Night of Thunder

TWENTY-SIX

Vern knocked on the door. He heard awkward, reluctant shuffling, sensed doubt, perhaps even fear, but finally the door popped open about two inches, held secure by a chain lock, and he and his partner faced a pair of ancient Asian eyes in an ancient Asian face. Mama-san looked to be in her seventies, without much English, and quite insecure.

Vern, with his gift of gab, his easy ways of persuasion, his cheap good looks, was on the case from the start.

“Ma’am,” he said with a smile and warmth radiating from his eyes, “sorry to bother you, but we are official inspectors. We have to inspect, you know? Only take a moment.”

The woman’s face collapsed into confusion. Suddenly a much younger Asian face, possibly no more than fourteen years old and belonging to a very pretty child, leaned beyond the door. Well, hello, hello, Vern thought.

Her skin was fair, her eyes almond, her hair drawn back. She was smooth as a peach and tiny as a fairy princess.

“My grandmother doesn’t understand. What is it?”

“Sweetie,” said Vern, kneeling to the girl, “we are official inspectors. From the Department of Official Inspection. Here, lookie this.”

He showed her an Alabama driver’s license in the name of Horton Van Leer.

“See that star. Means it’s official. Just need to come in a second and we’ll be gone. Have to make a report. You wouldn’t want to get in trouble with the department now, would you?”

The child said, “There’s no such thing as a department of inspections. That’s an Alabama driver’s license, not a badge or an ID. Go away.” Then she shut the door.

Alas, working quickly, Ernie had already knocked the hinge bolts out, and when she slammed it, the door almost toppled in. Catching it, Vern scooted forward, while Ernie held the door, secured at that moment only by the still-attached chain lock. To give his pal some leverage, Vern smilingly unhooked the chain, as if to say to the two terrified women, “See, that’s all there is to it.” He actually managed an expression that suggested he expected some kind of congratulations. Having entered the apartment, Ernie swiftly and expertly remounted the door on its hinges, replaced the bolts, then closed and locked it. The two women stared at the intruders, horrified. Whatever visions of American evil they secretly held, these two men now liberated.

Meanwhile, Vern slipped across the room, peered through the sliding doors that opened, as if onto a balcony, but where there was no balcony since this was the first floor. Instead, they opened onto the parking lot. Across the lot stood another building like this one, an undistinguished, three-story brick structure with four outdoor stairwells, and six units per stairwell. The unit directly across from them was Nikki Swagger’s, which they’d discovered by checking the mailboxes.

“Is it okay, Vern?” called Ernie, who was more or less just intimidating the prisoners with his presence and his baleful, charmless stare.

Vern said, “Yeah, it’s fine. We can see him good, no problem.”

He turned to the two Asian women.

“Sorry, gals,” said Vern, “but what’s got to be’s got to be. Now, no need for nobody to git excited. We are very easygoing, long as you cooperate.”

Without violence but with a force that suggested the possibility of violence, Vern herded the women into the living room.

“Now, little lady, since you’re so damned spunky, and Granny here don’t talk the lingo, looks like you’ll have to answer the questions. No holding back now, little dolly.” He put his hand, friendly-like, on her frail shoulder, feeling it stiffen.

“Are you thieves? We have so little but take it and go away. My grandmother has been ill. A shock could kill her. Look at her, she’s scared to death.”

Vern hugged Grannie.

“There, there, Mama-san, it ain’t nothing. You just relax now, okay. Just sit down on the sofa and relax. Watch a show, do some knitting.”

“She likes Sudoku.”

“Yeah, then do that. Meanwhile-”

He took the smaller girl back into the bedroom. She was one of those scrawny-beautiful scrappers, with eyes that glittered fiercely. Twelve, maybe. No breasts. Short, a T-shirt, some running shoes. The T-shirt said HANNAH MONTANA ’08 TOUR and had a picture of another kid. The child had no sexuality but she was hotter than hell nevertheless, as the smart, feisty ones always are. She’d never back down from nobody.

“Sweetie, please work with me on this. It’s better for everone. How many people live here? Where are they? When they gonna be home? I don’t want no surprises, and if I’m surprised, you ain’t gonna be a happy camper.”

He showed her the grip of his shoulder-holstered Glock.

“In case you don’t get it, that’s a real gun. I am a real bad man and I have to be here for a time. I ain’t gonna hurt you. You ain’t a witness, because my name’s already on a hundred circulars. But I am the real thing, and there ain’t no heroes no more, nobody’s coming to save you, so you do what I say, exactly, or there will be some problems. And I’m the easy one. That guy, Ernie, with me? He is a true bastard. I’m the only thing between your family and him.”

He loved the perfect tenderness of her beautiful little ear: so tiny, so precise, like some kind of exquisite jewelry.

“You’re an ape. Why are you doing this? We have nothing.”

“I am not an ape. Well, maybe a little. Sweetie, we’re here because we’re here and we’ll be gone when we’re gone. What are you, Chinese?”

“Vietnamese. My grandfather’s with the hospital, a researcher. My father’s dead, my mother works. My brother and sister will be home by four, Mom at five. Please don’t hurt us. We don’t have a thing, we haven’t done a thing.”

“There you go, sweetie, talking about hurting. I told you, nobody gets hurt long as I get smooth cooperation. Here’s how it’s gonna be. Grandma’s in here with you. You can watch TV, go to the bathroom, whatever. You can fix food. But that’s it. We’re going to be outside in the living room, looking out the sliding doors at the building across the parking lot. Don’t know for how long. If we’re still here when the other folks start arriving, it’s your job to keep them from going nuts. You tell them what’s what. You cool them down. You have to be a grown-up today. How old are you?”

“None of your business, you ape.”

“Wow, you do have snazzle. I like that. Think somewhere I got a gal your age. Hope she’s got the same snazzle. Anyhows, go ahead, hate me, I’m used to it. I kind of like it, truth is. Maybe that’s why I turned out so rotten. Anyhow, you got responsibilities. You have to please God. I am God. Please me and you’ll come out happy.”

“You’re not God. You’re an ape bastard bully with a gun.”

He saw he was never going to make any headway with this one, which of course made him really like her a lot. Maybe too much. An idea was starting to form. He could get her in the bathroom and she had to do what he said or he’d hurt her family so she’d have to do it. He saw her fear, her little body, the trembling. It excited him.

“I’ll go get Grandma. Oh, and one other thing. What do you want on your pizza?”

TWENTY-SEVEN

For some reason, like an old bear, he needed sleep. So he violated his promise to the sheriff by sleeping through the clock radio, awaking at ten-thirty and thinking first of all, Oh hell, where am I?

That moment of confusion, familiar to men beyond sixty. His eyes flashed around the banal motel room and he had no idea what he was doing there, what time it was, why he was so late, why in his dreams people seemed so disappointed in him. It came back, of course, but not quickly enough, and he needed a good ten minutes for the blood to somehow reach his brain and revive his short-term memories. Quickly he took up the Kimber.38 Super, made a quick recon of the parking lot of the Mountain Empire Motel and was satisfied to see it largely empty, no sheriff’s cars in sight. He started the coffee, took a shower, pulled on his last clean Polo-there had to be a washer and dryer at Nikki’s-and began his calls.

The first, of course, was to his wife.

The news was great.

“Bob, she’s awake. She’s back, our baby is back.”

Bob felt the elation blossom bright, like a flare in the night, signaling that reinforcements were coming in.

“Oh, thank God. Oh, Christ, that is so great. When did it happen, how, what’s her condition?”

Julie tumbled through the story. At about eight-fifteen, Nikki opened her eyes, sat up, shook her head groggily, and said, “Hi, Mom. Where am I?”

Doctors came and went, tests were made, Nikki gradually seemed to focus, and particularly benefited from her little sister’s incredible joy. The two girls sat on the bed and talked for what seemed hours, while all the fuss went on about them. Now she was getting further tests.

“She doesn’t remember anything about the incident, but everything else seemed all right. How’s Dad-oh my God, how much work have I missed-oh, I have to call my editor-when can we leave-I’m hungry.”

“Oh, that’s so great,” said Bob. It doesn’t get much better than the moment you hear your kid has pulled through a tough one. His first impulse was to race to the car and beeline to Knoxville to be with his family at this precious moment.

“The doctor says the signs are good. She’ll get more memory back over the next few days. Our little girl is going to make it.”

Miko came on, delirious, and he talked to the second daughter for a while, in the language of fathers and daughters, both intimate and silly. But at a certain point it came back to him. Yeah, she’s fine, she’s okay, it’s all right, there’s a happy ending…if.

He realized that she’d make it if the boys didn’t come back to take her out again. She was much more dangerous now that she was conscious. Unconscious, there was always the thought that she could pass; now, revived, she was a threat.

“I’d like to come back,” he said. “I wish I could come back.”

“But you can’t,” Julie said. “You have work to do.”

“Yes, I do. I want the security tightened.”

“Bob, I’ve already called Pinkerton. They’re upping the manpower. It’ll cost us a fortune, but I don’t care. What’s happening there, where are you?”

He told her, summing things up, wishing he had a definite next step in mind, or that a solution would somehow soon be at hand. But it remained amorphous. Strange men tried to kill Nikki, tried to kill him for looking into it. The sheriff’s office didn’t have a clue. Nick Memphis hadn’t returned his phone calls.

“I’m going to go to Bristol now, to her apartment. That’s where they’ll know to find me.”

“Bob, be careful.”

“Maybe I can turn a thing on them. If not, I’ll wait a few days until after the race, then I’ll sneak back here and sniff out Eddie Ferrol. If anyone knows anything for sure, it’s him. He and I’ll have a little conversation, and then I’ll be up to speed.”

“Can you find him?”

“I think I can.”

He saw his cell light blinking, informing him another call was coming in.

“You know, I have to go. I’ll get back to you when I’m in Bristol.”

“Love you.”

“Love you.”

He called up Received Calls and recovered Charlie Wingate’s number. He punched Call and the phone was answered in two seconds.

“Charlie?”

“Mr. Swagger, did you hear?”

“No.”

“They found the owner of that gun store dead. Eddie Ferrol, the guy who owned Iron Mountain Armory. Someone shot him. They found the body off the interstate.”

Bob blinked, took a swallow of the coffee.

“Yeah,” he said. “And before he and I could chat.”

“Remember, I gave you the number from your daughter’s laptop hard drive. Did you see him? I don’t-”

Bob suddenly saw how it might have looked to the kid.

“You think I tracked him down? You think I’m some kind of hit man? No, Charlie, it’s not that way. I saw him and asked him some questions about my daughter. He denied ever having seen her, but I learned that was a lie. I was going to see him again, but the next thing I know, I’m the one who’s targeted. Long story. Been more or less laying low ever since. But anyone concerned about me would know that Eddie’s the man I’d have to get back to. If they couldn’t get me, they could get him. Especially since they can’t have had any confidence in his ability to stand up to tough questions. The fastest way out of that jam is a bullet in his head.”

“Yes sir. Um-am I in any danger?”

“Don’t think so. Only way would be if whoever I’m looking for has very sophisticated phone intercept capability. Government quality. No, not these boys. Smokeless powder is about as sophisticated as they get. It ain’t the CIA or even the mafia. It’s some boys who aren’t sure the wheel is going to last. Charlie, I’m about to leave town. You keep working on what I told you, and I’ll check back from Bristol, okay?”

“Yes sir. This is kind of cool.”

After disconnecting, Bob tried Nick again. Agh! Where was he?

