Bob understood that the kid had somehow gotten something off the hard drive.
“Go ahead.”
“Well, it was numbers, the numbers ‘three-six-two.’”
“Three-six-two?”
“Yes sir. And I could tell that it was a sequence of three numbers, a dash, then four numbers. It was the last three numbers in that sequence.”
“A phone number!”
“That’s right. So I know a cop and he has a reverse directory and—some computer genius—I just found all the numbers by hand. There’s only about three thousand people in the county—we found seven numbers ending in three-six-two.”
“Go on.”
“Five were just residences—I have those numbers for you—one was a day care center.”
“Yes.”
“And the last was a place called Iron Mountain Armory. It’s a gun store on the north side of town.”
“That’s great, Charlie. When you write out that check to yourself, throw in a million-dollar tip.”
FOURTEEN
This one wasn’t stolen, it was rented, although the credit card used to rent it was stolen, by the ever-slick Vern Pye.
He’d moseyed about the mall in Johnson City, eyeing teenage girls, especially the ones with them little bubble asses. You know, no real bounce to ’em yet, but tight, kind of bursting against the cotton of the shorts and—He saw a fellow just about his own age, height, and coloring, close enough to pass as Vern in thumbnail photography but not nearly as handsome. He jostled the fellow in a knot of other shoppers leaving the big K, smiled, excused himself, and walked away with one wallet but without another one. His fingers were that fast and that good. What was that all about, you might ask? Vern knew that what gave away the stolen wallet, sooner rather than later, was the absence of the weight. So when he lifted leather, he replaced leather, usually with a few fives and ones in it. That way the mark wouldn’t note the absence of the weight on his hip. Later, when he reached for his wad to pay for something, that’s when he’d make the discovery that he’d been boosted. There were a few instances, though, where a guy had actually pulled the new wallet out, plucked out a five, paid, put the wallet back, and went about his business! Some people don’t pay no attention at all.
The truck, yellow with two up front and eight in back, came from Penske and was a 7-stroke Ford diesel mover, as had been all the rest of the trucks (well, Fords, not movers necessarily), though this was an ’06 when the others had been ’04, ’01, and even a ’99, which Brother Richard had not been able to use because its electronics varied.
So now the three of them—Brother Richard, Vern, and his ever-present sidekick and buddy, Ernie Grumley, sat in Vern’s very nice Cadillac Eldorado along a completely deserted road in the Cherokee National Forest a few miles west of Shady Valley. Vern and Ernie smoked their Marlboros, enjoying the mellowness and getting ready for the show. The yellow Penske renter sat nearby.
“Looks perfect,” said Brother Richard.
“As they always are, Brother Richard, I do good clean work, you know.”
Vern was anxious that he not be confused with the lower class of Grumley, whom Brother Richard was known to despise.
“Okay, I’m guessing under sixty seconds today.”
“Can’t bet agin’ you, Brother.”
“Got that stopwatch?”
“Yessir.”
“Okay, watch me go.”
“All set.”
“You call it, Ernie.”
“Yessir. Ready…set…go!”
And with that Brother Richard was off. Besides certain tools, he carried with him a strange rig that consisted of a small, green plastic box with “Xzillaraider 7.3” imprinted on it, a swirl of heavy wire with electronic interface clips at one end, with a more complex swirl of lighter wire—one for power, one for grounding—a bypass, and a switch connecter. It was the Xzillaraider 7.3 unit from Quadzilla, of Fort Worth, a truck performance shop known in the biz as the cleverest in coming up with ways to gin up the power on a diesel engine. There were other techniques, of course. You could even cut the diesel fuel in the injector by forcing propane from a tank and get a significant power swell. But who wanted to be messing with propane in the middle of a gunfight? Not Richard, no sir. So the Xzillaraider was the best for his purposes. It was a genius-level mesh of electronics that essentially took over the brain of the diesel in the Penske and increased performance parameters. It fed more fuel to the engine. More fuel meant it burned hotter, and there was your power upgrade, sometimes up to 120 extra horsepower and a torque gain of 325 foot-pounds. The problem was, you had to monitor the temp, because if you didn’t, you could melt or ignite the engine. The additional problem was that Richard wasn’t going to have time to mount temp gauges and all the wires of the gizmo, not in a gunfight. His problem was to find exactly how few wires he could connect and still get the maximum power boost without bothering with all the safety devices. It just had to run for a few minutes, and after that, it didn’t matter if the truck burned or not.
