Free Black Hornet by James Sallis

had indeed set about doing what young people did those days, when someone knocked at the door.
    “Lewis! You in there?”
    “Hang on.” I stood up, straightened things and looked at Verne. She made a face and straightened her own things.
    I opened the door a few inches. He wore black jeans, western boots, a yellow Ban-Lon shirt. Squinting in the bright sunlight.
    “What are you doing here? And more important, how did you find me?”
    “Hope you don’t mind. Figured after you got some sleep—”
    “Which hasn’t happened yet.”
    “—we could get together and—”
    He stopped, jaw still working. “Hey. I’m sorry. You get to bed.” At which point LaVerne stepped into sight. “I can come back.”
    I opened the door the rest of the way.
    “Better come on in. Sun shining off your white face like that, down here, it’s liable to blind someone. You want coffee? Nice shirt, by the way.”
    “Had a potful of it already. Hello, miss.” His eyes went back and forth between us a couple of times.
    “LaVerne: Don Walsh.” They both nodded. “A drink, then?”
    “You got a beer?”
    I did. I tracked it down in the icebox, trapped it, and handed it to him. He rolled the first mouthful around a while, swallowed.
    “There’s this guy over on Jackson keeps an eye and ear open for us.”
    “A snitch.” So I wasn’t as invisible as I thought I was. We seldom are.
    “Yeah, well, what’s in a name. He’s turned a lot of things our way.”
    “Including my address.”
    “It’s any consolation to you, I did have to tell him exactly what our connection was.”
    “We don’t have a connection, Officer.”
    Silence shimmered in the air like heat lightning.
    “I’ll be going now, Lew,” Verne said. “It’s been a long night. Get some sleep, call me later on?”
    “You need a cab?”
    “No, honey. St. John gave me a lift.” Sinjun. Her fifty-year-old neighbor who still dressed in chinos, sweater, blue shirt, loafers. Like many people in this city, he seemed stuck, like a fly in amber, in some prior era. “He’s waiting at a bar on Claiborne.”
    “Beautiful woman,” Walsh said.
    True enough. Heads turned, men’s and women’s alike, wherever she went, and I was pleased, flattered, proud, to have her beside me. Only much later, after almost thirty years with and without her, and when it was too late, did I realize that LaVerne had saved my life—that in some strange, indecipherable way we had saved each other’s lives.
    And in the years before that realization came, without meaning to I would hurt her terribly again and again, the same way I’d repeatedly damage myself. Each year, the ground pulls harder. Each year, the burden of what we do and fail to do helps push us down.
    “You want another beer?” I said. “No? Then what the hell do you want?”
    “A question I’ve asked myself again and again.”
    “Ever get an answer?”
    “Oh yes. Lots of them.”
    He found the trashcan under the sink and dropped the bottle in.
    “I want to stop feeling this hole where my brother was. I want things to make sense. I want justice and truth and decency and clear blue skies.”
    “Walsh?”
    “Yeah?”
    “You’re going to have a miserable life, man.”

Chapter Thirteen
    W E FOUND HIM, CASTING OURSELVES bodily for the fifth or sixth time into the abyss of the absurdly hopeful, ready to call it quits after one, two more, tops, at a bar not far off Lee Circle on Girod.
    He had on a tuxedo coat with lapels wide as mud flaps, purple-and-green Hawaiian shirt, khaki work pants, hightop tennis shoes with most of the black worn away. There were patches on the pants that looked like they belonged on a tire.
    “Looking good, Doo-Wop.”
    “Captain.” Doo-Wop was able to recall the minutest detail of a story you told him four years ago, but he couldn’t remember your name from the beginning of a sentence to its end; so everyone was captain. “Been a while.”
    “This is Walsh.”
    “Captain,” he said.
    Walsh