The odd sense of perfection at the Church camp, as if it had been oh-so-hastily cleaned up, and Reverend Grumley’s seeming to fish for information on Nikki’s progress while mildly cooperating. Again, it was the nature of religious establishments to keep themselves extremely tidy, although the skeet trap in the shed was an unusual touch and it might well double as a kind of subterfuge under which a lot of gunfire could be explained away innocently, just in case of curious visitors such as himself and Nikki. Not completely unlikely but again provocative.

The strange tracks in the dust. They reminded him of something, but what? And why couldn’t he remember it? Where had he seen such tracks? On the other hand, why were they so strange? Could have been some kind of cart wheeled out for maintenance of the skeet trap, could have been the gardener’s cart for-but a gardener’s cart would be wider. Why would it be so narrow?

And finally:

The fact that he was being followed. Maybe that was the best thing. It couldn’t be Thelma’s department, because they didn’t have the manpower to detach two boys to play tag with an annoying stranger all day long. But two boys had been playing tag with him all day long, ever since his visit to the sheriff’s office. So someone in the department had a contact with someone he shouldn’t have. The tail car was a Ford Crown Vic, beige. He’d yet to make direct eye contact with it, because a sniper develops instincts for when he himself is being hunted. Bob had the experience to know that you never let your hunter know that you know he’s hunting you, so that in actuality, you’re hunting him. So when the prayer camp showed up all clean and sparkly, it was no surprise, because the boys following him in the car-they had passed him, and he knew they were waiting around another two or three turns in the road-had seen him heading down 167. They’d called ahead to the Reverend, who got his boys off on a quick and hasty clean-up, so that when he got there he’d be welcomed warmly, and nothing of suspicion would be around.

Okay, he thought, this is an interesting game, all of a sudden. So what I will do is go back to my room at the Mountain Empire and set a spell, and after dark, I will sneak out a back way, and cut open their tires, and then, unfollowed, I will head back here and see what I have got and-

His cell rang.

He answered, hoping it was Julie with good news about Nikki, but saw an unknown number in the display.

“Swagger.”

“Mr. Swagger, it’s Charlie Wingate, you know, at Mountain Computers.”

“Yes, Charlie.”

“Well, I did some work and couldn’t come up with much, but I did get it to print out some script and I managed to decode a little of it.”

Bob understood that the kid had somehow gotten something off the hard drive.

“Go ahead.”

“Well, it was numbers, the numbers ‘three-six-two.’”

“Three-six-two?”

“Yes sir. And I could tell that it was a sequence of three numbers, a dash, then four numbers. It was the last three numbers in that sequence.”

“A phone number!”

“That’s right. So I know a cop and he has a reverse directory and-some computer genius-I just found all the numbers by hand. There’s only about three thousand people in the county-we found seven numbers ending in three-six-two.”

“Go on.”

“Five were just residences-I have those numbers for you-one was a day care center.”

“Yes.”

“And the last was a place called Iron Mountain Armory. It’s a gun store on the north side of town.”

“That’s great, Charlie. When you write out that check to yourself, throw in a million-dollar tip.”

This one wasn’t stolen, it was rented, although the credit card used to rent it was stolen, by the ever-slick Vern Pye.

He’d moseyed about the mall in Johnson City, eyeing teenage girls, especially the ones with them little bubble asses. You know, no real bounce to ’em yet, but tight, kind of bursting against the cotton of the shorts and-He saw a fellow just about his own age, height, and coloring, close enough to pass as Vern in thumbnail photography but not nearly as handsome. He jostled the fellow in a knot of other shoppers leaving the big K, smiled, excused himself, and walked away with one wallet but without another one. His fingers were that fast and that good. What was that all about, you might ask? Vern knew that what gave away the stolen wallet, sooner rather than later, was the absence of the weight. So when he lifted leather, he replaced leather, usually with a few fives and ones in it. That way the mark wouldn’t note the absence of the weight on his hip. Later, when he reached for his wad to pay for something, that’s when he’d make the discovery that he’d been boosted. There were a few instances, though, where a guy had actually pulled the new wallet out, plucked out a five, paid, put the wallet back, and went about his business! Some people don’t pay no attention at all.

