Anyhow, he struggled down through the thick stop-and-go of Volunteer Parkway until he reached its closest point to the speedway itself, and saw that here too, everything was on an upswing. The grinding buzz of the cars qualifying inside—maybe his new pal Matt MacReady was on the track now, sailing along at about thirty-five degrees at 185 per—filled the air, giving every physical thing, including Bob’s rental car and his eardrums, a kind of vibration. Baby sister, the boys were burning rubber and high-test today!
What was new today was that some kind of trailer park had been constructed in the immediate vicinity of the structure itself and proudly wore a kind of midway carnival banner that said NASCAR VILLAGE.
It was all jammed up with pilgrims of the faith. He saw that it was a little neighborhood composed entirely of trailers, trucks, and vans that had the specialized capability of converting to retail outlet by opening up into a kind of high counter. From behind that counter, dozens of men and women, all in NASCAR regalia, sold yet more souvenirs, most all of it driver oriented, worshiping the cult of the guy that pressed the steel around the oval at speed and risked death in the process. He had time to examine the setup at length, because the traffic had stalled almost to a creep, and it wasn’t long before he noted the Matt MacReady trailer, just as big and busy as any of them, with young Matt’s face emblazoned everywhere and the USMC 44 digital-camouflage pattern spread everywhere.
You couldn’t but think about the money. If it was a religion, part of the observance was the cash transaction, as dollars were traded for official NASCAR gear and the official stuff evidently demanded a premium over the Chinese crap that the imitators and hustlers sold in their little stalls across the way.
Someone’s sure getting rich, he thought. All that damn money. Turns people to fools.
Then at last the traffic cleared, and he sped away from NASCAR Village and the speedway toward the green mountains ahead.
NINE
Why, O Heavenly Father, why, he beseeched. Lord, how thou tests me. Lord, I am thy humble servant, please send me relief.
God was busy. He didn’t answer.
So the Reverend Alton Grumley was left to his own bitter devices, and they told him, goddamnit, things wasn’t happening as they’s supposed to. Curse that girl!
He left his tiny office off the gym floor of the rec center of the Piney Ridge Baptist Prayer Camp and stepped out into the heavy, pressing heat of an August afternoon in Tennessee, and in a yard meant to accommodate Baptist jumping jacks and deep-knee bends, saw before him sweaty men struggling with an entirely different set of rigors.
“Jesus Christ, no,” shouted Brother Richard to a gaggle of Grumleys who fought with a device at the base of a large truck. It was a graceful, but surprisingly heavy, steel construction that rode its own smallish steel wheels. It was called a hydraulic jack, and was used for lifting the left or right half of a vehicle off the ground. It was crude, old, disobedient, and annoyingly stubborn. It hated Grumleys and Grumleys hated it. What they had to do with it, they had to do fast. Getting Grumleys to do something fast was like getting cats to dance. It just hardly didn’t ever happen.
“You monkeys!” screamed Brother Richard to all the sweaty, tattooed Grumley beef—the sun was high, the sky cloudless; bugs and skeeters, drawn by the stench of flushed Grumley flesh, swooped and darted. “You can’t do nothing right. You, balding guy, what’s your name again?”
“Cletus Grumley, Brother Richard.”
“You don’t come across when he’s trying to get the air wrench on the lugs. You wait till he’s got ’em coming out, then you git on around. It’s gotta work smoothly or you get all tangled up, the tires roll away, and many a race, in fact most races, are lost in the pits where the big muscle boys like you haven’t practiced enough, and it ends up looking like a Chinese fire drill.”
“Yes sir. But Mosby stepped on my heel, Brother Richard, which is why I done spilled forward. Wasn’t going forward, wasn’t meaning to, just got tripped up by Mosby.”
“Mosby, you a cousin or a son? Or maybe both?”
“Don’t know, sir. Heard it both ways. Not sure which gal is my real ma. Was raised by Aunt Jessie, who may have been the Reverend’s third wife, or maybe his fourth. I tripped on Cletus because someone, either Morgan or Allbright, pushed me.”
