At one point, Bekasu leaned over and tapped his arm. “This is a long event!” she shouted above the roar.
Pointless to try to converse, so he smiled and nodded. Even at 90 miles per hour it takes a while to go 500 laps. He wondered if the lady judge had prepared for the bus tour by renting a racing movie like Days of Thunder. If he remembered rightly, that film covered the whole Daytona 500 in five minutes of screen time. Anybody who expected motor sports to be run in horse-race time was in for a long evening of disillusionment.
Fifty laps to go.
Harley felt someone grab his arm. He turned to see a stricken Jesse Franklin, round-eyed with shock. Without a word he pointed toward the walkway at the bottom of the grandstand. Harley leaned forward, scanning the crowd, and suddenly he saw what had upset the man. Dale Earnhardt was standing there with his back to the fence. Sunglasses. White Goodwrench firesuit. He just stood there, waiting-but not for long. A woman in a black number 3 jacket approached him, waited until he nodded for her to come ahead, and then threw her arms around him and hugged him for dear life. People in the lower seats, those nearest where he stood, came forward a few at a time to shake his hand or to pose for pictures with him. They seemed to forget the race, and the fact that Dale Junior was out there trying to win. The Intimidator was back.
Sarah Nash had seen Mr. Franklin’s reaction, and she leaned over and said above the roar of the engines, “It’s the Impersonator. Dresses up like Earnhardt and goes to races.”
He still looked blank, his gaze wavering from Sarah Nash to the familiar figure now walking toward an exit.
“An imposter,” said Sarah, carefully mouthing the word. “He’s been to a number of races this year.”
Harley nodded. He’d heard about the Impersonator. Funny how people seemed more interested in the pale imitation of Earnhardt than they did in the real drivers out there in an actual race. The imposter’s resemblance to Dale was striking, but if DEI caught him, he’d be impersonating chopped liver.
Forty laps to go.
Forty-three drivers had started the Sharpie 500 and only thirty-six finished the race, par for the course at Bristol where the banking and the short track made collisions inevitable. Nobody got hurt, though. Harley was glad, partly because he wouldn’t wish an injury on any of the drivers-not even if it meant a chance at their ride-and partly because he figured a wreck might upset some of the people on the bus.
The final “hit you from behind” came on the very last lap of the race, with Rusty Wallace in the lead, barreling for the finish line, when the colorful number 24 car-Jeff Gordon, the Wonderboy-smacked Rusty out of the way to win. Wallace managed to keep control of his car, and took second place, followed by the number 8 car, Dale Earnhardt, Jr., running third.
Bill Knight tapped Harley on the arm, and motioned for him to take out his earplugs.
“What?”
“You were right! You predicted the outcome of the race. You said Gordon and Wallace were the drivers who wanted to win the most, and that Jeff Gordon probably would win. And he did. So I guess there must be more than pure chance and speed involved in racing. Well done!”
Harley nodded. Gordon had won. Just his luck. He felt a little cheap taking the credit for the gift of prophecy, when all he had been doing was indulging in a little pessimism with his prediction. Who had he not wanted to win the most? Bingo!
The crowd was beginning to push its way out of the grandstands now, though why anybody bothered to hurry was more than Harley could fathom. Fifty-plus thousand cars all trying to leave an area at once to proceed on just two lanes of blacktop in each direction would result in a traffic jam of biblical proportions. (Exodus, to be exact.) You could live five miles from the Speedway and not make it home for two hours in that logjam of vehicles. He signaled for his group to stay put. “No hurry,” he said. “We’ll be here a while.”
Justine must have left the corporate skybox the minute the race ended, because she fought against the tide of departing spectators, made it down the steps to their row, and rushed up to Harley, big-eyed with some new revelation. “Did you notice that Little E. finished third?” she said. “Get it? Third-like the number three. Do you think that means anything?”
Harley sighed. “Well, it means about $131,000 to Junior,” he said. “And there’s another three in that sum for you. I wouldn’t read any more into it than that.”
Justine rolled her eyes. “Well, I think it means something,” she said. “All those threes.”
He sighed again, but it was useless to argue with a mystic. Maybe he ought to introduce the group to Hector the Shaman. Come to think of it, Hector’s prophecy had been right on the money. Harley was glad he hadn’t asked the Speedway mystic about Earnhardt, though. He was afraid of what Hector might have said.
Chapter XI
April 1982
Three miles back on Bear Creek Road-just about the only flat, straight stretch in the whole county. At least one without oncoming cars to worry about. The perfect Thirteen-Twenty: Just over a quarter mile of straightaway, creek on one side, woods on the other; a fine and private place. It was late April, the first time since winter that the narrow road was dry, and by now most of the potholes would have been filled in with gravel by the farmer who lived at the end of the lane. Newly minted leaves ruffled in the night breeze, and moonlight silvered the tree branches, turning the dirt road into a white river shadowed by the blackness of Bear Creek rippling alongside it.
Harley Clay Moore had been the first to arrive that night. He had skipped baseball practice (which he wasn’t much good at anyway) to get home early and tinker with the engine, and now it was as ready as it would ever be. He had to leave before his dad got home, though. If the old man saw him working under the hood, he’d be bound to guess what was going on and then Harley wouldn’t have had a cat’s chance in hell of getting out that night. So he had taken a package of Twinkies for dinner and driven out to Bear Creek Road before it was even dark. He was too nervous to wait anywhere else, half afraid that if he delayed his arrival, he would chicken out and not show up at all. Taking advantage of the solitude before the others arrived, he had walked up and down the Thirteen-Twenty, the quarter-mile straightaway, checking for rough patches, noting where the edge of the road was clear of logs and boulders. In a drag race that lasted only a couple of heartbeats, there was no use trying to figure out the best place to make his move. There wasn’t time for strategy in a drag race. Later on, though, if he was good enough, there’d be real races when tactics did matter. Finally he might reach the big leagues of NASCAR: three-hour campaigns that played out like battles, where supplies and strategy counted for as much as skill and courage.
As a last resort for killing time, he’d brought his English book, more as a distraction than out of dedication. Harley was nobody’s idea of a scholar. He passed the time until sunset trying to finish the reading assignment in the gathering twilight, but he found that he was reading the same sentence over and over. Too keyed up to focus on a page full of long, peculiar words. Wann that aprille…Well, it was April, all right. That’s about all he could relate to in that moldy old story. He opened the glove compartment and took out a picture of his favorite NASCAR driver, Darrell Waltrip, last year’s champion. He had torn the photo out of the sports page of the Charlotte Observer and he stashed it in the car for luck, like a St. Christopher’s medal, but better.