“Mr. Swagger,”
“Detective Fielding.”
“This is our Fugitive Apprehension Team.” The guys, beefy cop types. Two white, one black, in their twenties with short hair, thick necks, and the look of middle linebackers, nodded at him without making any sincere emotional commitment.
“Wow, you must be expecting some kind of gunfight. You look like you’re going on a commando raid.”
“You just want to take precautions. I doubt Cubby has a fix on going down hard. He’s a gentle soul, as long as he isn’t lit up on ice.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“All right, sir, you drive with me, and the FAT guys will follow in their van. Let me brief you. I will park down the way and you will stay in the car; we’ll wait for the van to park and the boys will take up entry positions in the rear. Then I’ll signal Air and my brother Tom, who’s the sheriff’s helicopter pilot—”
“Your brother’s the pilot?”
“Tom was shot down as an army aviator three times in two wars. The last one, in Baghdad, was bad. He had some problems and had to leave the army. Maybe I started this whole drug-war thing, because I put through the Justice Department grant paperwork to get us the bird so my brother would have someplace to go.”
“I see. Impressive. You helped him.”
“I tried, but you know the law of unintended consequences. Now I worry that—oh, never mind. Let’s get back to it. Tom will bring the ship in, and his copilot will work the high-intensity beam in case Cubby tries to run. I’ll go in and knock and tell Cubby he’s coming with me. It should go fine, but if he bolts, he’ll just run into these fellows and if he goes violent on us, then we’ll have to run him down. But I’m not betting on trouble.”
“Okay.”
“You just stay in the car. When we bring him in and book him, I’ll let you listen from the next room to the interrogation. Cubby’s no master criminal, believe me; he’ll give it up fast and I’ve set it up with the Prosecutor’s office to have him indicted in the morning. Paperwork’s all done. Then it’s just a matter of making sure Tennessee justice don’t drop the ball, and I will watch that one very closely.”
“I thank you for taking me along. I appreciate it.”
They sat on a tree-lined street in what could never be called the nicer side of town, a run-down section east of downtown where the old houses—shacks more like it, maybe at best bungalows—leaned this way and that. And you had the sense that a lot of police action had taken place there before.
“I’ve been busting Cubby for ten years, off and on,” Thelma said. “He’ll go clean for a while, maybe as long as six months, but he’s always gone back. Sad to see such a handsome man give his life away for nothing. He’ll gin up a lab, he’ll deal a little, he’ll snitch out somebody to buy more time, just scuffling along, waiting for a way to amp the scratch to buy another bag of the stuff. Man, it’s the devil’s business, what it does to folks. You have any addiction problems in your family, sir?”
“Detective, I am not proud to say that I had some troubles with the bottle years back and to this day I miss my bourbon, but one sip and I’m gone. It cost me, and I finally beat it down, though now and again, under trying circumstances, I will break down and have a drink. I usually end up in the next county engaged to a tattooed Chinese woman.”
She didn’t acknowledge his joke.
“But my daughter’s never had a thing to do with it, and only now and then drinks a glass of wine. We’ve been so lucky.”
“Yes, you have. The wrecked families I’ve seen.”
“Let me ask you: You’re sure on this boy?”
“Sure as sure is. He has a brother who has a car that matches the vehicle ID’d on the state forensics reports, the cobalt ’05 Charger. I checked this morning—it was a busy morning—and in fact Cubby had the car and in fact it’s banged up where he hit your daughter. I looked at the car and I think we can make the presence of your daughter’s paint in the gash along the side of the Charger.”
Bob was thinking, What the hell is she talking about? Who is this Cubby? Is he working for Eddie Ferrol, or some mysterious Mister Big, the Godfather of Johnson County? How’s it all connected? What does this detective know of his connections?
“You’ll check on his associations once you get him locked up? Be interesting to see if he was—”
“Working for somebody. Last person he worked for was Mr. McDonald, of the hamburger chain, who fired his worthless ass in three weeks. He was never able to master the deep-fat fryer.”
“Maybe he has other connections, criminal connections.”
“Doubtful, Mr. Swagger, but if so, we’ll find out tonight when I run the interrogation.”
