Stephen Hunter: Night of Thunder

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.

“So I can’t make any sense of it, Detective. Can you tell me how you read it?”

“Would you want to sit in the squad car, Mr. Swagger. It’s hot here in August, and you look a mite peaked. Wouldn’t want you developing any health problems on top of everything else.”

My damned hair, Bob thought. Makes me seem 150.

“Ma’am, I’m fine, at least for a little while. I just see tracks engraved in the road, where I’m guessing my daughter’s bad boy skidded after he knocked her from the road at whatever speed he was going.”

“Sir, I should tell you what you’ve probably guessed by now. This time of year such a thing is hardly rare. These young boys git all het up on account of the big NASCAR race week at Bristol. They want to show off for each other. It can get out of hand fast.”

“Yes, ma’am. What I remember of young men reminds me such a thing is frequent.” But the young men he knew spent their aggression on jungle patrol, ready to give it all up for something this batch couldn’t fathom called “duty.”

“The theory is,” Deputy Thelma continued, “some kid decided to put a scare into the lone gal and buzzed her. Evidently she didn’t scare, so he wasn’t satisfied, so the game turned rough. He kind of lost his mind and banged her too hard and knocked her into the trees. Then he panicked, saw what he had done, and got the hell out of there. She was damned lucky she had a cellphone and called 911 before she passed out, and that we got her in less than an hour. Otherwise, she may have lain there for a week before help came.”

Bob examined the skid marks and could make no sense of them. He wanted to believe, yes, that’s all it is. It had nothing to do with him, it was the random drift of the universe, a bad news connection between a hopped-up junior in a pickup and his few-years-older daughter, all earnest desire and commitment. The cross-hatched skidmarks were all that remained of the accident because the highway emergency vehicles and tow trucks that pulled her car out of the gully messed up the shoulder bad.

“You see, the thicker tires are his; you can tell where he skidded, then peeled out to catch up to her. She veered off the road a bit, lost some traction. He hit her right to left, then came around the other side and hit her left to right. That’s what we see here. She went off right up there, down that slope, which ain’t by no means the worst slope of the road, and somehow avoided hitting the trees head-on. It’s all in the tracks.”

He felt briefly overwhelmed.

“Is there any, you know, scientific clues that might help you figure it all out and lead to a guilty party? On the TV, there’s all this crime scene stuff, makes you think it’s just a matter of shining some magic light on something.”

“Yes sir. Well, let me say that many folks have a wrong idea how detective work goes,” Detective Thelma said. “It’s the television. We shine the magic light and take something back to the lab and blow it up a thousand times and it tells us who to arrest. Not true now, never was. We do have some scientific evidence, if you call it that. I have sent both the tire tracks imprint and a paint sample I scraped off your daughter’s door to the state police crime lab in Knoxville. In a few days, I’ll hear back, and I’ll get a make and model of tire and a make and model of car, the latter based on the color. Amazing how much auto paint can tell you. Then I can circularize all the auto body shops around the three states, see if anybody brought in a vehicle for damage repair in those colors. I can then ask local jurisdictions to check on the tires, and if we get a match or two, we might be in business. If the tires are any way unique, I can contact tire outlets.”

“What are the odds?”

“Not good. Lots of folks here don’t repair their dents and dings or they do it themselves. Or if the car was stolen, maybe he’ll just dump it and forget about it, that’s something these thrill drivers do. Anyhow, that’s what the book says. Now I work a different way.”

“I’m hoping you’ll tell me.”

“I’m no genius but I have a sound appreciation of human nature. I collect snitches. What I do is, when I bust a kid on meth or grass or assault, I pull him aside and I say, ‘Look I can go forward or you can cooperate with me and this can go away, you get a fresh start and maybe you ain’t as dumb as you look.’ ‘What you mean?’ he says. ‘I mean,’ I say, ‘what do you know, what can you give me, what things you heard, where’d you buy the stuff, who’s moving the shit, this sort of thing.’ He listens, sees where his best interests lie, and opens up. I take notes. Clear up a lot of cases that way. Who broke into the Piggly Wiggly. Who stole seventy-six dollars and fifty-three cents from the Pizza Hut. How Junior Bridger afforded his new Camaro with a 344 under the hood. Other things I hear about it factor in: Why homecoming queen Sue Ellen Ramsey dumped quarterback Vince Tagetti for seeming no-’count Cleon Jackson. The answer is that Cleon’s cousin Franklin just got into the meth business big time, and suddenly the dough is rolling in. Cleon delivers to folks all over town, he’s now got a Lexus SUV, and Sue Ellen has always loved the Lexus line. That sort of thing. That’s how crime works in a rural zone of hills and hollows and small towns and big football and bad methamphetamine addictions and very peculiar behaviors. And the kids, the snitches, they take to it. Finally, for some of ’em, they got somebody to listen to them. So right now I have my snitches working full time. And somebody’ll talk. Too much beer in Smokey’s one night, he’ll talk. He’ll brag on it, how he bopped the Volvo and it felt good. The story’ll get around, it’ll get to one of my kids, and he’ll let me know, and I’ll get a name. Then I’ll bring ’em in and sweat ’em and they’ll roll over and we’ll have a case. It may take a little while, but that kind of police work is worth all the CSI bullshit in the world.”