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and his only alternative was to choke in the wire leash, Bullseye kept it
sweet and cool. His various efforts to see his assailant's face were in vain,
for one eye was puffed shut, and the darkness among all his trees was
profound. All he could say for sure was that the man had the strength of he
paused a garage mechanic? A sumo wrestler? A
robot? The residual THC of his earlier pot helped a bit, but mainly he kept
his anger down by keeping his intellectual composure up. There were, for
instance, the five journalistic W's that needed answering: who, what, why,
where, when. None of it was coming together, though. Was this one of the duped
bikers from his past? Some L.A.
chemical freak? A highway psycho? Strange thing was, the man acted more like a
cop than a stalker, certain of himself, unfrenzied, every motion a study in
economy. But what had he done that everyone else hadn't? And say this was a
cop. What kind? And why alone? And what was he looking for? DEA? One of those
FBI dudes he'd harangued at the blowout? But even at the height of his
revolutionary fever in the ripe hot days of Vietnam and Chicago, Bullseye
wouldn't have dreamed up a lone agent working this far beyond the pale.
Weirder things had happened, he reckoned, and just wished it could be over
soon. At last the man backed through the van's sliding door. Stabbing his
flashlight beam here and there around the clearing, he started to circle the
van to where Bullseye waited.
Suddenly, his light picked up Bullseye's food bag hanging like a giant blue
plum in the treetops, and the man stopped cold. The way he looked from the bag
to Bullseye and back up, you could tell he was thinking bingo. He lowered the
bag and eagerly
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light yanked open the drawstring on top and jammed his
light inside. From where he stood, all Bullseye could see was a yard-wide set
of shoulders slumped in disappointment, which was enough. Whatever the man
thought was in there wasn't.
Perch on it, Bullseye grinned with deep satisfaction. Now it was over. The
bastard would leave. Fuck you, thought Bullseye, and started to plot how he'd
cut the man off in the woods and hamstring him with his Swiss army knife or
call a strike in with his dog or sound a hue and cry in Camp Four, not that
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they'd hear. But, still being wired to the van, Bullseye kept his cards close
to the vest. The sucker was crazy, but even a crazy man's not going to let a
hornet loose. And that's what Bullseye figured he was: a mad fucking hornet.
So Bullseye was surprised when the man came over and unwired the leash from
the door handle. He was even more surprised when, incredibly, the man pushed
the van shell over on its side. It was like being at the mercy of a bad drug.
"What the fuck do you want?" Bullseye finally dared to ask.
"That's not even close to good enough," the man replied.
"Serious, man. I don't know what you want."
The dark shape sighed. "That's your elective," he said. "Let's go." He started
to lead
Bullseye off into the woods by the wire leash.
"Tell me what it is," Bullseye pleaded. "I don't know."
"Here's what it is, Mr. Broomis." The use of his real name seemed as
calculated as the rise-'n'-shine beating. Again Bullseye tried to see his
assailant's face, and again glimpsed only a huge dark figure in the night,
like a black hole in the blackness. "All you need to know is that you're doing
this to yourself. I'm not really against you."
The thought hit Bullseye harder than a fist. "Can I think a minute?" he
begged. He needed to slow down, sort through, orient. It was a mistake. But
the man knew his name. There had to be options. Compromise. Already Bullseye
was prepared to capitulate on almost any terms, if only he could grasp the
terms. A minute and he could find his bearings and communicate. He could
network with the motherfucker.
All he needed was a minute.
"No," the man said and yanked on the wire around his neck. Stage by rapid
stage, Bullseye learned how quickly the human spirit shuns chaos. He was at
the man's mercy, and yet there was no hint of mercy in this man. This was
Bullseye's Valley, and yet this stranger knew the path better than he did. The
assault made no sense, and yet Bullseye had always believed that ignorance was
your own responsibility.
He kept begging for a minute, just a minute, first to think, finally just to
breathe. And he kept not getting it. By the time they had climbed the hillside
stretching high above
Bullseye's hole in the forest and threaded between piles of old, rotting slash
left over from a fire ignited by lightning in 1958, by the time Bullseye was
led to the edge of this circular cliff and had knelt down on the cold earth to
observe the quicksilver trees and the quicksilver owl, he knew his captor was
exactly right, that ignorance is
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light a form of knowledge, too. There are no accidents.
There is no coincidence. The goofy fog he'd spent a lifetime weaving for
himself... lifted. He suddenly understood that
John had warned them all, but they'd made themselves deaf. They'd made
themselves blind with doubt, mute with gossip. Tucker hadn't slipped, because
Tucker wouldn't have. Because there are no accidents. There is will. Bullseye
stared off over the trees, marveling at how much we pretend to ourselves not
to see. Now he realized that from his very first perception, he'd known this
giant was Tucker's killer.
The other connections escaped him, the whys and now-whats, but at least he was
clear now. He was in tremendous pain and fear. But at least the confusion was
gone.
As it always does, if only to affect the next cause, the chaos took on a
purpose. That was the foothold he needed. He began crafting a plan.
"Mr. Broomis?" The man was pacing behind him, but his voice was patient.
"Not much scares me," said Bullseye. "But you got me scared.
Honest-to-fucking-God scared." That empty black pit terrified him. He was nose
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to nose with nothing. It was sniffing at his balls, teeth bared.
The footsteps padded on the gravel.
"Where'd you get my name?" asked Bullseye, trying to feather in. If only he
could get a dialogue going.
"A whore."
"A whore?" Then he remembered the party, the three whores. "You killed Tucker,
didn't you?"
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