“Yes ma’am. Now on another thing, this sheriff’s making a big splash with his chopper. But I hear the price of the stuff hasn’t gone up, which you’d expect if all the labs were being closed down. What’s the feeling?”
“Nobody knows. Maybe there’s a superlab somewhere, but you’d think you’d smell it, because manufacturing crystal meth in quantity produces a terrible, rotten egg smell. Or maybe it’s being trucked in from somewhere. Don’t know if you know it, but there’s a shooting last night, some grocery clerk got lucky and killed two robbers. The robbers were interesting: real serious bad actors, your white-trash professional heavy hitter, with rumored contacts to a batch of mobs all over the South, and participation suspected in a dozen armed robberies. Them boys ran out of luck in the worst possible way last night. Anyhow, way my mind works, I’m thinking, maybe they muled a load of ice from somewhere deeper south, and that’s where the stuff is coming from. I don’t know what else would explain their presence here. It would go to someone who knew the area, had ambitions, and a lot of criminal skills. Don’t know who that would be. You see any criminal geniuses hiding at Arby’s on the way over?”
“No ma’am, but there’s a shady dude at the Pizza Hut.”
This got a laugh out of her, but her mind was elsewhere, really, as she scanned the shabby front of the house down the street.
“Adam-one-nine, you there?” came a squawky call on the radio.
She spoke into her throat mic.
“Adam-one-nine copy.”
“Adam-one-nine, we in place. You can go any time.”
“Air-one, stat. You there, Tom?”
“I read you Adam one-nine.”
“Tom, you bring it on in and when you see me at the front door, you have Mike open up with the big lamp on the back of the house, you got that?”
“I read you, Adam one-nine.”
She turned to Swagger.
“Please don’t make me look bad. Sheriff doesn’t know about this. But I figure the dad gets to watch as the fellow who tried to kill his daughter goes down.”
He could tell she was uneasy, and the breath came hard and shallow. She ran a dry tongue over dry, cracked lips, and for one second did something amazingly feminine that totally contradicted the image of a tough cop about to make a bust. She grabbed a role of lip balm from the dash, and smoothed it, dainty as an expensive French lipstick, across her lips.
“Yes ma’am,” said Bob, as she got out of the car and walked slowly to the front door.
He wondered why they didn’t do it bigger; ten cars, lights flashing, loudspeakers. But maybe that would spook an icehead like this Cubby, legendary maker of bad decisions, and the next thing, there’d be another big gunfight. Give Thelma the benefit of the doubt. She’s done this, you haven’t. You don’t know so much, and as it is you are riding the raw edge of a term in jail on any one of a dozen charges.
So he sat back and watched the police theater.
Thelma arrived at the doorwell, hesitated. Her hand flew to her pistol, made certain it was where it should be and that the retaining device still held it ready and secure until the moment she drew, if she drew.
She knocked.
She knocked again.
No answer.
She slithered next to the door j
amb and edged the door open. She had a Surefire in her nonshooting hand, and she used it to penetrate the darkness. He heard her yell, “Cubby? Cubby, it’s Detective Fielding. You in there? You come on out now, we’ve got business.”
There was no answer.
Don’t go in, Bob thought. One-on-one in the dark of a house against a violent offender whose head is all messed up on account of the skank he eats and makes every day, who’s paranoid, maybe crazy, oh lady, don’t go in, it isn’t necessary. Drop back, watch the exits, call for backup, let the boys in the Tommy Tactical outfits earn their dough.
But Thelma slipped in.
The moments passed, and before he knew it Bob had gotten out of the car and crouched in the lee of its wheel well, watching, waiting for shots or something.
Oh, Christ. Through the windows, he could see the beam of her flashlight dancing against the walls and ceiling of the dark interior of the small place, which couldn’t have more than a few rooms.
Come on, he thought. He wanted to see her come out with the suspect cuffed, and the boys with the guns come racing around the house to take him away. Nice job, great job, good work, good old Thelma but—
From under the line of the house—it must have been a cellar window cut against a gap in the foundation—he saw someone squirm free, low crawl across the yard into the bushes lining the house next door.
