Then he thought, no, no, it’s not burned out. You change the tires in order to change the performance profile of the vehicle. It’s tired-up one way, for one purpose, and now you re-rubber it and you use it for some other, presumably unusual purpose. Maybe that somehow linked with this fit of exploding trucks around the area? Maybe they were deviling up the engine as well for that purpose. But what truck could it be, what new purpose could it have?
“You still there? Does that help?”
“It sure does. Can’t see just how yet, but I’m getting pieces in a row and pretty soon a pattern will be there. Now let me ask you something. This here’s a long shot. Does the biblical passage Mark 2:11 about Jesus curing a crippled man mean anything to you? Would it fit into anything along these lines?”
“We really weren’t people of the book, Gunny. Some drivers are but not us. So no, it doesn’t mean anything to me, and I don’t think it connects to Big Racing in any way.”
“Okay, well, thanks. Really appreciate your taking the time with all you got do do. You’re a good fella, I can tell.”
“My pleasure.”
“All you must have to do and you gave me a hand. That’s marine all the way.”
“Fact is, we don’t do much day before. We’ll run the car this afternoon for a last minute check, I have a signing at my retail trailer in NASCAR Village that’ll be a madhouse but will move a lot of souvenir hats, and other than that it’s just relaxing and trying to keep the mind clear.”
“Well, good luck. I know you’re good enough, I just hope the breaks go your way.”
“Can’t control that, so never worry about it,” said the boy.
Bob sat, ruminated, took notes. Nothing. Then he realized he was hungry, slipped his .38 Super into the Kydex holster, locked on his belt after checking it for the millionth time to be certain it was cocked and locked, and eased out the door. Nothing seemed to be moving in the blazing August heat. A few cars were in the lot, but it was mostly dead space. A couple of stores down the big road was a Denny’s, so Bob headed down to it, completely in Condition Green, giving his world a three-sixty every few minutes on the hunt for anything unusual, looking into shadows, looking for irregularities like the exhaust from a parked car or the same hat showing up on different people, that sort of thing. But it was just a hot day in small-town America.
He ate breakfast, though it was nearing one, and halfway through the meal had an idea of something proactive to do. He would read the entire Book of Mark, and maybe that way he’d get a feel for verse 2:11, see something in it that might have given his daughter some insight that would turn Eddie Ferrol and his associates homicidal.
So he spent the afternoon in his room reading the Bible, enjoying it more as a story—it was a great story, the way Jesus could have run and didn’t want to go up on that cross, reminding him of too many marines who could have run and didn’t and stayed to die—than as anything else. When he was done reading the chapter the second time, he had nothing.
Think. Another thing to do was to look up Eddie Ferrol’s home, then visit it well after dark. Almost certainly Eddie wouldn’t be there, but who knows what clues he might have left behind. Then there was the Carmody and the B.J. Grumley cousins; maybe by now, more information on them had emerged. But he’d have to get that through Nick, as calling Thelma and betraying an unusual interest in that case would not be an intelligent move. But Nick hadn’t called either. Bob called again, and the same thing happened—no answer. And there was no call from the kid in the computer store.
He was tired and felt room-bound and restless at the same time. After a good start, the day was turning out to be worthless. He’d learned nothing, made no progress and—
He knew the sound, the almost liquid sloshing of a heavy airborne engine that could spell only one thing, and that was helicopter. He’d ridden in enough of ’em, and one had saved his life in Vietnam by getting him to the field surgical hospital at Dak To before his life signs slipped away after a Russian sniper had blown a hole in his hip. This one was no Huey, but a larger, more powerful craft and it grew louder and louder, signifying close-by descent.
Bob went to the window, looked out, and saw a large ship settle in the empty parking lot, its rotors a heavy blur that stirred up whirlpools of dust and debris for a hundred yards. It was a Blackhawk no less, much weathered by the winds of wars here and there across the planet but now wearing the starred emblem of law enforcement and the announcement, SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT JOHNSON COUNTY TENNESSEE across its nose. A handful of grit flew into Bob’s face, and the force of the air beat him back, but he saw the chief Tommy Tactical of them all, Sheriff Reed Wells, drop heavily from the large cargo hatch and head his way.
