opener bolted onto various rails that ran around the gun’s forearm and receiver top. Lord, the man looked war.
Bob stepped back to let the warrior king clamber in, all rattley and clanky, as if he’d just gotten off his horse sometime in the fifteenth century. But it wasn’t a raid, and the sheriff gestured to Bob to sit, while he himself sat heavily on the bed. Bob saw immediately that the sheriff couldn’t put the M4 down because it was looped to him by a single strand of sling that ran diagonally around his body. But he laid the gun in his lap and took off his hat and glasses. Outside, the noise of the Blackhawk lowered as the pilot shifted to an idling pitch.
“Mr. Swagger, I am beginning to grow annoyed. Your daughter’s case is closed. Thelma closed it last night. We here are very sorry about what happened, but I took it for granted that you’d move on out of here today.”
“Yes sir, don’t mean to overstay my welcome. I’se just going over some loose ends and was going to type ’em up and send ’em off to Thelma. She did damned well, by the way.”
“She saved your life as I recall. Or at least at the time, it certainly seemed she did.”
“Long as I live, I will never forget the sound of that hammer being pulled back and the speed of her draw. The gal is superfast and shoots straight. I was a lucky man and will be forever grateful.”
“Let me ask you about a few loose ends myself. What you went through last night would send most men to the hospital. At the least, they’d be throwing up in the grass for a week. They’d also be changing underpants right away, to be crude but truthful. And that’s just the hostage situation and the trigger pull on the empty chamber. On top of that, you saw a man killed at close range, his brains blown out, and the bullet that took his life passed within six inches of your head. Again, a source of major psychological trauma. When people see people shot, it robs them of sleep for weeks, sometimes months, sometimes years. But from all reports, you hardly noticed and were up and perky in seconds.”
Bob realized he’d misplayed the scene last night. Some macho twist in his mind made him make certain that Thelma and the three FAT officers understood he was as much man as they were and his close call was meaningless to a man who’d had thousands of close calls. Duh! Stupid. Now they were curious about his fortitude. Where did it come from, what did it mean? He should have thrown a weeping jag and pretended to be too distraught to continue. But it hadn’t occurred to him. Another foolish old man’s mistake.
“It was so fast in the happening and so unreal. I still can’t believe it happened. Maybe my rough times are all ahead of me, and that’s when the sleep goes away.”
“I suppose. That would be one explanation. But another occurred to me. You’re not a professional? A gunman, some kind of commando veteran, a former SWAT officer, military with a lot of combat, something like that? That’s how you operated.”
“I told you, I had some military experience years ago.”
“We ran your record. Clean. No indictments, no felonies. I’d pay that ticket you owe the Boise police, though. And I hope you get the drainage issue on your Pima County barn settled. You don’t want trouble with those environmental groups.”
“Yes sir. I have a lawyer working that one now.”
“See, I can’t help notice that you show up and suddenly this little sleepy village becomes Dodge City. Two nights ago, some kid clerk outshoots two hardcore bad guys. I mean really outshoots ’em, absolutely the way a trained professional with a knack for gunwork and a commando’s sense of aggression might have outshot ’em. You’re nowhere connected to that, except that I do have an unverified report of a dark sedan, probably a rental, leaving the grocery store in the immediate aftermath of that shooting. We can’t crack that kid, but I do note you drive a dark green Ford rental sedan. Ain’t that one interesting?”
“Sheriff, I’m just a dad trying to figure out-”
“And yesterday you take down a fleeing armed man. You’re sixty-three years old and walk with a pronounced limp, yet you have no fear of going one-on-one at top speed with an armed drug addict. I have twenty-five-year-old, two-hundred-forty-pound deputies who wouldn’t do that. Then, when he takes you hostage, you don’t even sweat. When he cocks the hammer-”
“I didn’t hardly have time to react to that, sir. It happened, and Thelma fired almost in the same second.”
