“Good,” said Bob. “Thanks a lot.”
“Yes sir,” said the boy.
Something reminded Bob of a certain kind of young marine, the loser kid who joins the Corps as a way to start over, to have a new life, to do something well and right. Some of ’em don’t make it, and it’s just more fuck-ups until they’re gone with a new set of grudges. But now and then you find one who gets to the top of the hill and goes on to become a real marine, and maybe has a life he couldn’t have imagined when he was fat, pimply, and sullen without friends and hated by everyone, most of all himself.
“That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
“No sir.”
“It ain’t my business, but a young fellow like you shouldn’t be cooped up in a nowhere place like this. And those guys, Baptists or not, are right about how shitty Lester’s store is.”
“Yes sir,” said the boy. “I know that.”
“Can’t you get a better job?”
“No sir. Can’t seem to get my letters straight. Didn’t do well in school, quit after two years. Don’t test out good enough to get into the service. Like to be in the Air Force, work on planes. Love planes. But can’t pass the tests. Lester’s only fella that would have me. I think he knew my daddy.”
“Maybe you got something wrong with your eyes or some little deal in your brain makes you see the letters in the wrong order. There is such a thing, you know. You should look into it.”
“Yes sir,” said the fellow.
“You should get yourself tested.”
“Yes sir.”
“Well, I can tell from the way you say it you don’t mean a word of it. Son, don’t give up. Take some free advice from an old goat with a limp who’s been around a block or two in his time on earth. Some social service deal in town or off in Bristol or wherever will test you for free and if you have a thing wrong, come up with a way to fix it up. Give it a try. You don’t need to do this shit forever.”
The boy looked at him from darkest abject misery, then smiled. It seemed nobody had ever talked to him like a human being before. The smile showed surprisingly good teeth and maybe a little brainpower in the eyes.
“I will look into it,” he said.
“Thatta boy,” said Bob.
“By the way, that Baptist place got to be the old Pioneer Children’s Camp, where I think a man hung himself when they caught him diddling little children back some years. I heard someone rented and moved in. It’s four miles up on the left, black metal gate, locked all the time. They painted it over so the black is shiny but I don’t think they changed the Pioneer sign.”
“You do know a thing or two,” said Bob.
Bob got there soon enough, and it was as the fellow had said, the gate was newly painted though the sign that read PIONEER CHILDREN’S CAMP was still shabby with age. A dirt road led off into the forest, disappearing as it wound through the dense trees in a few yards. The gate was still sticky in the August heat and it seemed a lot of bugs had landed and found their fate to be paralyzation in the thick goop someone had slopped all over. Bob looked for a way in, thought it wrong to just climb over the gate, and then saw a ’70s-style intercom relay on the gatepost.
He pushed the sci-fi plastic Speak button.
“Hello there.”
Through a rattley smear of electricity the answer was nothing more than a “Can I help you?”
“Name’s Swagger,” he said. “My daughter was the one nearly killed in an accident on 421 on Iron Mountain out of town last week. I’m looking into the circumstances and have information suggesting she stopped off here. Was wondering if I could talk about it to someone, the bossman I guess.”
The cackly soup recommenced to jabber from the speaker and Bob thought he heard a “Certainly.” A clunk of some sort announced that the lock had been sprung from afar, so he opened the gate, drove through, then closed it behind him. The road twisted through trees, then between a couple of foothills, and came finally to an open valley behind elevations that formed obstacles that were green and high but somewhere between hills and mountains. Maybe what eastern people would call mountains, but certainly not what a westerner would so label.
He saw a small, white chapel standing alone; a barn; a kind of exercise yard of pounded dirt; a schoolbus, yellow in the sun; a dormitory, and a kind of gymnasium, all of the buildings constructed with sturdy tin, tin-roofed, and a little shiny. Ballfields, basketball courts, and the crater of an old and unfilled swimming pool also used up the open space until the forest took over again, and shortly thereafter, the mountains began their skyward inclination.
He parked next to the bus in a parking lot where a lot of vehicular traffic had worn a lot of grooves. But no other machines were in sight, and as he closed his door, he looked up to see an old buzzard in some kind of powder-blue three-piece suit approaching, a cross between Colonel Sanders and Jimmy Carter, with the former’s corn-pone stylings and the latter’s hidden hardness of spirit.
“Mr. Swagger, Mr. Swagger, we are so sad about your girl,” said the man, rushing urgently to him, laying a little too much courtly southern-style bullshit on him.
Bob stretched out a hand, felt a grip stronger than you might expect, saw blue, deep eyes, pink skin; smelled cologne, saw white fake teeth and a bristle of a genteel mustache, as the older fellow announced himself to be one Reverend Alton Grumley of the New Freedom Baptist Church, Hot Springs County, Arkansas. He was up here with a constituency of young men who wanted quiet and solitude to pursue their Bible studies. The Reverend had waves of moussed hair—possibly real but almost certainly not his own by birth—and the pinkness of the overscrubbed. He told Bob that he was welcome to stay as long as he wanted and the Reverend would answer any question.
“Sir, thanks for the time.”
