Black Light

26

They stood on a little yellow hill under the blinding sun. Off to the east, like a white-walled city from a fairy tale, lay some intricate structure, with towers and mansards and sub-buildings: McAlester State Penitentiary. Off to the west, simple rolling Oklahoma countryside. Here there were markers, bleak and unadorned.

“So that’s it?” Bob asked. “You brought me all this way to see this?”

“Yes, I did,” said Russ. “That’s what became of Jimmy Pye’s only son. That’s what remains on this earth of what happened July 23, 1955.”

The inscription simply said, “Lamar Pye, 1956-1994.” A few feet away lay another one. “Odell Pye,” it said, “1965-1994.”

“His cousin,” said Russ. “Jim Pye’s brother’s boy. A hopeless retardate. Belonged in an institution, where no one would bother him. You see what the Pye blood got the two of them.”

“Russ, I just see two gravestones on a bare hill on a little bit of nowhere in Oklahoma. It’s like Boot Hill in some goddamned cowboy movie. It don’t mean a thing.”

“It’s just so obvious,” said Russ. “Don’t you see it? It’s all here: murder, a family of dysfunctional monsters, the seed going from father to son. It’s The Brothers K set in Oklahoma and Arkansas over two generations.”

“Son, I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. But if it helps you to come look at it and say, ‘Yeah, he’s dead, he’s gone,’ that’s fine. Glad to oblige.”

Russ looked at him sharply.

“You scream at night, Russ,” said Bob. “Sometimes two, three times. ‘Lamar,’ you scream, or ‘Dad, Dad.’ You got a mess of snakes up there. You best get yourself some help. See the chaplain, we’d say in the Corps. But see somebody.”

Russ shook his head. “I’m all right,” he said. “I just want to get this thing done with.”

“It ain’t about you and Lamar Pye. Your daddy took care of that, all right? Lamar is in the ground, he’s finished, it’s over. That’s your dad’s present to you: the rest of your life.”

“And his girlfriend was his present to himself. The end of the family, that was his present to himself.”

“Russ, things aren’t as easy as you make them. Nothing’s that clear.”

“It feels clear,” said Russ bitterly.

“You going to be all right? This thing could go crazy at any second. Maybe you ought to stay here in McAlester, take the bus back to Oklahoma City. You could get your old job back, work on the book from there. I’d let you know what I eventually found out.”

“No, this is my project, I invented it. We’ll solve it together.”

“Okay, Russ, if that’s what you want.”

They walked down the hill. A black inmate trusty waved at them.

“You find what you want?”

“Yes sir,” said Bob.

“That was Lamar Pye’s grave you stopped at, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, it was,” said Russ. “Did you know him?”

“Oooo, no,” said the man, as if a taboo had been violated. “No, Lamar was not friendly toward the brothers. He was as mean as they come. Got to say this for him, though: he was a brave man. He stood up in the joint, and when it came his time, he went down like a man. He kilt two polices.”

“Actually, he just killed one. The other one lived,” Russ said.

“My, my, do tell,” said the old trusty mildly.

They walked another fifty feet to the truck, finding themselves in some kind of depression in the land, so that down here the white-walled prison was not visible.

“You drive,” said Bob.

Russ climbed into the truck, parked a few feet away.

“Shall we head back up to U.S. 40?”

“Hell no,” said Bob, looking at a map. “We’ll go back the scenic way. I got some thinking to do. We’ll head down to Hawthorne and then over to Talihina. There’s a real pretty road down that way, takes us back over the mountains to Blue Eye. The Taliblue Trail. You’ll like it. We’ll be home for supper.”

Around noon, Red filed a flight plan that set him on a course of 240 degrees south-southwest toward Oklahoma City. It took him another half an hour to fuel up the Cessna 425 Conquest and ten minutes after that for a takeoff clearance, as American Eagle’s 12:45 P.M. from Dallas into Fort Smith was landing. But at last he was airborne.

The plane surged upward as Red eased the stick back, seemed to catch a little thermopane and rushed even faster skyward. He leveled out at 7,000 feet, well below commercial traffic patterns, scudded southwest toward the green mounds on the horizon that were the Ouachitas. The first leg all twenty minutes’ worth, was easy flying; beneath him the land was a blue haze, rolling and vague, without true detail, not particularly revealing.

He loved to fly and was quite a good pilot: perfect solitude, the fascinations of the intricate machine that held him aloft with its clever compromise of dynamic forces and its endless stream of numerical data. Yet at the same time, as mechanistic an equilibrium as it was, there was still the wildness of the unpredictable, the sense of being a true master of one’s fate. Also, it was for rich people mainly, and Red liked that quite a bit.

