Faster Pastor
By Sharyn McCrumb & Adam Edwards
Published by INGALLS PUBLISHING GROUP, INC at Smashwords
Copyright 2010 by Sharyn McCrumb & Adam Edwards
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Chapter One
Pushing up Daisies
The black car was still behind him, right on his tail, just where it had been for the last fifteen minutes. He didn’t know what would be worse— speeding up on this winding Tennessee mountain road or letting the black car catch up with him, although now that he thought about it, the end result would probably be the same either way.
He speeded up.
Pajan Mosby clutched the scrap of poem in her hand, and tried to concentrate on Reverend Bartlett’s eulogy, so that she wouldn’t miss her cue. She had been a bit surprised that in his carefully outlined funeral instructions, old Jimmy Powell had requested that she read a poem, but she didn’t mind. He had been a nice old fellow, already elderly when she was a child. She remembered him as a great favorite with the neighborhood kids, always up for sandlot baseball or a fishing expedition to the river. He had outlived his family before his heart finally gave out in his ninetieth year, but he certainly didn’t lack for mourners. Most of the town had turned out for the graveside service, and the pallbearers, Jimmy’s old cronies, all wore caps emblazoned with “3” or “24” or “8,” a nod to Jimmy’s love of NASCAR. Someone had remarked that it was good that he’d be buried facing the highway so that he could watch the cars go by.
It was a pretty spot to spend eternity in, she thought. A rolling meadow dotted with wild daisies and shade trees, all visible from the road above, which skirted the valley on a little ridge cut into the side of the mountain. And a few hundred yards off to the right was the river, where one long ago summer Jimmy had taught her to skip stones across the surface of the water.
She blinked, feeling the sting of tears. No, she mustn’t get all maudlin at poor old Jimmy’s funeral. He’d expect her to read his poem in a loud clear voice with no sissy blubbering to spoil his send-off. She could almost hear his voice admonishing her: Anybody what totes a gun to work didn’t ought to be crying at the funeral of someone who went when he was good and ready. She would do him proud.
Everyone was looking at her, and she suddenly realized that Rev. Bartlett had stopped speaking, and was making faces at her. Obviously, she had missed her cue. Pajan nodded to show that she understood, and stepped up in front of the row of wreaths that flanked the coffin.
“Jimmy asked me to read this,” she told the assembled mourners, as she unfolded the paper. “It’s a poem. I think he wrote it himself.” Surely. She cleared her throat and began in a clear, stilted voice,
When the Angel drops the checkered flag
And says my race is run…
He was a much better driver than the guy in the black car. Indeed, that fact had long been one of the central tenets of his self-esteem, but now, despite a good five minutes’ head start about twenty miles back, he was being overtaken by his nemesis, on a steep, winding road where pulling over was not an option. That hardly mattered, though. He had a pretty good idea that the driver of the black car was in no mood for a civilized resolution. He dipped the right side wheels off the road on the inside of the turn and then swung wide with the left wheels onto the yellow line to block the black car in case he was crazy enough to try to pass on this two-lane corkscrew. Another tap on his bumper impelled him to speed up again—doing eighty now, which, according to that triangular yellow sign, was about twice the speed recommended by the Tennessee Department of Highways …
Almost finished now, thought Pajan.
And when I see the finish line
Before the Pearly Gate,
I’ll take my place in Victory Lane
Where Dale and Davy wait ….
The assembled mourners started to scream and run, and Pajan looked up from her typescript, thinking that the poem hadn’t been all that bad. And then she saw it, too: a white car had left the road at the curve and was sailing through the air—straight for them. The shrieking crowd scattered, heading for the shelter of the nearest grove of trees, well away from the trajectory of the airborne car, and from there they watched what happened next.
The soaring car seemed to hang in the air for a long moment, and then it thumped to the ground, uprooting a swath of daisies a few yards from the casket, skidding forward, scattering metal folding chairs, until the nose of the car touched the row of wreaths a foot away from the coffin itself.
In the silence that followed, one of the pallbearers called out, “That Jimmy Powell damn sure knew how to stage a funeral!”
Chapter Two
Unavoidably Detained
The moonfaced policeman peered anxiously through the bars. “You’re sure you’re not hurt?”
“Hurt,” said Cameron Berkley, “is a relative term.”
The cop, whose name badge read Westcott, grinned. “’Course I reckon you’re used to spectacular wrecks.”
Also a relative term, thought Camber, leaning back on the thin mattress covering the metal shelf that his jailer laughingly called a bed. It was true that he had experienced his share of automotive acrobatics. Once at Talladega he had gone airborne at 200 mph, and the car had spiraled through the air like a football before it settled upside-down in the infield grass. But as dramatic as those NASCAR wrecks had looked on slow-motion replay, they probably weren’t as dangerous as the header he’d taken this afternoon off that Tennessee mountain road. In racing, he wore a fire resistant suit and a complex array of seat belts and harnesses. He sat in a custom-made seat that fit his body like a glove, and the seat itself was encased in a steel roll cage, all designed to protect the driver from just such deadly contingencies as aerial ballet. Today, though, all he’d had between him and eternity was a seat belt. The fact that he landed in a cemetery was probably a cosmic joke—just to underscore the warning about race car drivers who treat two-lane mountain roads as if they were super speedways. Point taken.
He was too proud to admit it to the inquisitive officer, but in truth, he was somewhat the worse for wear after his unscheduled crash landing. The seat belt had done its job well enough, but he still had sore shoulder muscles and a headache that felt suspiciously like a concussion.
“It sure was providential you crashing old Jimmy Powell’s funeral,” said Westcott. “A race car driver, you say. Imagine that.”
Resolutely ignoring the throbbing at his temples, Camber tried to make small talk with the officer who was, after all, the person who would bring his dinner and should be encouraged not to spit in it. “The deceased was a NASCAR fan, was he?”
