A Bob Lee Swagger eBook Boxed Set: I, Sniper, Night of Thunder, 47th Samurai

by Stephen Hunter

  No, she told herself. Some kid, too much beer, he thinks he’s some NASCAR hero, these people love their drivers, that’s what a kid’s fancy would turn to. She half-believed that in the next twenty miles she’d come across the low, black speed merchant on its side, bleeding flame in a pulse of red light, as the emergency service vehicles circled it and their crews tried to pull the hero, now a crispy critter, his soul in heaven, from the flames.

  She shivered. Then she slipped into gear and pulled out.

  He saw her. It was in a haze of speed, but he made out the Volvo and a young woman’s face caught in the glow of dash light. She’d pulled aside on the right, nestling under trees, and had been working at some task, some continuation of the curiosity that had doomed her. He saw in that flash of light a beautiful young face and he knew how close it was, he was running out of mountain road, and she’d be a much harder kill without an iron wall of trees to drive her into on her right side.

  Why had he looked to the right at that moment? Who knew? It was the Sinnerman’s luck, and even the Sinnerman got lucky once in a while. He slowed to eighty, then found a wayside, pulled over more deeply, to await her.

  Brother Richard punched the iPod and ran through his Sinnerman options again, beginning with the Travelers 3, going to the pure gospel of the Reverend Seabright Kingly and His Hebrew Chorus (that was funky!) and on to the personality-free Seekers. Then to Les Baxter’s balladeer, winding through the high-boring purity of Shelby Flint, and finishing up with the arrhythmic, antimelodic approach of Sixteen Horsepower. All interesting, with the Travelers 3 maybe the truest folk esthetic, the Balladeer the highest show-biz, and the Reverend the fanciest old–Negro church version, almost unrecognizable for all the hooting and shrilling.

  Brother Richard knew himself proudly to be the Sinnerman. He would do the wrong. I can live with the wrong. I exult in the wrong, he thought. I define the wrong. I am the wrong. It could have turned out different, but it turned out this way.

  He waited as the music roared in his ear. And finally, she came by him on the lonely road, not seeing him pulled off to the side, her placid, little, sensible Volvo trimly purring along at less than forty. He could see that she was tense behind the wheel, for he saw her body hunched forward to the wheel, her neck tight and straight, her head abnormally still, her hands rigid at ten and two on the wheel. She was worried about the road, about the possibility of a big truck coming up from behind her or barreling widely and wildly around a turn.

  But she wasn’t worried about the Sinnerman. In her version of the world, there was no Sinnerman. She had no concept of the Sinnerman and no idea of what was about to befall her.

  Almost out of these damned mountains. Then a short, flat run across the floor of Shady Valley, a last splurge of hills, and then Sullivan County, civilization, as 421 took her back to Bristol, to her apartment, to a nice glass of wine.

  Then Nikki saw death.

  It was a blur in her mirror, just a shadow as no details presented themselves. Then it was a blur in her driver’s-side window, growing exponentially by the nanosecond, full of thrust and empty of mercy. It was death in a dark car, come to snuff her out.

  No one had ever tried to kill Nikki before. But she had her father’s blood in her veins and more importantly his DNA, which meant she had reflexes fast as her killer’s, and she wasn’t by nature turned toward fear or panic. The car hit her hard, the noise filled the universe and knocked her askew, toward trees which rushed at her, signaling catastrophe as her tires bit against the skittish dust. Then she did what one person in ten thousand will do in those circumstances and she did it at a speed that has no place in time, out of certitude for correct behavior at the extremes.

  She did nothing. She let the car correct itself as its wheels reoriented swiftly. She had control again.

  Most, seeing trees or cliff rushing at them, will overcorrect, and when they do that the laws of physics, immutable and merciless, mandate a roll. The roll is death. The neck and its thin stalk of spine can’t take the g-force and sunder under the extreme vibration. Cessation of consciousness and life signs is immediate, and whether the wreck is in flames or not, further body trauma, broken bones, sundered blood-bearing organs, whatever, is immaterial. She didn’t know that the Sinnerman, with his experience in automotive assassination, had presumed she would yank the wheel for life, guaranteeing death, and was surprised as she rode the bump out, got soft control, and then accelerated, half on road, half on gravel, to escape his predation.

