It was late; the place was nearly empty. It was big enough, however, so that the concept of “stranger” could apply. No nurse, for instance, could know all the medical personnel by name or face and could therefore be counted upon to yield before slickness, sureness of authority, and the steady guidance and charisma of an experienced confidence man.
It’ll be easy.
No one suspects a thing.
The girl is an accident victim, not a murder survivor.
No security, no suspicion, no fear.
Thus the two men ambled happily, making eye contact, issuing warm “Hellos” and “Say, there, how’s the boy?”s as they coursed through the fourth floor’s spotless hallways. They even stopped now and then for a cup of coffee, to assure a patient on a walker, and to examine bedside charts. They took pulses, looked into eyes, felt throats, just like on the television doctor shows.
When they reached Nikki, it would be a simple matter. Vern, a little brighter and that much more ambitious, was to calmly reach into his pocket and remove a number seven hypodermic filled with air. He had practiced on the skin of a grapefruit all afternoon. He was to look for a blue artery that led to and not from the heart, plump up the flesh just a bit, gently inject the needle, draw some blood to make certain he’d hit the mother lode, then cram the plunger forward. This would put a bubble the size of a small nuclear missile in her bloodstream and it would jet to her heart and explode it. Meanwhile, Ernie would race to the nurses’ station yelling “Get an arrest team STAT! She’s lost rhythm!”
Then they’d quietly turn and continue their rounds.
The trick, as Vern had patiently explained to Ernie, was to do nothing suddenly. If you moved fast, if your body had a shred of fear or hesitation, it would register with witnesses who were otherwise oblivious. It was the first key of the con, to sell the mark on your authenticity, which was always done with gentle insistence, assuming correct subtextual details. For example: If you were on a job like this, you made damned certain your hands were very clean, almost pink, along with your ears, your face, any visible patch of skin. Docs become docs because they hate filth, disease, laziness, clumsiness. It’s how they feel like God. So to pass as one you had to play by the rules of the game. Another issue Vern was very big on was shoes. What kind of shoes do doctors wear? People notice shoes even if they don’t realize they do. Thus they’d parked for a bit outside the hospital in the staff lot, and noted men of a certain age, whom they took to be docs and not orderlies of some sort (your younger fellas), and noted a lot of Rockport wingtips. So they drove to the mall—not to Mr. Sam’s where all the shoes would have been made by Wah Ming Chow when she wasn’t hand-cutting powder blue suits for the Reverend—found a Rockport store, and paid for a pair each, one cordovan wing-tips, the other less fashionable, beige walkers. They scuffed the shoes against the asphalt of the mall parking lot because the docs were parsimonious and wore each pair unto death.
Now, on those new-but-old Rockports, they slowly approached the girl’s room. It was so close; it was two rooms away, which they’d discovered after an earlier quick stride down the hallway, reading names on the doors while feigning to look for a drink of water.
Here was where your lesser cons would give up the ghost. They wouldn’t play it out straight. They’d see that the room was so damned close and that the nurses were sitting at their stations on the floor without paying any attention at all to them and they’d sort of go into git-’er-done panic. They’d go straight to the girl’s room, do the deed, and get out of Dodge. Yeah, but that’s where it goes wrong. An orderly is on the way to the john and he happens to look down the hall and he sees something he doesn’t hardly ever see, which is a doc moving fast. Docs don’t move fast, not unless it’s the emergency ward and some poor fool is bleeding out or going into advanced vapor lock. Docs have too much dignity to move fast. So he goes to investigate and walks in and sees the needle going into her arm and he says, Hey what? and Ernie has to pop him with his nickle-plated Python 2.5 inch, and the whole thing goes up in flames, and Vern and Ernie end up at the wrong end of another needle somewhere down the line.
No sir, the Reverend didn’t raise no fools for sons or cousins or whatever.
