Black Hornet

by James Sallis

  “Bergeron here. Please. To whom am I speaking?” I told him.

  “And you’re interested in employment, my secretary says. In what capacity, if I might ask?”

  I sketched my background in paper serving, skip tracing, bodyguard and security work. Most of the last was pure invention, but set up by the rest, which was true, it sounded good.

  “Well,” he said. “Ordinarily we wouldn’t consider accepting an application over the phone. I’m sure you understand. But as it turns out, we find ourselves in need of extra help tonight—unexpectedly. A good and regular customer. Else we would have declined. And you do seem to be the kind of experienced professional we’re always looking for.”

  “Had a feeling this might turn out to be a good day,” I said.

  “First name spelled L-O-U-I-S?”

  I corrected him, then went ahead and spelled my last name too.

  “And you’re currently employed … ?”

  “I’m not—though not for lack of trying, I assure you. Generally I work freelance. Bodyguard work, collections, like I told you. And I walk a lot of paper for Boudleaux & Associates. But things have been getting thin for a while now.”

  “Frankie DeNoux?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I know him. Everybody knows him.”

  “Seems like it.”

  “Your training?”

  “Military.”

  No reason to tell him I’d gone from civilian to MP back to civilian in a hop and a skip. More skip than hop, come to think of it.

  “Address?”

  “Wouldn’t do you much good. I move around a lot.” I had my fish, I could slack off now.

  “I understand. Some place you can be reached, then? Since the law requires it.”

  I gave him Verne’s address.

  “Social Security number?”

  “Let’s see …” I tried a couple of three-digit sequences. “Sorry. Can’t remember it just this minute.”

  “No problem. Happens all the time. Just bring it in when you come by for your check.”

  “Then I have work?”

  “Are you free from seven to around twelve tonight?”

  “I can be.”

  “Then you have work. Pays four dollars an hour, four hours guaranteed, probably run between five and six. You’ll need to be at Esplanade and Broad by seven at the latest. Report to Sam Brown. Big guy, hair and beard completely white. You can’t miss him. He’s front man on this, and whatever he says, goes. Checks will be ready to pick up here by four tomorrow afternoon. We can cash your check on the premises, if you want. Sam likes you, puts in a good word, we’ll be using you again.

  “Thank you for getting in touch with us, Mr. Griffin. Any questions?”

  “Only one. What am I going to be doing?”

  “Of course. I did fail to mention that, didn’t I. You’ll be working crowd control.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “GENTLEMEN,” SAM BROWN SAID.

  Bergeron was right, he looked like a fullback. Hell, he looked like two fullbacks. You could land fighter planes on his shoulders. He wore a black suit skillfully tailored to downplay his size, but man’s ingenuity only goes so far.

  “Most of you here, I’ve worked with you before. And work, for those new to SeCure Corps, is most definitely the operative word. We pay good money, we expect good value. You take care of business, we’ll take care of you.

  “Tonight’s business is crowd control, people. You are intelligence, and intelligence only. You’ll be teamed in pairs, given walkie-talkies and specific watches. You’ll report in each fifteen minutes. You do not, repeat not, take any action. See anything unusual, anything suspicious, any sign of trouble, you get away from there and report back to me. And that’s all you do. Is that understood?

  “Officially the city anticipates that about three hundred people will show up tonight; they’re prepared to handle twice that. Police estimates are running higher, maybe as many as a thousand, they say, before it’s over, and the department has placed officers accordingly.

  “The affair’s sponsors, however, have reason to believe attendance may be well in advance of expectations. And you, gentlemen, we, are their insurance.

  “I repeat: intelligence only. Circulate, observe, reconnoiter, report. Police officers both in uniform and plainclothes will be on watch for legal violations or for any possibility of violence. Federal agents are also present. We are here expressly as their helpmates, an early warning system. And the lower profile we keep, the more effective we can be.”

  Walking up Broad on my way here, I’d seen stragglers as far back as Canal, then as I approached Esplanade, more and more, until they were everywhere: stapled to telephone poles, abandoned storefronts and boarded-up houses, impaled on ironwork fences, stuck beneath the wipers of cars sitting on bare wheels at curbside.

  CORENE DAVIS

  TONIGHT!

  COMMUNITY HALL OF

  REDEEMER BAPTIST CHURCH

  8 P.M.

  HEAR THE TRUTH

  “Who’s Corene Davis?” I asked the guy I got paired with. He was as thin as Sam Brown was broad. He could lie down, you’d think he was the horizon.

  He shrugged with shoulders a sparrow would fall off. “Big shot in Black Rights, I guess. From up North somewhere. Man said your name was Louis?”

  “Lew.”

  “James. You worked this before?”

  “Not for SeCure Corps. Usually work on my own—freelance.”

  “Oh yeah? You ever need help?”

  “Only finding customers.”

  “I know what that’s like. Used to do sales, myself. Fine men’s clothing. Only trouble was, no fine men ever came in to buy it, and I was on straight commission.”

  “What about you?”

  “What about me.”

  I gestured around us.

  “Oh. Yeah, I score a job with them a couple, three times a month. SeCure’s good people. Pay a decent wage, never try to hold back on you. I’ve been trying to get on as a regular, but it’s a long list.”