The sheriff wore a black Nomex jump suit that was hung with belts containing gas grenades, flashbangs, knives, and radio gear. A low slung holster was strapped to his thigh with a tricked-up, cocked and locked .45. His upper body was encased in a stiffly uncomfortable armored vest, with SHERIFF in white letters across the front. Both his knees and his elbows were protected by thick plastic and foam pads. He had a black baseball cap that bore the star emblem of his department, tear-shaped shades, and carried a shorty M4 with a 30-round P-mag, a suppressor and a couple of thousand bucks’ worth of optical sights, flashlights, lasers, and maybe even a can opener bolted onto various rails that ran around the gun’s forearm and receiver top. Lord, the man looked war.
Bob stepped back to let the warrior king clamber in, all rattley and clanky, as if he’d just gotten off his horse sometime in the fifteenth century. But it wasn’t a raid, and the sheriff gestured to Bob to sit, while he himself sat heavily on the bed. Bob saw immediately that the sheriff couldn’t put the M4 down because it was looped to him by a single strand of sling that ran diagonally around his body. But he laid the gun in his lap and took off his hat and glasses. Outside, the noise of the Blackhawk lowered as the pilot shifted to an idling pitch.
“Mr. Swagger, I am beginning to grow annoyed. Your daughter’s case is closed. Thelma closed it last night. We here are very sorry about what happened, but I took it for granted that you’d move on out of here today.”
“Yes sir, don’t mean to overstay my welcome. I’se just going over some loose ends and was going to type ’em up and send ’em off to Thelma. She did damned well, by the way.”
“She saved your life as I recall. Or at least at the time, it certainly seemed she did.”
“Long as I live, I will never forget the sound of that hammer being pulled back and the speed of her draw. The gal is superfast and shoots straight. I was a lucky man and will be forever grateful.”
“Let me ask you about a few loose ends myself. What you went through last night would send most men to the hospital. At the least, they’d be throwing up in the grass for a week. They’d also be changing underpants right away, to be crude but truthful. And that’s just the hostage situation and the trigger pull on the empty chamber. On top of that, you saw a man killed at close range, his brains blown out, and the bullet that took his life passed within six inches of your head. Again, a source of major psychological trauma. When people see people shot, it robs them of sleep for weeks, sometimes months, sometimes years. But from all reports, you hardly noticed and were up and perky in seconds.”
Bob realized he’d misplayed the scene last night. Some macho twist in his mind made him make certain that Thelma and the three FAT officers understood he was as much man as they were and his close call was meaningless to a man who’d had thousands of close calls. Duh! Stupid. Now they were curious about his fortitude. Where did it come from, what did it mean? He should have thrown a weeping jag and pretended to be too distraught to continue. But it hadn’t occurred to him. Another foolish old man’s mistake.
“It was so fast in the happening and so unreal. I still can’t believe it happened. Maybe my rough times are all ahead of me, and that’s when the sleep goes away.”
“I suppose. That would be one explanation. But another occurred to
me. You’re not a professional? A gunman, some kind of commando veteran, a former SWAT officer, military with a lot of combat, something like that? That’s how you operated.”
“I told you, I had some military experience years ago.”
“We ran your record. Clean. No indictments, no felonies. I’d pay that ticket you owe the Boise police, though. And I hope you get the drainage issue on your Pima County barn settled. You don’t want trouble with those environmental groups.”
“Yes sir. I have a lawyer working that one now.”
“See, I can’t help notice that you show up and suddenly this little sleepy village becomes Dodge City. Two nights ago, some kid clerk outshoots two hardcore bad guys. I mean really outshoots ’em, absolutely the way a trained professional with a knack for gunwork and a commando’s sense of aggression might have outshot ’em. You’re nowhere connected to that, except that I do have an unverified report of a dark sedan, probably a rental, leaving the grocery store in the immediate aftermath of that shooting. We can’t crack that kid, but I do note you drive a dark green Ford rental sedan. Ain’t that one interesting?”
