Black Light

Worked best on clear, dark nights. He puts out a beam. He watches my daddy in that beam. My daddy never knows a thing. One shot. Only the snake knew. It felt the heat; it has pit organs in its skin, heat receptors, and when the light came onto it, it stirred, rattled. Then it did what a hunter would do. It went toward the source of the infrared. That’s why it crossed the road, no matter all the cops. It was hunting the sniper.”

“But you can’t know,” said Russ. “It’s all abstract theory. There’s no real proof.”

“Yes, there is,” said Bob. “The bullet hole in my father’s chest. It was .311 of an inch, which is the diameter, with impact beveling, that an M-l carbine bullet would make. Jimmy had a .38 Super. Its diameter would be a little more than .357. Bub had a .44 Special, which hadn’t been fired. My father was killed in the dead of night by a .30 carbine bullet.”

“Jesus,” said Russ.

“You see the whole thing was about killing my father. I don’t know why. My father must have known something, but there’s nothing in his behavior that last week to suggest anything unusual was going on. But these guys maneuvered very cleverly. Stop and think: They investigated Earl and found his weakness, his soft heart for a white trashy punk named Jimmy Pye. They got to Jimmy in jail, made him some kind of offer so good he had to take it and sell out everything he had. They set up a grocery store job guaranteed to make Jimmy famous, even to the little bit about him stopping for a hamburger! They moved him downstate; he got in contact with Daddy to surrender. They had access to a state-of-the-art piece of hardware and a military shooter who knew what the hell he was doing, just in case. Thorough, professional, very well thought out, all contingencies covered. All to kill one little state trooper sergeant in rural Arkansas in a way that would appear to be open-and- shut. Put the body in the grave, say the prayers and walk away from it.”

Russ said, “And it’s still going on. The exchanged headstones. Duane Peck.”

“Yes, it is.”

He nodded.

“Only the snake knew,” repeated Bob. “It was hunting the sniper. Now I am.”

It came down to a telephone. There was no telephone at Bob’s trailer so after he and Russ ate and changed and Bob locked the Ruger and its ammunition in the Tuf-Box bolted across the back of his truck, they got in and headed not into town but to the Days Inn, where Bob rented a room—for its phone and its privacy.

Jorge, leading a convoy of hitters, got to Bob’s trailer forty minutes after they left. The truck was not in sight.

“Goddamn,” he said.

He went back to the men in his unit. He left one man in the trees across from the trailer with a pair of binoculars and a phone; he assigned the remaining vehicles to begin to patrol on preselected routes in Blue Eye and greater Polk County, in search of the truck, a green Dodge, one unpainted fender, Arizona plates SCH 2332. The instructions were simple. They weren’t to make contact or even follow. Instead, they were to phone in; Jorge himself, with telephone consultations with the boss, would try and determine where Bob was headed. The idea was to set the ambush well in advance and spring it with the whole team, in the coordinated way they had agreed upon.

Unawares, Bob started his hunt with a call to the Pentagon, Department of the Army, Archives Division, Sergeant Major Norman Jenks.

“Jenks.”

“Say, Norman.”

“Bob Lee, you old coot! What the hell, you still kicking around?”

“I seem to be.”

The old sergeant, who’d first met on Bob’s second tour when he led recons up near Cambodia while assigned to SOG and Jenks had been S-2 staff, chatted for a bit in the profane language of retired senior NCOs. But eventually Bob got to it.

“Need a favor.”

“Name it, Coot. If I can do it, I’ll do it. I’m too old for them to do anything to me now.”

“And too top-heavy,” sergeantspeak for having won too many combat decorations.

“Yeah, well,” said Jenks. “Go ahead, pard. Shoot.”

“You remember you guys had a gadget called a goddamned Set No. 1/M3 20,000 Volt?”

“That piece of shit? My first tour the ARVNs were using ’em. They were old then, and they was supposed to be fungus-proofed but whoever said they was never saw the fungus in Nam. That shit’d eat you for lunch!”

“Yeah, it was old by the sixties.”

“It was really World War II vintage. Based on some piece of German gear an OSS team brought back after the war, as I recall.”

“Well, anyway, I’m looking at the year 1955. Suppose a fellow had a need to use a night-vision setup in 1955 and he was in West Arkansas. How’d he get a hold of one? Where’d they be? Were they issued widely to troops? Would they have been, say, up at Campbell with the 101st Airborne? Would they have been at Bragg with the 82nd? Or maybe they were up at that ballistics development lab in Rhode Island? I’m just trying to get a feel for how common they was and how close to West Arkansas. And who was their expert? Who advocated them? Who trained on them and knew them? My feeling is, you couldn’t become proficient without training.”

“You couldn’t. It was like looking into an aquarium. The gooks never did figure it out. Anyhow, when do you need this by?”

“If it came yesterday, I’d be late.”

“Damn, Bob, what the hell this all about?”

“It’s a deal I’m working on with a writer.”

“Oh, a book! It’ll be a best-seller, I can guarantee you. You gonna tell him about An Loc?”

“I might.”

“Okay, I got a light schedule today and a newbie spec 4 just assigned; I’ll get this boy right on it. Number?”

Bob gave him the number.

“You hang tight. I’ll see what we can dig up.”

He hung up.

“Now what?” said Russ.

Bob opened his wallet and peeled out $300.

“I want you to take the truck and head up one exit on the Etheridge Parkway. That’s the Y City exit. I seem to recall a camping store up there. You go up there and buy two sleeping bags, a Coleman lantern, some Coleman fuel, some changes of underwear, toothbrushes, the works. Remember the fuel, the damn lantern don’t work without it! We’re not going back to my trailer for a spell.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s good to change your base of operations every once in a while. We been at the trailer a week. We’ll move somewhere else for a couple of days or so.”

“But I had a sleeping bag. At the trailer. I had underwear. I had—”

“Now, don’t get yourself lathered up. Man, you start to squeal like a pup every goddamned time. We’ll leave that stuff there. If anybody like a Mr. Duane Peck takes a look, he’ll see it and figure we’re due back at any time. Got it?”

“You are paranoid,” said Russ.

“Para-what?”

“Never mind.”

Russ left. Bob lay back and rested. He gave Russ time to drive off, then left the room and went down the hall to the pay phone and called his wife collect.

“Well, hello.”

“Well, howdy, stranger,” said Julie. “Thought you’d married a movie star and headed for California.” “Not this boy. No sir. Ah—”

“Ah—I know that tone. You’re about to tell me something I don’t want to hear.”