He looked again when the show was complete, but he couldn’t find the bird. Where had it gone, what was it-
He saw it sliding out of the sky. He watched through the magnification of the scope and caught the thing in its downward gyre. It wasn’t smoking or burning, but its internal rhythms were psychotic and the fuselage rotated wildly, whipping ever faster, until it was just barely flying, and at the last the pilot, whoever he was, got some control, and the thing hit with a smash against the empty seating of the speedway, its tail boom shearing off and going for a tumble, smoke rising now from a dozen different areas. Then Bob saw men spilling crazily out of it, even one, from this distance, in blue.
Then a glare spotlighted him.
He looked up to see another bird just a few feet up. He felt himself pinned, silhouetted in the harsh light. He raised his hands, holding Nick’s badge up for all to see.
The bird got even lower, and in its own light he now saw KFOXTV written on its boom.
He climbed up to the roof of the truck and the chopper came even lower. He got a foot on the runner, launched forward, and eager hands pulled him in.
He was aboard next to a guy with a fancy haircut and a guy with a camera, both so excited they looked about to pee. But he wedged past them, knowing all too well the interior of the Huey, and leaned into the cockpit.
The pilot handed him a set of earphones, which he slipped on, finding a throat mic at the ready.
“I’m with the FBI,” he said, gesturing with the badge.
“Yes sir.”
“Listen, can you run this baby south to 421, then follow 421 all the way over Iron Mountain out to Mountain City?”
“Sure can.”
“When we get there, I’ll talk you in the rest of the way. You drop me where I say, and then you make tracks.”
“Read you, Special Agent.”
“Then let’s rock and roll the fuck out of here.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
The boss waited. Radio reports were incoherent, inclusive, communicating only chaos and conflicting intelligence. Choppers down, but Caleb had to bring a chopper down. How many? One? Two, three? Hard to say. In the end, it was pointless to listen, and so the boss turned off the unit.
The boss checked the time. After midnight. Here, so far away, the night was calm, the sky full of radiance, the temperature at last bearable, and a sliver of gibbous moon let low gleam smear the southern hemisphere. When the hell would it be here? Why wouldn’t the hands on the watch move more quickly? Why was breath so hard, neck so stiff, mouth so dry?
Suddenly, there it was. The boss felt immense relief. It felt so good. They were here. It was done.
The black bird, running low over the mountain crest, finding this unlit field behind the prayer camp without a problem. He was such a good pilot and now he could be taken care of too.
The boss lit a flare, the only signal necessary.
It’s done. They said it couldn’t be done. But I did it. Now I’m free and clear and rich and untouchable. I’m a legend. They’ll wonder for a hundred years what became of me, what I did with all that money. They’ll tell of the boss who beat the game.
The helicopter set down, pitching up a whirl of wind and dust and leaves, blowing and bending the grass away from its roar. But Grumleys didn’t jump out. That old man in his blue suit didn’t leap out, dancing as was his way when gleeful, and there were no Grumleys shouting and pounding and strutting as was expected, everybody hungry for their share of the swag, neatly pre-cut into bales of cash, one for each boy, two for the old man, and the rest for the boss, as planned. Then the boss would jump aboard the chopper, and it would continue its run in the dark, low and unfollowable, another hundred miles to an obscure rural field where an SUV waited along with some phony passports. They’d be in Mexico in a day.
But no, none of that happened.
No Grumleys got off.
Just one old man: Bob Lee Swagger.
“Howdy, Detective Thelma,” Bob said. “Nice to see you.”
“Swagger,” she said. “Goddamn you.”
“I do annoy people.”
She saw the badge.
“You were FBI undercover all the time?”
“No, ma’am. I am Nikki Swagger’s father, pure and simple. But I have a great friend in the Bureau and we linked up. Now I’m working for him. But I’m still working for Nikki.”
“It wasn’t personal.”
“It never is.”
The two faced each other in the flicker of the flare as the helicopter skipped away into a high orbit.
“No way that hayseed gun store gets hold of imported Norwegian Raufoss armor-piercing rounds without someone running a request on police stationery through Justice under the sheriff’s signature, the sort of thing someone running an anti-meth lab program might have, right, Thelma? But who runs the department? That matinee-idol sheriff? He’s so dumb he doesn’t know how many feet he’s got. They’ll figure that out down there soon enough. I already did.”
“Swagger, don’t make me do this. I see I have to run hard now, and I can’t waste time here with you.”
“There ain’t no rush, Detective Thelma. I don’t think you’re going nowhere. Hmm, let’s see, what else? Oh, yeah, sure, I’m betting the superlab is in the coal yard next to the sheriff’s office, under the stink of all that coal where nobody can sniff it out, most of all that sheriff. Boy, you made some monkey out of him. But that’s why you got to go, isn’t it, Thelma? OSHA’s closing down the yard and y’all are moving the department. You can’t run the lab if they’re closing down the whole zone. You’ve run meth in Johnson for three years now. You fed the sheriff the intel, let the sheriff take out the competition, and you manufactured the stuff by the bagful right under his nose, slipstreamed behind him, kept the cost of meth the same. That network of snitches you’re so proud of; those are your dealers. That poor boy Cubby Bartlett you shot was a dealer and he was so cranked he didn’t have any idea what was going on. You grabbed the gun because when you showed up at his place that afternoon and pumped him full of ice, you found his piece, unloaded it. So you had to grab it to justify your prints all over it. The upshot is, you used the profit to set up this operation, to turn an awkward million you shouldn’t have had into eight unmarked free and clear. Hell, the pieces were already in place for you; the helicopter, its pilot being your banged-up gone-to-hell brother. And I know you got him the job. The Barrett rifle already in the inventory, the inside dope on the cash movement, the inside dope on how tied in knots law enforcement was. All you had to do was get the sheriff to sign off on the Raufoss. Then off you go, laughing all the way. What you got on old Alton to leverage him like that? Something pretty, I imagine.”
“Damn you, Swagger, how’d you get so smart? He likes boys. He come chickenhawking up here, and I heard and set up a sting and got video on him. In his circles, that’s ruination. So he does this job, and we’re quits.”
“You are a bad girl, Thelma. But we ain’t quite at the end. You knew Grumley before. You got some strange connection to Grumley. Grumley don’t trust no outsiders. They’d just roll over you. What is it, Thelma. Who are you?”
“Born Grumley. Maybe Pap’s, maybe someone else’s. Grumley blood. They got rid of me. Too smart. Raised in an orphanage. But I backtracked and found ’em. Pap could never bring himself to shed Grumley blood. End of talk. Time to go. Swagger, you are way overmatched. You have seen me draw. You know how fast I am, and how I don’t never miss. I have to leave now. If you try to stop me I will kill you. Who do you think you are?”
“Who do I think I am? You never got it, did you? Y’all thought I was some old coot from out West, no match for Grumley killers and armed robbers and crooked-as-hell detectives. I am Bob Lee Swagger, Gunnery Sergeant, USMC, eighty-seven kills, third-ranking marine sniper in Vietnam. I have shot it out with Salvadorian hunter-killer units and Marisol Cubano hitmen and a Russian sniper sent halfway around the world. I even won a sword fight or two in my time. They all had one thing in common. They thought they were hunting me, and I was hunting them. Faced many, all are sucking grass from the bitter, root end. Here’re your choices: You can come easy or you can come dead.”