He called Terry Hepplewhite, the clerk at Lester’s, about whom he still worried. But he found Terry in fine spirits with nothing to report. He had half a mind to pay for a vacation or something, but saw in an instant that wouldn’t work. Thelma’d be all over it if Terry suddenly vanished. No, Terry had to sit it out, at least until whatever happened happened, his case was processed, and police interest had moved elsewhere. Bob thought, That was another mistake. I shouldn’t have involved that kid, I should have stuck around and taken the heat. Man, am I losing it? I have made a batch of bad decisions on this one, and maybe I am just making things more difficult than they are. But there was nothing left to do but get out of town, so that sheriff didn’t drop down in his Blackhawk again.

He threw his laundry into his duffel, and went to the car. He drove aimlessly, hoping to smoke out anybody following, but his sudden turns and reverses uncovered nobody. For all of it, he was in the free and clear.

The route took him up and down Iron Mountain on 421, across Shady Valley, where he stopped and refueled and got a bite to eat. He then crossed Holston Mountain and, twenty miles out of Bristol, almost immediately hit the Race Day traffic he’d sworn to avoid by leaving early. That plan lost, he settled in for the long haul: the drive across the valley, a backup at the approach to the bridge over Holston Lake, and then into really heavy stuff as he got close to the speedway itself, which was twelve miles outside of Bristol. He hated traffic. He was too old for traffic. Traffic was no fun. The only good thing about traffic was that nothing bad could happen in it, because nobody who did anything bad could get away. There was too much traffic.

He looked at the map, thought maybe he could figure out a way around the mess. It might be longer in miles but it would keep him driving and engaged instead of crawling. That was always his theory in other situations: it’s better to drive at speed even if it takes longer than to endure the frustrations of the slow stop-and-go.

But none of the other routes really offered much in the way of possibility. He had to remember that hundreds of thousands of people were on the march, and that every single route would be slowed down. It was just physics: That many cars on those few roads computed to simple congestion no matter what. You had to accept it, not let it screw you up.

So he just tried to stay relaxed, giving himself up to the radio, running from country western station to country western station, occasionally nesting on the Knoxville 24/7 news station, hoping there might be new information on the two Grumley boys who’d tried to kill him. But there wasn’t. That story was dead, as was the killing of the meth addict Cubby Bartlett. Nothing lasted more than a day in today’s news cycle.

Why didn’t Nick call? With Nick’s help, he could find out in minutes who these Grumleys were, what their involvement foretold, and who, possibly, they were connected to or working for.

But Nick didn’t call.

Finally, around four, he hit the city limits, and forty minutes later crawled past the speedway itself. It was the same, only worse. The huge structure dominated the valley, but it was aswarm with crowds. Traffic just crawled, and people wandered through it en masse. Most of the husky fellows who herded families through the merriment seemed to carry coolers full of beer on their shoulders, and NASCAR ball caps were perched on every head from the youngest to the oldest. The pilgrims were dressed any old way, mainly in cut-off jeans and tank tops, and everybody smoked or had a beer in a caddy. The women wore flip-flops, and a few even seemed to have bras underneath their shirts, but mainly it was down-home as it could be. Not a tie or a jacket anywhere in sight, just thin clothes, heaving flesh, a sense of complete ease. This was the night of nights, the Night of Thunder.

On both sides of the road-he’d turned from 421 to the Volunteer Parkway-even more booths had been set up, so that the strip appeared to be a vast bazaar. There wasn’t hardly anything NASCAR you couldn’t buy, except possibly body parts or DNA samples, and every merchant seemed to be doing land-rush business, all of it cash. Smoke hung in the air from the barbecue grills, and even the tee-totaling Baptists were selling water bottles to raise money for their prayers.

Bob found it hard not to feel the joy these folks felt, and he connected with it. His daughter was all right. She’d come back. She was okay, she was going to be fine. He again felt rich in daughters and possibilities and wished he could just enjoy it a little.

But there was the worm. Someone had tried to kill her, might try again. They’d tried to kill him; they’d kill anyone who got in the way, even if that person didn’t realize they’d gotten in the way. Mark 2:11. “I say, arise from your pallet and go to your house.” Crippled man, arise, you are cured. I give you your life back. That fellow would feel some joy too; the sensation leaking into his legs, the strength burgeoning, the psychological burden of self-loathing, of imperfection, of isolation, all of that gone. Rejoin the world, son. Welcome back to the land of the whole. That’s how he felt when the word came that Nikki was awake-he’d risen from his bed, able to go to his home again.

What could it mean? What could it mean? The thing weighed like an ingot on his brain, so much so that he hardly noticed that the traffic had thinned and-glory be!-that he could accelerate, stoplight to stoplight, because he was now inside the destination. It was the lanes on the other side of the median that were so impossibly jammed up.

He sped through downtown Bristol, found the right cross street, looked for the Kmart that was his tipoff, managed a left, and wound through the little, hidden neighborhood and up a hill into the complex that ultimately yielded her apartment.

He parked next to a red Eldorado-wow, don’t someone have extravagant taste in transporation!-and stopped to look around, see if there was a chance anyone had stayed with him through the endless hours of traffic. Nope. Funny, though, he had a strange feeling of being watched. He had good instincts for such. Kept him alive more than once.

He looked again, saw nothing. A parking lot longer than it was wide, on each side of it low four-story brick buildings, typical American apartments, lots of balconies. Down the way some kids played, but no one new pulled into the lot. He looked for activity in the cars, for any sight of activity on the balconies and no, no, there was nothing.

Gunman’s paranoia. Going a little nuts in my old age. Mankiller’s anxiety. All the boys I put down are coming after me. Happens to the best of them.

Satisfied no sign existed of threat, he climbed the stairs, opened the door to her apartment, and stepped in.

As he did, a man stood up from her sofa.

Hands flew to guns.

The weapons came out, fingers on triggers, slack going out, killing time was here. But then-

“Nick Memphis, for Christ’s sake.”

“Hello, Bob. You sure took your time getting here. Didn’t think you’d ever make it.”

TWENTY-EIGHT

“Vern, dammit, I can’t do this alone, git over here. I might miss something. I have to pee.”

That was Ernie sitting in the dining room chair at the drawn sliding doors, peering at the building across the street through a sliver of open curtain.

But Vern didn’t answer.

Instead, he asked the young Vietnamese girl in the bedroom, “So, what’s your name?” while the grandmother looked on with angry eyes. She clearly did not think his attentions were appropriate, and the way he kept looking over to her and grinning with his big white teeth got on her nerves. But then she had never understood these strange white people anyway. What was wrong with them? They were so stupid about so many things.

“What difference does it make?” asked the girl.

“Well, if it don’t make no difference, might as well tell me as not. I’m guessing Susan. You look like a Susan.”

“I do not. I look like a Hannah. Hannah Ng. Pronounced ‘ning.’”

“Hannah Ng, my name is Vern Pye. This ain’t the way I’d have arranged it, but I sure do think highly of you. You’re about as cute as they come. I’d like to hang out with you.”

“You’re trying to date me? My mother doesn’t even let me date boys my own age. Plus, you smell like a smoker. You must smoke eight packs a day.”

“I ain’t that much older’n you. Only two packs, and I’ll be quitting real soon.”

“About sixty years, it looks like to me. And you smell like eight packs. Ugh.”

“You’re what, fifteen?”

“Fourteen.”

“Well, I am forty-four. That makes me only thirty years older. And I have the constitution of a much younger fellow.”

“You’re really delusional. Really, you’re sick.”

“You are so cute. I like your ears. Your ears are so tiny. You’re like a little doll. Anybody ever tell you how cute you are? We could have some fun together, you bet. You’d git some cool new clothes out of it. We’d go to the mall, git Hannah Ng any damn thing she wanted. New jeans, new T’s, new tank tops, new hoodies, new sneaks. We’ll have a hell of a swell time, sweetie, Vern promises.”

The child shivered.

“This is getting creepy.”

“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 T-shirts 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 one-time 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.”

Vern sat next to the little girl on the sofa, his big hand draped protectively about her. Gently he’d been caressing her arm for about and hour, whispering softly into her ear.

“Well, sir, Mr. Holy Water, I will do my job, same as you, and earn my money, same as you.”

He went back to the phone.

“Sir, I-”

“Vern, I heard discord. I told y’all I didn’t want no discord. Discord is what makes things fall apart, that I know true and straight.”

“Sir, Ernie and I are fine. We just ran into some unexpected situation is all. As for that old man, he ain’t peeked out a bit. Ernie kept a good watch on him, yes he did. There’s no move or nothing.”

“Okay, we are about to let hell out of the jar here. The race’ll be over in a little bit-they’re up to lap four eighty or so now-and they’ll let the traffic build a bit, and then they go and we jump. Like I said before, that’s when you go up, you bash in the door, you hit him with both barrels, a lot of shooting, it don’t matter, no po-lice getting there for six hours with the mess we making here. Then you git gone but good. I’ll call you later so’s you can pick up your swag.”

“That is a good plan, sir.”

“Boys,” said the Reverend, “I just want you to know, you’re doing Grumley work tonight, but more important, you are serving the Lord.”

“Sir, He has rewarded me. I have met the gal of my dreams here tonight, yes sir!”

THIRTY-ONE

Bob tore open the Amazon package.

It was The History of Sniping and Sharpshooting by Major John L. Plaster, a sniper expert and former SOG war dog in Vietnam, who Bob actually knew.

“Sniping,” said Nick. “So she was trying to find something about snipers.”

“She couldn’t have found a gun. Nobody loses a gun. She’d found, I don’t know, a piece of equipment, a gillie hat, a range book, or maybe some shell-related thing. The shell itself, the box, a piece of carton, a manifest, a bill of lading, something with a shell designation on it. But it had to be something unusual. The girl is my daughter. She’d been around cartridges her whole life. She knew the difference between a.308 and a.30-06 and between a shell, a cartridge, and a bullet.”

“And it had to be arcane then, if she didn’t know it right away and sought someone with more information-the guy in the gun store, you, finally the book.”

“Let’s try Mark 2:11,” Bob said.

He went to the index. Damn! No Mark 2:11. But he was so close now, he could feel the answer almost as a palpable presence, floating just out of focus in the corner of the room.

“Damn,” said Nick. “I was so sure it-”

“Wait,” said Bob, “I think technically they abbreviate ’em. And we never saw the word ‘Mark’ written in her own hand. Don’t know if it really was a Mark or some kind of abbreviation. I think the military uses ‘M-k period’ as its abbreviation, left over from the old days. But I don’t see-”

“Go back to the index.”

Bob found the designation “Mk.211, 622.”

Bob turned to page 622 and immediately saw a photo of a group of long, big, mean-looking cartridges, missiles really, their sleek brass hulls propped upright as they rested on a rim, while at the top, a bullet like a warhead promised speed, precision, and destruction. The conical, streamlined-to-death-point thing itself was sometimes black, sometimes blue, sometimes red, sometimes tipped in these colors, all a part of the complex system of military enumeration, by which armies on the prowl in far dusty places could keep their logistical requirements coherent.

And there, finally, it was: Mk.211 Model O Raufoss, with green-over-white painted tip.

They read. The Mk.211 Raufoss is a dedicated armor-piercing.50 caliber round, meant to penetrate light steel, of Norwegian manufacture (NAMMO being the name of the firm) and design, in play in specialized roles in the American war effort in the Middle East. It consists of a tungsten core buried in the center of the 650-grain bronze bullet and was designed so that the bullet itself, traveling at over twenty-five hundred feet per second and delivering four thousand foot pounds of energy at impact, would bore through the armor of the vehicle. A nanosecond later a small charge would explode, thus releasing the tungsten rod within, which being heavier and harder, would fly into the crew compartment, shatter and fragmentize, quickly wounding, disabling, or simply slaughtering the human beings and any delicate electronic equipment inside.

