He told her his story, each discovery at a time, each event at a time, including Mark 2:11.
When he told her he’d killed two men the night before, her gaze showed nothing. She had changed. It was her daughter; her rage and instinct had been aroused and now she understood that she could not allow anyone—anyone—to harm her daughter.
“You can’t go to the police?” she finally asked. “Wouldn’t that be the wisest thing?”
“Well, I’m not sure how they figure into it. I think this Detective Thelma Fielding is okay, but the sheriff is a pompous son of a bitch with his eye on something else. Loves publicity, won’t stop talking about his time in the war. But the real problem with them is they got it all figured out to be a bad kid on a binge, looking for somebody to squash. That’s all they see, that’s what they want to see, that’s the file it’s in. They think it’ll just be a day or so till somebody snitches him out, and meanwhile they got other fish to fry. So if I go to them, I have some kind of institutional inertia working against me to begin with. Then I have to explain why I ran out after the shooting, what my suspicions are, and their minds aren’t equipped to deal with any of that yet. It’s too much information, too fast, and it challenges the way they do business. It’s like the Marine Corps used to be on snipers. They just don’t want to know about it. Took a war to change their minds.”
“What about the FBI? Can you call Nick Memphis? He’d drop anything to help you. At least he can put Bureau resources behind you, and your learning curve will be much quicker.”
“Hmmm,” said Bob. “You sure you haven’t done this before? That’s a great idea. No, that didn’t occur to me because I been so goddamn caught up in my own drama and not thinking straight. Yeah, I will call him first thing, and see what he can get me.”
“Can you handle this? You’re older, Bob. Maybe not so fast. Maybe your mind is a little slower than it once was, as well as your hands. And maybe this time you’ll run out of luck, you know that. You’ll end up face down, shot by some kid with a .22 who has no idea he’s just murdered Achilles.”
“I may run out of luck, sure. And I ain’t too happy to be a hunted man once again, and to have to go to guns once again. But it’s come, and I told you, I will do with it what I must. I need you behind me.”
“But it seems since Japan you’ve had doubts, even fears. I know. You thought I was asleep, but many’s the night you woke with a start, all asweat. In this kind of game, you can’t have doubts. You’ve said that many times.”
“If I was working for a government or a sheriff’s office, I might have doubts and they might get me killed on the job. But I am working for my daughter. So those doubts don’t count. They went away. I have no doubts, and last night, it was the same old Bob Lee back, gun in hand, shooting for blood, making the right moves. I do need one thing. I need you behind me.”
“I am behind you.” She reached into her purse and pulled out a set of car keys with a Hertz emblem on the ring. “It’s a blue Prism, Tennessee LCD 109953. I parked on the fourth floor, where there’s fewer cars, but not on the roof, where somebody in an office could see you. You pull up to it, trunk to trunk. There are some goods inside. I went to Meachums and asked Mr. Meachum what kind of rifle he recommended for self-defense in a ranch house. He was very helpful. Didn’t have any trouble on the flight. Locked case, declared firearm, the gal at the counter didn’t even want to look inside. The handgun was yours, under the mattress. I bought ammunition for it and the rifle and spare magazines. It’s all in the trunk. I spent last night loading magazines. The rifle is supposed to hold thirty but I could only get twenty-eight in.”
“Twenty-eight is fine,” said Bob. “It’s better. Less pressure on the spring. More reliable that way.”
“The handgun magazines loaded fine. Ten in each, ten of them.”
“Thank you,” he said. “Now I’m going to go. I think I have to get back to Mountain City. I can’t let them think they’ve run me. They have to know they’re in for a fight and if they’re scared, maybe they’ll make a mistake.”
She said, “You find the men who tried to kill our daughter. You take care of them.”
He kissed her, took the elevator down, went to the garage and moved his car up to hers. Satisfying himself there were no other people on the floor, he opened her trunk.