  He hit her again, in the rear-third of the accelerating Volvo, knocking her fishtailing off the road in a screech of dust. But she didn’t panic at the wheel and hard-spin it this time either (sure death), but instead let it spin free and find its own proper vector as she scooted just ahead of him. He pulled himself left, drew off, set up for another thump, this one better aimed.

  Nikki was not scared. Fright is imagination combined with anticipation combined with dread, and none of those conditions described her. Instead, she accepted instantaneously that she was in a fight to the death with a trained, experienced killer, and she didn’t waste any concentration on the unfairness of it all. Instead, she pushed the pedal so hard to the floor of the car that she felt the beginning of g-force, though of course the Volvo 240 with its 200-horsepower six-cylinder was no match for the muscled-up Chrysler barn-burner under her antagonist’s foot. But as he struggled to find an angle, she put surprising space between the vehicles and yet was astute enough to see in supertime a turn approaching. So now she finally braked, softly turning into a power slide that would get her around the turn at the best angle and set her up for another dead-on acceleration the hell out of there, if such a thing were possible, and it probably wasn’t.

  Damn, she was good! As she control-skidded around the turn in a whine of rubber fighting for purchase of asphalt, Brother Richard saw his opening and, instead of veering outside of her, he bravely cut inside to begin his surge. His professional-quality cornering, as opposed to her gifted amateur approach, won him the inside where she didn’t expect him to be. As she tried to float back into the proper lane, he revved beyond redline, closed that off from her, and delivered his blow to the front fender of her righthand side, not so much a thud as a nudge to push her out of equilibrium. But now, damnit, she figured this one out too, and jammed hard on her brakes, pumping the wheel as she skidded left.

  The world spun before Nikki, racing across her windshield, pure abstraction in the cone of the one headlamp that still burned, and she nursed the brake pedal with a delicate foot while merely making suggestions to the wheel, which kept her in a semblance of control as she stopped, alas, to find herself one-eightied in the other direction. She was now facing the dangerous rising linkage of switchbacks up Iron Mountain that she’d just survived. So she punched it hard, jammed on the brakes as he came by her a third time (how had he gotten around so fast!), somehow got through a reverse righthand, backing turn at a speed at which such a maneuver should never be conceived of, much less attempted, and again punched hard.

  But he beat her, somehow, to possession of the road, and this time he hit her, rode her hard right. He turned, and she saw his face in the glare of the dash, its plainness, its evenness of feature, its dull symmetry, its almost generic quality, like the father of Dick in a Dick and Jane; it burned into her mind. And then she was off the road, out of control among the trees, and the world was jerking left and right, hard as the car slammed against or glanced off the trees. She felt her neck screaming, her head flopping this way and that, and then she hit, and everything stopped.

  TWO

  It happened so fast, two weeks. His hair went straight to winter from summer, with no autumnal pause. It didn’t thin, it didn’t fall out, it just veered off to dull gray. He looked ancient, or so he thought.

  It was a memory that did it. He had recently had an actual sword fight to the death—in the twenty-first century, in one of the most modern cities on earth—with a Japanese gentleman of infinitely s
uperior skill and talent. Yet he had won. He had killed the other man, left him cut through the middle in a mushy field of sherbet snow, turned magenta by the man’s own blood.

  Bob thought often: Why did I win? I had no right to win. I was…so lucky. I was so goddamned lucky. It was like a worm, gnawing at his heart. You lucky bastard. Why did I luck out and that guy end up guts out in the snow?

  Not that Swagger had escaped intact. The guy had laid him open to steel bone at the hip, and he’d gone too long before stitches saved his life. It never healed right, and he didn’t help by denying so fiercely that there was a problem. Somehow his leg stiffened, as if the tide of blood that the stitching dammed was still there, coagulating and about to break out in a red ocean spray and bleed him to death. Killer’s revenge. But the killer had also, as another part of his revenge, turned him comical, with one of those weird bounces in his gait. Could still ride, could still walk, couldn’t really run much. No talent at all for climbing. A motorcycle saved his life by giving him the illusion of freedom that had once been his strongest attribute.

