Archer Mayor - Occam's razor

But that rural quaintness was visual only. To the ear, there was no mistaking what the enterprise was all about. Sam and I got there late, as the light was beginning to fade, and the races had been running for several hours. The air reverberated with the scream of high-test engines, the squeal of tires, and the rattle-and-pop of other cars waiting in line for the next event. The breeze over the parking lot was thick with the acrid smell of burnt rubber and exhaust. Sammie and I walked to the entrance gate and showed our shields to the ticket-taker.

“Is Danny Mullen around tonight?” I asked.

She smiled brightly, seemingly unfazed by our identities. “Yup. Never misses a night. You’ll have to find him yourselves, though. God knows where he’s at. Unless you want to use the PA.”

“No, no,” I quickly answered. “He’s not racing?”

“He pretty much gave that up. He’s got a team, though. You could ask them-they’re parked with the other late models, up against the hill.”

“Walter Freund around, too?” Sammie asked suddenly.

The woman looked at us blankly. “He a driver?”

Sam shook her head. “Never mind.”

As we followed the edge of the access road leading to the pit area, I asked her, “You think Walter’s here?”

“Not really. Just thought I’d ask. What did she mean by ‘late models’?”

“They race three classes of car here: street stocks, which are four-cylinder jobs mostly run by local teenagers. Intermediates, which they call ‘Flying Tigers,’ I guess from World War Two days-they’re a little pricier and have some high-end equipment on them-and the late models. They’re what you see on TV. They come from all over, travel the country in special enclosed trailers, do about forty races a year, and basically try to make a living at it. They start at around twenty-five thousand dollars and have full support teams. When I used to help my brother Leo try to commit suicide this way, it was all pretty crude-no brakes, no rules, no floorboards, and some chicken wire to stop you from flying into the woods. Nowadays they use computers to calculate the jacking bolts, suspension, fuel loads. It’s all geometry and physics, and they fool with it nonstop, all night long. Not the street stocks, though,” I added, as we passed several of them being worked on by their youthful tenders. “They’re pretty much reduced to playing with tire pressure.” I pointed ahead. “Those are the ones I was talking about.”

We were approaching a long line of large, enclosed, low-slung trailers, their gaping mouths looking like whales poised to swallow the cars crouching before them. Under an assortment of colorful flags advertising STP, Chevrolet, NAPA, and others, groups of men and women in overalls scurried around the cars. Several of them had radios clipped to their belts, with wires running to headsets slung around their necks.

Sammie nodded toward one of them as he jogged by. “What’s with the radios?” A sense of intense purpose was palpable all around us. Everyone was serious and focused, with minimal laughing or joking. To our right, barred from sight by the embankment holding the curve, the racetrack emitted an undulating high-pitched howling.

“Each of the drivers is connected to a spotter. As the cars go around the track, the spotters tell the drivers who’s ahead, whether they’re clear to cut back into line, and other things the driver can’t really tell. They’re moving at eighty-five miles an hour sometimes-twelve seconds every lap. Takes concentration. Here’s Mullen’s car.”

We stopped before a dark blue car bedecked with advertisements, its flimsy hood open to reveal a huge engine unlike anything available in a normal car. The steering wheel had been removed to allow easier access for the driver.

This time, I didn’t show my shield to the young woman coming out of the trailer with a tool in her hand. “Danny around?” I asked.

“Yeah. Up in the stands somewhere.”

We walked along the rows of cars to a chain-link fence enclosing the concrete stands mounted into the hillside. A white-haired deputy sheriff stood by the open gate.

“Hey, Rob,” I greeted him as we drew near. “How you been?”

His craggy face split into a wide smile. “Joe, by God. Haven’t seen you in years. How you been? How’s Leo?”

“He’s fine. Still cutting meat over in Thetford, living with our mom.” I introduced him to Sammie and asked if he’d seen Danny Mullen. He directed us to the upper reaches of the stands.

We climbed the paved path bordering the stands, shading our eyes against the floodlights above the crowd. The higher we got, the more the track dropped away below us, until we could see the entire layout, strung with bare bulbs, circled again and again by a mad pack of jostling race cars filling the air with their screaming. The two curves of the track were nicknamed the Launching Pad and the Widow Maker, and as each car approached either one or the other, I remembered various accidents I’d seen here over the years-miraculously none of them fatal.

I closed my eyes for a split second and let the sounds alone hold sway, recalling how the street stocks squealed more than the late models, since their wheels were configured like those of a regular car. Late models are designed only for tracks like this, and have their right front wheels canted in at an angle to put more rubber on the road during a tight left turn. At eighty miles an hour, the pressure on that one wheel can reach two tons. The point of the exercise, of course, is better contact, which means late models don’t squeal as much as their smaller, lighter, more home-built counterparts.

From the sound alone, therefore, I knew I was hearing the same kind of car Leo had worked on in the family barn for hours on end, dreaming of the day he’d qualify for the big leagues.

“What’re you doing?” Sammie’s voice in my ear cut through the cheering, the nonstop loudspeaker chatter, and the deafening sound of the engines.

“Sorry-reminiscing.” I looked once more at the vehicles below, noticing how each driver seemed isolated and alone in his or her cockpit, as if maneuvering a spaceship through an asteroid shower.

I resumed climbing alongside a crowd remarkable only for its normalcy-all blue jeans, T-shirts, and baseball caps, with a smattering of older folks, the men sporting suspenders stretched over comfortable guts.

We didn’t have any luck finding Mullen. The current race came to an end, a “Victory Lane” banner was quickly rigged on the track facing the crowd, and the announcer grabbed a mike and proclaimed the teenage winner, who was so enthused he leapt onto his car and jumped up and down on the roof. The whole ceremony was over in minutes flat, the banner was removed, and before we’d reached the bottom again, the pace car, sporting a flashing yellow light bar and a boldly painted “Cody Chevrolet” sign, was already positioning to lead the next field of cars, this time late models.

As we cut away from the stands and passed before the crowded concession booth, heading back toward the gate, I saw Rob gesture to us from his post. I waved back as he yelled, “He just went by. I told him you were looking for him.”

But in that instant, I was no longer thinking about Danny Mullen. Attracted by Rob’s yelling over the line of cars behind him, a man straightened from laboring over a late model’s engine and looked up in our direction.

It was Walter Freund, dressed as one of Mullen’s pit crew.

Sammie saw him, too, and immediately began running.

Freund’s reaction was fast and lethal. He sprinted toward us, reached Rob in five steps, and chopped him on the side of the neck, felling him like an ox. He then pulled the old man’s revolver from its holster.