Black Light

Suppose he forgot this? Suppose it had vanished in the morning in that great black fog that rolled in across his mind so frequently? Home was still ten minutes ahead. The office was only five back.

He cranked into a U-turn, bumping up on a curb and crushing what had to be someone’s bushes, and with a blast of acceleration headed back.

“What the goddamn hell are you doing here?” demanded the old man. “Who the hell are you, anyway?”

“Ah—Mr. Sam, it’s Duane Peck, the deputy. I, uh, seen your lights on. I came up. Hell, you left the door wide open and the lights blazing. I’se just checking to make sure nothing was missing or that there weren’t no prowlers.”

The old man didn’t blink or back down; he didn’t retreat into confusion.

“The hell you say! I did no such goddamned thing. I turned my goddamned lights off and locked my office. What are you doing here, sitting at my goddamned desk like you own the place?”

Pugnaciously, he advanced. His shrewd old eyes ate Duane up. He saw that Duane was holding the tablet in his hand.

“What the hell are you doing with that?”

“Nothing,” Duane said.

“You were snooping! You were spying! You damned spy, what the hell are you doing?”

Then his eyes knitted up into something tight and knowing.

“Who you working for? You working for them, ain’t you, you no-’count piece of white trash.”

“Sir, I ain’t working for nobody,” Duane said, rising awkwardly. Still the man advanced on him.

“You ain’t working for the sheriff. No sir, I know the sheriff, and you ain’t working for him. Who are you working for? You tell me, you trashy dog, or by God I will beat it out of your scrawny hide and hang you out to dry in the morning.”

“Sir, I ain’t working for nobody,” Duane said, alarmed at the old man’s fiery temper.

“Well, goddammit, you better believe we’ll find out about that. Yes sir, we will get to the bottom of that.”

He pivoted slightly to pick up the phone. He dialed 911.

Duane watched him, stupefied. It was happening so quick. He tried to think what to do. His mind was blank, a vapid, empty hole.

Would they make him tell about Mr. Bama? What about the money he owed, would he still owe it to Mr. Bama? What about his new job, and how well he was doing on it? What about working for Mr. Bama personally?

The flashlight rose in his hand, almost as if on its own will, and Duane brought it down with a thunderous thud on the back of the old man’s neck. He felt the shiver of blunt instrument striking meat and bone and in the impact thought he heard or felt the sensation of something brittle breaking.

“Sheriff’s Department,” came the voice over the phone.

The old man stiffened, reached back for his wound and turned, his face black and lost, his eyes pools of emptiness. Duane smashed him again, this time where the neck met the shoulder, a powerful downward diagonal blow that made the head twitch spastically. The phone fell free and banged on the floor and the old man took a stricken step backwards, face gray, old tongue working pitifully in an old mouth, then toppled to the earth as his eyes rolled upward.

“Sheriff’s Department? Anybody there?” Duane recognized the voice as Debbie Till’s, the night-duty dispatcher.

He hung it up.

He was breathing hard. His knees felt weak. The old man lay still, but was still breathing.

Duane tried to figure what to do next. He could just leave, and they’d find him here and ascribe it to a prowler. But then there’d be an investigation. Suppose someone had seen his car parked outside?

Then he had it.

He wiped the phone off with his handkerchief, in case he’d left prints. Then he quickly turned off the lights, pausing to rub the switches with the handkerchief. He stuffed the tablet with the engraved words into his shirt. Then he hoisted Sam under his arms, feeling the old man’s lightness and brittleness. The old man stirred weakly, then went limp. Duane hefted him, because he knew if he dragged him, he’d leave a trail in the dust, and got him to the head of the stairs. He paused for just a second.

This is what Mr. Bama wants, he told himself.

He took a deep breath, gathered his strength and then launched the old man into the air. Sam hit on the fourth step, shattering his teeth, and rolled, legs and arms flopping, down the stairwell, gathering speed and violence as he went, until he smashed to a halt on the downstairs door-jamb.

Duane breathed heavily.

He went back to the office, pulled the door shut and heard it click. He wiped his prints off the knob.

Then he went down the stairs, stepping over the body.

28

A

fter the fight, Bob bypassed Blue Eye and caught the Boss Harry Etheridge Parkway and took a straight shot north up to Fort Smith. He wanted to put as much distance as he could between himself and the shooting site.

“From now on, we operate as if we can be jumped at any time. Do you understand? They are hunting us. We only got out because the boss man didn’t trust his troops and had to control the thing from the air and I saw the plane. Without that jump, I wouldn’t have had time to make a plan and we’d be dead.”

Russ nodded gravely, as if he understood, as if he were functioning normally. But he was not. He was still half in shock: so much carnage, so fast, so much noise, so much smoke.

“It was so … confusing,” was all he could think to say. Then it poured out.

“I mean, my God, it just happened, the shooting was so loud, Jesus, the explosions, we were so lucky, the whole thing just went berserk, I never knew the universe could go so psychopathic, so twisted. Jesus, you were unbelievably calm. You were like ice. I could hardly breathe.”

Bob wasn’t listening; he was thinking aloud.

“And I want to stow this truck as soon as possible. It’ll take the police two days’ worth of forensic examination before they realize there was another vehicle involved and another weapon. Then they’ll find our tread type and match the paint we left on that boy when we cropped him, and come looking for us.”

“I don’t think there’s enough left of that car to get a sample of its own paint much less any of ours,” Russ said.

“You can’t be too sure. I’ll long-term it at the airport and we’ll rent a car. Next, I got to find that Frenchy Short.”

It was six before they were checked into a Ramada Inn on 271 south of town, the truck hidden, and Bob set about finding Frenchy Short. First, he called a friend he knew at the Retired Marine Officers’ Association in Los Angeles, a retired gunnery sergeant who ran the clerical section of the association, and quickly came up with the number of a former captain named Paul Chardy, whom Bob placed in memory as having worked with Frenchy at SOG. He dialed the number, in some town called Winnetka, Illinois, and got no answer until, after several subsequent tries, he connected around 8:30

P.M

.

A woman answered the phone.

“Hello.”

“Ma’am, I’m trying to reach Captain Paul Chardy, USMC, retired.”

“May I ask what this is in reference to?”

“Yes, ma’am, he and I served together in 1969 in the Central Highlands. I’m trying to locate a third man both of us knew.”