Black Light - Страница 4

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The girls laughed, for Jimmy was so handsome and outrageous they knew he meant no harm, though it was Bub who noticed that he had crossed the centerline and that a truck was bearing down on them.

“J-J-J-J—”

“Or how about a drive-in movie, we could go to the Sky-Vue and see Jail Bait,” Jimmy hollered.

The truck was—

The truck honked.

The girls screamed.

Jimmy laughed.

“J-J-J-J—”

With just the flick of his wrist, Jimmy jiggered the wheel and stepped on the gas and with his athlete’s coordination shot into the tiny space left between the station wagon on the right and the rushing, honking, squealing truck just ahead; the car dipped and swooped ahead.

“Whooooooie!” sang Jimmy. “I’m a goddamned free man.”

He took the next left, fishtailing in a spray of gravel, and headed back downtown.

“You find me some music, Bub Pye, you old dog, you.”

Bub caught something familiar, with at least the kind of banging rhythms he had figured his cousin needed.

“That’s a nigger,” said Jimmy.

“N-n-n-n-no,” finally Bub got out. “That’s a white boy. He sounds like a nigger.”

Jimmy listened. It was a white boy. White boy with rhythm. White boy with nigger in him, full of piss and cum, hot and dangerous.

“What’s that white boy’s name?” he wanted to know.

Bub couldn’t remember it. It was something new, some name he could never remember.

“Cain’t ’member. Goddamn,” said Bub.

“Well, you ain’t no damn good, then,” said Jimmy with a big old smile, in the way of saying in code, it don’t matter a damn.

Jimmy looked at his watch. He seemed to know where he was going. Bub had only been up to Fort Smith a few times before; he had no idea.

Pretty soon, Jimmy pulled over.

“Just about noon,” he said.

They were on a busy street, Midland Boulevard, across from a big grocery store. “IGA Food Line,” it said on the sign. It was the biggest grocery store Bub had ever seen.

“Goddamn,” said Jimmy. “Lookie that, Bub? Lookie all them people in and out a place like that. All of them with their goddamned money just spent on food. Hell, boy, must be fifty, sixty thousand dollars in that place.”

Bub wondered what the hell Jimmy could be talking about. Something he didn’t quite like about it.

“J-J-J-J-J—”

But goddamn, Jimmy’s luck was good.

...

One, two, three o’clock, four o’clock ROCK,

five, six, seven o’clock, eight o’clock ROCK,

nine, ten, eleven o’clock, twelve o’clock ROCK,

We gonna ROCK around the clock tonight!

We gonna ROCK ROCK ROCK ’til the broad daylight!

The unleashed dogs found her. Earl heard them baying wildly, their voices a-gibber with excitement.

“Them dogs won’t—”

“Won’t touch a goddamned thing,” said Pop.

“Over here, over here,” shouted Jed Posey. “Goddamn and a half, over here!”

Earl, breathing hard, struggled uphill through the trees and saw brier and broke into some kind of clearing, where, the shade vanished, the full, killing force of the heat struck him.

Earl saw Jed standing, his chest heaving, next to a shale wash, where the earth was stony and broken, the sun harsh. On the other side of the wash, the three dogs sat obediently, barking to drive the devil away. But the devil had already been here and done his work.

Shirelle lay on her side, her pink gingham dress crunched up around her hips, her panties gone, her blouse ripped off. She was beyond shame. Her eyes were wide and lightless. Her skin was gray, almost colorless, sheathed in dust. Her body was fat with bloat so that she seemed some balloon version of herself, and the left side of her face was swollen into a massive yellowish bulge crusted with a fissure of gore, where someone had smashed her with a rock. A yard away, the rock lay stained with black.

“You can see her cooze,” said Jed. “G’wan, look everbody, you can see her cooze.”

You could, of course, and Earl looked and saw what appeared to be a black gruel of blood on the child’s privates and what looked like contusions and abrasions. The buzz of flies, the stink of rot.

Earl had seen death in all its forms over three major island invasions. He’d done more than his share of dealing it too. But the girl looked so broken and thrown away, so blasphemed by the gases that filled her, then abandoned on the side of a rough hill, it broke a heart he thought would break no more after the long walk through the tide at Tarawa and the flamethrower work on Saipan and the up-close tommy-gun killings, so very, very many of them, on Iwo. No Jap or dead American boy ever looked so uselessly, pointlessly wasted.