“Sheriff, I’m just a dad trying to figure out—”
“And yesterday you take down a fleeing armed man. You’re sixty-three years old and walk with a pronounced limp, yet you have no fear of going one-on-one at top speed with an armed drug addict. I have twenty-five-year-old, two-hundred-forty-pound deputies who wouldn’t do that. Then, when he takes you hostage, you don’t even sweat. When he cocks the hammer—”
“I didn’t hardly have time to react to that, sir. It happened, and Thelma fired almost in the same second.”
“And when our officer drills him beneath the eye, you don’t even notice. You’re hardly curious. You don’t breathe hard, you don’t become agitated or nothing. It’s ho-hum. Another day in Mr. Swagger’s life, yawn. Another head-shot, another dollar. Yet your record is curiously, curiously clean, as if some professionals had taken care of you for whatever reason, and there’s no paper or reports of any kind on you. Did you work for CIA or something?”
“I have known an officer of that agency, a very fine lady. Also some assholes. I am friendly with a highly placed FBI agent as well, from events years back. But there’s no paper on me because I’m just a lucky businessman from outside Boise. I was in the marines for a time. There’s no story there. This ain’t some kind of thriller book where everybody’s somebody else and everybody knows how to shoot.”
“I hope you’re telling the truth.”
“Should I get a lawyer sir? Am I a person of interest? Would I be better off with legal representation?”
“I suspect you’ll always be a person of interest, Mr. Swagger. No, you don’t need a lawyer, what you need is a full tank of gas and a good westward destination.”
“Yes sir. I never argue with a man who has a machine gun. But I have paid my night’s rental and it’s now dark, so I have no particular interest in driving the far side of Iron Mountain at this time of night. Suppose I leave tomorrow, bright and early, hoping to beat the Race Day traffic. I’ll finish up the report at my daughter’s and send it to Detective Fielding. Is that acceptable?”
“Somehow I doubt you’re afraid of the dark, sir.”
“It’s not the dark. It’s what’s in the dark.”
“I heard a very capable Green Beret say the same thing. All right, Mr. Swagger. Tomorrow you’re gone or we will meet again at Booking. Over and out?”
“Over and out, Sheriff.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Brother Richard looked so much like Richard Petty you’d have thought he’d get arrested for impersonating a hero. He had that befeathered, straw cowboy hat pulled low over his ears, the tip and tail of its rakishly cantilevered brim cranked beneath eye level, its Indian festival of secretly meaningful charms and amulets flopping insouciantly in the breeze. His eyes were shielded behind glasses that would have looked equally good on the authentic King Richard or Jacqueline Onassis. He had Richard’s scrawny, twisty, muscular body and he wore a NASCAR T-shirt with a pack of Marlboros rolled up in the sleeve. He wore tight jeans and comfortable Luchese boots.
The reason he didn’t get arrested or beaten up or mobbed by teenage white gals was that where he was, every other man looked just the same. It was like a carnival of Richard Petty look-alikes, that being but one category. Others chose the Kurt Bush paradigm, and still others the Dale Jr. Huck Finn, the Tony Stewart, the Juan Montoya, the Mike Martin, the Matt MacReady, and there were even, hard to believe, a few Jeff Gordons, though they had to be from California. This was the crowd at NASCAR Village, that gridwork of cult and retail sites just outside the mighty Bristol speedway, which towered above them all, while providing a steady deafening roar as the weekend’s cars whizzed about it a few last times to run the engines at speed for a final checkout.
It was Friday, the start of racing weekend, under a hot August sky, in a Shenandoah Valley that at this moment was plastered with cars, tents, Rec-Vs, SUVs, everything short of armored personnel carriers. The vehicles rode the gentle hills like a gigantic carpet, as the hundreds of thousands came to worship, live, experience glory and fear vicariously, drink, smoke, shove, fuck, hoot, and have a hell of a good time. Most of them were beyond bliss; there was so much happiness in the meandering beast of the crowd you couldn’t but crack a smile at the heat of the joy. It turned you a little red in fact.
