Black Light bls-2

by Stephen Hunter

  Bub contemplated this novel idea. Suddenly a carhop appeared.

  “What’s the ruckus, honey gal?” Jimmy asked her.

  “Some old boys robbed the IGA,” she said. “They done killed some people and a nigger too.”

  “Oh, you just wait,” said Jimmy, giving Bub a big wink, “bet that changes real soon and you find out nobody’s been shot for real.”

  “I don’t know,” said the girl.

  “What’s your best burger here?”

  “We got all kinds. They sell a lot of the Bacon Supreme. You got your bacon and your cheese and your lettuce and tomato. They got to hold it together with toothpicks. They put a little flag on it. It’s really cute.”

  “Sound good to you, Bub?”

  Bub nodded. He was hungry.

  “Yeah,” said Jimmy, “two of them Bacon Su-premes, two orders of the fries, and you got a good milk shake? I mean, now, made out of real ice cream and milk, mixed up superthick on one of them beater things?”

  “Yes sir. Best shakes in the town.”

  “You bring us two. Chocolate.”

  “Strawberry,” said Bub.

  “One choc, one straw,” said the girl.

  Jimmy sat back. He lit another Lucky, inhaled deeply, then looked at his watch. He seemed like a man without a worry in his mind.

  “You just re-lax now,” he crooned. “It’s all going to be all right. It’s going to be cool. We are the coolest cats around.”

  The girl brought the hamburgers and it was the best hamburger Bub had ever had. In Blue Eye, a place named Check’s Check-Out offered hamburgers, but they was greasy wads of overcooked beef on a tough little bun, nothing like this. Heaven: the meat was so damn tender, the cheese tangy, but that bacon really made the thing sing. Who’d ever think of putting a piece of bacon on a burger?

  “Damn,” Bub said, “ain’t that a damn burger?”

  “That’s a king burger,” said Jimmy. “The king of all burgers. Okay, now, you just come with me.” He got out of the car, taking the bag that said IGA with him ever so casually, and just began to amble along, easy as can be.

  “By now, they got our car ID’d,” he said. “We wouldn’t get two damn blocks with it. So we’ll git another car right where I got the last one. See, this is working out just fine.”

  They turned off the main road and walked a block or two into a nice little area with small houses neatly kept. The summer heat was lighter because of the heavy green trees that closed everything off. It felt enchanted. Water sprinklers heaved back and forth like giant fans on a few of the lawns and a couple of young men mowed their grass, the mowers sounding clackety and mechanical. They passed an old lady.

  “Howdy, ma’am,” said Jimmy. “Nice day.”

  “Nice day to you, young man,” she answered with a smile.

  Soon enough Jimmy came to an Oldsmobile parked unattended in a driveway. He turned back and smiled at Bub.

  “See, you get all nervous, you can’t do nothing, people sense you’re up to bad. You be cool, you just smile and look like you got the whole world in your back pocket, they back off and give you all the room you want. You just watch how damn easy this gonna be.”

  With that, he sauntered up the driveway, opened the door and in a second had the car started. He backed up.

  “Come on, Bub. You gonna wait for Mr. Earl Swagger himself to invite you?”

  Bub got in.

  Off they drove, in another nice car, tooling down suburban streets as mild as could be. Jimmy looked at his watch again, as if he had a schedule to keep.

  “Turn on the radio, find us some good tunes,” he said.

  This felt weirdly familiar to Bub and he bent over and worked the dials and knobs as a crackle of sounds came out. But none of that hard-driving hillbilly crazy stuff that Jimmy preferred. He got some country, Patsy Cline, he got that Perry Como singing about the moon hitting your eye like a big pizza pie, he got Miss Day doing “Que Sera, Sera” and he got—

  “Authorities in Fort Smith have set up a two-state dragnet to locate two armed and dangerous men who robbed a downtown grocery store, killing four men including a police officer.”

  Bub just heard the killing news dumbly.

  “The police say that newly released car thief Jimmy M. Pye, of Blue Eye, and his cousin Buford ‘Bub’ Pye, also of Blue Eye, were responsible for the outbreak of violence on peaceful Midland Boulevard. They theorize that the two killers will attempt to return home to the Polk County wilderness.