So they played it out by good con discipline, riding the gag hard. They dipped in on Mr. X and saw that he was fine, then had a nice visit with Mrs. Y and noted that her color had improved and got a nice smile out of her for the comment, even if she had no idea who in hell they were, until at last, after a quick check on Mr. Z, who was comatose as well, they reached the doorway of SWAGGER, NIKKI, ACCIDENT VICTIM, and were about to—
“Say—”
They looked up, puzzled but not riled.
“Say there, excuse me, gentlemen.”
The speaker was a man in a blue suit and a crewcut, followed by another gentleman in a black suit but the same crewcut. He wasn’t a doc, as he was moving too fast and looked a little out of place. And when he got there, he was out-of-breath.
“Whoa,” he said, “more running than I’m used to, plus a terrible drive over from Knoxville. Anyway, sorry, don’t mean to be a bother, we just got here.”
“You’re?”
“Sorry again, Ron Evers, Pinkerton Detective Agency, Knoxville office. We’re setting up security for this patient, here, let me show you this.”
He struggled goofily, unsure to be busting doctors, but better safe than sorry, and he pulled out a comic-book badge just like Deputy Dawg’s and some kind of photo ID with an official PINKERTON imprimatur.
“I’ll have to see some ID before I can allow entrance.”
“Son, I’m Dr. Torrence, I’m on my rounds,” said Vern smoothly.
“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.
Okay, sweetie, he told himself. If this is what you want, I will try and get it back for you.
He sat in a conference room—glass-walled, affording a view of the newsroom and the staff, right next to the managing editor’s office—as Jim Gustofson, the managing editor, a tough gal named Jennifer something, and Nikki’s immediate editor, briefed him on what she’d been up to.
The gist of it was that Nikki was the cops reporter, and her specialty was the crystal meth craze that now gripped rural America, as it played across northeastern Tennessee and southwestern Virginia. She’d done a prize-winning story on the children of crystal meth distributors, who are put in foster homes when their parents are arrested. She knew the sheriffs of most of the seven immediate counties, she knew a lot of the knock-down-the-door cops, she knew the social services people, the welfare people, the educators, for the problem impacted all these areas. The stuff was pure shit; its only advantage was that it was cheap and the high it granted was intense if short lived. Once in a while you put your baby in the oven or ran over your grandmother with a lawnmower on the impression she was a troll halfling from the realm of Zelazny. But generally, like dope everywhere of every kind, it made its users useless slackers who sat around all day figuring out how to get a few nickels together for the next fix, or kitchen chemists in trailer parks who tried to cook it up themselves, all too often blowing a crater into the earth and themselves straight to hell. A few shrewdies had big labs that made what real money was available in the down-home heroin racket.
“She was preparing another big story on the shape of the problem in the immediate Tri-cities area. She’d been visiting the local police entities, trying to get a sense of what she was doing.”
“Sir, are these people dangerous?”
“Well, as they say, they only kill their own kind. Turf wars, the occasional hardhead who goes for the assault rifle when the raid team shows, bitterness over price hikes or debts owed. You know that easy money, stupid people, and hard times have a way of creating misery. Your daughter was the witness to all that. She’s damned good at her job. She’ll be moving to a bigger city soon, I’m betting. It has been a pleasure to work with her and watch her grow.”
“Yes sir. But was there anything specific about Johnson County? Some particular area she was looking at. I think I want to go poke around. It’s my nature. Annoys the hell out of people, I know, but can’t be helped.”
“You don’t agree with the police report? Thelma Fielding is a good cop.”
“She is and I liked her very much. It just don’t—excuse me—doesn’t sit right with me. That’s why I have moved her to another hospital.” He didn’t bother to tell them it was in another city. Reporters talk, people listen, that much he knew.
“Yes, she said she might have to go back,” said the woman editor, Jennifer. “Johnson County is so far from everything it’s a kind of a bad joke around here about the cultural tendencies of the rural working class, or these days in this economy, non-working class.”
