Gracefully, she took a jump, without a twitch to her posture, a tightness to her spine, a twist to her landing.
“That was a good one, sweetie,” he called.
“I know, Daddy,” she responded, and he smiled a bit, wiped his brow, then looked up at a flash of movement too fast for good news and saw Julie coming from the house. He knew immediately something was wrong. Julie never got upset; she’d stitched up enough cut-open Indian boys on the reservation where she’d run a clinic for ten years, and kept her head around blood and pain and emotional upheaval and the occasional death. So if she was upset, Bob knew immediately it could be only one thing: his other daughter, Nikki.
“Sweetie,” he called before Julie reached him, wanting to bring Miko in before the bad news arrived and he lost contact with reality, “you come on down now, just for a second.”
“Oh, Daddy, I—”
He turned to Julie.
“I just got a call from Jim Gustofson, the managing editor of Nikki’s paper—”
Bob felt constriction through his heart and lungs, as if his respiratory system had just blown a valve and was leaking fluid. His knees went weak; he’d seen violent death, particularly as inflicted upon the young and innocent, in both hemispheres, and he had a bleak and terrifying image of disaster, of his daughter gone, of his endless, terrible grief and rage.
“What is it?”
“She was in some kind of accident. She went off the road out in the mountains, ended up in some trees.”
“Oh, Christ, how is she?”
“She’s alive.”
“Thank God.”
“She was conscious long enough to call 911 and give her location. They got to her soon enough, and her vital signs were good.”
“Is she going to be all right?”
“Mommy, what’s wrong?”
“Nikki’s been in an accident, honey.”
It killed Bob to see the pain on his younger daughter’s face; the child reacted as if she’d been hit in the chest by a boxer. She almost crumpled.
“She’s in a coma,” Julie said. “She’s unconscious. They found her that way, with minor abrasions and contusions. No paralysis, no indications of serious trauma, but the whiplash must have put her out, and then she hit her head hard, and her eyes are blackened, and she’s still out.”
“Oh, God,” said Bob.
“We have to get out there right away.”
Yet even as Julie said that, Bob knew it was wrong. His oldest and darkest fear came out of its cave and began to nuzzle him with a cold nose, looking him over with yellow eyes, blood on its breath and teeth.
“I’ll go. I’ll leave soon as I can get a flight. You book me on the Internet, then call me as I head to Boise for the flight out.”
“No. No, I will see my daughter. I will not stay here. We’ll all go. Miko has to see her too.”
“Come over here,” he said, and when he drew her away from the child, he explained.
“I’m worried this could be linked to something I’ve done to someone. It’s a way to get me out—”
“Bob, not everything—”
“Not everything’s about me, but you have no idea of some of the fixes and the places I’ve been. You have no idea who might be hunting me. You have a scar on your chest, and memories of months in the hospital when that fellow put a bullet into you.”
“He put it into me because of me, not you.”
It was all so long ago, but he remembered hearing the shots and finding her, almost bled out, along the trail, Nikki screaming, another man dead close by.
“I don’t say it’s my business,” he said. “But I can’t say it ain’t. And I can’t operate if I’m thinking all the while about your safety and Miko’s. I have to recon this alone. If it’s safe, I’ll let you know.”
It was gunman’s paranoia, he knew it. All the boys felt it, all the mankillers, good, bad, or indifferent. At a certain age, faces come to you unbidden, and you can’t place them quite, but it’s your subconscious reminding you of this or that man you took down and you think: Did he have brothers, parents, cousins, friends, peers, colleagues? Maybe they were as savaged by that unknown man’s death as he had been by the deaths of those he’d known himself, like Julie’s first husband, Donnie Fenn, such a good young man, the best, his chest torn open by the same sniper who put the bullet into Julie. Bob remembered, I killed the sniper.
But maybe the sniper’s brother was here and couldn’t get at Bob in Idaho where Bob had friends and family and knew the land and where all the creeks were, so he figured out how to draw him onto unfamiliar land, and maybe it was his pleasure to see the pain on Bob’s face by taking his family first, one by one, first Nikki, then Julie, then Mi—
He cursed himself. Every time he came home alive and more or less intact, he thought about going underground, going into his own private witness protection program. New identity, new start, new place, new everything. But another part said no, you can let it drive you crazy, it’s nothing, it’ll take your life if you let it. You win not by surviving but by living, by having the things you need and love: family, land, home.