He moved swiftly, but didn’t try to push it, got to the engine of the truck, and opened the hood. Where others might have seen complexity, confusion, terror, he saw the universe of his upbringing, the nurture of experience, the thrill of God-given genius about to be engaged. Expertly, he reached deep into the engine space beyond the big architectural structures, and into the nest of wires, found the MAP sensor, directly behind the fuel filter bowl. He quickly disconnected the factory connector and connected the Xzilla harness in its place, plugging in the male connector to the harness. He cut away the wires connected to the injection pump and attached the blue wire tap to the wire closest to the engine block. From that point on, it was wire work. He had to know which wires to cut, which wires to reconnect, all of them color coded. Quickly he grounded the engine—ugh, was it really necessary to unscrew the negative terminal connection, no, not really—and then cut a hole through the rubber grommet to the right of the master cylinder assembly, and shoved the wire harness through it into the cab. He dashed into the cab, and didn’t bother to mount the switch but simply began plugging the wiring harness into the module itself, that little green box, where the gods of engine monitoring lived and worked. He turned the key and watched the module’s blinking LEDs finally signal success after running through the sequence, settling in the red, the highest power zone. He turned the key further, and after a grinding clunk and another turn of the key, the engine burst to life.
And, brother, did it burst. The sound was almost like no engine on earth, a guttural blast, full of implications of the explosive, and it rocked the entire vehicle. He could hear the engine revving insanely, suddenly injected with a power beyond measure, almost too much for the confines of the combustion chambers. It was on steroids! It was the Barry Bonds of truck engines!
“Fifty-seven four,” yelled Vern, “a new record.”
Brother Richard goosed the pedal, and the engine howled demonically, yet it didn’t burst into flames.
He had it. He finally had it. And pretty goddamned near time too! Talk about cutting it thin, why the deal was only a day or so away and—
Suddenly he saw the paint on the cantilevered hood begin to bubble and crackle, and that meant flame, invisible to the human eye, had burst out of the engine.
Shit!
He rolled sideways, hit the ground, and kept rolling as he heard the tell-tale whoosh of the fuel in the tank igniting, not exploding—it wasn’t under enough pressure—but flinging a blade of hot-star radiance a good thirty bright feet in the air from under Mr. Penske’s fine vehicle, bleaching the color from the day for just a second. Then the flames settled back into your normal total-toast truck burn, licking and eating and devouring, issuing the rancid odor of scorched metal, melting plastic, burning rubber.
Vern carefully backed out in the Eldorado, threw out his cigarette, turned on the air conditioner to full to evaporate the sweat on the men’s brows. Soon enough they found a main road and were well g
one by the time the fire trucks and poor Detective Thelma Fielding showed up.
“Lord A’mighty, that was close,” howled handsome Vern, aflame in delight at the excellent adventure. “You’se almost tonight’s meal.”
“I’m too tough to digest, I’d keep you boys up all night with stomach pains.”
“It ran good for a while, though,” said Ernie.
“Yes, it did,” said Richard. “I think that’s it. I don’t think I had it grounded right. You’re supposed to remove the nut at the negative battery cable and attach the black wire. I didn’t take the nut off, but just wound the black wire around the terminal. Naughty, naughty. Next time, I will take the few seconds to remove the nut. It’s time well spent, and we will be close enough for government work, you’ll see.”
“You sure, Brother Richard?”
“Sure, I’m sure. All on that day, I’d hate to burn like a bonfire ’stead of running like a stallion.”
“Burning hurts,” said Vern. “Case you hadn’t noticed.”
