Black Light

Lamar Pye and his gang, it’s write tickets. He probably wrote ten thousand tickets in his time.”

The moment hung in the air. Bob had a sense of something before his eyes, something luminous and heavy, something palpable and dense, something big.

He looked at Russ.

Russ looked back.

“Something’s on your face,” said Russ.

“Ah—” Bob thought. “Tickets,” he finally said. “Tickets.”

“So? I—”

Then he too felt the touch of the breeze.

“In my father’s effects. Remember?” said Bob. “A last book of tickets, half gone. Right to the end: he was giving out tickets.”

Tickets, he thought: tickets.

45

“P

ull!”

Incomers. They shot from the trap, a simultaneous pair, and rushed at him as if they were bound to destroy him.

But Red was together today. The Krieghoff barrel was a black blur as it rose through the lowest—he fired— and then moved, instinctively, a bit right and up through the highest—and fired again. The two birds detonated spectacularly against the green of the forest, powdered, literally obliterated, by the 7? Remington charges.

“You are on a tear, Red!” said his companion.

“I am, I am,” he said, pleased.

He’d hit thirty-eight straight. He hadn’t missed. The expensive shotgun felt alive and beautiful in his hands, hungry to kill. It sought the birds as if liberated from all restraint, like a purebred, ferocious dog just off the leash, and gunned them out of the sky mercilessly, pounded them to puffs of orange powder.

“I feel good,” said Red. “Next week, I’m taking the family to Hawaii. All of ’em. Both wives, all the kids, except goddamned Amy, who wouldn’t go across the street to see me hanged, my guards, the whole thing. My first wife’s mother, goddammit. The Runner-up’s worthless brother, for God’s sake. We’ll have a great time.”

“You’ve been through a lot,” said his companion. “You want to be fresh for the fall.”

“Yes, I do,” said Red.

They walked through the forest to the next station. It was a beautiful day in West Arkansas and the trees towered majestically, green and dense against the pure blue sky and the surrounding mountains. The path occasionally yielded to openings where they could look out on the humps of the Ouachitas stretched before them, or, in another direction, to the flatter lands of Oklahoma to the west.

“It’s good to be alive,” said Red.

Ahead, his trapper scampered into the trap station and Red stood back as his friend took the next cage. Rising teal, far out, a tough one, a single, a following pair and a simo pair. As he set up to shoot, Red absently closed his gun, took out his choke wrench and changed his Improved Cylinder and Skeet I and screwed in Modified and Modified Improved for the longer shot.

His friend was shooting an expensive Perazzi and was an excellent shot, but not up to Red’s standards today. He fired, took the single, but only one of the following pair.

“Just relax,” called Red.

“I’m too relaxed,” he called back.

“Pull,” he called, and the two birds climbed out of the tree line against the blue sky; he followed and tracked them and fired, but only one vaporized.

“Damn!” he said.

“You have too much on your mind,” Red said. “You have to be empty, Zenned out. You have to trust your instincts.”

His friend laughed.

“Whenever I trust my instincts,” he said, “I get into trouble.”

Red went into the shooting cage, a little wooden gazebo that oriented him down a long yellow draw to a clump of bushes between two golden hills, slid a Remington into the lower barrel and set himself.

“Pull!” he commanded, and the bird announced its own launch with the whang of the trap arm, and soon rocketed into vision. With leisurely aplomb, Red followed it and dusted it.

Felt so good!

He ejected the shell, dropped two more into the chambers, reset himself. He gave himself a second to think out the sequence: see it, move, mount, shoot, follow through. He took a breath, looked for little indications of panic or doubt and found none.

“Pull,” he shouted.

Whang the bird rose and he waited until it came to a dead rest, that wondrous moment where gravity and acceleration were in total equipoise and blew it away. He dropped the barrel a bit to pick up the rise of the following bird and there it was, there it was, he rose up and through it and squeezed and the bird was vapor.

Ah, he thought, a warm surge of pleasure. He’d never shot a 50. He’d had seven 49s, dozens of 48s, and hundreds of 47s and 46s, but never a 50. And he’d never been this close. And this teal simo was the last really tough shot. He had to get this shot and then it was downhill.

He broke the gun, watched the small mushroom of gun smoke rise from the chambers as each shell popped out, and threaded two more in.

He set himself, but didn’t want to take too much time, because it’s more than possible to think yourself out of a good shooting sequence. He liked where he was: loosey-goosey, ready, hot, fluid, quick and in the zone.

“Pull!” he called.

Nothing happened.

No whang, no birds, nothing.

Damn. He hated it when that happened. That’s how you lose concentration. He made a mental note to chew out the trapper when the round was finished.

“Are you ready?” he yelled.

There was no answer.

He took the silence as assent, set himself again, wiped his mind and once again called, “Pull!”

Again: no birds.

“Mike,” he called the trapper’s name. “What the hell is going on?”

There was no reply.

He looked back to his friend and—

The vibrator on his pager buzzed against his hip.

Damn! That meant Peck was calling him. What the hell was this about? He thought about ignoring it, just shooting the round out, but how do you ignore it?

Call him, get it dealt with, then get back in the round.

He leaned the shotgun against the gun cage, stepped out.

“Have to make a call,” he told his companion.

He dialed the message line, waited for it to connect, heard that he had one new message and then got the message.

“Call for the birds again,” it said.

Fine, he thought, stepping back into the cage, picking up the shotgun.

Then his mind computed the significance.