“Please,” he said.
“Bob, this can’t be yours alone. That is my daughter. That is my daughter. I cannot stay here; I have to be at her side, no matter what it costs or what the risk. I feel that so powerfully I can hardly face it.”
“Let me go, let me figure it out, and as soon as I can, at the absolute soonest, I will let you know and you can go. If it’s dangerous at all, I will have her moved, I will hire bodyguards, I will set up a secure place for you to come. But I have to know first.”
She shook her head. She didn’t like it.
“I know I can be wrong,” he said. “I’m wrong all the time. It ain’t about me being wrong or me being—what was the word Nikki used?”
“Narcissistic. Someone who loves himself too much, even if he can’t admit it. You’re not a narcissist. No narcissist would be as shut up, cut down, beaten, bloodied, dragged, and kicked in the head as much as you. I give you that. Whatever your flaws, and God knows there are hundreds of them, you’re too insane to risk your life for this or that or nothing whatever to be a narcissist. So your scars buy you two or three days. Then we’re coming.”
“Thank you. Now I’ve got to get packed.”
THREE
As he’d just seen Miko atop a large, muscular horse, controlling it and taking such delight in the process that morning, he now stood next to his older daughter and remembered her atop the same large, muscular animals, how she thrilled at them, how she loved them, how she made them do her bidding, how they loved her.
But Nikki was far from horseback. She lay in the intensive-care unit of the Bristol General Hospital, monitored by a million dollars’ worth of gizmos. Beeps beeped, lines dashed across screens to symbolize breathing, brain activity, blood pressure, and so forth. She was still, her seemingly frail chest moving upward and downward just a fraction of an inch to signify the functioning of her taxed respiratory system.
“Those roads can be so dangerous at night, Mr. Swagger,” said Jim Gustofson, the managing editor of the newspaper Nikki worked for. “If she weren’t such a good reporter she would have come home earlier, when it was light. But she stayed, she got every last thing out of the day that she could have. Oh, this is so awful. I just don’t know what to say.”
Gustofson was a tall man in his early fifties, with a full head of hair and a shocked expression. He had repeated this statement about ten times. It was all he could say.
Bob had received the doctor’s verdict. They were in the wait-and-see stage. All the monitoring systems recorded strong life signs. She was badly bruised and lacerated, but there were no broken bones. Brain activity seemed unaltered; EKG strong, signifying no permanent damage. But she was totally unconscious and had been so now for over twenty-four hours.
“There’s no telling in these cases,” said the young resident. “She took a bad knock on the head and the whiplash w
as vicious in the few seconds the car bounced. She was rattled around pretty hard. We just don’t know how long she’ll be out. Classically a coma of this nature lasts a few weeks.”
“Or months or years? Or forever?”
“That’s an outside possibility. Yes sir, Mr. Swagger. But it’s rare. Usually a few weeks and they recover, their memory is foggy but in time it returns. The brain has had a shock. It realizes how close it came to death. It wants to rest and relax for a while. It’ll be back when it feels safe. She’s a strong young woman. Anyhow, Dr. Crane can tell you more tomorrow.”
“What do the police say, Mr. Gustofson?” Bob asked.
“I’ve got a copy of the report for you. But Johnson County Sheriff’s Department says their assessment is that she was driving home down the road, and some teenager, possibly high on the very thing she was investigating, methamphetamine, decided to show off. You know these rural kids get NASCAR fever with the big race less than a week away.”
“I noticed the traffic and all the activity driving in,” Bob said.
“Yes sir. Well, one of the things we’ve noted is that traffic aggression goes way up this time of year. So the cops believe some punk kid was trying to be Dale Senior to the decidedly un-hip Volvo, just for the thrill of it, the kick of it, and he got carried away, misjudged his speed and instead of scaring the bejesus out of her and getting a laugh out of his buddies, he smacked her off the road, and down the incline she went. She was lucky in one way.”
