Black Hornet (17 page)

Just as I hit the other side I looked back. Creech’s head turned toward me. He lifted the walkie-talkie.

Beside the drive-in was what had probably been an automobile showroom, with walls intact but the windows that had spanned the whole storefront, and most of the roof, gone. I dove in there and raced through its junkyard floor: stacks of ancient tires, carcasses of small animals, fast-food containers, remains of campfires. At first I saw no way out. But an emergency exit finally gave way on the fourth kick.

I came back out into sunlight and open air and saw the screen only ten, twelve yards away.

Someone was scrambling away from its base toward the stand of trees behind.

Scrambling as once before he’d scrambled over a Dumpster and through a delivery door.

He was almost to the trees when his foot caught in something—weeds, a tangle of roots, a sinkhole—and he fell.

He got up, looked down, looked behind to see me advancing, and shot off into the trees.

Where I lost him.

I plunged on for some time—thrashing about, turning this way and that, stopping to listen—but there was little doubt my bucket had sprung a terminal leak.

At last I found my way back out. Traffic on Airline was picking up fast. More cars and pickups than trucks now, as people started home from work.

Sam Brown said, “Little ways off your post aren’t you, Lewis?” So much for my bright future with SeCure.

I shrugged and walked over to where my pursuee had stumbled. No doubt about it. A professional’s piece, assembled by hand or made to order. Winchester bolt action, with a Zeiss 10x scope. The rifle’s original barrel appeared to have been replaced. Only the receiver was attached to the stock. The new barrel was free-floating. I’d seen snipers carry similar hot rods.

Sam Brown had followed me.

“Who is he?” I said, looking up.

“
You’re
the one has trouble, Lewis.”

“Sam.” I stood. “Now, I can’t be absolutely sure, of course, but I think we can both assume this weapon is loaded. Since it hasn’t been fired yet.”

I was careful to avoid touching trigger and guard, places on the stock where fingerprints might be, though I knew there wouldn’t be any.

“People know your shooter was on the job, Sam. You go down here, under his rifle, he’s the one did it. No one will say different.”

He started to raise the walkie-talkie and stopped himself. “You’re crazy, Griffin. Crazy as everyone says you are.”

I shrugged. “America. I’ll yield to the majority opinion. What are you going to do?”

Moments shouldered by. Twenty or thirty cars, pickups, service vehicles.

“I authentically don’t know who he is, Griffin.”

“How’d he get on the SeCure roster?”

“Again: I don’t know. You’d have to go higher up on the chain. But my feeling is,
he
got in touch with
us
.”

“Everything okay across the street? Weaver handed on safely?”

He nodded.

“Good. I need one of your men to drop me—and this—off downtown, at the central police station. That all right with you?”

He shrugged. “Sure. Why not?” Then as I started away he said: “Lewis.”

I turned back.

“This is what you were after all along, right?”

I told him it was and he said he had wondered.

Never as invisible as we think. Us or our motives.

Chapter Twenty-Five

“I
T’S
A
W
INCHESTER,
ALL
RIGHT.
Model 70, .308 caliber, two or three years old. A real hot rod. The new barrel’s a Douglas Premium, floats free for maximum accuracy. Fires a 173-grain, boat-tail bullet in a metal jacket that the ballistics boys tell me can travel at close to 2,250 feet per second.”

“Not the kind of thing you pick up at your local Sears.”

“Not hardly.”

“And it’s the gun used in the shootings?”

“Probably so. They’re still playing with it. And trying to track down sources. Where the Winchester came from, the barrel, scope. But usually we don’t have much luck with this kind of thing. Lot of it’s strictly underground.”

“What about the ammunition?”

“We know where that came from: Lake City, Missouri. There’s no other source. But when we go looking it’ll have passed through eighteen hands and a couple of blinds and there won’t be any way in hell we can trace it.”

“So what do we do?”

“Hope we get lucky. That’s mostly what cops do.”

“You’ve talked to the good folks at SeCure.”

“And to at least three of their lawyers. The company has no official connection with this alleged shooter, knows nothing of his identity or whereabouts, and perhaps it would be best if we did not return for any further chats without a court order.”

“I almost had him, Don.”

“So did I.”

“Oh yeah? That’s not the way I remember it. But thanks, man. Talk to you soon.”

I hung up the phone, went over and sat at the bar. Place called Bob’s I’d never been before, a few blocks town and lakeside of Tulane and Carrollton. Lots of Bobbie Blue Bland and Jimmy Reed on the jukebox.

The bartender stepped up and looked at me without saying anything. One of those places.

“Bourbon,” I said. “Preferably from a bottle with some kind of label on it.”

He grabbed one out of the well (yes, it had a label) and up-ended it over a shot glass. Put the bottle back with one hand as he set the shot glass before me with the other.

“Been a long walk,” someone said from the open door behind me. “I could do with one of those myself.” I knew it was open because the bar had flooded with light. And since the whole place was maybe ten feet square, I didn’t have to squint too hard to see who it was once I turned around.

“Is there a bar anywhere in New Orleans you
don’t
frequent?”

“Course there is. Way bars are apt to come and go, sometimes they don’t stay around long enough to become in-co-operated in my i-tinery.”

“Their loss, I’m sure.”

I signaled the bartender for two more bourbons as Doo-Wop took the seat beside me. The bartender could barely restrain himself. The joy of it all.