“And when our officer drills him beneath the eye, you don’t even notice. You’re hardly curious. You don’t breathe hard, you don’t become agitated or nothing. It’s ho-hum. Another day in Mr. Swagger’s life, yawn. Another head-shot, another dollar. Yet your record is curiously, curiously clean, as if some professionals had taken care of you for whatever reason, and there’s no paper or reports of any kind on you. Did you work for CIA or something?”
“I have known an officer of that agency, a very fine lady. Also some assholes. I am friendly with a highly placed FBI agent as well, from events years back. But there’s no paper on me because I’m just a lucky businessman from outside Boise. I was in the marines for a time. There’s no story there. This ain’t some kind of thriller book where everybody’s somebody else and everybody knows how to shoot.”
“I hope you’re telling the truth.”
“Should I get a lawyer sir? Am I a person of interest? Would I be better off with legal representation?”
“I suspect you’ll always be a person of interest, Mr. Swagger. No, you don’t need a lawyer, what you need is a full tank of gas and a good westward destination.”
“Yes sir. I never argue with a man who has a machine gun. But I have paid my night’s rental and it’s now dark, so I have no particular interest in driving the far side of Iron Mountain at this time of night. Suppose I leave tomorrow, bright and early, hoping to beat the Race Day traffic. I’ll finish up the report at my daughter’s and send it to Detective Fielding. Is that acceptable?”
“Somehow I doubt you’re afraid of the dark, sir.”
“It’s not the dark. It’s what’s in the dark.”
“I heard a very capable Green Beret say the same thing. All right, Mr. Swagger. Tomorrow you’re gone or we will meet again at Booking. Over and out?”
“Over and out, Sheriff.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Brother Richard looked so much like Richard Petty you’d have thought he’d get arrested for impersonating a hero. He had that befeathered, straw cowboy hat pulled low over his ears, the tip and tail of its rakishly cantilevered brim cranked beneath eye level, its Indian festival of secretly meaningful charms and amulets flopping insouciantly in the breeze. His eyes were shielded behind glasses that would have looked equally good on the authentic King Richard or Jacqueline Onassis. He had Richard’s scrawny, twisty, muscular body and he wore a NASCAR T-shirt with a pack of Marlboros rolled up in the sleeve. He wore tight jeans and comfortable Luchese boots.
The reason he didn’t get arrested or beaten up or mobbed by teenage white gals was that where he was, every other man looked just the same. It was like a carnival of Richard Petty look-alikes, that being but one category. Others chose the Kurt Bush paradigm, and still others the Dale Jr. Huck Finn, the Tony Stewart, the Juan Montoya, the Mike Martin, the Matt MacReady, and there were even, hard to believe, a few Jeff Gordons, though they had to be from California. This was the crowd at NASCAR Village, that gridwork of cult and retail sites just outside the mighty Bristol speedway, which towered above them all, while providing a steady deafening roar as the weekend’s cars whizzed about it a few last times to run the engines at speed for a final checkout.
It was Friday, the start of racing weekend, under a hot August sky, in a Shenandoah Valley that at this moment was plastered with cars, tents, Rec-Vs, SUVs, everything short of armored personnel carriers. The vehicles rode the gentle hills like a gigantic carpet, as the hundreds of thousands came to worship, live, experience glory and fear vicariously, drink, smoke, shove, fuck, hoot, and have a hell of a good time. Most of them were beyond bliss; there was so much happiness in the meandering beast of the crowd you couldn’t but crack a smile at the heat of the joy. It turned you a little red in fact.
But none of them were as happy as Brother Richard, as he let the crowd push him this way and that through what really amounted to a NASCAR Casbah. The streets weren’t lined with gold, not, that is, if you were buying, though maybe if you were selling. For NASCAR people were spenders. They had to take something of the great Night of Thunder home with them. They bought pendants and T-shirts and cup-holders and beer caddies and hats and thick leather jackets and sweat shirts and polo shirts and pictures and die-cast models and bottled water, beer and bourbon and corporate propaganda. Chevy, Ford, Toyota, and Dodge, the four sanctioned automobile suppliers,