“How is that, sir.”
“They say he first hit her about three miles back, much higher up the mountain. If she’d have gone over there, the incline was several hundred feet. Rolling the whole way, then smashing into trees, she’d have been dead for sure. As it was, where she finally went off, the distance was only 150 feet or so, and she didn’t hit any of the trees head-on but rather glanced off them. The big thing is, she didn’t roll. The roll is the killer. Somehow, she outdrove him for three miles, and when he finally hit her solid, she kept the car in traction and out of the air. I’d say she saved her own life.”
Bob saw his daughter in the car, in the dark, some big punk fool in a pickup with a brainful of crystal meth and a gutful of Budweiser slamming her, laughing hard, deciding it was fun, and slamming her again and again. He’d like to have a conversation with the young fellow. He’d leave him a check for the facial reconstruction bill but not a penny for the wheelchair he’d need forever.
“Do they have any leads?”
“They have a detective on the case. I spoke to her. She’s very good, she’s broken some big cases. Thelma Fielding. She’d be the one to see.”
Bob looked at his watch. He’d taken a 1 P.M. from Boise to Knoxville via St. Louis, rented a car, and roared the whole way up I-81 to get here this fast. Now it was nearly ten.
“I’m so sorry, Mr. Swagger. She’s an outstanding young woman. We all hope for the best for her. Do you have a place to stay? The town is filling up with racing fans, it might be hard to find a room. We have a spare bedroom. The paper has rallied also and there’s lots of folks willing to accommodate you if need be, no matter how long you stay.”
“I’ll go to her apartment and stay there. The nurse gave me her effects when I checked in and I saw the key. I hope you have the address and can give me some directions. Then tomorrow after I see her and talk to the doctors on the day shift, I’ll want to go out and talk to that detective.”
“Just to warn you, this big race screws everything up. It brings in millions and millions of bucks. You could say the whole region lives off this month the year long. But the downside of course is that everybody’s all involved in it, and the cops especially. It’s a royal pain moving around town or trying to get anything normal done.”
“I’m used to waiting,” said Bob. “You might say, I was once a professional waiter. I can wait a long, long time without moving a twitch, you just watch.”
You always fear entering your own child’s private life. What if you make discoveries, learn things you weren’t meant to know, find out intimacies, privacies, discretion that a child always hides from her parents, just to save them worry or knowledge. You can learn too much.
But that didn’t happen. If she had a private life, or any secrets, it hadn’t gotten interesting yet. Nothing indicated a boyfriend, a scandal, a secret. She was dead set on doing well in this job, moving on to another job on a bigger paper and who knows what. Maybe some fancy rag like the Times or the Post, maybe running a smaller, more focused thing. Copies of those papers lay everywhere, as did magazines like The New Yorker and Time and so forth. Her books were all by journalists and novelists. That was her talent. Bob knew: You had to let them be what they could be, just as in his way, although dying young for it, Bob’s own father Earl had let his son be what he wanted, and had encouraged his talents and not held his flaws against him.
After several misturns and dead ends and an involuntary tour of Bristol, even the line in the city where Tennessee magically turns into Virginia and vice versa depending on the direction, Bob had at last found the side road that ran just next to and so close to a Wal-Mart that you’d have thought it was the parking lot, followed it behind the giant store, down a hill, into a little glade of houses, along a creek, and then up into an apartment complex. Hers was on the third floor. He saw a sheeted Kawasaki 350 in the parking lot and knew it was Nikki’s, and that she loved that bike. He wished she’d taken it to Mountain City, because on the bike no redneck high on shit and beer would have outperformed her. He’d seen her ride the damned thing. She could stay with anyone, she could stay with him—he was good—and she’d have left that cracker crashed and burning in the gully, gone home, taken a shower, had a beer and a good laugh, and then a good night’s sleep. She had Swagger blood, after all.