When he got ten miles north of Blue Eye, he dropped down to 4,000 feet and the details sharpened considerably; he had no problem picking up the parallel roads of 270 and 88 as they plunged westward from just above Blue Eye, which itself looked like a scatter of dominoes, blocks, cards and toys against the roll of the earth. As he flew west, the town disappeared and below him were just two roads cutting across the rolling mountains and valleys. Traffic on both of them was very light.

He leaned to his radio console, switched to the security mode in the digital encryption system and keyed in the code he’d selected from the 720 quadrillion possibilities, the same code selected in de la Rivera’s radio on the ground; the radio was now secure from intercept.

He picked up the microphone, punched the send button and said, “Yeah, this is Air, come in, please.”

The radio fizzed and crackled and then de la Rivera’s slightly Hispanic tones came back at him.

“Yes, I have you loud and clear.”

“That extender is working nicely,” said Red, “I have you loud and clear. No trouble installing it?”

“No sir. One of the boys did army commo.”

“Good. Position report, please.”

“Ah, I have you visually, you just buzzed my position. I’m at the wayside just inside Oklahoma. I got a car with three men with me. I got my other two units about twenty-five miles ahead, right where 259 cuts across 1.”

“What units are those?”

“We’re just calling them Alpha and Baker. My car here is Charlie, I’m Mike.”

“Alpha and Baker, you there?”

“Yes sir,” came a voice.

“You got me visually?”

“I see you on the horizon. You’re still a few miles away.”

“Okay, I’m going to buzz to Talihina and back. That’s where I’ll be. When I get a visual, I’ll confirm. Then I’ll trail him into your range. When you see me, you’ll know he’s coming.”

“Yes sir,” came the replies.

Red dropped down a thousand feet. At his altitude, the cars on the mountain road were easily recognizable by type and color, though not by make. He was looking for a green pickup with one unpainted fender. Suppose he found one and directed it into the ambush and it was some Mexican family traveling from bean harvest to bean harvest or some group of tender young college girls going to the Little Rock Pearl Jam concert? He had a set of Zeiss 10×50 binoculars, the finest that could be found in Fort Smith on a crash basis, and from 3,000 feet up he found he could get a very solid up-close and personal view of the vehicle. There wouldn’t be any mistakes.

He flew onward, enjoying the freedom and the sense of the hunt. Off far to the left and a thousand feet higher, he made out another flight, a Lear, obviously headed south to Dallas; there was no other air traffic. The road below was equally empty, though he made out a station wagon pulling tourists along the vividly beautiful road as it rolled along the crest of the green mountains, one of those ludicrous camper things, a couple of private automobiles and one black and white Oklahoma Smokey pulled off by the side of the road, on watch for speeders or merely dozing in the sun. He switched from his secure channel to the Oklahoma Highway Patrol frequency and heard nothing except the odd exchange between troopers somewhere in the area, nothing of note.

He passed over the 259 crossroads and the possibility of contact drew him ever lower, down to 2,500 feet. Maybe too low; he didn’t need FAA complaints against his license. But there were no other flights in view. The road beneath him, bright in the afternoon sun, was a ribbon. Onward he flew, all the way to Talihina, spotting nothing.

He veered and headed back along the highway, now having risen to 4,000 feet, and raced back toward the ambush kill zone. He could monitor the road just in case he’d missed something, but there were no green trucks.

“Okay, boys,” he said into the radio when he was in range, “so far I got nothing. You all okay?”

“We’re fine,” said de la Rivera.

“No police interest or anything?”

“Haven’t seen a cop all day, sir.”

He glanced at his Rolex. It was 3:30 by this time. Where the hell were they? It was beginning to look like a wash. He’d guessed wrong.

He used some left rudder, then dropped back down to 2,000 feet and began to zoom up the road, eyes peeled. The traffic had really thinned out by now. It wasn’t—

Green vehicle.

He dropped a little lower.

Pickup truck.

He overflew it and got on the radio.

“I got a possible. Got a possible.”

“Copy you, Air.”

“Okay, let me just check this out.”

He banked wide to the left, left wingtip falling, right rising, the world going giddily topsy-turvy as the two big engines drove the props through the air, and came around again level-out about a half mile to the right of the road and saw the truck ahead of him. He reached for the throttles, eased them back; the sound of engines racing could be heard for several miles and he didn’t want to alert them at all.