“Sure was. You should see the collection of racing memorabilia he left behind. Dates all the way back to the ‘Forties. Why, he’s got stuff there signed by Roy Hall.”
Camber, who did not even date back to the ’Seventies, thought he might have heard of Roy Hall, but through the pounding of the headache he couldn’t quite place him. “That’s nice,” he murmured.
“I expect you’d know all about that old stuff Jimmy had in his collection, bein’ a race car driver yourself.”
Camber closed his eyes, because he knew what was coming next. When people found out that he was a driver, they invariably asked three questions. How fast can you go? (Depended on the track and the car; roughly 200 mph.) How much does it cost to race a car? (If you have to ask, you definitely cannot afford it.) And How do you get started in racing? Which wasn’t a short answer question. He had never managed to condense his entire life story into a sound bite.
Besides, since he was sitting there in a jail cell, shouldn’t they be talking about his one allotted phone call or the availability of a lawyer, or bail or something?
Officer Westcott cleared his throat, “Say, fella, How fast can—”
* * *
Camber stretched out on the metal bunk, thinking that it was good thing he was used to being uncomfortable, because this cell was as spartan as they came. Like a really big roll cage, he told himself. The town jail was a two-cell affair tucked away behind a solid steel door in a corridor inside the police department. A small rectangular window in the steel door allowed an officer to peer in at the prisoners without actually having to go into the cell block. There was a metal toilet attached to the wall of his cell, but no privacy and no sink. Good thing he was a race car driver. He was used to not having to pee for hours at a time. Of course, it helped that the temperature in a stock car was around a hundred and twenty degrees, so that you sweated instead of peeing. The cell was uncomfortably warm, but nowhere near hot enough to alleviate the problem. He decided that his best option was to try to sleep until they let him out for a hearing, or for whatever was going to come next. It wasn’t easy to sleep with this possible concussion doing a drum solo in his head, but even the semblance of a nap would be better than having to conduct a NASCAR seminar for a bored cop.
“Where is that redneck moron who ruined Jimmy’s funeral?”
Even Westcott, with a gun in his holster, looked a little shaken at the sound of that imperious voice. In the doorway stood a small dark-haired young woman whose expression suggested that it would take tranquilizer darts to subdue her.
Camber didn’t remember seeing the woman before, but since she was definitely dressed for a funeral, he had a pretty good idea who the “redneck moron” was. He waggled his fingers at her through the bars.
“You!” Ignoring Westcott, she marched up to the cell door and peered in at him. “Have you sobered up yet?”
“I was not inebriated,” said Camber truthfully.
“Ha! That’s a crock. You came sailing off the highway like—inebriated?”
“Well, intoxicated if you prefer,” said Camber, belatedly wondering if there were some legal distinction between the two terms. “Anyhow, I wasn’t.”
Seeing the look of astonishment on Pajan Mosby’s face, Westcott chuckled and jerked his thumb in Camber’s direction. “Talks just like NPR, don’t he?”
Distracted from her rage, she nodded slowly. It wasn’t just the five-syllable word, certainly non-standard vocabulary for jailhouse drunks. It was also the accent—or the lack of one, and the prisoner’s urbane assurance that he was equal to anything he would encounter in a small-town lock-up. Her eyes narrowed. “I thought you claimed to be a race car driver.”
“Now I am guilty of that,” said Camber affably.
She glanced back at Westcott. “What’s his name?”
“Cameron Berkley. Says so on his Virginia driver’s license, too.”
She gave him a wry smile. “So he’s not claiming to be Jeff Gordon, then?”
Camber patted his cheeks in mock alarm. “I don’t look that old, do I?” he said. “Gordon’s got ten years on me, at least! Although, this has been a rough day.” She obviously didn’t know much about racing, he thought. Jeff Gordon was a good eight inches shorter than Camber, and much lighter in coloring. Camber liked to think of himself as a younger, thinner, better-looking version of Tony Stewart, but this hardly seemed like the time to play image consultant.
Her suspicious glare returned as she peered at him through the bars. “Who are you?”
“Ca-me-ron Berkley,” The prisoner’s frown suggested concern for his interrogator’s short-term memory. “My friends call me Camber. But if you won’t believe this nice policeman or the DMV of the Commonwealth of Virginia on the subject of my identity, I’m sure it’s no use my telling you.”
The angry young woman regarded him thoughtfully, and wrinkled her nose as if—metaphorically, anyhow—she smelled a rat. “You do talk funny,” she announced.
Camber raised his eyebrows. “I beg your pardon?”
“Exactly!” She nodded triumphantly. “Most of the race car drivers we have around here would’ve said ‘Whut?’ So would most of the NASCAR Cup drivers, for that matter. But you talk like a TV anchorman. Big words. Broadcast accent. And yet you came off the highway at a hundred miles an hour and managed to control the car well enough to avoid a whole field full of people, and you claim you’re a race car driver, which I almost believe, because I know what Camber means.”
He perked up. She knew what camber meant? Was she a racing fan? His momentary elation subsided, though, because her forbidding expression told him that even if Dale Earnhardt, Jr. showed up to bail him out in person, which was not happening, this woman would still think he was pond scum.
Her scowl deepened. “So, what gives?”
Camber sighed. Here it came. The story of his life. “With all due respect, ma’am,” he said, “That is a two-aspirin question, and besides, I think I really should be talking to a lawyer, or, at the very least, to a bail bondsman.”
Through the clanging of his headache, he heard them laughing.
The story of his life in a sound bite? That was easy.
I was the Falls Church redneck.
Most people just blinked at him in total incomprehension when he said that, but nonetheless it was fundamentally true. Cameron Berkley—in those days, years away from being known as “Camber”—had been born within a Metro ride of D.C., the only child of an ordinary suburban Beltway couple—two nice college-educated people with dull, respectable government jobs, who did not watch NASCAR, or listen to country music, or eat possum. They had gotten divorced, of course, when Cameron was seven, but that only made him all the more average in Beltway society. Nobody expected anything else these days.
