Night of Thunder

“So sorry, doctor, really I am, but I’ll have to get an administrator here to verify you. Pain in the ass, I know, and it’s your hospital, and all that, but her father hired our firm and his instructions were very clear. No entrance without verification. I’ve already liaisoned with hospital security, if you’re wondering. I’ll call the hospital admin right now,” and he lifted a cell.

Something scalding went off inside Vern’s head. In his younger days, he would have hit the young security guy in the throat, then kicked the other in the balls. Then he would have kicked each in the head until he was sure they were dead. Then he would have killed the girl with the knife he carried. But Vern was mellower now. Even as he felt the frustration build and build like a steam engine about to blow, he kept it together.

“Well,” he said, “no need for that. I’ll go get the duty nurse and she’ll get this straightened out.”

“Yes sir, that’s fine.”

“Come on, Jack,” he said to his cousin or brother or whatever kin Ernie was to him, “we’ll get the nurse. I hate it when procedure is violated.”

And the two Grumleys walked ever so slowly down the hall in their Rockports to the elevator and waited ever so slowly for it to come, Vern thinking, I need to kill something or get laid, preferably by a kid, fast!

SEVEN

He called her from Knoxville the next afternoon.

“Where have you been? My God, what is going on?”

“Sorry, it’s been busy. She’s fine, or as good as can be expected. The brain work is all fine, she’s just unconscious. They say they usually come out of these things in a week or two, and recovery is almost always 100 percent. So it’s looking very positive here, medically.”

“Bob, I called the hospital, she’s been moved.”

“That’s my doing. The doctors agreed it was medically sound, and so I’ve got her in a private hospital here in Knoxville.”

“What is-”

“Uh, there was an incident.”

“I don’t-”

“Unclear, and maybe I’m overreacting. But the Pinkerton agent-”

“Pinkerton agent?”

“I did some checking and I’m not sure I buy the story about the redneck kid in the pickup anymore. At least not wholly. So I hired Pinkertons to provide 24/7 plain-clothes security, three teams of two. Anyhow, as the first team was going on duty, they stopped a couple of doctors on their rounds. No big deal, nobody thought anything about it, but the docs went off to get administrative authorization and never returned. So I asked, and nobody knows who they were. Nobody got a good look at them. Only evidence they were doctors was the green scrubs and the nametags, but hell, anyone can buy a pair of surgical scrubs. It didn’t sit right.”

“So you moved her. That was wise.”

“I think it’s okay if you fly in now. I don’t want to give you the name of the hospital until you’re in town. But I’d stay on the north side, in a suburb. She needs her mother. She looks so sad, all banged up, all those wires and tubes, so still. Breaks my heart.”

“She’s strong. She’ll come through this, I know it.”

“Okay, you have my number. When you get in here and get booked in a hotel, call me, and I’ll come by. Meanwhile, I’ve got some nosing around to do.”

“What is it?”

He told her at length about the tire treads, the interpretation of the NASCAR fellows, the general indifference of the sheriff’s department, the intensifying traffic and crowding as the big race day approached, and the town filling up with campers, celebrants, drinkers, rowdy kids, and other assorted pilgrims.

“So I mean to look into it. I know you think I’m paranoid but-”

He was surprised at what came next.

“You listen to me a moment. You have gone on many dangerous adventures, leaving me to raise the child, and now I have another child to raise. Yes, I think you can turn paranoid. But this time I am paranoid too, because it is my daughter involved. So you’re not working off some crazy sense of honor or something you think you owe your long-dead father or something left over from a war nobody remembers. You’re working for me. If you think someone tried to kill our daughter, Bob, then you find them and you stop them. You stop them from harming our daughter or anyone’s daughter.”

“I will do that,” he said. “Oh, and one more thing.”

“Yes?”

“Bring some guns.”

EIGHT

Bob didn’t really approve of newspapers and had certainly never been in the office of one before. But that’s what his daughter had wanted, and as he looked at the city room, with its ranks of messy desks, its knots of insouciant young people, its phone obsessives, its listless copy editors, its harassed junior editors, its earnest techies to service the computers in mysterious fashion, he wondered why it had meant so much to her, ever since she was a child. There was nothing in his family to account for such a leaning; maybe there was a writer tucked away in some branch of Julie’s, but he’d never heard of such a thing. But he knew this: She loved it, she lived, dreamed, breathed, and ate it.