Lem Tolliver spat his plug out explosively.

“Them niggers,” he said. “What they do to their own kind! We never should have brought ’em over. They belong back in the African jungle.”

“Lem,” said Earl, “you get these boys out of here and go on down to my car. I want you to—”

“Hey, Earl,” said Jed Posey. Jed’s brother laughed. “Hey, Earl, you mind if I jump on for a free one? I mean, I might as well, before you close her up. She ain’t going to mind none. And she sure ain’t no virgin no more.”

Earl hit Jed with his balled fist just under the ear, toward the jaw, a short, vicious, completely satisfying jab. He hit him so hard the man was driven backwards as he chomped on his own tongue, opening a terrible wound, and blood began to gurgle out of Jed’s mouth and darken on his overalls. A storm of dust floated up as Jed thrashed a bit and then lay still, one hand raised in surrender. Earl stepped toward him as if to work on him some more. Jed scurried back on his hands and knees, his face gone to the fear a man feels when he knows he’s way overmatched.

“Don’t hit him no more, Earl,” begged Lum Posey.

“Git this piece of shit out of here,” Earl said to Lem. “I want him out of here. You go to my car, you call on the goddamned radio to the Greenwood barracks, tell ’em it’s a real bad ten-thirty-nine, I want the Criminal Investigations team here as fast as they can git it. And the Criminal ID team, just in case our boy done left prints or something. You put in a call to Sam Vincent, I want him out here representing the Prosecutor’s Office. He’ll be the one heps me put this fucker in the chair. You call your sheriff, you tell him I want his people out here to close the site and search for evidence. You call the Coroner’s Office ’cause we gonna need some real careful body work done. You got that, Lem?”

“I got it, Earl.”

“Pop, you rest and feed them dogs now and git ’em into the shade. We might need them see if they can get up a scent on whoever done that. You understand, Pop?”

“Yes sir.”

“Now, go on, git.”

The men turned back down the hill, Lum Posey helping his bleeding brother.

Earl was alone with the body.

Okay, baby girl, he thought, time for you to talk to me, so’s I can find who done this to you. And I swear to you: I’m gonna nail his ass and watch it fry in the chair.

Earl was not Sherlock Holmes; he wasn’t any kind of big-city homicide cop. He hadn’t even worked a murder before, that is, as opposed to a killing, where the killer’s identity was obvious from witnesses or known grudges. This was different: a body, abandoned for close to a week. It was a true mystery. It went way beyond anything Earl had ever tried before. But Earl Swagger was a serious professional law enforcement officer, committed to, perhaps even obsessed by, the twin masters of duty and justice. His mind was so rigid that he could only see one possible outcome of the event before him, the execution of the murderer, and until that happened, he would feel a serious hole had been blown into the wall of the universe. It was up to him to plug it.

He set about it methodically, oblivious first to the odor of death which attended, second to the flies that hung and buzzed and finally to the obscenity of the crime itself. First thing: drawing the scene. Let the photogs do what they would later, he wanted to record, for his own uses, the overall look of the body, its relationship to the setting. He used the triangulation method, useful in outdoor settings where no baseline such as a road could be located. He chose as his three points the closest tree, about twenty-five feet beyond the child’s head, the edge of the vegetationless shale on which she lay and, off to the right, a stone humping out of the surface of the earth. Crudely, he did a stick-figure version of her broken body, placing it between the landmarks.

Then he began an immediate site search for footprints or other signs of disturbance in the earth, as well as other bits of personal evidence of the man or men who’d brought or dropped her here. But the land was so hard and dry it would register no such impression; instead a breeze kicked up, unfurling Shirelle’s dress, throwing vapors of dust. Then, just as quickly, it subsided.

Earl went to the body itself. Later the Criminal Investigations team, the professionals, could make a more intense examination in search of microscopic information: fibers, body fluids, possible fingerprints, bloodstains, that sort of thing. But he wanted to learn what he could from the poor child.

Speak to me, honey, he said, feeling such an aching tenderness come over him he could hardly abide it. Something in him yearned to take her up and cradle her against the pain. But there was no pain, there was no her anymore, only her swollen remains. Her soul was with God. He shook his head clear and spoke again to her in his mind: Come on, now, you tell Earl who did this to you.