  “Says State Police Colonel Timothy C. Evers,” and here a richer, deeper voice came across the radio, “‘If I know my bad men, they’ll head to land they know. Well, they’ll run into our blockades and we’ll take care of ’em the way they should be taken care of.’”

  “That ole boy sounds ticked,” said Jimmy. “He sounds like we got him out of bed or something. Jesus.”

  “J-J-J-Jimmy?”

  “Yeah, cuz?”

  “He did so say we done killed them boys.”

  “Well, maybe they was real bullets in my gun. But there weren’t none in yours. You in the free. You was just ’long for the ride, Bub. Your cuz Jimmy wouldn’t get you in no shit, that I swear. Wouldn’t be cool at all. Now, we’s just gonna head out to Blue Eye, pick up Edie and off we go. Figure we may lay up with an uncle I got over in Anadarko, Oklahoma. He’ll—”

  But Bub was crying.

  “Bub, what’s eating you, boy?”

  “Jimmy, I want my mama. I don’t want to go to no jail. I didn’t want to kill nobody. Oh, Jimmy, why is this happening? It ain’t fair. I never did nothing wrong, not nothing. I just want—”

  “There, there, Bub, don’t you worry ’bout nothing. I swear to you, you got it all up ahead: California, a job as a star’s Number One Boy. You can bring your mama out there and buy her a nice little house. It’s all set up. I swear to you, all set up.”

  Bub began to sniffle. His heart ached. He threw the gun on the floor. He just wanted to make it all go away.

  “Well, lookie here,” said Jimmy.

  Bub looked up and saw a gaudy sign against the bright blue sky, but since it was midday, the sign wasn’t turned on. It said “Nancy’s Flamingo Lounge” and Bub noticed that all up and down the street were other places called “clubs,” all of them with unlit signs and the sleepy look of nighttime spots. Jimmy pulled off the road and down a little driveway so that he was out back, in a parking lot area dominated by a large, blank garage.

  There was utter silence.

  “Hey,” said Jimmy. “Guess what? We there. We made it. We gonna be fine.”

  Bub watched as the large garage doors of the structure peeled back and Jimmy eased the car forward. Darkness and silence swallowed them, cut only by some jangled music, far off, as from a cheap, small radio.

  ROCK ROCK ROCK around the clock tonight

  ROCK ROCK ROCK ’til the broad daylight!

  “Cool,” said Jimmy.

  3

  When he got there, he thought everything would clear up, but instead—and of course—things simply got more confused. He took a room in a cheap motel near the Mexican quarter of town and spent the morning fretting in his room about his next step. Here’s what he came up with: no next step.

  Ultimately, he decided to go for a walk on the dumb hope that he’d just get lucky, that things would just work out, as they usually did. But of course the one fact he knew precisely and totally was that things didn’t always work out. That’s why he was here, because sometimes things don’t work out, violence and craziness break out, people die, lives are destroyed.

  It was so much hotter and brighter. It was, after all, the desert, but he’d had a different image of it, somehow. What he saw was a spine of purple mountains, or hills, actually, blocking the horizon in one direction and in all the others just low rills of hills crusted with spiny, scaly vegetation, the odd cactus pronging up off the desert floor like some kind of twisted tree of death. The color green was largely absent from a World now d
ominated by browns, ochers and pewters.

  The town was total jerkwater; it lay along a single main street, fast-food joints at one end, trailer parks and quasi “suburban” places back a little bit farther under imported palms, and the rest scabby little shops, many boarded up, convenience stores, a grocery, a dry cleaner, cowboy and Indian “souvenir” places for the odd, lost tourist, any small town anywhere too far off the interstate. This state happened to be Arizona and the town happened to be called Ajo.

  So Russ walked up and down the street and saw nothing and didn’t get lucky. He found a bar-café and eventually had lunch, listening to cowboys talk in low hushed voices about nothing much. Nobody noticed him. Finally, he paid the bartender the five dollars for the sandwich and thought he caught a semihuman smile of acknowledgment.

  “Say,” he said, “I wonder if you can help me.”

  “Oh, I bet it is I know what you want, son.”

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “It’s pretty goddamned obvious.”

