by Dale Bailey
“How do you plan to do it?”
He leaned forward and sketched it out for me, and I saw then that he was a madman. But something in his voice made me keep listening—the lure of the open road maybe or the hunger to feel a car come to life under my hands one more time. Maybe it was money and maybe it was love for Jack himself. A crew chief lives in the shadow of his wheelman, after all. Comforts him and cossets him and makes sure his car is purring like a kitten every time he takes the pavement. So, yeah, I listened. Most of us never can say why we do the things we do. Oh, we can count out reasons like we count out change, but those are just rationalizations. We’re mysteries to ourselves. That’s the one true thing I know, so in the end I can’t say why I did it. I can say only that I started off by telling him no. I thanked him for lunch and sent him packing, to pitch his crazy scheme to someone else—Joe maybe, or Lola. Anybody but me, brother. Hydraulics were the thing for me, and when the war came I’d follow my own advice, keep my head down, and hope that the draft board needed a gearhead more than another grunt.
Three months later, Alabama seceded from the union. I got my draft notice from the Citizens’ Militia two months after that. I didn’t make the appointment, though. I called Jack up and skipped town instead. He met me at the gate to tell me he’d pulled the crew back together. “Welcome home, brother,” he said, clapping me on the back. “Let’s ride.”
Our first job was a disaster. The gunners in the crow’s nests took one of our chase cars straight out of the game, spinning it off to the shoulder where it slammed into a guardrail. A minute later it was moving again, but by then it was too late. The action had moved on. It limped to the rendezvous point, where we learned that the man in the turret—Vance Tyler, my gasman for a good half-dozen years—had caught a face-full of lead. Worse yet was the swingman, Paul Harrison. He’d worked behind the pit wall, wrangling air hose, and I think it was that more than anything else that caused him to volunteer to make the leap. He’d always longed to work the dangerous side of the wall. He miscalculated his jump and rolled up under the truck. The tires thundered over him, unwinding him like a ball of twine as Jack peeled away toward the exit.
Jack and I both took it hard. When we sheltered up at an abandoned garage, Jack told me he’d never matched speeds with the tanker. Paul hadn’t had a clean shot at the running board. “Bullshit,” Lola said later.
“Sure,” I said. “Doesn’t help me any, though.”
“What do you mean?”
“Vance,” I said.
“Well, don’t cry about it,” she told me. “Armor up.”
We disassembled the gun turrets and rolled home under cover of darkness, just another band of gearheads testing the night air. We weren’t hot, not yet.
While Jack calmed our client, my crew and I went to work on the cars. The biggest challenge was balancing speed and weight. Jack was used to hitting 200 on the straightaways of a fast track like Daytona, and that was with restrictor plates. The question was how to maintain that kind of velocity on a vehicle that weighed considerably more than 3300 pounds.
“That’s the wrong question,” Lola insisted.
“Then what’s the right one?” I demanded one day in the garage. I’d been complaining about the weight and drag of the aluminum armor we’d begun bolting to the Dragon’s exterior.
“How to achieve your objective,” she said. “Speed is not your objective.”
“Then what is it?”
“You want to snatch a forty-ton vehicle off the highway. What do you think it is?”
Me, I thought about Vance Tyler, and did just as she’d told me to. I armored up. I reckoned that top speed for a loaded tanker couldn’t be more than a 100, 110 miles per hour on a long straightaway, and that without a convoy to slow it down. We had plenty of weight to give. We upgraded to rolled steel armor and we were still hitting 150. Like I said, there’s not anything I can’t do with an engine if you give me enough time.
Which is enough car talk. I could talk about cars all day long if you let me, but this story is about Lightning Jack, and how he finally went under the running boards himself. The next job—and don’t worry I’m not going to belabor every one of them, either—went down outside of Baltimore. We scooped the tanker off 70 West and dropped it into Ellicott City. You have to understand, we never held on to the rigs for long. It was all very bang bang. Our job was to acquire and deliver. After that it was the customer’s problem, and what they usually did was put it under cover somewhere quick and drain the tank into an idling fleet of smaller vehicles. But as I said, they could blow the thing sky high on the spot if they wanted. We didn’t care what they did with it. We were in it for the cash and—this was true especially of Lightning Jack, I think—the thrill of the thing.
