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

by Stephen Hunter

  “I think it did,” said Red.

  They didn’t talk for a while, except in some kind of code.

  “Great traction, all the way through. He’s left footing. Seems to find the ideal line a lot. Say, I really like his angle.”

  “His angles are damned good, considering the corners are all unknown. I also like how soon he gets to the ideal, early in mid-corner. He rides this one real good and ain’t fighting it none.”

  “This boy’s been in a hundred-mile-per slide before, I think. Like his traction. He ain’t hardly ever on two.”

  “I think so, too, Matt.”

  “Mr. Swagger, you got any other pictures? What I see is a damned fine driver knocking the little foreign job off the road. I will say, this girl of yours, she’s a damned cool hand. Suppose she gets it from her daddy.”

  “Her mommy, more ’n likely. Yes, I didn’t know what to make of these. Mr. Dewey told me when he was done he one-eightied and flew back up the road to make sure he didn’t miss nothing. He stayed on the road a longer time than I asked him to, and way, way back he came upon some other skids. Now, it may not be the same guy, but it sure looks like it to me. Same width of track, same density of color. You’d have to make a tread comparison to be sure, but as I said earlier, don’t believe much in coincidence.”

  He handed the two photos over, and the two men looked hard at them, then back several times at the actual pocket-of-engagement sequence.

  “Well,” Red finally said, “that ties it up with a ribbon.”

  “It sure does,” said Matt.

  “So tell me what you make of it.”

  “As I say, where he’s whacking her, it’s hard to make it out, other than he’s a good driver, so’s she. The cars are banging together, speed’s up near a hundred, she keeps turning inside him, he skids out—don’t lose it though—and goes after her.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “But see these here? They’re bad news, I’m afraid.”

  Bob didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to find out the worst. The world was so much better for everybody if this was just one drunk or hopped-up farmboy who wanted to put a lick on another car, just like his hero, the late Dale Senior.

  But that wasn’t to be.

  “Now here we are, ten miles before the accident, and see this here turn he made. And here’s another one. He’s running like hell to catch up to her, like he got the news late that she was there.”

  “But it’s not like he’s chasing her, in the sense that he sees her and is closing,” Bob said. “It means, in other words, miles before he makes eye contact, he’s going like hell to catch her.”

  “Well, he’s sure going like hell,” said Matt. “He’s not just running flat out for the fun of it, he’s right on the edge of a very dangerous road, and take it from me you can’t get there unless you’re closing on the leader with two laps to go. Nobody goes that close to dying for the fun of it. Then here, this last curve, that’s his boldest, and damn it’s a fine piece of driving. He read the angle of the curve exactly, knew what his attack would be and how long, maybe to the tenth of a second, and he had to hold it. A tenth too long one way, he’s in the trees to the left of the road, a tenth too short, he’s in the trees to the right. He found what we call the ideal angle. It may not be the shortest angle, but it means he’s reading the input at supertime, he knows his car like he knows his own face, he goes into the curve just fine, he keeps traction at maximum—traction is speed and control—he never slides or drifts, he’s left-footing the brake while he right-foots the pedal, not easy, and at the ultimate, perfect moment he’s set up to go to the floor and hit the straightaway, speeding up not slowing down, and never wastes no time correcting or recovering.”

  “That’s good driving.”

  “No, sir. That’s great driving. Most civilians don’t know how to corner, even cops and good young racers. It takes time and some investment of guts and fender metal and a lot of good luck to learn the trick. You find that ideal angle that don’t feel right, but it is right. You ride that angle, at a certain point you brake but as she starts to skid, you got to play left-foot-right-foot, making the car dance, so that you can be speeding up before you’re on the straightaway ’cause if that’s where you’re stomping it, you’re already too late. And in all this, if your timing ain’t right you’re upside down in flames and hoping the foam truck gets there before your hands and feet burn off, never mind the busted neck.”

  “I see.”

  “Gunny,” said Red, “whoever drove your daughter off the road wasn’t no kid. He was a damned good, experienced racing driver. He had all the tricks. He’s way up there with the big boys like scrawny little tub-of-guts Matt there. He’s a professional. What he was trying to do, he was trying to kill her.”