“It’s for light armored vehicles,” said Bob. “Not a tank, but an armored personnel carrier, a Humvee, a car, a radar screen, an aerial, a mobile command center. Or maybe a bunker or barricade, a helicopter, a plane on the ground, a wiring junction, a stoplight, a camera or infrared scope, any number of military applications which are classified ‘soft targets,’ anything short of the real, big mechanized stuff. I’m betting they do a lot of damage wherever they’re deployed.”

“The.50 caliber. That’s the big one?” Nick wanted to know.

“They call the original gun the Queen of Battle. Ma Deuce, from the heavy machine gun designation which is M-2. You rule the battlefield with it in certain situations, say on a hill way out in bad-guy land. We used a lot of ’em in ’Nam. We loved ’em. But this here’s the newest wrinkle. It ain’t for a machine gun. See this Mk.211 shit’s for a rifle built by an outfit called Barrett, a big son of a bitch, just barely man-portable. Six feet long, forty pounds or so, off a bipod. Looks like an M16 on hormones for Arnold Schwarzenegger. You couldn’t carry it in a holster to rob a store. But placed with a trained operator, you could use it to snipe at over a mile to take out trucks and lightly armored defensive positions, you could rain havoc and brimstone on your target zone with pinpoint accuracy. You could take down people, low-flying planes, missiles on their launch pads, radio and radar installations, anything. You could use it on the president with that ammo. It ain’t the gun, it’s the ammo. It’s strictly military-only, banned from civilian use, and I don’t think even the NRA cares about that. It’s for blowing up stuff, for multiplying the killing force, for bringing down planes or choppers, That ammo’ll go through anything and cut the shit out of what’s on the other side.”

“So that’s what she found,” said Nick. “Some evidence of a.50 caliber rifle with deadly, military-only ammunition in criminal hands, presumably being readied for some kind of kick-ass caper. And that’s why they wanted to kill her, and when you found out, they had to try and kill you. But what would the caper be? Can you guess? And when is it going down?”

“Could it be a kill?” said Bob. “That’s what you could do with this. The president, I don’t know, the governor, some big guy, he’s in a box watching the race. They’re on the mountaintop which just barely might give you a vantage point on the speedway or somehow they’ve gotten into the speedway itself, though with a gun that big, I don’t know how. Maybe he can zero the big guy’s box, put ten Mk.211s into it, kill everybody in two seconds, I’m guessing. Or it could take out an armored limousine. Turn it to Swiss cheese.”

“The president isn’t there. The governor of Tennessee is, but…the governor of Tennessee? I suppose. I just-” Nick ran out of words. “Somehow, it doesn’t seem Grumley. It’s not their style.”

“No, no, this is good, consider it,” said Bob. “They’re hired by some mob who knows their one value isn’t sophistication but silence. That’s what they’re selling. So maybe the governor is organizing some new anti-organized crime task force, got ’em all scared. They contract the hit to the Grumleys who bring it off with their usual crudeness and violence but also a refusal to snitch ’em out if caught.”

“The tires, Bob. You were the one that discovered the tires. Were you wrong on that? How would that fit in?”

“Ahhh-” Bob thought, clinging to his thesis. “Yeah, yeah, they could count on their being an SUV there in the crowd, but not with off-road tires. Yeah, after the hit, which takes maybe two seconds, they chase a family out of its Bronco, speed-change the tires, and take off cross country, maybe to the top of that hill. A chopper picks ’em up. It sounds pretty good to me, partner.”

“But maybe you have biases. You’re a sniper. Everything to you looks like a sniper job.”

“From ten feet with a.50 Mk.211, it ain’t much like sniping. It’s like blowing stuff up real good.”

“Okay, I think we have to alert this command structure somehow. They’ve got to get people into the area, put a hold on all VIP transit, and maybe-I still don’t like it. It just doesn’t seem Grumley. Does it seem Grumley to you?”

“Until today, I didn’t know a Grumley from a dandelion.”

“Could they shoot up the race? From up above, fire the ten shells into the lead three cars as they move through the pack on a turn? You’d get a massive crash, cars all over the place, the race would be a catastrophe, they’d stop it, cancel it, something.”

Bob saw through that.

“And if someone laid money against the one-in-a-million shot there’d be no winner to the Sharpie 500-well, that person would win a fortune. But he’d get a visit from the Vegas mob enforcer to make sure his win was on the up-and-up, and since it wouldn’t be, he’d get a swim in Lake Tahoe with a pair of cement socks.”

“And it doesn’t seem to need a driver, a speed-tire change, or any of the other stuff. It just doesn’t seem to make any sense,” Nick said.

“And just to make it more ridiculous, the race is almost over. It’s near eleven. They start at eight and do the five hundred laps in about three hours. Man, I am so buffaloed. Come on, Nick, you’re supposed to be smart. Figure it out.”

“I’m tired, I’m old. I feel older than you look.”

“Okay, go back to basics. What do we know, absolutely.”

“We know, absolutely, they have acquired a.50 caliber rifle and a supply of armor-piercing incendiary rounds of a sort the government categorizes as ‘antimatériel.’”

“So,” said Bob, “let’s pursue this particular line. What is matériel?”

“Okay, I’d answer like this: light armor. Limousines, sure. Or, given this environment, power lines, TV trucks, light safes, radio installations, I don’t know, McDonald’s signs, news helicopters, race cars, race car trailers, propane barbecue tanks. It could be any of those. I’m afraid we’re stuck with-”

“Just make the call. You don’t have to designate a target. You just have to flood the zone with law enforcement and security and-”

“What zone?”

“I guess the race zone.”

“Yeah, but, hello, it’s full of three hundred thousand happy campers. Too bad there’s not a nice armored car in the middle of this, chock full of cash. Now that would make some sense. Okay, I’ll make the call and-”

It lay there in the room for a while. Each man considered what Nick had just blurted out. Yes, armored car. Seemingly impregnable, full of cash, stuck in traffic, yet easily taken down by such a tool as an Mk.211.

“What you just said,” said Bob, “now that makes some sense.”

“It does, doesn’t it?” But he had to fight it. “Why would there be an armored car in the middle of all this? It doesn’t track, it’s a bad idea, a red herring, it-”

Nick took out his cell, punched a number. “I’ll call a state police captain I’ve worked with. He might know something,” he said.

When he got through, Bob heard him say, “Hey, Mike. It’s Memphis, sorry for the late call. You’ve been watching the race? Cool, is it over yet? No, I could call back, it’s almost over, but let me just lay something on you. I’m here in Bristol myself. Sorry but it’s important.”

He said to Bob, “Now he’s turning the TV down. Ah, okay, Mike, we have intelligence that some very bad actors are on scene here with a piece of ugly work called an Mk.211 Raufoss antimatériel round. And a.50 caliber rifle to fire the stuff. They could use it to do all sorts of things but the more we think about it, this group seems criminal, not political, and we’re trying to figure out if there’s a target they could unzip with it. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I’m thinking how ideally suited the ordnance would be against some sort of armored car. Is there an armored car in play here that you would know anything-”

He listened as far-off Mike told him all about it.

Then he said, “All right, can you patch through to your command center? I’m going to try to reach them from my end. I’ll try and get a Bureau SWAT team deployed from Knoxville by chopper, and then we’ll move on site fast as we can. Ten-four.”

“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 time, 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.

It happened fast, faster by far than the speed of coherent thought, faster almost than the pulse rate that was in any event suspended by blood chemicals, and each of the four at close range in the dark devolved into creatures of instinct and training, and the victory would go to the one with the best instinct and the most training. The determining factor was distance; up close, skill counted for nothing, but at ten feet out in the dark, it wasn’t just who shot fast, but who shot best, who had the knack to hit movers in bad light on the fly.

Bob’s hand flew at a speed which could never be known or measured, so fast that he himself had no sense of it happening, he just knew that the Kimber.38 Super was locked in his fist, his elbow locked against his side, his wrist stiff, the weird, maybe autistic brainfreak in his head solving the complexities of target identification, acquisition, alignment that had been the gift of the Swagger generations since the beginning, his muscles tight, all except the trigger finger, which-you get this about ten thousand repetitions into your shooting program-flew torqueless and true as it jacked back, slipped forward to reset then jacked back again, four times, all without disturbing the set of the gun in his hand. Brass bubbles flew through the air, as spent shells pitched by the Mach 2 speed of the flying slide as it cycled, all four within an inch or three of the others, and Bob put four.38 Super CorBons into the center-mass of the fellow closest to him, who immediately changed his mind about killing.

Nick fired. Bob’s opponent fired finally, but into the ground. The man on Nick fired twice more from a smallish silver handgun, though crazily, and Bob vectored in on him and fired three more times in that superfast zone that seems to defy all rational laws of physics. The night was rent by flash. From afar it must have looked like a photo opportunity as a beautiful star entered a nightclub, the air filling with incandescence, the smell of something burned, and the noise lost in the hugeness of all outdoors. But it was just the world’s true oldest profession, which is killers killing.

It was over in less than two seconds.

Bob dumped his not-quite-empty mag, slammed a new fresh one in and blinked to clear his eyes of strobe, then looked for targets. The guy he hit second was down flat, arms and legs akimbo, his silver revolver three or four feet away, weirdly gleaming in the dark from a random beam of light. The other fellow, hit first, was not down but he had dropped his gun. He walked aimlessly about, holding his stomach and screaming, “Daddy, I am so sorry!”

Bob watched as he went to a big car and settled next to it, his face resting on the bumper. The lack of rigidity in the body posture told the story.

Bob knelt to Nick.

“Hit bad, partner?”

“Ah, Christ,” said Nick, “can you believe this?”

“No, but it sure happened. I’m looking, I don’t see no blood on your chest.”

“He hit me in the leg, stupid fucker. Oh Christ, what a mess.”

By this time, people had come to their balconies and looked down upon the fallen men.

“Call an ambulance, please. This officer is hit. We are police!” yelled Bob.

But in seconds another man had arrived, a smallish Indian with a medical bag.

“I am Dr. Gupta,” he said, “the ambulance has been called. Can I help?”

“He’s hit in the leg. I don’t think it’s life threatening. Not a spurting artery.”

The doctor bent over, quickly ripped the seam of Nick’s suit pants with scissors, and revealed a single wound about an inch inboard on his right thigh, maybe off-center enough to have missed bone. The wound did not bleed profusely, but persistently. It was an ugly, mangled hole, muscles puckered and torn, bad news for weeks or months but maybe not years.

“Tie,” said the doctor.

Bob quickly unlooped Nick’s tie and handed it to the doctor, who wrapped it into a tourniquet above the wound, knotted it off, then pulled out and cracked open a box, removed a TraumaDEX squeeze applicator and squirted a dusting of the clotting agent on the wound to stop the blood flow.

“Don’t know when the ambulance will arrive in all this traffic. Can you give him something for pain?”

“No, no,” said Nick, “I am all right. Where’s that damned phone. Oh, shit, we can’t get a chopper in here. Oh, Christ, I need to-”

“You ain’t going nowhere,” said Bob, “except the ER.”

“Oh, Christ,” said Nick. “I hope they got my message.” But even as he said it, he knew it was hopeless, as did Bob. The shooters would bring their weapons to bear, the cops were strung out, the situation was a mess, nobody would know a thing, it was-

“I’ll get there,” said Bob.

