“So far, so good. The cars don’t crunch up so much no more, and I take crunching up seriously because it put my granddaddy in a wheelchair for the last sixty years of his life. And they don’t burn much no more neither, that’s the best thing. My daddy burned to death in one, so I take burning seriously. Anyhow, since you don’t want to tell me how damned great I am, that tells me you ain’t no ass-kiss haircut here who wants free tix. Or no corporate glad hander wants me at a cocktail party with some of the clients where I stand around all bashful-like and the boys come up and pet me like some kind of cuddly critter. Hate all that shit, but it is a part of the business. So we are getting off to a good start. Now you tell me how I can help you. I’m guessing it don’t involve putting on the firesuit and shaking a lot of hands.”
“Nor putting frosting in your hair, nor getting petted much.”
“I’m liking this better n’ better.”
“Yes sir, well, I hope I won’t take too much of your time.”
“Let me get Red Nichols in here, my crew chief. He’s forgot more than I know. He was my daddy’s crew chief too.”
“Sure.”
While Matt MacReady got out a cell to call Red, a beautiful girl—say, the kid was doing well!—came out and offered Bob a cold drink. Bob took a bottle of juice, and pretty soon the door opened, and a man Bob’s age, wrinkled and greasy, came in.
“Red, meet Bob Lee Swagger, of the real USMC.”
“Mr. Swagger, an honor, sir. I was a motor mechanic late in Vietnam and I heard of the famous Bob the Nailer.”
“That old bastard is long gone. It’s just an old man with a bad leg here today.”
“Matt, you realize he run just as hard as you, difference is, people shooting at him. So you mind your manners around him.”
“I will,” said Matt. “I already have Mr. Swagger marked down as a serious southern man, not a haircut with a soft-gal handshake.”
“Well, let’s see if we can help him some.”
And so Bob laid it out, quickly as he could, free of nuance. What had happened to his daughter, what the police made of it, his own worries, his decision to spend $2,700 to have Dewey’s photo-recon the road, the arrival of the pictures over a fax transmission a few hours ago.
“So my hope is, you can look at the skid marks and make sense of them for me. It looks like chicken scratches to me. I figure you’ve seen skid marks before, you know how cars behave at high speed, brakes on, brakes off, how they skid, turn, wobble, go over. So you can tell me what happened. If the cops are right, and this is some hopped-up teenager, then I can rest easy. They’ll get him, I’m sure. If not, I have to dig deeper and make preparations. I will protect my daughter.”
“I believe you will. Is there any reason to expect anyone might try to kill your daughter?”
“It’s not inconceivable. She was investigating a criminal enterprise in a county known for its corruption and drug trade. That would be one thing. Another would be my involvement, over the years, in a number of situations where violence sometimes came into play. Those episodes may have made me some powerful enemies. So it is possible that someone is trying to strike at me through her. That one just can’t be ruled out. I’ve been around enough not to believe in coincidence.”
“We don’t believe in it either,” said Red. “Out here, on the track where it’s all happening at close to two hundred per, we don’t never believe in coincidence. So let’s see what you’ve got there, Mr. Swagger.”
The boy and the old man examined the faxes, not the clearest photos ever taken, but Mr. Dewey had gotten pretty damned low and he had a real fine camera. Bob felt he got every cent’s worth of the twenty-seven-hundred-dollar dent he’d put in his credit card.
“What you’ll see right away is two tracks. One is my daughter’s Volvo, though she doesn’t come into the picture till late in the sequence. Hers are much lighter and narrower.”
“Yep, he’s sailing on some heavy, wide tread, no doubt about it.”
“You can see where he tries to knock her this way and that, you can see how she gets away from him twice, and how she got enough down the hill that so when he did finally whack her off the road, the incline wasn’t so steep and the car never rolled. They say that saved her life.”
“I think it did,” said Red.
They didn’t talk for a while, except in some kind of code.
“Great traction, all the way through. He’s left footing. Seems to find the ideal line a lot. Say, I really like his angle.”