“Come on in, set a spell. I’ll answer any question I can to put your mind at ease. Oh, the poor dear. That’s sad, and a parent’s pain is sad as well.”
The buzzard, fretting about Nikki, led Bob to a porch that overlooked the athletic fields, and in time a well-prepared young man in a white shirt and dark trousers came out with a pitcher of iced tea, and the two men sat talking and sipping.
“She was such a nice young lady,” said the Reverend Grumley.
“My first child,” said Bob, “so you can see my concern.”
“How is the dear girl?”
“She shows signs every day of improvement. Yet she’s still in that coma. They say she could come out at any moment, or never.”
“Don’t mean to give you worries, but have you thought of moving her from Bristol? To a bigger city with more sophisticated hospitals?”
“Actually, I already did that. She’s in Baltimore now, where they’ve got the best medicine in the world.”
“I see,” said the Reverend.
“Yes sir, the world famous Johns Hopkins.”
“I have heard of it,” said the Reverend. “I’m happy she’ll have the best care. She’s fortunate to have a father who has resources.”
“The horses have been kind to me. I own a series of lay-up barns across the West, where they take their horses seriously. What’s the money for, though, if not your own children?”
“True enough. Now the police say it was some unruly young man trying to be a NASCAR star that caused the accident, at least according to the paper. Is that the accepted version?”
“It is and I have no cause to doubt it. Still, I want this boy caught, so he won’t do the same again to another man’s daughter. Now the sheriff’s department in this little county is all stretched thin because they’ve got to provide a detail for the big race, that plus Sheriff Wells’s helicopter raids on the meth labs that you’ve read so much about, which seems to be his obsession at the expense of other duties, so I worry this issue may have slid to the back burner. I am poking about to see if there’s any need to hire a private investigator.”
“Tell me how I can help you.”
Bob said he was reconstructing that last day and was cur
ious as to why she had come out here, given the fact a Baptist prayer camp didn’t seem the sort of place to conceal a methamphetamine lab, which was the original intent of her assignment.
“She was just doing her job,” the old fellow said. “She’d evidently heard reports of gunfire from out here and made a connection between guns and criminals and drug lab security, that sort of thing. But I explained to her…here, come with me, Mr. Swagger. Let me set your mind at rest.”
They walked across the yard, then the field, and came at last to a small structure, a kind of open hut. Bob looked inside and saw a robotic-looking electric device that was like something out of an old black and white science fiction movie, with pulleys and fly wheels and an arm along one side; a stack of orange clay disks sat in a kind of magazine assembly up top. Of course he knew what it was; an electric trap for sporting clays, skeet or trap.
“It throws birds. Clay birds.”
The Reverend opened up a cabinet, and inside were three over/under shotguns.
He took one, an old Ithaca, broke it open, and handed it to Bob, who looked at it as if he’d never seen a gun before.
“Many nights the boys gather here and fling birds, then try and hit them as they sail off. It takes skill, concentration, judgment, a steady hand. Philosophically, it expresses endorsement of our beloved Second Amendment, the discipline to master the gun, the wisdom to use it wisely. Discipline and wisdom, exactly what it takes to lead a life in Christ. I’d rather have the boys doing something like this than playing basketball or touch football, where they smack against each other, where strength and size count more than skill, and cliques and grudges are formed. Unhealthy.”
“I see.”
“And when I explained to your daughter that to the locals—we’re not socializers out here, we need the silence to concentrate on the Book—that to the locals the sound of the guns in the twilight was almost certainly what they took as suggestion of some kind of drug activity, she understood in a flash. She smiled, apologized for interrupting, and went on her way.”
“I see,” said Bob.
“Really, that’s all. Here, watch me with the gun.”
He took the gun back, dropped two red cylindrical shells into it, and snapped it shut.
“Used to be pretty good at this. Go ahead, turn on the machine there, it’ll throw a pair and you’ll see.”
Bob examined the gizmo for a switch, found it, snapped it, and the thing clacked and whirred to life; two clays descended from the stack, rolled to the arm and settled in some kind of grip; the arm suddenly unloosed itself with a spring-driven force and flipped the disks in a curving path across the field.
Smoothly, the Reverend brought the gun to his shoulder as he pivoted in rhythm to the rushing saucers in front of him, and he fired twice in the same second. Both birds dissolved in a puff of red dust.
“Ow, that’s loud!” said Bob, clapping his ears.
“Sorry, should have given you plugs or muffs. Yes, the guns do make a bang, though you get used to it. The boys do it over and over. You can adjust the trap to throw birds in an amazing variety of ways.”
“I see,” said Bob. “Now I get it.”
“Yes sir. Would you care to try a pair?”
“Thanks, Reverend, but I don’t care for guns. Haven’t touched one in years.”
“That limp of yours, I guessed it might be from a war.”
“You’d laugh if I told you. Nothing so dramatic. In Japan, a fellow who was demonstrating an old-fashioned sword. He slipped and cut me. Imagine how surprised he was at how his demonstration turned out.”
“I hope you sued him but good.”
“No, there was no point. He learned his lesson. Anyway, that’s all forgotten.”
“So, would you like to see the place? Or stay for supper? Or, I know, the 4 P. M. prayer service? Very calming, serene, a sense of connecting with God’s way.”
