He kissed her, took the elevator down, went to the garage and moved his car up to hers. Satisfying himself there were no other people on the floor, he opened her trunk.
The rifle was in a Doskocil plastic travel case. He unlatched it to see what Meachum had come up with. His first thought was “Shit,” because it was an M16. Well, an AR-15, as the civilian variant was called. As a man of the.30 caliber, he’d always despised the pipsqueak.223 of the classic AR platform with its tendency to bore tiny holes in people, keep going and kill the talented orphan-kid piano-prodigy while the bad guy didn’t blink an eyelash and kept shooting. And he noticed it had all sorts of gizmos bolted on-an EOTech holographic sight that looked like a TV set, a forward vertical grip with a Surefire flashlight built into it at six o’clock, just under the muzzle. And the muzzle-well, it looked a little wider. He bent close, tried to make out the barrel marking in the dim light, and saw that it read DPMS 6.8mm REMINGTON SPC. As he transferred the gun and case to his trunk, he saw a few extra boxes of ammo, Black Hills 6.8, cracked one and discovered a short round that had a big bullet. Let’s see, 6.8, that meant about.270 caliber. And then he remembered hearing that in the sand, the Special Operations people were so pissed at the poor one-shot, take-down ratio they were getting from the.223, some of them worked with some people at Remington to come up with a bigger, more powerful cartridge. It functioned in a system using an AR lower, and only required a new upper, thus saving the government millions of dollars. If the government adopted the cartridge, it only had to buy the top half of five hundred thousand new weapons. Maybe that would happen, maybe it wouldn’t, but the cartridge had been combat-tested and was said to put ’em down and keep ’em down. That pleased him. She had done well.
The handgun was a.38 Super, his own 1911 model Kimber, a very nice gun that as he got older he appreciated more for its lack of recoil and muzzle flip in fast strings, while completely identical to the.45 in handling and operating procedures. The extra boxes indicated the load Meachum had chosen was the CorBon 130-grain jacketed hollow point +P+ ammo. His Kydex holster lay beside the case, amid the ammo boxes.
Locked and loaded, he thought. Loaded for bear or whatever.
His cellphone rang.
He looked at the caller ID and saw that it was Detective Thelma Fielding’s number. He thought a bit. What do I do? Maybe that kid broke. She wants me to come in so she don’t have to put out an arrest warrant. Maybe I ought to call a lawyer. Meantime, I have an arsenal in the trunk and no place to stash it. Damn, I wish that boy had lasted longer. Thought he had the stuff for it.
He could just not answer, of course. But what would that tell her?
“Hello.”
“Mr. Swagger.”
“Yes, howdy, Detective, what’s up?” Trying to be nonchalant, just in case.
“Sir, we’ve had a break in the case.”
“A break?”
“Yes sir. Soon’s I get free and clear of an unrelated shooting took place last night, I’m going to make an arrest. Fellow named Cubby Bartlett, a longtime meth dealer. He’s the man who tried to kill your daughter. Got him cold. Someone snitched him out and I’m going to pull him in.”
Swagger didn’t know quite what to feel-relief that the boy had held steady and hadn’t given up his name, or laughter that poor Thelma seemed way up the wrong tree and barking hard. Or maybe in some way this Cubby Bartlett fit into it.
“Sir, you said you wanted to be there for the arrest. Now if you give me your word you won’t cause no trouble, I will let you sit stakeout with us tonight and watch as we bring him in.”
“I’ll be there,” he said, and she gave him the details.
TWENTY
“You’re an idiot,” said Brother Richard.
“Brother Richard, if we don’t do this here job, and it looks like we won’t, then your ass ain’t worth a cowpie in January. So I’s you, I’d get myself long gone, ’cause when Grumley business be finished, my boys may remember how mean and disrespectful to them you’s been. And when that happens and specially since they have the taste of blood on their tongues, maybe they get a hunger for you.”
“You’re an idiot,” repeated Brother Richard.