Suddenly a flashbang erupted in Cubby’s house, the loud smack of percussion breaking the still of the night, and the helicopter dropped low and its light came on hard and bright. The sounds of windows breaking, doors being busted in told the story: The FAT guys were assaulting from the rear. Maybe Thelma had him or he’d clonked her and she’d just awakened and given the green light to the FAT team. But the shadowy figure that had slipped out and squirmed across the yard suddenly broke from his hiding place and began to run crazily down the sidewalk, trying to put as much distance between himself and his pursuers as he could. He raced right toward Bob, who had a sudden almost comic memory flash over him. It was so football, the running back, broken free of the line of scrimmage, scurrying down the sideline, the lone safety, the only man between him and the end zone. He knew it was a bad idea, a sixty-three-year-old man with a bum leg and everything, but it didn’t matter what he knew, it only mattered what he did, which was to launch himself, run through his sudden hip pain, find the right angle, and close the distance.
At the last second, Cubby saw him and from somewhere produced a handgun. But Bob was too far gone and just plunged ahead, driving his shoulder hard into the man’s ample gut, trying to drive clean through him and bring him flat to the ground, hearing some ancient coach from somewhere back in the Jurassic scream, “Drive through him, Bobby, take his legs out, give him your whole damn shoulder, explode through him.” And that’s what he did, textbook perfect. Both men went down in a bone-bruising crack, lights flashing through each head, knees abrading bloodily on the pavement as they tumbled, limbs flying, breaths knocked free.
He didn’t feel the knee to the head. It couldn’t have been planned. It was just one of those football things, when two flying bodies collide and torsos hit with the smack of wet meat falling off the table, legs and arms go screwball. And it so happened that Cubby’s knee flew up in a spasm as his breath was belted out of his lungs, and the knee hit Bob flush upside the head, a little forward of the ear. It was having your bell rung, and Bob’s rang so loud it knocked pinwheels of light, illumination rounds, spasms of tracers, sparks from a bonfire, fly legs and spider heads through his brain. He went to the ground all tangled with Cubby, but his limbs and his brain were momentarily dead. In a second, he came back to consciousness first to sound. The sound of running steps. The sound of a powerful helicopter engine. Then came light as the copter nailed Bob and his prey in the bright circle of thirty-five hundred lumens, and they were like as on a stage, shadowless and drained of all color except the lamp’s eerie cold pure moonlight. He blinked, felt the pain, tried to breathe, and realized Cubby had linked himself to him with an arm around his throat tight, squeezing off the breath until Bob coughed and shook and the grip loosened a little.
“Goddamn you, Mister, you keep still or I will put a goddamned bullet through your head,” Cubby yelled so forcefully that the message was conveyed just as eloquently by the jetstream of saliva that hit Bob. Bob saw something in his peripheral vision and felt it go hard against his head. He recognized by its circularity that it was the muzzle of a revolver.
Oh, fuck, he thought. Now you have gone and done it.
“Goddamn you, Thelma—you said—you said—Goddamn you, Thelma.”
“Cubby, you hold on now. Don’t you do nothing stupid. That fella ain’t a cop, you got no grudge against him. You let him go and put the gun down and we’ll get all this straightened out.”
He could see her, about twenty-five feet away, just out of the cone of illumination; behind her, the three FAT officers had gone into good strong kneeling positions, their weapons jacked dead on the target, which he hoped was Cubby and not himself. Aim small, miss small, boys, go to semi-auto, think trigger control and breath control, he thought, gasping for air.
“Cubby, don’t do anything stupid,” Thelma said in a smooth calm voice, walking into the light looking calm, more like a mom than anything. “You just let that fella go. Put the gun down and we’ll work our way through this.”
“Thelma, no! You said, you said—no, I ain’t going back to all that. It ain’t right. Goddamn, oh, why this happening, why why why? I had her licked this time. Oh God, they’s in my head, I hears ’em yelling. Oh Christ. No, Thelma.”
Bob was thinking: Where’s the fucking sniper when you need him? Did he have a Little League game to coach or something? A good man on a .308 and a solid position could send 168 grains of Federal’s best match load through Cubby’s eye and into his ancient snake brain and end this thing in the time it took the bullet to fly at twenty-three hundred feet per second to its target. But there was no sniper, just the woman cop and the three young Tommy Tacticals looking shaken as they crouched, trying to keep good muzzle discipline.