“How, you can’t-”

“My daughter’s bike. It’s over there. I can ramrod through the traffic. I’ve got some firepower. I know where they’re going. I can intercept them at the hill, put some lead on them, maybe stop them from that chopper pick-up.”

“Swagger, you can’t-” but then he stopped.

“Okay,” said Bob. “Who, then? You see anybody else around? You want these lowlife fucks to get away with this thing, and the contempt it shows for all law enforcement, for civilians, for anything that gets in the way? You see anyone else here?”

But there wasn’t anybody else around. Funny, there never was.

“Here,” Nick finally said, “maybe this’ll stop the cops from shooting you.” He reached into his shirt and pulled out a badge on a chain around his neck. “This makes you officially FBI and there goes my career. Good luck. Oh, Jesus, you don’t have to do this.”

“Sure, why not,” said Bob. “I got nothing better to do. It’ll be my kind of fun.” Bob threw the chain around his neck so that the badge hung in the center of his chest, signifying, for the first time since 1975, his official righteousness.

He rose, walked through the gathered crowd. He walked across the parking lot to his car, but next to it, came across the curious scene of a Vietnamese family standing in a semicircle around the gunman who had fallen against the bumper of his red Cadillac. One of them was a pretty young girl in a Hannah Montana T-shirt.

“You yelled the warning?” he asked.

“Yes. They were in our apartment all day, scaring my family to death. Horrible men. Monsters,”

“Can on co em. Co that gan da va su can dam cua co da cuu sinh mang chung toi,” he said.

She smiled.

He walked to his car, popped the trunk. He withdrew the DPMS 6.8 rifle, and inserted a magazine with twenty-eight rounds. He looped its sling, held by a single cinch, diagonally across his body so that the gun was down across his front with enough play to allow him to get it either to shoulder or a prone position. He looked at the monitor atop it, that EOtech thing that looked like a ’50s space-cadet toy, figured out which of several buttons turned it on, so that if he had to do it in the dark, he’d know which one to use.

He threw on the vest Julie had provided, in which he’d inserted, in dedicated mag pouches, the other nine magazines, all full with ammo.

Slamming the trunk, he walked back to the stairwell where Nikki’s bike rested under a tarp. He ripped the canvas free and climbed aboard the Kawasaki 350. Shit, the pain in his hip from Kondo Isami’s last cut flared hard and red, but he tried not to notice it. He turned the key to electrify the bike. It took three or four kicks to gin the thing to life, but he saw that he had plenty of fuel. He heeled up the stand, lurched ahead, kicked it into gear, pulled into the lot, evaded the gawkers, and took off into the night, running hard, disappearing quickly.

Nick, his leg throbbing but feeling no pain, watched him go.

Lone gunman, he thought, remembering Lawrence’s words defining the American spirit: “hard, stoic, isolate, and a killer.” But on the Night of Thunder, so necessary.

THIRTY-FOUR

The muzzle flash of the Barrett 107 was extraordinary, a ball of fire that bleached the details from the night, so bright that it set bulbs popping in eyes for minutes. Caleb, who was holding it under his shoulder like a gangster’s tommy gun, felt the heavy surge of the recoil as the weapon rocked massively against his muscle, almost knocking him from his feet, while at the same moment fierce blowback from the point of impact lashed against his face. Without glasses, he’d have burned out his eyes. The muzzle blast, expanding radially at light speed, ripped up a cyclone of dust from the earth beneath; it seemed a tornado had briefly touched down, filling the air with substance.

The 650-grain bullet hit the steel door two inches below the window frame, blowing a half-inch-size gaper and leaving a smear of burnt steel peeling away from the actual crater. It took both driver and assistant driver down, spewing a foam of blood on the far window inside the cab, after the tungsten core, liberated from the center of the bullet by the secondary detonation, flew onward at several thousand miles per hour and ripped them apart.

“Jesus Christ,” said Caleb, himself awestruck and even a little nonplused by the carnage he had unleashed.

“The rear, the rear,” screamed the old man.

Caleb lumbered around behind the truck with the heavy weapon in his hands, locked under his shoulder, as the Grumleys fanned out to surround the vehicle, while at the same time gesturing with their submachine guns to frozen passengers in the jammed cars to abandon ship and run like hell.

“G’wan, git the hell out of here, git them kids out of here, there’s going to be a lot of goddamned shooting.”

Caleb closed his eyes, fired one more time, point blank, into the rear of the truck from dead six o’clock. He even remembered to crouch and hoist the weight to orient the gun at a slight upward angle so that the tungsten rod it flung wouldn’t continue forward, exit the end of the armored box, shred the dash, and end up chewing the bejesus out of the engine. That would have been a mess.

Again, the fireball blinded any who happened to observe the discharge from within a hundred yards, though most civilians had abandoned their cars and were running en masse in the opposite direction. Again, the muzzle blast unleashed a cyclone of atmospheric disturbance. Again, the recoil was formidable, even if slightly dissipated by the give in Caleb’s arms and body as he elasticized backward from the blow. This time, for some reason, the noise was present in force and Caleb, even with ear plugs in, felt his eardrums cave under pressure of the blast.

A crater ruptured the upper half of the rear door.

A Grumley leaned close and yelled into the hole, almost as if there were a chance in hell anyone inside could hear, “You boys best open up or he’ll fire six more in there.”

There was a moment, then the door unlatched. Two uniformed men, with darkened faces from the blast, their own blood streaming from ear and nose, someone else’s splattered randomly about them, eyes unseeing for the brightness, staggered out, fightless and dazed. Instantly the Grumleys were on them, disarmed them, and shoved them to one side of the road, where they collapsed and crawled to a gully to try and forget the horror of what they had just seen-the third member of their crew, who’d evidently taken a full injection of flying tungsten frontally, vaporizing the upper half of his body. His legs and lower torso lay on the floor, like the remains of a scarecrow blown down and scattered by a strong wind; the plastic bags of baled cash stacked on racks now wore a bright dappling of his viscera.

“Damn thang means business,” a Grumley said.

“Go, go, boys, git going, no goddamned lollygagging,” shouted the old man, a kind of cheerleader, amazingly animated and liberated by the violence. “Watch for them coppers.”

A Grumley took up a position at each of the four compass points around the truck. The idea was to try and locate approaching police through the lines of cars, and engage them far away, because with their handguns the cops couldn’t bring effective fire from that range. Meanwhile, other Grumleys set about their business. One dragged the second half of poor Officer Unlucky out of the truck, and dumped him. Another flew to the bags and began to pull out the ones containing change, which he dragged out and dumped. No need for extra weight on the upcoming hill.

Now it was Richard’s turn.

“Tire guys, go, go, get it done,” he shouted, and as they had so often practiced, a Grumley team of three hit the rear axle of the vehicle, got the heavy power-jack underneath, and with swift, focused strength jerked the thing atilt. Meanwhile, from roadside, two heavy tires with off-road treads meant to bite and tear at the earth in maximum, tractor-pull traction, trundled out, driven by Grumley power to the site of the armored truck, and the changing commenced.

Richard raced to the engine with his trick bag, not looking at the cab, not wanting to see what remained of the crew; he’d let Grumley minions clear that mess out. A Grumley struggled against the locked hood, then fired a blast of tracer into it. The bullets tore and bounced and in seconds had reduced the metal to tatters so that the hood could be lifted and hoisted high.

Richard set to work, as flashlights beamed onto the chugging complexities of the engine. He waited till a Grumley turned it off, and it went still. It was exactly as he expected, a Cat 7-stroke diesel, producing around 250 horsepower, which is why the big truck would always move sluggishly, underpowered for the extra weight of the armor. Quickly, he plunged into the nest of wires, found the MAP sensor, disconnected it, and reconnected the Xzillaraider wire harness. Plug and play was the principle. As the Grumleys held the flashlights, his fingers flew to the right wires, cut them, and quickly and expertly clipped in the new wires. He grounded the assembly, this time taking the time to unscrew the negative terminal, carefully wrap the grounding wire against the plug, then rescrew the cable terminal, making sure everything was nice, tidy, and tight. He paid no attention to what was going on around him, and so maximized was his concentration that he missed the crash of a helicopter brought down by Caleb. Then he leapt back to the rear of the engine compartment, pulled a knife, and cut through the rubber grommet and stuffed the wire harness through into the cab.

Ugh. Now the unpleasantness. When he got to the F-750’s cab, however, the bodies were gone and some Grumley with a thoughtful touch had thrown a wad of NASCAR T-shirts on the blood and flesh matter that the Mk.211 had blown loose from the drivers. It wasn’t so bad; no hearts or lungs or heads lay about, it only looked like several gallons of raspberry sorbet had melted.

He got to work, linking the harness of wires to the Xzillaraider module. He quickly wired the unit to the fuse box, then slid behind the wheel, paying no attention to the three gunshots that ricocheted weirdly off the three-inch glass, leaving a smear, nor to the fact that the whole scene appeared to be lit by an orange glow, as the crashed helicopter blazed brightly in the middle of NASCAR Village. Under normal circumstances, who would not stare at an aviation disaster such as that one? But these weren’t normal circumstances, and Richard was much more fascinated by the blink sequence on the module. Yep, as he turned the key, the lights went through their positions and ended up in the red of high power.

He turned to see the Reverend, a Peacemaker in his hand and a cowboy hat on his head, and Brother Richard said, “When the tires are finished, old man, we are good to go.”

While Richard worked, the old man had been commanding Grumley defenses. His gunners peered three-sixty, looking for targets, and when a poor police officer approached on foot, illuminated by his traffic safety jacket, a Grumley put a burst of 9mm tracer into him. The tracers were a wonderful idea: they made manifest the strength and invincibility of the Pap Grumley firepower.

Pap watched as a sleek streak of 9-mils raced down the corridor between abandoned cars, struck the poor officer, who had not even drawn his pistol, and flattened him. Those that missed their targets spanged off the cars on either side, pitched skyward into the night air. Hootchie mama, it was the Fourth of July! It was Jubilee! It was hell come to earth, fire, brimstone, the whole goddamned Armageddon thing.

“Good shooting,” he yelled, “that’ll keep their damned heads down.”

Then someone poked him in the ribs and he looked down and saw a black hole in the lapel of his powder blue Wah Ming Chow custom suit. Fortunately the armored vest underneath stopped the bullet, but it meant some cop had fired from nearby up on the hill to the right.

“Over there,” he commanded, and two Grumleys put out a blaze of noon light in the form of a half-mag apiece. If they got the cop or not, nobody could say, but the bullets sure chewed the hell out of an SUV in line to get out of a parking lot. Fortunately for all concerned, it had been long abandoned and so if anyone died, it would only have been a copper.

The sound of shots rang out everywhere as Grumleys on the perimeter either saw or thought they saw policemen slithering closer, and answered with long, probing bursts of tracer. Now and then something caught fire, including the rear of a Winnebago, a souvenir stand whose supply of T’s and ball caps went up in flames, a propane heater for a barbecue stand. These small disasters added yet more hellish illumination to flicker across the already incredible scene, part monster movie (the citizens flee the beast), part war movie (the noise, the tracers, the screams of the wounded), and part NASCAR documentary (the tire crew operates at top speed, well choreographed and rehearsed) as the Grumley tire team, having gotten one of the off-road tires rigged, switched sides of the F-750, and went hard to work on the other.

But then a new source of illumination shocked all the Grumleys with its relentless quality. It was a harsh beam of light from a state police helicopter thirty feet up and fifty yards out, catching everything in high, remorseless relief.

