The handgun was a .38 Super, his own 1911 model Kimber, a very nice gun that as he got older he appreciated more for its lack of recoil and muzzle flip in fast strings, while completely identical to the .45 in handling and operating procedures. The extra boxes indicated the load Meachum had chosen was the CorBon 130-grain jacketed hollow point +P+ ammo. His Kydex holster lay beside the case, amid the ammo boxes.
Locked and loaded, he thought. Loaded for bear or whatever.
His cellphone rang.
He looked at the caller ID and saw that it was Detective Thelma Fielding’s number. He thought a bit. What do I do? Maybe that kid broke. She wants me to come in so she don’t have to put out an arrest warrant. Maybe I ought to call a lawyer. Meantime, I have an arsenal in the trunk and no place to stash it. Damn, I wish that boy had lasted longer. Thought he had the stuff for it.
He could just not answer, of course. But what would that tell her?
“Hello.”
“Mr. Swagger.”
“Yes, howdy, Detective, what’s up?” Trying to be nonchalant, just in case.
“Sir, we’ve had a break in the case.”
“A break?”
“Yes sir. Soon’s I get free and clear of an unrelated shooting took place last night, I’m going to make an arrest. Fellow named Cubby Bartlett, a longtime meth dealer. He’s the man who tried to kill your daughter. Got him cold. Someone snitched him out and I’m going to pull him in.”
Swagger didn’t know quite what to feel—relief that the boy had held steady and hadn’t given up his name, or laughter that poor Thelma seemed way up the wrong tree and barking hard. Or maybe in some way this Cubby Bartlett fit into it.
“Sir, you said you wanted to be there for the arrest. Now if you give me your word you won’t cause no trouble, I will let you sit stakeout with us tonight and watch as we bring him in.”
“I’ll be there,” he said, and she gave him the details.
TWENTY
“You’re an idiot,” said Brother Richard.
“Brother Richard, if we don’t do this here job, and it looks like we won’t, then your ass ain’t worth a cowpie in January. So I’s you, I’d get myself long gone, ’cause when Grumley business be finished, my boys may remember how mean and disrespectful to them you’s been. And when that happens and specially since they have the taste of blood on their tongues, maybe they get a hunger for you.”
“You’re an idiot,” repeated Brother Richard.
“Grumley come first,” said the Reverend. They sat in his office off the gym floor of the rec center. The boys had already locked and loaded and headed out, just to keep a watch and see if and when that fellow came back into town, after which point all Grumleys would coordinate and vengeance would be taken, as it mightily should be, amen.
“Don’t you think you’re overstating the drama of the two men you lost? Those boys were professional strong-arm men. They were begotten of and by violence. That’s the life they chose. They lived high on it, scoring kills and drugs—”
“My boys don’t take no drugs!”
“Yeah, you don’t work with them on a daily basis like I have the last few weeks. I know Grumleys a lot bettern’ you, old man. Anyhow, those two, Carmody and Blow Job—”
“Damn you to righteous flame, you bas—”
“Carmody and Blow Job had the kills and the swag and the dope and the whores and probably even a good girl or two along the way, because there do seem to be some good girls who find outlaws amusing. They lived a life of the superego unrestrained, like few men, the great thrill of the criminal lifestyle and its secret true reward. They ran hard and lived hard. It was always in the cards that at any second of any day they could run into some country cop who knew how to shoot, or take a corner too fast and smear themselves on the concrete. That’s the cost of doing business in the business of violence, and it turned out that their number came up. It’s an anomaly, it’s unfortunate, from your twisted-sister viewpoint it might even be a tragedy, but it is what it is, and there’s no money in it for any of us and we have worked too goddamned hard to give it up for some nickel-and-dime sense of vengeance on someone who, after all, was only defending himself in a square gunfight and appears to have been faster on the trigger and truer on the aiming part than your boys. Vern was right. Vern’s the smartest Grumley.”
“Sir, you do not understand family. And I am disappointed in son Vern.”
“Sir, I do understand family. No man you ever met understands family more than me. Now, I’ll tell you what’s interesting in all this. It’s my sense you have been looking for a way to fail. I believe you were coerced into this plan by someone smarter and tougher than yourself, because it is too clever for a fellow like you to think up. You’re no strategist, your only product is the rawest of force. That’s what you sell, that’s all you know. But this thing is too cool for words and you are about to give it up not in spite of your best instincts but because of your best interests. You want an excuse to fail, to go down in some fucking massacre shootout in a blazing barn, a gun in each hand. You have ‘death wish’ written all over you, goddamnit.”
“You have fancy words, Brother Richard, and you speak cleverly but your words ain’t but spit compared to the Grumley family tra—”
“What’s he got on you? Bet I know.”
This threat alone, of all the things Brother Richard had said, shut the old geezer up. And when that happened, Brother Richard knew he was right and bored in for the kill.