The rifle was in a Doskocil plastic travel case. He unlatched it to see what Meachum had come up with. His first thought was “Shit,” because it was an M16. Well, an AR-15, as the civilian variant was called. As a man of the .30 caliber, he’d always despised the pipsqueak .223 of the classic AR platform with its tendency to bore tiny holes in people, keep going and kill the talented orphan-kid piano-prodigy while the bad guy didn’t blink an eyelash and kept shooting. And he noticed it had all sorts of gizmos bolted on—an EOTech holographic sight that looked like a TV set, a forward vertical grip with a Surefire flashlight built into it at six o’clock, just under the muzzle. And the muzzle—well, it looked a little wider. He bent close, tried to make out the barrel marking in the dim light, and saw that it read DPMS 6.8mm REMINGTON SPC. As he transferred the gun and case to his trunk, he saw a few extra boxes of ammo, Black Hills 6.8, cracked one and discovered a short round that had a big bullet. Let’s see, 6.8, that meant about .270 caliber. And then he remembered hearing that in the sand, the Special Operations people were so pissed at the poor one-shot, take-down ratio they were getting from the .223, some of them worked with some people at Remington to come up with a bigger, more powerful cartridge. It functioned in a system using an AR lower, and only required a new upper, thus saving the government millions of dollars. If the government adopted the cartridge, it only had to buy the top half of five hundred thousand new weapons. Maybe that would happen, maybe it wouldn’t, but the cartridge had been combat-tested and was said to put ’em down and keep ’em down. That pleased him. She had done well.
The handgun was a .38 Super, his own 1911 model Kimber, a very nice gun that as he got older he appreciated more for its lack of recoil and muzzle flip in fast strings, while completely identical to the .45 in handling and operating procedures. The extra boxes indicated the load Meachum had chosen was the CorBon 130-grain jacketed hollow point +P+ ammo. His Kydex holster lay beside the case, amid the ammo boxes.
Locked and loaded, he thought. Loaded for bear or whatever.
His cellphone rang.
He looked at the caller ID and saw that it was Detective Thelma Fielding’s number. He thought a bit. What do I do? Maybe that kid broke. She wants me to come in so she don’t have to put out an arrest warrant. Maybe I ought to call a lawyer. Meantime, I have an arsenal in the trunk and no place to stash it. Damn, I wish that boy had lasted longer. Thought he had the stuff for it.
He could just not answer, of course. But what would that tell her?
“Hello.”
“Mr. Swagger.”
“Yes, howdy, Detective, what’s up?” Trying to be nonchalant, just in case.
“Sir, we’ve had a break in the case.”
“A break?”
“Yes sir. Soon’s I get free and clear of an unrelated shooting took place last night, I’m going to make an arrest. Fellow named Cubby Bartlett, a longtime meth dealer. He’s the man who tried to kill your daughter. Got him cold. Someone snitched him out and I’m going to pull him in.”
Swagger didn’t know quite what to feel—relief that the boy had held steady and hadn’t given up his name, or laughter that poor Thelma seemed way up the wrong tree and barking hard. Or maybe in some way this Cubby Bartlett fit into it.
“Sir, you said you wanted to be there for the arrest. Now if you give me your word you won’t cause no trouble, I will let you sit stakeout with us tonight and watch as we bring him in.”
“I’ll be there,” he said, and she gave him the details.
TWENTY
“You’re an idiot,” said Brother Richard.
“Brother Richard, if we don’t do this here job, and it looks like we won’t
, then your ass ain’t worth a cowpie in January. So I’s you, I’d get myself long gone, ’cause when Grumley business be finished, my boys may remember how mean and disrespectful to them you’s been. And when that happens and specially since they have the taste of blood on their tongues, maybe they get a hunger for you.”
“You’re an idiot,” repeated Brother Richard.
“Grumley come first,” said the Reverend. They sat in his office off the gym floor of the rec center. The boys had already locked and loaded and headed out, just to keep a watch and see if and when that fellow came back into town, after which point all Grumleys would coordinate and vengeance would be taken, as it mightily should be, amen.
