“Cubby, don’t do anything stupid,” Thelma said in a smooth calm voice, walking into the light looking calm, more like a mom than anything. “You just let that fella go. Put the gun down and we’ll work our way through this.”
“Thelma, no! You said, you said—no, I ain’t going back to all that. It ain’t right. Goddamn, oh, why this happening, why why why? I had her licked this time. Oh God, they’s in my head, I hears ’em yelling. Oh Christ. No, Thelma.”
Bob was thinking: Where’s the fucking sniper when you need him? Did he have a Little League game to coach or something? A good man on a .308 and a solid position could send 168 grains of Federal’s best match load through Cubby’s eye and into his ancient snake brain and end this thing in the time it took the bullet to fly at twenty-three hundred feet per second to its target. But there was no sniper, just the woman cop and the three young Tommy Tacticals looking shaken as they crouched, trying to keep good muzzle discipline.
Thelma took another step. She had guts and how. This screwball could pop one into Bob and whirl and fire and take her down before she cleared leather. Of course the three Tacticals would each heroically dump a magazine into him, but both he and Thelma would be beyond caring. Why had he done such a stupid thing? Where could Cubby have gone anyway, cranked as he was on the ice that ate holes into his brain? But his grip on Bob and the force of his wrist against Bob’s throat was iron, and Bob struggled again for air, while smelling his rank body odor, and feeling the fear and craziness vibrate through Cubby’s flesh.
“Don’t you move goddamn you,” said Cubby, pressing the gun muzzle so hard against the thin skin at the crown of Bob’s head that he cut it. A trickle of blood oozed out, and Bob felt the warmth of the liquid and then the sting of the wound.
“Cubby, you just calm down. Nobody has to get hurt now, I’m telling you.”
“But you goin’ send me back. Don’t know why I did it, Thelma, don’t remember none. I don’t know, I been so high for so long don’t think I hit no car, but goddamn I got voices saying you hurt a girl you hurt a girl. Wouldn’t hurt no girl, Thelma. Like them girls sometimes they nice to me. God, they in my head—it hurts. I can’t go back—I can’t go back. It ain’t right—I didn’t do nothing, I don’t want to hurt nobody. God, Thelma, it just ain’t right—I can’t do this no more—it’s just no good no more. Oh, Thelma, you said you’d help me—I am so sorry I can’t—”
Bob heard the oily slide of the hammer against the constriction of the frame, as Cubby drew it back, then the slight vibration as it locked. The gun was now cocked, his finger on the trigger, just a single-action jerk away from firing.
“Thelma, I will kill this boy—you go way—y’all go way—put down your guns, let me go. Don’t want to hurt nobody. Please, please, it don’t have to be this way, but goddamn I will squeeze on this here boy—you just lay down your guns and—”
Thelma drew and fired with a speed that was almost surreal. Bob had never seen a hand move so fast, so sure, so smooth, so clean. It was like a trick of physics, a speed beyond the influence of time, that seemed to come from nowhere, elegant, controlled, blazing. It was professional shooting at its finest.
He saw the flash, saw the slight buck of the automatic as its slide jacked in supertime, saw the spent shell flip away, caught in the light, and even felt the simultaneous vibration as whatever she’d sent off hit its target. The sound of bullet on flesh is always the same, dense and wet and full of the sense of meat splattering and bone shattering, yet compressed into a nanosecond. He actually felt Cubby die instantly, the vivid vital flesh in supertime again alchemizing to dead, directionless weight, pulled on by impatient gravity. As Cubby fell, his draped arm brought Bob down with him harshly, and they landed in a heap and the handgun, still cocked, bounced away.
Bob wriggled free and saw that Thelma’d hit him left of the nose, maybe an inch, and that the bullet had drilled a perfect round black hole, which, in another second, began to release a surprisingly thin gurgle of black fluid. Then his nose began to bleed, not copiously, just a trickle of black as blood under pressure sought escape. The man’s eyes were open, and so was his mouth. Behind him, a ponytail fanned out on the sidewalk in the harsh light, and a puddle of exit-wound blood, black in the illumination, began to delta outward through the hair. That must have been a hell of an exit. He wore a cut-off Ole Miss T-shirt, a pair of tight jeans, and was barefoot. His feet were dirty with long, animal-like toenails crusted with grime.
