A Bob Lee Swagger Boxed Set

by Stephen Hunter

  Eddie said no.

  “He had no clue. He’s just grasping,” the Reverend said.

  “Maybe not, Reverend, but he sure come close, and when this thing goes down there’s going to be all kinds of commotion, and he might be the one to figure it out. So even if he don’t got no idea now, maybe he will then. You said nobody could connect all this up, and goddamn it’s already been connected up.”

  “Settle down, Eddie. I see now I got no choice. It’s too close, too much is at stake. Okay, you sit tight, the Reverend will figure on it.”

  He hung up, repunched B.J. in Carmody’s follow car.

  “You got him.”

  “Yeah, some bad news too.”

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t know what this means but he didn’t go straight to the car. He went around back. He’s back there five minutes. Ain’t there an entrance or something? I don’t know what he’s looking at or doing back there, but when he come out, he made a beeline to the car, and now he’s headed back into town.”

  “You stay with him, you understand, while I work out a plan.”

  “How’s this for a plan. We pop him. There’s the plan.”

  “You idiot. Why’d he get killed? You get state polices in here and they much smarter than the Johnson Smokies and the whole goddamn thing crashes and burns just a few days before. Got to come up with some way to get rid of him that don’t look like Grumleys done the work on contract for something else big. That goddamn Sinnerman is out blowing up trucks with my boy Vern, and I can’t use him again, like on the gal. You stay with him, you hear? Meanwhile, I’ll think something up.”

  “Reverend, in 1993,” said Carmody, evidently taking over the cell while driving, “I worked a Memphis hit where we waited till the mark was in a little store. We walked in, shot him dead, beat the shit out of the storekeep, took all the money and some peanut butter, and was gone. They never ever made it to be a hit. They may have suspected, but they never could do nothing about it. How’s about that one?”

  “Hmmm,” said the Reverend.

  “Could goddamn work. You’d get Thelma and that photo-crackpot sheriff and maybe some Mountain City fellows, but they’d be thinking robbery and they’d never link it to nothing else. They’d say, damn, this family sure did run out of luck when it come to Johnson County.”

  “You make certain you don’t kill the clerk or any of the other witnesses. Scare hell out of them, you hear? So the cops have to wring necks just to get descriptions. Got it?”

  “This one’ll be fun, Daddy,” said Carmody.

  SIXTEEN

  Bob went to the car, then stopped and looked back. Only one grimy window of the Quonset fronted the parking lot, and he could see that no one was eyeballing him. Maybe they were listening, so he went to his car, turned it on, gunned the engine, then turned it off. He got out, walked at an angle to a path around back, and followed it. There he found the receiving area, an open garage door and a loading dock. He leaped up some steps—ouch, the pain in his hip stabbed at him!—and slipped in. There he found the grubby assistant on his hands and knees, applying crowbar to a crate of Russian 7.62 x 39mm ammo, by which rough process he liberated twenty boxes, junked the wood, and loaded the boxes on a cart for eventual shelving.

  “Howdy,” Bob said.

  The kid looked up, one of a type. Sallow-eyed, furtive, maybe a little brighter than the poor boy in the grocery store, backwoodsy but not an idiot.

  “You ain’t supposed to be back here, Mister.”

  “And you ain’t supposed to contradict the great Eddie when it comes to remembering things.”

  “Sometimes I speak out of turn.”

  “Well maybe you have something to say worth hearing,” said Bob.

  “Why’d I tell you a thing? ’Round here, folks treasure loyalty.”

  “What I see in you is righteousness. You’re stuck with a moral center. So you’ll know that if it was my daughter in here, I have a right to know, and Eddie ain’t got no right to clam up.

  “Eddie’s not righteous, that I’ll say. Some things I know could—well, that ain’t your business.”

  “But this young woman is,” he said, handing over the picture of Nikki.

  “She’s a fine-looking young gal,” said the boy. “I have to say, she deserved a lot more than getting knocked into a ditch by an asshole playing Mr. Dale, the senior.”

  “I’m looking for him. He and I have business.”

