Black Light

He looked back along the road and out of the distance watched as two large sedans roared along the highway at over a hundred miles an hour, trailing dust and closing fast with the much slower moving truck.

“Oh, I smell blood. I smell the kill. It’s looking very good. Alpha, I see you and your buddy closing. You just keep closing, you’re getting close, okay now, slow way down. Mike, you and Charlie now, okay, you start moving out, nice gentle pace, about fifty-five, we are two minutes away, I got you both in play.”

Someone inadvertently held a mike button down and Red heard strange things over the radio—some harsh tense scraping and what sounded like someone systematically turning a television set on and off. Then he realized: that was the dry breathing of men about to go into a shooting war and they were cocking and locking their weapons for it.

Words poured out of Russ as if he’d lost control of them, and he could not control their tone: they sounded high, tinny, almost girlish.

“Should we stop?” he moaned. “Should we pull off and call the police? Is there a turnoff? Should we—”

“You just sit tight, don’t speed up, don’t slow down. We got two cars behind us. I bet we got some traffic ahead of us. And we got a plane off on the right coordinating it. We are about to get bounced and bounced hard.”

Russ saw Bob shimmy in the seat, but he could tell he was reaching to get something behind the seat without disturbing his upright profile. He looked into the rearview mirror and saw two cars appear from behind a bend in the road.

“Here’s the first and only rule,” said Bob steadily. “Cover, not concealment. I want you out of the truck with the front wheel well and the engine block between you and them. Their rounds will tear right through the truck and get to you otherwise.”

Russ’s mind became a cascade of silvery bubbles; he fought to breathe. His heart weighed a ton and was banging out of control. There was no air.

“I can’t do it,” he said. “I’m so scared.”

“You’ll be all right,” Bob said calmly. “We’re in better shape than you think. They have men and they think they have surprise, but we’ve got the edge. The way out of this is the way out of any scrape: we hit ’em so hard so fast with so much stuff they wish they chose another line of work.”

Ahead, one and then a second vehicle emerged from the shimmery mirage. The first was another pickup, black and beat-up, and behind it, keeping a steady rate fifty yards behind, another sedan. Russ checked the rearview: the two cars were drawing closer, but not speeding wildly. He made out four big profiles, sitting rigidly in the lead car.

“Don’t stare at ’em, boy,” said Bob, as he overcame the last impediment and got free what he was pulling at. In his peripheral vision Russ saw that it was the Ruger Mini-14 and the paper bag. He pulled something compact from the bag; Russ realized it was the short .45 automatic, which he quickly stuffed into his belt on his right side, behind his kidney. He groped for something else.

Russ looked up. The truck drew nearer. It was less than a quarter of a mile away. It would be on them in seconds now.

“Where is it?” demanded Bob of himself harshly, fear large and raspy in his voice as he clawed through the bag. His fear terrified Russ more powerfully than the approaching vehicles.

What is he looking for? Russ wondered desperately.

Red watched as his masterpiece unfolded beneath him with such solemn splendor. It was all in the timing and the timing was exquisite. De la Rivera in the Mike truck, followed by the four men in Charlie, closed from the front at around forty miles per hour. Meanwhile, the Alpha and Baker vehicles, moving at the speed limit, steadily narrowed the distance between themselves and Swagger. They would be fifty or so yards behind him when de la Rivera hit Swagger’s truck and blew it off the road.

“You’re closing nicely, Alpha and Baker,” he crooned. “You’re looking good there, Mike.”

They had him!

It would work!

Red pulled in his breath, felt his heart inflate and his blood pressure spiral.

De la Rivera was now taking over.

“Okay, muchachos, is so very muy bueno, let’s be very, very calm now, let’s stay calm and cool, I see you, Alpha, you’re so very fine, let’s do a quick double check on our pieces, make sure we got our mags seated, our bolts locked, our safeties in the red zone, let’s stay muy glace, icy, icy, very icy, very cool, it’s happening, oh, it’s gonna be so good for all of us.”

The vehicles were closing.

They had reached a flat, high section of the road, where the dwarf, ice-pruned white oak lay gnarled and stunted on either side, yielding swiftly to vistas on either side of other ranges.

“Now you listen,” said Bob fiercely. “This truck’s going to try and whack you. The split second before you pull even to him, I want you to drop to second and gun this motherfucker. That should carry us by his lunge and cut the two boys off behind us. Then I want a hard left, you rap the rear of his follow car, really mess him up, shake up the boys inside; you continue from that into a hard left panic stop, we skid across the road and come to rest in the shoulder on that side, so’s we can fall back and get into them trees and down the side of the mountain if need be. Okay, you’re coming out my side of the vehicle and you’re breaking left to the front wheel well where you’re going to cover. You take the bag. Your job is going to be to feed me magazines from the bag as I need them. You watch; when I pop a mag, you hand me the next one, bullets out so’s I can slap her in and get back to rock and roll.”

“Yes sir,” said Russ, trying to remember it all, desperate that he would forget it, but amazed somehow that already there was a plan, and somehow also calmed by it. And Bob seemed calm too.

“You gotta stay calm, you gotta stay cool,” said Bob.

“I’m okay,” Russ said, and he was.

“Ah,” said Bob, “here the goddamn thing is.” And with that he withdrew something from the bag and Russ could see that it was a long, curved magazine, different from the others, with a red-tipped cartridge seated in its lips.

The truck was on them. It was happening right now.

“What’s that?” Russ had time to ask as the universe unlatched from reality and fell into dreamlike slow motion. He heard Bob seat the magazine and with a clak! let the bolt fly home.

“Forty rounds M-196 ball tracer,” said Bob. “We’re fixing to light these boys up.”

Red watched in full anticipation of his precisely choreographed envelopment, simultaneously banking to the left and adding power so that he could hold the spectacle beneath him as he circled around it, gull-like. He watched as the vehicles seemed to combine and it was almost magical the way he’d seen it in his mind and it was working out in reality.

But there seemed to be something …

It was happening so fast, there was dust, so much dust, he couldn’t …

Confusion. He’d never seen a battle before except in the movies but in the movies everything was clear. That was the point of movies. Here nothing was clear, it was a helter-skelter, some new dance, a reinvention.

He heard them on the radio as it unfolded in microtime.

“Ah, no, goddamn—”

Whang! the jarring bang of metal on metal.

“Jesus, what is—”

“Look out, he’s firing, he’s—”

“Oh, fuck, we’re on fire. Christ, we’re burning!”

“I’m hit, I’m hit, oh, shit, I’m hit—”

“The flames, the flames.”