Bob stood up.
“Mr. Swagger, are you all right, sir?”
“I am fine, Detective. That was some shooting,” he said.
“I am so sad I had to drop him. Only had to do it once before and it shook me up for a year.”
“I am glad you were over your shakes tonight, Detective.”
The other three officers had gathered around, and Thelma put her pistol away, and knelt next to the fallen man. She pried the gun from his fingers—a Smith K-frame, probably in .38—decocked it, and expertly popped the latch open, letting the cylinder rotate out.
They both looked into it.
“Empty,” she said. “Well, I couldn’t wait. I had to put him down.”
“You made the right decision, ma’am.”
“Thelma,” one of FAT kids said, “you didn’t have no choice. You did the right thing.”
“That’s right, Thelma,” said another. “Don’t you worry about it. Nobody could fault you.”
“You sure you’re okay, Mr. Swagger? Maybe when the medical people get here you might want to have them look at you.”
“I’m fine, I’m fine. Maybe it’ll hit me later, but right now it just seems unreal. Detective, where’d you learn to shoot like that? I never—”
“Thelma’s three-times running ladies’ USPSA champ of the Southeast Region, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Kentucky. She could go pro, she’s that good, Mr. Swagger. Para-Ord sponsors her. You’re lucky she’s here. She’s probably the best shot of any law enforcement agent in this part of the country. Maybe the whole damn country.”
A cruiser, its lights running hard, pulled up, and then another and another, so on until general delirium took over the scene.
TWENTY-TWO
The thing was, you couldn’t smoke. He might see a lit cigarette glowing in the otherwise-darkened interior of Vern’s red Cadillac El Dorado, then bolt. Agh. So both Vern and Ernie, in cranky moods, sat grumpily scrunched down in the car in a dimly illuminated zone of the parking lot of the Mountain Empire Motel. Neither had had a cigarette in hours. It was a little after midnight.
“I might sneak out and run around back for a smoke,” said Ernie.
“You will not, cousin, no sir. And take a risk he pulls in just as you’re in his lights? That’s how it’ll happen, you know it is, that’s how it always happens when you give in to your hungers on a job. You be a good bad guy now, and do what Daddy has said. We may get a kill out of this tonight and then we can smoke our asses off.”
“Vern Pye, I don’t mind saying, I didn’t enjoy your tone with me just there. Didn’t say I’d do it, now, did I? No sir, said I might. Just talking. You’re so high and mighty, I see your eyes go all buggy anytime a piece of hot under the age of fifteen with no tits goes on by. Please watch that tone, Vern.”
“Well, excuse me, sir, I’m just trying to get the job done right and proper so I can go back to my regular line of business. And what kind of gal I take a fondness toward ain’t nobody’s business. I will say, this here stay in scenic Mountain City has been as hard on me as it has on you, cousin.”
“You don’t even want to be here, that is why you are in such a punky mood.”
“No, I don’t. This is not the right move. But if the old man says do it, I have to do it and so do you, even though you agree with me and not him.”
“All I know is, he says go, I go. That’s how it is.”
“Even now in this car alone you are afraid to defy him.”
“Maybe I just respect the rules, i
s all. And if you don’t, no cause to turning all crabby on me.”
But then a car pulled into the lot. Both squirmed down a little, both noted that it was indeed a small Ford or Toyota, the sort the rental companies generally provided. It prowled, looking for spaces, and found one close to Room 128, which they knew to be the hit’s.
“Could be,” said Vern.
“Pray to God,” said Ernie. “Or maybe it’s a teen-age gal in short-shorts and a halter with the new issue of Tiger Beat.”
“Asshole.”
The fellow got out, slid around to the trunk, opened it, took something out, and held it tight under his arm, looked about for signs of something not in place, and then moved gently toward the room. But it was the limp that gave him away for real. It was like he had pain in that right hip from more than a single wound. He was also moving stiffly as if bandaged in a dozen or so places. He paused, took a look around the lot again, satisfied himself that it was all clear, then bent to open the door, slipped in, and locked the door behind him.