  “Hope you find him. Okay, here’s what you want to know. Yep, she was here that afternoon, late then, near dark, like it is now. Close on closing time. I heard her voice, and knew it was a younger gal. I peeked out and got a good look and damn, she was a beautiful young lady, sir, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

  “Takes after her mother. What was it all about?”

  “Well, took a bit of squirming and I come in late on the conversation, see, I wiggled over there—” he pointed up the wall to a hazed window that separated the backroom from the store itself—“and I popped the window a bit. I suppose, I don’t know, you might think bad of me, I just had to figure out what it was, sorry to say, had to get close or—”

  “She’s an attractive young woman. You’re a young guy, you have hormones. It’s only natural.”

  “Yes sir, thank you. Anyway, she’s asking about something. The Bible, I think.”

  “Hmmm,” said Bob. “The Bible.” That Bible again. Somehow between leaving the Reverend’s prayer camp and showing up here, the Bible had become important.

  This connected with no theory of his daughter he could imagine.

  “She had a Bible. And they’d been talking about a passage, I think that was it. I was forty feet away now.”

  “What passage?”

  “Mark 2:11.”

  “Mark 2:11. And she had a Bible?”

  “Unless they make other books that have black imitation leather covers and gold page edges. It was a Bible. It was Mark 2:11.”

  “Why’d she come to a gun store to ask about the Bible? Any ideas?”

  “Well, Eddie is a lay preacher. He does know the Book. Maybe she asked someone to help her on a Bible passage and they said, hell, just down the road, Eddie Ferrol knows his Bible times backwards and forwards. Makes sense to me.”

  “Yeah. Possibly. And that’s it?”

  “Well, yep, except…”

  “Except what, son?”

  “You didn’t never hear this from me.”

  “I never even talked to you.”

  “You will go away and not come back into my life.”

  “Yes, I will.”

  “Eddie’s twitchy anyhow but suddenly he’s real twitchy and I hear him on his cell, he goes way over in the corner so nobody can make out what he’s saying, and he’s like, totally twitched out, almost in tears, almost crying, almost sobbing, and then he’s calmed down somehow by whoever’s on the other end, he says ‘okay, okay.’ Then he hangs up. He comes looking for me, tells me to go home early—that’s a first, let me tell you—and only time I ever saw him look like that was two years ago when his wife left him and he went on a binge. I know he binged hard that weekend, and was a grouchy son-of-a-bitch for—well, till now.”

  Bob knew what happened.

  Somehow Nikki revealed through a Bible passage that she knew something and it scared the hell out of Eddie and as soon as she left, he called whoever he was in this with, whoever he was working for, and they called the driver fast and he raced after her, which is why he had to leave rubber up and down Iron Mountain and only just caught her, and did his killing thing then. Only she’d gotten too far down the slope and she was too good and he didn’t get that roll on her, and so she survived.

  Boys, he thought, I’m getting close. And then we will have our business.

  But then another thought hit him.

  “You go look. You tell me what Eddie’s doing right now.”

  The boy went to the hazed window, cracked it, and peeked out.

  “Just like th
en. He’s over in the corner talking on his cellphone and he’s all twitched up.”

  SEVENTEEN

  It was getting dark, and the two boys on him weren’t holding back anymore. They’d gotten up close, maybe two hundred yards out.

  Could do a sudden turn, shake ’em.

  What would that accomplish? You forestall confrontation, certainly violence, but a cost: you tell them you’re onto them and suddenly you’re the object of a manhunt here in Johnson County and you don’t have any weapons. Maybe you don’t even shake ’em, they’re damned good, they run you down and that’s it, you’re dead, after all you’ve been through, some white trash peckerwoods take you down in a gully in Passel o’ Toads, Tennessee, or wherever the hell it is.

  No. You keep surprise on your side, make it work for you. Make them think you’re an idiot. You’re just bob-bob-bobbin’ along, singing a song. You don’t know a thing. You’re an amateur. They’re the professionals.

  I need a gun.

  That was what it came down to.