“Drop your firearms,” came the amplified order, “you are covered, drop your firearms and-”

“Caleb, take ’er down,” yelled the old man.

“Pap, you sure?”

“It’s copper, boy, they about to fire.”

“Got it.”

Caleb set up the Barrett on the hood of an abandoned car next to the F-750. He shouldered the weapon for the first time, drew it tight to him, and put his eye to the scope-he had no idea, but it happened to be a superb Schmidt & Bender 4x16 Tactical model-and in a second, as he adjusted his eye to the focal length, saw the black shape of the helicopter behind the blazing radiance of the light which was quadrisected by the cross hairs of the scope. He fired. The gun kicked so hard it broke his nose.

“Ow, fuck,” he screamed, thinking, Wouldn’t want to do that again, goddammit.

He put a 650-grain Mk.211 into the helicopter, right through the engine nacelle, and the bird climbed upward abruptly as the pilot realized he was under heavy fire. But then all his linkages went, and from aircraft the thing alchemized into sheer weight, beyond the influence of anything except gravity, and it simply fell from the air, straight down into NASCAR Village, nose forward. There it hit, its rotors chawing up a circle of dust from every bite. It seemed to die like an animal for a few seconds, still and broken, and then it exploded, an incredibly bright, oily, napalmesque four-thousand-degree burn. It lit the scene like day, exposing the fleeing masses, the fallen and trampled, the occasional crouching police officer popping away ineffectively with a handgun from two hundred yards out. Then the glare dulled and subsided, and all detail was lost.

“That’ll keep them boys far away,” yelled the old man.

“I’d like to git me another, Pap,” said Caleb.

“You just wait on it, son, goddamn, them other birds is far away.” And it was true, for a mile out, a number of choppers had settled into orbit.

“Tires done,” yelled a Grumley.

“Richard, we are set to rock out of here.”

“Okay,” yelled Richard from the cab. “Git the boys aboard, all that want to come.”

“Time to go, fellas.”

With that, the Grumleys descended upon the F-750. That is, the armed Grumleys. The tire boys had been well prepped and knew there wasn’t enough room aboard for all of them. Instead, they moseyed to the edge of the cone of light, and there, in darkness, peeled off armored vests, put on new baseball hats, and melted off into the trees. There were a few Grumley cars hidden in outlying spots to which they’d have no trouble proceeding, and would rendezvous later for their split of the swag. But now it was left to Richard and the shooters to get the load out of there.

Richard, in neutral, rode the pedal as his gunmen jumped aboard. Pap climbed into the other seat.

“Four minutes,” he said, looking at his watch. “By God, we are ahead of schedule, don’t think we’ve taken a wound, much less a kill, and nothing left to do but to drive on out of here, Richard. Let them boys shoot at us all they want, ain’t going do no damage.”

Richard shifted from neutral, gunned ahead, battered the car in front away until he had maneuver room. He turned the truck, found an angle between two abandoned cars pinning him on his right, and smashed between them. They fought the strength of his vehicle. The clang of vibrations loosened everyone’s dentures, the metal screamed, but the cars yielded to the pumped-up CIT vehicle. Freed, he turned left, rode the shoulder for fifty feet, then turned right down an access road toward the speedway. This road took him to a bridge over a gully, and he pulled across it. Before him, pristine but not quite deserted, lay the heart of the kingdom, the confluence of courage for sale, engineering genius, soap opera, family feud, grudge, redemption, and failure, along with hats and shirts and signed portraits, the trailers turned to shops, the industrial pavilions, the souvenir and bric-a-brac outlets, the beer joints, and the cash machines that were NASCAR Village. It was the only thing between them and the mountain a mile away.

THIRTY-FIVE

Swagger had no trouble at first, and raced through the streets of Bristol, skewing and fishtailing around curves, zipping in and out of the traffic, as most people were off the streets or, if in their cars, intent on the racing news that had turned into robbery news. But the traffic began to thicken as he got through downtown and headed out the Volunteer Parkway toward the speedway and the civic disaster that engulfed it.

Signs of the disaster were everywhere as he buzzed at eighty down the road; it seemed that signal lights pulsed from every direction, and the traffic soon began to coalesce into something dense and motionless. He diverted to the shoulder but found that congested with fleeing citizens. He veered back onto the roadway and found the lane between jammed cars also impenetrable because of the panicked crowd.

He pulled up, looking for an alternate route from the mess of fleeing civilians and abandoned cars that solidified the parkway before him, when a cop on foot materialized from nowhere and started screaming, “Buddy, get that goddamn thing out of here, do you know what’s-”

But then Bob offered him the magic talisman of the FBI badge, and the man’s eyes slid quickly to the assault rifle Bob wore crosswise down the front of his body, and his eyes bugged.

“You got an update?” Bob said.

“Well, it’s a real bad ten-fifty-two, lots of shots fired, officers down all over the place. They got some kind of cannon or-”

“Can you get through to command on that thing?” He indicated the radio unit pinned to the man’s lapel.

“It’s a mess, I can try.”

“Okay, tell them FBI recommends they get their SWAT units to the mountain overlooking the speedway. They’re going to try to take that truck up there and go out by helicopter.”

“What truck?”

“It’s an armored-car job. They want to take all the baled cash to Mexico or wherever and anybody who gets in their way gets shot up. Now make the call.”

“Sir, we can’t move nobody in there now. It’s a mess, with thousands of civilians in the immediate and we can’t get through ’em.”

“Are there secondary routes to the mountain?”

“Not really. Lots of little streets, but nothing straight that ain’t jammed with cars.”

“Okay, advise SWAT to get as close as possible then move out on foot. It’s the only way. Now someone has to intercept them and I don’t see anybody around so it looks like it’s me. You tell me my next move.”

“You’re it? You’re the whole FBI? A guy on a bike?”

“Better yet, an old guy on a bike. We have people incoming by chopper, I’m advised. Look, we’re wasting time. How do I get to that mountain? Up ahead’s no good.”

“Okay, sir, I’d fight my way down Volunteer best as possible. Too bad you don’t have a siren on that thing.”

“I liberated it from a civilian.”

“You go down and about a mile before the speedway, you’ll hit Groverdale Road. You left-turn on that, follow it to something called Cedarwood Circle. You can cut through somebody’s yard there and you want to find Shady Brooks Drive, it’s not much, but it curls around behind some houses that have probably given their yards up to parking, and that’ll take you alongside the hill before it heads back to the parkway. You may want to leave the road when you’re next to the mountain, as I’m thinking there’s nothing up there except fields and stuff and maybe you can move faster. I’m guessing that’s the only clear way.”

“Got it.”

“You want my body armor?”

“Thanks, officer, I don’t have time.”

“When this is over, I’ll have to cite you for no helmet and driving off roadways.”

“You do that. Mr. Hoover’ll pay the fine.”

“Who?”

“Never mind, son. You get on that squawk box and try and get SWAT where I told you.”

“Yes sir. Good hunting, Special Agent.”

“Thanks.”

With that Bob spurted ahead, trying to ease his way between fleeing citizens, at last finding a fairly clear path between cars on the wrong side of the road. He never got into third gear. Up ahead the disaster played out; it seemed all the squad cars in the world were on the perimeter while the sky above was filled with the lights of orbiting choppers. He became aware of glare against the darkness which could only signify something burning hot, eating up aviation fuel, and that stench seemed in the air as well. He could hear no shots because of the sound of the engine, and now and then a hard-moving foot patrolman would try to wave him down and get him out of there, but the FBI badge made these phantoms depart.

At last he hit Groverdale, which took him down a road lined with modest houses, where each homeowner had turned his land over to parking use. The rate, he saw from the remaining signs, was a hundred dollars a night. Most people had been glad to pay it, and now most of them were in cars, caught in a thermal stew of light, dust, exhaust, cigarette smoke, and body odor, the cars locked bumper-to-bumper. But Bob made pretty good progress just along the edge of the shoulder where the road dissolved into grass and the walkers had moved up a bit, giving him room.

He found himself in a bright cul-de-sac, where the illumination blocked out all sense of what lay beyond. He had a sense, possibly from a new, dead quality to the echoes, possibly from the imposition of a kind of dampness on the sultry air, of a mountain, a huge, green obstacle, close at hand. Between the houses he could see glimpses of NASCAR Village, jiggles of flame, and everywhere, it seemed, emergency service vehicles trying to penetrate the gridlock of wreckage, but hopelessly behind the curve, unaware of what was happening to whom. He thought it was better he had no radio contact with any of this, for the network would have been a crazed blur of garbled facts, glaring misinterpretations, wrong advice, command ego, reluctance. It was like radio traffic during a big attack in that far off fairyland called Vietnam, all but forgotten these days but still the crucible that burned in Bob and made him the man he was.

He cut between two houses, almost put-putting along, riding the throttle grip and clutch grip and the gears between first and second, really defying the bike’s true nature, which was to rush ahead, faster and faster. He skidded, found himself in a backyard where folks clustered around a radio and looked at him fearfully. A shotgun or two seemed to come his direction.

“FBI!” he yelled, holding up the badge. “Which way to the fight?”

A fellow in Bermudas with a beer in one hand and a Remington 870 in the other gestured onward, the direction he was headed.

“You go get ’em,” he screamed. “Let me finish this beer and I’ll be right behind.”

“You’d best sit this one out, sir. You need to protect wife and family and in-laws.”

“Yes sir,” said the guy, settling into a lawn chair. “FBI with a machine gun on a Kawasaki in my back yard. Goddamn, ain’t I seen everything now.”

Bob lurched ahead, through a line of bushes, into another back yard, the bike grinding and chawing through a garden. Threading between houses, he found himself on a still-narrower road-this had to be Shady Brooks Drive, which was really only wide enough for one car, and which was jammed with them, all going the way Bob wasn’t.

But there was room on the shoulder, and he got all the way up into third for a while, at last running free of cars. Then he saw why. The road wound back to the right, toward the parkway, toward NASCAR Village itself, and that small metropolis now blazed like London in the blitz. Something had ramrodded through it, strewing wreckage and ruin everywhere.

But Bob saw clearly that proceeding in this direction would prove nothing, for it would take him only where his enemies had been.

He looked to the left, saw trees in pale illumination and saw that it had to be the base of the mountain. His thought now was to run the edge of the incline and see if he could cut trail, and where the boys had gone up, follow them.

It seemed to take for-goddamned-ever. He couldn’t run full out-the way was tough, and he had to wiggle this way and that off-road and around natural obstacles. He couldn’t see far enough ahead to make any speed at all, and though the land looked flat, it yielded up a bumpiness concealed in the height of the grass.

He came at last to some sort of installation in the lee of the mountain, a complex of corrugated tin buildings sealed off by cyclone fence, its approach from some other angle. He prowled around the perimeter and came upon a gate that had been smashed in. No lawman had made it this far. He pulled open the gate, found himself at last on level roadway, and followed the tracks of a heavy vehicle with born-to-raise-hell treads on the tires that had churned its way back beyond the buildings. At last he found an archway in the trees where a much-disturbed dirt road and dust in the air signified the recent passing of a major vehicle. The road had to lead up.

Bob circled, backtracked a hundred or so yards, then gunned his engine and jumped gears. He hit the road in a fishtail of spewed mud, slithered around a boulder, penetrated heavy woods, and began the stark upward climb, his bike fighting the mud below and the gravity that pulled it backward.