“Don’t you think you’re overstating the drama of the two men you lost? Those boys were professional strong-arm men. They were begotten of and by violence. That’s the life they chose. They lived high on it, scoring kills and drugs—”
“My boys don’t take no drugs!”
“Yeah, you don’t work with them on a daily basis like I have the last few weeks. I know Grumleys a lot bettern’ you, old man. Anyhow, those two, Carmody and Blow Job—”
“Damn you to righteous flame, you bas—”
“Carmody and Blow Job had the kills and the swag and the dope and the whores and probably even a good girl or two along the way, because there do seem to be some good girls who find outlaws amusing. They lived a life of the superego unrestrained, like few men, the great thrill of the criminal lifestyle and its secret true reward. They ran hard and lived hard. It was always in the cards that at any second of any day they could run into some country cop who knew how to shoot, or take a corner too fast and smear themselves on the concrete. That’s the cost of doing business in the business of violence, and it turned out that their number came up. It’s an anomaly, it’s unfortunate, from your twisted-sister viewpoint it might even be a tragedy, but it is what it is, and there’s no money in it for any of us and we have worked too goddamned hard to give it up for some nickel-and-dime sense of vengeance on someone who, after all, was only defending himself in a square gunfight and appears to have been faster on the trigger and truer on the aiming part than your boys. Vern was right. Vern’s the smartest Grumley.”
“Sir, you do not understand family. And I am disappointed in son Vern.”
“Sir, I do understand family. No man you ever met understands family more than me. Now, I’ll tell you what’s interesting in all this. It’s my sense you have been looking for a way to fail. I believe you were coerced into this plan by someone smarter and tougher than yourself, because it is too clever for a fellow like you to think up. You’re no strategist, your only product is the rawest of force. That’s what you sell, that’s all you know. But this thing is too cool for words and you are about to give it up not in spite of your best instincts but because of your best interests. You want an excuse to fail, to go down in some fucking massacre shootout in a blazing barn, a gun in each hand. You have ‘death wish’ written all over you, goddamnit.”
“You have fancy words, Brother Richard, and you speak cleverly but your words ain’t but spit compared to the Grumley family tra—”
“What’s he got on you? Bet I know.”
This threat alone, of all the things Brother Richard had said, shut the old geezer up. And when that happened, Brother Richard knew he was right and bored in for the kill.
“It’s gotta be a sex thing. That lizard of yours, that baby’s got to feed, what, three, four times a day? You’re omnisexual, polysexual, metasexual. You’re unisexual. There isn’t a word for what you are. It seems to run in the godhead biz. Wasn’t David Koresh and that Jim guy who fed all those people Kool-Aid the same? Yeah, yeah, that’s it, isn’t it? You have all those kids, all those wives, all their sisters, it’s all about the Reverend Alton Grumley getting his wand wet three, four times a day, even at your age. I will say, you are probably more full of sperm than any man born since Genghis Khan, father of us all, not just because you know family conspiracies are the only conspiracies that work and so you need a lot of family, but also because you have a weird gene that makes you have to fuck three or four times a day. I bet you have a cock the size of a trailer hitch, come to think of it. It all fits together—your golden tones, your soothing ways, your clank of sanctimony, your secret ruthlessness. Boy, you are one huge, perpetual-motion fucking machine. You even see it in Number One son, Vern. I picked up on the way his eyes light on the youngest, flattest, hottest, sluttiest twelve-year-old. He fixes on one of them, he’s lost to the cause. You’d best hope that when the big day arrives, old Vern’s got his mind on business, not on the shock-absorber-sized boner in his pocket. We need Vern’s sagacity, or rather, normal Vern’s sagacity, not het-up Vern’s insanity.”
The Reverend seemed to be getting a little crazy. The Y-veins on his forehead pulsed, his eyes sank to the size and color of ball bearings, his breathing grew harsh and shallow, and he clenched and unclenched his big hands. He looked like he wanted to strangle the life out of Brother Richard and was but a second from doing it.
