“So you moved her. That was wise.”
“I think it’s okay if you fly in now. I don’t want to give you the name of the hospital until you’re in town. But I’d stay on the north side, in a suburb. She needs her mother. She looks so sad, all banged up, all those wires and tubes, so still. Breaks my heart.”
“She’s strong. She’ll come through this, I know it.”
“Okay, you have my number. When you get in here and get booked in a hotel, call me, and I’ll come by. Meanwhile, I’ve got some nosing around to do.”
“What is it?”
He told her at length about the tire treads, the interpretation of the NASCAR fellows, the general indifference of the sheriff’s department, the intensifying traffic and crowding as the big race day approached, and the town filling up with campers, celebrants, drinkers, rowdy kids, and other assorted pilgrims.
“So I mean to look into it. I know you think I’m paranoid but-”
He was surprised at what came next.
“You listen to me a moment. You have gone on many dangerous adventures, leaving me to raise the child, and now I have another child to raise. Yes, I think you can turn paranoid. But this time I am paranoid too, because it is my daughter involved. So you’re not working off some crazy sense of honor or something you think you owe your long-dead father or something left over from a war nobody remembers. You’re working for me. If you think someone tried to kill our daughter, Bob, then you find them and you stop them. You stop them from harming our daughter or anyone’s daughter.”
“I will do that,” he said. “Oh, and one more thing.”
“Yes?”
“Bring some guns.”
EIGHT
Bob didn’t really approve of newspapers and had certainly never been in the office of one before. But that’s what his daughter had wanted, and as he looked at the city room, with its ranks of messy desks, its knots of insouciant young people, its phone obsessives, its listless copy editors, its harassed junior editors, its earnest techies to service the computers in mysterious fashion, he wondered why it had meant so much to her, ever since she was a child. There was nothing in his family to account for such a leaning; maybe there was a writer tucked away in some branch of Julie’s, but he’d never heard of such a thing. But he knew this: She loved it, she lived, dreamed, breathed, and ate it.
Okay, sweetie, he told himself. If this is what you want, I will try and get it back for you.
He sat in a conference room-glass-walled, affording a view of the newsroom and the staff, right next to the managing editor’s office-as Jim Gustofson, the managing editor, a tough gal named Jennifer something, and Nikki’s immediate editor, briefed him on what she’d been up to.
The gist of it was that Nikki was the cops reporter, and her specialty was the crystal meth craze that now gripped rural America, as it played across northeastern Tennessee and southwestern Virginia. She’d done a prize-winning story on the children of crystal meth distributors, who are put in foster homes when their parents are arrested. She knew the sheriffs of most of the seven immediate counties, she knew a lot of the knock-down-the-door cops, she knew the social services people, the welfare people, the educators, for the problem impacted all these areas. The stuff was pure shit; its only advantage was that it was cheap and the high it granted was intense if short lived. Once in a while you put your baby in the oven or ran over your grandmother with a lawnmower on the impression she was a troll halfling from the realm of Zelazny. But generally, like dope everywhere of every kind, it made its users useless slackers who sat around all day figuring out how to get a few nickels together for the next fix, or kitchen chemists in trailer parks who tried to cook it up themselves, all too often blowing a crater into the earth and themselves straight to hell. A few shrewdies had big labs that made what real money was available in the down-home heroin racket.
“She was preparing another big story on the shape of the problem in the immediate Tri-cities area. She’d been visiting the local police entities, trying to get a sense of what she was doing.”
“Sir, are these people dangerous?”
“Well, as they say, they only kill their own kind. Turf wars, the occasional hardhead who goes for the assault rifle when the raid team shows, bitterness over price hikes or debts owed. You know that easy money, stupid people, and hard times have a way of creating misery. Your daughter was the witness to all that. She’s damned good at her job. She’ll be moving to a bigger city soon, I’m betting. It has been a pleasure to work with her and watch her grow.”
“Yes sir. But was there anything specific about Johnson County? Some particular area she was looking at. I think I want to go poke around. It’s my nature. Annoys the hell out of people, I know, but can’t be helped.”
“You don’t agree with the police report? Thelma Fielding is a good cop.”
“She is and I liked her very much. It just don’t-excuse me-doesn’t sit right with me. That’s why I have moved her to another hospital.” He didn’t bother to tell them it was in another city. Reporters talk, people listen, that much he knew.
“Yes, she said she might have to go back,” said the woman editor, Jennifer. “Johnson County is so far from everything it’s a kind of a bad joke around here about the cultural tendencies of the rural working class, or these days in this economy, non-working class.”
“You mean the trailer trash, ma’am. I’m proud to say I am one of them pure and simple, but you don’t need to pull punches with me. I know they make the best soldiers, farmers, and family people in the world, but that same stubbornness and willingness to risk makes them sick-bad-ugly-tempered boils on the butt of humanity if they choose the dark side.”
“We’d never put that in the paper, but yes, that’s what we’re talking about. So the meth problem is particularly bad in Johnson. That’s where you see your most grotesque crimes and some of the ugliest violence. But last year they elected a reformer for sheriff, a county man named Colonel Reed Wells.”
“I have heard the name.”
“Handsome guy, famous because he was a Ranger officer in the war in Baghdad and won some kind of medal. A star?”
“Silver Star?” Bob asked.
“Yes, I think that’s right? Were you in the army, Mr. Swagger? You have something of the military about you.”
“Not in the army, no ma’am. I did a spell in another branch.”
“Well, it shows. I wish some more of my reporters had the discipline and the organization that the military teaches so well. Anyhow, Reed Wells was in the forefront of the fight against the drug. He’s your dynamo type. To the accompaniment of much publicity, he has acquired a helicopter from the army on some kind of Justice Department grant that passes surplus material on to police agencies. He’s organized a first-rate raid team, all very gung-ho. You know, guys in black with hoods and machine guns. He searches for the labs from the air most days, then coordinates with ground, then he hits ’em from above just as the ground team hits ’em from two sides. Very commandolike. Nikki said she felt like she was in Vietnam, though I don’t know how she could know anything about Vietnam.”
“Maybe she saw some old books,” said Bob.
“But here’s the thing. Johnson County leads the region in the number of meth labs raided, the number of arrests, the number of prosecutions. But the odd part is, the price of meth in Johnson hasn’t gone up, it’s stayed the same.
“Now why would that be? If the supply is drying up, the price would rise. Yet Nikki had discovered from someone in an abuse program that the stuff is just as plentiful and just as economical. That means that either a) outside sources were bringing it in, or b) there were a lot more meth labs than anybody thought, or c) there was some kind of superlab, capable of taking up the slack, that nobody had discovered yet. Finding the superlab: There’s your Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting, and there’s your ticket to the Washington Post.”