  The community center had already filled. Earlier in the day speakers had been set up outside, and now a huge crowd was forming, spilling off the sidewalk into the street and sidewalk opposite. It looked like Carnival had touched down. Most had brought food: bags of fried chicken, picnic baskets and cardboard boxes, coolers, poboys in white butcher paper.

  “Brown did say federal agents, am I right?”

  We had our backs to the wall across the street, keeping watch on new arrivals.

  “Word is,” James said, “there’ve been threats.”

  “What kind of threats?”

  “The death kind.”

  “Against Corene Davis.”

  He nodded. “They’ve kept it quiet. One of the regulars I worked with before told me.”

  “Who made the threats? How were they made?”

  “That’s been kept even quieter. Someone said by letter—white ink on black paper. I don’t know. Yoruba’s been mentioned. So has the group that wears purple shirts and berets. The Black Hand seems to be a current favorite.”

  Around the corner to our right came a group of young men, sixteen of them marching in formation, four-by-four. They wore black jeans and shirts and their heads were shaved. The leader, front left, called out the rhythm as they advanced. They executed the turn in finest drill form, at crowd’s edge made a perfectly coordinated right-face and marked time as the leader counted down cadence. Then they stood erect and still, feet slightly apart, hands clasped in the small of their back, eyes forward.

  “Don’t you just love watching the little childrens play soldier?” a voice said to my left. As I turned that way, Leo Tate stepped up grinning, Clifford close behind.

  “Yeah, get themselves some cool hats like yours, they’d really look sharp.”

  “Such a romantic soul, Lewis.”

  “I try. Had no idea you guys were interested in Corene Davis, though.”

  “We’re interested in any
one who tries to tell the truth about being black in this country.”

  “You happen to know anything about threats against her life?”

  The two of them exchanged glances. Clifford shrugged, shoulders moving maybe a quarter-inch. Leo nodded back in kind.

  “We heard that, yeah. Mostly why we’re here.”

  “Any idea who could be behind it?”

  “You want the long list or the short one? Short one’s almost as long as the long one—know what I’m saying?”

  “Of course, there may be nothing to it all,” Clifford said.

  Static crackled on the walkie-talkie, and Leo looked down at my hand.

  “Man, everybody’s playing soldier today. They give you your official decoder badge too?”

  “Friends of yours, I take it,” James said after they had stepped off into the ever-thickening crowd. I looked at him. He just shook his head. “Takes all kinds.”

  I looked around us again. “Which is about what we’ve got here.”

  “For sure.”

  We made our way along the rear of the crowd, which by now had expanded well into the next block. People still streamed in from every direction. James called to report, cupping his hand over the walkie-talkie and all but shouting to be heard against the din.

  We had turned to start back across when a hand fell on my shoulder and someone spoke behind me.

  “Lewis. I can’t help but notice that you seem to be taking a sudden, decided interest in black affairs these days.”

  “Working,” I said. I held up the walkie-talkie.

  Hosie looked at it, back at me. “That may be even more intriguing.”

  “Leaping to conclusions again?”

  “Peering cautiously over the edge of one, anyhow. Go on about your business, Lewis, whatever it is. We can talk later.”

  We started across to check out the other side, noting that a half-dozen hardcases had grouped around the men in black with shaved heads. The hardcases were tossing insults and taunts at them. The sixteen men stood in formation looking straight ahead, making no response.

  I glanced at James. He nodded and bent his head close to the walkie-talkie to call it in.

  Cackles shot from the speakers outside the hall, then a loud, shrill peal before they were again shut down. After a moment a steady sizzling sound came back on. Several taps—of fingers? A clearing throat.

  “Ladies … and … gentlemen.

  “Brothers.

  “Sisters.

  “It is a great honor tonight to be called upon to introduce the young lady sitting here beside me. Rarely has the voice of our black nation, rarer still that of its youth, been heard so clearly, with such honesty and …”

  Static obliterated the voice. There were further thumps. A murmur started through the crowd.

  Momentarily the voice resurfaced: “… testimony to an enduring people.” Then more static and, after a bit, speakers chopping his words into hiccups: “Ladies and gentlemen, please bear with us.”

  Static.

  The crowd’s murmur grew both in pitch and intensity.

  “… a minor technical problem, I’m told, now resolved. And so, with no more preamble or presumption, I present to you: Miss Corene Davis.”

  But apparently the technical problem wasn’t that minor after all. Even as he spoke, speakers were cutting in and out, swallowing words and syllables.

  “I would like to begin tonight,” Corene Davis said once the applause had died down, “by quoting Andre Breton:

  “ ‘Beauty,’ he said, ‘will be convulsive, or it will not exist.’ ”

  It was then that the speakers cut out once and for all.

  The crowd’s murmur built to a roar. I could hear, from every corner, shouts and curses, raised voices, breaking glass. Fists went into the air. Tidelike surges shuddered through the mass of bodies around me. I watched as the sixteen men with shaved heads, as though on order, broke rank all at once and tore into the hardcases who had been heckling them.