THIRTY-SIX

Brother Richard paused for a second, feeling the thrill of the moment, feeling the low hum of vibration running from the amped diesel to his foot on the pedal, feeling his fingers in barest contact with the truck through the wheel, feeling all the million little tingles of tremor and jiggle and bounce that signified a vehicle with a load, a lot of fuel, and a wide open road.

“Richard, boy, goddamn, time’s a wasting,” said the Reverend.

“No, no, just look for a second. Look at it now to fix it in your mind.”

“What you talkin’ about, boy? All this here don’t matter a frog’s fart, just get us to the mountain!”

“It matters to me, old man.” He smiled, turned and looked at the old man, and the Reverend saw for the first time how insane Richard was. He swallowed. The driver was one twisted visitor from beyond Pluto with his superiority, his mechanical and driving genius, and now this, his weird and furious insistence of enjoying the ride as if it were sex.

Richard winked.

“Remember Slim Pickens in Strangelove?”

What the hell the boy talking about? The Reverend thought this was crazyman talk.

“Remember ‘Yee-haw,’ the ride down to Armageddon, the sheer joy of it all? Well, old man, it’s yee-haw time!”

Richard punched it. With a lurch even its toughened-up shocks couldn’t soften, the heavy cash truck surged forward. First up was some sort of Jack Daniels tent, the center of which was a huge construct of whiskey bottles and cases. Richard aimed and hit dead zero. He felt the flimsy canvas yield without a whisper, devoured by the roaring bull of the truck, and the whiskey bottles shattered in a spew of brownish chaos, asparkle with the light, blown this way and that by the big vehicle’s velocity. It was a whiskey explosion. He emerged from the mess with a truck bathed in eighty-proof Jack, good for curing colds, relieving virgins of their burden, burying grudges or exposing them, as well as causing the ruin of many good men of high birth and low, and being a boon companion on a long flight through lightning.

“Richard, goddamn boy, you just git us to the hill. Don’t you be smashing things.”

But Richard had another agenda, and the Reverend now saw that this thing here, this glory-run through the civilization that was NASCAR, this was the point.

“See them feathers fly?” Richard shouted, eyes lit by the glare of superego blitzed on brain chemicals. “Well, they shouldn’ta run!”

He was truly insane, particularly to the narrow mind of Alton Grumley, who didn’t realize Richard was channeling Bo Hopkins from the first shoot-out in The Wild Bunch, nor that he had morphed into both Holden and Borgnine.

“Let’s go,” he said. Then he answered himself, “Why not?” and let a little sliver of psycho’s giggle escape, just as Borgnine’s Dutch had in that movie all those years ago.

“Richard, Richard, we don’t have the time.”

Richard then hit the pedestal on which an orange Toyota Camry, Daytona subvariant, was mounted twenty feet above all as part of Toyota’s very polished pavilion. He didn’t hit it straight on; it was more of a glancer, the point being to knock the car to the ground. In this humble desire, he succeeded, and the sleek vehicle pitched nose first into the mud, then toppled like a flipped turtle onto its back. Richard continued his war on the Japanese by clipping the corner of the Toyota structure, a piece of airport-like architecture meant to suggest the future, and his blow was so well considered that half of the roof went down, shattering glass and burying display cars in rubble inside.

He accelerated, took out this or that little place, the details were unimportant to him, saw people flee before him in both terror and glee and-oh, boy, fun, fun, fun till Daddy took the T-Bird away-found himself lined up perfect dead-on zero angle for the concourse of driver retail outlets, those trailer-truck souvenir shops where each of the big guys had heroic portraiture, replica clothing, ball caps, leathers, books, and related vanities on sale.

Richard revved the truck, enjoying himself. It was here he noted with amusement a certain base human truth. It was not he alone who looked upon the organization of commerce, the standardization of currency, the capitalist system, and had a violent impulse to destroy it all. He liked to crush things, sure, but so did lots of Americans. Yep, and it seemed that there were hundreds, maybe thousands, watching him. The moms and the kids and the old guys had fled. Not the young ones, the key NASCAR demographic of fourteen to thirty-six, southern, male, employed, tattooed (at least three), smoker, drinker, carouser, fighter. These guys, in the thousands, had somehow sensed that a show was about to begin.

“Can you hear it, old man?” Richard asked.

The Reverend could. It was soft, a murmur at first, but it picked up, the chant, “Go, Go, Go,” until it became “Go, Go, Go!” and Richard was nothing if he wasn’t the fellow who knew how to play to a crowd.

He punched. The roar rose, the windshield blurred with speed, then jolted with impact after impact, pitching this way, then that, tossing stuff through the air either whole or in many pieces. He fishtailed and jackrabbited his way in a perfect, high-test zigzag of destruction, hitting and smashing the truck trailers, which yielded by tipping or jumping or simply collapsing in shame. In thirty loud seconds Driver’s Row looked like Battleship Row after the first wave of Japanese dive bombers. For good measure, samurai Richard-san pounded the snot out of a cash machine at the end of the formation, and dollars flew everywhere.

Richard heard the cheer of the crowd. He looked in his side mirror and was saddened to see that he had started no fires, though he’d knocked down some electric wires and they bled sparks in a few places, dangerous and beautiful and spectacular at once. Then suddenly one of them ignited something and the fire rose and leaped, at least on one half of Driver’s Row, and soon enough flames consumed a great many of the battered retail installations.

Damn, that was good! Do it git better?

“Richard, my poor Grumleys in the back. They ain’t got no seatbelt.”

“Their heads are too hard for injury. You can’t hurt a Grumley by hitting him in the skull. But okay, let’s go.”

He came next to a little bridge across a gully, initially cut off by traffic blocks set in the earth. But a less important Grumley job had been to wander down there during the race itself and pull them out. Richard rumbled across the bridge, pulled up an incline, and came again to flatness and temptation. Now the speedway was half a mile behind him, the mountain half a mile before him, and the structures on this side of the gully less substantial.

“Go, Richard,” shouted the old man.

This wouldn’t be as fun. It was all ticky-tack, tents and ramshackle lean-tos, all of it held together by aluminum and canvas and tape and twine, representing the lower end of the NASCAR money pyramid. Not corporate power but scavenging entrepreneurial nomadism.

“Ho hum,” said Richard. “Don’t think nothing’ll burn or electrify, sorry to say.”

“Richard, you don’t got to narrate everthing. This ain’t a damn movie.”

“Oh, it is, old man. You’re Tommy Lee Jones, avuncular and charming, but now old and weary. I’m the mean Kevin Costner, not the sensitive Kevin, Caleb is Marky Mark, and maybe somewhere there’s a hero who’ll bring us down, but Clint retired and nobody took his place, so I don’t think so.”

After these important comments, Richard finally consented to do his job, and roared through the lesser precincts of NASCAR with much less pizzaz, as if he’d grown bored, having the attention span of a gnat. It was just snap, crackle, and pop, as the flimsy structures were eaten alive by the power of the Cash in Transit truck, and no pile of hats or Chinese Confederate flags or funnel cakes or barbecued ribs and sausages could stand against the onrush. Beer exploded, tables of goods were splattered, tents billowed as their ropes were cut, signs fell, but it lacked the FX grandeur of the previous few minutes’ work. As spectacle, it had fallen. His esthetic sense somewhat blunted, he glumly soldiered on.

But as tactical enterprise, the genius of the plan soon became evident. There simply was no way any four-wheeled vehicle could have followed them, because Richard left behind him so much more damage than had been there before, and whether or not planned, the dynamic of the crowd, ebbing this way and that, opening before him, then solidifying behind him, precluded penetration. Then too, of the few roads around NASCAR Village, all were impenetrable, because all were jammed with civilians headed out, not in. Many of those people had abandoned their cars upon seeing the panicked crowd and hearing stories of machine guns, armed guerrillas, terrorists, Klansmen, militia. So in the vast mess, only the armored truck had any maneuverability, purely on the strength of its ruthlessness. It could and would drive through anything, it could and had driven down anybody, it was without conscience, a Moby Dick on land, or a Godzilla or a Beast from Twenty Thousand Fathoms that regarded humanity as insects to be crushed. It was just diesel nihilism on four tires, driven by venality and psychopathology and the fury of sons who’d disappointed their fathers, and it was unstoppable.

Richard drove on, he flattened, folks danced in delight, some throwing beer bottles at him, not so much to stop him but to participate in the wanton pleasure of the evening. Now and then a police bullet sounded a pitiful ping as it bounced off the heavy armor but failed to penetrate. At the far end, the anticlimax arrived with a whimper. Richard found a dirt road that led to a gated installation in the lee of the mountain, built up some nice speed and fragmented the cyclone gate with his Ford cyclone, and roared along the edge of the mountain, which presented itself to him as an incline swaddled in trees.

“There ’tis,” shouted the old man, and indeed, up ahead, an archway in the trees revealed a dark portal, behind which lay the serpentine of a switchbacked track to the top, glistening with perpetual mud from a dozen mountain springs, its existence all but forgotten, a relic left over from logging days. “Here’s where you earn all that goddamn money we done paid you!”

“Think there’s a man in America who could get a rig this heavy up a road this steep and sharp? Well there ain’t but one, and he took the Pike’s Peak hill climb three times running and some other uphills as well, and has done the trick on bikes and go-carts and destructo jalopies and tractors and big-daddy trucks and hell, even a kiddie cart or two.”

“You’d best have it, boy.”

“Hang on, Grandpappy. The elevator is reading Up.”

He plunged ahead.

A lesser man would have wept. Not Caleb. His shattered nose blossomed blood, and he felt like a piece of popped corn in a corn popper, floating this way and that, a hard trick with a thirty-pound rifle in his hands.

“Goddamn him, that sumbitch, gonna whip his ass!” screamed another flying Grumley, immediately before hitting the goddamned wall or sharp shelf or any of the dozens of hard surfaces inside the box.

“The fucking little prick, he doin’ this ’cause he thinks he’s special, it’s his little trick on us poor dumb Grumleys.”

“He thinks we ain’t human!”

It was, in other words, no fun in the box. The five boys each were made clumsy by submachine guns, their body armor, their spare magazines, the darkness, the claustrophobia. It was like a submarine undergoing a depth-charge raid by the Japanese. They were tossed this way, then that, without visibility. On top of that, shrapnel, in the form of thirty-pound bales of bills in tamper-evident plastic bags flew around the interior like really heavy pillows. They fucking hurt when they hit you, and they could hit you at any time from any angle. Then there was a lunch box or two, maybe a few cans of Diet Coke, and who knew what else afly in the dark atmosphere of the steel box and though the shocks supporting it were thick and strong, they did little to protect against the vicissitudes of crumple and crunch that Richard produced as he wreaked vengeance on NASCAR for the crime of being NASCAR. Back here, a hero was needed, a man of strength.

But these were Grumleys, greed-driven and sensation hungry, the brains scientifically bred out of them, so they had no hero. No calm voice took over and soothed, not even Caleb’s, as that unhappy warrior simply sat as still as possible, clutching the huge Barrett.50, trying to breathe through blood, while dreaming of driving the Barrett’s butt into Richard’s strange, disguised head and watching it shatter. The rest got through the ordeal of the ride on the strength of their considerable sheer meanness, their similar hunger to pulp Richard when the day was done, and dreams of swag and whores and drugs and other cool Grumley things.