“It’s gotta be a sex thing. That lizard of yours, that baby’s got to feed, what, three, four times a day? You’re omnisexual, polysexual, metasexual. You’re unisexual. There isn’t a word for what you are. It seems to run in the godhead biz. Wasn’t David Koresh and that Jim guy who fed all those people Kool-Aid the same? Yeah, yeah, that’s it, isn’t it? You have all those kids, all those wives, all their sisters, it’s all about the Reverend Alton Grumley getting his wand wet three, four times a day, even at your age. I will say, you are probably more full of sperm than any man born since Genghis Khan, father of us all, not just because you know family conspiracies are the only conspiracies that work and so you need a lot of family, but also because you have a weird gene that makes you have to fuck three or four times a day. I bet you have a cock the size of a trailer hitch, come to think of it. It all fits together—your golden tones, your soothing ways, your clank of sanctimony, your secret ruthlessness. Boy, you are one huge, perpetual-motion fucking machine. You even see it in Number One son, Vern. I picked up on the way his eyes light on the youngest, flattest, hottest, sluttiest twelve-year-old. He fixes on one of them, he’s lost to the cause. You’d best hope that when the big day arrives, old Vern’s got his mind on business, not on the shock-absorber-sized boner in his pocket. We need Vern’s sagacity, or rather, normal Vern’s sagacity, not het-up Vern’s insanity.”
The Reverend seemed to be getting a little crazy. The Y-veins on his forehead pulsed, his eyes sank to the size and color of ball bearings, his breathing grew harsh and shallow, and he clenched and unclenched his big hands. He looked like he wanted to strangle the life out of Brother Richard and was but a second from doing it.
“But let’s leave poor Vern out of this. He’s only your pattern played out, what chance did he have with a pa who was so sexed up sometimes he didn’t care what kind of hole he put it in, am I right? Oh, that’s the pattern, I see it now. He’s got video on you and some chicken, right? Some boy whore. Some boy-child even, one of those classic cases of the holy man who can’t keep his mitts off of little Billy and Bobby and tells them God commands them to drop their drawers? Oh, that’s it, I hadn’t seen it till now, that’s got to be it.”
“Sir, you are the Whore of Babylon, the Antichrist, hiding behind a smiley demeanor and a charming patter, but truly inside, the Beast.”
“Arf, arf,” said Richard. “Now I see. You’ve been leveraged into this job, and there’s nothing you can do about it. But you cannot accept it either, because the fulcrum on
which it turns is your own darkest secret, the one that would destroy you in front of all Grumleys. So your attitude is classic passive-aggressive, and the longer it goes on, the longer it annoys the bejesus out of you. So now you have it: an excuse to quit, an excuse to fail, an excuse to die.”
The Reverend looked skyward.
“Lord, help the Sinnerman all on that day. He has nowhere to run to. The moon won’t hide him because it’s bleeding, the sea won’t hide him because it’s boiling. With his education he comes up with terrible ideas and he contaminates those who believe. Lord God, smite him, and take him with you and give him a shaking and a talking to, so that he knows why it is you’re sending him to an eternity of burning flesh in the dark and sulphurous caverns of hell.”
“Who writes your stuff, Stephen King or Anne Rice? Anyhow, let me tell you: Call in the boys. Settle ’em down. We need ’em calm and collected for Race Day. We can do this thing, I tell you, and I can have my little run through Big Racing’s peapatch. And we can all go home rich and nobody, nobody, will ever forget the Night of Thunder. Okay? Concentrate. That’s how you beat your tormentor. You pull the job, you get the money, you get your film-at-eleven-minister-fingerfucks-choirboy back. Living well is the best revenge. Oh, and a few years down the line, you go back and kill the shit out of whoever was blackmailing you.”
The Reverend looked at him sullenly.
Richard continued. “Apostate speak with wisdom, no, old goat? Infidel know thing or two, eh, Colonel Sanders? Think on it. Think on it, for God’s sake. Now I’m going to leave. I have to get into Bristol and get a look at my little peapatch, so I can prepare my own kind of fire and brimstone for what’s coming up next. I’m not even going to demand that you change your plan and call those boys in, because I know you will.”
“Thou art sin,” said the Reverend. “Thou wilt burn.”
“Just so I don’t roll,” said Brother Richard.
TWENTY-ONE
On the way back to Mountain City, Bob tried to call Nick Memphis, special agent, FBI. He had Nick’s own private cell number, and he punched in the numbers as he drove north on 81 from Knoxville in the setting afternoon sun. But there was no answer, only Nick’s voice mail. “This is Memphis. Leave a detailed message and I will get back to you.”
“Nick, Swagger. I have to run something by you and sooner would be so much better than later. Call me on this number please, bud.”
But Nick never called him back.
He was disappointed. He loved Nick. Years ago, so long ago he’d repressed it and most of the memories had vanished, Nick had believed in him. He was on the run, set up by some professionals, briefly number one on the FBI hit parade. Every cop in America was gunning for him. Then along came Nick, who’d looked at the evidence and saw that the narrative everybody was dancing to simply couldn’t have happened. By the laws of physics, too many anomalies, too many strangenesses. Nick looked hard into it, then hard into Bob’s killer eyes, and believed.