“His angles are damned good, considering the corners are all unknown. I also like how soon he gets to the ideal, early in mid-corner. He rides this one real good and ain’t fighting it none.”
“This boy’s been in a hundred-mile-per slide before, I think. Like his traction. He ain’t hardly ever on two.”
“I think so, too, Matt.”
“Mr. Swagger, you got any other pictures? What I see is a damned fine driver knocking the little foreign job off the road. I will say, this girl of yours, she’s a damned cool hand. Suppose she gets it from her daddy.”
“Her mommy, more ’n likely. Yes, I didn’t know what to make of these. Mr. Dewey told me when he was done he one-eightied and flew back up the road to make sure he didn’t miss nothing. He stayed on the road a longer time than I asked him to, and way, way back he came upon some other skids. Now, it may not be the same guy, but it sure looks like it to me. Same width of track, same density of color. You’d have to make a tread comparison to be sure, but as I said earlier, don’t believe much in coincidence.”
He handed the two photos over, and the two men looked hard at them, then back several times at the actual pocket-of-engagement sequence.
“Well,” Red finally said, “that ties it up with a ribbon.”
“It sure does,” said Matt.
“So tell me what you make of it.”
“As I say, where he’s whacking her, it’s hard to make it out, other than he’s a good driver, so’s she. The cars are banging together, speed’s up near a hundred, she keeps turning inside him, he skids out—don’t lose it though—and goes after her.”
“Yes sir.”
“But see these here? They’re bad news, I’m afraid.”
Bob didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to find out the worst. The world was so much better for everybody if this was just one drunk or hopped-up farmboy who wanted to put a lick on another car, just like his hero, the late Dale Senior.
But that wasn’t to be.
“Now here we are, ten miles before the accident, and see this here turn he made. And here’s another one. He’s running like hell to catch up to her, like he got the news late that she was there.”
“But it’s not like he’s chasing her, in the sense that he sees her and is closing,” Bob said. “It means, in other words, miles before he makes eye contact, he’s going like hell to catch her.”
“Well, he’s sure going like hell,” said Matt. “He’s not just running flat out for the fun of it, he’s right on the edge of a very dangerous road, and take it from me you can’t get there unless you’re closing on the leader with two laps to go. Nobody goes that close to dying for the fun of it. Then here, this last curve, that’s his boldest, and damn it’s a fine piece of driving. He read the angle of the curve exactly, knew what his attack would be and how long, maybe to the tenth of a second, and he had to hold it. A tenth too long one way, he’s in the trees to the left of the road, a tenth too short, he’s in the trees to the right. He found what we call the ideal angle. It may not be the shortest angle, but it means he’s reading the input at supertime, he knows his car like he knows his own face, he goes into the curve just fine, he keeps traction at maximum—traction is speed and control—he never slides or drifts, he’s left-footing the brake while he right-foots the pedal, not easy, and at the ultimate, perfect moment he’s set up to go to the floor and hit the straightaway, speeding up not slowing down, and never wastes no time correcting or recovering.”
&nbs
p; “That’s good driving.”
“No, sir. That’s great driving. Most civilians don’t know how to corner, even cops and good young racers. It takes time and some investment of guts and fender metal and a lot of good luck to learn the trick. You find that ideal angle that don’t feel right, but it is right. You ride that angle, at a certain point you brake but as she starts to skid, you got to play left-foot-right-foot, making the car dance, so that you can be speeding up before you’re on the straightaway ’cause if that’s where you’re stomping it, you’re already too late. And in all this, if your timing ain’t right you’re upside down in flames and hoping the foam truck gets there before your hands and feet burn off, never mind the busted neck.”
“I see.”
“Gunny,” said Red, “whoever drove your daughter off the road wasn’t no kid. He was a damned good, experienced racing driver. He had all the tricks. He’s way up there with the big boys like scrawny little tub-of-guts Matt there. He’s a professional. What he was trying to do, he was trying to kill her.”
