Stephen Hunter - Black Light

Then the car was gone in a huge flash as the tracers lit up its fuel tank. The noise was a thunderclap, throwing feathers of flame everywhere as it seemed for one delirious second it was raining flame. All around them, the world caught fire; and a wave of crushing heat rolled against Russ. He heard screams in the roar, and a flaming phantasm ran at him but fell under the weight of its own destruction into the roadway.

Motion struck at Russ’s peripheral vision and he saw that one of the follow cars had gunned from behind the topsyturvy truck.

“Coming around, coming around,” he screamed.

But Bob was shooting even as Russ yelled and the tracers flicked quick and nasty like a whipcrack and seemed to liquefy the oncomer’s windshield; it dissolved into a sleet of jewels as the car lost control and went hard into the gully, kicking up a gout of dirt.

“Magazine! Magazine!” Bob screamed, and Russ slapped a twenty-rounder, bullets outward, into his palm and he sunk it into the rifle, freed the bolt to slam forward just as the third car came around, bristling with guns. But Bob took it cleanly, riddling its windshield with a burst of ball ammunition, and then held fire, emptying what remained of the magazine into the windows and doors as the car went by. The car never deviated, but sped by furiously, more as if it hoped to get away than do them any harm, and a hundred yards down the road it noticed that its cargo was dead men and it veered into a gully, lurched out surfing a wave of dirt and grass and came to a broken ending amid splintered white oaks.

And suddenly it was quiet except for the dry cracking of the wind and the hiss of the flames.

“Jesus, you got them all,” Russ said in utter astonishment and devotion, but Bob was by him, .45 in hand. He’d seen something. Two men with submachine guns had extricated themselves from the wreckage in the gully just before them, and started up the little embankment. But Bob stood above them and got his pistol into play so fast it was a blur. Did they see him yet? One did, and tried to get his weapon on target but Bob fired so quickly Russ thought for a second he had some kind of machine gun, floating six empties in the air, and the two shooters went down like rag dolls. One was an immense man in an expensive jumpsuit with gold chains on. He lay flat, eyes blinkless and vacant as the blood turned his sweatshirt strawberry and an odd detail leaped out at Russ: he had a necklace of scar tissue as if someone had gone to work on his throat with a chain saw but only got halfway around before thinking the better of it.

Another moment of silence. Bob used it to change magazines.

Russ looked around.

“Jesus Christ,” he said. It reminded him of TV coverage of the Highway of Death out of Kuwait City after the Warthogs and the Blackhawks finished a good day’s killing. Four wrecked vehicles, one on its back, one boiling with black, oily flame of petroleum products oxidizing into the sky, bodies and blood pools and shards of glass and discarded weapons everywhere.

“What do you think of that, you motherfucker!” Bob suddenly shouted, and Russ saw that he was screaming at a white airplane a half mile out low and banking away to the south.

“You got them all,” said Russ. “You must have killed twenty men.”

“More like ten. They were professionals. They took their chances. Now let’s see if we done bagged a trophy.”

Then he strode across the littered roadway to the ramming truck, upside down and half in the gully. The odor of gasoline was everywhere.

He opened the door and peered in. Russ looked over his shoulder.

Inside, in a posture of unbearable discomfort that signaled something important had broken, was a tough-looking Hispanic with creamy silver hair and an expensive suit over an open silk shirt. The angle of his neck suggested that it was broken. Pain lay across his handsome face like a blanket, turning him gray under the olive tones of his skin. His eyes were glazing and his breath was labored.

Bob pointed the .45.

The man laughed and his eyes came back into focus. He held a lighter in his left hand.

“Fuck you, man,” he said. “I’m already dead, you cracker motherfucker.” His voice was a little lilting with Cubano accent, an odd play of ch’s through it. “I flick my Bic and we all going to heaven.”

“It won’t blow, partner, it’ll only burn.”

“Fuck you,” said the Cubano.

“Who’s the man in the plane?” Bob demanded.

The man laughed again; his teeth were blinding white. He made a little move with his free hand and Russ flinched but Bob didn’t shoot. Instead, both watched as the hand reached his shirt and, pausing only once or twice in pain, ripped it open. The brown chest was latticed with extravagant tattoos.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Bob said.

“I’m Marisol Cubano, you norteamericano cabrón . You puta! Fucking Castro couldn’t break me in his prisons, man, you think I’m going to talk to some hillbilly homeboy?” He laughed.

“You are one tough customer,” said Bob, “that I give you.”

He holstered the .45.

“Let’s go,” he said to Russ.

“Hey,” screamed the man in the truck. “I say this to you, motherfucker, you got some balls on you, my friend. You cubano? Maybe Desi Arnez done fucked your mama when your daddy was out fucking the goats.”

“I don’t think so,” said Bob. “We didn’t have no TV.”

They turned and were back at their own truck when the Cubano ended his misery; the truck flared as it went and the heat reached Bob and Russ.

It was nearly dark when Red landed back at Fort Smith. He taxied the Conquest to the hangar and instructed his mechanic to secure it from the flight. He went to the parking lot where his two bodyguards, ever astute, ever loyal, ever dreary, waited in their car. He got into his Mercedes and drove home.

“Honey,” said Miss Arkansas Runner-up 1986, “how did it go today?”

“Oh, it was all right,” he said. “You know. Sort of unsettled, but all right.”

Then he and his two youngest children watched a videotape of Black Beauty , a favorite of the kids’, and, truth be told, a movie that he himself didn’t find too irritating.

After the kids were in bed, he watched the news. The big story, of course, was the drug-dealer shoot-out only a hundred miles away in Oklahoma, on the Taliblue Trail. Ten men dead, four pounds of uncut cocaine recovered. An Oklahoma State Police spokesman said authorities were still trying to figure out what had happened, but the un-burned bodies had all been identified as professional criminals tied to Miami, Dallas and New Orleans, with long records of violent felonies, and that conjecture at this time was leading in the direction of some kind of drug shipment ambush that got out of hand and ended up in a flat-out battle on one of Oklahoma’s prettiest highways. “Thank God,” the cop said, “no innocent people were hurt.”

Only after the news was over and the kids were in bed did he step out of denial and face the reality: he was in big trouble. This guy Swagger was the best who’d ever come at him, and, at least in the ten years after his father had been killed, men came after him regularly and he’d beaten them all.

Now he knew he had to do something very clever, very subtle and extremely professional, or he would lose it all. He looked around at his house and thought of his kids from this marriage and the kids from his first marriage and wondered what would happen to them if this guy Swagger took him. It terrified him.

He had a drink and then another, and then the buzzer on his beeper sounded.

He called his number and got Peck’s report.

Then he called Peck.

“He’s gone now?” he asked.