A Bob Lee Swagger Boxed Set

by Stephen Hunter

  “Well?” said Bob.

  “Come on,” said Nick, “we don’t have time. I’ll explain on the run.”

  Bob threw on a light khaki sports coat to cover the gun in Kydex and mags arrayed in clip holders along his backside.

  “It’s the concession money,” said Nick. “All of it, cash, small bills, a week’s worth of souvenirs and baseball hats, plus tickets for tonight, hot dog money, beer money, all the money from that NASCAR Village operation. He says it’s a six to eight million take. Now I should say, if you rob a bank and get two million, you’ve really only stolen $200,000 because you’ve got to move it to an overseas cartel, they’ve got to launder it and get it back to the U.S., and they’ll only pay out one on ten. That’s universal—except for this. Eight million small bills—maybe eight hundred to a thousand pounds of deadweight—is eight million. No one for ten. Straight one-for-one. You can start spending immediately, no one can track it.”

  “It’s in an armored car?” asked Bob.

  “More like a truck. They gather it up during the race and haul it to speedway headquarters. But there’s no vault there. So they bale it up and load it aboard that armored car. When the race is over, that vehicle, with a driver and three or four guards, moves out into the traffic and begins the long crawl to Bristol where it’s vaulted at one of the big downtown banks. The traffic jam, that’s supposedly the security. No one would hit an armored car in a traffic jam, because there’s no way out. But I’m guessing they’ve figured some way—”

  It was suddenly clear to Bob.

  “I see it. No, they don’t take the swag. They blow open the car, kill or incapacitate the crew. It takes ten seconds with an Mk.211. They set up perimeter security to deal with the cops who will have to fight the tide of panicked fans in the thousands to even get there. This team changes tires fast. Why? Because they ain’t driving down no road. The roads are jammed. They go off-road, they just mounted some kind of powerful off-road, heavy-tread tire. They go off-road, they grind through the most open area, which is that NASCAR Village, they just smash through it, nothing could stand up to the power of that truck. Maybe they’ve amped the engine somehow, to get a lot more power for a few minutes before the engine seizes or catches fire. That’s something the driver could do; he could figure it out.”

  “Yeah, but where does that get ’em?”

  “It gets ’em to the mountain. The hill, whatever. Up they go, and for that ride they’d need the best driver in the world, someone who’d won hill-climbs and truck demo derbies, the whole nine yards. They crank up that hill five minutes and fifty dead citizens and cops after they first hit the car. Up top, that’s the only safe place for that chopper pickup I came up with earlier. The chopper comes down the mountain range, way out of reach or even sight of any police firepower on scene, it picks them and the dough up, and they’re gone in seconds. They run through the dark low without lights, and nobody will follow them, because a) they can’t see ’em, and b) even if they could, they’re afraid of that .50 caliber, which will easily take a chopper down.”

  Nick took up the narrative. “They chopper out of the area, land, split the swag, and they’re gone by dawn. We won’t even find where they’ll land.”

  Bob made his choice at that moment. He knew where they’d land. But he had business there too.

  “I have to move,” said Nick. “I’m going to try and get a chopper in here and get out there. You don’t have to—”

  “Oh, yes I do. You need guns. I’ve got one.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  The race was over. It was a jim-dandy. Junior won, just beating Carl by shedding him in a pile of the lapped but persistent tail-enders on the last half of number five hundred, when Junior went low, slipped through a gap between Food City and Bass Pro Shop, buzzed dangerously around the blue-green Dewalt reading the apex of the curve—which he knew better than his girlfriend’s inner thighs and which he dreamed of more often—and hit the last straight in FedEx’s wake, slingshotting off the suck, and hitting the checker maybe six feet ahead of Carl’s Office Depot. Carl got caught behind Cheerios—damn him!—then caught a gap and some sling action of his own, but just couldn’t overcome Junior. If it had been a five hundred-lap-plus-thirty-foot race he’d have done it. Okay, so? It’s only one race.

  The boys were all cheering, all up and down Volunteer Parkway outside the gigantic speedway structure, where the rug merchants all waited for a last shot at the johns and their families. Less sincerely, the Grumleys lurked, waiting for their big moment.

