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

by Stephen Hunter

  He moved swiftly, but didn’t try to push it, got to the engine of the truck, and opened the hood. Where others might have seen complexity, confusion, terror, he saw the universe of his upbringing, the nurture of experience, the thrill of God-given genius about to be engaged. Expertly, he reached deep into the engine space beyond the big architectural structures, and into the nest of wires, found the MAP sensor, directly behind the fuel filter bowl. He quickly disconnected the factory connector and connected the Xzilla harness in its place, plugging in the male connector to the harness. He cut away the wires connected to the injection pump and attached the blue wire tap to the wire closest to the engine block. From that point on, it was wire work. He had to know which wires to cut, which wires to reconnect, all of them color coded. Quickly he grounded the engine—ugh, was it really necessary to unscrew the negative terminal connection, no, not really—and then cut a hole through the rubber grommet to the right of the master cylinder assembly, and shoved the wire harness through it into the cab. He dashed into the cab, and didn’t bother to mount the switch but simply began plugging the wiring harness into the module itself, that little green box, where the gods of engine monitoring lived and worked. He turned the key and watched the module’s blinking LEDs finally signal success after running through the sequence, settling in the red, the highest power zone. He turned the key further, and after a grinding clunk and another turn of the key, the engine burst to life.

  And, brother, did it burst. The sound was almost like no engine on earth, a guttural blast, full of implications of the explosive, and it rocked the entire vehicle. He could hear the engine revving insanely, suddenly injected with a power beyond measure, almost too much for the confines of the combustion chambers. It was on steroids! It was the Barry Bonds of truck engines!

  “Fifty-seven four,” yelled Vern, “a new record.”

  Brother Richard goosed the pedal, and the engine howled demonically, yet it didn’t burst into flames.

  He had it. He finally had it. And pretty goddamned near time too! Talk about cutting it thin, why the deal was only a day or so away and—

  Suddenly he saw the paint on the cantilevered hood begin to bubble and crackle, and that meant flame, invisible to the human eye, had burst out of the engine.

  Shit!

  He rolled sideways, hit the ground, and kept rolling as he heard the telltale whoosh of the fuel in the tank igniting, not exploding—it wasn’t under enough pressure—but flinging a blade of hot-star radiance a good thirty bright feet in the air from under Mr. Penske’s fine vehicle, bleaching the color from the day for just a second. Then the flames settled back into your normal total-toast truck burn, licking and eating and devouring, issuing the rancid odor of scorched metal, melting plastic, burning rubber.

  Vern carefully backed out in the Eldorado, threw out his cigarette, turned on the air conditioner to full to evaporate the sweat on the men’s brows. Soon enough they found a main road and were well gone by the time the fire trucks and poor Detective Thelma Fielding showed up.

  “Lord A’mighty, that was close,” howled handsome Vern, aflame in delight at the excellent adventure. “You’se almost tonight’s meal.”

  “I’m too tough to digest, I’d keep you boys up all night with stomach pains.”

  “It ran good for a while, though,” said Ernie.

  “Yes, it did,” said Richard. “I think that’s it. I don’t think I had it grounded right. You’re supposed to remove the nut at the negative battery cable and attach the black wire. I didn’t take the nut off, but just wound the black wire around the terminal. Naughty, naughty. Next time, I will take the few seconds to remove the nut. It’s time well spent, and we will be close enough for government work, you’ll see.”

  “You sure, Brother Richard?”

  “Sure, I’m sure. All on that day, I’d hate to burn like a bonfire ’stead of running like a stallion.”

  “Burning hurts,” said Vern. “Case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “So I hear. Saw a fellow burn to death once. Lord God, he screamed. I had the distinct impression he wasn’t enjoying himself a bit.”

  “Nor will you, Brother.”

  “True enough, Brother. Well boys, get that old fraud of a daddy or an uncle or a molester or whatever polysexual archetype he’s playing this week to pray hard for you and me or else we’ll all arrive in hell pre-fried, COD. We’ll be a goddamned bucket of Colonel Grumley’s chicken, extra crispy.”