“Morgan, Allbright, slow down,” said Richard. “Slooowwwww downnnn.” And he tried to indicate calmness, lack of excitement, craziness by a kind of universal gesture for calming, pressing both flattened hands down as if to say, “Bring it down a notch.”
“It’s Morgan’s sweat,” said Allbright, “it stinks so it makes me want to throw up.”
“Ain’t my sweat,” said the one who had to be Morgan, “it’s your own damn farts you be smelling, Morgan farts more than any white man in this world and most Negroes.”
The issue was syncopation. An air-driven power wrench and the high-strength hydraulic jack had to be dragged sixty feet, set under the edge of the truck, and the truck jacked up. The power wrench had to tear loose the lugs. The old tires had to be yanked off and dumped, the new ones slammed on, the lugs power-wrenched tight. It had to be done fast, really fast, and the boys had been trying so hard. But maybe this wasn’t a Grumley sort of thing. There was no one else, though, time was short, and Race Day was approaching.
“Okay, boys,” said Brother Richard, “you knock off now. We’ll do it again later when it’s cooler. And don’t let Allbright eat no beans tonight, or cabbage neither.”
Richard, wiping his neck with a red handkerchief, came over to the porch where he’d seen the Reverend watching grumpily.
“Well, sir,” he asked, “you tell me. Were these boys just raised by pigs or were they suckled by them too? Or maybe sired?”
“You are the Whore of Babylon, Brother Richard. That wicked tongue will get you smitten, Brother Richard.”
“Not till after you’ve had your Race Day fun, old man. We both know that. So I will amuse myself as I see fit until we have done our jobs, and by that time, you will be so rich you won’t have any thought for Brother Richard and his sharp tongue. Now, what’s going on with the girl?”
“I have just heard,” the Reverend said, “that that daddy of hers has moved her.”
“Damn!” said Richard.
“Damn is right. She wakes up and starts singing, we are fried in batter. Maybe she won’t wake up before we move. Or maybe she’ll die or something.”
“You can’t take that gamble. You know well as I do, that girl is trouble. She has seen my face and she knows enough to tip off your plan; she makes a single phone call to ask a single question to someone who knows a little something, and we are finished. You’re supposed to be a crime lord. Do something criminal.”
“Well, son, that’s the problem. If we find her—she’s got to be in either Knoxville or Raleigh, as he moved her by ambulance, that much I know—if we find her and make sure, then we expose completely the idea that what happened to her was part of a plan, or a necessity to protect a plan. And maybe that makes all their security go up. And the plan is based on their overconfidence that no further security is needed, as you well know.”
“I do know, just as I know,” said Brother Richard, “that the plan is damned smart. Don’t believe nobody never did what you’re trying to do the way you’re doing it before, so how could they figure it out? It’s so damned smart, I also know you, Grumley, didn’t think it up. No sign of a Grumley pawprint anywhere on it. Your ilk may screw it up if they can’t get the goddamned tires switched off fast enough and we become peas in a pod for the police shooters. But I think they’ll just manage it.” Like many men in his profession, Brother Richard had a clear view of what was necessary for his own survival.
“No,” he explained, “you can’t just hope she doesn’t wake up or if she wakes up, she doesn’t remember. Even if she wakes up in six months, she may know enough to lead law enforcement straight to you, and I know you’ll roll over on me like a mangy dog with an itch. Th
at, plus she saw my new face. I can’t have her helping a police artist by drawing a good picture of my new face. I spent a fortune on this face and it hurt like hell for months. I need a new face to operate, you understand? Old man, you have to act on this now and permanently.”
“Mark 2:11. ‘Get up off your pallet and go to your house.’ Rise, you cripple, on the strength of faith in the Lord. Walk, pray, work, and triumph. If the Lord is our shepherd, we shall not want.”
“It ain’t wanting I’m worried on. It’s arresting. They git me, I go to the chair. Then it’s frying.”
“You think you know all, Brother Richard. Even dumb old Reverend Alton knows it’s now a needle.”
“Chair, needle, you still end up dead. I am the Sinnerman, as I have explained. I do not want to face a day of reckoning. I will run from the Lord and try and hide in the sea or the moon or the mountain all on that day. You, you’ve got no worries.”