Cameron had been raised by his mom in an ordinary brick house in a genteel Falls Church neighborhood, where he attended the local public schools with the usual complement of preppies and jocks. On weekends with his dad he had been carted to youth soccer league games, enrolled in the neighborhood Scout troop, and encouraged to thrive in the mainstream culture of elitist Northern Virginia, where one was expected to dress well, go to a good college, and, in due time, marry a cheerleader, settle into a sedate white-collar job in a cubicle somewhere, and take up golf.
But Cameron Berkley was a changeling.
The way he figured it, on July 26, 1980 there must have been some nice country-fried couple from somewhere near the Tennessee line—a strapping young dude who was maybe a jackleg mechanic and his pregnant wife, with big hair and a name like Wanda Jean, who had been passing through Fairfax County on their way to the NASCAR race that weekend at Pocono, PA. He pictured them passing through Fairfax in an old Chevy plastered with NASCAR decals, when Wanda Jean or Sally Jo, or whoever she was, had gone into labor and been rushed to the county hospital, where just after midnight on the 27th she had proceeded to give birth to a baby boy, while her husband, watching TV in the maternity ward waiting room, was cheering for Neil Bonnet to take the checkered flag at Pocono. Camber wasn’t sure they even televised NASCAR races back in 1980, but the scene fit nicely in the movie-in-his-head.
That down-home couple was so real in Camber’s mind that he could almost see them. He imagined them with a strong family resemblance to himself. He figured that when they checked out of the county hospital, the nice blue collar couple from the hills had been given Baby Boy Berkley, while their real child—who was no doubt intended to be named Bobby Cale or Darrell Dale—had been christened Cameron Berkley and sent home to a Winnie-the-Pooh themed nursery with the two genteel suburbanites from Falls Church. “Blood will tell.” Somehow despite all his parents’ suburban propriety, little Cameron Berkley had grown up with an instinctive love for country music, fields and woods, and stock car racing.
He figured that somewhere in far southwest Virginia, there was probably a skinny, bespectacled kid in khakis and a Brooks Brothers shirt, trying to get his friends to drink Merlot and to watch the World Cup soccer tournament with him.
Yep, a changeling.
It had been obvious even before he could talk.
Almost as soon as he could walk far enough to reach the sandbox, he had traded all his plastic dinosaurs for Match Box cars and Hot Wheels gear. He hadn’t just played with the toy cars, either. He had devised elaborate chase scenes, complete with intricate jumps and horrific, shattering crashes. The box of tiny cars had been his miniature empire, in which he was driver, car owner, track manager, and crew chief, all rolled into one.
After the Match Box era had come Big Wheels and then bicycles. This entailed more elaborate jumps and a few unfortunate crashes, which had put his mom on a first-name basis with the staff of the local emergency room, but eventually—the hard way—he had learned motor skills, coordination, reaction time, and, best of all, judgment. That last attribute wasn’t infallible, obviously, or he wouldn’t be sitting in a jail cell in the middle of nowhere, but at least on a race track, he seldom made stupid mistakes.
Of course, the changeling story was simply Camber’s own private mythology to explain why he had felt so out-of-place in Beltway suburbia. He shared the same blood type as his parents, after all, and people always said that he resembled his dad. But sometimes he wished the switched-baby story were true, because, for one thing, that would mean that he and Tracy Berkley-Brown were not related in any way. But, alas, he very much feared that they were.
“He’s right about the lawyer, you know,” said Pajan Mosby, who was somewhat calmer now, but no less exasperated.
Further attempts to question the young man in the cell had not yielded much information. He’d kept holding his head and groaning, and finally he lay back on the bunk with his eyes shut and refused to talk any more at all.
Pajan and the officer had finally given up and left the cell block. Now they were talking softly on the office side of the reinforced steel door. Stoney Westcott glanced back through the small glass panel. The figure in the cell was not moving. Stoney shook his head. “I gotta tell you, Pajan, he must have taken a pretty hard hit in that wreck. If he’s not faking that headache, I think we’d be better off seeing about a doctor.”
“Have you noticed any symptoms other than the headache he claims to have? Any strange behavior?”
Stoney hesitated. “Well, I asked him did he want anything to drink, and he asked for a Ramune Hello Kitty Soda. You reckon he’s hallucinating?”
“No, I think it means he really is an asshole from northern Virginia.”
“Yeah, but he could still have a head injury.”
“He told you: it’s just a mild concussion,” said Pajan. “He said there’s nothing they can do about it. Just wait for the brain swelling to go down. And if he’s a race car driver, he certainly ought to know about head injuries. Besides, we don’t exactly have a state of the art medical center handy. If he makes bail, he can go to the Mayo Clinic for all I care, but he can pay for his own treatment. I doubt he’d bother, though. He seems more inclined to want to sleep it off.”
“That sure was some header he took off the highway,” said Stoney. “I reckon you’d have to be a race car driver to survive that, and not hurt anybody when you landed. Cameron Berkley. Have you ever heard of him?”
Pajan shook her head. “No. He’s not a Cup driver, obviously. We’d have heard of him. Maybe he drives CART or ARCA or something. But his nickname is a racing term. Camber.”
“Yeah? What’s it mean?” Stoney Westcott’s hobby was fishing.
Old Jimmy Powell had taught her that, in one of his many discourses on racing. “Camber is the angle between the vertical axis of the wheel and—” Noting the glazed look on the officer’s face, Pajan stopped the lecture with a shrug. “Basically, Stoney, it’s a factor in a car’s steering and suspension.” She was still thinking about the wreck, though. Another thought occurred to her. “You gave him a breathalyzer test, of course?”
Stoney Westcott nodded. “First thing we did, Pajan. He passed it. Like he told you. He wasn’t drunk.”