The truck, yellow with two up front and eight in back, came from Penske and was a 7-stroke Ford diesel mover, as had been all the rest of the trucks (well, Fords, not movers necessarily), though this was an ’06 when the others had been ’04, ’01, and even a ’99, which Brother Richard had not been able to use because its electronics varied.

So now the three of them-Brother Richard, Vern, and his ever-present sidekick and buddy, Ernie Grumley, sat in Vern’s very nice Cadillac Eldorado along a completely deserted road in the Cherokee National Forest a few miles west of Shady Valley. Vern and Ernie smoked their Marlboros, enjoying the mellowness and getting ready for the show. The yellow Penske renter sat nearby.

“Looks perfect,” said Brother Richard.

“As they always are, Brother Richard, I do good clean work, you know.”

Vern was anxious that he not be confused with the lower class of Grumley, whom Brother Richard was known to despise.

“Okay, I’m guessing under sixty seconds today.”

“Can’t bet agin’ you, Brother.”

“Got that stopwatch?”

“Yessir.”

“Okay, watch me go.”

“All set.”

“You call it, Ernie.”

“Yessir. Ready…set…go!”

And with that Brother Richard was off. Besides certain tools, he carried with him a strange rig that consisted of a small, green plastic box with “Xzillaraider 7.3” imprinted on it, a swirl of heavy wire with electronic interface clips at one end, with a more complex swirl of lighter wire-one for power, one for grounding-a bypass, and a switch connecter. It was the Xzillaraider 7.3 unit from Quadzilla, of Fort Worth, a truck performance shop known in the biz as the cleverest in coming up with ways to gin up the power on a diesel engine. There were other techniques, of course. You could even cut the diesel fuel in the injector by forcing propane from a tank and get a significant power swell. But who wanted to be messing with propane in the middle of a gunfight? Not Richard, no sir. So the Xzillaraider was the best for his purposes. It was a genius-level mesh of electronics that essentially took over the brain of the diesel in the Penske and increased performance parameters. It fed more fuel to the engine. More fuel meant it burned hotter, and there was your power upgrade, sometimes up to 120 extra horsepower and a torque gain of 325 foot-pounds. The problem was, you had to monitor the temp, because if you didn’t, you could melt or ignite the engine. The additional problem was that Richard wasn’t going to have time to mount temp gauges and all the wires of the gizmo, not in a gunfight. His problem was to find exactly how few wires he could connect and still get the maximum power boost without bothering with all the safety devices. It just had to run for a few minutes, and after that, it didn’t matter if the truck burned or not.

He moved swiftly, but didn’t try to push it, got to the engine of the truck, and opened the hood. Where others might have seen complexity, confusion, terror, he saw the universe of his upbringing, the nurture of experience, the thrill of God-given genius about to be engaged. Expertly, he reached deep into the engine space beyond the big architectural structures, and into the nest of wires, found the MAP sensor, directly behind the fuel filter bowl. He quickly disconnected the factory connector and connected the Xzilla harness in its place, plugging in the male connector to the harness. He cut away the wires connected to the injection pump and attached the blue wire tap to the wire closest to the engine block. From that point on, it was wire work. He had to know which wires to cut, which wires to reconnect, all of them color coded. Quickly he grounded the engine-ugh, was it really necessary to unscrew the negative terminal connection, no, not really-and then cut a hole through the rubber grommet to the right of the master cylinder assembly, and shoved the wire harness through it into the cab. He dashed into the cab, and didn’t bother to mount the switch but simply began plugging the wiring harness into the module itself, that little green box, where the gods of engine monitoring lived and worked. He turned the key and watched the module’s blinking LEDs finally signal success after running through the sequence, settling in the red, the highest power zone. He turned the key further, and after a grinding clunk and another turn of the key, the engine burst to life.