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

by Stephen Hunter

  “Say—”

  They looked up, puzzled but not riled.

  “Say there, excuse me, gentlemen.”

  The speaker was a man in a blue suit and a crewcut, followed by another gentleman in a black suit but the same crewcut. He wasn’t a doc, as he was moving too fast and looked a little out of place. And when he got there, he was out-of-breath.

  “Whoa,” he said, “more running than I’m used to, plus a terrible drive over from Knoxville. Anyway, sorry, don’t mean to be a bother, we just got here.”

  “You’re?”

  “Sorry again, Ron Evers, Pinkerton Detective Agency, Knoxville office. We’re setting up security for this patient, here, let me show you this.”

  He struggled goofily, unsure to be busting doctors, but better safe than sorry, and he pulled out a comic-book badge just like Deputy Dawg’s and some kind of photo ID with an official PINKERTON imprimatur.

  “I’ll have to see some ID before I can allow entrance.”

  “Son, I’m Dr. Torrence, I’m on my rounds,” said Vern smoothly.

  “So sorry, doctor, really I am, but I’ll have to get an administrator here to verify you. Pain in the ass, I know, and it’s your hospital, and all that, but her father hired our firm and his instructions were very clear. No entrance without verification. I’ve already liaisoned with hospital security, if you’re wondering. I’ll call the hospital admin right now,” and he lifted a cell.

  Something scalding went off inside Vern’s head. In his younger days, he would have hit the young security guy in the throat, then kicked the other in the balls. Then he would have kicked each in the head until he was sure they were dead. Then he would have killed the girl with the knife he carried. But Vern was mellower now. Even as he felt the frustration build and build like a steam engine about to blow, he kept it together.

  “Well,” he said, “no need for that. I’ll go get the duty nurse and she’ll get this straightened out.”

  “Yes sir, that’s fine.”

  “Come on, Jack,” he said to his cousin or brother or whatever kin Ernie was to him, “we’ll get the nurse. I hate it when procedure is violated.”

  And the two Grumleys walked ever so slowly down the hall in their Rockports to the elevator and waited ever so slowly for it to come, Vern thinking, I need to kill something or get laid, preferably by a kid, fast!

  SEVEN

  He called her from Knoxville the next afternoon.

  “Where have you been? My God, what is going on?”

  “Sorry, it’s been busy. She’s fine, or as good as can be expected. The brain work is all fine, she’s just unconscious. They say they usually come out of these things in a week or two, and recovery is almost always 100 percent. So it’s looking very positive here, medically.”

  “Bob, I called the hospital, she’s been moved.”

  “That’s my doing. The doctors agreed it was medically sound, and so I’ve got her in a private hospital here in Knoxville.”

  “What is—”

  “Uh, there was an incident.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Unclear, and maybe I’m overreacting. But the Pinkerton agent—”

  “Pinkerton agent?”

  “I did some checking and I’m not sure I buy the story about the redneck kid in the pickup anymore. At least not wholly. So I hired Pinkertons to provide 24/7 plain-clothes security, three teams of two. Anyhow, as the first team was going on duty, they stopped a couple of doctors on their rounds. No big deal, nobody thought anything about it, but the docs went off to get administrative authorization and never returned. So I asked, and nobody knows who they were. Nobody got a good look at them. Only evidence they were doctors was the green scrubs and the nametags, but hell, anyone can buy a pair of surgical scrubs. It didn’t sit right.”

  “So you moved her. That was wise.”

  “I think it’s okay if you fly in now. I don’t want to give you the name of the hospital until you’re in town. But I’d stay on the north side, in a suburb. She needs her mother. She looks so sad, all banged up, all those wires and tubes, so still. Breaks my heart.”

  “She’s strong. She’ll come through this, I know it.”

  “Okay, you have my number. When you get in here and get booked in a hotel, call me, and I’ll come by. Meanwhile, I’ve got some nosing around to do.”

  “What is it?”

  He told her at length about the tire treads, the interpretation of the NASCAR fellows, the general indifference of the sheriff’s department, the intensifying traffic and crowding as the big race day approached, and the town filling up with campers, celebrants, drinkers, rowdy kids, and other assorted pilgrims.