It was dialogue. It was not oration, still less a lecture, and least of all some kind of pontification. No, it was chat, conversation, attention to nuance, cooperation, and teamwork. This is how you climb a hill that doesn’t want to be climbed in a big vehicle that doesn’t want to climb it. Richard listened and talked with the components of the adventure. He felt the traction in each tire, not a chorus, but the voice of each as the expression of a personality; he felt the play between torque and transmission even in the crude containment of the automatic gear shift as these two dynamisms bartered their way through the complex transaction. He felt the tremble of vibes from the shocks, the subtler orchestration of announcements from the enhanced diesel as the Xzillaraider had blown out the parameters of the performance package, and the diesel fuel burned hot and long and fierce, turning its own chambers a molten red, threatening to go volcanic at any second. On top of that, through the imperfect vision cones of the illuminating headlights, Richard read the curves, finding the ideal line in each, read the texture of the mud in the road, divining where its gelid smoothness contained strength and where only watery treachery. He sensed which logs could be crushed, which knocked aside and which, still strong, had to be avoided. It was a complex negotiation, and he was right that few men in the world could have done it, and few would have wanted to.

It seemed to take forever, and Richard at a certain point felt his muscles locked against the wheel as if the wheel was the enemy and the addition of his human strength could make a difference. He cued himself to relax, and felt the iron melt from his neck. Though bathed in sweat, he felt at last a kind of relaxation, because it occurred to him that that which he feared most-a sucking pool of mud that would engulf him to above the hubcaps-would not befoul him.

“Jesus Christ,” said the old man, “I think you done it, boy. I think we going to make it.”

The truck broke from gnarled, mythic wood into a kind of grassy meadow and it suddenly occurred to Richard that there was no more hill to climb.

He brought the truck to a stop. He opened the door and almost fell out, limp with exhaustion, spent and wasted and hungry for vacation. He sucked coolish air, felt coolish air against his brow. He looked, saw stars, pinwheels of ancient energy, dancing light years off. Jesus, what a fucking thing.

“We here, boy, we done it,” sang the old guy. From behind came an outpouring of Grumleys as the boys liberated themselves and had a moment of pure bliss. They were on top of the world. Ma, we’re on top of the world. From hating Richard, they flew to loving him. Richard had never been so admired in his life. He felt like a rock star as hard Grumley hands pounded him on the back.

“Okay, boys, you git that dough on the roof,” yelled the old man, and then turned to speak on the cell, “Tom, get that bird in and get us the hell out of here. Time to go home.”

As behind him, the Grumleys set about to move the money bales to the roof of the truck so that they could be tossed into the hovering chopper, Richard moseyed off a few yards and came to a vantage on what he had done.

He looked down from a thousand feet on the vast structure of the speedway and the NASCAR civilization that had spread forth and put roots down upon the plains.

He saw wreckage. He saw fire. He saw a thousand emergency service vehicles spitting out goobers of red light. He saw smoke, drifting this way and that in the wind, he saw the crushed, the broken, the smashed, the atomized. He saw pain, disbelief, destruction, disaster. He saw the beast wounded. He felt in himself an insane pride in the ruination. Sure you could have detonated a bomb like some A-rab boy-fucker, or opened up with a Glock like a sad, sick Korean kid, or any of another dozen methods of high-octane take-down, but to drive through it, to smash and grind and pulp and express the ultimate contempt in traction and horsepower-say, that was pretty fucking cool. It was so Sinnerman. He felt a sense of profound fulfillment.

Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.

But then he heard it. They all heard it. The sound of a motorcycle as it churned up the same hill they’d just mounted.

“It’s the goddamned Lone Ranger,” somebody said.

THIRTY-SEVEN

Bob hit the hill hard on his Kawasaki. The bike slid upward, attacking, sliding right and left, inclining on the sudden hairpins, spitting mud, churning dirt, sliding this way and that as it fought for traction. Up he went, feeling between his legs the throb of the pistons beating as he rode the line between second and third, foot alive to the quickness of the necessary shifting. He smelled gas as it was eaten in 350-cc gulps.

But he knew it was time to dump the bike when the tracers came floating his way. Whoever these boys were, they weren’t well schooled. They fired too early, counting on the display of neon death floating parabola-like through the trees (and rupturing wood where it struck) to drive him back. He might have been a different fellow, but Bob had taken tracer before, even fired batches of it, so panic was not what he felt, even as random bullets began to kick up stingers and puffs of mud near him.

He cranked hard, put the bike over, feeling it bite against the mud as it plowed furrows. Before it was even still, he’d scrambled off, found cover in the trees, and begun his assault. He had no targets yet, but still his finger flew to the EOTech gizmo atop his DPMS rifle, and pressed the button that was protected against accidental tripping by a plastic sheet across it. He nudged it, felt it give, brought the gun to his shoulder and saw, to his surprise, a bright orange circle on the 2x2 screen. You didn’t need training, so simple was the concept; you put the circle on what it was you wanted, you pushed the trigger, and you ventilated. He slithered upward, safety off, finger indexed along the top of the guard, and forty yards out saw two men hunched over weapons on a crestline, peering hard for target.

“I think we put him down, Pap,” came a cry. Bob put the orange circle on the center of mass, and fired three times. This damn gun was no poodle-shooter; it bucked, more by far than a.223, but not so much that it was beyond control. With superb trigger control and a stout shooting position, Bob knew he scored all three and he watched the unfortunate recipient jerk when struck, then fall to the left. Bob came over, wasn’t quite fast enough on the pivot, and by the time he got around, the second guy was down under cover. Gunflashes gave away his position, and so did the tracer burst which vectored like splashes of liquid weight toward Bob, bending as it arched toward him and tore into trees and ground. And suddenly other boys were on the line and the hill was alive with the sound of death. The guns buzzsawed hellaciously and ripped, and the world turned all nasty and full of frags and flying debris and the spritz of near-supersonic wood chips. Bob squirmed back, aware that they were shooting toward sound rather than actually acquiring a target.

He waited a bit, moved a little more but delicately, put his rifle up and waited patiently. Soon enough a scout popped up to see if he could see a thing, and just as quickly Bob put one into him, center mass again, the gun beating into his shoulder with its upward torque, the muzzle flash bleaching detail from his night vision, illuminating a spent 6.8 shell as it flew to the right. Another one down, but another cycle of mega-blasting came abanging as the rest of the boys dumped their mags at him.

He waited them out. Would they have the guts to flank? Would they put people off on his right and his left, triangulate and take him out? He bet not. They weren’t trying to hold the hill for but a few more minutes, and nobody wanted to miss the big bus out.

And indeed, here came the bus; it floated out of blackness, its rotor kicking up a cyclone, huge and messy, blowing clouds of dust everywhere. He couldn’t get a good shot at it, however, and when it had settled in, it was hidden behind the angle of the incline and he could only hear it, see its column of rising disturbance. Then another posse of tracer came his way, lighting up his world and almost hitting him. One came closer than any round since fifteen years earlier, and he had a moment of fear. Even he, the great Bob the Nailer, victor in a hundred gunfights against impossible odds, felt the terror of the near miss, and he slunk back, happy just to be alive.

The phone rang.

Odd time for a phone call. But it rang, some chipper computery tune calculated to alert and annoy, the sound fortunately buried from his antagonists by the roar of the chopper. Astounded that he would do such an amazingly stupid thing, he obeyed the human rule that no matter what, phone calls take precedence over all reality. Maybe it was FBI, or maybe Nick had given the number to local authority.

“Swagger,” he said into it after plucking it from inside his vest and slipping it open.

“Mr. Swagger, it’s Charlie Wingate,” said the voice.

“Charlie? Well-”

“I think I figured Mark 2:11 out. It took a thousand hits on the Net but it’s actually ‘Mark,’ as in military or industrial model designation, capital M, small k, period, then just two-eleven, no colon, and it refers to a.50 caliber armor-piercing munition that-”

At that moment the tree trunk behind which Bob had slithered exploded. It atomized as something weighing 650 grains with a secondary explosive and a tungsten core, traveling at twenty-five hundred feet per second, hit it at zero angle, detonated, and sent a shockwave through it that all but liquefied the wood structure itself. It toppled, but could not find room among the other trees to actually hit ground, and lay suspended at an angle.

“Thanks, Charlie,” said Bob, “I’ll get back to you.” He flipped the phone away, slithered even farther down the hill. Good old Charlie. Better late than never.

Two more.50 Raufosses arrived, but the gunner had no target. This time, not hitting wood, he did not get his secondary detonation, but only plowed into the dirt, kicking up a huge, dusty geyser of earth and leaves, each blast a bit farther from Bob, the thrust of the recoil taking him away from his target with each shot. Bob rolled to the side, came up in a good kneeling position, put the red circle on his target and, guessing that he was body-armored, shot him in the head.

Now, he thought, get to the top, get some rounds into that bird, cripple it, then fall back and live happily ever after. Let the real FBI take over.

Each thirty-pound, twenty-by twenty-four-inch, plastic tamper-evident bag contained approximately twelve thousand bills, as baled carefully in the counting room at Bristol Speedway headquarters. The distribution of bills was predictable, even immutable: 10 per cent of them were ones, 15 per cent fives, 25 per cent of them tens, 40 per cent of them twenties, 5 per cent of them fifties and 5 per cent of them one hundreds. Each bag contained about $226,000 and all thirty-five of them-roughly $8 million in small, unrecorded bills-weighed a thousand fifty pounds.

The Reverend needed men. So he sent only two gunners to the crestline to search for the ranger on the motorcycle, figuring the two could handle it easily enough. That left three to unload and hoist, and one on the roof to stack the bales in a neat pile for easy tossing into the wide-open chopper door. If that goddamned Richard were here, it would help, but the boy had disappeared.

The Grumley inside tossed the bags out to a Grumley beside the truck’s open rear door, and he in turn-husky Caleb, bloody nose and all-heaved it up to the Grumley atop the truck. When all the bags were out, all the Grumleys would climb up top and toss the bags into the chopper hovering above. It seemed to be going pretty well, given that the rotors of the helicopter were tossing up hell and gone, when someone wandered up groggily, holding his ear.

“Pap,” he yelled, “he goddamn hit me three times and the last one bounced off the vest and tore off my ear.”

“Oh, Lord,” said Pap.

“Pap, I’se hurt bad. Git me out of here. That boy can shoot a lick.”

The Reverend made a decision.

“Caleb, you no nevermind that, you git over there, you boys too, you put this fella down.”

So the whole goddamned team quit their loading and ran to the edge of the hill.

Pap waited as the guns blazed, the helicopter hovered, and nothing seemed to be happening except time was passing. What was taking so long?

“I’m getting worried hanging here,” said the helicopter pilot through the phone. “They git heavy guns up here, they can bring this thing down in a second. You said wouldn’t be no shooting.”

“Some damn hero trying to win a medal,” Pap said. “Hold her just a second.”

He looked about. Richard would sure have been a help around now. But no Richard.

Suddenly the boys was back. They’d dumped their mags, filled the woods with slugs, tore shit out of it no human man could live through, and left Caleb to hold the fort.

So it was Pap himself who climbed up top the truck from the hood, and started lifting and tossing the bales into the chopper. Hard to believe, each chunk of weight was about a quarter mil in swag, untraceable, immediately spendable, investable, hell, a feller could have himself a great weekend in Vegas with just one of ’em. And goddamn, he was getting two, the boys one each and-

He found superhuman strength in the power of his greed and tossed them aboard. The pilot helped by walking the chopper down the length of the truck so the distance wasn’t far, and the thirty-five bags went aboard fast. Then each scrambled in, all helping to get the wounded man aboard.

“Where’s Caleb?”

“Sir, he ain’t coming, don’t believe. We seen him go down just a second ago. We ought to-”

But the old man didn’t need to be told. He twisted from the news, looked through the entryway from cargo hatch to cockpit where a pilot looked back at him, and gave the thumbs up.