Gradually, he gained on them, trying not to force it or rush or anything.

When at last he was nearly parallel, he set the plane on autopilot and drew the binoculars into position and diddled with focus.

Green pickup. Unpainted left front fender. Dodge.

Got you, he thought, exultant.

He applied a touch of right rudder, a little aileron, and gently banked to the right, settling on a course of 180 degrees due south. He held the course for one minute, loafing at eighty knots, looking innocent, putting distance between himself and the target. Two minutes. He drummed his fingers on his thighs. Two minutes forty seconds. Red could take no more. He quickly reset the trim tabs, increased the pitch and pushed the throttles forward.

As the revs came up he executed a hard climbing turn to the left, straining for altitude. He was sweating.

“Air to Mike, Air to Mike. Are you there, are you there?” he said, hoping he was still in range.

“Yes sir,” said de la Rivera.

“I have them confirmed, about twenty miles west of the 259 cutoff. They’re coming your way. ETA 3:55 P.M.”

“Here’s something I thought of,” said Russ. “A theory. Let me just throw it out.”

Bob said nothing, just waited. They were cruising along the Taliblue Trail, a two-lane blacktop that ran along the crest of the Ouachitas and had just blown by the crossroads with Oklahoma 259. Ahead of them stretched empty road, gritty and dusty from poor upkeep here in Oklahoma. On either side, the mountain fell away, not a cliff but a steep slope; beyond, on either side, the valleys were deep and green; to the right, he could see the lesser ranges of the Ouachitas, the Jack Forks, the Kiamichis, the Winding Stairs. He heard something somewhere, on the far edge of his consciousness, that he couldn’t quite place. He ignored it.

“Go ahead,” he said.

“In the movies or in books, there’s no such thing as coincidence. No one’s going to pay to see or read about some guy who just finds something or something just happens to him.”

“Forrest Gump shows that one’s full of shit.”

“No, no, I mean normally. Forrest Gump being an exception to the rules. You can’t—”

“Russ, I was just joking. Don’t you got no sense of humor anywhere?”

“Well,” said Russ, thinking, No, no, he probably didn’t. “Anyhow, in real life, however absurd and irrational, coincidence occasionally happens. And I can’t help but notice you have an army night-shooting program that’s trying to develop tactics around night-vision devices in roughly the same area as the one where your father got hit at night. Maybe it’s not a conspiracy; maybe it’s one of those insane, ridiculous coincidences.”

“You saying Forrest Gump did it?” Bob laughed.

Russ breathed out his frustration.

“Now, suppose,” he continued, “they had a patrol or something and they got lost, got turned around. And they’re off post: and they watch this gunfight through the infrared scope where the details aren’t clear. They watch as one guy kills two others. And then he gets in a car; he’s going to get away. Maybe the sniper can’t help himself: he pulls the trigger and that’s that.”

“Won’t work,” Bob said. “He was in a tree. Had to be, otherwise he couldn’t have seen through the corn. And there wouldn’t have been that slight oval shape to the bullet hole.”

Russ nodded. He thought, Goddammit! He thinks he’s so smart!

“Okay, okay. Now, maybe, well, you know the attitudes were different then, there was very little press scrutiny, they all thought they were on some kind of crusade against the communists. They did test atom bomb radiation, biological warfare, LSD and some other stuff on unwary civilians. Maybe it was some test: they had to shoot at a human target. So they’re on the track of Jimmy and Bub because they know those’re clean kills without problems. But there’s a terrible mistake and your father’s the one that gets hit.”

“Not bad,” said Bob after a pause, “not bad. Wrong, but not bad.”

“Why wrong?”

“I’ll tell you why. You remember that short little guy in the photograph, the one Preece couldn’t remember?”

“Yeah.”

“Couldn’t remember, my ass. I knew that little prick. And anybody who knew him would remember him.”

“Who was he?”

“His name was Frenchy Short. He was CIA all the way. A cowboy. On my second tour I was detached TDY to lead recon teams in liaison with the Agency up near Cambodia. The Frenchman was hanging around; it was an outfit called SOG, Studies and Observation Groups. Lots of very nasty boys. Frenchy had a little war going on in Cambodia with some mercenary Chinese called the Nung and a marine officer named Chardy as the XO. Frenchy thought he was Lawrence of Cambodia. He was one of those goddamned screwball showboat guys, the rules didn’t apply to him, he was bigger than the rules, he was bigger than the service or the Agency. Hell, he was bigger than the fucking war. He just happened to work for us, but he’d have worked for anybody. It was the work he loved, not no cause. The point is, I put out the question earlier: who could put together the kind of operation fast and on the fly that connected the criminal world, Jimmy Pye, a well-planned robbery, a daring escape, and brought it all off with my father getting whacked as the end result and nobody knowing any better? Well, maybe two or three men in the world. One of them being Frenchy Short. That was his goddamned specialty. And there’s one other thing.”

