough to play the backfield, he’d been stuck at a position called linebacker. It involved a lot of football knowledge for which he just had no gift and the coaches were always yelling at him for being out of place or slow to react. He was never, ever comfortable. When he charged the line, inevitably a pass zinged to the exact place he’d just abandoned; when he stayed put against a pass, someone blasted through the line and veered through the hole he was supposed to plug. It was a terrible season and he yearned to quit because he wasn’t born with that cool-headed instinct his younger brother possessed in spades, but was, in truth, a spaz.

“Come on, Russ, stop ’em,” yelled his dad.

“Come on, Russ, you can do it,” yelled big old Lamar, ponytailed, charm, charisma, big white teeth, big sickle in his hands which he was sharpening with an Arkansas stone, running it with goose-pimply grinding sounds up and down the wickedly curving blade.

Russ was so intent on them that he missed the start of the play and when he finally snapped to—the coaches were yelling his name—it seemed that a big black kid on the other team had juked to the left then broken outside and was already beyond the line of scrimmage with no one near him but poor Russ in his weak-side linebacker’s slot.

Willing himself to run, Russ found a surprisingly good angle on the running back and zoomed toward him. But as he approached he saw how big the boy was, how fierce with energy and determination, how his legs beat like pistons against the ground, and in some way Russ’s ardor was dampened. Though everyone was yelling “Hit him low” he hit him high. Briefly, they grappled and Russ had the sense of bright lights, stars maybe, the wind rustling and then blankness.

When he blinked he was on the ground, his face mask having grown a fungus of turf, his whole body constricted in pain and as he turned, he could see through the ache behind his eyes the runner continue his scamper down the sidelines, borne by cheers from the crowd, until he crossed the goal line to be festooned with garlands and ribbons.

He tried to get up but Dad and Lamar stood over him.

“Russ, hit him low ,” his dad said with contempt.

Lamar lifted the sickle. Its blade picked up a movielike highlight from the sun. He was Jason, Freddy Krueger, the guy in Halloween all combined into one. He laughed loudly.

“Sorry, boy,” he said, “but you shoulda listened to your daddy. Nut-cuttin’ time!”

Whoooshhhh! The blade descended.

Russ awoke in a cheesy hotel room in Oklahoma City, his mind filled with shards of glass, pieces of gravel and infinite regrets. Someone was hacking at him, but no, it was the door, being pounded.

“Russ, come on,” someone was yelling, “you’re late again, goddammit. It’s time to go.”

Oh. It was his other father, Bob Lee Swagger, one more true man to find disappointment in him.

Russ got himself out of bed.

“Isn’t that illegal?”

“Not if you have it displayed.”

“But it isn’t displayed.”

“My, my, if it didn’t just fall off the gun rack here.”

Bob pointed to the empty gun rack above the seat in his truck. Behind the seat, he had just slid the Mini-14 in its gun case, plus a paper bag with three loaded twenty-round magazines and the immense forty-rounder, a curved thing that looked like a flattened tin banana. “What cop is going to give me a hard time? This here’s Oklahoma.”

“That isn’t legal,” said Russ. “My dad catches you with that, you’d go to jail.”

“Well, I’d never mess with your old man, so you’d best come up with a way to talk him out of it,” Bob said, sliding the .45 Commander in its holster behind the seat too, along with the extra magazines.

“I don’t know,” said Russ. “This is getting hairy.”

“It gets hairier. You drive.”

They climbed in. They were in the parking lot of the Holiday Inn, getting ready to call on General Jack Preece, of JFP Technology, Inc.

“What was that address again?” Russ asked.

Bob told him.

“I think it’s near the airport,” he said.

“Go to it, Junior.”

They drove in silence for a while. Then Russ said, “You’d better brief me on some stuff.”

“Why?”

“If you and I are supposed to be doing a book on sniping and it turns out I don’t know shit about it, this guy is going to kick us out on our butts and we get nothing.”

“So what do you want to know? ‘What’s it feel like?’ I used to get asked that a lot. ‘What’s it feel like?’”

“What’s it feel like?”

“Smart-ass punk kid.”

“All right. Why do you hate him?”

“Who, Preece?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t hate him. He’s a fine man.”

“You hate him. I can tell. Even behind the famous Swagger reserve, you hate him.”

“He was a fine officer. He ran a superior program. His people got hundreds, maybe thousands, of kills. They saved the lives of hundreds, maybe thousands, of American soldiers. He’s a fine man, a patriot, probably a father and a Republican. Why would you say I hate him?”

“You hate him.”