“Well, that’s too bad,” said Pajan. “Because drunks sober up, but stupid just goes on forever.”
* * *
Some time later Camber Berkley woke up with that momentary lurch of disorientation in which you wonder where you are and why, before memory floods back with full consciousness, making you wish you hadn’t bothered to remember.
Jail.
Small town in the back of beyond. He wondered how much time had passed since his race with the black car had ended in a nose dive off the ridge. Well, it didn’t matter. He had certainly lost that competition, and thus his big career chance for the weekend.
Sooner or later somebody here—probably a local magistrate—was going to ask him why he had been driving that corkscrew highway like a bat out of hell. Should he tell them the truth, he wondered. He couldn’t see any percentage in it. If the truth would make anyone feel sorry for him, or cause them to admire his bravery, or if it would have justified his wreck, then he would have trotted out the explanation in a heartbeat, but even to himself he had to admit that an unvarnished account of the circumstances did not cast him in a favorable light. In fact, even if he put the most positive, self-serving spin he could think of on the sequence of events, telling anything approaching the truth would not help his case one bit. He tried out an explanation in his mind, to see if he could concoct a version of the facts that would make himself sound worthy or sympathetic.
Not a chance.
“Well, sir, you see, it’s like this … My cousin Tracy is an arrogant, spoiled little jerk, and I’m a better race car driver than he is.”
“In which case, why didn’t Cousin Tracy land in the field below the highway, Smart Ass? How come you wrecked and he didn’t?”
For about two seconds, Camber found himself wondering where Tracy was. Surely he had seen Camber’s car go off the road. And he hadn’t stopped to make sure that Camber wasn’t hurt?
Of course he hadn’t.
Camber’s concussion would have to be a lot worse than it was before he’d start believing that Tracy Berkley had an unselfish bone anywhere in his body, or that he would let any circumstance whatsoever deter him from his mission, which was to reach Lowe’s Motor Speedway near Charlotte before dark.
If Camber were being completely honest, which he had no intention of being, he’d have to admit that had the situation been reversed, he wouldn’t have stopped, either.
Strictly speaking, Camber had no business being en route to Charlotte at all, just as he’d had no business answering his cousin’s cell phone, which is what started it all. But Tracy had insisted on going upstairs to find some wonderfully expensive new publicity photos of himself in his firesuit for Camber to admire, and Camber had been sitting there wondering how he could express his sincere admiration for those photos without Dramamine, when Tracy’s cell phone had rung, and without thinking, Camber had answered it.
The caller I.D. indicated that the person phoning was “Flash,” the self-awarded nickname of a rookie Cup driver who wasn’t as good as he thought he was. Camber always mentally added “in the pan” whenever he saw the word “Flash” in connection with that driver’s name. That was interesting. The racing web-site, which he had checked that morning, said that “Flash” had wrecked his car at practice for the upcoming weekend race at Lowe’s.
“Hey, how ya doin’, Buddy?” said Camber, who didn’t much care.
“Aw, the docs claim I got a concussion, Trace.”
Several thoughts ran neck and neck in Camber’s mind: the first being that if Flash in his current mental state could mistake Camber for his cousin Tracy, then the head injury was beyond dispute. His second thought was that a diagnosed concussion would surely put a driver out of the car for the Sunday race, which was when he realized that what he had intercepted was not merely a social call. If he could successfully impersonate his cousin for a few more minutes, long enough to extract the pertinent information before Tracy came back downstairs with his infernal photo album, Camber figured he would be the front-runner for whatever offer was being made.
Don’t talk too much, he told himself. Flash might spot the difference in voices. Besides, he couldn’t sound too sympathetic. Tracy had never spared a thought for anyone other than himself in his whole life. “That’s rough, man.”
“Yeah,” said the driver.
“Guess you tore up the car, huh?”
“Like I care. It’s only a race car. They can make more. It wasn’t my fault. They shouldn’t spilt rookies like me going in the corner, Trace. I ran my line. That was all I could do, right?”
“You just need more seat time,” said Camber warily.
“That’s what my dad says. I just need time on these super speedways, and a little luck. We can’t buy luck.”
Several cynical replies hovered on Camber’s lips, such as a remark about Flash’s rich daddy who was supposedly bankrolling his ride, but he thought better of mentioning it. “Right.”
“So we’re going to have to put someone in the car till I get 100 percent. And they asked me to recommend somebody.”
Camber’s heart leaped. “And you said Trace—er—me?”
“Well, naw, man. I said Chad Chaffin. I’ve seen him bounce between rides lately, or Tina Gordon. Woman behind the wheel: that could get us some press.”
Then why are you calling Tracy? thought Camber. But he knew. “Your team wants someone they wouldn’t have to pay to drive, right? Someone who could just fill in for a week or two until you get better.” Without the money his father was securing for the team, they just needed to get the car in the race. The points would help them keep their provisional; after all, Flash wasn’t the best qualifier. Qualifying is half the car and half driver nerves. Flash lacked the latter.
“Well, yeah. I figured you might like a shot at a ride, just to show people what you can do. You interested?”
“Sure,” said Camber, thinking fast. “When do they need me?”
“Look, I gotta go in a minute. They want me to take an MRI. Look, where are you, man?”
“Home,” said Camber. “I mean, my folks’ place. Close to Knoxville.” He had almost said “my uncle’s place in Knoxville” but at the last moment he’d remembered that he was impersonating Tracy. He hoped he sounded dumb enough.
“Can you get down to Charlotte by tonight. Start in the morning?”
“Sure,” said Camber. “Count on it.”
He heard footsteps on the stairs and broke off the connection just as Tracy came lurching down the stairs with a stack of albums and photo boxes balanced precariously in both hands, and steadied with his chin.