“I can face my Lord proudly.”
“Of course. Because you were born a snake and someone put a mouse before you and you ate it. You liked it, and that was it. You became an eater of mice. More mice, please, that was your code and you never gave a damn about anything. More and more mice you ate, and you never thought of the family life of the mice, the culture, the fantasies and religious structures of the mice, the history, theory, and music of the mice. For you, it was an easy enough thing, it was your nature. You eat mice. End of story.
“Now me, I chose to become a snake, for my own born-in-hell reasons. So I know that mice have as much right to life as I do, and that they feel every pain and fear and hatred that I do, love their kids, make the world go on, fight in wars, work in or build factories or houses. I empathize with mice. So when I eat a mouse, I know what agony I release in the world and knowing that, I take pleasure in it. Your code: More mice, please. Mine: I revel in the agony I release, and it suits a certain twisted-sister part of my brain, it fulfills me. That, Reverend, and I am proud to say it, that is sin.”
“I cannot believe a blasphemer like you, Brother Richard, thinks it appropriate to lecture me on sin. You must wear the number of the beast somewhere on your body.”
“No one knows less about sin than a Grumley. Y’all are basically animals. You may not even be mammals, I’m not sure. You just do what your instincts tell you, and in a funny way, it is God’s will. Lord, what snakes these Grumleys be.”
“Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here” announced itself for one moment, interrupting this important eschatological dialogue, and of course it was the Reverend’s cellphone, which he took out of the inside breast pocket of his powder blue Chinese suit.
“Hallelujah,” he said. “You sure? Hallelujah!”
He snapped the phone shut.
“It seems that damn girl’s father has showed up and is asking questions. Oh, Lord, another test.”
Fuck, thought Brother Richard.
“I will send Carmody and B.J. to watch on him. If we have to, we’ll have to take him down. He is old and harmless, can’t hardly walk straight, his hair’s all grayed out, but you never can tell.”
Another mouse, thought Brother Richard.
TEN
“Glad you came by,” said Detective Thelma Fielding, putting out a hand which turned out to conceal a strong grip.
“Should have worn a gas mask,” said Bob.
“Ain’t it the truth. You get used to it.”
She was referring to a strong scent of atomized carbon that filled the air and left a sheen of grit on all the flat, polished surfaces. Clearly it had drifted over from the coal yard next to the sheriff’s department, which sat in the old train station that had been converted three years earlier when the passenger service closed down.
“Nobody foresaw that when they started dumping coal there. Now we’ve had OSHA in here six days a week, and they finally decided to condemn this old building. A shame, it was a nice building once. Now it’s got grit everywhere and nobody can stand it. Next spring, we move into a new building across town.”
“Well, that’s something. Must be hell on white glove occasions.”
She laughed at his joke, which even he didn’t think was that funny. Then she said, “I have some news for you.”
“That’s great,” said Bob.
He sat at her desk in the sheriff’s department, seeing it was neatly kept with a stack of files in an ONGOING vertical holder. There were a couple of trophies as well, displaying a little gold man holding a pistol atop a plastic, imitation-marble pedestal, reminding him that Thelma had won some shooting competitions, which perhaps explained her fancy .45 in its strange plastic holster. He decided to try and get a gander at the inscriptions on them, but couldn’t from his angle. She was the same as before, khakis and a polo shirt, her gun held tight to her waist in that plastic holster, her arms oddly strong, as had been her grip. Her ducktail blonde hair had just been worked on and her face was tan, her eyes expressive.
“Also, Sheriff Wells is in, and I think you want to meet him, don’t you, Mr. Swagger?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Well, the best news is, we got a paint and tire match from the state police crime lab in Knoxville. Just came in.”
She reached over, took a file marked SWAGGER NIKKI, INCIDENT REPORT CF-112, opened it, and took out a faxed form.