FIVE
The Reverend Alton Grumley pronounced a mighty sermon, full of Baptist hellfire and damnation, in the meeting hall of the Piney Ridge Baptist Prayer Camp a few miles outside of Mountain City on old 167, just before it hit new 67.
He called upon God in his majesty to send wisdom to his young prodigal, he who had failed, send wisdom, humility, respect for elders, all those things a good Christian boy should show his religious mentor.
“Thou hast failed,” he said, in a power-voice, all throb and vibration. “Thou hast failed because thou did not pray for guidance hard enough. Thou must pray, Brother Richard, and give the soul in totality to the man upstairs. Only then will he listen.”
The Reverend was a scrawny old boy, with slicked-back hair, all pouf and vibrant with gray and hair oil, big, white, fake teeth, and dressed in a powder blue, three-piece suit from Mr. Sam’s big store. His sons and nephews had a joke. “Daddy’s tailor,” they’d say, “is Wah Ming Chow of Number 38 Industrial Facility, Harbin, Szechwan Province, China!” and get to laughing up a fit.
“You damned boys, the devil will take you!” he’d howl in rage, and then laugh harder.
But the boys weren’t there now. In fact only one parishioner listened to the Reverend. He was a raw-boned fella of indeterminate age—fellows like him could be thirty to sixty, all hardscrabble, southern school of hard knocks and rough roads, indomitable, relaxed, tougher than brass hobnails, not the sorts to get excited but exactly the sorts to avoid riling—who now sat in the front row of the meeting hall, in tight, faded jeans, beat-up boots, a blue, working-man’s shirt, and a Richard Petty straw cowboy hat both shabby and cool pulled low over his eyes. He wasn’t the sort who took the hat off indoors, church or no church. He had on a big pair of mogul sunglasses too, as King Richard commonly wore, and sported a mustache and a goatee, though the hair wasn’t real.
“Old man, you do go on,” he finally said. “I am getting extremely tired of all this show.”
“You was given a job, and you failed. If I wanted failure, I’d have sent my own damn sons. They so dumb, they guarantee failure, God love ’em.”
“They are dumb,” said Brother Richard, so called for his resemblance to the real Richard Petty and what was assumed to be a common NASCAR heritage. “But that’s okay, because they’re lazy, too.”
“They are good boys,” said the Reverend.
“Not really,” said Brother Richard.
“Anyhows, we in a porridge-pot o’ trouble now.”
“I agree. After all, she saw me. Not even you have seen me. If you had to describe me, you’d come up with, ‘He looks like Richard.’ So I guess they’d send out Richard on the circular. But by that time, I wouldn’t look like Richard.”
“Everyone knows that hair is phony,” said the Reverend.
“It doesn’t matter what they know. It only matters what they’ve seen.”
“Anyhow, you were highly recommended to me by at least three sources. It was said by all, ‘He’s the best. Nobody like him.’ Yet when I need you most, you fail.”
“There are some things I can’t control. I can’t control the fact that the girl drives like a pro. She must have raced go-karts. You can learn a lot in the damn little things. Ask Danica. Who knew? I’ve done that job more times than you can know, and nobody ever fought so hard or made so many good decisions at speed. If the world were fair, I’d be marrying her, not trying to kill her.”
“Yessir, but as I have noted in many a sermon, the world ain’t fair. Not even a little bit.”
“Anyhows, I am as upset as you. She saw my new face and it wasn’t cheap, not in money, not in time, not in pain. She’s the only one that’ll identify me.”
“You should have had on one of your disguises.”
“I didn’t have time. You called me and I was off. I had to kick hell to even catch her. Like to might have been smeared to ketchup by a logging truck, some of the turns I took.”
“Whyn’t you finish her? You could see the car didn’t roll. If it don’t roll, you got problems.”
“I am not smashing a girl’s head in with a rock or cutting her throat. Among other things, if you do that, then all the law knows it’s not a hopped-up kid and is a murder and maybe you got state cop investigators, maybe even FBI, and lots of trouble. It only works if everybody agrees it’s some kind of hit-run thing by some kind of speed-crazy, NASCAR-loving jackrabbit with the brains of a pea. That’s what I’m selling. But there’s an issue of what I do and what I don’t do too. I don’t kill up close where there’s blood. It’s my car against theirs, and I always win at that game. Nobody can stay in that game. If I kill up close, hell, I’m just another Grumley.”