Narrow escape, thought Camber, thinking that he’d have been willing to gnaw off his own foot to escape sitting through a Show & Tell session of that magnitude with Tracy holding forth. He was glad to have an excuse to leave, although he couldn’t exactly be truthful about what that excuse was.
Camber was at the front door before his cousin reached the bottom step. “I’m sorry, man,” he said. “I just got an urgent call. Gotta go.”
“A call?” said Tracy, offloading the photo boxes onto the sofa.
“Um, yeah. Mom. Dad’s away on business and the car is acting up.”
“Can’t she just call a garage?” asked Tracy. “I mean, you’re at least eight hours away.”
“Well, you know mom,” said Camber, forcing a laugh. “She panics. Anyhow, give me a rain check on the photos. See ya!”
He was through the door, into his car, and gone before Tracy had time to make any more perfectly sensible observations about his spur-of-the-moment excuse. Once he reached the road, Camber streaked out as if he’d just seen a green flag drop. He figured he could make it to Charlotte in four hours, tops, and he settled back in the seat, doing the speed limit, because he didn’t want to spoil a sure thing by taking unnecessary chances.
It was maybe fifteen minutes later that he saw Tracy’s black car in his rear view mirror. It was just a speck on the horizon at first, so that he couldn’t be entirely sure that’s who it was, but in less than a minute the car had narrowed the gap considerably, and by then Camber knew not only who was following him, but why.
“Flash must have called back.”
The injured driver had forgotten to tell something to his prospective relief driver, or he’d had a question, and so he had called Tracy’s cell phone again, only this time the call was answered by Tracy. Who had no idea what flash was talking about. What previous conversation? What driving job?
Unfortunately, Tracy had been able to figure out what had happened in less than a minute, and he had been on his way in a heartbeat, burning asphalt to catch his cousin the ride-napper.
That’s when the movie-style car chase began in earnest. At first Camber had thought he could outrun the competition, but “money buys speed” does not apply only to stock car racing: it also meant that Tracy’s new BMW had a considerable advantage of the elderly Detroit rust bucket that Camber was driving. Still, for a couple of white-knuckle miles along corkscrew mountain roads, Camber had managed to give Tracy a run for his money. There were moments when he had thought he might actually pull it off from sheer bravado, leaving his more cautious cousin behind in a spray of gravel, but then a quick succession of sharp curves had allowed Tracy to close the gap between them and to execute a few bump-and-run maneuvers, finally sending Camber over the edge and into the cemetery in the field beside the river.
Now here he was in a poky county jail with a throbbing headache and an immediate future full of lawyers, while Tracy was barreling into Charlotte, ready to head out to Lowe’s Motor Speedway for his shot at the big-time. The one consolation was that there was no television, telephone or access to email available in the cellblock, so at least for the foreseeable future he would be spared all news of Tracy’s NASCAR debut. Cold comfort, but he would take what he could get.
* * *
Later that evening when Deputy Westcott brought him a plate of mystery meat in gravy and boiled potatoes, Camber decided to postpone this gastronomic form of Russian roulette with an attempt at conversation.
“How come your lady friend there is so mad at me?” he asked, trying to sound concerned rather than hostile.
Westcott shrugged. “She thought the world of that fellow they were burying when you crash landed in the grave yard. She figured it was disrespectful of you to spoil the services like that. Now, I don’t think old Jimmy would’a minded, but you can’t tell Pajan that.”
“So was he a relative?”
“Nope. He was ninety-something, so he’d outlived what family he had, but he was everybody’s favorite around here. Never saw him mad at a soul. I think he’d have got a kick out of you wrecking his funeral, because he was crazy about NASCAR.”
“I wish he was still around,” said Camber, who felt that his popularity locally could use a boost.
“You should see the stuff old Jimmy collected over the years. Folks used to come for miles to see his NASCAR stuff. One time we had Cale Yarborough’s gas man right here in this town.”
Camber tried to look suitably impressed. “So, what did the old boy have? Die-cast cars? NASCAR autograph cards?”
“Some of that,” Westcott admitted. “But he had been a fan since the ‘Forties, and he didn’t mind keeping a lot of things that most people would have considered junk. He was a widower, of course, so he was lucky not having a little woman to make him get rid of that stuff.”
Camber took a bite of the mystery meat and wished he hadn’t. “What stuff?”
“There’s a list of it somewhere. On account of the will. Let’s see … Jimmy had a lug nut from every single car that ever won the Daytona 500—from Lee Petty all the way up to Kevin Harvick. Every one of them signed, too, by the driver. And Daytona 500 race programs signed by all the drivers who raced. I think he had near ’bout every year. He had car parts from wrecks—also signed—by Earnhardt, David Pearson, Bobby Allison, Richard Petty—everybody who was anybody, I reckon. And one of Curtis Turner’s old firesuits. A helmet of Davey Allison’s. I got a copy of the list around somewhere.”
“I’d like to see it,” said Camber softly. He was feeling chills along the back of his neck. He had begun to shovel forkfuls of stringy beef and boiled potatoes into his mouth with absolutely no sensation of having done so.
Stoney Westcott, who seemed to have nothing better to do, since the current jail population consisted of Camber himself, hurried out into the office, and returned a few minutes later with a ten-page list of items. He passed the paper through the bars, and Camber set down the tray with trembling hands, and began to read the list.
“Pretty good, huh?” said Westcott with a smirk of civic pride.
Camber looked up. “Look, he really had all this stuff? I mean, it’s not fakes or reproductions or anything?”
“Oh, it’s real. I remember seeing a lot of this stuff when I was a kid, and NASCAR souvenirs weren’t big business back then. Why, you could walk off with a car part after a race just for the asking. But not many people bothered. When I look at the prices some of that junk goes for on eBay, I’d have to say that old Jimmy Powell was just ahead of his time.”
Camber barely heard him, because he was captivated by the list. It was like the Holy Grail of NASCAR collectibles. There were things on the list that Camber didn’t even know existed, by people who were not famous by ordinary standards, but within the sport … oh, baby.