  FIVE

  The Reverend Alton Grumley pronounced a mighty sermon, full of Baptist hellfire and damnation, in the meeting hall of the Piney Ridge Baptist Prayer Camp a few miles outside of Mountain City on old 167, just before it hit new 67.

  He called upon God in his majesty to send wisdom to his young prodigal, he who had failed, send wisdom, humility, respect for elders, all those things a good Christian boy should show his religious mentor.

  “Thou hast failed,” he said, in a power-voice, all throb and vibration. “Thou hast failed because thou did not pray for guidance hard enough. Thou must pray, Brother Richard, and give the soul in totality to the man upstairs. Only then will he listen.”

  The Reverend was a scrawny old boy, with slicked-back hair, all pouf and vibrant with gray and hair oil, big, white, fake teeth, and dressed in a powder blue, three-piece suit from Mr. Sam’s big store. His sons and nephews had a joke. “Daddy’s tailor,” they’d say, “is Wah Ming Chow of Number 38 Industrial Facility, Harbin, Szechwan Province, China!” and get to laughing up a fit.

  “You damned boys, the devil will take you!” he’d howl in rage, and then laugh harder.

  But the boys weren’t there now. In fact only one parishioner listened to the Reverend. He was a raw-boned fella of indeterminate age—fellows like him could be thirty to sixty, all hardscrabble, southern school of hard knocks and rough roads, indomitable, relaxed, tougher than brass hobnails, not the sorts to get excited but exactly the sorts to avoid riling—who now sat in the front row of the meeting hall, in tight, faded jeans, beat-up boots, a blue, working-man’s shirt, and a Richard Petty straw cowboy hat both shabby and cool pulled low over his eyes. He wasn’t the sort who took the hat off indoors, church or no church. He had on a big pair of mogul sunglasses too, as King Richard commonly wore, and sported a mustache and a goatee, though the hair wasn’t real.

  “Old man, you do go on,” he finally said. “I am getting extremely tired of all this show.”

  “You was given a job, and you failed. If I wanted failure, I’d have sent my own damn sons. They so dumb, they guarantee failure, God love ’em.”

  “They are dumb,” said Brother Richard, so called for his resemblance to the real Richard Petty and what was assumed to be a common NASCAR heritage. “But that’s okay, because they’re lazy, too.”

  “They are good boys,” said the Reverend.

  “Not really,” said Brother Richard.

  “Anyhows, we in a porridge-pot o’ trouble now.”

  “I agree. After all, she saw me. Not even you have seen me. If you had to describe me, you’d come up with, ‘He looks like Richard.’ So I guess they’d send out Richard on the circular. But by that time, I wouldn’t look like Richard.”

  “Everyone knows that hair is phony,” said the Reverend.

  “It doesn’t matter what they know. It only matters what they’ve seen.”

  “Anyhow, you were highly recommended to me by at least three sources. It was said by all, ‘He’s the best. Nobody like him.’ Yet when I need you most, you fail.”

  “There are some things I can’t control. I can’t control the fact that the girl drives like a pro. She must have raced go-karts. You can learn a lot
in the damn little things. Ask Danica. Who knew? I’ve done that job more times than you can know, and nobody ever fought so hard or made so many good decisions at speed. If the world were fair, I’d be marrying her, not trying to kill her.”

  “Yessir, but as I have noted in many a sermon, the world ain’t fair. Not even a little bit.”

  “Anyhows, I am as upset as you. She saw my new face and it wasn’t cheap, not in money, not in time, not in pain. She’s the only one that’ll identify me.”

  “You should have had on one of your disguises.”

  “I didn’t have time. You called me and I was off. I had to kick hell to even catch her. Like to might have been smeared to ketchup by a logging truck, some of the turns I took.”

  “Whyn’t you finish her? You could see the car didn’t roll. If it don’t roll, you got problems.”

  “I am not smashing a girl’s head in with a rock or cutting her throat. Among other things, if you do that, then all the law knows it’s not a hopped-up kid and is a murder and maybe you got state cop investigators, maybe even FBI, and lots of trouble. It only works if everybody agrees it’s some kind of hit-run thing by some kind of speed-crazy, NASCAR-loving jackrabbit with the brains of a pea. That’s what I’m selling. But there’s an issue of what I do and what I don’t do too. I don’t kill up close where there’s blood. It’s my car against theirs, and I always win at that game. Nobody can stay in that game. If I kill up close, hell, I’m just another Grumley.”