  “I look a hundred and fifty,” he’d said, just that morning.

  “You don’t look a day aver one hundred forty-five,” his wife said. “Honey, look at Daddy, he’s turned white.”

  “Daddy’s a snowman,” shouted the little girl, Miko, now seven, delighted to find a flaw in a hero so awesome as her strange, white father. “Snowman, snowman, snowman!”

  “It’s gray, it’s gray,” Bob protested. Then he added, “I know someone’s going to find her ride cut short she don’t stop calling Daddy a snowman.” But the tone revealed the fraudulence of the threat, for it was his pleasure to spoil his daughters and then take pride in how well they turned out anyway.

  He was a rich man. Rich in land—he now owned six lay-up barns in three western states, two in Arizona, two here in Idaho, and one each in Colorado and Montana, and was looking at property in Kansas and Oregon—and rich in pension from the United States Marine Corps. He was rich in homes, as he owned this beautiful, recently finished place sixty miles out of Boise, on land he’d cleared himself that looked across green prairie emptiness to blue scars of mountains under piles of cumulus cotton against a blue diamond sky. He was rich in wife, for Julie was handsome, a character out of a Howard Hawks movie, one of those tawny, feline women who never got excited, had a low voice, and was still sexy as hell. And he was richest of all in daughters.

  He had two. Nikki was a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism and now working her first newspaper job in Bristol, Virginia, a place her father liked a lot more than the New York City where she’d spent the last year. He felt she’d be a lot safer in the small city right smack on the Virginia-Tennessee border. Meanwhile, his adopted daughter, Miko, had taken to western life without a hitch, and quickly became comfortable around horses, the messes that they made, the smells that they generated. She loved them, took to them automatically, and it thrilled her father to see such a tiny thing so relaxed atop such a giant thing, and controlling it so confidently, making it love and obey her. The kid was already earning blue ribbons in Eventing and might even overtake her big sister, who’d been a national champion in that sport two years running when she was a teenager.

  Now it was morning, and since it was August there was no school for Miko, so they were doing what they loved: the girl on her horse, Sam, and her father watching her canter gently about the ring. But he was not dominating. For while that had been his way as a marine NCO, it was not his way with his daughter. He leaned on the fence, and you’d have thought, There’s a cool cowboy type of fellow. His jeans were tight, framing his lanky legs; he wore a horseman’s slouch and sucked on a weed. He was all cowboyed up—the Tony Lamas boots muddy but solid, a blue, denim shirt, a red handkerchief around his neck, for it gets hot in Idaho in August, and a straw Stetson to keep the sun off his face.

  It really couldn’t have been more perfect, always a signal that disturbance lurks not far away.

  “Easy, sweetie,” he called, “you don’t want to force him. You have to feel him, and when he’s ready, he’ll let you know.”

  “I know, Daddy,” she called back. She rode eastern, on the snooty, Brit postage stamp of a saddle, with erect posture, a crop in her hand, tall, low-heeled boots, and of course a helmet. She was equally adept with the big western rigs that were like boats upon a horse’s plunging back, but both Bob and Julie agreed that she would eventually go to school in the East, that she should have riding skills set for that part of the country, and, on top of that, they wanted to keep her out of rodeos, where too many young gals flocked because they liked the string-bean boys who rode like hell and bounced up with a smile when they went for a sail in the air and a thump in the dirt. Though with Miko, maybe it would be something else. Maybe it would be to actually do some crazy rodeo thing, like leave a perfectly good cow pony for a ride on a bull’s horns.

  “She’ll probably end up the women’s bull-dog champion of Idaho, but still you’ve got to try,” he told his wife.

  “If she does, she’ll have to put up with a screaming nag of an old lady every damn day,” Julie said.

