Night of Thunder

But the squat, boxy Volvo had saved her life, he bet. It wouldn’t surrender to the forces of gravity or physics as it roared down the incline in a cloud of dust, shedding itself of speed. It was designed to keep people alive by Swedish geniuses, and God bless Lars or Ingmar or whoever, because he’d done his job that day. It never broke, it never collapsed, and though fenders and engine and trunk had cammed inward, the integrity of the passenger box stayed intact. His daughter lived on the slenderest of threads: that she’d been able to forestall her stalker for three miles downhill, that she’d stayed out of the roll, that she’d gone over where the incline was much slighter, that the car held together, that it didn’t hit the trees head-on but rather glancingly, and that she’d been conscious enough to call it in.

Outside, trees whistled in the southern night. Was this Tennessee or Virginia? He couldn’t be sure. You had to live here for years to know automatically. Whatever, it was the South, with its dark history of violence, its strange streaks of courage, its stubbornness, its pride, its love of hunting, fishing, twangy music, and fast cars. He himself had sprung from such a place, a state with a long history of clan feuds and grudges, violence on the street, youth swollen hard on aggression and let to bloom until someone was dead. It sent men in the hundreds up the Pea Ridges of the War of the Rebellion, and most went willingly and died-nobly? Bob had seen enough gut-shot men to know there was no nobility to it. But he also knew the strange pride that compelled the young men of the South onward into the grape and musket, up that bleak Pea Ridge swept by leaden blizzards, the majority to die slowly of massive intestinal wounds, screaming in the night six days after the battle was lost or won. That was something.

The South, he thought. It made me, but am I of it? Is my legendary father of it? Is my daughter of it? Or does this have nothing to do with the South, and only grows out of something I did in some forgotten neighborhood or other, in the tangled loyalties of my twisted past.

He tried to settle down. He lay on her couch, aching for booze to make the hurting go away. He called Julie, gave her what’s what, told Miko he loved her, and then, after nightmares that weren’t quite a product of sleep but more of memory, managed to fall asleep. It had been a hell of a long day, a day like no other. He hoped he’d never have a day like it again.

It was any strip of forested road sloping down from the mountain above, a vast, high bulk of stone, sheathed in the trees that went everywhere, like a carpet or a disease. He could make no sense of the cross hatches of the tire tracks fading on the asphalt or the messed-up shoulder dirt and gravel where the big vehicles had collided at speed, or the patch down the slope laid out by yellow accident tape, now a mite ratty three days into keeping folks off the spot where Nikki’s Volvo had landed.

“I’m not exactly getting a picture,” he said to the woman detective.

“Sir, I could trace it out for you. Explain it better that way. The diagrams in the report make it clear too.”

“No offense now, I never mean offense, but I have to ask: You sure you’re up to this sort of work? It’s not a big department and all this is highly technical, it seems.”

“I have investigated traffic accidents and fatalities too. I admit, our state police accident team is better set up for this kind of thing, but the trickiness of state laws keeps them from operating off the federal and state highways. This is a county highway. So there’s a jurisdictional problem right at the start.”

“Well, I don’t want to upset nobody’s apple cart. I just have to figure out for myself on what happened. I’m sure you get that.”

“I do, Mr. Swagger. That is why I am here to help. I have been at this a long time. I’m a good detective. We’ll get him, or them.”

“Yes ma’am, I believe you.”