Image of a man resting a gun on a garbage can flashed on the playback screen of his mind, zoomed in on the gun: a cool piece of lightweight, high-powered, purposeful steel. High-powered, rapid-fire, no mail-order .22 no Manlicher-Carcano. A pro gun.
And a pro job.
Bang! Bang! Bang! Five shots just like that, first one right on the old button, if I hadn’t moved off-rhythm, next two right into Franklin, and then right into the car. A hit-man contract job for sure!
“You all right?” The cop had reached him, taken one quick look at the ruined body, then ignored it like the rest of the ugly refuse littering the street. The cop’s square face like any other cop’s face, hardly noticed it was black.
“Nothing broken…” Barron muttered, his thoughts elsewhere, back in the apartment, Benedict Howards saying, “Don’t talk to Franklin, or else—” Howards scared shitless, Hennering’s plane exploding, his widow smashed by the wheels of a rented truck.… Or else… or else…
Only three people knew I was coming down here time enough to arrange a hit, he realized thickly, Sara. Luke. And Howards. No one else. Howards killed Franklin like he killed Hennering, tried to kill me. Had to be Howards!
The Foundation bought Tessie Franklin. The flash seemed to come from nowhere, but in the after-image wake of the gestalt-inspiration the train of logic behind it stood out hard and clear:
Howards is the only man in the world could’ve contracted for the hit in time. Howards wanted me dead, wanted Franklin dead, something he was scared enough of coming out in public to kill me for, kill Franklin for, and the only thing that made Franklin any different from twenty million other losers was he’d sold his kid. So if Bennie wanted Franklin shut up, Bennie’s outfit had to have bought the kid…
And if Bennie bought Tessie Franklin, that’d sure as shit be reason enough to make double sure I didn’t find out, and if I did I wouldn’t get it on the air. Hit-man maybe really did this job after all, maybe only supposed to scare me. Anyway, Franklin’s dead, I got nothing live to put on the air…
“Hey,” said the cop, “ain’t you Jack Barron? Sure, I see your show every week.”
“Uh…” Barron grunted, lost in convolutions of snake-dancing logic, remembering the first bullet right at his head, two more college tries after Franklin was dead… No doubt about it, that cocksucker Howards wanted me dead, Franklin or no Franklin, and that don’t make sense with the only cat I could do a show around dead, unless…
Unless there are other people who’d sold their kids to the Foundation walking around loose.
“Yeah, I’m Jack Barron,” he said, coming out of it fighting, “and I’m staying with Governor Greene. How about getting me a lift back to the Governor’s Mansion muy pronto! Got a whole lot of checking to do.”
“You got any idea who wanted to kill you, Mr Barron?” the cop said.
Barron hesitated. No thanks, he thought, this is between Bennie and me. Too many tangles, in too deep-immortality, three murders and my name on a murderer’s paper, the show, national politics, and Christ knows what else, all balled up in a writhing glob like a mob scene at a convention of spastic octopuses, too many waves to risk ringing in any dumb local fuzz.
Yeah, and something else too, admit it Barron, something maybe only the Sicilian in Vince’d understand. Vendetta’s the name of the game, Bennie, just a two-handed game of Russian roulette for all the marbles between me and you. Your boy blew the opening move, and now it’s my turn, Howards, don’t walk past any dark alleys. I’ll nail your ass to the wall or know the reason why! Nobody takes free pot-shots at Jack Barron and gets away whole.
“Haven’t the faintest idea, officer,” he said. “Far as I know, I haven’t got a real enemy in the world.”
15
Wonders of Modern Science, Jack Barron thought as he turned the rented car off the access road and back on to the highway to Evers. As the car picked up speed he glanced at the thin Manila folder beside him on the leatherette seat.
Take school-attendance records and birth certificates for the last fifteen years, punch ’em on cards and put ’em into the old computer for a cross-correlation, and you get the cards of all the kids who should be in school but ain’t; much smaller pile you feed back into the computer and run ’em off against death-records, out-of-state transfer records, for the same fifteen years, and you get maybe a couple thousand cards of kids truant from school, alive, and in the state for more than a month; and you whittle that pile down against hospital and loonie-bin records, and down again by running a cross-correlation with parental destitution, and after a final shuffle of the old cards for a fifty-mile-from-Evers radius you get four little cards, four little visits, four nitty-grittys out of the whole fucking state. Simple as that.
Four cards, four Negro children, ages seven to ten, with parents either on the edge of broke or on some kind of welfare. Four kids that disappeared from the face of the earth.
Four visits to four crummy slat shacks. Four new cars outside four traditional Southern niggertown shitholes, ranging from a Buick to an honest-to-Christ Rolls. Four crazy fairy tales: another “Educational Foundation” schtick, one kid supposedly visiting relatives for six months, a none-of-your-fucking business, and that incredible dumb motherfucker actually believed his kid is now the adopted heir to the kingdom in some nonexistent black African state. And four satchelfuls of untraceable cash money left by four different high-class shades.
No doubt about it, Barron thought as he moved over into the lefthand lane, whoever’s doing it is flush as hell. Plenty of cash and a mighty smart operation, five tries and five sales and in situations all carefully selected to make the fewest possible government paper-waves. Adds up to someone with private access to a mighty expensive computer, rich enough to buy an expert on the Mississippi State Records filing system—or even to buy a top man on the inside. At an average of fifty thou a kid, that’s a quarter million right there, not to mention what it takes to buy the computer or the computer time, at least five flunkies, grease to get hold of government records… millions of dollars just to make off with five kids!
How could it be anyone else but that crazy fucker Howards?
And why did he kill Hennering who didn’t know a thing about this? Or did he? Hennering found out the Foundation was buying kids so Howards killed him…? Millions of dollars and dangerous murders just to get hold of children super-cool-like? Bennie just ain’t the frustrated father type. Only one thing could make Bennie act like such a paranoid spender—immortality, his life, gotta know his hide’s somehow at stake. But why risk his precious immortal life over… ?
Schmuck,” Barron grunted aloud. Sure, that’s gotta be it—only thing that would make Bennie risk murder-death-sentence is covering up prior murders, and the only thing would make him risk murder in the first place is his goddamned immortality. Jeez, it figures… He must’ve used those kids like guinea pigs to develop that immortality treatment, whatever it is, and that’s why he gets so uptight anytime anyone gets near the subject. And that’s why it was worth three murders to keep it cool!
For the first time in years that he could remember, Barron felt a flash of pure feral anger, a selfless, uncalculated anger that served no cause but its own. Murdering children to buy his own rotten immortal life! Murdering Hennering and his wife and Franklin to keep it quiet! Buying a Congress and maybe a President soon to cool it, to stand on a pile of bodies on the neck of the whole country for paranoid nightmare million years! Yeah, and buying me to ram it down their throats—sell snuffing out lives in Frankenstein laboratories for the secret of life eternal for the fat-cat few to Brackett Audience Count estimated-hundred-million suckers!