Stephen Hunter - Black Light

But Bob got himself under some kind of control.

“We’ll deal with Peck when the goddamn time comes,” he finally said.

“Good, because I have something to work on.”

“What’s that?”

Russ told him about Jed Posey’s parole.

Bob wanted to know what she’d said. Where had the information come from? Was it tainted? Was it a trap?

Well, no, it seemed to arise spontaneously. Someone in the black community had found out about it. They weren’t even talking about it to white people, but one of Jeannie’s friends, a black student at Vanderbilt, had heard about it from her mother.

“How would the blacks find out?” Bob wanted to know.

“You know, they talk among themselves. A black prison guard tells his wife that goddamned Jed Posey has been paroled; his wife tells her sister tells her friend tells her husband tells his brother; it goes like a telegram; and down here they probably hear faster than anyone. It’s how an oppressed community would survive; it would develop extremely refined communications and intelligence skills.”

“But who originally found out? That’s what I want to know. Where does it start?”

“I don’t know. It’s lost, I guess.”

“It can’t be lost,” Bob said irritably.

“Do you want to go house-to-house knocking on doors in Blue Eye?” Russ said in exasperation. “Look, it’s simple. This guy is one of two people left alive who saw your father on his last day. Maybe his testimony is important. They searched for Shirelle Parker. They were together for, near as we can figure it out, close to three hours. That’s a long time. Maybe he can remember.”

Bob just didn’t like it.

“Why now? Why release him now?”

“He’s been in prison since 1962. That’s over thirty years. It was time. Do you want to go down to Tucker tomorrow and make inquiries as to why? Do you want me to call the paper”—the paper! Russ thought. What about that job?—“and see what their cop guy says? Or do you want to check it out tomorrow, go straight to Jed and find out what he has to say?”

It was like arguing with a stubborn old man. Bob never agreed or disagreed, he simply affected a blank look that stood for a strategic retreat while he reconsidered his options. Nothing ever budged him except himself and he only believed in things he could see or touch.

“We don’t even know where he is,” he said.

“I found Connie,” said Russ. “I will find Jed.”

“Fine,” said Bob. “Get some sleep now.”

Bob himself didn’t get to sleep. Instead, he lay in the hissing light of the Coleman lantern, trying to settle down, put his furies in the far place and nail them to the floor. He was now looking through the materials that John Vincent had handed over: the old book of tickets, the blood-smeared notebook, now yellow and brittle with age, and, fresh, the yellow legal paper with Sam’s notes on it.

He looked the notes over carefully. On the first run-through, it seemed clear that Sam was reinvestigating his father’s last case. Why would that be important? Bob asked himself. What had started him? What could that have to do with anything? It puzzled him; he simply could not imagine a mechanism by which the two could be connected, since the time element was all wrong. The body of Shirelle was found on the day that Earl was murdered; there couldn’t have been time to set something up based on Earl’s discovery.

But on faith, he progressed. Sam seemed to be noting ways in which Earl’s notes diverged from the later, official version of the crime.

Sam had written: “Body moved. What significance?” Then, underneath, in bolder pen strokes, “To disaffiliate body with site of crime!!”

Bob took this in. Sure. What would the point of that be?

He read on: “Fingernail: red dirt under fingernail!”

Would that be Shirelle’s fingernail? And if so, what would the significance of that be?

But Sam himself had solved it. “LITTLE GEORGIA,” he’d written in all caps. Then adding: “Must be authentic murder site.”

Bob himself knew that Little Georgia was a red clay deposit a few miles west of town, a notorious place where teenagers went to neck, just over the town line and in the county. So what? He’d been there, even.

Then: “Mrs. Parker says: it would be a black boy. No black girl in 1955 would get into a car with a white boy.” Then he’d written: “Damn!”

Bob saw why. Had Shirelle gone off with a white boy, some kind of conspiracy theory might actually work, particularly (though he couldn’t imagine how yet) if it was leveraged into the plot against his father. But if she’d gone off with a black boy, nothing made any sense. For, of course, if the murder of Shirelle Parker was another elaborate conspiracy, who in the black community could possibly benefit, and who would have the resources to put together the elaborate plot by which Reggie Gerard Fuller took the fall?

That was the cruncher: Shirelle would not get in a car with a white person in 1955. Bob knew why too. Black girls wouldn’t get in cars with white boys five years later. They probably still wouldn’t because the white boy only wanted one thing.

He rolled over, still confused, and lay there trying to get to sleep.

Bob drove around the town square six times. Russ had never seen him so tense; his eyes would not stop working the landscape, the terrain, the buildings, the mirrors; his muscles were tense and his neck so stiff and rigid Russ thought he’d break it off.

“You okay?”

“Fine, goddammit,” said Bob, breathing harshly.

“There’s no one here,” said Russ. “It’s small-town America, ten in the morning.”

Bob didn’t even listen or stop working security. Finally, he said, “Okay, you git in there and do your goddamned business and git out. No fucking around, no messing with the pretty women, nothing but work. You don’t go to the bathroom, you eyeball anybody comes in. You pick an escape route.”

“I hear you,” said Russ.

“You don’t ask for no help. You don’t let anybody see what you’re doing. You don’t leave nothing behind. You find what you got to find and you fall back, watching your back the whole way.”

“Man,” said Russ, “you got it bad.”

“I’ll watch from out here,” Bob said.

“You know—”

“Don’t you doubt it for a second,” said Bob. “They are hunting us.”

Russ nodded and stepped out of the car. Of course he felt ridiculous: this living in the red zone, what Bob called Condition One—it took too much energy and passion, it left you breathless and actually, he thought, duller than normal. You were beyond paranoia, in some strange and squalid place, where that lady up there with the baby buggy could reach into it and pull an AK-47 or that friendly mailman could reach into his pouch and come out with a sawed-off shotgun. He couldn’t live that way. No one could except some kind of nutcase.

So he put it out of his mind and walked the thirty-odd feet to the steps and bounded in. Nobody shot him; nobody even seemed to notice him.

It took a while but not forever. No phone books listed any Posey family but he requested the bound volumes of the weekly Polk County Star for the year 1962, received the heavy volume in due course and paged through it until he came at last to the big news:

COUNTY MAN SLAYS NEGRO, it said.

There, under the headline, which ran across the top of the page, was a picture of the glum and trashy Jed Posey, his cheeks sunken, his jaw clenched about a mouthful of tiny jagged teeth, his eyes baleful and dark, a Polk County Sheriff’s Office ID number under his chin. There was an odd lopsidedness to his face as if it had been broken apart, then cemented together again imperfectly. Next to it was a picture of Davidson Fuller, a haggard black man in his sixties, with a short Brillo pad of gray for hair and the haunted eyes of a father still mourning his loss. Both pictures were inset upon a shot taken at the gas station soon after the police arrived, with a body supine next to an old truck, its top half covered by somebody’s old blanket, but a raggedy track of black ran out from underneath, and Russ knew it was old Davidson’s blood. He shuddered, then read the account, which gave Posey’s address as County Route 70. He went to the county map and quickly found a RR 70—but was it the same 70? He looked around for someone elderly to ask but then recalled the Federal Writer’s Project Guide to the States, from the thirties. The card catalog yielded a call number and he found the volume in seconds on the open shelves. He paged through, county by county, until at last he came to Polk and to a map that dated from 1938: yes, in the old days, that road was called 70.