Black Light

by Stephen Hunter

  “Such a man. A tyrant, a ruler, but somehow, oh, I don’t know, necessary. They don’t make them like that anymore, do they?”

  “No, they make ’em like me,” he said—she laughed—“and I agree it’s a kind of a comedown.”

  “Oh, Russ, you’ll do fine.”

  “You’re … whose daughter?”

  “My father is John, Grandpap’s oldest son. He’s a doctor in Little Rock, an internist. I’m Jeannie.”

  “The New York one? I heard someone call you ‘the New York one.’”

  “Oh, that. I interned last summer in New York at Mademoiselle.”

  “Oh,” said Russ. Shit, she was ahead of him!

  “I just got coffee for assholes in too much makeup who’d done too many drugs and now did too much aerobics. Not helpful.”

  “It all helps. Or so they tell me.”

  “Have you picked up on the big scandal yet?”

  “No, what’s that?”

  “All the blacks are scandalized. I just learned this from my friend Tenille. She’s over there with her mother.”

  “I don’t—”

  “My grandfather won the Silver Star at the Battle of the Bulge but the bravest thing he ever did was prosecute a white man for the murder of a black man. His name was Jed Posey.”

  The name rang some kind of bell with Russ, but he couldn’t quite nail it down.

  “In 1962 he beat a civil rights leader to death with a spade in a gas station.”

  “Oh, yes,” Russ said. “One thing about this, I’m becoming quite an expert on the Faulknerian substrata of Polk County, Arkansas.”

  “Faulkner would have won two Nobel Prizes if he’d been born here, that is if he didn’t drink himself to death beforehand. Anyhow, Grandpappy prosecuted him and though he couldn’t get the death penalty, Jed Posey went away for life.”

  “Yes?” said Russ.

  “It cost Grandpappy the election and he was out of office for twelve years, after eighteen years in office. Finally, in 1974, he won again, and had eight more years. By that time, he’d turned into an anti-gun-control liberal, if you can imagine such a thing.”

  “Just barely,” said Russ.

  “Anyhow, they just paroled him. Jed Posey. Two days after Grandpappy died, they paroled him.”

  “Jesus,” said Russ. “That’s disrespectful.”

  “No,” she said. “That’s Arkansas.”

  But suddenly Russ wasn’t there. It all fell away, the wake, the noise, the crowd, even impossibly bright and pretty Jeannie Vincent in front of him.

  He saw that name somewhere in infantile print, but couldn’t quite pin it down. Jed Posey.

  It was part of a list.

  Lem Tolliver.

  Lum Posey.

  Pop Dwyer.

  Where?

  “Russ? Are you going to faint?”

  “Ah no, I just—”

  He remembered suddenly. Jed Posey. His name was on the inside of Bob’s father’s last notepad. He was in the party that found Shirelle Parker. He and Miss Connie were the only two people still alive who’d spent time with Earl Swagger on his last day on earth, July 23, 1955.

  “Do you know where this Jed Posey would be?”

  “I don’t—what’s going on?”

  “We have to find him. We have to!” he said, and thought he’d explain it to her, when Bob grabbed him suddenly and pulled him away from the young woman, with a look on his face like the war was just about to start and it was time to load the damned guns.

  35

  Sometimes he even impressed himself!

  Red Bama sat back for just a moment and reflected upon the wondrous thing that he had brought off and how quickly he had snatched an apparent victory from the jaws of defeat.

  He felt now like crowing loudly from the roof of Nancy’s. The secret war he had been fighting was about to pay off.

  His lawyer reported: the parole of Jed Posey happened with alarming alacrity. Posey himself was well prepared, initially by a screw whom Red controlled and then by a private detective in Red’s employ: he had been told that he would be paroled and that in order to stay out of stir, he had certain obligations to the man (unspecified) who had arranged all this. He would be located in his old cabin, a mile or so off old County 70 at the foot of Iron Fork Mountain in the densest hardwood forest in Arkansas. By this time, Jed was an experienced professional convict, with over thirty years in stir: surviving and finally flourishing, he had become an adept liar, a shrewd manipulator, a vivid reader of human weakness, a tough, scrawny, tattooed old jail rat, capable of witnessing the most extraordinary violence without a wince. Other people’s sorrow meant nothing to him at all; empathy had been milled out of him by the prison and, in fact, his favorite of all memories was the recollection of that blissful day in 1962 when he had stove in that nigger’s head with a spade, then sat down and had a last Cherry Smash before cops arrived.

  So it turned out freedom meant little to him; a chance to strike at the goddamned skunk-ass Swaggers was enough to get him happily through his old age.

  His role was easily within his grasp. He was told that sometime in the next week or so, Bob Lee Swagger would come to him in the forest. Don’t ask how or why, he just will; trust us. Your role, Jed, is twofold. First, simply step on a rigged floorboard that will send a radio signal. The second, keep him there until after dark or at least until twilight. You have no other responsibilities. In the daylight, Bob Lee is a formidable man. In the night, he is just another target.

  Jed knew he could do this. Cackling evilly through his toothless gums, he thought he had a trick or two up his sleeve that would keep them boys busy for a time.

  The sniper was the second part of Red’s plan. Now located on a farm just on the other side of 70 in the charge of Duane Peck, Jack Preece had spent the past few days in night-fire exercises and Duane reported that at ranges out to two hundred yards he was extremely deadly. He regularly patrolled, both by day and by night, the terrain on which the engagement was slated; terrain familiarity, after all, was the sniper’s best ally. When he was alerted that Swagger had arrived at Jed Posey’s, he would move swiftly over the familiar ground to intercept. The access in and out of the draw in which the ratty old Posey cabin sat was through a narrow enfilade where a creek cut between two hills. Under combat discipline, of course, Swagger would never take such an obvious path; but he wouldn’t be thinking in such terms, but merely be obsessed by the mystery he was trying to unravel. Plus, it would be dark, and going up or around the hills would be dangerous and time-consuming.

