“If you didn’t fight against it, it wouldn’t seem so hard, honey.”
“Vern, goddamnit, get over here,” yelled Ernie.
“Now don’t you worry about a thing. Vern’s got some work to do, then we’ll talk some more.”
Vern left, went to the living room, and pulled a chair up to spell Ernie so he could go pee.
“’Bout time. What you been doing?”
“Just talking to the kid.”
“Vern, we got a damn job. You stay away from her while we work, you hear. The Old Man’d be plenty ticked if he knowed you’se been mooning on that damn kid when you’se supposed to be man hunting.”
“When it comes, it comes. Sometimes you don’t get a second shot. You got to take it. Things is swell here.”
“I’m going to piss.”
Vern sat dreamy-eyed and disconnected at the window. He didn’t see the cars across the parking lot or the building they fronted, or the steps up to the doors. He saw himself and Hannah Ng in the bathroom, he saw his easy way with her, how he’d have his way, how good it would feel. He told himself she’d like it too. The more he thought about it, the better it seemed.
Ernie came back.
“Goddamn, Vern, there he is!”
Vern snapped out of the hot and sleazy place his brain was in, and reentered the known world. There indeed, not twenty-five yards away, was the tall, older man named Swagger who was their quarry. He’d parked, now he got out and peered about carefully, making certain he was unfollowed and unnoticed.
“See, he’s a careful one.”
“Yeah, he is. He ain’t no pushover.”
“But he’ll go down hard, like any man.”
The man then went to the stairwell, climbed past second-and third-floor landings, and on the fourth, took out a key, opened the door to an apartment, and stepped in.
“Now we really got to watch. Vern, you can’t—”
“I know, I know.”
“Better call the Old Man.”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Vern, taking out his cell. He punched in the number.
“What, Vern?” asked the Reverend.
In the background, Vern could hear hubbub, as the boys sold water and Reb hats and Tshirts to pilgrims going to the race. Vern could tell that business was land-rush scale.
“Reverend, he done showed. Just arrived. He’s there.”
“Oh, that’s good, that’s fine, that’s swell.”
“Yes sir. We could go over there right now, kick in the door, be in, out in five seconds, and it’d be done.”
“No, no,” said the Reverend. “You never can tell. Long as he’s in there, he ain’t doing us no harm. You just watch and wait. If he don’t never leave, you wait till we go at eleven or so, then you go. That way, what the hell, the laws have situations at both ends of town with a massive traffic mess in between ’em. They won’t never git it sorted out. That’s when you do ’em. Or, if for some reason, he decides to go somewhere. You see him come out and go to his car. Then we can’t know where he’s going, then you go out and while he’s in that car starting up, you pop his ass good and hard. Drop that hammer. Nail that boy to the wall. Yes sir, bappity-bap-bap and you all done. Then you go. It’s so far off, no laws will figure it has nothing to do with anything else. But that’s my second choice. Best wait till our fun commences before y’all go settle Grumley accounts. Got that, Vern?”
“I do, Pap.”
God,” said Ernie, “this is turning into an Adam Sandler movie. Dopey-stupid and crazy. Someone else just arrived. What’s next, the circus?”
The two boys watched as, indeed, someone went up the four landings and knocked at the old man’s door. After some time the door was answered, and an awkward transaction took place.
“Them guys always come at the wrong time,” said Ernie as the UPS man walked down the steps and returned to his brown van.
TWENTY-NINE
“Well, you look older and dumpier,” said Bob. Nick had indeed thickened some, and let his crewcut grow out a little. The years of service had engraved wary lines in his face, and now he wore glasses, horn-rims. He still wore the uniform, the black suit, white shirt, and red tie, and if you looked you saw his handgun printing high on his right hip. He now replaced it, as Bob replaced his.
“So do you. What’s with the hair? You must have seen a ghost.”
“Reckon so. It just went in two weeks. I had a rough spell in Japan. These folks kept trying to cut me down, so to get their attention, I cut them down. I’d tell you more about it except you’d have to arrest me.”