  So far, so good—Miko had a rhythm and a patience that even a generally stoic animal like a horse could feel and love. She had magical ways, or so Bob believed, and he would have gladly given up the other hip—or anything—for Miko.

  Gracefully, she took a jump, without a twitch to her posture, a tightness to her spine, a twist to her landing.

  “That was a good one, sweetie,” he called.

  “I know, Daddy,” she responded, and he smiled a bit, wiped his brow, then looked up at a flash of movement too fast for good news and saw Julie coming from the house. He knew immediately something was wrong. Julie never got upset; she’d stitched up enough cut-open Indian boys on the reservation where she’d run a clinic for ten years, and kept her head around blood and pain and emotional upheaval and the occasional death. So if she was upset, Bob knew immediately it could be only one thing: his other daughter, Nikki.

  “Sweetie,” he called before Julie reached him, wanting to bring Miko in before the bad news arrived and he lost contact with reality, “you come on down now, just for a second.”

  “Oh, Daddy, I—”

  He turned to Julie.

  “I just got a call from Jim Gustofson, the managing editor of Nikki’s paper—”

  Bob felt constriction through his heart and lungs, as if his respiratory system had just blown a valve and was leaking fluid. His knees went weak; he’d seen violent death, particularly as inflicted upon the young and innocent, in both hemispheres, and he had a bleak and terrifying image of disaster, of his daughter gone, of his endless, terrible grief and rage.

  “What is it?”

  “She was in some kind of accident. She went off the road out in the mountains, ended up in some trees.”

  “Oh, Christ, how is she?”

  “She’s alive.”

  “Thank God.”

  “She was conscious long enough to call 911 and give her location. They got to her soon enough, and her vital signs were good.”

  “Is she going to be all right?”

  “Mommy, what’s wrong?”

  “Nikki’s been in an accident, honey.”

  It killed Bob to see the pain on his younger daughter’s face; the child reacted as if she’d been hit in the chest by a boxer. She almost crumpled.

  “She’s in a coma,” Julie said. “She’s unconscious. They found her that way, with minor abrasions and contusions. No paralysis, no indications of serious trauma, but the whiplash must have put her out, and then she hit her head hard, and her eyes are blackened, and she’s still out.”

  “Oh, God,” said Bob.

  “We have to get out there right away.”

  Yet even as Julie said that, Bob knew it was wrong. His oldest and darkest fear came out of its cave and began to nuzzle him with a cold nose, looking him over with yellow eyes, blood on its breath and teeth.

&nb
sp; “I’ll go. I’ll leave soon as I can get a flight. You book me on the Internet, then call me as I head to Boise for the flight out.”

  “No. No, I will see my daughter. I will not stay here. We’ll all go. Miko has to see her too.”

  “Come over here,” he said, and when he drew her away from the child, he explained.

  “I’m worried this could be linked to something I’ve done to someone. It’s a way to get me out—”

  “Bob, not everything—”

  “Not everything’s about me, but you have no idea of some of the fixes and the places I’ve been. You have no idea who might be hunting me. You have a scar on your chest, and memories of months in the hospital when that fellow put a bullet into you.”

  “He put it into me because of me, not you.”

  It was all so long ago, but he remembered hearing the shots and finding her, almost bled out, along the trail, Nikki screaming, another man dead close by.

  “I don’t say it’s my business,” he said. “But I can’t say it ain’t. And I can’t operate if I’m thinking all the while about your safety and Miko’s. I have to recon this alone. If it’s safe, I’ll let you know.”

  It was gunman’s paranoia, he knew it. All the boys felt it, all the mankillers, good, bad, or indifferent. At a certain age, faces come to you unbidden, and you can’t place them quite, but it’s your subconscious reminding you of this or that man you took down and you think: Did he have brothers, parents, cousins, friends, peers, colleagues? Maybe they were as savaged by that unknown man’s death as he had been by the deaths of those he’d known himself, like Julie’s first husband, Donnie Fenn, such a good young man, the best, his chest torn open by the same sniper who put the bullet into Julie. Bob remembered, I killed the sniper.