Stephen Hunter - Black Light

He struggled pointlessly, as the larger, stronger man dominated him toward submission. Another knee thundered into his kidneys and sent a rocket of terrible pain up his body. He couldn’t see: he felt something hard and cold against the flesh under his ear, and he then heard a voice:

“You move, you fucking whelp, and I’ll kill you right here.”

It was Duane Peck.

Something snapped around his wrist and then around his other wrist.

He was handcuffed.

“Come on, baby boy,” said the deputy, pulling him up. Peck looked crazed, splotched with sweat, his hair a damp mess, his eyes wild with madness. “We’re going to meet your pal.”

Bob crawled from the brush at first light. He thought hard about his own next move and saw that attempting to intercept Russ in the forest was pointless. Instead, he decided to move back to the car, escape the immediate area and set up somewhere on Route 71 where Russ would probably emerge around noon. Then they could go get a good hot meal and return to base camp and figure out a next move, whatever a next move might be.

He looked at his watch. It was about 6:30 A.M.

He had one subsidiary stop: to head back to the far side of the clearing, where he had to recover the Mini-14, a rifle that was traceable to him and whose spent shells would match the spent shells found on the roadside of the Taliblue Trail. That might lead to more explaining than he cared to do.

Warily, he looked around and in the gray but increasing light, could see nothing. There was no noise, except the occasional peeping of an awakening bird. A low mist clung to the ground, all the better.

He crawled from cover, reached back to check his .45 and then began to move low and zigzagging through the forest. Did he want to recheck the body?

No, he decided not to. If there was another man in the forest, one thing such a boy might do is set up there. He determined that there was no incriminating evidence at the body, nothing to connect him once he got rid of the Mini-14. The rifle was the important thing.

He approached from the southeast, slithered up to a fallen log and examined what lay before him. He could see no signs of human activity: only an undulating, wild clearing a hundred yards by a few hundred yards, crazed with knee-high grass and speckled with flowers. At the oblique, a scorched, blackened tree stood, where he had detonated the fireball. Lucky the forest was damp and the flames didn’t spread. Very lucky. It was something he hadn’t thought of in the craziness of the moment last night.

It’s better to be lucky than good, he thought.

Carefully, he maneuvered around the perimeter of the clearing until at last he had returned to the site of last night’s action. A few small fires still smoldered and he kicked them out. He stood in the core of the fireball: a blackened cylinder seemed to have been cut in the trees, but it would grow out quickly.

He went to the tree behind which he’d hid, and saw the rifle lying a few feet out in the high grass. He went quickly to it and lifted it. While he was out there, he collected spent shells and seemed stuck at nineteen, but then, remembering the sense of being pronged in the face by a shell ejecting straight back (it happens), he slid backwards and found the twentieth shell far from where the others had landed and, near it, the single .45 casing that had lit the fire. Shit, he’d forgotten that one. He stuck it in his jeans pocket. Then he remembered he’d fired twice more, to attract attention, back in the trees a bit. He moved back and had a little trouble at first, but then a glint of brass announced itself and he picked up one and, nearby, the other.

Shells at car, he thought: three of them. Pick them up too.

He took a quick look back. Across the way, he could make out very little of where Jack Preece lay. It occurred to him to bury the body, but he didn’t have a shovel, he didn’t feel like getting Preece’s blood and DNA all over himself, and some forest animal would come along and dig it up, anyhow. If Preece was found, Preece would be found, and someone could have a field day coming up with a conspiracy theory as to how he got there and what he was up to. Some Johnnie would probably write another goddamned useless book on it.

He was set.

It was time to go.

He stood and began to move and then he heard something. Not sure what it was—a shout, a call, a squawk, something natural, something human?—he slid back, pulling out the .45, thumb rising to the safety, as the empty Mini-14 was now useless.

What the—?

He waited and it came again.

Yes, it was a human call, blurred and almost recognizable, from somewhere off to the left.

His eyes scanned the terrain.

He caught a flash of motion across the way, in the trees, and watched as it tumbled into focus, the awkward form of a man walking clumsily. He saw it was Russ, tumbling forward but yanked back, then pushed forward again. Bob made out the second man behind him, controlling him. It was Peck, of course.

Peck screamed again.

“Sniper! Come on and fight me, sniper, goddamn you.”

Duane Peck saw his future in a second when the boy stumbled toward him. He would take the boy and through the boy take the sniper. In that way he would endear himself to Red Bama and the Bama organization and enjoy a life of respect, wealth, property and importance, everything he yearned for.

And the boy presented himself so easily, snot-nosed punk stumbling through the woods. Duane had subdued many prisoners in his time: the secret was leverage and meanness, one of which he obtained by surprise and the other of which he had always had, by genetics or environment. The boy captured, cuffed and pushed before him, he now had to determine how to handle Swagger. But it didn’t take long to figure that out: the Glock had a hair trigger when you took the slack out of it; the muzzle held against the boy’s head, the trigger gone back on itself as far as it could go, and he was invulnerable to any rifle shot, for a rifle shot would surely cause his finger to constrict and the boy would be dead too. That he knew about Swagger: he cared about the boy. He would not let the boy die.

He would draw Swagger to him, unarmed, and then simply shoot him. What could Swagger do? He could not risk losing the boy, that was his code, that was his weakness. It was the one thing that Duane knew better than his own name: attack through weakness. This was Swagger’s; this gave him an advantage that neither the ten professional gunmen nor the night-vision-equipped marksman had. It was in fact the one advantage Duane Peck had always had and he knew it: he was willing to do the dirty work. He didn’t have any illusions: he didn’t mind the blood spatters and the screams. He could get through anything. He knew he could do it. He’d been spoiling for this chance his whole life.

He pushed Russ along savagely, not seeing him as human. He was full of rage and power, and felt at last he was coming into what was owed him for having put up with having so little for so long.

“Go on, you little fucker,” he hissed, his mind foggy with anger. “You give me any shit and I will kill you right now.”

“I—” the boy started, and Duane clubbed him hard with the gun, driving him to the earth, drawing a rivulet of blood down his neck and into his shirt.

He reached down and sank a hand into the boy’s thick hair, pulling his head back hard while putting his boot between the boy’s shoulder blades, as if to break him on a rack.

“Yeah, you give me lip, you little bastard, and you will be sorry as a sack of shit.”

He pulled the boy up to his legs and shoved him ahead.

“You moron,” the boy shouted back at him, “he knows you killed Sam. He’s been looking forward to this. He’ll kill you dead cold.”