  “So I mean to look into it. I know you think I’m paranoid but—”

  He was surprised at what came next.

  “You listen to me a moment. You have gone on many dangerous adventures, leaving me to raise the child, and now I have another child to raise. Yes, I think you can turn paranoid. But this time I am paranoid too, because it is my daughter involved. So you’re not working off some crazy sense of honor or something you think you owe your long-dead father or something left over from a war nobody remembers. You’re working for me. If you think someone tried to kill our daughter, Bob, then you find them and you stop them. You stop them from harming our daughter or anyone’s daughter.”

  “I will do that,” he said. “Oh, and one more thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “Bring some guns.”

  EIGHT

  Bob didn’t really approve of newspapers and had certainly never been in the office of one before. But that’s what his daughter had wanted, and as he looked at the city room, with its ranks of messy desks, its knots of insouciant young people, its phone obsessives, its listless copy editors, its harassed junior editors, its earnest techies to service the computers in mysterious fashion, he wondered why it had meant so much to her, ever since she was a child. There was nothing in his family to account for such a leaning; maybe there was a writer tucked away in some branch of Julie’s, but he’d never heard of such a thing. But he knew this: She loved it, she lived, dreamed, breathed, and ate it.

  Okay, sweetie, he told himself. If this is what you want, I will try and get it back for you.

  He sat in a conference room—glass-walled, affording a view of the newsroom and the staff, right next to the managing editor’s office—as Jim Gustofson, the managing editor, a tough gal named Jennifer something, and Nikki’s immediate editor, briefed him on what she’d been up to.

  The gist of it was that Nikki was the cops reporter, and her specialty was the crystal meth craze that now gripped rural America, as it played across northeastern Tennessee and southwestern Virginia. She’d done a prize-winning story on the children of crystal meth distributors, who are put in foster homes when their parents are arrested. She knew the sheriffs of most of the seven immediate counties, she knew a lot of the knock-down-the-door cops, she knew the social services people, the welfare people, the educators, for the problem impacted all these areas. The stuff was pure shit; its only advantage was that it was cheap and the high it granted was intense if short lived. Once in a while you put your baby in the oven or ran over your grandmother with a lawnmower on the impression she was a troll halfling from the realm of Zelazny. But generally, like dope everywhere of every kind, it made its users useless slackers who sat around all day figuring out how to get a few nickels together for the next fix, or kitchen chemists in trailer parks who tried to cook it up themselves, all too often blowing a crater into the earth and themselves straight to hell. A few shrewdies had big labs that made what real money was available in the down-home heroin racket.

  “She was preparing another big story on the shape of the problem in the immediate Tricities area. She’d been visiting the local police entities, trying to get a sense of what she was doing.”

  “Sir, are these people dangerous?”

  “Well, as they say, they only kill their own kind. Turf wars, the occ
asional hardhead who goes for the assault rifle when the raid team shows, bitterness over price hikes or debts owed. You know that easy money, stupid people, and hard times have a way of creating misery. Your daughter was the witness to all that. She’s damned good at her job. She’ll be moving to a bigger city soon, I’m betting. It has been a pleasure to work with her and watch her grow.”

  “Yes sir. But was there anything specific about Johnson County? Some particular area she was looking at. I think I want to go poke around. It’s my nature. Annoys the hell out of people, I know, but can’t be helped.”

  “You don’t agree with the police report? Thelma Fielding is a good cop.”

  “She is and I liked her very much. It just don’t—excuse me—doesn’t sit right with me. That’s why I have moved her to another hospital.” He didn’t bother to tell them it was in another city. Reporters talk, people listen, that much he knew.

  “Yes, she said she might have to go back,” said the woman editor, Jennifer. “Johnson County is so far from everything it’s a kind of a bad joke around here about the cultural tendencies of the rural working class, or these days in this economy, non-working class.”

  “You mean the trailer trash, ma’am. I’m proud to say I am one of them pure and simple, but you don’t need to pull punches with me. I know they make the best soldiers, farmers, and family people in the world, but that same stubbornness and willingness to risk makes them sick-bad-ugly-tempered boils on the butt of humanity if they choose the dark side.”

