Night of Thunder

Now, on those new-but-old Rockports, they slowly approached the girl’s room. It was so close; it was two rooms away, which they’d discovered after an earlier quick stride down the hallway, reading names on the doors while feigning to look for a drink of water.

Here was where your lesser cons would give up the ghost. They wouldn’t play it out straight. They’d see that the room was so damned close and that the nurses were sitting at their stations on the floor without paying any attention at all to them and they’d sort of go into git-’er-done panic. They’d go straight to the girl’s room, do the deed, and get out of Dodge. Yeah, but that’s where it goes wrong. An orderly is on the way to the john and he happens to look down the hall and he sees something he doesn’t hardly ever see, which is a doc moving fast. Docs don’t move fast, not unless it’s the emergency ward and some poor fool is bleeding out or going into advanced vapor lock. Docs have too much dignity to move fast. So he goes to investigate and walks in and sees the needle going into her arm and he says, Hey what? and Ernie has to pop him with his nickle-plated Python 2.5 inch, and the whole thing goes up in flames, and Vern and Ernie end up at the wrong end of another needle somewhere down the line.

No sir, the Reverend didn’t raise no fools for sons or cousins or whatever.

So they played it out by good con discipline, riding the gag hard. They dipped in on Mr. X and saw that he was fine, then had a nice visit with Mrs. Y and noted that her color had improved and got a nice smile out of her for the comment, even if she had no idea who in hell they were, until at last, after a quick check on Mr. Z, who was comatose as well, they reached the doorway of SWAGGER, NIKKI, ACCIDENT VICTIM, and were about to-

“Say-”

They looked up, puzzled but not riled.

“Say there, excuse me, gentlemen.”

The speaker was a man in a blue suit and a crewcut, followed by another gentleman in a black suit but the same crewcut. He wasn’t a doc, as he was moving too fast and looked a little out of place. And when he got there, he was out-of-breath.

“Whoa,” he said, “more ru

“You’re?”

“Sorry again, Ron Evers, Pinkerton Detective Agency, Knoxville office. We’re setting up security for this patient, here, let me show you this.”

He struggled goofily, unsure to be busting doctors, but better safe than sorry, and he pulled out a comic-book badge just like Deputy Dawg’s and some kind of photo ID with an official PINKERTON imprimatur.

“I’ll have to see some ID before I can allow entrance.”

“Son, I’m Dr. Torrence, I’m on my rounds,” said Vern smoothly.

“So sorry, doctor, really I am, but I’ll have to get an administrator here to verify you. Pain in the ass, I know, and it’s your hospital, and all that, but her father hired our firm and his instructions were very clear. No entrance without verification. I’ve already liaisoned with hospital security, if you’re wondering. I’ll call the hospital admin right now,” and he lifted a cell.

Something scalding went off inside Vern’s head. In his younger days, he would have hit the young security guy in the throat, then kicked the other in the balls. Then he would have kicked each in the head until he was sure they were dead. Then he would have killed the girl with the knife he carried. But Vern was mellower now. Even as he felt the frustration build and build like a steam engine about to blow, he kept it together.

“Well,” he said, “no need for that. I’ll go get the duty nurse and she’ll get this straightened out.”

“Yes sir, that’s fine.”

“Come on, Jack,” he said to his cousin or brother or whatever kin Ernie was to him, “we’ll get the nurse. I hate it when procedure is violated.”

And the two Grumleys walked ever so slowly down the hall in their Rockports to the elevator and waited ever so slowly for it to come, Vern thinking, I need to kill something or get laid, preferably by a kid, fast!

SEVEN

He called her from Knoxville the next afternoon.

“Where have you been? My God, what is going on?”

“Sorry, it’s been busy. She’s fine, or as good as can be expected. The brain work is all fine, she’s just unconscious. They say they usually come out of these things in a week or two, and recovery is almost always 100 percent. So it’s looking very positive here, medically.”

“Bob, I called the hospital, she’s been moved.”

“That’s my doing. The doctors agreed it was medically sound, and so I’ve got her in a private hospital here in Knoxville.”

“What is-”

“Uh, there was an incident.”

“I don’t-”

“Unclear, and maybe I’m overreacting. But the Pinkerton agent-”

“Pinkerton agent?”

“I did some checking and I’m not sure I buy the story about the redneck kid in the pickup anymore. At least not wholly. So I hired Pinkertons to provide 24/7 plain-clothes security, three teams of two. Anyhow, as the first team was going on duty, they stopped a couple of doctors on their rounds. No big deal, nobody thought anything about it, but the docs went off to get administrative authorization and never returned. So I asked, and nobody knows who they were. Nobody got a good look at them. Only evidence they were doctors was the green scrubs and the nametags, but hell, anyone can buy a pair of surgical scrubs. It didn’t sit right.”

“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.”