Black Hornet by James Sallis Read Free Book Online Page A

set sideways and bolted into the bricks. I jumped, caught a rung and scrambled up.
    Business was still brisk at the Chick’n Shack half a block uptown. Mostly groups of three or four young men and singles coming home from work, from the look of it. A few cars, but most of them on foot.
    Just downtown I could see the Holy Evangelical Church, a single-story brown-brick structure with a stubby spire of multicolored plastic squares and rectangles. The church’s windows were painted over black, as were those of Honest Abe’s pawnshop (yellow cinderblock) and Lucky Pierre’s FaSTop (bare cypress). This was back before the city had bars on every door and window.
    Up here, you got a good view of the whole expanse, from Louisiana down at least to Terpsichore, just before the tangle of overpasses and dogleg streets leading into downtown New Orleans. It was the tallest building in the stretch; no one was going to spot you. Downtown buildings might as well be in another state. And you had a choice of flight paths: back down the fire escape or onto one of the adjoining roofs.
    He’d chosen the spot carefully.
    I squatted at the roof’s edge and sighted along an imaginary rifle. He’d have had the strap wound about his right arm for stability, maybe even a small folding tripod. High-resolution scope. Instead of tracking, he’d extrapolate the movement of his subject and sight in on where the subject would be, waiting for him to step into place. Hold his breath instinctively when that happened. Squeeze. Breathe out.
    I caught the merest glimmer of what it must have been like, a momentary connection far more emotional than intellectual, then it was gone. So much for blinding insight, for sudden epiphanies that change your life.
    Starting back down the fire escape, I heard voices below. Two men about my age stood by my car, one of those Galaxies with the bat-wing rear ends. The taller guy held a strip of flexible metal with a notch at the end. The shorter one held a brick. They were in conference.
    “You gentlemen manage on your own, or you need help?”
    “Keep on walking, man.” The tall one.
    “None of yo’ business.”
    I shook my head sadly. “Unmistakable mark of the amateur. Never willing to take advantage of the resources available. Always has to do things the hard way.”
    “Yeah. Well, I’ll ama yo’ teur.”
    “Man, what the fuck you—”
    He stopped because I’d stepped in and slammed my fist into his gut and he just couldn’t bring himself to go on. He went down instead. I grabbed the homemade Slim Jim as it went by and whacked it against the other one’s head. It made a singing sound. The short guy’s brick skidded into the street where a White Fleet Cab lurched over it. Something, possibly an elbow, cracked as he went down.
    I transferred funds, a couple hundred, from their pockets to my wallet, then unlocked the Ford, got in and fired it up, heading for Jefferson Avenue.
    Half the apartment complex there dated from the early fifties, textured stucco, French windows and medallions everywhere. The rest, a lower structure of interconnected wooden bungalowlike apartments, had been tacked on more recently: a kind of fanciful sidecar. All of it according to The Times-Picayune had been shut down for almost a year now. Funding had run out with renovation well under way. Balconies and entryways drooped in disrepair, bare two-by-fours showed in cavities where facades had been hammered partly through, piles of old lumber, flooring and plasterboard lay moldering in the yard and parking lot.
    On the right, an empty double lot stretched to the street corner. The other side looked down on a row of shotgun cottages. Across the street a small park with swing sets and picnic tables fronted a wooden fence and a line of identical condos each painted a different pastel.
    No easy access this time. I climbed a young elm and dropped onto a tarpaper roof awash in detritus. Beer bottles, scraps of roofing, remains of packing