  “You get a lot of guys like me?”

  “Some like you. And other kinds too. Had a German TV crew in town for close to a month. Sold ’em maybe a thousand dollars’ worth of barbecue. The soundman, Franz, he really got to liking my wife’s barbecue.”

  “But they didn’t get anywhere?”

  “Nope. Not them. Not nobody. Had a real slick fellow from New York. He acted like he owned the world and we was his employees. He was out here for six weeks. He’d done a lot of big business. He’d set up a deal with that fellow they executed in Utah and with O.J. himself. But he didn’t get nowhere. And a French magazine writer. Some babe. Wish she’d come to write about me. I’d have told her all my secrets, even the secret to my wife’s barbecue.”

  “Does anybody ever see him? Does he come out?”

  “Oh, he’s about. Tall, quiet fellow, keeps to himself mostly. Married a damn fine woman. They got a little girl now. But he lives a life. He does things, sees things, mixes.”

  “Can you tell me where he lives?”

  “Can’t do that, son. He wouldn’t want me to. I respect him. You have to respect him. I think he just wants the world to leave him alone.”

  “I do respect him,” said Russ. “That’s why I’m here.”

  “You’re probably going to fail. Everybody else has. Why should you be different?”

  Why should I be different? Russ thought. Yes, key question.

  “Well,” Russ said, “I bet it’s something nobody ever threw at him before. It’s not even about him.”

  “Then just be patient, son. He’ll know you’re here. Probably knows already. People tell him things, you know.”

  “Yeah, I know. Well, thanks. I’ll probably end up buying my thousand dollars’ worth of barbecue too. I’m in for the long haul.”

  Russ went out—ouch! that blinding sun—and fumbled for his sunglasses. As he got them on, a pickup truck pulled down the road and Russ thought he saw him: a lean man, suntanned and leathery, with calm, squinty eyes. But no; it was just a fat cowboy.

  He ambled up and down the street, trying for eye contact with the locals, but all he got was the grim stare of smalltown America that proclaimed: No trespassing. Eventually, he went back to the motel and got out his file again.

  The exhibits were tattered and dry, a few a little greasy, from being handled too much. If reading could have drawn the blackness out of the ink, then they’d be faded as well; but it hadn’t and they weren’t. Modern industrial printing: vibrant, colorful, indestructible.

  The most famous item was the Newsweek cover from that month in 1992 when he’d been the most wanted man in America. “Bob Lee Swagger,” it said, “hero turned assassin.” Time, which he didn’t have, had run the same shot: “Bob Lee Swagger, Vietnam’s Tragic Legacy.” It was an old picture of Swagger, taken in Vietnam. It told everything and nothing: a southern face, somehow, a man in his twenties who could have been in his forties, with a jaw so grim and skin so tight he looked a little like a death’s head, which in a way he was. He wore tiger camouflage and a marine boonie cap; the eyes were narrow and hooded, allowing no contact with the world on any terms save their owner’s; they lurked behind sharply etched cheekbones. It was almost a nineteenth-century face: he looked like a cavalry trooper with Mosby or one of Quantrill’s raiders or someone who’d lugged a Colt down to the OK Corral—and come back again five minutes later, the job done. On the magazine cover, in the crook of his arm there rested a sleek rifle with about a yard of scope atop it, and it had been well established that with that tool he was one of the world’s foremost hunters of men.

  Russ passed on the cover shot and looked at other photos, which had come out of the photo morgue of his recent employer, the Daily Oklahoman of Oklahoma City. These were shots taken at the mysterious 1992 hearing that ended Bob Lee Swagger’s two months of celebrityhood and marked his return to total self-willed obscurity. He was like T. E. Lawrence hiding as Shaw the aircraftsman, a man who had an almost physical need for anonymity. He had just vanished, amazing in an America that quite routinely awarded celebrity with huge amounts of cash. But no: no book deals, no movies, no TV specials, no answers to the provocative questions some analysts had raised, suggesting that he knew things no one else knew. There’d been a rip-off novel from someone way on the outside and a number of patch-job articles in the survivalist and gun-nut press, all misleading, all vague and speculative, all, Russ knew, wrong. But one of them had contained one nugget of information: that Swagger had evidently come to roost in Ajo, Arizona, with his new wife, the handsome woman who had attended the explosive hearing.

