Night of Thunder

He disconnected, and almost before he could put the phone down, it buzzed again. He checked the number and realized it was the private number of Matt MacReady, the young NASCAR racer calling him! Wasn’t tomorrow the big race?

“Yes, Matt?”

“Hello, Gunny. How are you?”

“Only a week older’n last time I saw you, but it feels like a hundred years.”

“Time do race, don’t it? Only thing goes faster than my USMC Charger.”

“Only thing.”

“Anyhow, been thinking and looking and maybe I have something for you.”

“Go ahead, son.”

“Wheel marks, metal close together, part of the NASCAR racing operation? Well there is something. You see it all the time in the pits, it’s everywhere, what’s the word, upbequious?”

“Hmm, don’t know that word.”

“Red says it’s ‘ubiquitous.’ That’s what it is, ubiquitous.”

“Well, damn. Hope I don’t forget it. Ubiquitous. Everywhere.”

“What it is is, it’s the track of our hydraulic jacks.”

“For tire changing?”

“Sir, yes sir. It ain’t all the driver. Part of the art of winning at this game is teamwork on the car. I have a good crew, Red’s got ’em trained up real good. They get me gassed, watered, maybe oiled, and re-tubed in less than fifteen seconds. It’s like choreography, the way they work a car in the pits on Race Day. And the key to the tire change, of course, is the jack. It’s a big heavy dog, solid steel and it’s hydraulic, built of cylinders full of lube. Weighs about fifty pounds. Runs on steel wheels about an inch wide. You have your biggest, strongest stud as your jack man. He gets it over the wall, guides it fast to the wheel well, jacks the car off the ground. Meanwhile, your air-wrench guy de-lugs the tire even as the jack is lifting it high enough to clear. The wrench guy clears out, a guy comes in and grabs the lugs; that’s his job, his only job, to keep track of the lugs. Two other boys, the tire men, pull the burned-out tire off the axle, roll it away, and slam on another one, which two other boys have rolled to them. The wrench-man airblasts the lugs tight, and the jackman lowers the car, and the whole team of them crash hell for leather to the next tire and repeat the same thing. They can get the car re-rubbered in fifteen seconds, and if you look, after a race, win, lose, draw, or crash and burn, their hands and wrists and especially fingers are all cut to hell. But they’re tough boys, they don’t much care.”

“Got it. And they roll that thing through oil and water and it leaves tracks, maybe six to eight inches apart, everywhere on the tarmac, in the pits, everywhere?”

“I’d be willing to bet, sir.”

“So if you saw a tangle of ’em, you’d think, someone’s practicing a wheel change?”

“Well, that’s what I’d think.”

Hmmmm. Swagger tried to press this new information into the pattern he’d assembled. Tire change. Someone was practicing a speed-tire change, after the fashion of NASCAR. Now why the hell would that be? The boys setting this thing up weren’t racers, weren’t running a pit crew. What’d they need a speed-tire change for? What vehicle came with the wrong tires in place and had to be re-rubbered fast? What would be the point of the new tires? Well, only way it makes sense is if the first set of tires is burned out. Now what would burn out a set of tires? Were they going to steal a racing car? Those babies were expensive but he didn’t-

Then he thought, no, no, it’s not burned out. You change the tires in order to change the performance profile of the vehicle. It’s tired-up one way, for one purpose, and now you re-rubber it and you use it for some other, presumably unusual purpose. Maybe that somehow linked with this fit of exploding trucks around the area? Maybe they were deviling up the engine as well for that purpose. But what truck could it be, what new purpose could it have?

“You still there? Does that help?”

“It sure does. Can’t see just how yet, but I’m getting pieces in a row and pretty soon a pattern will be there. Now let me ask you something. This here’s a long shot. Does the biblical passage Mark 2:11 about Jesus curing a crippled man mean anything to you? Would it fit into anything along these lines?”

“We really weren’t people of the book, Gunny. Some drivers are but not us. So no, it doesn’t mean anything to me, and I don’t think it connects to Big Racing in any way.”

“Okay, well, thanks. Really appreciate your taking the time with all you got do do. You’re a good fella, I can tell.”

“My pleasure.”

“All you must have to do and you gave me a hand. That’s marine all the way.”

“Fact is, we don’t do much day before. We’ll run the car this afternoon for a last minute check, I have a signing at my retail trailer in NASCAR Village that’ll be a madhouse but will move a lot of souvenir hats, and other than that it’s just relaxing and trying to keep the mind clear.”

“Well, good luck. I know you’re good enough, I just hope the breaks go your way.”

“Can’t control that, so never worry about it,” said the boy.