  “We’d never put that in the paper, but yes, that’s what we’re talking about. So the meth problem is particularly bad in Johnson. That’s where you see your most grotesque crimes and some of the ugliest violence. But last year they elected a reformer for sheriff, a county man named Colonel Reed Wells.”

  “I have heard the name.”

  “Handsome guy, famous because he was a Ranger officer in the war in Baghdad and won some kind of medal. A star?”

  “Silver Star?” Bob asked.

  “Yes, I think that’s right? Were you in the army, Mr. Swagger? You have something of the military about you.”

  “Not in the army, no ma’am. I did a spell in another branch.”

  “Well, it shows. I wish some more of my reporters had the discipline and the organization that the military teaches so well. Anyhow, Reed Wells was in the forefront of the fight against the drug. He’s your dynamo type. To the accompaniment of much publicity, he has acquired a helicopter from the army on some kind of Justice Department grant that passes surplus material on to police agencies. He’s organized a first-rate raid team, all very gung-ho. You know, guys in black with hoods and machine guns. He searches for the labs from the air most days, then coordinates with ground, then he hits ’em from above just as the ground team hits ’em from two sides. Very commandolike. Nikki said she felt like she was in Vietnam, though I don’t know how she could know anything about Vietnam.”

  “Maybe she saw some old books,” said Bob.

  “But here’s the thing. Johnson County leads the region in the number of meth labs raided, the number of arrests, the number of prosecutions. But the odd part is, the price of meth in Johnson hasn’t gone up, it’s stayed the same.

  “Now why would that be? If the supply is drying up, the price would rise. Yet Nikki had discovered from someone in an abuse program that the stuff is just as plentiful and just as economical. That means that either a) outside sources were bringing it in, or b) there were a lot more meth labs than anybody thought, or c) there was some kind of superlab, capable of taking up the slack, that nobody had discovered yet. Finding the superlab: There’s your Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting, and there’s your ticket to the Washington Post.”

  “I see,” said Bob. “Tell me, if I wanted to figure out what she did the last day before the event, what would I look for? What does a reporter carry? A notebook, I’m guessing.”

  “She had a notebook, yes. Most reporters today have laptops that they carry with them. Then they can plug their notes straight into our computer system, and it saves copying and reduces mistakes. So there should be a computer, too. And of course a cellphone. It might have numbers registered that she called that day. The police would have recovered all those things from the accident site, though of course they may be damaged or whatever. Or they may be temporarily impounded, as a part of Thelma’s investigation. But Thelma’s a decent person; if you want your daughter’s things back, I’m sure she’ll cooperate.”

  “You must have some sort of list of names and numbers out there—people involved in the meth business, I don’t mean dealers, I mean all the social services people, the drug rehab programs, that sort of thing. She might have talked to them.”

  “I can get you an official list. I’ll talk to Bill Carter, he did cops before Nikki got here, and I know he gave her access to his Rolodex. I’ll get a list from him.”

  “That would be very helpful.”

  “Mr. Swagger,” said Jim Gustofson, “I can certainly appreciate your anger at the inability of the sheriff’s department to bring this thing to a close quickly. But I’m wondering if you really want to go up there on your own and start demanding answers and kicking in doors.”

  “I can’t just sit around. It’s not my nature, sir.”

  “With all due respect, sir, I see where Nikki’s aggressive nature as a reporter comes from. But I would caution all my reporters not to take chances and I have to say the same to you. The people up there don’t like strangers, and they have, as has been noted, violent proclivities. You could find yourself in a lot of trouble fast. I’d hate to see a tragedy become a double tragedy and you end up on the front page of our newspaper.”

  “Good advice, sir. I wish I could follow it. Most would. But sorry to say, I can’t.”