“Hot doggies,” said Vern. “I can taste that Marlboro right now.”
“He’s the pilgrim, all right. Can’t believe a old gray-hair like that dusted Carmody and B.J., but now’s the night he learn it don’t pay to poke at Grumley.”
“That’s holy Baptist writ, right there, cousin.”
Vern slipped his Glock .40 from the shoulder rig and edged back the slide to make certain a shell lay nested in the chamber, while Ernie, a wheel gunner with an engraved El Paso holster on his belt, did the same with his 2.5-inch-barreled, nickel-plated Python full of .357 CorBons.
Vern had figured it out.
“I say we wait a bit. Let him get settled in. Brush his teeth, check the lot through the window, make his calls, maybe have a sip or ten on that bottle of bourbon he done brung into the room, get all settled and snuggly, then we kick the door and empty our guns into the guy on the bed who won’t know what hit him, and then we head out fast. You okay with that, cousin?” Vern asked.
“Sounds like a plan,” said Ernie. “Should we call your daddy?”
“Don’t know about that. You look more like him than I do. It’s in the nose and the mouth.”
“I don’t like powder blue. It don’t bring out the color in my eyes. And I don’t wear no white fright wig so’s to look like that chicken-pushing Confederate colonel. My ma never said he was my daddy. He’s the only one.”
“Ooo, doggie, I see I done touched a nerve.”
“Hell, cousin, he’s probably both our daddies by both his sisters. Now what’s that tell you about the old man’s judgment? So why’d we want to call him?”
“I think my ma’s his daughter, not his sister. He do like to stir the soup, don’t he? Anyway, I’m thinking we ought to bring other boys in. Maybe someone with a shotgun to blow the door, then step aside.”
“He brings that shotgun, he ain’t gonna want to step aside. He’s going to want to put a couple of double-oughts into the guy in the bed, watch the fur and feathers fly. Then we ain’t done nothing but been good little scouts. It don’t do me no good. ‘You hear, someone dumped two Grumleys and old Vern Pye hisself went after and put the man down hard.’ I want that said about me, and I want a reward for three hours without a cigarette.”
“That’s cool by me.”
They settled in, waiting as the seconds dragged by. What, another hour? An hour was too long. Half an hour would do. But as the time crawled by, doubts appeared.
“You sure you don’t want to call the old man?”
Vern said, “He’d just want to come out hisself. Then we got to wait on him. We got to wait while the whole thing comes together. That’s two more hours without a smoke.”
“Or a poke.”
“You see anything pokable here now? No sir. Anyhow, I say, we do it, we’re gone, it’s over and it’s smoke time. Then we get back, then we go on the main job, then we get our swag, then we go about our business and put this here time in the prayer camp behind us. You can go back to your job in the warehouse, I can go home to one of my three wives, or maybe a stripper, or maybe pick me up something new and fresh.”
“Somewhere in there, can we throw in a shot of tequila? A shot of the worm, damn, that’d be just swell.”
“Yessir to that.”
“Yessir to the worm.”
But a few minutes later, it was Vern who said, “Hell. I just don’t know what’s nagging at me. Too long without a pop, my nerves are shot. Don’t want to make no mistake. Call him. Make certain.”
“Okay.”
“Keep it quiet now.”
Ernie slipped his cell out, ordered it to call the Reverend, and heard the rings, one, then two, then a thir—
“What is it, boy?”
“Sir, we got him. He just come in. Been in his room ’bout half hour now. Vern and me’s fixin’ to visit and leave hair and brains on the wall. Just want—”
“No, no, no,” said the old man. “Haven’t you heard? Already a shooting in town tonight, some meth dealer got wasted by Thelma. Man, you go and shoot the town up, it’s going to be like Dodge City here and we get the state cops and the FBI and all them other boys. They already here, I’m betting.”