  “Where’d USMC 44 finish?” asked Brother Richard.

  “They haven’t read off the order yet—wait, here it is—” and Caleb listened hard to his little radio in the darkness. Then he said, “Fourth, he finished fourth.”

  “Cool,” said Brother Richard.

  A half-mile off, the speedway was still a source of immense noise, even with the engines finally turned off as the hot and smoky cars were rolled to their garages. It was the roar of the tribe. It was immense, the NASCAR animal in full throat, and above the stadium one could see the illumination not merely of the lights that made night racing possible but the thousands upon thousands of flashbulbs pricking off to record the moment when the young Dale the junior took his trophy.

  “Okay, boys,” said the old man, “time to git ’er ready. Say a prayer for fortune if you’re with me, if you are a secret non-believer, that’s okay, ’cause I will say a prayer for you and as I am close to Him, he will look out for you.”

  The boys began to prepare. Caleb quietly slipped under the table, pulled two large plastic bins out and withdrew into the dark space made by the tent above and the revetment of water bottles behind. There, in privacy, he removed two large constructions of metal, the upper and the lower of a Barrett .50 caliber M107. Expertly, he fitted the two together, finding the machined parts connected in the perfect joinery of the well-engineered. Pins secured the two units into one solid mechanism. Completed, made whole, it looked like a standard M4 assault rifle after six years in the gym, the familiar lines where they should be, but the whole thing amplified and extended, thickened, lengthened, densified, packed with strength and weight. Another Grumley—he couldn’t see who in the darkness—handed him a heavy magazine with ten Raufoss armor penetrators locked in and held tense under extreme spring tension. He himself slid the heavy thing into the magazine well, heard it click solidly as it found its place. He drew the bolt back, his great strength helping, let it slip forward, moving one of the quarter-pound, 650-grain, tungsten-cored big guys into the chamber, and locked it.

  All up and down the line, the Grumley boys were cowboying up. Most wore bulletproof vests, and the guns were a motley of junky but effective Third and Fourth World subguns from various organized crime arsenals around the South, plus some functional American junkers. The inventory included a couple of Swedish K’s; a couple of Egyptian Port Saids (clones of the K), some beat-up Mk-760s from small American manufacturers after the original S&W variant, which was itself a K clone; an Uzi; a kicked-to-shit West Hurley Thompson; a full-auto AK-47. With all the clicking and snapping as mags were locked in, guns were cocked, belts of spare mags were strapped on, body armor was tightened and ratcheted shut, it sounded like chickens eating walnuts on an aluminum floor. But in a few seconds or so, it was done.

  “We all set, Pap,” said Caleb, more or less the sergeant.

  “Good, you boys stay back there in the dark, the crowd’s coming out now. Lord God Almighty, there’s a vast sea of people.”

  And there was. The first of about one hundred fifty thousand people slithered out of the speedway gates, spread when they hit open air, and fanned across the available ground. It was an exodus from the church that was NASCAR, and now these good folks had nowhere to go except back into the dreary real world and no way to get there except to take the slow-motion parade in the opposite direction of the afternoon’s slow-motion parade. A few runners made it to their cars early, began to pick their way out of the densely
packed lots. Meanwhile, seeming to materialize from nowhere, the police in their yellow-and-white safety vests with their red-lensed flashlights moved onto the roadway to govern or at least moderate the huge outflow of people and vehicles. Dust hung in the soft summer air, shouts mostly of joy, the clink of bottle on bottle, the pop of cans being sprung to spew brew, the friendly jostle of people of the same values, the hum of insects drawn by the lights, the acrid drift of cigarette and cigar smoke, the occasional boastfulness of the young and dumb, the wail of a too-tired baby, a whole human carnival of happy yet exhausted people.

  In just a few minutes gridlock had set in; so many cars, so many folks, so few roads. Honks filled the air, but mostly the crowd had made peace with the ordeal of the egress. In short order, the lanes immediately in front of the Piney Ridge refreshment station were jammed with cars full of citizens, bumper to bumper and door to door in either direction, frozen solid. The people in the cars unaware that a commando force, heavily armed and full of aggression and craziness, lurked just a few feet off in the shadows.