And there were plenty of thrills. I took the gunner’s position in Lola’s Spyder after Vance died, so when Jack said, “Let’s ride, Gus,” it had a personal immediacy I’d never felt before. A night job, this was, and in the dark you couldn’t see much more of that car than its tail lights. There’s tape of the raid, but the video has the cheap washed-out quality of CCTV, and in the dark it has no resolution at all. You can see muzzle flash as the team breaks cover, swings in behind the convoy, and takes out the crow’s nests on the last truck in line. There’s some return fire from the truck’s escort vehicles, but most of them are farther up in the convoy, already out of play. There are maybe two bringing up the rear, it’s hard to tell. But none of that can communicate the sheer adrenaline rush of being there. I took out one of the escorts from the gun turret on Lola’s Spyder. The other one rolled and skated down the highway on its roof, throwing up a rooster tail of sparks.
Up ahead, Jack’s car veered in beside the tanker and locked speed. The dark swallowed the swingman—Dean Ford, the front tire changer who’d volunteered after Paul kissed the deck—but I knew he’d made the exchange because the truck began to drift out of true. For ten seconds, twelve at the most, everything hung in the balance. The trailer swung to the left and the right front wheels of the tractor started to come off the ground. I thought the thing was going to ditch and go skidding across the pavement on its side. Then it righted itself and hit the exit to Ellicott City, the chase cars on its tail. It nailed the street going maybe sixty miles per hour, and that quick it was over. Ten minutes later Jack makes the exchange with the client, and ten minutes after that, we’re undercover in a bankrupt Toyota dealership on Baltimore Pike.
This is pit work, as exciting in its way as any tanker raid. The objective is to break the cars down as swiftly as possible—you can’t cruise the streets in armored vehicles with gun turrets—and get the hell out of Dodge. My crew is fast. We’ve simulated this a thousand times, just like we did in the old days. The turrets come down, and roof panels slide into place. Street tires replace sticky ones. Off comes the armor. Everything goes into a chaser van. Fifteen minutes later we hit the street, and branch off onto different routes, running by night to a second rendezvous point, two hundred, maybe three hundred miles away, wherever Jack has us sheltered up until we do it all over again. And there you have it. The anatomy of a job.
If we’d only run the one, everything would have been okay. But there was no chance of that, not now. Jack loved to drive too much. As for me and Lola and the others, we loved the feel of an engine beneath our hands. There were just six of us by then. We doubled up on the road team and in the pits, doing half a dozen jobs each. We were all junkies and road dogs, hardwired for gears and adrenaline. I think that was what sustained us over the next nine months. I want to emphasize that. Months. You’re reading this, you probably carry around a truckload of myths and misconceptions: that we had a ten- or twelve-year run maybe, that we pulled off dozens of jobs before Lightning Jack’s last ride. The truth is, we pulled seven tankers off the street in all, four in quick succession before we garaged the cars and laid up in Memphis, safe from the Feds in the heart of the New Confederacy.
After Baltimore, Jack sent out thank you
notes, leaking them to the news hounds. And sometime along the way—I think it was before number three, down in Charleston—he painted that incandescent lightning bolt from his NASCAR career down the rolled-steel armor on his hood. It was just like the old days: an express elevator to the top. His footage was playing every time you tapped a newsfeed. Like many race drivers, he was a little guy, Jack—5’10” and 160 pounds or so. That weight to speed ratio again. But he seemed like a much bigger man. He was as handsome as Old Scratch himself, and he inspired loyalty like no man I’ve ever seen. For a while, he kept a suite in the Adler Hotel, wearing his brand-new scar from the Tallahassee job, entertaining women and dining out on his notoriety.
But the New Feds had taken notice. We were plenty hot by then. Word on the street was that Buffalo was aiming to scalp us. After a month or so of jumping at shadows, Jack picked up the Heckler and Koch, a lethal-looking bastard if I ever saw one. Soon we were all sporting ordnance, pretending to be gangsters, or maybe not pretending, though in my heart I was never anything more than an old pit boss. But Jack still had a case of the nerves, so we moved shop to a farm outside of Little Rock. It belonged to Eileen Sheldon, one of Jack’s girls from the NASCAR circuit, and if she’d put a few miles on the odometer since then, well, who hadn’t? She was still a fine-looking woman—big boned and kind of rangy—and she took Jack into her bedroom that very night. More important, she had a big barn where we got to work upgrading the vehicles.
