Night of Thunder

Attempt at murder by professional driver. But what’s the hard evidence that it’s a “professional” driver? The interpretation of two expert race people on some aerial photos. They’re not professional accident investigators whose word could be trusted. Maybe they sensed my need to believe and without meaning to, fed into it, to make me happy. But they were so convincing on the subject of cornering, and clearly had a mountain’s worth of experience at that arcane art. That is my best evidence.

A second though admittedly unspecific attempt at the hospital. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. The Pinkerton security man, who seemed solid enough, just stated that some “doctors” tried to gain entrance to Nikki’s room. No one ever saw them again, no one had ever seen them before. Still memory and chaos play tricks on people’s minds, and given that it was a big, busy hospital, it’s easy to understand how it could have been legitimate.

The possibly missing pages and the destruction of the recorder and laptop. Also: no Bible. Again, interpretation, not fact. She could very easily have torn the pages out herself, and the electronic items could very easily have been smashed up in the crash. The Bible could have been so generic that it wasn’t recorded as hers, or maybe it was thrown clear of the crash.

The odd sense of perfection at the Church camp, as if it had been oh-so-hastily cleaned up, and Reverend Grumley’s seeming to fish for information on Nikki’s progress while mildly cooperating. Again, it was the nature of religious establishments to keep themselves extremely tidy, although the skeet trap in the shed was an unusual touch and it might well double as a kind of subterfuge under which a lot of gunfire could be explained away innocently, just in case of curious visitors such as himself and Nikki. Not completely unlikely but again provocative.

The strange tracks in the dust. They reminded him of something, but what? And why couldn’t he remember it? Where had he seen such tracks? On the other hand, why were they so strange? Could have been some kind of cart wheeled out for maintenance of the skeet trap, could have been the gardener’s cart for-but a gardener’s cart would be wider. Why would it be so narrow?

And finally:

The fact that he was being followed. Maybe that was the best thing. It couldn’t be Thelma’s department, because they didn’t have the manpower to detach two boys to play tag with an annoying stranger all day long. But two boys had been playing tag with him all day long, ever since his visit to the sheriff’s office. So someone in the department had a contact with someone he shouldn’t have. The tail car was a Ford Crown Vic, beige. He’d yet to make direct eye contact with it, because a sniper develops instincts for when he himself is being hunted. Bob had the experience to know that you never let your hunter know that you know he’s hunting you, so that in actuality, you’re hunting him. So when the prayer camp showed up all clean and sparkly, it was no surprise, because the boys following him in the car-they had passed him, and he knew they were waiting around another two or three turns in the road-had seen him heading down 167. They’d called ahead to the Reverend, who got his boys off on a quick and hasty clean-up, so that when he got there he’d be welcomed warmly, and nothing of suspicion would be around.

Okay, he thought, this is an interesting game, all of a sudden. So what I will do is go back to my room at the Mountain Empire and set a spell, and after dark, I will sneak out a back way, and cut open their tires, and then, unfollowed, I will head back here and see what I have got and-

His cell rang.

He answered, hoping it was Julie with good news about Nikki, but saw an unknown number in the display.

“Swagger.”

“Mr. Swagger, it’s Charlie Wingate, you know, at Mountain Computers.”

“Yes, Charlie.”

“Well, I did some work and couldn’t come up with much, but I did get it to print out some script and I managed to decode a little of it.”

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.