  “Car agin’ car, you didn’t win this time, Brother Richard.”

  “Now I don’t like that one, Rev. This whole shebang you’ve got set up—well, someone has set up, as I don’t believe you got the native intelligence of a porcupine—”

  “You are so insolent to your elders. You should respect your elders, Brother.”

  “Maybe next time. This whole damn thing turns on me. You need the best driver you can get for a certain job and if you don’t have him, it all goes away. You don’t want that. So why don’t you stop cobbing on me, Alton, and pick two sons or nephews, if you can tell them apart, which I doubt—the two with the most teeth and whose eyes are far enough apart so that in certain lights they appear normal—you send them into that hospital. And since they’re such smooth operators and nobody suspects nothing yet, they can just inject an air bubble into her vein and when it reaches her heart, she’s gone. Then all our problems are solved, and we can do our job, git our money and our revenge, and move on.”

  “I hope God don’t hear the disrespect in your voice,” the Reverend said. “But if I’m so dumb, how come I already sent the two boys?”

  SIX

  Vern Pye had the gift of gab and Ernie Grumley the talent of conviction. One was a nephew, one a son, though neither was aware of which category they fit into as names were sometimes misleading among the Reverend’s brood. After all, the man had had seven wives and six boys per wife as per certain biblical instructions, and, if rumor was believed, he had spread his seed amply among the various sisters of the various wives, whether those sisters were married to others or not. He had a way about him and a hunger, and women, for some reason, were eager to give to him that which they thought he wanted.

  They all—wives, formal and informal, legal and only by custom, sisters and husbands, the progeny—lived together far from prying eyes on a chunk of hilltop outside of Hot Springs, Arkansas. From there they did various jobs for various contacts around the South that the Reverend had inherited from generations of Grumleys before him. The Grumleys, foot soldiers to the Lord and also various interested parties. That is why they’d temporarily migrated to the Piney Ridge Baptist Prayer Camp on Route 61 in Johnson County, Tennessee, at the insistence of Alton, the patriarch.

  Vern and Ernie were somewhat slicker than the usual Grumley progeny. Each was smooth in his way and not too tattooed, and the Reverend, noting talent where it happened to spring up (although, Lord, why do you test me so? That quality was rare enough), always urged them to develop their talent. Thus Vern was the superstar of his generation of Grumleys. He was an aristocrat, a Pye out of Grumley, and so his blood was bluer than any other’s, uniting two lines of violent miscreants from the hinterlands of Arkansas outside Hot Springs. He had killed and would kill again, without much emotional investment, but he didn’t consider himself a killer. He had vanities, and pride. He was the compleat criminal. He could forge, extort, swindle, steal cold, steal hot, do banks or grocery stores, do hits, administer beatings, all with the same aplomb. He liked getting over on the johns, didn’t matter who or what the game was.

  It helped that he was unusually handsome, with a dark head of hair and large, white spades for teeth. His eyes radiated warmth and charm; he was as smooth with a line of bullshit as he was with a Glock, and he was pretty smooth with that. He’d done a few years’ hard time, where he’d basically networked, and he had three other identities going, two wives, seven children, girlfriends among the stripper and escort population in every southern state, and a thing for young girls, which he indulged at shopping malls, clubs, and fast food joints whenever he had a spare moment. He could con a twelve-year-old into a blowjob in the men’s room faster than most people could count to one hundred.

  Ernie was less accomplished. He was essentially a Murphy man, a fraudulent pimp who conned college boys out of their dollars and delivered zero in the sex department, in some of the Razorback State’s seamier venues. Basically, in today’s operation, Ernie’s job was to support Vern and learn from him, which is how they found themselves, in medical scrubs under MD nametags, walking down the hallway of the Bristol General Hospital, headed toward their destination, the critical-care ward.

