Black Hornet Read Online Free Page A

Quarter bar looking for someone who’d jumped bail and walked back out with his man, leaving behind, on the floor, a couple of hard customers with broken arms and cracked ribs.”
    She picked up her drink and took a long draw off it. Lowered her eyelids in respect as the taste took hold.
    “I had to start wondering if there wasn’t a story here.”
    “No, m’am, I don’t think so.”
    “I’m painfully aware that I’m at least twice your age, you know. But please don’t call me m’am. That makes me feel even older. Esmé. Or just Ez—that’s what most people call me.”
    I nodded. She looked his way and the bartender, who was keeping his eye on her, hustled over with another round.
    Buster retuned to standard and started a slow shuffle in E, improvising lyrics about Lewis Black and his Uptown Lady. I shot him a hard stare. He grinned.
    So did Esmé. “Listen,” she said, “they’re playing our song.”
    “You want a story?”
    “At least three times a week.”
    “Then there it is.” I nodded toward Buster and started telling her about him. All those old records, how you’d trip over his name in books on blues and jazz history, the time he put in at Parchman, how he’d spent half his life cooking barbeque in an old gas station up in Fort Worth.
    We went through that round and another as I talked. Esmé asked if I’d excuse her a minute. She was on the phone maybe a quarter hour, then came back.
    “Calling in my column. Work’s done. So now I can relax and have fun. No more grown-up for a while.”
    The next morning on my way home from the police station, numb with fatigue, shaky with the adrenaline still sputtering in my veins, I’d read her piece about Buster, titled simply “A Life.” And in days to come I’d read it over and over again, vainly seeking some final clue, some personal message or explanation, some reason that wasn’t there.
    “And what might that fun consist of?” I asked.
    “Well, I am open to suggestion. But another drink and then dinner with a handsome young man is one definite possibility.”
    “Will I do instead?”
    “Oh, I suspect you’ll do very nicely, Lewis.”
    Another drink turned into several, the club slowly filled with bodies, Buster careened from Carter Family to Bo Chatmon to Chicago blues.
    Finally we walked out into a warm, bright night. Across the street, leaves of banana trees moved slowly in the breeze, throwing terrible huge shadows across walls and sidewalk. Behind us Buster complained that his woman had waited till it was nine below zero and put him down for another man.
    “Which way?”
    “Depends. What are you in the mood for?”
    “Creole? French?”
    “Animal, vegetable or mineral.”
    “Mexican.”
    “Greek.”
    “Fried cardboard.”
    “That even sounds good. I’m starved.”
    “Me too.”
    “ Food. For the love of God, Montressor.” Hand held before her, fingers clawing feebly for purchase. eyes rolling back.
    I had just reached out for that hand—our fingers, I think, barely grazed—when she fell. I looked down at the puncture in her forehead, just beneath the hairline, thick blood rimming over.
    I remembered hearing the sound then and, though I knew there would be nothing to see, looked up.
    For just a moment I thought I saw something move on one of the rooftops, a shadow crossing the moon. But of course I could not have.

Chapter Four
    I COUNTED TWELVE POLICE CARS pulled up at various angles on the street by the time I was put inside one (hand lightly on my head as I was urged into the backseat) and taken downtown. Most of them had flashers going. It looked like one of those carnivals that unfolds out of two trucks and takes over a whole parking lot.
    At the station the cuffs were removed, I was given coffee, and for several hours, riders changing from time to time but always the same tired old pony, we played What-was-the-exact-nature-of-your-relationship-to-the-deceased.
    It was all pretty much stage whispers and much ado. They