Doo-Wop drank off the bourbon between breaths.

“Hoping I might run into you, Captain,” Doo-Wop said.

I waited. Finally I waved another drink his way.

“Many thanks.” But he hadn’t touched it yet. “Papa and I had a drink together over on Oak. I don’t know, could of been the Oak Leaf. Papa says there’s a man out there looking for something special.
On the loop
’s the way he put it. Told me, that captain friend of yours might want to know about this. You want to know about this, Captain?”

“What’s the man looking for, Doo-Wop? You know?”

“You mind if I go ahead and have a taste, Captain? Tongue’s near stuck to the roof of my mouth.”

I told him sure, go ahead.

He put the empty glass down. “Many thanks.” Then: “Man wants a Winchester, model 70.
And spare change
, Papa says to tell you. That worth something to you, Captain?”

I slapped my last ten on the bar, then picked it up and put down a fifty instead. The fifty I always carried in my shoe, under the insole, back then—to beat vagrancy laws, for bail, whatever. What the hell, I could live a few weeks off that ten. Sure I could.

“Yeah. Papa said it would be.”

Doo-Wop motioned grandiosely, and the bartender loomed up like a ghost ship at the bar’s horizon.

“Double brandy. And one for my friend here—whatever he wants.”

“Where is this man, Doo-Wop?”

“Papa said you’d ask that.”

“Right.”

“Papa says come see him.”

Chapter Twenty-Six

“H
E’S
ONE
OF
MINE,
L
EWIS
.”

The Oak Leaf looks like something that dragged itself, by brute force of will, out of the thirties into present time. Cypress walls, pressed-tin ceiling, rooms so narrow that people turn sideways to pass. Makes you think how the city itself is a kind of sprawling memory. A few blocks away, the Mississippi waits to flood all this. Only the Corps of Engineers,
that
brute force of will, holds it back.

“You have to understand,” the old mercenary said. “None of us ever belonged—here, or anywhere else. We’re a society to ourselves.”

“I know a little about that, Papa.”

He picked up his beer and looked through it at the meager light pushing its way through the bar’s front window.

“Probably more than you realize, Lewis.”

He swirled beer around the bottom of his glass, maybe looking to see if any of the light had remained there, and finished it off. I did likewise. The barkeep brought us two more.

An Irish ballad, “Kilkelly,” started up on the jukebox.

“He stopped being a soldier when he started his own war,” I said.

“It’s not his war, Lewis. Soldiers always fight other people’s wars. That’s what makes them soldiers. You should know something about that, too.”

“But the people he’s killing aren’t soldiers, Papa. This isn’t abstraction and theory, some pure idea you kick about the classroom or discuss over civilized martinis, white pawns here, black there. When these pawns fall down, they don’t get up for the next game. They don’t ever get up.”

“Hard for an old man to change.”

“Not easy at any age, Papa.”

He sat looking at me, finally spoke. “You understand so much more than you have any right to, Lewis, young as you are.”

“I don’t think I understand much of anything.”

“Then you’re wrong.”

He looked away again.

“Going on forty years now, I always said ideas don’t matter. Democracy, socialism, communism—all the same. Like changing your shirt between dances. Who the hell can tell any difference? One half-bad guy goes out and another half-bad guy slips into his place. No one even notices. You think any of them care about human rights, social progress? I tell my men: You’re soldiers. Professionals. These people contracted for your services. The money matters. That, and doing a good job, doing what you were hired to do. That’s all.”

It was a Hemingway moment. I understood that he wanted me to assure him somehow that violating his code was okay. And I couldn’t do that. I could only wait.

Papa put his glass on the bar. It was still half full.

“I think I’ve had enough beer today. Enough of a lot of things.”

He stood.

“You need a ride, Lewis? Van’s out back.”

“Think I’ll stick around for a drink or two.”

“Lewis?”

“Yes, Papa.”

“Was I wrong, too? All these years?”

“I don’t know, Papa. How can we ever know?”

He stood there a moment longer, then told me where the shooter lived.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

T
HE
ADDRESS
HE’D
GIVEN
ME
led to a partially converted warehouse on Julia. A walk-through florist’s-and-gardening shop occupied the ground floor. Above that was a quartet of luxury apartments. The third floor represented a kind of industrial-residential Gaza Strip.

To this day I have no idea how Papa knew. I asked him once, years later, not long before he died. He grinned and settled back, wearing the robe one of the sitters had bought for him and the booties another had knitted. The entire nursing-home staff loved Papa.

“Soldier doesn’t learn how to do good recon, he and his men don’t last long out there, Lewis. Something I always had a particular knack for, though. Man always likes doing a thing he’s good at.”

I handed him a beer then and asked why he’d done it. Why he had decided to help me, someone he scarcely knew, and betray one of his own.

“Long time back, there was a young man I purely believed in. Knew things he didn’t have any right to, understood even more. Kind of man that, he sets himself to it, he might even change his little corner of the world, make it a better place.

“That was me.

“Then years go by, my life goes on, and eventually this young man shows up again. A different young man, you understand—but the same in a lot of ways. How do we ever know what’s right or wrong, he tells me. And I know him better than a mother knows her child. I have to hope he’ll do better than I did with what’s been given him. And I see him standing there at that same crossroads.”