“Over there,” he commanded, and two Grumleys put out a blaze of noon light in the form of a half-mag apiece. If they got the cop or not, nobody could say, but the bullets sure chewed the hell out of an SUV in line to get out of a parking lot. Fortunately for all concerned, it had been long abandoned and so if anyone died, it would only have been a copper.
The sound of shots rang out everywhere as Grumleys on the perimeter either saw or thought they saw policemen slithering closer, and answered with long, probing bursts of tracer. Now and then something caught fire, including the rear of a Winnebago, a souvenir stand whose supply of T’s and ball caps went up in flames, a propane heater for a barbecue stand. These small disasters added yet more hellish illumination to flicker across the already incredible scene, part monster movie (the citizens flee the beast), part war movie (the noise, the tracers, the screams of the wounded), and part NASCAR documentary (the tire crew operates at top speed, well choreographed and rehearsed) as the Grumley tire team, having gotten one of the off-road tires rigged, switched sides of the F-750, and went hard to work on the other.
But then a new source of illumination shocked all the Grumleys with its relentless quality. It was a harsh beam of light from a state police helicopter thirty feet up and fifty yards out, catching everything in high, remorseless relief.
“Drop your firearms,” came the amplified order, “you are covered, drop your firearms and-”
“Caleb, take ’er down,” yelled the old man.
“Pap, you sure?”
“It’s copper, boy, they about to fire.”
“Got it.”
Caleb set up the Barrett on the hood of an abandoned car next to the F-750. He shouldered the weapon for the first time, drew it tight to him, and put his eye to the scope-he had no idea, but it happened to be a superb Schmidt & Bender 4x16 Tactical model-and in a second, as he adjusted his eye to the focal length, saw the black shape of the helicopter behind the blazing radiance of the light which was quadrisected by the cross hairs of the scope. He fired. The gun kicked so hard it broke his nose.
“Ow, fuck,” he screamed, thinking, Wouldn’t want to do that again, goddammit.
He put a 650-grain Mk.211 into the helicopter, right through the engine nacelle, and the bird climbed upward abruptly as the pilot realized he was under heavy fire. But then all his linkages went, and from aircraft the thing alchemized into sheer weight, beyond the influence of anything except gravity, and it simply fell from the air, straight down into NASCAR Village, nose forward. There it hit, its rotors chawing up a circle of dust from every bite. It seemed to die like an animal for a few seconds, still and broken, and then it exploded, an incredibly bright, oily, napalmesque four-thousand-degree burn. It lit the scene like day, exposing the fleeing masses, the fallen and trampled, the occasional crouching police officer popping away ineffectively with a handgun from two hundred yards out. Then the glare dulled and subsided, and all detail was lost.
“That’ll keep them boys far away,” yelled the old man.
“I’d like to git me another, Pap,” said Caleb.
“You just wait on it, son, goddamn, them other birds is far away.” And it was true, for a mile out, a number of choppers had settled into orbit.
“Tires done,” yelled a Grumley.
“Richard, we are set to rock out of here.”
“Okay,” yelled Richard from the cab. “Git the boys aboard, all that want to come.”
“Time to go, fellas.”
With that, the Grumleys descended upon the F-750. That is, the armed Grumleys. The tire boys had been well prepped and knew there wasn’t enough room aboard for all of them. Instead, they moseyed to the edge of the cone of light, and there, in darkness, peeled off armored vests, put on new baseball hats, and melted off into the trees. There were a few Grumley cars hidden in outlying spots to which they’d have no trouble proceeding, and would rendezvous later for their split of the swag. But now it was left to Richard and the shooters to get the load out of there.
Richard, in neutral, rode the pedal as his gunmen jumped aboard. Pap climbed into the other seat.
“Four minutes,” he said, looking at his watch. “By God, we are ahead of schedule, don’t think we’ve taken a wound, much less a kill, and nothing left to do but to drive on out of here, Richard. Let them boys shoot at us all they want, ain’t going do no damage.”
Richard shifted from neutral, gunned ahead, battered the car in front away until he had maneuver room. He turned the truck, found an angle between two abandoned cars pinning him on his right, and smashed between them. They fought the strength of his vehicle. The clang of vibrations loosened everyone’s dentures, the metal screamed, but the cars yielded to the pumped-up CIT vehicle. Freed, he turned left, rode the shoulder for fifty feet, then turned right down an access road toward the speedway. This road took him to a bridge over a gully, and he pulled across it. Before him, pristine but not quite deserted, lay the heart of the kingdom, the confluence of courage for sale, engineering genius, soap opera, family feud, grudge, redemption, and failure, along with hats and shirts and signed portraits, the trailers turned to shops, the industrial pavilions, the souvenir and bric-a-brac outlets, the beer joints, and the cash machines that were NASCAR Village. It was the only thing between them and the mountain a mile away.
THIRTY-FIVE
Swagger had no trouble at first, and raced through the streets of Bristol, skewing and fishtailing around curves, zipping in and out of the traffic, as most people were off the streets or, if in their cars, intent on the racing news that had turned into robbery news. But the traffic began to thicken as he got through downtown and headed out the Volunteer Parkway toward the speedway and the civic disaster that engulfed it.
Signs of the disaster were everywhere as he buzzed at eighty down the road; it seemed that signal lights pulsed from every direction, and the traffic soon began to coalesce into something dense and motionless. He diverted to the shoulder but found that congested with fleeing citizens. He veered back onto the roadway and found the lane between jammed cars also impenetrable because of the panicked crowd.
He pulled up, looking for an alternate route from the mess of fleeing civilians and abandoned cars that solidified the parkway before him, when a cop on foot materialized from nowhere and started screaming, “Buddy, get that goddamn thing out of here, do you know what’s-”
But then Bob offered him the magic talisman of the FBI badge, and the man’s eyes slid quickly to the assault rifle Bob wore crosswise down the front of his body, and his eyes bugged.
“You got an update?” Bob said.
“Well, it’s a real bad ten-fifty-two, lots of shots fired, officers down all over the place. They got some kind of cannon or-”
“Can you get through to command on that thing?” He indicated the radio unit pinned to the man’s lapel.
“It’s a mess, I can try.”
“Okay, tell them FBI recommends they get their SWAT units to the mountain overlooking the speedway. They’re going to try to take that truck up there and go out by helicopter.”
“What truck?”
“It’s an armored-car job. They want to take all the baled cash to Mexico or wherever and anybody who gets in their way gets shot up. Now make the call.”
“Sir, we can’t move nobody in there now. It’s a mess, with thousands of civilians in the immediate and we can’t get through ’em.”
“Are there secondary routes to the mountain?”
“Not really. Lots of little streets, but nothing straight that ain’t jammed with cars.”
“Okay, advise SWAT to get as close as possible then move out on foot. It’s the only way. Now someone has to intercept them and I don’t see anybody around so it looks like it’s me. You tell me my next move.”