Thelma took another step. She had guts and how. This screwball could pop one into Bob and whirl and fire and take her down before she cleared leather. Of course the three Tacticals would each heroically dump a magazine into him, but both he and Thelma would be beyond caring. Why had he done such a stupid thing? Where could Cubby have gone anyway, cranked as he was on the ice that ate holes into his brain? But his grip on Bob and the force of his wrist against Bob’s throat was iron, and Bob struggled again for air, while smelling his rank body odor, and feeling the fear and craziness vibrate through Cubby’s flesh.
“Don’t you move goddamn you,” said Cubby, pressing the gun muzzle so hard against the thin skin at the crown of Bob’s head that he cut it. A trickle of blood oozed out, and Bob felt the warmth of the liquid and then the sting of the wound.
“Cubby, you just calm down. Nobody has to get hurt now, I’m telling you.”
“But you goin’ send me back. Don’t know why I did it, Thelma, don’t remember none. I don’t know, I been so high for so long don’t think I hit no car, but goddamn I got voices saying you hurt a girl you hurt a girl. Wouldn’t hurt no girl, Thelma. Like them girls sometimes they nice to me. God, they in my head—it hurts. I can’t go back—I can’t go back. It ain’t right—I didn’t do nothing, I don’t want to hurt nobody. God, Thelma, it just ain’t right—I can’t do this no more—it’s just no good no more. Oh, Thelma, you said you’d help me—I am so sorry I can’t—”
Bob heard the oily slide of the hammer against the constriction of the frame, as Cubby drew it back, then the slight vibration as it locked. The gun was now cocked, his finger on the trigger, just a single-action jerk away from firing.
“Thelma, I will kill this boy—you go way—y’all go way—put down your guns, let me go. Don’t want to hurt nobody. Please, please, it don’t have to be this way, but goddamn I will squeeze on this here boy—you just la
y down your guns and—”
Thelma drew and fired with a speed that was almost surreal. Bob had never seen a hand move so fast, so sure, so smooth, so clean. It was like a trick of physics, a speed beyond the influence of time, that seemed to come from nowhere, elegant, controlled, blazing. It was professional shooting at its finest.
He saw the flash, saw the slight buck of the automatic as its slide jacked in supertime, saw the spent shell flip away, caught in the light, and even felt the simultaneous vibration as whatever she’d sent off hit its target. The sound of bullet on flesh is always the same, dense and wet and full of the sense of meat splattering and bone shattering, yet compressed into a nanosecond. He actually felt Cubby die instantly, the vivid vital flesh in supertime again alchemizing to dead, directionless weight, pulled on by impatient gravity. As Cubby fell, his draped arm brought Bob down with him harshly, and they landed in a heap and the handgun, still cocked, bounced away.
Bob wriggled free and saw that Thelma’d hit him left of the nose, maybe an inch, and that the bullet had drilled a perfect round black hole, which, in another second, began to release a surprisingly thin gurgle of black fluid. Then his nose began to bleed, not copiously, just a trickle of black as blood under pressure sought escape. The man’s eyes were open, and so was his mouth. Behind him, a ponytail fanned out on the sidewalk in the harsh light, and a puddle of exit-wound blood, black in the illumination, began to delta outward through the hair. That must have been a hell of an exit. He wore a cut-off Ole Miss T-shirt, a pair of tight jeans, and was barefoot. His feet were dirty with long, animal-like toenails crusted with grime.
Bob stood up.
“Mr. Swagger, are you all right, sir?”
“I am fine, Detective. That was some shooting,” he said.
“I am so sad I had to drop him. Only had to do it once before and it shook me up for a year.”
“I am glad you were over your shakes tonight, Detective.”
The other three officers had gathered around, and Thelma put her pistol away, and knelt next to the fallen man. She pried the gun from his fingers—a Smith K-frame, probably in .38—decocked it, and expertly popped the latch open, letting the cylinder rotate out.
A Bob Lee Swagger eBook Boxed Set: I, Sniper, Night of Thunder, 47th Samurai Page 50