Stephen Hunter - Black Light

“Hey, Red, got a question for you.”

“Shoot, son.”

“Have you heard the Holly Etheridge rumor?”

“Every goddamn one of ’em.”

“No, I mean the rumor.”

“Which one would that be?”

“It’s all over town. He’s your friend, you’d know.”

“He isn’t my friend. He went to Harvard. He ain’t hardly ever come back to the old stomping grounds. Hell, he went to prep school in Washington, D.C. St. Albans School, I think. He ain’t no Arkansawyer, I’ll tell you that. I know him some.”

“They say he cut a deal with old Mr. You Know Who, the front-runner. He’d drop out early and work behind the scenes … and that would get him the vice-presidential nomination.”

Roger Deacon pitched in with a comment. “We have been his local media buyers for eighteen years, and believe me, if Holly Etheridge were going on the national ticket, we’d know it by now. You have to buy into prime time early. It’s too late otherwise.”

“You ain’t thinking right, Rog,” said Red. “It ain’t a senatorial race. The buy would come from national party headquarters and not in his name. You check, and I’d bet you’ll see the parties already got money down on the time they need, through one of the big Little Rock shops.”

“So it is going to happen, huh, Red?”

“Neil, I ain’t heard diddly about old Holly. He’s too busy trying to fuck every living female between Maine and Southern California. I think he’s made it through Illinois and is just starting on Missouri.”

“I don’t think he’s given up his national ambitions,” said Jeff. “His daddy gave him an order, and one thing about Holly, he always obeyed his daddy. I think I ought to give him a call. He’ll probably end up looking for a good chief of staff. Maybe I’ll be moving up to Washington.”

“Shit, his team is set,” said Red. “I shot sporting clays with Judge Myers a few weeks back, and he’s the boy with the inside track. But he didn’t say nothing.”

“Holly may surprise us yet,” said Neil.

“We made a hell of a lot of money off that goddamn road he wanted to build for his daddy, though,” Red said.

“Hear, hear,” cheered the Rich Boys, for they too had made money, even at some remove, from the $90 million that the federal government had poured into Arkansas to build the Boss Harry Etheridge Memorial Parkway down to Polk County.

It went on that way until eleven, when Red finally broke it up. Toward the end, as the booze wore off, he found himself becoming morose and mean-spirited. The vibrator on his beeper had not gone off.

What did it mean? What was going on? It was so goddamned perfect .

He pushed aside his fears and went to the car, but for the first time in years, his two obedient, discreet bodyguards irritated him, though they were so steely efficient there was no cause for the annoyance. They just bugged him tonight.

He said, “I’m going to the lounge, not home.”

“Yes sir,” came the reply, untainted by human emotion.

He climbed into the big S-class and turned right, down Cliff Drive and back toward the city, instead of left toward his big white house overlooking the airport. At the halfway point, he called the Runner-up.

“Hello?”

“Beth, honey, something has come up. I’ve got to nurse one through the night.”

“Sweetie, are you all right?”

“I am fine. And soon, I’ll be finer.”

“Are you sure?”

Dammit, even she was irritating him tonight.

“Yes! Yes, everything is fine. You know what I want you to do? Plan a vacation. A nice one, the whole family, both families, Hawaii, we’ll rent out a goddamned island to ourselves. Your mother, even. All right?”

“Yes, Red, honey.”

“Your brother. He can come too. That’s my babe.”

He hung up, crossing Rogers, turning in toward town, took his next right and followed the progressively seedier Midland Boulevard until at last he came to Nancy’s. His parking place was wide open, as usual, and he pulled into it. As he leaped out, his two bodyguards seemed to materialize from nowhere and took up position next to him.

He threw open the door and about six dreary drunks and four dreary pool players looked over at, his magnificence and withered in it; he blasted through, telling Fred the night barkeep just one word: “Coffee.”

In his lair, he felt a bit more relaxed. Here at last was a world small enough and known enough to be completely dominated. He sat at his father’s old desk. He felt comfortable. He set his folder on the green blotter before him and willed it to ring: Phone! Ring! But unlike the golf ball of late afternoon, it did not obey him. What adventures could it be concealing? What extraordinary battle, what act of profane violence, what deliverance or destruction?

He tried to shut it out by concocting a plan to implement if he were to fail utterly.

Swagger lives. Swagger kills both men. No, worse, Swagger captures poor Duane, who spills the beans about the Bama connection. What would Swagger do next?

He’d come after me, he realized.

He leaned out and gestured to his bodyguards.

“It is very possible,” he said, “that a very tough man will be coming after me in the next few days. Not sure, but possible. Therefore y’all will need to be at your absolute tops. Understood?”

“Yes sir,” said the talkative one.

“We go into Condition One, all the way. We’ll need support teams, aerial surveillance, motion detectors, the works. I ain’t going to give it up without a fight.”

“We’ll get him, sir.”

Maybe, he thought, that would be better: face it, do it, get it over with. He and Swagger, man-on-man.

Then he laughed.

Swagger was too good. That would be suicide.

He looked at the phone.

Damn you. Ring!

But it wouldn’t.

The hours leaked by. He read the papers, tried to work on his books, had a lot of coffee, watched some TV on a ratty black-and-white. He may even have dozed for a time, for it seemed that there was a moment when it was dark followed by another moment when the dawn was suddenly breaking. He went out, looked down the broad boulevard that was still lifeless. Odd, even a slum like north Fort Smith could look pristine and wondrous in the first wash of moist, dewy light. But he knew his sentimentality was phony, more a function of stress and exhaustion than genuine feeling.

Now he began to feel sorry for himself. It went with the territory, the long night nursing through a crisis that he himself was incapable of influencing at this point, one which he must fight with surrogates.

He mourned his father, that great man. He wondered again at the great bitterness of his life: who had killed him? He missed his two wives and his five children. He missed the boys at Hardscrabble, the men he hunted, fished, flew to Super Bowls and occasionally caroused with. He mourned his life: was someone going to take it away from him now? At least his children would know who killed him, more than he knew of his own father’s death. He saw Swagger as a pale-eyed avenger, a figure of death, come to take it all away. Part of him yearned to fire both barrels of that expensive Krieghoff into Swagger and blow him to shreds. He calculated: two blasts of Remington 7½ from five feet, that’s almost sixteen hundred pieces of bird shot delivered at over 1,200 feet per second, hitting him that close, before the shot column opened up into a pattern but instead traveled through space with the energy and density of a piston. Wow! Total destruction.

But in the end, he weakened. His warrior spirit was spent. His dick was soft and would never be hard. He needed sleep, he needed help.