Kelley Armstrong - Blood Lite

"He's letting cars pass him like he was standing still. Every time a car comes near him, he scoots out of the way like he's terrified. Like this was his very first race."

I shook my head. That certainly didn't sound like the Champ. He didn't win a NASCAR championship by being a shrinking violet. Fifteen years ago I had seen him beat­ing and banging his way down the track, racing against Dale Earnhardt himself, and he never gave an inch. The Champ had gone into the wall so many times he could probably tell you which speedway he was at by the taste of the dust. Why would he suddenly lose his nerve?

I walked over to the wall to observe the progress of the race. It isn't easy to watch a race from the infield, especially at a mile-and-a-half track like Lowe's Motor Speedway. I could only see the cars for the few seconds that they swept past our pit stall on their way to the next turn in the oval, but that few seconds was enough to show me that Kit Porter had been right about our driver: He was dodging the other cars for all he was worth, and it was costing him track position with every second, as one by one even the slowest cars started whizzing past him.

"What's the matter with him?" asked Kit. "You'd think he'd never raced before."

I mulled that over. The Champ was certainly no rookie, but that body he was currently inhabiting had belonged to Eddie Taylor . . . who had died in a head-on collision. I wondered if somewhere deep in the muscles of that body was an ingrained fear of car wrecks. He sure had a right to feel that way, but I couldn't let that memory wreck our race team. I had an idea, though. NASCAR teams are in constant radio contact with their driver. They can advise him on tire wear and fuel mileage, and up on top of the grandstands a spotter warns him of trouble ahead or a car gaining on him out of his line of sight. So I could talk to the Champ, but since team frequencies are made public, I would have had a lot more listeners than just the Champ. "Give me a headset," I told Kit Porter. "Our driver needs a pep talk more than he needs a spotter right now. And put us on a closed-channel frequency. I don't want anybody eavesdropping on this conversation. Not even you."

Kit Porter handed me his own headset. "Whatever works," he said. "But make it quick."

I nodded, and took a deep breath while I worked out what to say. I sure hoped the channel was on a private frequency, but I decided to be careful anyhow. "Champ," I said into the microphone. "This here's Rattler. We got us a situation here, and it's going to cost you your comeback if you don't get a grip on it. Part of you is scared of the other cars. Do you get my drift?"

Silence.

I tried again. "What I am telling you is that the body driving the car is afraid of dying in a car wreck. And that body seems to have a pretty good memory of what that was like. Next caution, bring it in for a pit stop. There's one thing we can try. Eight wheels corner better than four. You know what I mean?"

I heard a grunt in my headset, and the Champ said, "Yeah."

I went over and tapped the crew chief on the shoulder. "I told him to come in for a pit stop next caution. When he does, disable his brakes."

"What?"

"He needs to relearn racing as a contact sport. Do it." Eight wheels corner better than four. I was referring to the move in racing when you speed up on the inside of the car you are passing by, not slowing down going into the turn. You are, of course, going too fast to make the turn, so in the middle of the turn your car slides up the track, flush into the car that you are passing. Using that other car as a crutch keeps you safely on track and allows you to complete the pass. The problem is that sometimes doing that puts the other car into the wall.

The Champ had cut his teeth on that maneuver, but the other passenger in our driver's body would be appalled at the thought of deliberately hitting another car. I figured if we took out his brakes, he wouldn't have any choice.

A dozen laps later, one of the rookies ran out of talent and hit the wall on Turn Two, which gave us that cau­tion lap we were waiting for. The Champ pulled in, the pit crew swarmed all over the car, and, per my instructions, they kinked the two front brake lines.

To actually sever the brake line would have been a has­sle. Fluid spills everywhere, and you can't repair it quickly, but it is possible to put a kink in the brake line, or to put vise grip pliers on it. Technically, there are four brake lines on a race car, and tampering with any one of them would only affect the brakes to that wheel, but since any reduc­tion in braking force is enough to cause a problem on the racetrack, the driver would be forced to compensate for his loss of braking power, which is exactly what I wanted.

Thirteen seconds later, the car roared back onto the track, and forty-two other NASCAR drivers were unaware that we had just sent a loose cannon out among them.

Caution laps run as sedately as Sunday afternoon free­way traffic, so nobody noticed anything amiss until they dropped the green flag again to restart the high-speed rac­ing. The Champ worked his way past 160 mph in a couple of heartbeats, and then Turn One was looming in front of him. Poor Eddie, whose body was understandably a little confused about whether or not it was dead, tried hard to keep that car away from everybody else on the track, but going into a turn at 200 mph without brakes didn't give him too many options. He could either go into the wall, or he could use another car as a crutch to get him out of that corner. Maybe he froze from the terror of the situation or maybe the Champ just overruled the body's reflexes, but when the car started to get loose, the driver swung it a little to the right, where one of the sport's golden boys just happened to be trying to pass on the outside. Eight wheels are better than four. That twenty-million-dollar set of training wheels carried us through the turn and into the straightaway slick as goose grease. Unfortunately for the golden boy, the weight of our car unbalanced him and sent him sliding toward the wall, where he ended up with a crumpled right front panel, and he collected a couple of other cars in the wreck. As always when wrecked cars are cluttering up the track, they threw a caution so they could clean up the mess, and when they did, we took the opportunity to bring the Champ back in, and we fixed the brakes. I figured he had the hang of it again now, and I was right.

We didn't win, of course. In a three-hour stock-car race, the difference between first place and fifteenth place is less than a second, and as I said, it takes a few million dollars to buy you every tenth of a second, which we still didn't have, but at least we made the race and finished in the middle of the pack. That's more than we had accomplished in a long time. But, while I might have been happy just to have a half-decent season, it wasn't enough for the Champ—or for J. P. Trampas, who was still pouring fifty grand a week into this racing operation. Sand down a rat hole.

"He's a good enough driver, Rattler," J.P. told me as we were loading the car back into the hauler. "But he still can't make enough of a difference in our standings unless we can afford to provide him with decent equipment."

"I wish I could conjure up a sponsor," I said. "But there are limits even to Cherokee magic."

"I think I have an idea about that," said J.P. "Let me see what I can do."

By the time I heard the details of J.P.'s brilliant idea, it was too late to do anything about it, except hope that it wouldn't blow up in our faces.

NASCAR has changed a lot since the Champ last took the checkered flag. Back in those days, drivers were ordinary-looking fellows who knew their way around an engine, but now the sport is an international multibillion dollar behemoth, and the drivers are expected to be movie stars in firesuits. If you are a corporation looking to pay a race team ten million dollars a year to advertise your product, then you want a lot of charisma for your money. J.P.'s idea was to turn our driver into a celebrity. After all, "Victor" was supposed to be my Cherokee cousin, and NASCAR was all about diversity these days. The Ganassi team's new Hispanic driver had brought a whole new set of fans into NASCAR, and J.P. figured he could do the same with his Native American phenomenon. So he wrote up some press release, giving the sports journalists Victor's bio, which consisted of the pack of lies I had given our official team publicist, who was also the wife of the jackman. Then, since the next race was Martinsville, relatively close to home, J.P. arranged for our driver to do a bunch of local appearances the week of the race. He'd be doing a signing in a local auto parts store, meeting with NASCAR fans at a charity event at the Roanoke coliseum, and doing local TV and radio interviews. It was a helluva schedule, but the big-time NASCAR drivers do it every week of the season, each week in a different city. It's part of the job. Didn't use to be, in the Champ's day, but it was now.