“I see.”
“Gunny,” said Red, “whoever drove your daughter off the road wasn’t no kid. He was a damned good, experienced racing driver. He had all the tricks. He’s way up there with the big boys like scrawny little tub-of-guts Matt there. He’s a professional. What he was trying to do, he was trying to kill her.”
FIVE
The Reverend Alton Grumley pronounced a mighty sermon, full of Baptist hellfire and damnation, in the meeting hall of the Piney Ridge Baptist Prayer Camp a few miles outside of Mountain City on old 167, just before it hit new 67.
He called upon God in his majesty to send wisdom to his young prodigal, he who had failed, send wisdom, humility, respect for elders, all those things a good Christian boy should show his religious mentor.
“Thou hast failed,” he said, in a power-voice, all throb and vibration. “Thou hast failed because thou did not pray for guidance hard enough. Thou must pray, Brother Richard, and give the soul in totality to the man upstairs. Only then will he listen.”
The Reverend was a scrawny old boy, with slicked-back hair, all pouf and vibrant with gray and hair oil, big, white, fake teeth, and dressed in a powder blue, three-piece suit from Mr. Sam’s big store. His sons and nephews had a joke. “Daddy’s tailor,” they’d say, “is Wah Ming Chow of Number 38 Industrial Facility, Harbin, Szechwan Province, China!” and get to laughing up a fit.
“You damned boys, the devil will take you!” he’d howl in rage, and then laugh harder.
But the boys weren’t there now. In fact only one parishioner listened to the Reverend. He was a raw-boned fella of indeterminate age-fellows like him could be thirty to sixty, all hardscrabble, southern school of hard knocks and rough roads, indomitable, relaxed, tougher than brass hobnails, not the sorts to get excited but exactly the sorts to avoid riling-who now sat in the front row of the meeting hall, in tight, faded jeans, beat-up boots, a blue, working-man’s shirt, and a Richard Petty straw cowboy hat both shabby and cool pulled low over his eyes. He wasn’t the sort who took the hat off indoors, church or no church. He had on a big pair of mogul sunglasses too, as King Richard commonly wore, and sported a mustache and a goatee, though the hair wasn’t real.
“Old man, you do go on,” he finally said. “I am getting extremely tired of all this show.”
“You was given a job, and you failed. If I wanted failure, I’d have sent my own damn sons. They so dumb, they guarantee failure, God love ’em.”
“They are dumb,” said Brother Richard, so called for his resemblance to the real Richard Petty and what was assumed to be a common NASCAR heritage. “But that’s okay, because they’re lazy, too.”
“They are good boys,” said the Reverend.
“Not really,” said Brother Richard.
“Anyhows, we in a porridge-pot o’ trouble now.”
“I agree. After all, she saw me. Not even you have seen me. If you had to describe me, you’d come up with, ‘He looks like Richard.’ So I guess they’d send out Richard on the circular. But by that time, I wouldn’t look like Richard.”
“Everyone knows that hair is phony,” said the Reverend.
“It doesn’t matter what they know. It only matters what they’ve seen.”
“Anyhow, you were highly recommended to me by at least three sources. It was said by all, ‘He’s the best. Nobody like him.’ Yet when I need you most, you fail.”
“There are some things I can’t control. I can’t control the fact that the girl drives like a pro. She must have raced go-karts. You can learn a lot in the damn little things. Ask Danica. Who knew? I’ve done that job more times than you can know, and nobody ever fought so hard or made so many good decisions at speed. If the world were fair, I’d be marrying her, not trying to kill her.”
“Yessir, but as I have noted in many a sermon, the world ain’t fair. Not even a little bit.”
“Anyhows, I am as upset as you. She saw my new face and it wasn’t cheap, not in money, not in time, not in pain. She’s the only one that’ll identify me.”
“You should have had on one of your disguises.”
“I didn’t have time. You called me and I was off. I had to kick hell to even catch her. Like to might have been smeared to ketchup by a logging truck, some of the turns I took.”
“Whyn’t you finish her? You could see the car didn’t roll. If it don’t roll, you got problems.”
“I am not smashing a girl’s head in with a rock or cutting her throat. Among other things, if you do that, then all the law knows it’s not a hopped-up kid and is a murder and maybe you got state cop investigators, maybe even FBI, and lots of trouble. It only works if everybody agrees it’s some kind of hit-run thing by some kind of speed-crazy, NASCAR-loving jackrabbit with the brains of a pea. That’s what I’m selling. But there’s an issue of what I do and what I don’t do too. I don’t kill up close where there’s blood. It’s my car against theirs, and I always win at that game. Nobody can stay in that game. If I kill up close, hell, I’m just another Grumley.”
“Car agin’ car, you didn’t win this time, Brother Richard.”
“Now I don’t like that one, Rev. This whole shebang you’ve got set up-well, someone has set up, as I don’t believe you got the native intelligence of a porcupine-”
“You are so insolent to your elders. You should respect your elders, Brother.”
“Maybe next time. This whole damn thing turns on me. You need the best driver you can get for a certain job and if you don’t have him, it all goes away. You don’t want that. So why don’t you stop cobbing on me, Alton, and pick two sons or nephews, if you can tell them apart, which I doubt-the two with the most teeth and whose eyes are far enough apart so that in certain lights they appear normal-you send them into that hospital. And since they’re such smooth operators and nobody suspects nothing yet, they can just inject an air bubble into her vein and when it reaches her heart, she’s gone. Then all our problems are solved, and we can do our job, git our money and our revenge, and move on.”
“I hope God don’t hear the disrespect in your voice,” the Reverend said. “But if I’m so dumb, how come I already sent the two boys?”
SIX
Vern Pye had the gift of gab and Ernie Grumley the talent of conviction. One was a nephew, one a son, though neither was aware of which category they fit into as names were sometimes misleading among the Reverend’s brood. After all, the man had had seven wives and six boys per wife as per certain biblical instructions, and, if rumor was believed, he had spread his seed amply among the various sisters of the various wives, whether those sisters were married to others or not. He had a way about him and a hunger, and women, for some reason, were eager to give to him that which they thought he wanted.
They all-wives, formal and informal, legal and only by custom, sisters and husbands, the progeny-lived together far from prying eyes on a chunk of hilltop outside of Hot Springs, Arkansas. From there they did various jobs for various contacts around the South that the Reverend had inherited from generations of Grumleys before him. The Grumleys, foot soldiers to the Lord and also various interested parties. That is why they’d temporarily migrated to the Piney Ridge Baptist Prayer Camp on Route 61 in Johnson County, Tennessee, at the insistence of Alton, the patriarch.
Vern and Ernie were somewhat slicker than the usual Grumley progeny. Each was smooth in his way and not too tattooed, and the Reverend, noting talent where it happened to spring up (although, Lord, why do you test me so? That quality was rare enough), always urged them to develop their talent. Thus Vern was the superstar of his generation of Grumleys. He was an aristocrat, a Pye out of Grumley, and so his blood was bluer than any other’s, uniting two lines of violent miscreants from the hinterlands of Arkansas outside Hot Springs. He had killed and would kill again, without much emotional investment, but he didn’t consider himself a killer. He had vanities, and pride. He was the compleat criminal. He could forge, extort, swindle, steal cold, steal hot, do banks or grocery stores, do hits, administer beatings, all with the same aplomb. He liked getting over on the johns, didn’t matter who