  FIFTEEN

  Bob drove through the town of Mountain City, sped along a picturesque route toward Virginia, and soon enough found Iron Mountain Armory. Of course it had a sign reading GUNS AND SURPLUS, and of course it was in an old Quonset hut with trees clumped around it with a small parking lot in front of it on Route 91 heading north. The mountains were to its left, casting late-afternoon shadows that buried the place in dimness. But he could make out a large-scale wooden .30 caliber Browning air-cooled mock-up at the apex of the corrugated steel building’s curve. The old trainer showed cutaways displaying red bolt faces and chambers, which must have taught six or seven generations of machine gunners their tricks before going on the surplus market and ending up on every gun store roof in the South. The gun was rotting, though its stout four feet of mock barrel, swaddled in cooling sleeve with the omnipresent grid of round perforations, certainly looked menacing enough. The place, like the old machine gun model, had that beaten-down quality to it, a sense of better times having gone by, interior rot under the paint.

  He walked it to find what he expected: ratty old trophies of bucks and bulls long since killed, fish in waxy midleap glowing against polished wood plaques, racks of rubbery rain ponchos, utilities, BDUs, netting, shovels from half the world’s armies, web gear, Chinese knockoffs of current sandbox dutywear, Multicam and digital-camo patterns everywhere, lots of gun safes, sunglass cases for that super–Tommy Tactical look, and behind the counter fifty or so rifles racked butt down for easy examination. The front case had another fifty or so handguns, mostly the black plastic stuff that was taking over the market, little of the blue steel and walnut motif that Bob and his generation had learned to shoot on except in the used box. ARs were the predominant theme, gun safes second, and hunting only a third.

  Fella came up to him from the counter, older gent, heavyset, eyes dead, not your natural-born salesman type.

  “Help you, bud?”

  “Hope so, sir,” Bob said. “You the manager?”

  “Close enough.”

  “My name’s Swagger. My daughter is Nikki Swagger. If the name’s familiar, it’s because she was the girl reporter from Bristol who had a bad car accident a week back on 421 coming down the other side of Iron Mountain. Someone tagged her and she’s still in a coma.”

  “Sorry for your daughter, bud, but what’s it got to do with me?” the guy said. But Bob thought he saw just a flash of dread and the beginning, soon quashed, of a guilty swallow. Maybe the fellow was just a nervous type.

  “Well sir, my girl wasn’t into guns or anything, which is why I thought it odd that on her laptop we came up with what appears to be the phone number of this place. I don’t know why she’d call or come by, but she may have. I’m trying to track down what happened that day.”

  “The papers said it was an accident. What difference does it make what she did? Accident don’t follow no plan. It just happens.”

  “I know, but there are some discrepancies in the official account. I’m just poking about trying to make sense of it all, sir. Sure it don’t amount to nothing, but I have to do something while I’m waiting for my daughter to come back to me.”

  “Well, I don’t know if—”

  “Here, let me show you her picture. Maybe it’ll jog a memory.”

  He pulled his wallet, showed the man a nice picture of Nikki at last year’s graduation, so beautiful, so young, so vulnerable.

  The man didn’t really look at it, just said, “No, no, believe me, we don’t get many young women on their own in here, and I�
��d remember. Sometimes a young fellow comes in with his girlfriend and sometimes the wife comes along to buy the Glock for home protection, but almost never will you find a girl like that in a place like this.”

  “I see.”

  “I’m real sorry for your troubles, but I can’t help a bit.”

  “Uncle Eddie—” came a call from a workroom behind the counter, and a kid peeped out. “You sure on that? I seem—”

  “Billy, goddamnit, you git to work. You got a lot of ammo to break down and get shelved. I don’t pay you to palaver.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Goddamn kid,” said the man to Bob. “Girl crazy. Catch him reading them dirty magazines one more time instead of breaking down all that .223 and his ass is gone, I don’t care what Margaret says.”

  “I see,” said Bob. “Yep, good help is hard to find these days. What about a phone call from a woman? There wouldn’t be a pretty face associated with it.”