“They say it’s a color called cobalt silver, found on Chrysler Corporation vehicles, notably the Dodge Charger, the Magnum, and the Chrysler 300, their muscle cars. The tire is a standard Goodyear 59-F, and damned if that doesn’t coordinate with a stolen car of a week earlier, a cobalt silver ’05 Charger. Lots of Chargers go missing this time of year, because the Charger is the big hoss of NASCAR and every punk kid or crankhead is in a Charger kind of mood. So this one was stolen in Bristol, and my guess is, whatever kid did it got himself liquored up and went out looking for someone to intimidate that night. As I say, I have my snitches working. I will circularize, but usually folks don’t take stolen cars to body shops, so I doubt that will pay off. They just dump ’em in the deep woods and maybe we find ’em and maybe we don’t, and if we do find ’em, maybe we can take prints and maybe we can’t, and if we can, maybe we can ID the car and maybe we can’t. Probably can’t. But I know who steals cars around these parts, and I’ve got some fellas you wouldn’t invite to dinner or let your daughter date looking into it. So I’m sure we’ll come up with a name and then we’ll go visit him.”
“I hope you let me come along on that one, Detective.”
“Mr. Swagger, you don’t have some vigilante-kickass thing in mind, do you? We can’t let that happen and if you—”
“No, no, ma’am, an old coot like me? No ma’am, I know my limits. I just want to be as involved in this as possible.”
“Well, we’ll see. Can’t make any promises. Probably not a good idea, but I am noted for sometimes making the wrong decision. More to the point, when your daughter awakes, we’ll want to interview her. What’s the word on that?”
Bob gave her a brief summary of Nikki’s medical situation, leaving out the detail that he’d moved her, leaving out as well the results of his independent investigations.
“You will call me when she’s ready to talk, sir? I know you’ve moved her and I am not even going to ask where, because that’s your business, but I know you will call me as soon as an interview is possible.”
“You don’t miss much, do you, Detective?”
“Miss things all the damned time, but try not to. Supposed to pay attention, that’s what they pay me for.”
She smiled, her face lit up, and Bob noticed what a damned attractive woman she was.
“Okay,” she said, “let’s go and see the boss.”
The office said war. War was in the pictures, the officer in lean camouflages standing with an M4 next to Middle Eastern ruins or in front of huge vehicles with guns everywhere, some airborne, some treadborne, all desert tan, all speaking of war. A plaque with medals on the wall said war, the Silver Star the biggest of them,
but there were others, impressive, a collection of a man who’d been in hard places, taken his fair share of risks and been shot at much, and had lived to tell about it.
Sheriff Wells was tall, thin, hard, and tan, with close-cropped graying hair, sharp, dark eyes, and a languid way of draping himself, as if to say that having seen most things, nothing on earth would be of much surprise. He wore the brown of the Johnson County Sheriff’s Department, with a gold star on his lapel, and a stock Glock pistol in his holster, as well as the usual duty getup of the police officer: the radio unit with curly cord mic attached to his shirt lapel, the taser, the cuffs; none of it taken off, because he had to set the example to his men and women that the gear can save your life. You wear it all the time, that’s what you do, comfort is not a part of the bargain.
“Mr. Swagger,” he said after the firm handshake and the direct look to the eyes without evasion or charm, “nice to meet you, though of course I wish the circumstances could be better. How is your daughter at this point?”
Bob told him, succinctly, keeping it tight and straight, as if he were himself back in service, reporting to a superior.
“Well, we all hope she’s going to be all right. I hope Detective Fielding has kept you abreast of our efforts. If you need any help, please feel free to contact us. Sometimes a criminal act is harder on the victim’s close relatives than on the victim herself. I know how the thought that someone tried to hurt your child can haunt a father or a mother. So please, feel free to call us. For our part, we’ll work hard to keep you in the loop. I know how tough it can be to go weeks without hearing a thing from the police. I’ve ordered all my officers to call each victim or next-of-kin once a week to keep them up-to-date on any investigation or legal proceedings. That’s our policy, and maybe you’ve guessed that although I am a sheriff by appointment I am still a full-bird colonel by inclination, and when I set a policy it is followed.”
A Bob Lee Swagger eBook Boxed Set: I, Sniper, Night of Thunder, 47th Samurai Page 42