  Ten minutes later, we had a full-scale riot on our hands.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “YOU DO HAVE A WAY OF ALWAYS being there, looking up just as the pigeons fly over.”

  “It’s a gift.”

  “What the hell were you doing there?”

  I told him.

  “And you think there’s a connection between the shooter and SeCure Corps?”

  “This so-called Sentry’s the only other person I’ve come across lately who’s as shy as our sniper.”

  “Shy—and high.”

  “Exactly. Well worth checking out even if it weren’t the only lead we had.”

  “Mr. Griffin?”

  We both turned. A low-browed, acned young man in a lab coat stepped through the curtain. He was tall and gangly and looked to be all of sixteen, as though he ought to be mowing lawns and sitting at the movie wondering how to get an arm casually around his date’s shoulder. Instead, here he was patching people back together and trying to save the occasional life.

  “Your X-rays came back. Skulls series and cervical spine are okay, no problems there. That hand looks okay, as far as we can tell. No evidence of fracture. You’re going to have one mother of a bruise, and the hand may swell up till you look like Mickey Mouse. However …”

  The great medical however.

  “… you have three cracked ribs. I don’t think there’s any danger, but we’d like you to stay here overnight for observation.”

  I shook my head. “Tape them.”

  “Mr. Griffin—”

  I stopped him. “Doctor. I appreciate your concern, believe me. But I’ve been through this before.”

  “You don’t understand. With injuries of this kind there’s always the possibility of—”

  “Lung puncture, pneumothorax, atalectasis, pneumonia. I do understand. As I said, this isn’t exactly new territory for me. First time, I went to bed the way I was told and I got so sore it took me two months to get over it all. Next time, because someone was stalking me, I didn’t have a choice, I had to keep moving. By the end of the week I’d almost forgotten it ever happened.”

  “Well … you have a point. All right, Mr. Griffin. We’ll do it your way, on a couple of conditions. One: you let me write a prescription for you in case the pain gets too bad, so you’ll at least be able to rest.”

  “Second?”

  “You come back day after tomorrow and let me take a look at you.”

  “Agreed.” Though I knew there was little chance I’d come back. He probably knew it too.

  “I’m still not clear on this thing with Davis,” Walsh said as the doctor began wrapping me.

  I looked beneath one raised arm.

  “When all hell started breaking loose, I had to wonder if it might be a set-up. If the whole thing, the speaker trouble, the ensuing riot, all of it, hadn’t started out just as a way to provide distraction.”

  “Making it easy for anyone who wanted to take Corene Davis down.”

  I nodded. “Hold still, Mr. Griffin,” the doctor said.

  “There wasn’t anything I could do out on the edge like that. Man could have been standing in moonlight on the roof with a cannon and I wouldn’t have seen him. So I pushed into the crowd. Thinking all the time that if I got in closer to the center, there was at least a chance I’d see something—assuming there was something to see.

  “About this time they brought Corene Davis out a side door, trying to get her away from danger. They came out of the church itself, not the community center, and I just happened to be in the right position and looking that way. Four men pressed close to her, and they were making for a black Lincoln parked in the alley behind.

  “I caught a glimpse, just a flash of motion, from a doorway back there. I wasn’t even sure, afterward, that I really saw it. But I went over the low stone wall between the buildings and along it, crouched as low as I could and still keep my speed up, and just as they reached the car, Corene and her escorts, this guy stepped out of the doorway.
”

  “You broke his arm in two places, Lew. Witnesses said it looked like you were trying to tear it off. Then you started in on the rest of him.”

  “I don’t know. I was concentrating on the gun. Funny how fast it came swiveling away from the others and toward me. All I wanted to do once he was down was make sure he stayed down. Man had one hell of a kick to him.”

  “Well, you took him down, all right. Hard. Be a while before he gets back up.”

  “Who is he?”

  “We don’t have much yet. His name’s Titus Kyle, appears to be local. We’ve got his picture and prints on the wire, and feds are running a check for affiliations with subversive organizations, known activist groups and the like.”

  “He’s an old man.”

  Walsh nodded. “Late fifties, anyway.”

  “Not the shooter.”

  “Nope.”

  “How does that feel, Mr. Griffin?” the doctor said.

  I lowered my arms, twisted about, took a deep breath. “Like someone’s sitting on me.”

  “Perfect.” He may even have smiled. “See you day after tomorrow.” He scribbled on a pad, tore off the sheet and gave it to me. “Every four hours if you need it.”

  Walsh handed me my shirt. I managed to get it on without gasping.

  “There’s a line forming outside the ER door, you know. People taking numbers. Your dance card’s filled. Five or six reporters, someone from the mayor’s office. Man from SeCure Corps wants to offer you a full-time position. And Miss Davis is waiting to thank you personally.”

  I tucked the shirt in, put on my coat. “There a back way out of here?”

  “That’s what I thought you’d say. Yeah, there is. And a car waiting in the alley.”

  We made it along narrow corridors smelling of chlorine and through a steel fire door without getting spotted. Walsh started the engine and sat there a moment looking ahead.

  “You know, you probably saved more than one life out there tonight, Lew,” he said.

  Then he slipped the Corvair into gear and headed for Jefferson Highway.