“You mean the trailer trash, ma’am. I’m proud to say I am one of them pure and simple, but you don’t need to pull punches with me. I know they make the best soldiers, farmers, and family people in the world, but that same stubbornness and willingness to risk makes them sick-bad-ugly-tempered boils on the butt of humanity if they choose the dark side.”
“We’d never put that in the paper, but yes, that’s what we’re talking about. So the meth problem is particularly bad in Johnson. That’s where you see your most grotesque crimes and some of the ugliest violence. But last year they elected a reformer for sheriff, a county man named Colonel Reed Wells.”
“I have heard the name.”
“Handsome guy, famous because he was a Ranger officer in the war in Baghdad and won some kind of medal. A star?”
“Silver Star?” Bob asked.
“Yes, I think that’s right? Were you in the army, Mr. Swagger? You have something of the military about you.”
“Not in the army, no ma’am. I did a spell in another branch.”
“Well, it shows. I wish some more of my reporters had the discipline and the organization that the military teaches so well. Anyhow, Reed Wells was in the forefront of the fight against the drug. He’s your dynamo type. To the accompaniment of much publicity, he has acquired a helicopter from the army on some kind of Justice Department grant that passes surplus material on to police agencies. He’s organized a first-rate raid team, all very gung-ho. You know, guys in black with hoods and machine guns. He searches for the labs from the air most days, then coordinates with ground, then he hits ’em from above just as the ground team hits ’em from two sides. Very commandolike. Nikki said she felt like she was in Vietnam, though I don’t know how she could know anything about Vietnam.”
“Maybe she saw some old books,” said Bob.
“But here’s the thing. Johnson County leads the region in the number of meth labs raided, the number of arrests, the number of prosecutions. But the odd part is, the price of meth in Johnson hasn’t gone up, it’s stayed the same.
“Now why would that be? If the supply is drying up, the price would rise. Yet Nikki had discovered from someone in an abuse program that the stuff is just as plentiful and just as eco
nomical. That means that either a) outside sources were bringing it in, or b) there were a lot more meth labs than anybody thought, or c) there was some kind of superlab, capable of taking up the slack, that nobody had discovered yet. Finding the superlab: There’s your Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting, and there’s your ticket to the Washington Post.”
“I see,” said Bob. “Tell me, if I wanted to figure out what she did the last day before the event, what would I look for? What does a reporter carry? A notebook, I’m guessing.”
“She had a notebook, yes. Most reporters today have laptops that they carry with them. Then they can plug their notes straight into our computer system, and it saves copying and reduces mistakes. So there should be a computer, too. And of course a cellphone. It might have numbers registered that she called that day. The police would have recovered all those things from the accident site, though of course they may be damaged or whatever. Or they may be temporarily impounded, as a part of Thelma’s investigation. But Thelma’s a decent person; if you want your daughter’s things back, I’m sure she’ll cooperate.”
“You must have some sort of list of names and numbers out there—people involved in the meth business, I don’t mean dealers, I mean all the social services people, the drug rehab programs, that sort of thing. She might have talked to them.”
“I can get you an official list. I’ll talk to Bill Carter, he did cops before Nikki got here, and I know he gave her access to his Rolodex. I’ll get a list from him.”
“That would be very helpful.”
“Mr. Swagger,” said Jim Gustofson, “I can certainly appreciate your anger at the inability of the sheriff’s department to bring this thing to a close quickly. But I’m wondering if you really want to go up there on your own and start demanding answers and kicking in doors.”
“I can’t just sit around. It’s not my nature, sir.”
“With all due respect, sir, I see where Nikki’s aggressive nature as a reporter comes from. But I would caution all my reporters not to take chances and I have to say the same to you. The people up there don’t like strangers, and they have, as has been noted, violent proclivities. You could find yourself in a lot of trouble fast. I’d hate to see a tragedy become a double tragedy and you end up on the front page of our newspaper.”