“Since I haven’t seen any Interpol circulars on them, you seem to have gotten away with it again. By the way, do you have a license to carry that gun?”
“No.”
“Good. Same old Bob. Just checking.”
“How’s that tough little wife of yours? She still want to put me in jail?”
“More like a mental home. Anyhow, Sally’s with the U.S. Attorney’s office in D.C. now.”
“She never liked me much. But then few do, why should she be any different?”
“I never liked you much either, if it matters.”
“Well, what I liked about you was, you’se so far down the totem pole, I could say ‘ain’t’ and ‘it don’t’ without any career harm. And, by the way, what’re you doing standing in the middle of my daughter’s living room?”
“How is she?”
“You know what happened to her?”
“As of two days ago, pretty much everything. I know she’s awake with a groggy memory, which is why there’s no sense talking to her. But I will. And that’s why even as we speak, a team of U.S. marshals has taken over security at her hospital. She’s a valuable federal witness, even if she doesn’t know it.”
“Looks like we’ve got a spell of talking to do. Mind if I get something to drink?”
“You shouldn’t drink and carry. Not a good idea.”
“Don’t mean that kind of drinking. Drink as in fruit juice or a nice Coke, something wet. You want one?”
“No, I’m fine.”
Bob got himself a fruit juice from the refrigerator and when he got back, Nick had sat down on the sofa. He reclined in a chair.
“Okay, old friend. Let’s talk. By the way, I’m really glad you’re here. This thing is very complex, and I ain’t got it half figured out. But why didn’t you call me back?”
“Because I’m looking for a very smart guy. I don’t know his capabilities, but he’s a highly organized criminal with amazing technical skills. He might know about the task force and he might have penetrated it. Just a precaution.”
“The driver, right?”
“Yeah, the driver. The guy who tried to kill your daughter. The car guy.”
“He came damn close.”
“You don’t know how lucky your daughter is. This is a very bad actor. He’s killed nine federal witnesses and six federal officers over the past seven years. He did a family in Cleveland three years back. The father was an accountant who was going to testify against a teamster local, money laundering and extortion. Never happened. The driver hit them and they were gone in a second. Mother, father, three kids. He may even have more kills that we don’t even know about; he also freelances for various mob franchises, even some overseas outfits—we have Interpol circulars on him. But we’re in this because of the federal angle.”
“You have a name?”
“We don’t have a name or even a face. All we have is a modus operandi, and it took years before we were even on to that. What we’ve been able to learn is that he’s some kind of genius with automobiles. Genius driver, genius mechanic, genius car thief, genius on automotive electronics. He can break into any car he wants in about six seconds, drive off in three more. He seems to like Chargers. He’ll steal a car, plates, and so forth. He sets the car up with a heavy-duty suspension, tunes the engine for max power. Then he scopes his quarry out. Waits till they’re on the highway. He understands the physics of the accident,
what it takes to knock a car out of equilibrium, where to hit it, which angle to take, that sort of thing. It usually takes only one pass. He hits ’em hard, they overcorrect to keep control, and they lose it. The car flips. It rolls, it bounces, and everyone inside is whiplashed to death in seconds. He’s gone in a flash, the car is never found, there’s no prints, no DNA, nothing. Just paint samples that lead back to a stolen car.”
“You don’t have any idea who he is?”
“There’s stories. Some say he’s a rogue NASCAR guy who killed another driver in a fit of rage and had to make himself scarce. We have seven names like that, all of them accounted for. Some say he pissed off Big Racing by fucking one of the family’s daughters, and they made sure he’d never race a sanctioned event again. Some say he’s just pure psycho, with a gift for automotives. It could be any of those, all of them, none of them. We just know he’s good, very thorough, highly intelligent, the fearless, classic psychotic. But when we heard about Nikki, we set up a task force out of Knoxville. Something’s up, we think.”
“I do too.”
“So what have you got?”
“Well—”
Someone knocked on the door.