“Yeah?”

“When I DEROSed out of SOG and headed back to the world, Frenchy drew me aside and asked me to ship him five hundred rounds of civilian ammunition.”

“I don’t—”

“He carried a Colt automatic in a tanker’s shoulder holster over his tiger suit. I just assumed it was a .45, same as mine. No, it was a .38 Super. He told me how he loved the .38 Super, it had so much less recoil than a .45 for the same killing power, plus extra rounds in the mag. He called it a pro’s gun.”

“Jesus,” said Russ.

“It’s more than—”

But Bob stopped.

A plane. That was it. The sound of an airplane engine, steady, not increasing in speed, just low enough and far enough away, almost a fly’s buzz.

“Go on,” said Russ.

“Just shut up,” Bob said.

“What is—”

“Don’t look around, don’t speed up, don’t slow down, you just stay very calm now,” Bob said.

He himself didn’t look around. Instead, he closed his eyes and listened, trying hard to isolate the airplane engine from the roar of the truck, the buffeting of the wind, the vibrations of the road. In time, he had it.

Very slowly he turned his head, yawning languidly as he went along.

Off a mile on the right, a white twin-engine job, maybe a Cessna. Those babies went 240 miles per hour. Either there was a terrific headwind howling out of the east, or the pilot was hovering right at the stall speed to stay roughly parallel and in the same speed zone with the truck.

“It’s more than coincidence,” Bob said, “that you got the one man in America there who could do such a thing and that he’s a great believer in the .38 Super, just what Jimmy was shooting. I smell Frenchy all over it. I think Frenchy threw it together, real smart, very fast, a fucking Agency home run the whole way. Not for the Agency, maybe, but for someone else. Someone powerful, that I guarantee you.”

He glanced quickly out the window. The plane was turning lazily away.

“Yeah, well—it’s okay? I mean, you tensed up there, now you’re relaxed. Everything’s okay, right?”

“Oh, every goddamn thing’s just superfine,” said Bob, yawning again, “except of course we are about to git ambushed.”

“Air to Alpha and Baker,” said Red, holding steady at 2,500 feet, running east, loafing again, dangerously near stall.

“Alpha here,” came a voice.

“What about Baker?”

“Oh, yeah, uh, I’m here too. I figured he said he was here, you’d know I was here.”

“Forget figuring. Tell me exactly what I ask you. Got that?”

“Yes sir,” said Baker contritely.

“Okay, I want you in pursuit. He’s about four miles ahead of you, traveling around fifty miles an hour. No Smokeys, no other traffic on the road. You go into maximum pursuit. But I am watching you, and on my signal you drop down to fifty-five. I don’t want him seeing you move superfast, do you read?”

“Yes sir.”

“Then step on it, goddammit.”

“Yes sir.”

“You hang steady there, Mike and Charlie. No need you racing anywhere, they are coming to you. I see intercept in about four minutes. I’m going to let Alpha and Baker close in, then I’ll bring you and Baker into play, Mike. You read?”

“Yes sir.”

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.”

BEOWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW—

A high-pitched scream pierced Red’s ears as he banked around; he winced, shuddered, wondering what the hell that was, and when he saw the geyserlike surge of blazing gasoline, he knew the microphone had melted.

It was happening. The truck’s fender with its cyclopslike headlight was as big as a house falling on him, but at that second Russ slammed the gearshift, punched the pedal and with a surprising giddy lightness, his own vehicle shot ahead and the oafish rammer missed, veered to correct and jacked out of control, tumbling savagely backwards amid a sudden huge blast of dust. Bob’s left hand reached for the wheel and wrenched it to the left. With a tremendous jolt the pickup slammed into the follow car, rocked crazily and continued to spin around, hauling up a shroud of dust as it fishtailed, then came to a rest, crazily canted to one side, half in and half out of the roadside gully.

Through it all, Russ had the ghastly sensation of ghosts, as faces lit up by rage and surprise floated by in the follow car, so close yet so far away. He felt that he was looking at men under ice, in a different world, their mouths working madly, their eyes swollen like his mother’s deviled eggs from so long ago. Then it all went to swirl and blur and vanished in the weird perspective of the canted windshield and the cloud of rolling dust.

