Night of Thunder

But for now, Nikki drove her Volvo down Tennessee’s State Route 421 from Mountain City, Johnson County’s county seat, twenty-odd miles out of Bristol. She drove carefully as the road wound down the slope of a mountain called Iron, switchbacking this way and that to eat up the steep elevation. She knew she had to be wary, for it was full dark, visibility was limited-sometimes interstate rigs came piling up on the verge of chaos and hurt, taking a shorter, emptier route at night between podunk destinations-and to her life was still one great adventure and she wanted to enjoy every single second of it.

She checked the speedometer and saw she was under forty, which seemed about right, and the world beyond her windshield consisted of two cones of light which illuminated the next 250 or so feet, a narrow ribbon on asphalt, and curves that came and went with breathtaking abruptness. She was an excellent driver, possibly because she’d studied the nature of vehicles in space so assiduously in her western girlhood where, besides horses, she’d spent years in tough-as-nails go-karting and had the medals and scars to prove it, as well as several roomfuls of trophies and ribbons and photos of herself. The girl in the pictures was beautiful as always but equally as always slightly disheveled, and usually posed in a caged car about quarter-size. In the pictures always were her mother, a handsome, fair woman who looked as if she stepped out of a Howard Hawks movie and should have been named Slim, and her father, whose military heritage seemed inscribed in the leather of a Spartan shield that comprised the perpetually tanned hide of his smileless face.

Down the mountain she went at a carefully controlled and agilely sustained forty per, her mind alight with possibility. She’d been in the county seat all day and talked to dozens of people, the subject being her specialty as a crime reporter, methamphetamine issues. Meth-called “crystal,” called “ice,” called “killer dust,” called “purple death,” called “angel breath,” called the “whispering crazies,” called whatever-haunted Johnson County, Tennessee, as it haunted most of rural America. It was cheap, it was more or less easily made (though it did have a tendency to explode in the kitchen labs of the trailers and shacks where it was manufactured), and it hit like a sledgehammer. People loved the first few minutes of the high, and didn’t remember the last few minutes, where they put their newborn-in the oven or down the well or just on the clothesline. They didn’t remember beating their spouse to death with a hoe or a brick, or wandering down the interstate, shotgun in hand, shooting at those strange things roaring by that turned out to be cars. People got themselves in a whole mess of trouble on meth. Not after every usage but often enough so that lots of ugliness happened. She’d seen families sundered, hideous crimes, law enforcement compromised by the abundant profit, dealers shot or slashed to death in alleyways or cornfields, the whole spectrum of big city dope woe played out in no-name towns the New York Times had never heard of and no movies had ever been made about. She was the scourge’s scribe, its Homer, its Melville, its Stephen Crane, even if no one had ever heard of her, either.

As she drove, she puzzled over several eccentricities her daylong trip had uncovered. The nominal reason for the trip was to go on a meth raid with Sheriff Reed Wells, the ex-Ranger officer who’d returned home to clean up the county, as the saying went, and who had talked the Justice Department into leaning on the Department of Defense and had somehow acquired a much-beaten but still-viable Blackhawk helicopter to permit scouting and airborne tactical consideration. In fact, she’d spent the morning airborne, sitting next to the handsome fellow, as he maneuvered his troops down brushy mountain paths, and coordinated a neat strike on a rusting trailer, which in fact did turn out to house a small-scale meth lab. Nikki had seen the culprit, a down-on-his-luck mountaineer named Cubby Holden, arrested, his apparatus hauled out into the yard and smashed by husky young deputies dressed up like Tommy Tactical action figures. They loved every second of the game, leaving behind a sallow woman, two wormy kids, and a hell of a mess in the yard.

A typical triumph for Sheriff Wells, yet the problem was that meth prices, despite his many strategic successes, stayed stable in the Tri-cities area. (The second and third cities along with Bristol were Johnson City-oddly, not a part of Johnson County-and King-sport.) She knew this from interviews with addicts at a state rehab clinic in Mountain City. Kid told her he paid thirty-five dollars a hit yesterday and two years ago, it was thirty-five dollars a hit.