  Bob called the hospital to check on Nikki, called Idaho and saw that Julie had already left for the trip to Knoxville, and then started the drive out to Johnson County but soon found himself ensnarled in traffic. He pulled over, got out a map and investigated various alternative routes, but all seemed to take him too far to the west and then back around. He decided to bull through straight down Volunteer Parkway on the premise that once he passed the speedway, traffic would lessen considerably and he could make up for lost time and still get out to Mountain City by midafternoon, where he’d begin with Detective Thelma and maybe even get a chance to meet up with the hero, Sheriff Reed Wells, Silver Star winner and reformer.

  The traffic crawled along, and the closer he got to the speedway, the more festive Bristol turned. He felt like he was at some gathering of clans or tribes or something. There was a feeling of celebration in the air and no shortage of alcohol to fuel the glee. Pennants hung across the road, all the street lamps had been festooned with portraits of blasting Chargers or Fusions or Camrys roaring through clouds of dust, blazing bright with primal colors, looking for all the world like fighter planes hungry for the kill. Flags of a hundred colors flapped and danced in the wind against a bright blue sky. Every lawn bore a sign offering parking, and the cost increased hugely the closer he got to the speedway. The far hills were carpeted with Rec-Vs, SUVs, and tents, as a whole new population of occupiers and spenders moved in. They were like the Lakota Sioux just before the Little Big Horn, only in vans and sleepers instead of wikiups. Crowds thronged the walkways, and seeped into the slowed traffic. Everywhere, entrepreneurs had erected booths or tents, offering souvenirs of the fun, blankets, hats, posters, rental radio sets for eavesdropping on the chatter between driver and crew chief, food of every sort, drink of every sort—no problem with liquor licensing down here, everybody just sold whatever they wanted—straw hats after the famous beat-up Richard Petty configuration, neckerchiefs, sweatshirts, Tshirts charting the rise of the Confederacy. Damn, these folks knew how to party. No wonder they called it a nation. It was a hootenanny combined with Oktoberfest with an office party with a safe return from thirteen months in the land of bad things with a Chinese New Year with a h
oedown with a rock concert and, oh yeah, the VJ-Day feeling his old man must have had after surviving—if barely—five invasions on five islands across the Pacific.

  He shook his head at the frenzy of it; the intensity seemed to have increased three-or fourfold since his visit with USMC Matt and his crew chief, Red Nichols, a few days earlier, and he saw that dropping by to see them now was all but an impossibility; they were sealed off by crowds and madness as the big day approached.

  Finally, he topped a low hill and saw his principal obstacle just ahead. It loomed gigantically, dominating all that was before or around it, and he saw it was situated a couple of hundred yards to the left of Volunteer Parkway. He would have to pass it to get beyond. The Bristol Motor Speedway looked like some kind of huge ship from space that had crash-landed in this part of the Shenandoah. It had a kind of familiarity to it he could not again place, but then it flashed clear. Some movie with Will Smith as a marine fighter pilot, but that wasn’t but a small part of it. It was about an invasion from space, and these huge ships came down and dominated the earth. The F-15s fired their Mavericks at it, and the missiles just popped on the perimeter because of some kind of magic shield. It was stupid, he realized, and wondered why on earth he’d wasted the time and money. Maybe the USMC fighter-pilot thing, but now he recalled after Will and the boys had put the old USMC boot up the ass of the whatever-they-weres from wherever-they-came, the big ships crashed and burned. That’s what it looked like, a giant space ship, all chrome and sleek streamline and immense scale and circularity, some kind of man-structure, too regular by far for nature, crashed and burning askew in some place where it didn’t belong, a green valley with whispers of blue mountain ridges to the east and the west.

  In fact, it looked like nature had somehow been scrubbed from the scene by the thing, so dominating was the man-made structure and so active the little city that had grown up in its shadows. But then he noticed, almost as an afterthought, a high foothill, carpeted in forest, rising above the speedway. It was about a mile off, on his left, separated from the speedway by a plain now peopled with a frenzied mob, where booths and exhibits and tents had been set up. Hell, you hardly noticed the hill at all—this big lump of verticality was all but banished from vision and notice by the hugeness of the speedway and all the frenzy it sustained. He thought, Wonder why they haven’t knocked that old pile of rocks and trees down and put condos in right there.