  Ain’t you folks gonna git a thrill in just a minute or so, thought Richard.

  He was behind the skirmish line, unarmed. No reason for him to be up front and get himself shot up in the early rush. He wouldn’t venture out until the truck was taken down, the guards either surrendered or murdered. He licked his lips, which were dry, and his tongue was also dry. He pulled a bottle of water out, now warm, popped the cap and slugged some down.

  “Go easy, Brother Richard. You don’t want to have to pull over for a piss in the middle of all this.”

  Everybody laughed.

  “Why, Cousin Cletus, if I do, you hold ’em off while I empty the snake, okay?”

  More laughter. That Richard. What a joker.

  The minutes dragged on, the boys sat patiently, a Marlboro or Lucky firing up in the darkness, the drift of the smoke through the tented space.

  “I see her,” said the old man from out front. “Yes sir, here she comes, trying to edge her way in.”

  Richard saw it. The vehicle, technically called a “Cash in Transit” truck, was a Ford F-750, probably from Alpine, the biggest of the up-armor specialty firms. It wore a bank emblem on its flat sides and doors, and was a boxy thing, ten feet high and twenty-two long, with the grace of a milk truck from the ’50s blown up to be a parade float. White, it gleamed in the cascade of lights, the rivets in their grid all over the damned thing cast tiny shadows, so unlike the smooth skin and bright primaries of the civilian vehicles, this big, sluggish baby had texture. Its grill was a meshwork of slots that looked like, but weren’t, gun slits, and if the thing was armored to the hilt at the highest upgrade it could withstand anything—except what the Grumleys had prepared for it that night. Squared fenders, a stout body, everything acute-angled off, vault-like, it was made to convey the impression of invincibility, of a moving fortress atop the upgraded shocks and suspension.

  Richard could make out the two doomed drivers, blandly sitting behind the three-inch-thick windshield glass, unaware that hell was about to arrive in spades. The two men slouched, like the others having made peace with the ordeal ahead, and the big thing edged its way down the road from speedway headquarters to the merge with Volunteer. As it advanced, waiting in a line to get in another line, it edged ahead ever so damned slowly. People poured around it, sloshed around it, some even clambering on its bumpers as they progressed, the whole thing eerie in the brownish lights of the vapor-mercuries up above. It demanded respect. Twice, vehicles with better position moved aside to permit it entrance, because it was in some sense magical.

  But everything was rapidly collapsing into a phenomenon of lights with no one feature predominant, because there were so many sources of illumination, those merc-vapors up top, the lights from the cars in the various lines in the various lanes, the bobbing strobes of the cop monitors, the overhead fast movers that were affixed to various news helicopters and a police ship or two. Beams cut the air this way and that—was it a lightsaber battle from Star Wars VII: Attack of the Baptist Killer Redneck Hell-Raising Natural Born Killers?—and zones of illumination played on the surface of the clouds of dust or smoke that roiled heavily, the whole thing punctuated by sounds of the America of 2008: cars, kids, squeals, shouts, taunts, laughter. In the scene the humans were insubstantial, almost flickering ghosts and shadows.

  “Damn,” said Richard to nobody in particular, “is this a great country or what?”

  “Hell boys,” said Caleb, “time to git some.”

  “Here he comes. Caleb, you ready?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Remember, you move with purpose like you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing. Remember, not through the windows, we need that bulletproof glass on the way up the hill.”

  “Yes sir, Pap.”

  “I loves you, son. I loves all you boys, you goddamned brave Grumley boys.”

  “We love you, Daddy.”

  “Brother Richard, I even love you.”

  “Reverend, will you take a shower with me after this is over?”

  Grumley laughter.

  “Such a Sinnerman,” said the old man.