  “Mister, I get nothing but phone calls, some of the damnedest you ever heard. Can I rent a machine gun? Will you guarantee a deer? How come Wal-Mart in Johnson City has it for $324.95 and you got it for $339.95? Is a nine millimeter more powerful than a .38? What’s the best gun for home defense? Can I buy a gun like the soldiers use? So maybe I got a call from her and maybe I don’t, but I sure as hell can’t answer you one way, the other with certainty. Billy, you get any calls?”

  “No sir,” said Billy, yelling from the back. “None that I can remember.”

  “That seems to be all she wrote, sir. Unless you want to buy a nice SKS for under a hundred?

  “What’s an SKS?” asked Bob.

  “Chinese military rifle. No, I don’t think you’re the type.”

  “Anyhow, thanks. You got me scratching another one off my list.”

  He turned and left.

  The Reverend Grumley was thinking about fucking, as he almost always did when he wasn’t thinking about the next few days. He hadn’t fucked in about three weeks now, and the ordeal was getting harder and harder. The images poured over him, all the holes that he had filled, all over America, how the gals just seemed to want to give a man of the cloth a reward for all the natural good he brought into the world. He was going insane! Some of the damn boys beginning to look pretty good to him! But the last time—

  The phone rang, he answered it there in the office of the chapel, and it was B.J. and Carmody, reporting that goddamnit, that fellow had somehow gone straight, straight in a goddamned beeline to Eddie Ferrol’s Iron Mountain Armory. How in hell he make that connection? He’d been in the goddamn county two hours and already he’d made two big connections on…

  The Reverend got the whole story, the fellow’s sit by the roadside, going over notes, then speeding off.

  “He see you?”

  “Nah. Carmody’s too good a driver.” B.J. was always boosting Carmody and Carmody, B.J. because they knew in the scheme of things, they were second-stringers to the more glamorous pairing of handsome Vern and Ernie. See, that’s what the Reverend hated. All that competition, the formation of cliques and rump groups and bitter outsiders. It made for bad business. And if he wasn’t mistaken Carmody might actually be Vern’s half brother, rather than cousin, but, hmmm, he’d have to work that one out later as these issues were never too clear. But now wasn’t time for lectures on brotherliness.

  “You got him?”

  “Yeah, he’s in there now. We’re parked a good three hundred yards down the road, eyeballing him with glass.”

  “Okay, hang tight. This here thang’s gittin’ a little hard to handle. Soon as he leaves, you call me and I’ll call Eddie, see what’s what.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “What y’all packing?”

  “I’m .45, Carmody’s .40.”

  “Git ’em ready. May have to go to guns.”

  “Yessir.”

  “I’ll try and think some plan up. You know, something—”

  “There he is.”

  “Okay, you hang tight.”

  He hung up, went to his wallet to find Eddie’s Mountain Armory number, but before he did, the phone rang again.

  “Reverend!”

  “Eddie, hear you had a visitor!”

  “Goddamnit, Reverend, you done promised me nothing, nothing like this going to happen. It was clean, it was legal, it was okay, we had the paperwork and everything, and goddamnit, first that gal shows up with that cardboard piece of box top and now her goddamn father, asking questions.”

  “The old gray-haired guy?”

  “Didn’t look so goddamned old to me.”

  “Tell me what he asked. Tell me what he knew. Did he know much?”

  “He said he’d heard she called or come out this way, it was on her laptop.”

  Eddie narrated the story of his conversation with Swagger.

  “But he didn’t seem to know nothing about what you got for me, what its possible use was, what we had planned?”

  Eddie said no.

  “He had no clue. He’s just grasping,” the Reverend said.

  “Maybe not, Reverend, but he sure come close, and when this thing goes down there’s going to be all kinds of commotion, and he might be the one to figure it out. So even if he don’t got no idea now, maybe he will then. You said nobody could connect all this up, and goddamn it’s already been connected up.”

  “Settle down, Eddie. I see now I got no choice. It’s too close, too much is at stake. Okay, you sit tight, the Reverend will figure on it.”