“So I hear. Saw a fellow burn to death once. Lord God, he screamed. I had the distinct impression he wasn’t enjoying himself a bit.”
“Nor will you, Brother.”
“True enough, Brother. Well boys, get that old fraud of a daddy or an uncle or a molester or whatever polysexual archetype he’s playing this week to pray hard for you and me or else we’ll all arrive in hell pre-fried, COD. We’ll be a goddamned bucket of Colonel Grumley’s chicken, extra crispy.”
FIFTEEN
Bob drove through the town of Mountain City, sped along a picturesque route toward Virginia, and soon enough found Iron Mountain Armory. Of course it had a sign reading GUNS AND SURPLUS, and of course it was in an old Quonset hut with trees clumped around it with a small parking lot in front of it on Route 91 heading north. The mountains were to its left, casting late-afternoon shadows that buried the place in dimness. But he could make out a large-scale wooden .30 caliber Browning air-cooled mock-up at the apex of the corrugated steel building’s curve. The old trainer showed cutaways displaying red bolt faces and chambers, which must have taught six or seven generations of machine gunners their tricks before going on the surplus market and ending up on every gun store roof in the South. The gun was rotting, though its stout four feet of mock barrel, swaddled in cooling sleeve with the omnipresent grid of round perforations, certainly looked menacing enough. The place, like the old machine gun model, had that beaten-down quality to it, a sense of better times having gone by, interior rot under the paint.
He walked it to find what he expected: ratty old trophies of bucks and bulls long since killed, fish in waxy midleap glowing against polished wood plaques, racks of rubbery rain ponchos, utilities, BDUs, netting, shovels from half the world’s armies, web gear, Chinese knock-offs of current sandbox dutywear, Multicam and digital-camo patterns everywhere, lots of gun safes, sunglass cases for that super–Tommy Tactical look, and behind the counter fifty or so rifles racked butt down for easy examination. The front case had another fifty or so handguns, mostly the black plastic stuff that was taking over the market, little of the blue steel and walnut motif that Bob and his generation had learned to shoot on except in the used box. ARs were the predominant theme, gun safes second, and hunting only a third.
Fella came up to him from the counter, older gent, heavyset, eyes dead, not your natural-born salesman type.
“Help you, bud?”
“Hope so, sir,” Bob said. “You the manager?”
“Close enough.”
“My name’s Swagger. My daughter is Nikki Swagger. If the name’s familiar, it’s because she was the girl reporter from Bristol who had a bad car accident a week back on 421 coming down the other side of Iron Mountain. Someone tagged her and she’s still in a coma.”
“Sorry for your daughter, bud, but what’s it got to do with me?” the guy said. But Bob thought he saw just a flash of dread and the beginning, soon quashed, of a guilty swallow. Maybe the fellow was just a nervous type.
“Well sir, my girl wasn’t into guns or anything, which is why I thought it odd that on her laptop we came up with what appears to be the phone number of this place. I don’t know why she’d call or come by, but she may have. I’m trying to track down what happened that day.”
“The papers said it was an accident. What difference does it make what she did? Accident don’t follow no plan. It just happens.”
“I know, but there are some discrepancies in the official account. I’m just poking about trying to make sense of it all, sir. Sure it don’t amount to nothing, but I have to do something while I’m waiting for my daughter to come back to me.”
“Well, I don’t know if—”
“Here, let me show you her picture. Maybe it’ll jog a memory.”
He pulled his wallet, showed the man a nice picture of Nikki at last year’s graduation, so beautiful, so young, so vulnerable.
The man didn’t really look at it, just said, “No, no, believe me, we don’t get many young women on their own in here, and I’d remember. Sometimes a young fellow comes in with his girlfriend and sometimes the wife comes along to buy the Glock for home protection, but almost never will you find a girl like that in a place like this.”
“I see.”
“I’m real sorry for your troubles, but I can’t help a bit.”
