glad hander wants me at a cocktail party with some of the clients where I stand around all bashful-like and the boys come up and pet me like some kind of cuddly critter. Hate all that shit, but it is a part of the business. So we are getting off to a good start. Now you tell me how I can help you. I’m guessing it don’t involve putting on the firesuit and shaking a lot of hands.”
“Nor putting frosting in your hair, nor getting petted much.”
“I’m liking this better n’ better.”
“Yes sir, well, I hope I won’t take too much of your time.”
“Let me get Red Nichols in here, my crew chief. He’s forgot more than I know. He was my daddy’s crew chief too.”
“Sure.”
While Matt MacReady got out a cell to call Red, a beautiful girl-say, the kid was doing well!-came out and offered Bob a cold drink. Bob took a bottle of juice, and pretty soon the door opened, and a man Bob’s age, wrinkled and greasy, came in.
“Red, meet Bob Lee Swagger, of the real USMC.”
“Mr. Swagger, an honor, sir. I was a motor mechanic late in Vietnam and I heard of the famous Bob the Nailer.”
“That old bastard is long gone. It’s just an old man with a bad leg here today.”
“Matt, you realize he run just as hard as you, difference is, people shooting at him. So you mind your manners around him.”
“I will,” said Matt. “I already have Mr. Swagger marked down as a serious southern man, not a haircut with a soft-gal handshake.”
“Well, let’s see if we can help him some.”
And so Bob laid it out, quickly as he could, free of nuance. What had happened to his daughter, what the police made of it, his own worries, his decision to spend $2,700 to have Dewey’s photo-recon the road, the arrival of the pictures over a fax transmission a few hours ago.
“So my hope is, you can look at the skid marks and make sense of them for me. It looks like chicken scratches to me. I figure you’ve seen skid marks before, you know how cars behave at high speed, brakes on, brakes off, how they skid, turn, wobble, go over. So you can tell me what happened. If the cops are right, and this is some hopped- up teenager, then I can rest easy. They’ll get him, I’m sure. If not, I have to dig deeper and make preparations. I will protect my daughter.”
“I believe you will. Is there any reason to expect anyone might try to kill your daughter?”
“It’s not inconceivable. She was investigating a criminal enterprise in a county known for its corruption and drug trade. That would be one thing. Another would be my involvement, over the years, in a number of situations where violence sometimes came into play. Those episodes may have made me some powerful enemies. So it is possible that someone is trying to strike at me through her. That one just can’t be ruled out. I’ve been around enough not to believe in coincidence.”
“We don’t believe in it either,” said Red. “Out here, on the track where it’s all happening at close to two hundred per, we don’t never believe in coincidence. So let’s see what you’ve got there, Mr. Swagger.”
The boy and the old man examined the faxes, not the clearest photos ever taken, but Mr. Dewey had gotten pretty damned low and he had a real fine camera. Bob felt he got every cent’s worth of the twenty-seven-hundred- dollar dent he’d put in his credit card.
“What you’ll see right away is two tracks. One is my daughter’s Volvo, though she doesn’t come into the picture till late in the sequence. Hers are much lighter and narrower.”
“Yep, he’s sailing on some heavy, wide tread, no doubt about it.”
“You can see where he tries to knock her this way and that, you can see how she gets away from him twice, and how she got enough down the hill that so when he did finally whack her off the road, the incline wasn’t so steep and the car never rolled. They say that saved her life.”
“I think it did,” said Red.
They didn’t talk for a while, except in some kind of code.
“Great traction, all the way through. He’s left footing. Seems to find the ideal line a lot. Say, I really like his angle.”
“His angles are damned good, considering the corners are all unknown. I also like how soon he gets to the ideal, early in mid-corner. He rides this one real good and ain’t fighting it none.”
“This boy’s been in a hundred-mile-per slide before, I think. Like his traction. He ain’t hardly ever on two.”
“I think so, too, Matt.”
“Mr. Swagger, you got any other pictures? What I see is a damned fine driver knocking the little foreign job off the road. I will say, this girl of yours, she’s a damned cool hand. Suppose she gets it from her daddy.”
“Her mommy, more ’n likely. Yes, I didn’t know what to make of these. Mr. Dewey told me when he was done he one-eightied and flew back up the road to make sure he didn’t miss nothing. He stayed on the road a longer time than I asked him to, and way, way back he came upon some other skids. Now, it may not be the same guy, but it sure looks like it to me. Same width of track, same density of color. You’d have to make a tread comparison to be sure, but as I said earlier, don’t believe much in coincidence.”
He handed the two photos over, and the two men looked hard at them, then back several times at the actual pocket-of-engagement sequence.
“Well,” Red finally said, “that ties it up with a ribbon.”
“It sure does,” said Matt.
“So tell me what you make of it.”
“As I say, where he’s whacking her, it’s hard to make it out, other than he’s a good driver, so’s she. The cars are banging together, speed’s up near a hundred, she keeps turning inside him, he skids out-don’t lose it though- and goes after her.”
“Yes sir.”
“But see these here? They’re bad news, I’m afraid.”
Bob didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to find out the worst. The world was so much better for everybody if this was just one drunk or hopped-up farmboy who wanted to put a lick on another car, just like his hero, the late Dale Senior.
But that wasn’t to be.
“Now here we are, ten miles before the accident, and see this here turn he made. And here’s another one. He’s running like hell to catch up to her, like he got the news late that she was there.”
“But it’s not like he’s chasing her, in the sense that he sees her and is closing,” Bob said. “It means, in other words, miles before he makes eye contact, he’s going like hell to catch her.”
“Well, he’s sure going like hell,” said Matt. “He’s not just running flat out for the fun of it, he’s right on the edge of a very dangerous road, and take it from me you can’t get there unless you’re closing on the leader with two laps to go. Nobody goes that close to dying for the fun of it. Then here, this last curve, that’s his boldest, and damn it’s a fine piece of driving. He read the angle of the curve exactly, knew what his attack would be and how long, maybe to the tenth of a second, and he had to hold it. A tenth too long one way, he’s in the trees to the left of the road, a tenth too short, he’s in the trees to the right. He found what we call the ideal angle. It may not be the shortest angle, but it means he’s reading the input at supertime, he knows his car like he knows his own face, he goes into the curve just fine, he keeps traction at maximum-traction is speed and control-he never slides or drifts, he’s left- footing the brake while he right-foots the pedal, not easy, and at the ultimate, perfect moment he’s set up to go to the floor and hit the straightaway, speeding up not slowing down, and never wastes no time correcting or recovering.”
“That’s good driving.”
“No, sir. That’s great driving. Most civilians don’t know how to corner, even cops and good young racers. It takes time and some investment of guts and fender metal and a lot of good luck to learn the trick. You find that ideal angle that don’t feel right, but it is right. You ride that angle, at a certain point you brake but as she starts to skid, you got to play left-foot-right-foot, making the car dance, so that you can be speeding up before you’re on the straightaway ’cause if that’s where you’re stomping it, you’re already too late. And in all this, if your timing ain’t right you’re upside down in flames and hoping the foam truck gets there before your hands and feet burn off, never mind the busted neck.”