“But let’s leave poor Vern out of this. He’s only your pattern played out, what chance did he have with a pa who was so sexed up sometimes he didn’t care what kind of hole he put it in, am I right? Oh, that’s the pattern, I see it now. He’s got video on you and some chicken, right? Some boy whore. Some boy-child even, one of those classic cases of the holy man who can’t keep his mitts off of little Billy and Bobby and tells them God commands them to drop their drawers? Oh, that’s it, I hadn’t seen it till now, that’s got to be it.”
“Sir, you are the Whore of Babylon, the Antichrist, hiding behind a smiley demeanor and a charming patter, but truly inside, the Beast.”
“Arf, arf,” said Richard. “Now I see. You’ve been leveraged into this job, and there’s nothing you can do about it. But you cannot accept it either, because the fulcrum on which it turns is your own darkest secret, the one that would destroy you in front of all Grumleys. So your attitude is classic passive-aggressive, and the longer it goes on, the longer it annoys the bejesus out of you. So now you have it: an excuse to quit, an excuse to fail, an excuse to die.”
The Reverend looked skyward.
“Lord, help the Sinnerman all on that day. He has nowhere to run to. The moon won’t hide him because it’s bleeding, the sea won’t hide him because it’s boiling. With his education he comes up with terrible ideas and he contaminates those who believe. Lord God, smite him, and take him with you and give him a shaking and a talking to, so that he knows why it is you’re sending him to an eternity of burning flesh in the dark and sulphurous caverns of hell.”
“Who writes your stuff, Stephen King or Anne Rice? Anyhow, let me tell you: Call in the boys. Settle ’em down. We need ’em calm and collected for Race Day. We can do this thing, I tell you, and I can have my little run through Big Racing’s peapatch. And we can all go home rich and nobody, nobody, will ever forget the Night of Thunder. Okay? Concentrate. That’s how you beat your tormentor. You pull the job, you get the money, you get your film-at-eleven-minister-fingerfucks-choirboy back. Living well is the best revenge. Oh, and a few years down the line, you go back and kill the shit out of whoever was blackmailing you.”
The Reverend looked at him sullenly.
Richard continued. “Apostate speak with wisdom, no, old goat? Infidel know thing or two, eh, Colonel Sanders? Think on it. Think on it, for God’s sake. Now I’m going to leave. I have to get into Bristol and get a look at my little peapatch, so I can prepare my own kind of fire and brimstone for what’s coming up next. I’m not even going to demand that you change your plan and call those boys in, because I know you will.”
“Thou art sin,” said the Reverend. “Thou wilt burn.”
“Just so I don’t roll,” said Brother Richard.
TWENTY-ONE
On the way back to Mountain City, Bob tried to call Nick Memphis, special agent, FBI. He had Nick’s own private cell number, and he punched in the numbers as
he drove north on 81 from Knoxville in the setting afternoon sun. But there was no answer, only Nick’s voice mail. “This is Memphis. Leave a detailed message and I will get back to you.”
“Nick, Swagger. I have to run something by you and sooner would be so much better than later. Call me on this number please, bud.”
But Nick never called him back.
He was disappointed. He loved Nick. Years ago, so long ago he’d repressed it and most of the memories had vanished, Nick had believed in him. He was on the run, set up by some professionals, briefly number one on the FBI hit parade. Every cop in America was gunning for him. Then along came Nick, who’d looked at the evidence and saw that the narrative everybody was dancing to simply couldn’t have happened. By the laws of physics, too many anomalies, too many strangenesses. Nick looked hard into it, then hard into Bob’s killer eyes, and believed.
Bob knew: He was reborn that moment. That was the moment he came back. That was his redemption. That gave him the strength to play it out, to go hard again, to find the lost Bob the Nailer and put the drunken, self-pitying loser-loner behind him. Nick’s faith became Julie’s faith became Nikki’s faith became Miko’s faith, all in a line, and let him be what he was meant to be, what he’d been born to be. And it let him almost, after all of it, get close to the one god he worshiped, his great, martyred father.