Night of Thunder

“Being recognized is overrated, Gunny, let me tell you. And most of the folks who do just want something from you, from a signature to an investment. They all seem to have fancy haircuts, too. Don’t trust a man with a fancy haircut, all smoothed up like cake frosting, you know. Hell, I just drive cars around in a circle, don’t even get to go nowhere! I end up right where I started, what’s the goddamn point!”

Bob smiled at the joke and the boy tried another one. “If this don’t work out, I guess I’ll head back to the gas station.”

“Son, from the looks of it, it’s working out swell.”

The boy grinned, pleased to have impressed a genuine hero.

“So far, so good. The cars don’t crunch up so much no more, and I take crunching up seriously because it put my granddaddy in a wheelchair for the last sixty years of his life. And they don’t burn much no more neither, that’s the best thing. My daddy burned to death in one, so I take burning seriously. Anyhow, since you don’t want to tell me how damned great I am, that tells me you ain’t no ass-kiss haircut here who wants free tix. Or no corporate glad hander wants me at a cocktail party with some of the clients where I stand around all bashful-like and the boys come up and pet me like some kind of cuddly critter. Hate all that shit, but it is a part of the business. So we are getting off to a good start. Now you tell me how I can help you. I’m guessing it don’t involve putting on the firesuit and shaking a lot of hands.”

“Nor putting frosting in your hair, nor getting petted much.”

“I’m liking this better n’ better.”

“Yes sir, well, I hope I won’t take too much of your time.”

“Let me get Red Nichols in here, my crew chief. He’s forgot more than I know. He was my daddy’s crew chief too.”

“Sure.”

While Matt MacReady got out a cell to call Red, a beautiful girl-say, the kid was doing well!-came out and offered Bob a cold drink. Bob took a bottle of juice, and pretty soon the door opened, and a man Bob’s age, wrinkled and greasy, came in.

“Red, meet Bob Lee Swagger, of the real USMC.”

“Mr. Swagger, an honor, sir. I was a motor mechanic late in Vietnam and I heard of the famous Bob the Nailer.”

“That old bastard is long gone. It’s just an old man with a bad leg here today.”

“Matt, you realize he run just as hard as you, difference is, people shooting at him. So you mind your manners around him.”

“I will,” said Matt. “I already have Mr. Swagger marked down as a serious southern man, not a haircut with a soft-gal handshake.”

“Well, let’s see if we can help him some.”

And so Bob laid it out, quickly as he could, free of nuance. What had happened to his daughter, what the police made of it, his own worries, his decision to spend $2,700 to have Dewey’s photo-recon the road, the arrival of the pictures over a fax transmission a few hours ago.

“So my hope is, you can look at the skid marks and make sense of them for me. It looks like chicken scratches to me. I figure you’ve seen skid marks before, you know how cars behave at high speed, brakes on, brakes off, how they skid, turn, wobble, go over. So you can tell me what happened. If the cops are right, and this is some hopped-up teenager, then I can rest easy. They’ll get him, I’m sure. If not, I have to dig deeper and make preparations. I will protect my daughter.”

“I believe you will. Is there any reason to expect anyone might try to kill your daughter?”

“It’s not inconceivable. She was investigating a criminal enterprise in a county known for its corruption and drug trade. That would be one thing. Another would be my involvement, over the years, in a number of situations where violence sometimes came into play. Those episodes may have made me some powerful enemies. So it is possible that someone is trying to strike at me through her. That one just can’t be ruled out. I’ve been around enough not to believe in coincidence.”

“We don’t believe in it either,” said Red. “Out here, on the track where it’s all happening at close to two hundred per, we don’t never believe in coincidence. So let’s see what you’ve got there, Mr. Swagger.”

The boy and the old man examined the faxes, not the clearest photos ever taken, but Mr. Dewey had gotten pretty damned low and he had a real fine camera. Bob felt he got every cent’s worth of the twenty-seven-hundred-dollar dent he’d put in his credit card.

“What you’ll see right away is two tracks. One is my daughter’s Volvo, though she doesn’t come into the picture till late in the sequence. Hers are much lighter and narrower.”

“Yep, he’s sailing on some heavy, wide tread, no doubt about it.”

“You can see where he tries to knock her this way and that, you can see how she gets away from him twice, and how she got enough down the hill that so when he did finally whack her off the road, the incline wasn’t so steep and the car never rolled. They say that saved her life.”

“I think it did,” said Red.

They didn’t talk for a while, except in some kind of code.