He blinked.

Wasn’t he supposed to be doing something?

“Out, goddammit,” barked Bob, and Russ clawed at his safety belt, glad that he’d had it on, felt it fall away and began to slither across the seat after already vanished Bob and out the door. He remembered the bag, and felt the loaded mags rattling around inside as he disengaged from the vehicle, slid fast down the front fender of the truck to the wheel well, where Bob had already set up in a taut, hunched shooter’s position. Russ couldn’t dive for cover. He had to see.

When he looked over the hood, the spectacle stunned him.

Upside down, the black pickup had cantilevered onto the shoulder on the other side of the road in its own cloud of dust, cutting off that lane. The two cars following Bob and Russ had slewed to a halt behind it, just coming out of their own panic stops and skids. They appeared to have collided themselves, the rear one smashing into the front one.

The truck’s follower had also slewed to a halt to avoid smashing into the destroyed truck. It was almost directly across the road from Russ. There was a moment of horrified silence. Inside the cars, men fumbled in confusion, trying not to shoot each other, trying to locate their target, which wasn’t where it should be.

Then, from just behind Russ, Bob fired.

Even in the bright light of day, the tracers leaked radiance to mark their passage as they flew across the narrow distance. They were like phenomena in a physics experiment, ropes of incandescence as straight as if drawn by a ruler, unbearably quick, quicker than a heartbeat or a blink, illusions possibly. Bob fired three rounds inside a second low into the car directly across from him; what was he shooting for? Not men, for he was shooting not into the passenger compartment but above the rear tire and Russ—

Then the car was gone in a huge flash as the tracers lit up its fuel tank. The noise was a thunderclap, throwing feathers of flame everywhere as it seemed for one delirious second it was raining flame. All around them, the world caught fire; and a wave of crushing heat rolled against Russ. He heard screams in the roar, and a flaming phantasm ran at him but fell under the weight of its own destruction into the roadway.

Motion struck at Russ’s peripheral vision and he saw that one of the follow cars had gunned from behind the topsyturvy truck.

“Coming around, coming around,” he screamed.

But Bob was shooting even as Russ yelled and the tracers flicked quick and nasty like a whipcrack and seemed to liquefy the oncomer’s windshield; it dissolved into a sleet of jewels as the car lost control and went hard into the gully, kicking up a gout of dirt.

“Magazine! Magazine!” Bob screamed, and Russ slapped a twenty-rounder, bullets outward, into his palm and he sunk it into the rifle, freed the bolt to slam forward just as the third car came around, bristling with guns. But Bob took it cleanly, riddling its windshield with a burst of ball ammunition, and then held fire, emptying what remained of the magazine into the windows and doors as the car went by. The car never deviated, but sped by furiously, more as if it hoped to get away than do them any harm, and a hundred yards down the road it noticed that its cargo was dead men and it veered into a gully, lurched out surfing a wave of dirt and grass and came to a broken ending amid splintered white oaks.

And suddenly it was quiet except for the dry cracking of the wind and the hiss of the flames.

“Jesus, you got them all,” Russ said in utter astonishment and devotion, but Bob was by him, .45 in hand. He’d seen something. Two men with submachine guns had extricated themselves from the wreckage in the gully just before them, and started up the little embankment. But Bob stood above them and got his pistol into play so fast it was a blur. Did they see him yet? One did, and tried to get his weapon on target but Bob fired so quickly Russ thought for a second he had some kind of machine gun, floating six empties in the air, and the two shooters went down like rag dolls. One was an immense man in an expensive jumpsuit with gold chains on. He lay flat, eyes blinkless and vacant as the blood turned his sweatshirt strawberry and an odd detail leaped out at Russ: he had a necklace of scar tissue as if someone had gone to work on his throat with a chain saw but only got halfway around before thinking the better of it.

Another moment of silence. Bob used it to change magazines.

Russ looked around.

“Jesus Christ,” he said. It reminded him of TV coverage of the Highway of Death out of Kuwait City after the Warthogs and the Blackhawks finished a good day’s killing. Four wrecked vehicles, one on its back, one boiling with black, oily flame of petroleum products oxidizing into the sky, bodies and blood pools and shards of glass and discarded weapons everywhere.

“What do you think of that, you motherfucker!” Bob suddenly shouted, and Russ saw that he was screaming at a white airplane a half mile out low and banking away to the south.