The two men exchanged looks.
“Were you followed?”
“Don’t think so.”
“Expecting anyone?”
“No.”
“Let’s be real careful on this one.”
Nick slipped to the right of the door, SIG in hand, tense, ready.
Bob went to the left of the door, drew the Kimber, held it behind him, thumb riding the safety, ready to push it off in a second.
“Yeah?” he demanded loudly.
“UPS,” came the muffled reply.
“Just a sec,” said Bob. He looked through the peep hole.
“He’s in brown. I don’t know, maybe they’re so far into this they have fake UPS uniforms.”
“I don’t know,” said Nick.
“Can you just leave it?”
“Need a signature, sir.”
“Okay,” said Bob.
He opened the door two inches until the chain restrained it, even as he peeled away from it in case somebody fired through it.
But instead a thin cardboard box slipped through the two-inch opening in the doorway. Bob grabbed it, shook it, and tossed it on the floor.
He opened the door, signed his name with a stylus on the computerized notepad, and watched the fellow trundle off, slightly absurd in his short pants and brown socks.
“Those guys always arrive at the wrong time,” said Nick. “They have a gift for it.”
They sat down again, and Bob told the whole story, from start to finish, his arrival in Bristol after his daughter’s accident, his investigation, the sheriff department’s investigation, the opposing conclusions of each, the two critical incidents that left three dead, Bob’s remorse about leaving poor Terry Hepplewhite alone back there as the supposed shooter, the death of Eddie Ferrol, the police politics of Johnson County, the situation as it now was with Nikki awake.
“So let me sum up your findings,” Nick said.
He ticked them off.
The strange economics of methamphetamine in Johnson County.
The Baptist prayer camp, run by an Alton Grumley.
The driver.
The tire-change jack and possible exercises to refine that skill.
The night firing of guns.
The attempts on Bob’s life by Grumleys as he tried to investigate.
“Grumleys are a southern crime family, headquartered near Hot Springs,” Nick explained. “Kind of a family training camp for the criminal skills. Been around for generations. They produce all kinds of mischief, force-based mainly, but also confidence, bunco, extortion, and kidnapping. Very tribal group of bad guys. If they’re involved, I’m suddenly seeing a lot of dough.”
Bob took it in, then continued.
The missing pages in his daughter’s notebook, the crushed car, crushed recording devices.
The trip to the gun store.
And finally, Mark 2:11.
“That’s it,” said Bob. “Now here’s my take. Somehow Nikki picked something up. So she visited the camp but saw through the Reverend. She poked around on her own and she found something. Clearly these Grumleys were involved. But what she found made her think of—I don’t know, here’s where it gets blurry, guns or the Bible or both? She wouldn’t call me to ask about the Bible, that I guarantee you. So maybe it is about guns. She tried to call me but I was out in the horse ring. So she went to the first Baptist minister she heard about, who turned out to be Eddie Ferrol, and asked about Mark 2:11, thinking that fella would know.”
“And the fact that he owns a gun store is coincidental? I don’t buy coincidences that big.”
Bob stopped. “Yeah, this is where it comes apart: the bullet or Bible issue. And she called me first, and I don’t know jerk about Bibles. But the fact that he claims she didn’t go there, and we know that’s a lie…She drives home, and that guy, who’s later killed, somehow gets to the driver, and he’s sent after her. Now he had to be close. So he was clearly at the prayer camp run by old man Grumley. We have his tracks as he raced down 421 to catch up to her.”
“That sounds right. Okay, we don’t have Mark 2:11, but what do we have? Here’s what I’m getting. It seems to me what they’re planning isn’t a conspiracy, a murder, a scheme, a plot. That doesn’t sound Grumley. It’s more of a caper, a onetime thing, some kind of raid or operation. Maybe a robbery. That’s the urgency. That’s why everything has to happen fast, ’cause they’re up against a tight deadline, and what happens happens soon. They have to go at a certain moment, not before, not after. And that information has to be protected. It’s so fragile that even the suspicion of something going on would screw things up. Their plan must depend on total surprise, and even minimum-security upgrades would defeat it. That’s why they go after Nikki. Even if she knows nothing, she might make phone calls or ask questions, and someone else might figure something was up and those upgrades would be made and their plans would be screwed.”
