sure. As it was, where she finally went off, the distance was only 150 feet or so, and she didn’t hit any of the trees head-on but rather glanced off them. The big thing is, she didn’t roll. The roll is the killer. Somehow, she outdrove him for three miles, and when he finally hit her solid, she kept the car in traction and out of the air. I’d say she saved her own life.”
Bob saw his daughter in the car, in the dark, some big punk fool in a pickup with a brainful of crystal meth and a gutful of Budweiser slamming her, laughing hard, deciding it was fun, and slamming her again and again. He’d like to have a conversation with the young fellow. He’d leave him a check for the facial reconstruction bill but not a penny for the wheelchair he’d need forever.
“Do they have any leads?”
“They have a detective on the case. I spoke to her. She’s very good, she’s broken some big cases. Thelma Fielding. She’d be the one to see.”
Bob looked at his watch. He’d taken a 1 P.M. from Boise to Knoxville via St. Louis, rented a car, and roared the whole way up I-81 to get here this fast. Now it was nearly ten.
“I’m so sorry, Mr. Swagger. She’s an outstanding young woman. We all hope for the best for her. Do you have a place to stay? The town is filling up with racing fans, it might be hard to find a room. We have a spare bedroom. The paper has rallied also and there’s lots of folks willing to accommodate you if need be, no matter how long you stay.”
“I’ll go to her apartment and stay there. The nurse gave me her effects when I checked in and I saw the key. I hope you have the address and can give me some directions. Then tomorrow after I see her and talk to the doctors on the day shift, I’ll want to go out and talk to that detective.”
“Just to warn you, this big race screws everything up. It brings in millions and millions of bucks. You could say the whole region lives off this month the year long. But the downside of course is that everybody’s all involved in it, and the cops especially. It’s a royal pain moving around town or trying to get anything normal done.”
“I’m used to waiting,” said Bob. “You might say, I was once a professional waiter. I can wait a long, long time without moving a twitch, you just watch.”
You always fear entering your own child’s private life. What if you make discoveries, learn things you weren’t meant to know, find out intimacies, privacies, discretion that a child always hides from her parents, just to save them worry or knowledge. You can learn too much.
But that didn’t happen. If she had a private life, or any secrets, it hadn’t gotten interesting yet. Nothing indicated a boyfriend, a scandal, a secret. She was dead set on doing well in this job, moving on to another job on a bigger paper and who knows what. Maybe some fancy rag like the
After several misturns and dead ends and an involuntary tour of Bristol, even the line in the city where Tennessee magically turns into Virginia and vice versa depending on the direction, Bob had at last found the side road that ran just next to and so close to a Wal-Mart that you’d have thought it was the parking lot, followed it behind the giant store, down a hill, into a little glade of houses, along a creek, and then up into an apartment complex. Hers was on the third floor. He saw a sheeted Kawasaki 350 in the parking lot and knew it was Nikki’s, and that she loved that bike. He wished she’d taken it to Mountain City, because on the bike no redneck high on shit and beer would have outperformed her. He’d seen her ride the damned thing. She could stay with anyone, she could stay with him-he was good-and she’d have left that cracker crashed and burning in the gully, gone home, taken a shower, had a beer and a good laugh, and then a good night’s sleep. She had Swagger blood, after all.
But the squat, boxy Volvo had saved her life, he bet. It wouldn’t surrender to the forces of gravity or physics as it roared down the incline in a cloud of dust, shedding itself of speed. It was designed to keep people alive by Swedish geniuses, and God bless Lars or Ingmar or whoever, because he’d done his job that day. It never broke, it never collapsed, and though fenders and engine and trunk had cammed inward, the integrity of the passenger box stayed intact. His daughter lived on the slenderest of threads: that she’d been able to forestall her stalker for three miles downhill, that she’d stayed out of the roll, that she’d gone over where the incline was much slighter, that the car held together, that it didn’t hit the trees head-on but rather glancingly, and that she’d been conscious enough to call it in.
Outside, trees whistled in the southern night. Was this Tennessee or Virginia? He couldn’t be sure. You had to live here for years to know automatically. Whatever, it was the South, with its dark history of violence, its strange streaks of courage, its stubbornness, its pride, its love of hunting, fishing, twangy music, and fast cars. He himself had sprung from such a place, a state with a long history of clan feuds and grudges, violence on the street, youth swollen hard on aggression and let to bloom until someone was dead. It sent men in the hundreds up the Pea Ridges of the War of the Rebellion, and most went willingly and died-nobly? Bob had seen enough gut-shot men to know there was no nobility to it. But he also knew the strange pride that compelled the young men of the South onward into the grape and musket, up that bleak Pea Ridge swept by leaden blizzards, the majority to die slowly of massive intestinal wounds, screaming in the night six days after the battle was lost or won. That was something.
The South, he thought. It made me, but am I of it? Is my legendary father of it? Is my daughter of it? Or does this have nothing to do with the South, and only grows out of something I did in some forgotten neighborhood or other, in the tangled loyalties of my twisted past.
He tried to settle down. He lay on her couch, aching for booze to make the hurting go away. He called Julie, gave her what’s what, told Miko he loved her, and then, after nightmares that weren’t quite a product of sleep but more of memory, managed to fall asleep. It had been a hell of a long day, a day like no other. He hoped he’d never have a day like it again.
It was any strip of forested road sloping down from the mountain above, a vast, high bulk of stone, sheathed in the trees that went everywhere, like a carpet or a disease. He could make no sense of the cross hatches of the tire tracks fading on the asphalt or the messed-up shoulder dirt and gravel where the big vehicles had collided at speed, or the patch down the slope laid out by yellow accident tape, now a mite ratty three days into keeping folks off the spot where Nikki’s Volvo had landed.
“I’m not exactly getting a picture,” he said to the woman detective.
“Sir, I could trace it out for you. Explain it better that way. The diagrams in the report make it clear too.”
“No offense now, I never mean offense, but I have to ask: You sure you’re up to this sort of work? It’s not a big department and all this is highly technical, it seems.”
“I have investigated traffic accidents and fatalities too. I admit, our state police accident team is better set up for this kind of thing, but the trickiness of state laws keeps them from operating off the federal and state highways. This is a county highway. So there’s a jurisdictional problem right at the start.”
“Well, I don’t want to upset nobody’s apple cart. I just have to figure out for myself on what happened. I’m sure you get that.”
“I do, Mr. Swagger. That is why I am here to help. I have been at this a long time. I’m a good detective. We’ll get him, or them.”
“Yes ma’am, I believe you.”
Detective Thelma Fielding, probably forty, was a strong woman with exceptionally large eyes, man-hands, what you’d call a big-boned woman. She wore blue jeans, tight to show off a body that was not beyond desire by any means-she had large breasts-and a polo shirt, black, with a badge over her left breast. A baseball cap carried the badge motif, but what told the world she was a professional law enforcement agent was the tricked-out.45 automatic worn in a Kydex speed holster on her hip. Behind it rode three mags, double stack. So the gun was probably a Para-Ordnance, not that Bob let her know he knew a Para from a Springfield from a Kimber from a Colt from a Nighthawk from a Wilson, and all the other 1911 models that were suddenly all the rage in self-defense and sporting circles. Next to the gun and the holster was her actual badge, wreathed in a leather badge holder, worn on the belt. On the other hip she wore her two-way, with a curly cord up to the mic pinned to her shirt collar. Oh, and the Para-Ord was carried cocked and locked, ready for speed work in less than a second’s notice.