  Now it was Caleb’s move. He stepped onto the roadway with the heavy, lengthy weapon—thirty pounds, fifty-eight inches long—and boldly walked across the lanes, dipping in and out, once waiting patiently as an SUV full of kids pulled by, two in the backseat bugeyed at the unbelievable image of a blond hulk in a heavy metal T-shirt, a Razorbacks baseball hat, plugs in his ears, body armor clinging to his upper torso and six feet of the gunliest gun ever made in his hands. But no one could really put it together. He seemed calm because he was calm. He got right up close to the sluggishly moving F-750, at almost-point-blank range, the muzzle three feet from the steel door, the guards looking lazily not around but up the road at the jammed-up lanes of cars and their blinking, on-again, off-again brake lights that yawned before them, and then Caleb fired.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Vern removed the girl from the bedroom with an insincere smile to her cowed family and took her into the bathroom. He sat down on the toilet, his arm draped across her shoulders. The door was closed.

  “Now, sweetie.”

  “I don’t like this,” she said, her eyes looking nervously around.

  “Now, sweetie, you just calm down. Does Vern look like a man who could hurt a cute little thing like Hannah Ng?”

  “Please don’t hurt me.”

  “Sweetie, I would never hurt you. In fact, to relax, I want you to think about ice cream. What’s your favorite flavor?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t think.”

  “Strawberry. Mine too. Now what do you do with a nice big pink strawberry ice cream.”

  The girl had shut her eyes. He held her by the arm.

  “You lick it. Isn’t that what you do?”

  He forced her to her knees.

  “You lick it, nice and hard. Ummm, good. Now, Hannah, let’s pretend we got us a nice ice cream right here right now—”

  “Let’s go,” called Ernie from the living room.

  Damn!

  Vern leaned down and gave the little Asian girl a kiss on the cheek.

  “I’ll be back for you. We got some fun ahead.”

  He raced through the apartment, out the open sliding doors, crossed the lawn, and caught up with his cousin just as Ernie hit the parking lot. They slipped between cars, and Vern saw ahead of him two men coming down the building steps on the other side of the parking lot, lit in the glow of the stairwell. Who the hell was the other guy? Too bad for him, he’s dead too. He indexed his finger above the trigger guard of his Glock for fast application, and he and Ernie described a straight line on the interception of the two targets who, heading on the oblique, were obviously going to a car somewhere farther down in the lot.

  Didn’t matter. Was easy. Them boys didn’t know a thing, didn’t have a prayer or a hope. Bang bang, it’d be over. He watched them, as everything seemed to accelerate in t
ime, noting one was the lanky, gray-headed older guy, a Mr. Swagger Pap said, who had been their quarry so many times before and who Pap said killed Carmody and B.J. The other, a beefier guy, police beef in a suit with a thatch of hair, who was talking into a phone.

  The Grumleys had their guns out, but the rule was, get close as you can, then get closer, get close enough to touch, get close enough so missing isn’t on the table, shoot ’em fast in the guts, shoot ’em down, then lean over ’em for the head shot, blow their brains out, shoot your gun empty, then get the hell out of town.

  It was happening now, it was happening fast, his gun came up, his finger flew to trigger, it was so easy, they picked up their speed on the unsuspecting marks, almost running now.

  “Look out,” came a cry from behind, “they’re killers, look out!”

  It was a young girl’s voice.

  As they raced down the stairwell, Nick held a slight lead and Bob could hear him talking urgently into his cell.

  “Officer, this is Special Agent Nick Memphis, FBI, Fed ID 12-054. Lancer, you’ve got to patch me through to the speedway command center, whoever’s in charge. We believe there’s going to be a robbery assault at your location. No, no, I’ve got SWAT operators inbound from Knoxville, but it’ll be a time before they’re on scene. This is a heavy ten-fifty-two by an armed team, maybe with automatic weapons, all units should be alert and ready to move on the sound of the gunfire, somewhere in the speedway vicinity. Please patch me through to your command center, and I will need airborne transportation to the site and need a rendezvous point and—”

  They cleared the building, slid through the darkness to Nick’s car, though Bob didn’t know which one it was, and seemed almost to be on the run when Bob heard a voice from across the way screaming, “Look out, they’re killers, look out.” In that same second he saw two hunched men rushing at him, guns out, guns upfront. A gun flashed, there was no noise, but the brightness of the muzzle flash displayed the urgent mug of a handsome-ugly guy and Bob knew Nick was hit. Stricken, he muttered an animal noise, lost a step and all rhythm, and was struggling for his own gun.