But none of them were as happy as Brother Richard, as he let the crowd push him this way and that through what really amounted to a NASCAR Casbah. The streets weren’t lined with gold, not, that is, if you were buying, though maybe if you were selling. For NASCAR people were spenders. They had to take something of the great Night of Thunder home with them. They bought pendants and Tshirts and cup-holders and beer caddies and hats and thick leather jackets and sweat shirts and polo shirts and pictures and die-cast models and bottled water, beer and bourbon and corporate propaganda. Chevy, Ford, Toyota, and Dodge, the four sanctioned automobile suppliers, had gigantic pavilions, and all four had a pedestal inside. Atop each pedestal was a street shell of the hand-made, custom machine that would, tonight and especially tomorrow night, roar four hundred then five hundred times around the stiffly tilted half-mile where dreams could die in seconds, sometimes in flames, sometimes in the crunch of collapsing metal. The track where guts and grit and luck played against each other at 140 per until one boy was smarter, tougher, braver, and luckier than all the others, and crossed the line first and tasted, however briefly, godhood.
Each of the boss drivers had a long-haul trailer set up in the village, which they’d converted to a dedicated sales outlet. There the hero’s image or number or both had been imprinted on everything, books and videos were added to the swag, hats in a hundred variations were on display—and for sale—and a crew of cashiers lined up to take your bucks. The cash flow must have been amazing; the twenty-dollar bill was the new one-dollar bill, and although the modern cash registers didn’t ka-ching like the old mechanical marvels from Dayton, you could tell yourself that you heard a heavenly choir of ka-chinging, even if it weren’t necessarily true. Brother Richard looked at all that money flowing one way and one way only and briefly considered what might have been but never was, and stifling a choking sound, he took another hard blast on the Bud he carried (like everybody else) in a bright red foam caddie.
You could tell who was hot by the crowds. Both Kyles were doing swell and of course everybody had a thing in their heart for the wonderful Dale Jr., inheritor of the mantle and now driving for the beloved football genius Joe Gibbs; there was little business at Jeff’s, the eternal outsider’s unit, where only malcontents and self-proclaimed mavericks gathered. But the hot one just now was the young redhead, Matt MacReady, just twenty-two, already with a handful of major wins at Sprint venues, in the hunt for the big cup itself still this late in the season.
Somehow, Richard felt himself pulled by torrents of enthusiasm, even love, toward the MacReady locality. In a secon
d he realized why there had been such a current in the crowd. Good Lord, the boy himself was there.
Brother Richard halted and held back. He considered it for a second, then realized that after his surgery and in his currently repackaged King Petty mode, he would stir no old memories, not to the boy, not to Red, not to any of them. So he ambled close, slipping in and out of the whirls and eddies of pilgrims, and by not pushing it too hard, he got pretty close. No, he wouldn’t get in the line, where Matt was dutifully signing posters, hats, T’s, anything, with a Magic Marker, accepting goodwill wishes and even love-horsepowered thumps on the back with grace and ease and charm.
Richard didn’t want to halt, for motion was the law of the crowd. He let it sweep him on by and saw Matt’s calmness—Matt always had that—and his decency—Matt really had that—and it made him realize with surprising bitterness that Matt was really the beneficiary of all the madness of eleven years ago, though nobody could have known it then, for Matt was just a boy from the second, the trophy wife. He was good-natured and unassertive, all eyes and ears to the excellent adventure the fates had decreed would be his life.
“Yes ma’am,” Richard heard Matt say in that soft voice of his. “Be happy to.” And he took a three-year-old upon his lap and smiled for a pic. Then it was time to go and the thousand still in line had to be disappointed. Matt rose and said into a mic, “Folks, I have to get my beauty rest and keep my arm loosey-goosey for all them left-hand turns!” And of course everybody laughed.
Matt waved. Then he and Red left the venue as a golf cart arrived, and Richard saw how thin and muscular the young man was, how lean and graceful. He had the racer’s perfect body, the body that the great ones had, short and slender so there was no crowding in the driver’s seat, with muscular forearms and a longish neck, which gave him eerie pivoting ability for peripheral vision left and right, legs able to reach pedals without cramping, in short, the whole package.
A Bob Lee Swagger eBook Boxed Set: I, Sniper, Night of Thunder, 47th Samurai Page 52