By then, Lola and I had started sleeping together. As I’ve said, I’d had a hankering for her all along—she was a petite kid, with dark hair and eyes so black you could catch reflections of yourself if the light hit them right—but like Jack, I’d known she had too much value as a jack man to even think about it. A crew is a finely oiled operation. The last thing you need is personal tension to gum up the works. But thinking wasn’t part of the equation. A driver and his shotgun man have to trust one another completely, and a close brush with the grave—and every job counted on that score—left you with a yen for a little human warmth. When we reached the safe house after the job in Baltimore, we just kind of fell into the sack together. Nobody said a word about it, but after that it was understood: Lola Bridger was my girl. I count this as the biggest mistake of my life, but I couldn’t know that then. And God I loved that girl. In my heart I love her still.
A gentleman doesn’t speak of such things—and I don’t intend to in any detail—but late one night we found ourselves futzing around alone in Eileen Sheldon’s barn. The radio was playing some old dance tune, slow and easy, and we’d both had a beer or three too many. Me, I was poking under Jack’s hood, when Lola says something I don’t hear. I straightened up to listen and, bonk, knocked myself dizzy on that rolled-steel armor. Next thing I know, Lola’s saying, “You okay?” and we both got to giggling and one thing led to another and we ended up having it off right there in the hay. What I’m trying to say is, there was some heat in that relationship, if you take my meaning, and if neither one of us ever professed our love aloud, we didn’t need to. It was understood.
We lingered three months on Eileen’s farm, and it was a kind of idyll. Joe Hauser was a mean hand with a spatula. We ate like kings, and afterward Joe would sit back like a sultan and watch us wash up. Everybody but Jack took a hand in the suds. Nobody caviled either. Jack was a different order of being. It would be unseemly for the wheelman to dirty his hands scraping leftovers into the disposal. But Jack and Eileen had it sweet and steady, and so did Lola and I. In retrospect, I think that was the best time of my life. If I could have stretched it out forever, I would have. But all good things, right?
Jack wanted to drive, and he’d gotten some intel on a convoy coming out of Buffalo and heading toward Nashville. Everything Jack had predicted had pretty much panned out the way he said it would. The United States had splintered along lines geographic and sectarian—and these weren’t always in agreement. The New Feds were trying to put down insurgencies on a half a dozen fronts. The insurgents themselves were engaged with pockets of New Fed loyalists in their midst who needed reinforcement and resupply: guns, grub, and gasoline. The convoys would have been impossible in another era, but the satellites were useless and the fighter jets had been grounded by particulates in the atmosphere. The air war was a joke, leaving the convoys to defend themselves against occasional skirmishes—and us. I was against the whole thing. I worried about Lola behind the wheel of the Spyder, and I was none too enthusiastic about taking more fire myself. But you didn’t cross Lightning Jack, and besides, part of me wanted to see what the rebuilt vehicles could really do. I was a gearhead at heart.
The answer was, they did fine. We cut a truck free of the convoy on 65 South, just north of Bowling Green, broke down the cars, and hit the road again by nightfall, three hundred thousand New Confederate dollars richer. I think Jack sold the gas back to the New Fed loyalists who’d been scheduled to receive it in the first place, which was good for a laugh, especially when the update hit the newsfeeds. We pulled off two more jobs in the next two weeks: Raleigh and Frankfort. We were really hot by then, and we scooted for home under cover of darkness. A Fed patrol—maybe twelve guys armed with popguns and rocks—stumbled across us at the second rally point, but between Jack’s G40 and five other buzzsaws we cut through them like a good wheel man cutting through the pack. By this time we were back in New Confederate territory, and we didn’t face any more resistance on our way to Eileen Sheldon’s farm. When we rolled up, Eileen was waiting at the door to meet us. We’d escaped pretty much unscathed—Lightning Jack was nothing if not lucky—though the iron plating on our vehicles had been dinged dozens of times and Dean Ford had taken a round clean through the shoulder. Eileen disinfected and packed the wound—Lord, I’ve never heard such a racket—but Dean pulled through. His arm was never quite the same, though, and his days as swingman were over.