A tire signed by Lloyd Seay. Lloyd Seay? One of the pioneers of racing, a bootlegger turned pro. Seay had won a race at Daytona when they still ran the cars on the beach. He had been dead eight years before NASCAR had even existed as an organization … Killed in a moonshining dispute at the age of twenty-one, but he had been the first awesome driver from Dawsonville, Georgia, well before “Awesome” Bill Elliott was even born. Camber had never heard of anybody having a Lloyd Seay racing souvenir.
He let out a low whistle. What else was on here?
The list read like a Who’s Who of Motorsports. Everybody who was anybody had contributed something to Jimmy Powell’s collection. Camber supposed that the most valuable items were the ones from the Forties and Fifties, the signed tires and helmets from the likes of Tim Flock, Red Byron, and Roy Hall. He saw Ralph Earnhardt’s name on the list, too. The autographs alone were worth a fortune.
“This stuff ought to be in a NASCAR museum somewhere like Charlotte,” he murmured, still scanning the items.
“Yeah, I wonder why Jimmy didn’t think to donate it to some place like that,” said Westcott. “But as it is, he left instructions for the whole shebang to be sold, and the proceeds given to charity, I guess you could say. Some of the folks at the funeral were thinking about having a Saturday night auction at the Moose Lodge, but I think it’s worth more than that. What do you reckon, being in the sport and all?”
Camber looked up, still reeling from the thought of undiscovered treasure, and in his confusion he blurted out the truth before he thought better of it. “What do I think? I think this stuff is worth about two million dollars. Easily that. Maybe more.”
In hindsight, he probably shouldn’t have said that, but he found the urge to show off irresistible, especially when it came to matters concerning motor sports. Modesty was never one of Cameron Berkley’s more conspicuous virtues, anyhow.
Chapter Three
Full Court Press
Maybe it was the head injury, but when Cameron Berkley looked back on the events of what could laughingly be called his trial, he always remembered it as a montage of court room movies ranging from My Cousin Vinny to Inherit the Wind. In Camber’s previous imaginings he had always pictured the film version of his life as an action-adventure epic starring any James Bond actor at the age of 26, but in his current role as The Defendant in this small county courtroom, he was very much afraid that the part was more suited to whoever-played-the-Werewolf in the horror movie of your choice. At least, that’s how everyone else there seemed to view him: as an unkempt, alien creature in shabby clothes who might go berserk at any time. The deputy had not handcuffed him, but his expression suggested that tasers and pepper spray were not entirely out of the question, should he make one false move. Nobody bothered to talk to him, either. Not even his lawyer, who would remind no one of Gregory Peck in To Kill A Mockingbird.
Camber’s hastily-appointed legal representative—the first guy in the phone book who was not otherwise busy that morning—was a slight, flustered man in a rumpled brown suit and a skinny tie, whose horn-rimmed glasses dwarfed the rest of his face. His yellowing business card, which read “Edwin Peebles,” had obviously spent many months in the lawyer’s wallet. Nothing about the man inspired confidence, but Camber didn’t see that he had many other options, and after all this was only a traffic case, in a Podunk town, so what did it matter?
Mr. Peebles had looked distinctly wary of his newly-acquired client. “Do you have any questions?”
Camber hesitated. “Well, this isn’t my primary concern, but just so I can stop wondering about it, could you tell me the name of this town? I think I must have mis-read the sign.”
Mr. Peebles allowed himself a taut smile. “People often think that,” he said. “In fact the town’s name is indeed Judas Grove.”
“You guys actually named a town for Judas?”
“Well, therein lies a tale,” said the lawyer, and, with all the patient serenity of one who charges by the hour, he settled back to tell it.
When the little east Tennessee town was founded in 1865, its residents had intended to name it Judah Grove, in honor of the Confederate Secretary of State, Judah P. Benjamin. After Appomattox, Judah Benjamin had escaped capture, and fled to England, with—according to rumors—most of the Confederate gold stashed away in his luggage. The townspeople did not hold that against him. In fact, they admired his enterprising spirit. The dissenting opinion in the community turned out to be the only one that counted: the newly-appointed postmaster, a carpetbagger who got the job because of his Union connections. He had no intention of allowing these Tennessee turncoats to name a town after a Rebel, and, as a rebuke to them for siding against the Union, he christened the town Judas Grove, after the most famous traitor of all.
When the postmaster finally left office in 1876, there was some talk of changing the name back, but by then Judah Benjamin was a fading memory to the residents, and there was no consensus on a new name for the town. At the community meeting, the mayor, who was a book-keeper, pointed out that, since Judas Iscariot was the treasurer among the disciples, he could be honored for his fiscal competence as God’s Bookkeeper. No one was swayed by this argument, and there was some talk of renaming the town “Elijah,” but since several residents actually were named “Elijah,” the idea was shelved.
Before further suggestions could be put forth, Mrs. Liberty Powell, the judge’s wife and an avid gardener, stood up and said, “It’s the name of a tree, mind you. The judas tree is the other name for the flowering redbud, which we have in abundance all through the woods hereabouts. It seems to me that we could keep the town name Judas Grove in honor of the tree.”
The mayor nodded. “It’s already on all the maps,” he said. “It would take years to get it changed. And if we keep the name, we won’t have to reprint our stationery.”
The motion was carried, and Judas Grove sailed on past two more century marks, feeling few effects from its odd name, except perhaps that its residents got more than their share of traveling missionaries, who probably reasoned that anyone living in a town named Judas was in greater than average need of salvation.
“I’ll bet you tell that story a lot,” said Camber.
“Well, people are naturally curious,” said Mr. Peebles. “Now about your little legal difficulty—”
“You’d think that a town named after Judas would be tolerant of the sins of others.”
