A Bob Lee Swagger Boxed Set

by Stephen Hunter

  “Yes sir.”

  “Now I can’t tell you anything about the entertainment field. It’s full of sharpies and you’d best keep your hand on your wallet is all I know. But you do call me if you have any trouble, you see anyone dogging you. And be careful. These fellas was working for other fellas. You hear me?”

  “I do.”

  The next call was to Charlie Wingate, the boy genius in the computer store.

  “Any more for me, Charlie?”

  “Mr. Swagger, this hard drive is totally fried, near as I can tell. I only got that little bit, I’m afraid to say. Won’t charge you a thing for that.”

  “Oh, yes you will. You charge me for a full day’s work at top-scale, consultant level, and not a penny less, you hear?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Now I want that brain of yours working on something else. Know anything about the Bible?”

  “Not much.”

  “Well I don’t either. But something’s come up involving a biblical passage, Mark 2:11. It’s where Jesus cures a crippled man and says to him, ‘Get up, go home.’”

  “‘Mein Fuhrer, I can valk,’” said the boy.

  “Yeah, something like that,” said Bob, not even close to getting it. “So what hI want you to do is analyze it from any perspective you can think of. Is the number significant, the two-eleven? Is the page on the Bible significant, don’t know what it would be. What do the commentators say about it? What are the different interpretations? Is there some word translated differently from the original language, whatever the hell it was.”

  “Aramaic.”

  “Yeah, fine. Could it be a code, what are its other citations or usages in history or whatever? Are there paintings or something based on it? All that stuff. You’re smart, you know what I mean.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “You know the town?”

  “Been here my whole life.”

  “Okay, maybe there’s some connection between it and this town. I don’t know what, but be creative, think outside the box, make it fun, a puzzle. Who knows what you might come up with.”

  “Yes sir.”

  He disconnected, and almost before he could put the phone down, it buzzed again. He checked the number and realized it was the private number of Matt MacReady, the young NASCAR racer calling him! Wasn’t tomorrow the big race?

  “Yes, Matt?”

  “Hello, Gunny. How are you?”

  “Only a week older’n last time I saw you, but it feels like a hundred years.”

  “Time do race, don’t it? Only thing goes faster than my USMC Charger.”

  “Only thing.”

  “Anyhow, been thinking and looking and maybe I have something for you.”

  “Go ahead, son.”

  “Wheel marks, metal close together, part of the NASCAR racing operation? Well there is something. You see it all the time in the pits, it’s everywhere, what’s the word, upbequious?”

  “Hmm, don’t know that word.”

  “Red says it’s ‘ubiquitous.’ That’s what it is, ubiquitous.”

  “Well, damn. Hope I don’t forget it. Ubiquitous. Everywhere.”

  “What it is is, it’s the track of our hydraulic jacks.”

  “For tire changing?”

  “Sir, yes sir. It ain’t all the driver. Part of the art of winning at this game is teamwork on the car. I have a good crew, Red’s got ’em trained up real good. They get me gassed, watered, maybe oiled, and re-tubed in less than fifteen seconds. It’s like choreography, the way they work a car in the pits on Race Day. And the key to the tire change, of course, is the jack. It’s a big heavy dog, solid steel and it’s hydraulic, built of cylinders full of lube. Weighs about fifty pounds. Runs on steel wheels about an inch wide. You have your biggest, strongest stud as your jack man. He gets it over the wall, guides it fast to the wheel well, jacks the car off the ground. Meanwhile, your air-wrench guy de-lugs the tire even as the jack is lifting it high enough to clear. The wrench guy clears out, a guy comes in and grabs the lugs; that’s his job, his only job, to keep track of the lugs. Two other boys, the tire men, pull the burned-out tire off the axle, roll it away, and slam on another one, which two other boys have rolled to them. The wrench-man airblasts the lugs tight, and the jackman lowers the car, and the whole team of them crash hell for leather to the next tire and repeat the same thing. They can get the car re-rubbered in fifteen seconds, and if you look, after a race, win, lose, draw, or crash and burn, their hands and wrists and especially fingers are all cut to hell. But they’re tough boys, they don’t much care.”

  “Got it. And they roll that thing through oil and water and it leaves tracks, maybe six to eight inches apart, everywhere on the tarmac, in the pits, everywhere?”

  “I’d be willing to bet, sir.”

  “So if you saw a tangle of ’em, you’d think, someone’s practicing a wheel change?”

  “Well, that’s what I’d think.”

  Hmmmm. Swagger tried to press this new information into the pattern he’d assembled. Tire change. Someone was practicing a speed-tire change, after the fashion of NASCAR. Now why the hell would that be? The boys setting this thing up weren’t racers, weren’t running a pit crew. What’d they need a speed-tire change for? What vehicle came with the wrong tires in place and had to be re-rubbered fast? What would be the point of the new tires? Well, only way it makes sense is if the first set of tires is burned out. Now what would burn out a set of tires? Were they going to steal a racing car? Those babies were expensive but he didn’t—

  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 sho
ot.”

  “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.