  Preece set up his hide about 150 yards out, oblique to the left, with a good clear field of shooting, an arc of more than forty degrees. The M-16 didn’t have much recoil. They’d come along into the cone of infrared light, bright as day, and he’d drill the man first, the boy second, one 55-grain ball round to each chest, velocity a little under 3,000 feet per second, delivering about 800 foot-pounds of energy. The man would be dead before the boy knew a shot had been fired; the boy would be dead before the man had begun to fall.

  As this was explained to Red, he thought of it as an incoming simo in sporting clays, two birds coming right at you. You panic the first or second time, but you learn quickly enough to simply pull through the last bird to the first, shooting as the barrel covers up the bird. It’s a shot that’s quite easy to master but demands aggressiveness and confidence more than talent.

  It was beautiful. It turned on Bob’s predictability. He would learn that Jed Posey was free, for Red had seen to it that the black woman herself was told. He would think on it. He would investigate, and satisfy himself that it was not a trap. He would sniff, paw, hesitate, think, but in the end, because he believed, he would go forward. He had to. It was his nature to push on, heroic to the end, destroyed by his very heroism.

  Only this last bothered Red a bit: the man, like his father, was a true hero, bold, smart, violent and aggressive. Such men were harder and harder to find; possibly Bob was the last one lef
t in America, outside a few Army Rangers or Green Berets. Red respected heroism but he was not sentimental about it. If it came at him, it must be destroyed and what was accomplished must be preserved. It was that simple.

  The phone rang.

  “Bama.”

  “Mr. Bama?”

  It was a Bama lieutenant who was officially on the books as a security consultant to Redline Trucking, but actually served as Red’s troubleshooter in all aspects of communications that his enterprises demanded.

  “Yeah, go ahead, Will.”

  “Sir, you know we broke down the calls from the motel out to the army archives and that JFP Technology place for you?”

  “Yes, I do, Will. That was fine work.”

  “Well, sir, I got to thinking that if this boy is smart as we think he is, he wouldn’t use a traceable phone for a private call.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Red.

  “He’d use a pay phone. So I dropped by that hotel yesterday and I took down the numbers of all the pay phones in the lobby.”

  “Yes,” said Red, wondering where this was going.

  “Then I designed a software program for the phone company mainframe—you know, I can still get into their system.”

  “Yes.”

  “And it turned out on one of them phones, there was a collect call to Ajo, Arizona.”

  “Hmmmm,” said Red.

  “So anyway, I backchecked the number to find the address. You said he was from Arizona. Well, sir, that’s our boy’s home. He’s got a wife and a daughter there. You know, sir, I know how important this is to you. But you could now use that to strike at him. The wife, the little girl.”

  Red nodded. “Excellent,” he said. “You are one smart boy, Will. I am grateful and you will be rewarded.”

  “Thank you, sir. You want me to alert the boys?”

  “I’ll do that,” said Red. “Don’t you worry.”

  He hung up.

  It was appealing: he could strike at the family. Now he really had him.

  But it was a no-brainer.

  He thought of his own little squirmers and the warm and safe place he’d made for them. No, we don’t do families. It isn’t about families. We leave the families out of it. The families aren’t on the board.

  He wasn’t an idealist but—he just didn’t do families. It was his only rule.

  36

  Bob was still grim and freaky with paranoia. He radiated hostility and sat, hunched and tense, always silent, communicating in grunts. He didn’t want to return to the trailer or get a set of motel rooms or anything to make them easy to find. They sat in the flicker of a Coleman lamp deep in the Ouachitas, the silence even more forbidding than usual.

  “What’s eating you?” Russ finally said. “You’re pissed. I can tell. Something’s going on.”

  Bob, typically, said nothing. He looked like Achilles again, and Russ thought how the severe planes of his face would fit so appropriately under the bronze of a fierce Greek helmet, scarred from much action outside the walls of Troy.

  “You learned something,” Russ said again.

  Bob breathed out a wisp of vapor, like liquid anger, possibly enough to allow him to live another moment or two before the demons inside chewed him to pieces. He had an ulcer of anger like a gigantic leach sucking fluid from his soul.

  “I ran into a neighbor lady,” he finally said. “I couldn’t get rid of her. And then she said, ‘I wonder where that wonderful deputy is? I’m surprised he isn’t here.’ Seems our boy Duane Peck done been hanging out in Sam’s neighborhood. She saw his car parked there two, three days running and later saw Sam driving ’cross town, Duane right behind. We gonna have us a chat with Duane real soon.”

  “You, ought to reconsider that,” said Russ.

  “What for?” Bob demanded, flashing a Bronze Age glare at Russ.

  “If you call him out and kill him, you’re a murderer. What does that prove?”

  “It proves that Duane Peck is dead.”

  “But it doesn’t get the man or men who killed your father, for whom we both believe Duane works. You have to wait until Duane moves against you. Then you do him and it’s righteous; nobody cares, you go home to YKN4 and Julie. Put your anger aside until it’s time.”

  Bob stared out into the darkness. His eyes narrowed into something pale and bitter and Russ knew he was looking at the pure soul of a killer. It was the first time he’d ever recognized how much anger smoldered in Bob and what terrible things the man was capable of.

  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 th
e 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.