Perfect killer

PROLOGUE — 1961

A moonless black-on-black night shrouded the Mississippi delta in shades of dark and darker that flattened the feverishly humid world into a two-dimensional caricature.

Heard, felt but unseen, mosquitoes boiled out of the killing fields' stagnant pools like a biblical plague. In the distance, a scattering of lights glowed beyond a low embankment that kept the Columbus and Greenville Railroad tracks above water even in flood season. From beyond the embankment came strains of a church hymn drifting from the general direction of Balance Due, the notoriously impoverished black quarter of Itta Bena, where raw sewage fermented in open ditches along rutted dirt roads lined with battered wooden shacks.

At one with this deepest of nights, Darryl Talmadge squatted in the tall, soggy grass and held his suppressed Colt. 45 Model 1911 well out of the swamp water seeping into his boots. He breathed silently through his mouth and listened with his whole body, trying to feel his quarry as much as hear him. A freight train rumbled distantly from the east, and from the darkness near the C amp;G berm came the sounds of a desperate man making his way through mud and tall grass. Talmadge knew all he had to do was be patient. Like hunting deer, he thought. Bag a big buck. The thought made him smile.

Talmadge had been a hunting guide in the Delta before the Korean War, before the head wound they'd fixed up so well. They'd saved his life, and for that he did what they asked. That and because he needed the medicine they gave him to keep the visions and memories away.

A sucking sound riveted Talmadge's attention. Over to his left, maybe twenty-five yards away. Then another and another. Feet liberating themselves from muck, slowly, cautiously at first, then with a labored acceleration making an angle toward the railroad tracks.

Perfect.

Talmadge stood up and in a single fluid motion aimed the Colt. It took only a split second to spot the faintest of shadows, night modeled on night. He sighted, squeezed the trigger, registered the mild cough of the shot and the shriek of pain as the shadow dropped with a wallowing splash.

"Give it up, nigger!" Talmadge yelled as he crashed through the mud and high grass. Then he picked up the panicked thrashes of a wounded man stumbling away

"Shit a brick," Talmadge mumbled. This was number four in the past ten days, and he was simply tired of tracking down these boys.

Ahead of him, his prey's shadow moved right, reversed course, then sprinted toward the tracks. As the freight rambled closer, Talmadge knew the boy would rush across the tracks in front of the engine and let the rest of the train shelter his escape, or hop a boxcar.

Either way worked for him, Talmadge thought as he swiftly made his way to the edge of the clinker stone at the base of the berm and hunkered down behind a clump of dead grass. He leaned against the slope and aimed the Colt down the berm, steadying it with his left arm.

Behind him the light from the train engine played shadows atop the berm. In moments, Talmadge spotted a shadow maybe thirty yards away detach itself from the brush and start up the slope. In another instant the locomotives headlight lit up a wounded man, red across his shoulder where the last shot had winged him.

Talmadge fired, then cursed when the slug scattered gravel immediately behind the man's feet. The man scrambled faster. Talmadge felt no anger, no emotion, no disappointment. He kept the aim of his last shot and its trajectory precisely in mind as he corrected his sights for the spot he figured the man would reach at the top of the tracks.

Talmadge fired as the locomotive blew its horn. The man with the wounded shoulder froze as his face turned toward the train. The slug punched through the man's torso, bent him forward over the nearby track, and fed him to the locomotive's wheels.