Black Hornet

them, sixty-four panes per frame. Six hundred and forty different worlds.

At one rear corner, away from the windows, a mattress and box springs were flanked by orange crates, six of them stacked one atop another on either side and crammed with paperback books. Beneath the window two inch- thick doors on makeshift sawhorses comprised a bare banquet table. Midway in the room, on a nine by twelve cotton rug, sat a Danish Modern chair, spindly table and floor lamp: a kind of island, or raft.

Outside the windows an expanse of rooftops littered with beer bottles and pigeon droppings, pools of black tar, necks of antiquated ventilator shafts rising from them like so many Loch Ness monsters.

Beneath the improvised table a steel box filled with ammunition. 308 caliber, 173-grain, boat-tail bullets.

Milk in the tiny refrigerator had gone sour. Leftover coffee in the carafe had been there a while. The Times-Picayune on the floor by the bed was last week’s Wednesday edition.

So while this was headquarters, command central, home base, evidently he spent much of his time out there.

On recon.

Way out in the world somewhere, as Buster Robinson, Robert Johnson, or John Lee Hooker would put it.

Methodically I went through what there was to go through: a plastic suitcase tucked behind the front door, boxes of foodstuff from a shelf by the toilet mounted in the corner opposite mattress and box springs, the toilet tank itself, gym bag, bookshelves. I learned that he liked Philip Atlee, Simenon and natural history, used Ipana toothpaste, drank French Market coffee, bought his clothes at Montgomery Ward and Penney’s, kept a Walther PPK under his mattress.

Nothing personal anywhere.

No bulletin board scaled with news clippings about his victims. No lists. No collage of candid snapshots. No file of letters to the editor, to old lovers, to the President. No stacks of pamphlets, propaganda, messages-in- bottles.

I could wait, of course. He might be back in ten minutes with a sack of food-or in a week.

I’d been careful not to misplace anything, not to give any clue that someone had been here.

I went back down the ringing stairs, along the second-floor hallway, through the banks of plants onto Julia, and sat in a doorway opposite. Four men who could have been the shooter walked by.

Five men.

Six.

Then I remembered what Papa had told me, that first time: You want to find him, you look up.

I did, and saw a figure making its way over the crest of the adjoining roof.

Talk about private entrances.

He moved easily down the slope, dropped a foot or two onto his own flat roof. When he came to the edge he turned and went backward off it, body pivoting at the waist, legs snaking in at the top of one of the open window frames.

Then he was inside.

Within minutes I was, too.

Watching his back at the huge table by the windows as I eased into the room.

“Griffin, right?” he said. “From the alley that night. And the motel out on Airline.” A coffee mug came into view past his right shoulder as he set it down. “You’re a persistent man.”

I wasn’t, not really. Closer to plain stubborn than to anything else.

“I’d feel better about this if you didn’t come any closer, or move around too much. I assume you know that I’m armed.”

And I knew, from the way his head tracked me, that he could see me in the window glass. I just didn’t know how well.

I had the gun Walsh had returned, but I wasn’t going to use it.

“I have no quarrel with you, Griffin. Don’t open doors that don’t need opening.”

I looked to the left and started as though to rush him, then twisted and dived hard right. He saw it change but had started his own turn left and couldn’t pull out of it quickly enough. His right hand with the gun was coming around just as I hooked his left arm and, using my own momentum, spun him back onto the table.

To my credit, I got the handgun away from him as it came around.

To his, he rebounded off the table with a two-handed blow to my chest that put me down like a felled tree.

I felt him pulling at the gun, trying to pry it loose. Stubborn, remember? Even if I couldn’t catch my breath.

Then I realized he wasn’t trying any longer.

I had to breathe. Had to get up.

When I did, and got to the window, I saw him scrambling among protrusions-an ancient chimney, a low wall of some sort, an antenna-two roofs away.

By the time I got there, he was halfway up a steel ladder bolted into the next building. This building was twice as tall. Up here that’s all there was to them: height, how level the roofs were, how much was in your way. Nothing else mattered. It was a lot simpler world.

I scrambled up the ladder after him, steadily gaining, and lunged over the rim of the roof just in time to see his shoe sink into a pool of soft tar. It stuck there. He stumbled. Fell.

I was almost to him when he hooked clawlike fingers into the laces and tore them out. Leaving the shoe behind, he sprinted off again, listing to the left with each jog. Quasimodo heading for his tower.

But I was closing fast.

He hopped onto a parapet, crouched for a short jump to the next roof. The wall was ancient cement, crumbling everywhere, and somehow I knew what was about to happen.

Instinctively I leapt toward him just as the wall gave way. He tried to go ahead with the jump.

I missed.

So did he.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

I remember standing there for what seemed like a long time looking down, wondering what all this meant, wondering if it could possibly mean anything. All those people senselessly, needlessly dead. Now one more.

I thought about Esme’s face falling away from me. Wondered if all my life that’s what people would be doing: falling away from me, leaving. I was closer to the truth than I could know.

Over the next years, through many more departures, through the ruins of a marriage, sitting in Joe’s or Binx’s, in the Spasm Jazzbar or bars down along Dryades where Buster was playing, I’d think about that a lot. For a while that’s about all I did. Read during the day, drink and think at night. Then the nights started advancing on the days.

I’d cracked my head on the parapet when I lunged to try to catch him, and standing there looking over the edge-it couldn’t have been long, though it seemed that way-I felt myself tipping forward, dizzy. I stepped back, something hit me, and suddenly I was looking at sky.

Pale blue, bright. Puffy white clouds tacking slowly through it. Birds askitter.

Then something black that started at the center, grew, flew toward me, erased it all.

LaVerne’s face was above me when I awoke. No sky now, only a chipped plaster ceiling, but that same pale blue. And voices that for a terrifying moment seemed not outside but within me.

“Lew? Can you hear me? Do you remember what happened?”

Other voices behind hers, all of them crowded together and indistinguishable. The whole world, when I opened my eyes again, flat, as though all its surfaces had been skimmed away and pasted onto cardboard.

I tried to clear my throat. They’d sealed it over somehow. Plaster, cement, Superglue. Rolled the stone back in place. For the love of God, Montressor.