Bob thought, Yeah he’s pretty smart. That’s good for government work.
“Could it be a code, a signal? Let’s Google it again. Maybe we missed something.”
But they came up with nothing except the endless and seemingly fruitless biblical references.
“Let me call this kid Charlie. He’s real smart, maybe he’s come up with something.”
Bob called Charlie; the boy was apologetic, self-doubting and disappointed because he hadn’t come up with anything.
“I even ran it by a guy I know who specializes in codes. He looked at it for numerology, misplaced letters, anagrams, displacements, upside down writing, backwards writing, and he came up zilch.”
“Okay, Charlie. Thanks.”
“Sorry I couldn’t do better for you, Mr. Swagger.”
“Well, you actually cross out a lot of possibilities, son. So that’s of some help. It ain’t a code, it ain’t nothing from the Bible or the numbers or letters in the Bible. That cuts it way down.”
“I won’t charge you.”
“Charlie, how many times do I have to say this: Charge me!”
Bob disconnected.
“Nothing. And if you’re right, if they have some kind of caper going on against a deadline, here we sit with nothing to show for it, no progress made. Could it have to do with the race? The big race?” He looked at his watch. “Hell, eight-thirty. It’s started. Could it be a rob…”
But he let it trail off.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” said Nick. “How could they rob something in the middle of the biggest traffic jam in Tennessee this year? How could they get in, get out? I suppose they could go on foot, but how much could each man carry? I just don’t see any reasonable methodology here. Those roads are going to be like parking lots for hours. Nobody’s going anywhere.”
“I am at the end of the road.”
“Man, I’m
about to say, call it a day. Maybe tomorrow I can run it by the analysts back in D.C. and get some genius to look into it and see what we don’t. I do need a drink, a real one. But let’s ask: What do we know the most about?”
“The answer is Nikki. I know Nikki. I know how her mind works and what a stubborn little cuss she can be.”
“So let’s think along with her. Take us through her thoughts on that last night. You know she’s called you.”
“She calls me…but I’m not answering. She gets a burr under her saddle, she’s got to get it out. She calls me, I ain’t there. What does she do? Call someone else? Who else would she call? She’s been to a gun store, she had a Bible she got from the Reverend, she can’t find no satisfaction, she calls me, I’m not there, who else does she call? It’s early evening, most places are closed down. Who does she call? The newspaper? Could she have called the newspaper?”
“But you said she didn’t.”
“That’s right.”
“Maybe she didn’t call anyone. Maybe she just up and left for home and the driver caught her and—”
“No. Gal wouldn’t give up. That’s not how she was taught. She’d want to do something positive, achieve a sense of progress. So somehow she’d continue to search. So, who’s open that late? Who never closes? Who has information on anything on tap even if you’re in the woods in rural Tennessee in the dark?”
They looked at each other.
“She had a laptop, right?” said Nick. “Wireless, right? She went to the Internet. She tried to Google Mark 2:11 and came up with what we came up with—ten thousand explanations of how Jesus cured the cripple and sent him home, and she couldn’t make any sense of it. Who does she call next?”
They looked at nothing and then they looked at each other again.
They looked at the package that Bob had just dumped on the floor. It said AMAZON.
“She buys a book!”
THIRTY
Vern’s cell rang.
“Yes sir.”
“What’s the word, Vern?”
“Ernie, what’s the word?”
“Ain’t no word, goddamnit, Vern, and you’d know that if you done your job. Don’t know how you can take money for tonight, just sittin’ there hammerin’ on that poor little girl and her family.”
A Bob Lee Swagger eBook Boxed Set: I, Sniper, Night of Thunder, 47th Samurai Page 55