Stephen Hunter - Black Light

“Not on your best day, you old dick. Ask the Japanese. They knew him well,” Bob fired back. “Who did he talk to? What did he say?”

“Mainly, old Lem. And Pop Dwyer, who run the dogs. He liked Pop but he didn’t like them dogs. I don’t know why, but I could tell. He hung back from them dogs. But mainly, he was fuckin’ around on me. Mr. High and Mighty. He’s on my case like a bastard from the start,” said Jed. “Didn’t your old lady give him none? It was like he hadn’t had nothing in weeks.”

Bob just glared at him.

“So he runs us up and down the road and into the woods, goddammit, it was hot nigger work. All the time he’s jawin’ on me, like I say. And when he finds that damn girl, I hears him telling goddamn Lem to order all this fancy equipment. Teams, shit like that, from Little Rock. Like it was goddamned important or something. Hell, it were just a raggedy-ass nigger gal.”

Bob took all this in evenly, his face drawn and remote.

“How did he know to look there? What led him to that spot? Do you recall?”

Jed’s features knitted up in concentration. As if summoning a memory, he summoned up a gob of juice and fired it toward the can, missing by a wide margin. Russ noticed that the gobs were coming closer and closer to him.

“Something about a lady calling in saying she’d seen a nigger boy acting ‘peculiar’ four days earlier out by the Texaco sign. Yore damn daddy always poking his nose in other people’s business. When he heard the girl was missing, he put ’em together and that’s how he got us out there.”

Bob nodded. It squared: the black boy, in local lore, would have been Reggie Fuller.

But it wasn’t Reggie Fuller, because he was driving people home from the meeting in secret. But if it was a black boy who’d killed the girl, someone was doing an elaborate operation to frame Reggie. Why? Why? What possibly could there be to gain?

“Did he say anything about other investigations or matters?” asked Russ. “Was he consumed with anything else?”

“He’s tired,” said Jed. “That’s all, tired. He always seemed tired.”

“From what?” asked Russ of Bob.

“He didn’t work no regular duty day,” said Bob, recalling. “He’d be gone sometimes fifteen, sixteen hours a shot, sometimes two or three days. He’d work the mornings and the afternoons, maybe come home for a couple of hours at dinner, maybe take a nap. Then he’d go back out on the road, monitor the state police network, look for speeders, mischief, answer calls, that sort of thing. He worked like a goddamned dog.”

Bob ended, letting it hang quiet in the melancholy air.

“Is that it, Swagger?” Jed demanded.

Bob just looked at him.

“That’s all you wanted? Hah! That ain’t worth no twenny dollar! You ain’t got no more questions and I’m still hotter’n a firecracker.”

He laughed, as if he’d won some great victory.

“You boys been here so long it’s dark out! Ha! And what’d you learn? Nary a goddamned thing! Hah! You got my money, Swagger?”

Bob threw the twenty on the table.

“Have a party, Posey.”

It was full dark and Russ felt both exhausted and liberated when at last he sucked in a lungful of air that wasn’t tainted with the odor of bacon fat and stale sweat.

“We didn’t learn much,” he admitted, as they stepped off the porch.

“I told you we wouldn’t,” said Bob. “You keep trying to make this link between poor Shirelle and what happened to my father. You keep trying to do that but it don’t work out in time or in logic.”

“Well—” said Russ. But then he paused. “Consider this. First, coincidence. Is it logical that there would be two elaborate conspiracies engineered within days of each other in a remote backwater of West Arkansas? I mean, things like that hardly ever happen in real life. Doesn’t it make some kind of sense to presume they were in some way connected, that there was only really one?”

Bob said nothing.

“Then consider,” Russ said, “that although each conspiracy is different in terms of objective, they share the same mechanism or pattern. In both cases, there’s two levels. The first, seemingly impenetrable, offers a plain and simple crime, complete to motives and very obvious clues. Jimmy and Bub Pye rob a grocery store; ten hours later they’re confronted by Sergeant Swagger, who guns them both down and is killed himself. Open-and-shut. Shirelle Parker is raped and murdered twelve miles outside Blue Eye. Her hand conceals the monogrammed pocket of her killer. At his house, the rest of the shirt, smeared with her blood, is found. Open-and-shut. But in both cases, at the level of the most excruciating detail, the anomalies begin to assert themselves and if you go beyond the open-and-shut, you see that in each case some genius operator set it up—night infrared for your dad, moving the body from the site of the crime in the other case. Don’t you see?”

“Consider yourself,” said Bob. “The boy that killed Shirelle was black, you dope. Shirelle’s mama told Sam she was raised so she wouldn’t get in no car with no white boy. Now, you got to ask, if he’s a black boy, who the hell in Arkansas in 1955 had the wherewithal to throw together a frame? For a black boy? Don’t make no sense at all. If it were a white boy, maybe. But no: it was a black boy.”

“Shit,” said Russ.

“I’m convinced my daddy was investigating a crime and that’s what got him killed. He learned something, something big, that powerful men wanted stopped. How else would they have had the resources? They had the CIA, an army sniper, state-of-the-art gear.”

In exasperation, Russ shouted, “I am the son of a state police sergeant. My dad couldn’t investigate an outhouse!”

“Shut up, we just passed our mark.”

“What?”

“I’m counting.”

“What?”

“Steps. Once we hit two hundred forty steps from that big boulder, we head off this goddamned path, veer to the left and begin our zigzag back. We move in units of two hundred forty of my long steps, hard left, hard right by the compass, and that gets us back to the car.”

But Russ hadn’t been paying attention. They had now reached the draw where the creek bed, off to the left, cut between the two hills. The trees loomed above them, more felt than seen. The wind gently pressed through them, filling the night with whispers. The dark lay like a blanket, suffocating Russ. A flash of paranoia illuminated a far corner of his mind; he thought of being alone out here with his hyperactive imagination, zero visibility, lost in some maze that wore an ancient cloak, alone completely. He would die.

Then he heard something terrifying: from close by, it was the raspy, dryly cracking rattle of a poisonous snake; it released an almost archetypal toxin of fear into his system.

T hese were difficult days for Red. He could do so much and then had to let go, sit back and trust the others to execute his plan. He couldn’t, as Amy had said of her father, indulge in his capacity to overmanage. He had to trust. Would Bob read the clues correctly? Would he show up as predicted? Would the damned Duane Peck be able to bring off his end or would the man’s stupidity and impetuousness bring them down? Would Jack Preece hit the shots that needed to be hit? Would the old man, the scrofulous, nasty Jed Posey, hold together in a long session with Bob?

Ironically, of them all, Red trusted Posey the most: he was familiar with the type, the prison rat so hardened by a life lived at the extreme end of existence he’d been turned into some Nietzschean thing, a being so intense and one-pointed he hardly had any other life left him except the life of duty.