“You got them all,” said Russ. “You must have killed twenty men.”

“More like ten. They were professionals. They took their chances. Now let’s see if we done bagged a trophy.”

Then he strode across the littered roadway to the ramming truck, upside down and half in the gully. The odor of gasoline was everywhere.

He opened the door and peered in. Russ looked over his shoulder.

Inside, in a posture of unbearable discomfort that signaled something important had broken, was a tough-looking Hispanic with creamy silver hair and an expensive suit over an open silk shirt. The angle of his neck suggested that it was broken. Pain lay across his handsome face like a blanket, turning him gray under the olive tones of his skin. His eyes were glazing and his breath was labored.

Bob pointed the .45.

The man laughed and his eyes came back into focus. He held a lighter in his left hand.

“Fuck you, man,” he said. “I’m already dead, you cracker motherfucker.” His voice was a little lilting with Cubano accent, an odd play of ch’s through it. “I flick my Bic and we all going to heaven.”

“It won’t blow, partner, it’ll only burn.”

“Fuck you,” said the Cubano.

“Who’s the man in the plane?” Bob demanded.

The man laughed again; his teeth were blinding white. He made a little move with his free hand and Russ flinched but Bob didn’t shoot. Instead, both watched as the hand reached his shirt and, pausing only once or twice in pain, ripped it open. The brown chest was latticed with extravagant tattoos.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Bob said.

“I’m Marisol Cubano, you norteamericano cabrón. You puta! Fucking Castro couldn’t break me in his prisons, man, you think I’m going to talk to some hillbilly homeboy?” He laughed.

“You are one tough customer,” said Bob, “that I give you.”

He holstered the .45.

“Let’s go,” he said to Russ.

“Hey,” screamed the man in the truck. “I say this to you, motherfucker, you got some balls on you, my friend. You cubano? Maybe Desi Arnez done fucked your mama when your daddy was out fucking the goats.”

“I don’t think so,” said Bob. “We didn’t have no TV.”

They turned and were back at their own truck when the Cubano ended his misery; the truck flared as it went and the heat reached Bob and Russ.

It was nearly dark when Red landed back at Fort Smith. He taxied the Conquest to the hangar and instructed his mechanic to secure it from the flight. He went to the parking lot where his two bodyguards, ever astute, ever loyal, ever dreary, waited in their car. He got into his Mercedes and drove home.

“Honey,” said Miss Arkansas Runner-up 1986, “how did it go today?”

“Oh, it was all right,” he said. “You know. Sort of unsettled, but all right.”

Then he and his two youngest children watched a videotape of Black Beauty, a favorite of the kids’, and, truth be told, a movie that he himself didn’t find too irritating.

After the kids were in bed, he watched the news. The big story, of course, was the drug-dealer shoot-out only a hundred miles away in Oklahoma, on the Taliblue Trail. Ten men dead, four pounds of uncut cocaine recovered. An Oklahoma State Police spokesman said authorities were still trying to figure out what had happened, but the un-burned bodies had all been identified as professional criminals tied to Miami, Dallas and New Orleans, with long records of violent felonies, and that conjecture at this time was leading in the direction of some kind of drug shipment ambush that got out of hand and ended up in a flat-out battle on one of Oklahoma’s prettiest highways. “Thank God,” the cop said, “no innocent people were hurt.”

Only after the news was over and the kids were in bed did he step out of denial and face the reality: he was in big trouble. This guy Swagger was the best who’d ever come at him, and, at least in the ten years after his father had been killed, men came after him regularly and he’d beaten them all.

Now he knew he had to do something very clever, very subtle and extremely professional, or he would lose it all. He looked around at his house and thought of his kids from this marriage and the kids from his first marriage and wondered what would happen to them if this guy Swagger took him. It terrified him.

He had a drink and then another, and then the buzzer on his beeper sounded.

He called his number and got Peck’s report.

Then he called Peck.

“He’s gone now?” he asked.

“Yes sir. What should I do?”

“Peck, I have to know what he’s onto. Can you get inside that office?”

“Yes sir,” said Peck.

“Okay, I want you to break in and make careful notes of his papers. I want to know what he knows, do you understand?”

“Yes sir.”

“I don’t need any more surprises,” he said.

He hung up. He would have gone to bed, but somehow Miss Arkansas Runner-up 1986, real tits or no, didn’t seem to amuse him tonight.

Instead, he placed one more phone call and arranged for a quick blow job from a black crack whore. That expressed his mood perfectly.