“Grumley come first,” said the Reverend. They sat in his office off the gym floor of the rec center. The boys had already locked and loaded and headed out, just to keep a watch and see if and when that fellow came back into town, after which point all Grumleys would coordinate and vengeance would be taken, as it mightily should be, amen.
“Don’t you think you’re overstating the drama of the two men you lost? Those boys were professional strong-arm men. They were begotten of and by violence. That’s the life they chose. They lived high on it, scoring kills and drugs-”
“My boys don’t take no drugs!”
“Yeah, you don’t work with them on a daily basis like I have the last few weeks. I know Grumleys a lot bettern’ you, old man. Anyhow, those two, Carmody and Blow Job-”
“Damn you to righteous flame, you bas-”
“Carmody and Blow Job had the kills and the swag and the dope and the whores and probably even a good girl or two along the way, because there do seem to be some good girls who find outlaws amusing. They lived a life of the superego unrestrained, like few men, the great thrill of the criminal lifestyle and its secret true reward. They ran hard and lived hard. It was always in the cards that at any second of any day they could run into some country cop who knew how to shoot, or take a corner too fast and smear themselves on the concrete. That’s the cost of doing business in the business of violence, and it turned out that their number came up. It’s an anomaly, it’s unfortunate, from your twisted-sister viewpoint it might even be a tragedy, but it is what it is, and there’s no money in it for any of us and we have worked too goddamned hard to give it up for some nickel-and-dime sense of vengeance on someone who, after all, was only defending himself in a square gunfight and appears to have been faster on the trigger and truer on the aiming part than your boys. Vern was right. Vern’s the smartest Grumley.”
“Sir, you do not understand family. And I am disappointed in son Vern.”
“Sir, I do understand family. No man you ever met understands family more than me. Now, I’ll tell you what’s interesting in all this. It’s my sense you have been looking for a way to fail. I believe you were coerced into this plan by someone smarter and tougher than yourself, because it is too clever for a fellow like you to think up. You’re no strategist, your only product is the rawest of force. That’s what you sell, that’s all you know. But this thing is too cool for words and you are about to give it up not in spite of your best instincts but because of your best interests. You want an excuse to fail, to go down in some fucking massacre shootout in a blazing barn, a gun in each hand. You have ‘death wish’ written all over you, goddamnit.”
“You have fancy words, Brother Richard, and you speak cleverly but your words ain’t but spit compared to the Grumley family tra-”
“What’s he got on you? Bet I know.”
This threat alone, of all the things Brother Richard had said, shut the old geezer up. And when that happened, Brother Richard knew he was right and bored in for the kill.
“It’s gotta be a sex thing. That lizard of yours, that baby’s got to feed, what, three, four times a day? You’re omnisexual, polysexual, metasexual. You’re unisexual. There isn’t a word for what you are. It seems to run in the godhead biz. Wasn’t David Koresh and that Jim guy who fed all those people Kool-Aid the same? Yeah, yeah, that’s it, isn’t it? You have all those kids, all those wives, all their sisters, it’s all about the Reverend Alton Grumley getting his wand wet three, four times a day, even at your age. I will say, you are probably more full of sperm than any man born since Genghis Khan, father of us all, not just because you know family conspiracies are the only conspiracies that work and so you need a lot of family, but also because you have a weird gene that makes you have to fuck three or four times a day. I bet you have a cock the size of a trailer hitch, come to think of it. It all fits together-your golden tones, your soothing ways, your clank of sanctimony, your secret ruthlessness. Boy, you are one huge, perpetual-motion fucking machine. You even see it in Number One son, Vern. I picked up on the way his eyes light on the youngest, flattest, hottest, sluttiest twelve-year-old. He fixes on one of them, he’s lost to the cause. You’d best hope that when the big day arrives, old Vern’s got his mind on business, not on the shock-absorber-sized boner in his pocket. We need Vern’s sagacity, or rather, normal Vern’s sagacity, not het-up Vern’s insanity.”