Night of Thunder

Then, at last, he turned to her Reporter’s Notebook, a standard 3 x 6 pad held together by spiral rings. At first its pages were densely covered, and he saw that it was her interview with the sheriff. Then a page or so documented the raid, mostly scattered impressions like “rush of air…helicopter lands just as team hits…kid cops seem to be having time of their life. Pathetic suspect, Cubby something, sad little mutt.”

He paged through it carefully, reading items from her later interviews:

Jimmy WILSON, 23, Mtn C. Drug Rehab Clin, “It’s so hard, it’s everywhere and it ain’t no more expensive, don’t know why.”

Or

Maggie CARUTHERS, Carter Cnty, didn’t get address, “Used to come to Johnson for drugs, pushers everywhere. Then all the busts, stopped coming, but head price was same, came over and it was still everywhere, maybe even cheaper.”

“SUPERLAB???” Nikki had written. “Where is SUPERLAB?” in another place.

But it petered out, with no next step, no list of appointments. He could glean a little. She’d started at the sheriff’s department in the morning, gone on the airborne raid with the sheriff, then gone to the drug abuse center and spoken to three people, then the rehab center and spoke to four, including a supervisor. Then…nothing. But how long would that have been? Would it have taken up the whole afternoon? The accident was at 7:35 P.M., according to the clock in the Volvo.

Where had she gone, where had she been?

He looked carefully at the notebook, trying to determine if there was any sign of tampering, but there was nothing apparent. Then it occurred to him to count the pages.

Very carefully, he turned the leaves over and came up with exactly seventy-three.

Hmm, seventy-three?

Now it’s possible all Reporter’s Notebooks have seventy-three pages. But that struck him as odd, wouldn’t it more likely be an even number, like seventy-five? He looked into the spirals for signs of, what were they called, hanging chads, little nuggets of paper residue left from some kind of tearing operation? Nope, nothing.

He went to the last page with writing on it, guessing that if pages had been removed, they’d have been at the back. He found nothing. Well, maybe nothing, maybe something. He found a light set of inscriptions, the tracks of a pen against a paper that had gone through and recorded on the next sheet. He couldn’t make it out, but took it into the bathroom, where the light was stronger, and holding it a variety of ways to capture the right proportion of light and shadow, came across something interesting. It seemed to say:

PINEY RIDGE BAPTIST PRAYER CAMP

And it also said…“gunfire”?

TWELVE

The Grumleys were the Special Forces of southern crime. The Reverend raised them, homeschooled them, taught them the ways and means of crime, strong arm, grift, con, theft, and murder, exactly as they had been handed down through generations to him. He kept them sequestered on the mountaintop compound halfway between Hot Springs and Polk County in Arkansas, while preaching hellfire and damnation on Sundays to keep his religious education accreditation and as excellent camouflage. He only trusted family; family was the magic bond that made the Grumleys invulnerable. No Grumley had ever snitched out another Grumley or a client, as was well known and part of the Grumley magic. But to keep the enterprise going, the Reverend had to procreate heroically. His real product was progeny. Fortunately, he was a man who had found his true calling, and with women he was dynamic. He had had seven wives and none had ever left him. The divorces were pro forma to keep the law at bay, and some of the girls may not even have known they were divorced. He had children by all of them, by most of their sisters and a ma or two. He even had a thing for a bit with Ida Pye of Polk County, and out of that got his spectacular boy, Vern. Though Vern, for all his skills, had issues of pridefulness as demonstrated by his refusal to take the Grumley name. Alton’s brothers contributed their own seed, and the result of all the crossbreeding and the endless nights of bunny-fucking was a tribe of criminals higher by far than scum, more disciplined by far than trash, and, perhaps best of all, not the brightest of all the boys in the trade. It was a Grumley breeding principle to eschew intelligence, and when a boy or a girl was born with an uncommon mind, he or she was sent to private school far off, then college, then exile. Those kids had prosperous, if lonely, disconnected lives, and never knew they were damned by IQ. Their superior intelligence was known to beget inferior criminality, because they had imagination, introspection, questing natures, and occasionally the worst attribute of all for criminals, irony. They were poison.