“Car agin’ car, you didn’t win this time, Brother Richard.”
“Now I don’t like that one, Rev. This whole shebang you’ve got set up—well, someone has set up, as I don’t believe you got the native intelligence of a porcupine—”
“You are so insolent to your elders. You should respect your elders, Brother.”
“Maybe next time. This whole damn thing turns on me. You need the best driver you can get for a certain job and if you don’t have him, it all goes away. You don’t want that. So why don’t you stop cobbing on me, Alton, and pick two sons or nephews, if you can tell them apart, which I doubt—the two with the most teeth and whose eyes are far enough apart so that in certain lights they appear normal—you send them into that hospital. And since they’re such smooth operators and nobody suspects nothing yet, they can just inject an air bubble into her vein and when it reaches her heart, she’s gone. Then all our problems are solved, and we can do our job, git our money and our revenge, and move on.”
“I hope God don’t hear the disrespect in your voice,” the Reverend said. “But if I’m so dumb, how come I already sent the two boys?”
SIX
Vern Pye had the gift of gab and Ernie Grumley the talent of conviction. One was a nephew, one a son, though neither was aware of which category they fit into as names were sometimes misleading among the Reverend’s brood. After all, the man had had seven wives and six boys per wife as per certain biblical instructions, and, if rumor was believed, he had spread his seed amply among the various sisters of the various wives, whether those sisters were married to others or not. He had a way about him and a hunger, and women, for some reason, were eager to give to him that which they thought he wanted.
They all—wives, formal and informal, legal and only by custom, sisters and husbands, the progeny—lived together far from prying eyes on a chunk of hilltop outside of Hot Springs, Arkansas. From there they did various jobs for various contacts around the South that the Reverend had inherited from generations of Grumleys before him. The Grumleys, foot soldiers to the Lord and also various interested parties. That is why they’d temporarily migrated to the Piney Ridge Baptist Prayer Camp on Route 61 in Johnson County, Tennessee, at the insistence of Alton, the patriarch.
V
ern and Ernie were somewhat slicker than the usual Grumley progeny. Each was smooth in his way and not too tattooed, and the Reverend, noting talent where it happened to spring up (although, Lord, why do you test me so? That quality was rare enough), always urged them to develop their talent. Thus Vern was the superstar of his generation of Grumleys. He was an aristocrat, a Pye out of Grumley, and so his blood was bluer than any other’s, uniting two lines of violent miscreants from the hinterlands of Arkansas outside Hot Springs. He had killed and would kill again, without much emotional investment, but he didn’t consider himself a killer. He had vanities, and pride. He was the compleat criminal. He could forge, extort, swindle, steal cold, steal hot, do banks or grocery stores, do hits, administer beatings, all with the same aplomb. He liked getting over on the johns, didn’t matter who or what the game was.
It helped that he was unusually handsome, with a dark head of hair and large, white spades for teeth. His eyes radiated warmth and charm; he was as smooth with a line of bullshit as he was with a Glock, and he was pretty smooth with that. He’d done a few years’ hard time, where he’d basically networked, and he had three other identities going, two wives, seven children, girlfriends among the stripper and escort population in every southern state, and a thing for young girls, which he indulged at shopping malls, clubs, and fast food joints whenever he had a spare moment. He could con a twelve-year-old into a blowjob in the men’s room faster than most people could count to one hundred.
Ernie was less accomplished. He was essentially a Murphy man, a fraudulent pimp who conned college boys out of their dollars and delivered zero in the sex department, in some of the Razorback State’s seamier venues. Basically, in today’s operation, Ernie’s job was to support Vern and learn from him, which is how they found themselves, in medical scrubs under MD nametags, walking down the hallway of the Bristol General Hospital, headed toward their destination, the critical-care ward.
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