  He hung up, repunched B.J. in Carmody’s follow car.

  “You got him.”

  “Yeah, some bad news too.”

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t know what this means but he didn’t go straight to the car. He went around back. He’s back there five minutes. Ain’t there an entrance or something? I don’t know what he’s looking at or doing back there, but when he come out, he made a beeline to the car, and now he’s headed back into town.”

  “You stay with him, you understand, while I work out a plan.”

  “How’s this for a plan. We pop him. There’s the plan.”

  “You idiot. Why’d he get killed? You get state polices in here and they much smarter than the Johnson Smokies and the whole goddamn thing crashes and burns just a few days before. Got to come up with some way to get rid of him that don’t look like Grumleys done the work on contract for something else big. That goddamn Sinnerman is out blowing up trucks with my boy Vern, and I can’t use him again, like on the gal. You stay with him, you hear? Meanwhile, I’ll think something up.”

  “Reverend, in 1993,” said Carmody, evidently taking over the cell while driving, “I worked a Memphis hit where we waited till the mark was in a little store. We walked in, shot him dead, beat the shit out of the storekeep, took all the money and some peanut butter, and was gone. They never ever made it to be a hit. They may have suspected, but they never could do nothing about it. How’s about that one?”

  “Hmmm,” said the Reverend.

  “Could goddamn work. You’d get Thelma and that photo-crackpot sheriff and maybe some Mountain City fellows, but they’d be thinking robbery and they’d never link it to nothing else. They’d say, damn, this family sure did run out of luck when it come to Johnson County.”

  “You make certain you don’t kill the clerk or any of the other witnesses. Scare hell out of them, you hear? So the cops have to wring necks just to get descriptions. Got it?”

  “This one’ll be fun, Daddy,” said Carmody.

  SIXTEEN

  Bob went to the car, then stopped and looked back. Only one grimy window of the Quonset fronted the parking lot, and he could see that no one was eyeballing him. Maybe they were listening, so he went to his car, turned it on, gunned the engine, then turned it off. He got out, walked at an angle to a path around back, and followed it. There he found the receiving area, an open garage door and a loading dock. He leaped up some steps—ouch, the pain in his hip stabbed at him!—and slipped in. There he f
ound the grubby assistant on his hands and knees, applying crowbar to a crate of Russian 7.62 x 39mm ammo, by which rough process he liberated twenty boxes, junked the wood, and loaded the boxes on a cart for eventual shelving.

  “Howdy,” Bob said.

  The kid looked up, one of a type. Sallow-eyed, furtive, maybe a little brighter than the poor boy in the grocery store, backwoodsy but not an idiot.

  “You ain’t supposed to be back here, Mister.”

  “And you ain’t supposed to contradict the great Eddie when it comes to remembering things.”

  “Sometimes I speak out of turn.”

  “Well maybe you have something to say worth hearing,” said Bob.

  “Why’d I tell you a thing? ’Round here, folks treasure loyalty.”

  “What I see in you is righteousness. You’re stuck with a moral center. So you’ll know that if it was my daughter in here, I have a right to know, and Eddie ain’t got no right to clam up.

  “Eddie’s not righteous, that I’ll say. Some things I know could—well, that ain’t your business.”

  “But this young woman is,” he said, handing over the picture of Nikki.

  “She’s a fine-looking young gal,” said the boy. “I have to say, she deserved a lot more than getting knocked into a ditch by an asshole playing Mr. Dale, the senior.”

  “I’m looking for him. He and I have business.”

  “Hope you find him. Okay, here’s what you want to know. Yep, she was here that afternoon, late then, near dark, like it is now. Close on closing time. I heard her voice, and knew it was a younger gal. I peeked out and got a good look and damn, she was a beautiful young lady, sir, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

  “Takes after her mother. What was it all about?”

  “Well, took a bit of squirming and I come in late on the conversation, see, I wiggled over there—” he pointed up the wall to a hazed window that separated the backroom from the store itself—“and I popped the window a bit. I suppose, I don’t know, you might think bad of me, I just had to figure out what it was, sorry to say, had to get close or—”