Night of Thunder

He’d moseyed about the mall in Johnson City, eyeing teenage girls, especially the ones with them little bubble asses. You know, no real bounce to ’em yet, but tight, kind of bursting against the cotton of the shorts and-He saw a fellow just about his own age, height, and coloring, close enough to pass as Vern in thumbnail photography but not nearly as handsome. He jostled the fellow in a knot of other shoppers leaving the big K, smiled, excused himself, and walked away with one wallet but without another one. His fingers were that fast and that good. What was that all about, you might ask? Vern knew that what gave away the stolen wallet, sooner rather than later, was the absence of the weight. So when he lifted leather, he replaced leather, usually with a few fives and ones in it. That way the mark wouldn’t note the absence of the weight on his hip. Later, when he reached for his wad to pay for something, that’s when he’d make the discovery that he’d been boosted. There were a few instances, though, where a guy had actually pulled the new wallet out, plucked out a five, paid, put the wallet back, and went about his business! Some people don’t pay no attention at all.

The truck, yellow with two up front and eight in back, came from Penske and was a 7-stroke Ford diesel mover, as had been all the rest of the trucks (well, Fords, not movers necessarily), though this was an ’06 when the others had been ’04, ’01, and even a ’99, which Brother Richard had not been able to use because its electronics varied.

So now the three of them-Brother Richard, Vern, and his ever-present sidekick and buddy, Ernie Grumley, sat in Vern’s very nice Cadillac Eldorado along a completely deserted road in the Cherokee National Forest a few miles west of Shady Valley. Vern and Ernie smoked their Marlboros, enjoying the mellowness and getting ready for the show. The yellow Penske renter sat nearby.

“Looks perfect,” said Brother Richard.

“As they always are, Brother Richard, I do good clean work, you know.”

Vern was anxious that he not be confused with the lower class of Grumley, whom Brother Richard was known to despise.

“Okay, I’m guessing under sixty seconds today.”

“Can’t bet agin’ you, Brother.”

“Got that stopwatch?”

“Yessir.”

“Okay, watch me go.”

“All set.”

“You call it, Ernie.”

“Yessir. Ready…set…go!”

And with that Brother Richard was off. Besides certain tools, he carried with him a strange rig that consisted of a small, green plastic box with “Xzillaraider 7.3” imprinted on it, a swirl of heavy wire with electronic interface clips at one end, with a more complex swirl of lighter wire-one for power, one for grounding-a bypass, and a switch connecter. It was the Xzillaraider 7.3 unit from Quadzilla, of Fort Worth, a truck performance shop known in the biz as the cleverest in coming up with ways to gin up the power on a diesel engine. There were other techniques, of course. You could even cut the diesel fuel in the injector by forcing propane from a tank and get a significant power swell. But who wanted to be messing with propane in the middle of a gunfight? Not Richard, no sir. So the Xzillaraider was the best for his purposes. It was a genius-level mesh of electronics that essentially took over the brain of the diesel in the Penske and increased performance parameters. It fed more fuel to the engine. More fuel meant it burned hotter, and there was your power upgrade, sometimes up to 120 extra horsepower and a torque gain of 325 foot-pounds. The problem was, you had to monitor the temp, because if you didn’t, you could melt or ignite the engine. The additional problem was that Richard wasn’t going to have time to mount temp gauges and all the wires of the gizmo, not in a gunfight. His problem was to find exactly how few wires he could connect and still get the maximum power boost without bothering with all the safety devices. It just had to run for a few minutes, and after that, it didn’t matter if the truck burned or not.