Me, I hoped our days as outlaws were over too. And they were, though we didn’t know it at the time.
For a while, the idyll resumed. We spent the stifling Arkansas days working on the vehicles. We ate Joe’s cooking. Evenings it cooled down into the 90s. We sat on the porch drinking beer, while Lightning Jack lounged on the hammock strung between two big oaks out front. Everything seemed free and easy, but the truth was the Feds had turned up the heat on Lightning Jack. He’d heisted three tankers in three weeks, and they needed to stop the bleeding. Plus, he was more famous now than he’d ever been in his NASCAR days. Taking him out would be a coup for Buffalo, and it might curtail the ravages of Gallant Jim and Albertini and the half dozen other gangs that had sprung up in our wake. Worse yet, the rumors of undercover Federal agents that had forced us out of Memphis had started floating around in Little Rock. It was enough to make a man nervous.
Despite all that, Jack was anxious to get on the road again.
“I want to drive, Gus,” he told me one afternoon out in the barn. He leaned against the hood of the Dragon and crossed his legs at the ankle. A shaft of sunlight pierced the roof—the barn had seen better days—limning him in a golden nimbus. The scar from the Tallahassee job was a vivid white streak across his forehead. A millimeter to the right—less even—and it would have splattered his brains across the rear window of his black Dragon. Sometimes I think it would have been better that way.
“Remember when we met? You blew that race on the truck circuit because you were too aggressive.”
“I remember.”
“Sometimes you got to know when to pit, Jack.”
“I want to win,” he said.
“Well, the stakes are a lot higher than they were in Daytona.”
I didn’t say it—I didn’t have to—but the stakes were life and death. I didn’t know how many crow’s nest gunners I’d killed, but I figured in all that shooting I must have taken my fair share. And that didn’t include the seven tanker drivers that had gone down, or the boy I’d shot in that New Federal patrol that had stumbled across us after the Frankfort job. I still remembered him. I
favored an older daisy cutter, the G39-X, a predecessor to Jack’s Heckler and Koch, but it was still lethal. It had cut that boy nearly in half, and I couldn’t stop seeing that image in my mind—the shocked look on his face as the bullets tore into his midsection and his mortality dawned on him for the second or two it took him to bleed out. He probably hadn’t thought about it before, not in any real serious way, and he didn’t have long to think about it then. But you could tell it made an impression. He was the one who stuck with me most, but none of them were very far from my mind in those days. I couldn’t lie to myself that I was merely a crew chief anymore. The knowledge of what I had become and what I had done sometimes woke me up in the night to gaze out the window into the dark rolling hills of the farm. When I’d showed up at Jack’s gate after the Citizens’ Militia had drafted me, I hadn’t realized I was signing on for this.
Lola too seemed to be having some trouble coping—or that’s what I thought anyway. She grew distant and quiet, and while she still shared my bed, there were no more good-natured tussles in the hay. Sex became perfunctory, a grim duty. It’s not that I didn’t love her anymore. But a river of blood flowed between us now, and we couldn’t find a way to bridge it. We didn’t spend much time in the barn together, and when we did we kept our conversation to the point: “Reach me that spanner, will you?” or “Can you give me a hand with the lift?”
I guess the rest of the crew must have known before I did—love can blind you that way—but no one said a word. You didn’t cross Jack for one thing, but I think the true reason is that none of them wanted to break the glue that bound us all together. We’d divorced ourselves too much from the world for us to risk it. With those rumors of Federal agents in the air, even Little Rock was off limits. So we lived for one another, and we lived for the cars, and we lived for Lightning Jack. He was the most solitary of us all, I suppose. As the wheelman, he stood a step above his crew, isolated by his skill and by his fame and by the scar that forever marked his identity. The easy days of living in the Adler Hotel and making the social rounds were over. He was a marked man, and I think he knew that he was living on borrowed time. I believe that’s why he was so anxious to hit the road and boost another tanker—it was the only time he really felt alive anymore. And I think that’s why he started sleeping with Lola, as well. For the thrill of it, nothing more. To this day I don’t believe he meant anything personal.