“You—er—you crashed old Mr. Powell’s funeral … Literally. Crashed into it. ”
“Yes, but I didn’t mean to,” said Camber. “My car went off the road on that sharp curve, and that’s where I landed. You know: momentum, inertia. I certainly obeyed the laws of physics, anyhow.”
The lawyer, blinked at him, apparently disinclined to consider a physics defense. “Ah umm.”
“I see myself as an injured party here, really,” Camber went on. “The victim of a tragic road accident. In fact, I am thinking of suing the state highway department for the condition of that road. I might have been killed.”
The attorney peered at the paperwork and intoned: “Speed in excess of ninety miles per hour.”
It was Camber‘s turn to blink. “How would they know that?”
Mr. Peebles smirked. “Physics.”
The pre-trial consultation was not encouraging. Camber was all for pleading not guilty, and banking on his appeal as a dashing young race car driver to charm the jury into an acquittal, but his attorney thought otherwise.
“Well, you could go that way,” Peebles said, in tones suggesting that he was humoring a maniac. “I expect the case would drag on for months, though, and with legal fees running $200 an hour, it might be expensive. Of course, I guess you race car drivers don’t have to worry about money.”
Camber hesitated, hating to distance himself from the likes of Dale Earnhardt and Jeff Gordon by admitting that practically all he ever did was worry about money. He wasn’t a Cup driver, which meant that he didn’t have a corporate giant for a sponsor, or even a team out there trying to keep him in tires. He drove when he could, trying to impress somebody enough to take him on as their permanent driver, and he worked at whatever jobs didn’t interfere with his racing schedule. Money was a sore subject. He had enough to make it from one month to the next, more or less, but certainly not enough to keep lawyers as pets.
“Race car drivers can’t afford the negative publicity of a lengthy trial,” he said. “It would make the sponsors nervous.” Which was basically true, except that he didn’t actually have any sponsors.
Edwin Peebles was giving him the appraising look of a mind reader who doesn’t care for the fine print. But he was a courteous man who saw no point in embarrassing people just to prove that you had figured out their shabby little secrets. So he coughed discreetly and said, “Or you could just stand up in front of Judge Mosby right now, plead guilty, and take what’s coming to you.”
A fine, probably, Camber figured, and he did see the sense in saving large amounts of money that he did not, in fact, possess. “Does the court take credit cards, Mr. Peebles?”
The lawyer ventured a faint smile. “I believe so, these days,” he said. “One must move with the times.”
Having thus decided on a guilty plea with no back-chat, Camber’s attorney-client conference lasted less than half an hour. Camber was a little disappointed to be shortchanged in his first court-room drama. This was always happening to him. When he did drive in the rare televised race, he was always having to call his friends to tell them where to pause the TIVO so that they wouldn’t miss the one nano-second that his car had appeared onscreen during the race. The perennial also-ran, that was Camber. You’d think that when he was the defendant in the case, he get a little more attention, but apparently not.
What a shame. He had envisioned dazzling a jury with a parade of expert witnesses, “Tell us, Mr. Harvick: if you had gone off that curve at ninety miles per hour in the defendant’s car, do you think you could have steered the car in order to avoid the funeral area? You do not? Thank you. Next witness: Tony Stewart …” Yeah, right. Unfortunately, since Camber’s acquaintance with Cup drivers hardly extended past an occasional “How ya doin’,” he didn’t think any of them would actually remember him, much less show up to help a lower-echelon colleague with a minor traffic case, even if he had tried to summon them. Even imagining the conversations made him wince. “Hello, Mr. Gordon, this is Camber Berkley. You said hello to me at a race once, and I was wondering if you could take time out of your busy schedule to come to a town in Tennessee that is only on the map two days a week to testify for me in a minor traffic case. Hello? Hello?”
After all, he thought, why not just pay the $200 fine, or whatever it was, and save all the money on attorney’s fees and other expenses that he’d otherwise spend trying to fight it. Not to mention the time factor. Okay, he had lost the chance to drive this weekend at Lowe’s Motor Speedway, but surely some other opportunities would arise, and he needed a clear schedule to allow for any opportunities that might be forthcoming.
Thus, although he had no overwhelming faith in Mr. Peeble’s legal expertise, Camber decided to take his advice, and thus the course of least resistance, mostly because the $238 he had in the bank and his $1200 credit card limit wouldn’t allow him to decide otherwise. Besides, by requesting an immediate hearing, he wouldn’t have to worry about bail, or coming back to town, or any of the other messy eventualities that would accompany a lengthy jury trial.
So there he was in the sleepy county courtroom, the day after his automotive sky-dive, hoping to be done by noon, so that he could tackle his next problem: getting his car back into drivable condition. Camber had left the scene of the accident in the back of a sheriff’s department car, while his Detroit rust-bucket had been towed to some local garage, where it was no doubt disintegrating peacefully while awaiting its owner’s release from jail. If its captors wanted more than two hundred bucks to release it from impoundment, Camber planned to hop a Greyhound out of town and write off the car as a total loss. He was a good enough jackleg mechanic to buy another junker at some handy auto graveyard, and restore it to working order without expending too much time and expense. While all these thoughts bump-drafted each other in his head, Cameron settled himself at the defendant’s table in the tidy little courtroom, and tried to look like an earnest pillar of the racing community. It was unfortunate that he didn’t have any dress clothes with him. It was hard to look important in jeans and a Talladega tee shirt, and somehow orange prison jumpsuits did not confer the same air of excitement and glamour as the superficially similar firesuit, but he would make the best of it. He’d smile a lot. That ought to help.