“Uncle Eddie—” came a call from a workroom behind the counter, and a kid peeped out. “You sure on that? I seem—”
“Billy, goddamnit, you git to work. You got a lot of ammo to break down and get shelved. I don’t pay you to palaver.”
“Yes sir.”
“Goddamn kid,” said the man to Bob. “Girl crazy. Catch him reading them dirty magazines one more time instead of breaking down all that .223 and his ass is gone, I don’t care what Margaret says.”
“I see,” said Bob. “Yep, good help is hard to find these days. What about a phone call from a woman? There wouldn’t be a pretty face associated with it.”
“Mister, I get nothing but phone calls, some of the damnedest you ever heard. Can I rent a machine gun? Will you guarantee a deer? How come Wal-Mart in Johnson City has it for $324.95 and you got it for $339.95? Is a nine millimeter more powerful than a .38? What’s the best gun for home defense? Can I buy a gun like the soldiers use? So maybe I got a call from her and maybe I don’t, but I sure as hell can’t answer you one way, the other with certainty. Billy, you get any calls?”
“No sir,” said Billy, yelling from the back. “None that I can remember.”
“That seems to be all she wrote, sir. Unless you want to buy a nice SKS for under a hundred?
“What’s an SKS?” asked Bob.
“Chinese military rifle. No, I don’t think you’re the type.”
“Anyhow, thanks. You got me scratching another one off my list.”
He turned and left.
The Reverend Grumley was thinking about fucking, as he almost always did when he wasn’t thinking about the next few days. He hadn’t fucked in about three weeks now, and the ordeal was getting harder and harder. The images poured over him, all the holes that he had filled, all over America, how the gals just seemed to want to give a man of the cloth a reward for all the natural good he brought into the world. He was going insane! Some of the damn boys beginning to look pretty good to him! But the last time—
The phone rang, he answered it there in the office of the chapel, and it was B.J. and Carmody, reporting that goddamnit, that fellow had somehow gone straight, straight in a goddamned beeline to Eddie Ferrol’s Iron Mountain Armory. How in hell he make that connection? He’d been in the goddamn county two hours and already he’d made two big connections on…
The Reverend got the whole story, the fellow’s sit by the roadside, going over notes, then speeding off.
“He see you?”
“Nah. Carmody’s too good a driver.” B.J. was always boosting Carmody and Carmody, B.J. because they knew in the scheme of things, they were second-stringers to the more
glamorous pairing of handsome Vern and Ernie. See, that’s what the Reverend hated. All that competition, the formation of cliques and rump groups and bitter outsiders. It made for bad business. And if he wasn’t mistaken Carmody might actually be Vern’s half brother, rather than cousin, but, hmmm, he’d have to work that one out later as these issues were never too clear. But now wasn’t time for lectures on brotherliness.
“You got him?”
“Yeah, he’s in there now. We’re parked a good three hundred yards down the road, eyeballing him with glass.”
“Okay, hang tight. This here thang’s gittin’ a little hard to handle. Soon as he leaves, you call me and I’ll call Eddie, see what’s what.”
“Yes sir.”
“What y’all packing?”
“I’m .45, Carmody’s .40.”
“Git ’em ready. May have to go to guns.”
“Yessir.”
“I’ll try and think some plan up. You know, something—”
“There he is.”
“Okay, you hang tight.”
He hung up, went to his wallet to find Eddie’s Mountain Armory number, but before he did, the phone rang again.
“Reverend!”
“Eddie, hear you had a visitor!”
“Goddamnit, Reverend, you done promised me nothing, nothing like this going to happen. It was clean, it was legal, it was okay, we had the paperwork and everything, and goddamnit, first that gal shows up with that cardboard piece of box top and now her goddamn father, asking questions.”
“The old gray-haired guy?”
“Didn’t look so goddamned old to me.”
“Tell me what he asked. Tell me what he knew. Did he know much?”
“He said he’d heard she called or come out this way, it was on her laptop.”
Eddie narrated the story of his conversation with Swagger.
“But he didn’t seem to know nothing about what you got for me, what its possible use was, what we had planned?”