Black Hornet by James Sallis Page A

another. But so much of it’s not connected. You’re sliding along, hit a bump and come down in a life you don’t recognize. Every day you head out a dozen different directions, become a dozen different people; some of them make it back home that night, others don’t.
    When I came home from Dunbar’s, just after dark, Verne was there waiting.
    Walsh and I had driven by the CircleCtop on Tchoupitoulas. The block was still choked with emergency vehicles and gawkers. Walsh decided to head back downtown, dropped me off on the way.
    Happy hunting, I told him.
    Verne sat in the front room in her slip with the lights off. Her dress was draped over the back of an easy chair. She’d poured a couple fingers of Scotch into a glass and sipped her way down to the first finger.
    “Walking like an old man there, Lewis.”
    I told her why.
    “Not infected, are they?” She got up and walked toward me. “You really do need to start taking better care of yourself, have I mentioned that?” She reached up and put her arms around me. “Good to see you anyhow. Old, infected, whatever.”
    “You do know how to flatter a man, Miss LaVerne.”
    I always felt like I’d hit one of those bumps with LaVerne. Like I’d hit a lot of those bumps.
    “I put some coffee on,” she said. “Or maybe you want a drink instead. Have you eaten?”
    I didn’t say anything, just held on to her.
    “I miss you so much when you’re away, Lew. Or when I am.”
    I nuzzled her neck, kissed one bare shoulder.
    “I always tell myself: this time he won’t be back. That’s the kind of thing women think, the kind of fears we live with. But it’s never that I’m afraid you’ve found someone else, stopped caring about me, wanting to be with me. What I’m afraid of, is that you’re dead somewhere.”
    “Someday I will be.”
    “And how long will it be before I even know it? How will I find out? I’ll just think you’re away again. Working. Business as usual.
    “Women wait. That’s what we do, what we learn, what we become. No one else ever knows how much waiting can hurt.”
    She climbed out of bed to grab a couple of beers.
    “You matter to me, Lew,” she said, handing over a bottle. “That’s the thing.”
    “I know.”
    So I held her to keep her from the foggy, foggy dew.
    Porgy you is my man.
    Later she lit a cigarette and lay beside me smoking. This small red beacon there in the darkness. I listened to her breath go in, hold, come back out. Felt the bed move with it, move again with her arm.
    “Lew. I never told you about my folks, did I?”
    “Unh-unh,” I said, near sleep.
    “I will some time.”
    “Ummmm.”
    She took a final draw and stubbed the cigarette out.
    “Welcome home, Lew,” she said. Then: “Home is the sailor, home from the sea. And the hunter, home from the hill.”
    “Hmmmm?”
    “Nothing. You go on to sleep, honey. I’ll lie here a while with you.”
    Later still, I felt her swing her legs slowly out of bed so as not to disturb me, heard the whisper of her dress sliding over the nylon slip. The bathroom door closed. The light came on. Water ran into the sink. The light went off. Cat-soft footsteps from bathroom to front door. Door eased shut around the latch’s fall.
    For the first time, it came to me that we’re damned every bit as much by the things we don’t do as by things we do.
    When she was gone I snapped on the light and read The Stranger from cover to cover.

Chapter Nineteen
    I FINALLY GOT TO SLEEP AT TWO in the morning and dreamed I was walking along a beach in Algiers—the real one, not the one across the river. People all around me were frozen in position, lifting carafes of water, turning pages, gesturing to those beside them, running out toward the water. Then I was in a white room with no furniture and with paintings, also white, in white frames, on the walls. Everything outside the windows was white too, and you couldn’t tell windows from paintings from walls. My patron asked if I would