It wasn’t exactly a trial—not by cinematic standards, anyhow. There was no press; no gallery packed with avid spectators; no jury, even. Just a few very bored-looking “officers of the court” standing around waiting for the judge to drop by. Occasionally one of them would make a friendly remark to one of the others, and then they would all glance uneasily at the only stranger in the room—which was Camber himself—as if to reproach him for putting a damper on the occasion, which Camber considered most unfair, considering that he was the guest of honor. He tried giving them a grin and a little wave, as if to say “Don’t mind me,” but these efforts at cordiality only made them stiffen and turn away. Even Mr. Peebles, who was supposed to be on his side, had left the table to socialize with his colleagues. Camber felt like the corpse at a funeral—a necessary encumbrance, of course, but not one that is encouraged to participate in the festivities. He sighed and settled back in the uncomfortable wooden chair to wait for show-time.
Boredom and anxiety: He recognized the combination as the pre-race set of feelings. He supposed that he could pretend he was about to be interviewed on NASCAR Inside after having his car disqualified for mechanical infractions, or trying to explain a $10,000 fine for getting into a shoving match with a fellow driver after a race. Since Camber’s driving experience in competition was regrettably minimal, neither of those things had ever happened to him, but he had seen Michael Waltrip and Matt Kenseth being interviewed in just such situations, and he tried to remember how they had handled it. As far as he could recall, their approach had been quiet contrition, topped with judicious measures of earnest integrity. Okee-dokee. Cameron tried to look earnest and humble. A Jeff Gordon imitation. Or maybe Carl Edwards. Got it.
Just before the proceedings began, another person joined what Camber was beginning to think of as the courthouse office party. The irate young woman, who had been the only visitor to his jail cell, swept in and took a seat behind the railing in the spectators’ section of the courtroom. He tried the smile again, since they were, after all, speaking acquaintances, but she gave him a look that could have frozen motor oil, which he took to mean that she remembered him all too well.
He wondered what she was doing in court. She looked quite severe in a navy skirt and blazer, with her dark hair was pinned up in a no-nonsense bun at the back of her neck. Witness for the prosecution? Surely they weren’t going to bother to call witnesses to testify that he had wrecked his car in the midst of Jimmy Powell’s funeral. Mr. Peebles wouldn’t dream of letting him deny that fact, anyhow. He obviously had no imagination, and his manner suggested that if anyone had attempted to give him an original idea, he would have tried to exchange it for breath mints.
The young woman had turned away from him as much as possible. Now she was consulting some paperwork in a folder on her lap. Maybe she was just there as an observer, he thought, here to see that the disrupter of her friend’s funeral was duly punished. He hoped she wasn’t a newspaper reporter, because publicity about this incident would be a bad thing. NASCAR took a dim view of reckless driving on public thoroughfares.
It was a pity that they’d met under such unfortunate circumstances, Camber thought. Reasonably attractive women who knew something about racing weren’t all that easy to find. In fact, if she would stop looking at him as if he were a cockroach, she’d be downright interesting. She looked up just then, caught him looking at her, and gave him another withering look. Oh well, it was a thought.
Cameron felt an irrational stab of optimism when the judge turned out to be a ringer for the 80’s Daytona 500 winner Benny Parsons. In his present state of gloom, he decided that he would take good omens wherever he found them, and surely having a judge who looked like a NASCAR legend was a hopeful sign. Unfortunately, the resemblance between his honor and the genial, hard-driving Mr. Parsons was only skin-deep. Certainly it did not extend to a fondness for motorsports, if his malignant expression was any indication. He listened carefully to Mr. Peeble’s perfunctory explanations. It soon became obvious that Isaac Newton’s First Law of Motion would not be one of the laws governing the disposition of his case today. At Camber’s insistence, his attorney offered it up as a mitigating factor, to which the judge replied, “Nice try.”
Almost before one could say “foregone conclusion,” the prosecution and defense attorneys ran out of things to say. Camber had spent most of the time trying to decide what he was going to say when the court asked him for a statement, and he was ready to launch into his Jeff Gordon imitation, but he never got the chance.
When the judge finally did turn his attention away from the two attorneys to take notice of the prisoner, he merely remarked, “Well, Mr. Berkley, what are we to do with you?”
Camber opened his mouth to offer some helpful and eminently merciful suggestions, but the judge held up his hand, ordering him in no uncertain terms to remain silent.
The prosecuting attorney murmured, “There is the matter of the will, your honor.”
“I was just thinking of that,” nodded the judge. He looked again at Camber, this time with the thoughtful expression one gets when one looks at a chicken while thinking up recipes. He looked down at the paperwork on his desk, smiled, and said, “The nice thing about being a local judge is that I have some leeway in your sentencing procedures, which enables me to be merciful in cases where circumstances warrant it.”
Camber began to feel hopeful, but then the judge continued, “It also allows me in exceptional circumstances to be creative.”
He didn’t like the sound of that. What did creative mean in back-of-beyond Tennessee? Tar and feathers? Being shackled to the local ax murderer on a chain gang?
“Now, you broke quite a few laws with that flying car stunt, young man. Speeding. Reckless driving. Reckless endangerment, considering all the people you could have killed at the funeral. Why, I expect if we gave our learned counsel here time to consult his law books, he could have you so hamstrung with felonies that you wouldn’t see the light of day for quite a spell. Especially since I could take it upon myself to see that the sentences ran consecutively, like cars run in qualifying, rather than concurrently, like they do in an actual race. I take it you follow me?”
Camber, struck dumb by this unexpected reference to motorsports, managed to nod. Consecutively. One after the other. Who knew how many months that could end up being if they really did get creative? He wondered if anybody in NASCAR liked him enough to pay his legal fees, because nobody else he knew would be able to afford it.
“Well, I’m glad you understand the gravity of the situation, because gravity is what got you in this mess in the first place, wouldn’t you say?”
Camber nodded again, wondering if prisoners were supposed to laugh when judges made wisecracks. On the whole, he thought not.
“So taking gravity into account as a mitigating factor, and also considering that the deceased whose funeral you crashed was a racing fan, I am, as I said, inclined to exercise my discretion in the disposition of this case. In short, young man, I am going to offer you a deal.”