Her face was tight and she was scared.
Peck liked that a lot.
“Y-yes?” she said.
He smiled. “Ma’am?” he said as charmingly as he knew how, “ma’am, I’m Deputy Duane Peck of the County Sheriff’s Department. I’m here to talk to a Mrs. Lucille Parker.”
“That’s Mama. What is this in reference to, please?”
“Ma’am, I’m investigating the death of Sam Vincent, the former county prosecutor. He died night before last. That day, he came out here and talked to Mrs. Parker. I happened to see him out here. I’m just checking up to make sure everything’s on the up-and-up. I know she’s an elderly lady, ma’am, and I don’t mean her no bother. Just got a few questions is all. Be over and out of here in a jiff.”
“Just a minute,” the woman said stonily, shutting the door.
The anger rose in Duane, like smoke. A nigger gal treating him like that! He has to stand in the hot sun! But he quelled it, telling himself to be cool, for this here goddamned thing was going to lead to a bigger job working for Mr. Bama permanent, and no one would treat him like white trash ever again. Neechee said so!
The minutes passed and eventually the door opened.
“Mama will see you. She’s upset over the death of Mr. Sam. You go easy with her, you hear? She’s eighty-two years old.”
Duane walked into the house, astonished to find it so nice and whitelike. He’d always thought these people lived like pigs in a sty.
The woman—the daughter, he knew—led him through a living room to a back porch, where the old lady sat like a queen of the village, in regal splendor and glory.
“Ma’am, I’m Deputy Peck. Hope I’m not bothering you none, but we have to make inquiries. I’ll try and be out of here fast.”
She nodded.
“Ah, you know that poor Sam Vincent fell down the stairs of his office night before last and died?”
She nodded.
“Poor Sam,” Duane said. “Anyhow it looks like a straight accidental death, but I have to ask a question or so.”
“Go ahead, Deputy.”
“Ma’am, did he seem agitated about anything? Was he in control of hisself? What was he talking about?”
“My daughter was killed in this town forty-odd years ago,” said the proud old lady. “He prosecuted the boy they said did it. I had written him a letter about the crime some years back. He came by to talk about it, that’s all.”
“I see. But he was okay? I mean, he weren’t in no state, what you might call it. So excited-like, he might fall or something. Balance problems. Did he have balance problems?”
“He was a good man. It seems like good people die around these parts and the bad ones just go on and on.”
“Yes, ma’am, it do seem that way sometime. But he was physically all right, wasn’t he? Is that what you’re telling me.”
“I don’t think Mr. Sam would fall down no stairs, no sir,” said the woman. “He was strong as a bull and very sharp and clear. I didn’t see any evidence of balance problems.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“His death is a terrible thing. He was a good man.”
“I agree, ma’am. Old Sam: he was like a daddy to me.”
“He was the only man in this state with the gumption to prosecute a white man for the murder of a black man. That took courage.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Duane, trying to bite down his delight. The woman had brought him right to where he wanted to be.
“I looked it up,” he said. “Jed Posey, convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Davidson Fuller, back in 1965. Beat him to death with a shovel.”
The old lady shook her head. She was tracking the tangled coils back to the murder of her daughter Shirelle. Shirelle was killed, the law said, by Reggie Fuller, who was sentenced to death. Davidson Fuller, his father, lost everything trying to free his son but was somehow made strong by the ordeal and emerged in the early sixties as the most energetic and fearless of the civil rights leaders in Arkansas. He had stopped for gas out near Nunley and a terrible white man came out of a gas station and hit him three times with a spade, just for nothing, just for being black, then went back on the porch to drink a Cherry Smash until the police arrived. Mr. Sam couldn’t get the death penalty but he got Jed Posey to spend the rest of his life in prison.
As if they both reached that destination simultaneously, their eyes met. And Duane gave her the news he’d been sent to deliver.
“D’ja hear they finally paroled that old boy Jed Posey?”
She looked at him in horror.
“Yep, he gets out today. They say he’s going back to his brother Lum’s cabin somewhere in the damn mountains. A shame a boy like that can’t die in the pen, where he belongs.”
He smiled.
“Well, thanks so much, ma’am. You cleared it all up for me.”
Jack Preece opened the gun vault and stepped inside. It was a large vault, extremely expensive, with space in it for two hundred rifles. But there were only thirty or so, all ready for shipment, various of his products destined for the world’s hot spots.
He tried to think it out.
Night shot. Infrared or passive ambient light? Range, two hundred yards or less. What to take? Match the weapon to the mission.
State-of-the-art, of course, was the Knight SR-25 with the Magnavox thermal sniperscope mounted and zeroed and a JFP suppressor, the No. 1 System. It was at this moment in time the best sniper rifle in the world. But the businessman in him looked at the one unit locked in the rack, the demonstrator. It represented an investment of about $18,000, for the rifle, the very expensive thermal scope, the suppressor and the complex array of armorer’s skills to unify all the elements into the single system. There was always the possibility of a breakage or even a battlefield loss. Could he absorb that much of a financial bite? Worse, the gun was not wiped clean; it still bore Knight’s serial numbers and the Magnavox unit bore the Magnavox numbers, both traceable to him. If by some twist of fate, he got out but the gun didn’t and it was recovered by authorities, it led them straight to him, literally in a matter of hours. Of course he had his powerful allies in the intelligence and military communities, and the helpful mantra of national security could always be invoked, but that was much less powerful nowadays. You couldn’t be sure it would work at alclass="underline" newspapers had no commitment to a higher thing called national security, they hardly believed in the concept of the nation, much less security! His friends could only protect him so far; in the realpolitik of Washington, he could find himself served up fried and covered in gravy for somebody’s Pulitzer Prize. So the Stoner was out.
He looked next at the rack of lesser semiautos. These were mostly recovered M-14s or Springfield M-lAs, all in 7.62 NATO, reconfigured as the standard army M-21 sniper rifle of Vietnam, accurized and mounted with an ambient night scope, usually the AN/PVS-2 Starlight scope, and the JFP suppressor. Fine weapons, with a hundred custom tricks to make them shoot straighter and more reliably than off-the-rack 14s. But they had something in common with the Knight weapon: they were traceable to him, although there might be some salvation there, as the guns were older, had a much longer history and had come through many sources and via many avenues. That meant that the paper trail could be very complex, with dead ends and red herrings strewn throughout it, depending on the actual weapon. Would it be complex enough to protect him if the weapon was lost and then recovered? There was no way of knowing and he wasn’t sanguine about living the next ten years of his life waiting for some government computer to kick out the serial number connection to him. Nix to the 21s.
Next were the bolt guns. These too came from a variety of sources, many of them civilian. All were basically the same rifle, the Remington 700, though they had been worked over by secondary contractors, in some case the Remington Custom Shop, some cases Robar, or McMillan or ProFiber, or individual custom gunworks, like Tank’s Rifle Shop or D&L Firearms or Fulton Armory. Some had the night-vision device, one or two had lasers, one or two had simple Leupold police marksman scopes or Unertl 10x’s, the marine choice. Again, the possibility of tracing these guns was present, though possibly not paramount, if he consulted the records and chose carefully. But another difficulty presented itself to this system: that was tactical.