“No sir, you have solved that little mystery right swell.”
“Good, sir, I am pleased. Now let me press on you something I give all visitors. It’s a very nice King James Bible. We give them out quite freely. I gave one to your daughter, and she seemed grateful to receive it.”
“Sir, I believe there’s one in my hotel room.”
“But this is a gift, and as a gift you might someday turn to it and find wisdom and succor. You’ll pay no attention to a hotel room Bible.”
“True enough, I suppose.”
The old man trundled off and returned with the black book in his hand. He gave it over to Bob.
“With that, I believe I have made a friend for life,” he said. “I’ll not beg you to read it. But some night on the road, you find yourself hungering for something, I think you’ll find nourishment within its pages.”
“Thank you, sir. I’ll go on now, and try and locate other witnesses to my daughter’s adventures. Then I’ve got to call the hospital to check on her.”
The Reverend walked him to his car, along the edge of the grass, and it was there that Bob noticed that whoever had raked out the dust field had missed a spot at the margins, and at least twice he saw some strange tracks, wheel grooves about twelve inches apart, deep and evenly cut, indicating they had borne something heavy. It rang a bell but didn’t call up an image, and he wondered where he’d seen it.
But then he was at the car.
“Again, Reverend Grumley, thanks for your cooperation and understanding and hospitality.”
“It’s a privilege, Brother Swagger. You’re not a Baptist, I fear?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, you don’t need to be a Baptist to figure in my prayers, sir.”
“I appreciate that, sir.”
Bob headed back to town, but pulled over to the shoulder and stopped the car.
I need to get all this straight, he thought.
Do I have something or is it all coincidence, and my own vanity has got me believing there’s some deep conspiracy here because I’m so damned important?
He tried to think it out, each step at a time.
Attempt at murder by professional driver. But what’s the hard evidence that it’s a “professional” driver? The interpretation of two expert race people on some aerial photos. They’re not professional accident investigators whose word could be trusted. Maybe they sensed my need to believe and without meaning to, fed into it, to make me happy. But they were so convincing on the subject of cornering, and clearly had a mountain’s worth of experience at that arcane art. That is my best evidence.
A second though admittedly unspecific attempt at the hospital. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. The Pinkerton security man, who seemed solid enough, just stated that some “doctors” tried to gain entrance to Nikki’s room. No one ever saw them again, no one had ever seen them before. Still memory and chaos play tricks on people’s minds, and given that it was a big, busy hospital, it’s easy to understand how it could have been legitimate.
The possibly missing pages and the destruction of the recorder and laptop. Also: no Bible. Again, interpretation, not fact. She could very easily have torn the pages out herself, and the electronic items could very easily have been smashed up in the crash. The Bible could have been so generic that it wasn’t recorded as hers, or maybe it was thrown clear of the crash.
The odd sense of perfection at the Church camp, as if it had been oh-so-hastily cleaned up, and Reverend Grumley’s seeming to fish for information on Nikki’s progress while mildly cooperating. Again, it was the nature of religious establishments to keep themselves extremely tidy, although the skeet trap in the shed was an unusual touch and it might well double as a kind of subterfuge under which a lot of gunfire could be explained away innocently, just in case of curious visitors such as himself and Nikki. Not completely unlikely but again provocative.
The strange tracks in the dust. They reminded him of something, but what? And why couldn’t he remember it? Where had he seen such tracks? On the other hand, why were they so strange? Could have been some kind of car
t wheeled out for maintenance of the skeet trap, could have been the gardener’s cart for—but a gardener’s cart would be wider. Why would it be so narrow?
And finally:
The fact that he was being followed. Maybe that was the best thing. It couldn’t be Thelma’s department, because they didn’t have the manpower to detach two boys to play tag with an annoying stranger all day long. But two boys had been playing tag with him all day long, ever since his visit to the sheriff’s office. So someone in the department had a contact with someone he shouldn’t have. The tail car was a Ford Crown Vic, beige. He’d yet to make direct eye contact with it, because a sniper develops instincts for when he himself is being hunted. Bob had the experience to know that you never let your hunter know that you know he’s hunting you, so that in actuality, you’re hunting him. So when the prayer camp showed up all clean and sparkly, it was no surprise, because the boys following him in the car—they had passed him, and he knew they were waiting around another two or three turns in the road—had seen him heading down 167. They’d called ahead to the Reverend, who got his boys off on a quick and hasty clean-up, so that when he got there he’d be welcomed warmly, and nothing of suspicion would be around.
Okay, he thought, this is an interesting game, all of a sudden. So what I will do is go back to my room at the Mountain Empire and set a spell, and after dark, I will sneak out a back way, and cut open their tires, and then, unfollowed, I will head back here and see what I have got and—
His cell rang.
He answered, hoping it was Julie with good news about Nikki, but saw an unknown number in the display.
“Swagger.”
“Mr. Swagger, it’s Charlie Wingate, you know, at Mountain Computers.”
“Yes, Charlie.”
“Well, I did some work and couldn’t come up with much, but I did get it to print out some script and I managed to decode a little of it.”