“Daddy, I can nail him in ten—”
“No, boy. I changed my mind. Too much of a risk. We have a big job. Now here’s what I want. You and Vern, you head on into Bristol. I’m betting he’s staying at his girl’s apartment, and I got that address. You set up over there. After the big job is done, he’ll be there. That’s when you hit him and finish this business but good, in the Grumley way.”
“Yes sir. Does that mean, if we don’t go on the big job, we don’t git our share of—”
“No, it does not. You get full share. You just don’t meet up at the camp ’cause we’ll be long gone and spread to the four winds after Race Day. You call me a week down the road, and I’ll have your share for you. Just as promised.”
“Thank you, Daddy.”
“You follow me?”
“I do, sir.”
Ernie clicked off.
“Well?” said Vern.
“Smoke ’em if you got ’em,” said Ernie, lighting up a cigarette.
TWENTY-THREE
Swagger awarded himself a good night’s sleep, as he’d been running without it for two or three days. He’d gotten back from giving a deposition at the sheriff’s office around midnight. He jammed a chair under the doorknob to hang up any unexpected intruders, stuffed his pillow under the blankets to represent a fellow sleeping on a bed, and took his rest in the bathtub, boots on, with the Kimber .38 Super as a pillow. He had good, deep sleep, slightly broken by dreams where his father told him how disappointed he was in the man Bob had become. But this theme presented itself so often it didn’t bother him. It went with the privilege and the luck of being Earl Swagger’s son.
He awoke at ten, took a shower, rebandaged the cut on his knee, checked on the swelling around his eyes to see that it had gone down a little, took three ibus, then changed into new jeans and a new polo shirt. Next, rather than breakfast, came coffee brewed in the room’s coffee maker. Then he got down to it. His first call was to his wife.
“Well howdy,” she said, and he sensed from the joy in her voice something good had happened.
“Is she awake, Julie?”
“She was. For almost a whole minute. She sat up in bed, looked at me, and said, ‘Hi, Mom.’ Then she smiled at Miko and said, ‘Hi, little sister.’ Then she lay back down and went back to wherever.”
“Oh, great! Oh, that’s the best news! What do the doctors say?”
“It’s how they come back. It’s never, ‘Hi, what’s for breakfast? Let’s go to the movies.’ It’s a slow swim out of the dark place. She may have short periods of wakefulness for a few days going before she comes out of it completely. So they’re very, very optimistic. Sometimes the victims don’t remember a thing, but she knew who I was and who Miko was. Oh, it’s such good news. Can you come soon? It’d be s
o good if you were here when she really came out of it.”
“Well, damn, I’ll try. There are some things, some issues, I have to deal with.”
“There was more shooting last night out there.”
“I didn’t fire a shot. In fact, my gun was still in the trunk. I come through it all right, except for a cut knee and a swollen forehead. They’re even calling me a hero and some TV station wanted an interview. I told ’em to call my PR rep. Anyway, I’ll call back in a bit. It still ain’t—isn’t a good idea for you to call me. I just don’t know where I’ll be and the sound of the phone might not do me any good.”
“Okay. But please come soon. Oh, I am so excited.”
“The news is great, honey.”
The next thing he did was call Nick Memphis again. Nope, no answer. Where the hell was he? It wasn’t like Nick to disappear. Maybe he was overseas or something. Anyhow, Bob just left the same message. Then he called Terry, the grocery clerk, to see how he was doing, but got no answer. He left a message. A second later the call-back came.
“You all right?” Bob asked. “Holding up?”
“Sir, it’s been great. I been on the TV a bunch of times, I got calls from some producers in Hollywood, I been in all the papers. Is that okay? Am I handling this correct?”
“You ride this for all it’s worth, you hear. You owe me nor nobody nothing. You leverage it for all you can get out of it. If you want, I won’t never call again, Terry.”
“No, no, sir, call me. I want to know what’s going on and I may need your advice. Also, I feel guilty being called a hero—”
“Which is the true mark of a hero. All heroes feel that way. I’ve known a few. But don’t kid yourself, you stood and fought against two armed men, you took one of ’em down, put him on the floor and really won the fight while all I did was squeeze a trigger a few times. You are a hero, son. Even if you don’t believe it. The rest is meaningless details.”