  Therefore, thought Russ, I am in Ajo, Arizona, in a cheap motel, running out of money and time and luck.

  Finally, on the fifth day, as Russ chomped through his last morsel of barbecue while not facing the reality that his funds were getting dangerously low, the bartender came over.

  “Say there,” the man whispered, “did you know that a certain party sometimes comes to town today?”

  Russ swallowed.

  “Yes sir. It’s Friday. He comes in to lay in supplies at the Southern States. Now, I may have this mixed up with someone else, but I’d say I just saw a certain pickup heading down in that direction and if I was you, that’s where I’d relocate myself.”

  “Great!” blurted Russ.

  “You didn’t hear nothing from me.”

  “Not a thing.”

  Russ fumbled with his sunglasses and sprinted out. Southern States, Southern States? Yes, Russ remembered, two blocks down, where the ranchers gathered in the mornings before work and then returned to after work, where you could buy anything from sacks of grain to half-million-dollar International Harvester threshers. Russ was so excited he got a little mixed up, but then got himself under control and decided, rather than driving, to just hoof it.

  He turned and sprinted, his feet flying, ducking along the covered sidewalk, around the odd party of tourists, past some lolling teenagers, feeling like a complete jerk. No: feeling somehow flushed and excited. Once in his career on the Oklahoman he’d had to sub for the vacationing movie critic and go on what was called a junket, where he’d flown down to New Orleans and sat at a table in a hotel banquet room when Kevin Costner and Clint Eastwood were paraded around the room, a half an hour per table. It was of course a completely ridiculous situation, but when he first saw the two men entering the big hotel room, he felt as he felt now: giddy, goofy, unprepared, callow as a pup, completely unworthy. And they were only movie stars and turned out to be, at least as far as he could tell in the time he shared with them at the big tables, fairly decent guys but pretend heroes.

  Now, this guy was a real hero: in war and in peace, he’d done extraordinary things. As Russ ran and as his excitement mounted, his concentration scattered; his mind seemed full of glistening soap bubbles.

  A plan, he thought, you need a plan.

  But before he could hatch a plan, his shoes took him around a corner and into the parking lot tha
t lay in front of the Southern States store. It was a gravel lot and dust hung in the air; Russ stopped, and drank in what looked like a scene from some documentary on America’s working habits. This would be the rural division, as imagined by someone with the mordant glee of Hieronymus Bosch and the eye for detail of Norman Rockwell: Everywhere it seemed that farmers or ranchers or cowboys milled in the yard, swapping yarns near their pickups or backslapping and grab-assing in little clots. In the background were cattle pens and there was some lowing from the imprisoned animals. It looked like Saturday night at the railhead; where was John Wayne? Well, dammit, John Wayne was everywhere.

  These men all had craggy brown faces and seemed woven together out of rawhide and pemmican. All were encased in dusty denim and leather from head to toe in a dozen different shades, all wore boots beat to hell and gone, but the headgear was various: straw hats, Stetsons both domed and flat, brims curly or straight, baseball caps, engineer caps, even a fishing cap or two.

  Out of such chaos Russ could make no sense at all, and felt as out of it as an African American at the local Klan meeting. But they seemed to be so enjoying themselves that they paid him no mind at all, and he wandered among them, looking for a set of features he could match with the features he’d memorized off the magazine cover and the more recent photos. He’d guess a man like Bob would leave a wake of wannabes, would be at the center of a circle of acolytes, so he looked for a king among all these princes. He could make out none, and now, one or two at a time, the boys would peel out and begin to leave.

  “What’s going on?” he asked one old-timer.

  “Friday noontime, they haul in to reload on supplies. Lots of spread-out places here. More’n you’d imagine. The boys all git together for a bit of joshing time on Friday noons.”

  “I see,” he said.

  He wandered on through the thinning crowd, utterly failing to connect any of these tawny, ageless men who seemed from a different race altogether with his image of Bob Lee Swagger.

  He reached at last the supply house, where some laborer was throwing sacks of feed into the back of a weathered green pickup.