Stephen Hunter - Black Light

Russ nodded. Then he said, “All right. I can do that.”

N o sir,” said Duane Peck. “No sir, not at all, sir. I never seen him. I went up there, I got what I could, what I just give you, and I got out. That was it.”

Like many policemen, he was adept at lying; he had the liar’s best gift: he could absolutely convince himself that what he was saying was the truth, convince his own respiratory system, and come eventually to believe it wholly. He didn’t swallow or tremble, he didn’t breathe raspily, or touch his mouth, he had no difficulty meeting anyone’s eyes, his pupils did not get small and far away, his face color did not change.

“You had nothing to do with the old man’s death, then?” said Red Bama. They were in the back room behind Nancy’s Flamingo Lounge, where he had summoned Duane when he heard the news.

“No sir, did not. Hell, I wouldn’t do nothing to a old man. I got respect for the old. That’s what’s destroying this country, sir. Lack of respect.”

His face was perfectly passive as he spoke. His voice was calm, earnest, under control, his throat unfilled with phlegm. His heart beat dully.

“You can’t be killing people when you decide to,” said Red. “There’s something called the law of unintended consequences. It brings everything down. Besides, he was such an old man.”

“I swear to you,” said Duane, “sir, I swear to you I had nothing to do with that.”

“All right,” said Red, wanting somehow to believe in him, but not quite yet doing so entirely.

“Sir, he had gone crazy. I told you how he tore his stuff apart. Going back to that office in his wife’s bathrobe, falling down them stairs. Hell, it was a tragedy. The old gentleman needed looking after. It’s a crime his damn family didn’t do nothing for him, all he done give them.”

Bama nodded.

He examined the exhibits before him—a scrap of a hearing report from 1955, a letter in flowery script from some woman named Lucille Parker, dated 1957, and a yellow tablet faintly inscribed with the impression of writing on a top page now missing—then looked back at Duane.

“Sir, if you hold that tablet up to the light, you can sort of make out what the hell it’s all about. I see the word—”

“All right, Peck, that’s enough. I want you back in Blue Eye, but doing nothing. You wait for me to contact you. Is that clear? You do not want to be eyeballing Bob Lee Swagger. You stay away from him for now. He may sniff something out on you. I may need you for him later, if I can figure out a way.”

“Yes sir. Uh, sir, uh … about my gambling debts—”

“Forgotten, Duane. You’re no longer working in the red. You’re in the black. Don’t blow it. The pay’s five hundred a week, starters. Full medical benefits. Of course you keep your deputy’s job; that’s why you’re worth anything at all.”

“I bet I could git Bob Lee for you.”

“Don’t even think about it,” said Red. “He’ll know and he’ll come for you. There are ten men fried to crisps on a highway who thought he’d be easy. Now go on, get out of here.”

After Peck left, Red went over and filled a Styrofoam cup with the rancid bar coffee. It was an important time: he had to make some decisions.

He had to kill Bob Lee Swagger and kill him quickly. But firepower, the best professional killers, a dream team of hit men, had not worked. He realized now that sheer violence wasn’t the answer; stealth was. Cleverness, planning, nerve, execution.

Again, by God, underneath his melancholy and his acid distaste for Duane Peck, he was oddly happy. Swagger. This guy was brilliant. He was the best that Red had ever come against, smart and brave and calm and resourceful. If many guns couldn’t do it, what could?

Hmmmmm. Maybe one could. How else to kill a sniper but to snipe him?

In his orderly mind, he tried to list his advantages. First, though Swagger of course knew he was being hunted, he had no idea by whom or why, other than the general suspicion that it had something serious to do with issues of forty years ago which he was currently investigating. That gave Red the opportunity, really, for any kind of approach. And the more he thought, the more he realized that the key to today lay in yesterday. There had to be a way to put something before Swagger, something which beckoned him and which he could not deny, whose call he would answer even if he knew it might kill him. In that way, the cautious and wary man could be destroyed.

Red was in a curious state: he throbbed with creativity. He understood the shape, the values, the thrust of the project he was undertaking, he just did not yet know the details, the connections. Yet, really, the details could come later. It was the excitement of creation that overwhelmed him so.

He set to work. He had to understand everything about forty years ago. The past held the answers.

With that in mind, he went back into another room where an ancient wall safe lay. It held the treasures and secrets of his own father’s empire. He had a moment here of sentimentality, as his fingers touched the worn old knob of the dial. He knew his father’s fingers had touched it thousands of times. He thought of his father: that shrewd and disciplined man, self-taught and vast of insight, part tyrant, part genius, who came from nowhere. Really, that was the thing. The man came from nowhere. He was born dirt-poor and barefoot in a sharecropper’s shack in Polk County in 1916, amid appalling conditions of nutritional deprivation, impoverishment, brutality and the general coarseness of life in that station and that time. He had been beaten savagely, which is why he never beat his only son. He had been laughed at and called hillbilly and white trash by the quality, who secretly feared him, as they feared all long-boned, pale-eyed members of the rural proletariat.

Yet he’d come up to Fort Smith in 1930, a fourteen-year-old boy, on his own because he was smart enough to sec nothing could happen in Polk County and if there was a future, it lay in the city; he’d gotten a job as a numbers runner for Colonel Tyree, who ran the town then from a grand suite in the old Ward Hotel. It wasn’t a big job, a comer’s job, just a job running numbers for a criminal organization that would not mourn him for a second if he fell under the wheels of a train or was ground to pulp by the wagon teams that still dominated Garrison Street in those days.

But like the gift he passed on to his son, Red, Ray Bama had a talent for numbers, for lightning calculation, and understood that the secrets of the universe lay within. (None of Red’s own children had such a thing, but then, bless them, they didn’t need one.) He was wary and shrewd, and his rise was the classic American gangster’s, which mirrored the Horatio Alger myths of the larger population: that in crime, as in industry, the hardest, most tireless worker and the shrewdest, most able calculator ended up the winner. He went from running numbers to running pawnshops to shylocking to managing casinos and cribs to investing; there were always three or four layers between himself and his violence, though three times assassins attempted to nail him. He trafficked in flesh but did not partake of it; he lent money but never borrowed it; he sold drugs but never took them, nor allowed anybody around him to take them. He understood the dynamic of the separate black and white populations. Though he was, even at some remove, a killer, he never committed other crimes, which some would judge more harshly: he was not a racist and did business with black gangsters, eventually taking over their rackets, not out of fear but out of trust; he was not a psychopath, and only killed when it was necessary; he never killed families or siblings; he never killed indiscriminately; he never tortured or brutalized. He was the last thing a redneck pauper should have been, an honorable gang lord, a gentleman.