Too bad for Caleb, but that were the Grumley way, and even though the bird was no rocket, they all felt some kind of low g-force as she zoomed skyward, straight up into the black, with four Grumleys and eight mill small unrecorded aboard.

Whooooeeeee, Pap felt himself gush as the bird climbed and began its outbound jaunt, running low, hard and without lights.

Nothing could stop them now.

Bob hadn’t even made it out of the trees as the bird-it was a Blackhawk, no less-took off for the moon or other parts ethereal. It climbed high until it was damned near invisible, and it was out of range in seconds. He didn’t have a shot.

Shit, he thought.

Then he cursed himself for chucking away the phone as he now saw he might have been able to get a call through, somehow have gotten word to somebody that…but he saw that was impossible. Nah. The airwaves were still a mess, nobody knew anything, no-

Mark 2:11. “Arise from your pallet and go to your house.”

Mk.211, Model O, Raufoss armor-penetrating incendiary.

It was time to let Jesus speak for himself.

Swagger ran to the fallen man, who lay in a fetal position, his head bent and crushed by a 6.8 Remington. But that wasn’t the point. The point was cradled in dead hands. Bob picked up the goddamned Barrett rifle, all thirty pounds of it, and ran back with it to the armored truck. He set up over the hood, after performing a quick check with the bolt to make certain a shell lay in the chamber and seeing that it did, he found a good supported position, the heavy thing on its bipod legs. He drew it to his shoulder, aware from Japan that he’d find speed in no speed, he’d find attainment in no attainment, he’d find it all in smooth, and in smooth he ticked them off: spotweld, check, trigger finger, check, breathing discipline, check, bones locked, check, mind numbed to stillness, going, going, going on toward nothing.

The last time he’d fired through a scope was months ago, and what was this scope, what was its zero, who set it up? Well, the bad boys didn’t set it up, because they used it close in, and the shooting they’d done was from the hip, at distances of twenty feet or less, as witness the beefy guy who’d tried to hipshoot him. They’d left it alone, most likely, fearing it a little. What was the origin of the gun? Was it a privately owned weapon, used by some rich gun guy for hitting targets a mile out? No way, too beat up for that, not well enough cared for. Had to be from the same source as the restricted Raufoss ammo, that is, from some Justice Department/Defense Department equipment program, meaning it was a military gun, maybe refurbed by Barrett after use in the sand, declared surplus and turned over to law enforcement cheap for use in the war against drugs and somehow coming all the way to Mountain City. Bob tried to feel its last real shooter and came up with a man like himself, a marine NCO, hard and salty and given to the mastery of the technology, his imagination enflamed by the possibility of doing bad guys a mile away and saving the lives of young marines who’d otherwise have to close and do it at muzzle-blast range.

He’s a mile out, he thought, and whoever set this up, he fired at a mile, that was his pride, his power. He knew with certainty: The scope is zeroed at a mile.

Bob settled behind the reticle, indexed on his approximation of the angle at which the bird had headed, and there it was, illuminated in the light of the speedway its occupants had just looted, the bird in blur, three-quarter profile, bisected in the milliradian-designated crosshairs, and it all came together in the kind of stroke only someone who’d done the deed under pressure a thousand or a million times on training fields and in bad places where they shot back could make happen-smooth and beyond attainment or speed or ambition.

He didn’t even feel the recoil in the nanosecond the bird crossed the crosshairs of the scope, though it may have been ferocious, even as he gave with it, rolled backward, and let the gun resettle for a second shot. He didn’t see the blinding muzzle flash as the huge missile with its tungsten core flew onward at well past the speed of sound, he didn’t feel the noise, which was immense, he didn’t sense the disturbance all those hot, roiling gases unleashed.

He looked again when the show was complete, but he couldn’t find the bird. Where had it gone, what was it-

He saw it sliding out of the sky. He watched through the magnification of the scope and caught the thing in its downward gyre. It wasn’t smoking or burning, but its internal rhythms were psychotic and the fuselage rotated wildly, whipping ever faster, until it was just barely flying, and at the last the pilot, whoever he was, got some control, and the thing hit with a smash against the empty seating of the speedway, its tail boom shearing off and going for a tumble, smoke rising now from a dozen different areas. Then Bob saw men spilling crazily out of it, even one, from this distance, in blue.

Then a glare spotlighted him.

He looked up to see another bird just a few feet up. He felt himself pinned, silhouetted in the harsh light. He raised his hands, holding Nick’s badge up for all to see.

The bird got even lower, and in its own light he now saw KFOXTV written on its boom.

He climbed up to the roof of the truck and the chopper came even lower. He got a foot on the runner, launched forward, and eager hands pulled him in.

He was aboard next to a guy with a fancy haircut and a guy with a camera, both so excited they looked about to pee. But he wedged past them, knowing all too well the interior of the Huey, and leaned into the cockpit.

The pilot handed him a set of earphones, which he slipped on, finding a throat mic at the ready.

“I’m with the FBI,” he said, gesturing with the badge.

“Yes sir.”

“Listen, can you run this baby south to 421, then follow 421 all the way over Iron Mountain out to Mountain City?”

“Sure can.”

“When we get there, I’ll talk you in the rest of the way. You drop me where I say, and then you make tracks.”

“Read you, Special Agent.”

“Then let’s rock and roll the fuck out of here.”

THIRTY-EIGHT

The boss waited. Radio reports were incoherent, inclusive, communicating only chaos and conflicting intelligence. Choppers down, but Caleb had to bring a chopper down. How many? One? Two, three? Hard to say. In the end, it was pointless to listen, and so the boss turned off the unit.

The boss checked the time. After midnight. Here, so far away, the night was calm, the sky full of radiance, the temperature at last bearable, and a sliver of gibbous moon let low gleam smear the southern hemisphere. When the hell would it be here? Why wouldn’t the hands on the watch move more quickly? Why was breath so hard, neck so stiff, mouth so dry?

Suddenly, there it was. The boss felt immense relief. It felt so good. They were here. It was done.

The black bird, running low over the mountain crest, finding this unlit field behind the prayer camp without a problem. He was such a good pilot and now he could be taken care of too.

The boss lit a flare, the only signal necessary.

It’s done. They said it couldn’t be done. But I did it. Now I’m free and clear and rich and untouchable. I’m a legend. They’ll wonder for a hundred years what became of me, what I did with all that money. They’ll tell of the boss who beat the game.

The helicopter set down, pitching up a whirl of wind and dust and leaves, blowing and bending the grass away from its roar. But Grumleys didn’t jump out. That old man in his blue suit didn’t leap out, dancing as was his way when gleeful, and there were no Grumleys shouting and pounding and strutting as was expected, everybody hungry for their share of the swag, neatly pre-cut into bales of cash, one for each boy, two for the old man, and the rest for the boss, as planned. Then the boss would jump aboard the chopper, and it would continue its run in the dark, low and unfollowable, another hundred miles to an obscure rural field where an SUV waited along with some phony passports. They’d be in Mexico in a day.

But no, none of that happened.

No Grumleys got off.

Just one old man: Bob Lee Swagger.

“Howdy, Detective Thelma,” Bob said. “Nice to see you.”

“Swagger,” she said. “Goddamn you.”

“I do annoy people.”

She saw the badge.

“You were FBI undercover all the time?”

“No, ma’am. I am Nikki Swagger’s father, pure and simple. But I have a great friend in the Bureau and we linked up. Now I’m working for him. But I’m still working for Nikki.”

“It wasn’t personal.”

“It never is.”

The two faced each other in the flicker of the flare as the helicopter skipped away into a high orbit.

“No way that hayseed gun store gets hold of imported Norwegian Raufoss armor-piercing rounds without someone running a request on police stationery through Justice under the sheriff’s signature, the sort of thing someone running an anti-meth lab program might have, right, Thelma? But who runs the department? That matinee-idol sheriff? He’s so dumb he doesn’t know how many feet he’s got. They’ll figure that out down there soon enough. I already did.”

“Swagger, don’t make me do this. I see I have to run hard now, and I can’t waste time here with you.”

“There ain’t no rush, Detective Thelma. I don’t think you’re going nowhere. Hmm, let’s see, what else? Oh, yeah, sure, I’m betting the superlab is in the coal yard next to the sheriff’s office, under the stink of all that coal where nobody can sniff it out, most of all that sheriff. Boy, you made some monkey out of him. But that’s why you got to go, isn’t it, Thelma? OSHA’s closing down the yard and y’all are moving the department. You can’t run the lab if they’re closing down the whole zone. You’ve run meth in Johnson for three years now. You fed the sheriff the intel, let the sheriff take out the competition, and you manufactured the stuff by the bagful right under his nose, slipstreamed behind him, kept the cost of meth the same. That network of snitches you’re so proud of; those are your dealers. That poor boy Cubby Bartlett you shot was a dealer and he was so cranked he didn’t have any idea what was going on. You grabbed the gun because when you showed up at his place that afternoon and pumped him full of ice, you found his piece, unloaded it. So you had to grab it to justify your prints all over it. The upshot is, you used the profit to set up this operation, to turn an awkward million you shouldn’t have had into eight unmarked free and clear. Hell, the pieces were already in place for you; the helicopter, its pilot being your banged-up gone-to-hell brother. And I know you got him the job. The Barrett rifle already in the inventory, the inside dope on the cash movement, the inside dope on how tied in knots law enforcement was. All you had to do was get the sheriff to sign off on the Raufoss. Then off you go, laughing all the way. What you got on old Alton to leverage him like that? Something pretty, I imagine.”

“Damn you, Swagger, how’d you get so smart? He likes boys. He come chickenhawking up here, and I heard and set up a sting and got video on him. In his circles, that’s ruination. So he does this job, and we’re quits.”

“You are a bad girl, Thelma. But we ain’t quite at the end. You knew Grumley before. You got some strange connection to Grumley. Grumley don’t trust no outsiders. They’d just roll over you. What is it, Thelma. Who are you?”

“Born Grumley. Maybe Pap’s, maybe someone else’s. Grumley blood. They got rid of me. Too smart. Raised in an orphanage. But I backtracked and found ’em. Pap could never bring himself to shed Grumley blood. End of talk. Time to go. Swagger, you are way overmatched. You have seen me draw. You know how fast I am, and how I don’t never miss. I have to leave now. If you try to stop me I will kill you. Who do you think you are?”

“Who do I think I am? You never got it, did you? Y’all thought I was some old coot from out West, no match for Grumley killers and armed robbers and crooked-as-hell detectives. I am Bob Lee Swagger, Gunnery Sergeant, USMC, eighty-seven kills, third-ranking marine sniper in Vietnam. I have shot it out with Salvadorian hunter-killer units and Marisol Cubano hitmen and a Russian sniper sent halfway around the world. I even won a sword fight or two in my time. They all had one thing in common. They thought they were hunting me, and I was hunting them. Faced many, all are sucking grass from the bitter, root end. Here’re your choices: You can come easy or you can come dead.”

Thelma drew.

She was way fast, she was so smooth, her hand flew in a blur to the Para-Ord in the speed holster, it came up like a sword stroke, invisible in its raw speed.

Bob hit her twice in the chest before she even got the safety off.

She spun, hurt so bad, and the heavy gun fell from her hand, the two CorBon.38 Supers enabling the ritual of drainage that would take her life from her as they opened up like sharp steel roses. She gasped for air, finding little, and turned to look at the old man with the pistol in his hand, just as the flare died.

“By the way,” he said, “I was also Area 7 USPSA champ five years running. Nobody ever called me slow.”