  Without the gun, he was an old goat with a limp, a gray-haired fool in over his head. And he had two gunmen on his tail because he’d done exactly what his daughter had done, somehow cut trail on somebody’s plans, even if he didn’t know those plans himself or hadn’t figured them out. Something would be happening soon though, else why the urgency to kill his daughter and now to kill him?

  Whatever, it came to one thing: I need a gun. God made men but only Colonel Colt can make them equal, for without the gun the old, the young, the weak, the meek, the silly, the soft were nothing but prey to the hard and ruthless predators of the world, no matter what the rules say. Rules are written for nice people in well-guarded zones who laugh and chatter and enjoy their little jokes at cocktail parties, but here in the hard world where the shit happened fast and the blood gathered in lakes on the wet pavement, without the gun you were just roadkill anytime anyone decided such a thing. You lived at their whim and when they decided to take you down for whatever reason, down you went, cradle and all.

  Fuck, why didn’t I bring a gun. I am on the goddamned bull’s-eye and I need a gun and there’s no place I can go without—

  He thought: Drive to the sheriff’s department. Go see Detective Thelma. Spend an hour or two there until you figure out what—but they’d wait. So tell her everything. She’d laugh, then she’d be pissed, because his findings directly contradicted hers, and she’d shoo him out the door and where’d he be? They’d wait for him and take him when he was available. They were hunters, they waited for their shot.

  Then he got his hard, cold Bob the Nailer mind back, and he thought, How will they do it? They can’t do me with a car again, it would be too strange. It has to be a firearms thing, a shooting. What, they’ll take me, put me in the trunk, drive me deep in the forest and shoot me, then bury me. It’ll be days before anyone figures out I’m missing. That would be one way.

  But even then, questions, things hard to control, things hard to foresee. Someone might find the car too soon, or someone might see them, someone might hear them, I might get close enough to hurt them or get a gun away from them, they don’t know who I am. No, they’d much rather shoot me dead from twenty-five feet and leave me. How would they do that?

  Then of course he saw how it had to happen.

  He realized he had one card to play, and that was, he could control where the thing took place. And he could only come up with one answer.

  He picked up the cell, tried to remember the name of the goddamned place, then produced an image of the sign, LESTER’S GROCERY, on Route 167.

  He punched 411, gave them the town and name of the place, waited for the connection, and shortly enough, after three and a half rings, he heard a familiar voice.

  “Yeah?”

  “Is this Lester’s?”

  “Yeah, who’s this?”

  “You recognize my voice. I’se just in there two hours ago. Old guy, gray hair, limp, gave you a little lecture.”

  “Yes sir, I remember.”

  “Okay, son, you listen hard to me, son. This ain’t bullshit. Okay?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “I’m going to get there in about five minutes, maybe goddamned sooner. I will park, come straight in. As I park, you’ll see another car pull in behind me. In a bit two fellas will get out of it. They will have masks and guns—”

  “Oh, shit,” said the boy. “I’ll call the—”

  “You don’t call nobody. Ain’t time, sirens’d chase these boys, they wouldn’t show, you’d look like a fool and so would I, and I’d still be dead by morning. You understand?”

  The boy made a sound that sounded like a cross between a whimper and a gulp.

  “Son, you listen to me and you will come out all right. You reach under that counter and pull out the gun stashed there, an old Colt I’m guessing. I know you got one there, ain’t been cleaned or checked in twenty years, but it’s there, and let’s hope it’s working. Just take it out so I can reach it easy. I will come in, take it up, and git ready. Then when the two men in masks come through the door, you hit the deck. I will take care of them.”

  “I—”

  “We will get through this. It’s the only way, and you may even get your picture in the paper and a date with Mary Sue.”

  He’d passed through town, turned right up 167, and by now it was full dark, and he was winding up in the hills, scooting by the odd little house here and there, otherwise alone on the road except for the headlights of his pursuers a couple hundred yards back.

  “I just put the gun on the counter,” said the young man.

  “We will get through this.”