  It was late; the place was nearly empty. It was big enough, however, so that the concept of “stranger” could apply. No nurse, for instance, could know all the medical personnel by name or face and could therefore be counted upon to yield before slickness, sureness of authority, and the steady guidance and charisma of an experienced confidence man.

  It’ll be easy.

  No one suspects a thing.

  The girl is an accident victim, not a murder survivor.

  No security, no suspicion, no fear.

  Thus the two men ambled happily, making eye contact, issuing warm “Hellos” and “Say, there, how’s the boy?”s as they coursed through the fourth floor’s spotless hallways. They even stopped now and then for a cup of coffee, to assure a patient on a walker, and to examine bedside charts. They took pulses, looked into eyes, felt throats, just like on the television doctor shows.

  When they reached Nikki, it would be a simple matter. Vern, a little brighter and that much more ambitious, was to calmly reach into his pocket and remove a number seven hypodermic filled with air. He had practiced on the skin of a grapefruit all afternoon. He was to look for a blue artery that led to and not from the heart, plump up the flesh just a bit, gently inject the needle, draw some blood to make certain he’d hit the mother lode, then cram the plunger forward. This would put a bubble the size of a small nuclear missile in her bloodstream and it would jet to her heart and explode it. Meanwhile, Ernie would race to the nurses’ station yelling “Get an arrest team STAT! She’s lost rhythm!”

  Then they’d quietly turn and continue their rounds.

  The trick, as Vern had patiently explained to Ernie, was to do nothing suddenly. If you moved fast, if your body had a shred of fear or hesitation, it would register with witnesses who were otherwise oblivious. It was the first key of the con, to sell the mark on your authenticity, which was always done with gentle insistence, assuming correct subtextual details. For example: If you were on a job like this, you made damned certain your hands were very clean, almost pink, along with your ears, your face, any visible patch of skin. Docs become docs because they hate filth, disease, laziness, clumsiness. It’s how they feel like God. So to pass as one you had to play by the rules of the game. Another issue Vern was very big on was shoes. What kind of shoes do doctors wear? People notice shoes even if
they don’t realize they do. Thus they’d parked for a bit outside the hospital in the staff lot, and noted men of a certain age, whom they took to be docs and not orderlies of some sort (your younger fellas), and noted a lot of Rockport wingtips. So they drove to the mall—not to Mr. Sam’s where all the shoes would have been made by Wah Ming Chow when she wasn’t hand-cutting powder blue suits for the Reverend—found a Rockport store, and paid for a pair each, one cordovan wingtips, the other less fashionable, beige walkers. They scuffed the shoes against the asphalt of the mall parking lot because the docs were parsimonious and wore each pair unto death.

  Now, on those new-but-old Rockports, they slowly approached the girl’s room. It was so close; it was two rooms away, which they’d discovered after an earlier quick stride down the hallway, reading names on the doors while feigning to look for a drink of water.

  Here was where your lesser cons would give up the ghost. They wouldn’t play it out straight. They’d see that the room was so damned close and that the nurses were sitting at their stations on the floor without paying any attention at all to them and they’d sort of go into git-’er-done panic. They’d go straight to the girl’s room, do the deed, and get out of Dodge. Yeah, but that’s where it goes wrong. An orderly is on the way to the john and he happens to look down the hall and he sees something he doesn’t hardly ever see, which is a doc moving fast. Docs don’t move fast, not unless it’s the emergency ward and some poor fool is bleeding out or going into advanced vapor lock. Docs have too much dignity to move fast. So he goes to investigate and walks in and sees the needle going into her arm and he says, Hey what? and Ernie has to pop him with his nickle-plated Python 2.5 inch, and the whole thing goes up in flames, and Vern and Ernie end up at the wrong end of another needle somewhere down the line.

  No sir, the Reverend didn’t raise no fools for sons or cousins or whatever.

  So they played it out by good con discipline, riding the gag hard. They dipped in on Mr. X and saw that he was fine, then had a nice visit with Mrs. Y and noted that her color had improved and got a nice smile out of her for the comment, even if she had no idea who in hell they were, until at last, after a quick check on Mr. Z, who was comatose as well, they reached the doorway of SWAGGER, NIKKI, ACCIDENT VICTIM, and were about to—