But the squat, boxy Volvo had saved her life, he bet. It wouldn’t surrender to the forces of gravity or physics as it roared down the incline in a cloud of dust, shedding itself of speed. It was designed to keep people alive by Swedish geniuses, and God bless Lars or Ingmar or whoever, because he’d done his job that day. It never broke, it never collapsed, and though fenders and engine and trunk had cammed inward, the integrity of the passenger box stayed intact. His daughter lived on the slenderest of threads: that she’d been able to forestall her stalker for three miles downhill, that she’d stayed out of the roll, that she’d gone over where the incline was much slighter, that the car held together, that it didn’t hit the trees head-on but rather glancingly, and that she’d been conscious enough to call it in.
Outside, trees whistled in the southern night. Was this Tennessee or Virginia? He couldn’t be sure. You had to live here for years to know automatically. Whatever, it was the South, with its dark history of violence, its strange streaks of courage, its stubbornness, its pride, its love of hunting, fishing, twangy music, and fast cars. He himself had sprung from such a place, a state with a long history of clan feuds and grudges, violence on the street, youth swollen hard on aggression and let to bloom until someone was dead. It sent men in the hundreds up the Pea Ridges of the War of the Rebellion, and most went willingly and died—nobly? Bob had seen enough gut-shot men to know there was no nobility to it. But he also knew the strange pride that compelled the young men of the South onward into the grape and musket, up that bleak Pea Ridge swept by leaden blizzards, the majority to die slowly of massive intestinal wounds, screaming in the night six days after the battle was lost or won. That was something.
The South, he thought. It made me, but am I of it? Is my legendary father of it? Is my daughter of it? Or does this have nothing to do with the South, and only grows out of something I did in some forgotten neighborhood or other, in the tangled loyalties of my twisted past.
He tried to settle down. He lay on her couch, aching for booze to make the hurting go away. He called Julie, gave her what’s what, told Miko he loved her, and then, after nightmares that weren’t quite a product of sleep but more of memory, managed to fall asleep. It had
been a hell of a long day, a day like no other. He hoped he’d never have a day like it again.
It was any strip of forested road sloping down from the mountain above, a vast, high bulk of stone, sheathed in the trees that went everywhere, like a carpet or a disease. He could make no sense of the cross hatches of the tire tracks fading on the asphalt or the messed-up shoulder dirt and gravel where the big vehicles had collided at speed, or the patch down the slope laid out by yellow accident tape, now a mite ratty three days into keeping folks off the spot where Nikki’s Volvo had landed.
“I’m not exactly getting a picture,” he said to the woman detective.
“Sir, I could trace it out for you. Explain it better that way. The diagrams in the report make it clear too.”
“No offense now, I never mean offense, but I have to ask: You sure you’re up to this sort of work? It’s not a big department and all this is highly technical, it seems.”
“I have investigated traffic accidents and fatalities too. I admit, our state police accident team is better set up for this kind of thing, but the trickiness of state laws keeps them from operating off the federal and state highways. This is a county highway. So there’s a jurisdictional problem right at the start.”
“Well, I don’t want to upset nobody’s apple cart. I just have to figure out for myself on what happened. I’m sure you get that.”
“I do, Mr. Swagger. That is why I am here to help. I have been at this a long time. I’m a good detective. We’ll get him, or them.”
“Yes ma’am, I believe you.”
Detective Thelma Fielding, probably forty, was a strong woman with exceptionally large eyes, man-hands, what you’d call a big-boned woman. She wore blue jeans, tight to show off a body that was not beyond desire by any means—she had large breasts—and a polo shirt, black, with a badge over her left breast. A baseball cap carried the badge motif, but what told the world she was a professional law enforcement agent was the tricked-out .45 automatic worn in a Kydex speed holster on her hip. Behind it rode three mags, double stack. So the gun was probably a Para-Ordnance, not that Bob let her know he knew a Para from a Springfield from a Kimber from a Colt from a Nighthawk from a Wilson, and all the other 1911 models that were suddenly all the rage in self-defense and sporting circles. Next to the gun and the holster was her actual badge, wreathed in a leather badge holder, worn on the belt. On the other hip she wore her two-way, with a curly cord up to the mic pinned to her shirt collar. Oh, and the Para-Ord was carried cocked and locked, ready for speed work in less than a second’s notice.