  “Oh, this is too good,” said Carmody. “He’s going back to that grocery store he stopped at earlier.”

  “Maybe he’s going to visit the Reverend again.”

  “Maybe. But he’ll stop there I’m betting and he thinks he can get something else out of that dumb clerk. Oh, this is too good. This is just what the doctor ordered.”

  Carmody was driving, of course, so he reached into his belt and touched the piece he always carried, just to make sure it was there. It was a SIG P229 in .40, with thirteen fast-moving, husky hollow-points tucked into the magazine and another in the chamber.

  Meanwhile, B.J. was rummaging around in the glove compartment, where he came up with two balaclava hats, which could be peeled down to make face masks, either for cross-country skiing or armed robbery, depending on the Grumley mood. He got them, then drew his own weapon from his shoulder holster, a stainless steel Springfield .45. He took the safety down, performed a chamber check to make certain there was a 230-grainer nested just where it should be, put the safety back on, and reholstered the gun.

  “We goin’ kick some ass,” he said, the blood rushing to his extremes, and his breathing grew harder and shorter.

  “Yes, we are, we are for sure,” said Carmody.

  Bob pulled into the parking lot.

  They think they’re hunting me; I’m hunting them. It felt familiar and now, from somewhere, his battle brain took over. Even as he walked to the store, past the pumps, up two steps, he felt things slowing down yet at the same time enriching in color and texture, as if his vision were mutating to something beyond excellence. His muscles were turning to flexible iron, his breathing was growing nutritious, his hearing super-attuned, so that every sound was crisply isolated in the universe.

  He walked down the wide main aisle to where the boy stood, awash in fear, his body rooted stiffly, his eyes too big, his lips covered in white chalk. Bob could see the gun, made it out to be an old Colt New Service and guessed that it had to be either a .45 Colt or a .44–40. It was like a gun out of an old movie, from an old America, huge, blue and gray where the finish had been eroded or spotted off by exposure to blood. It was a humpbacked thing, big for the big men who lived big American lives in the generations before, and unusually heavy for its size, possessed of an almost magic density which in turn gave it a density of purpose. He took it
up, felt the checked wood grips worn flat, almost smooth, ticked open the cylinder lock and spilled out that tube to see it sustained six brass circles, glowing in the fluorescent light. Each circle wore a smaller circle in its center, the primer, and around each was inscribed .45 COLT. He snapped the cylinder shut, not hard and flashy like the fools in the movies did, but with a soft, almost gentle touch. For a revolver, even a big old boy like this one, was a gentle mesh of the strong and the delicate, an intricate, frail system of pins and levers and springs and arms that had to work in perfect synchronicity, in a very nineteenth-century sense of mission, for it was a relic of that far century. He felt it and its solidity immediately reached out and embraced him. For Bob Lee Swagger, it was like reentering a cathedral; this is where he was raised to a faith and it had never let him down and he would not let it down.

  He heard the door opening, he saw the boy’s eyes widening, which told him what he needed to know, that indeed, masked, armed men rushed at them.

  He turned, the gun came up fast in both hands, and if he noticed a large man in black, with a blackened, hooded, furious face and a black gun coming up, he didn’t have time to mark it. For in the next nanosecond he pressed the big old Colt’s trigger twice, and with each crank, felt the gun’s complexities occurring. All the systems were in perfect mesh, as the trigger came back under the muscular pressure of his finger, the cylinder rotated under the same spring-conveyed pressure, the hammer drew back, exactly as Sam Colt or some forgotten, genius engineer working for him had planned it back in Hartford under the big gold dome and the dancing pony at the turn of the century. As the sight blade rose and became all there was in the universe, the hammer fell, and in three tenths of a second he sent two 230-grain lead fatboys on their way to somebody’s low, center chest, where they tore, an inch apart, through skin, muscle, and rib and blew out large, atomized chunks of heart tissue that spewed crazily throughout the chest cavity.

  That one went down with a thump to the floor that sounded comic against the huge reverberation of the two powerful revolver blasts in the closed-in space before he got his own gun up.