Bob knew: He was reborn that moment. That was the moment he came back. That was his redemption. That gave him the strength to play it out, to go hard again, to find the lost Bob the Nailer and put the drunken, self-pitying loser-loner behind him. Nick’s faith became Julie’s faith became Nikki’s faith became Miko’s faith, all in a line, and let him be what he was meant to be, what he’d been born to be. And it let him almost, after all of it, get close to the one god he worshiped, his great, martyred father.
But Nick wasn’t there. Where the hell was Nick?
So he called the number he had for Matt MacReady.
Again, he just got the machine. “This is Matt. Leave a message.”
“Matt, Swagger here. Boy, hate to bother you so soon before a race. One question: Recently I saw the tracks of some kind of machine. Steel wheels, maybe eight or ten inches apart, cut deep in the dirt. Hmmm, I recall all kinds of tracks in the pits when I visited you. Any idea what those kinds of tracks could be? Sure could help me. Thanks and good luck on Race Day.”
He did catch up on the news from a Knoxville twenty-four-hour radio station. According to the reporter, the two dead men in the Johnson County Grocery Store shootings had been identified as Carmody Grumley and B.J. Grumley, both of no fixed address, both known to have organized crime connections and thought to be part of a mobile, shifting culture of strong-armed men used in various mob enterprises over the years. Each man had a substantial rap sheet. Young Terry Hepplewhite, the grocery clerk who shot it out with the robbers, was being hailed as a hero, though he had yet to meet with the press and tell his side of the story.
Grumley, he thought. The Grumley boys. What is this Grumley? Another question for Nick, who could dig up a file on Grumley.
Instead of going to his motel, where he thought these Grumleys might have had lookouts waiting, Bob went to the first church he saw, which was John the Revelator Baptist Church of Redemption. Just a one-story building with a steeple that hardly went up twenty-five feet, it wasn’t a mighty structure but had a rough quality, as if it had been slowly assembled brick by brick in the humblest of ways. When he entered the hushed devotional space, he first thought he’d gone astray, for two worshipers were black, and it occurred to him that their memory of large white men in jeans and boots might not be all that warm. But shortly a young black man in a suit and tie came out of a walkway and came over to him.
“May I help you, sir? Do you come to worship? You are welcome.”
“Thank you, sir,” Bob said. “But actually I have a biblical puzzle to solve and I thought someone here might pitch in.”
“I can try. Please come this way.”
The doors led Bob to a spare office with many Bibles and other books of religious persuasion occupying the shelves on one wall.
“Have a seat. My name is Lionel Weston, I am the pastor of John the Revelator.”
“My name is Bob Lee Swagger, and I’m greatly appreciative, sir. This has to do with a passage that has come to my attention. My daughter was interested in it before an accident she had, and I’m wondering what it could mean.”
“I’ll try.”
“Mark 2:11.”
“Ah,” said the Reverend Weston, “yes, of course. ‘Arise from your bed and go to your home.’ Or sometimes, ‘Arise from your pallet and go to your house.’ Christ has just performed a miracle. He had restored mobility to a paralyzed man. Doubters have assailed him even as worshipers have brought the sick and malformed to him. Not from ego, not from pride, but from compassion, he has restored this man’s limbs to strength. It’s one of the great miracles of the text. In fact, one might say those words express the pure joy of God’s power, his ability to restore the infirm through faith. Does that help, Mr. Swagger?”
Bob’s puzzled expression evidently communicated a truth to the minister.
“Possibly it has metaphorical meaning to your daughter. She’s saying, ‘I can walk.’ Her sickness has been cured. She’s had a revelation of sorts. Was she in spiritual or physical pain?”
“Sir, I don’t think so. In fact, this muddies up the waters considerably. Could it be a code, a code word, a signal?”
“Mr. Swagger, I don’t think God talks in code words. His meanings are clear enough for us.”
“You are right, sir, and I am very grateful for your wisdom. I have to think on this and see how it fits in.”
“How is your daughter?”
“She’s recovering. I would ask her, but she’s still unconscious.”
“I will pray for her.”
“I greatly appreciate it, sir.”
“I will pray for you, Mr. Swagger. I hope you solve your riddle and straighten things out. I see you as a man who is good at straightening things out.”
“I try, sir. Lord, how I try.”
Leaving the church, he checked his watch and saw it was time to head to the sheriff’s office. He contemplated whether he should slip the Kydex holster with the .38 Super on, and in the end concluded it would be a bad idea, a careless move, an ac
cident. Detective Thelma would see that he was armed, which could lead to embarrassing questions, even charges.
He got there at eight, pulling into the lot.
Agh, that perpetual shroud of coal dust that hung over this neck of the woods hit him. In a second he’d have a headache. No wonder they were getting the hell out of here. Bob walked into the station and a clerk nodded him back to the bullpen area where Thelma stood by in her polo and chinos while three SWAT officers with MP5 submachineguns and AR-15 shorties were gearing up for the night’s event.
A Bob Lee Swagger eBook Boxed Set: I, Sniper, Night of Thunder, 47th Samurai Page 49