Shock Wave vf-5

by John Sandford

  Virgil called Ahlquist- the sheriff was still out at the equipment yard-and told him about Davenport’s idea for a press conference. Ahlquist jumped on the idea and said he’d set it up. “I’ve been working on the rest of your list, all morning. I’ll give it to you at the press conference,” Ahlquist said. “Or you can stop by anytime.”

  “It’s a mess out there, isn’t it?” Virgil asked.

  “Oh, yeah. Is it gonna get worse?”

  “Barlow thinks so,” Virgil said.

  Virgil dug out the list of contacts that Ahlquist had given him the night before. Ahlquist had suggested that he talk first to Edwin Kline, one of the three city councilmen who voted against PyeMart, and a pharmacist. Ahlquist said that Kline had been on the city council for twenty years, and had been mayor for twelve, and knew all the personalities. “Since he’s a pill-pusher, people talk to him, like they would a doctor. He knows what’s going on in their heads.”

  Virgil found Kline in his drugstore on Main Street, introduced himself, waited for two minutes until he’d finished rolling some pills for a single customer, and then followed him to a backroom office.

  Kline was an older, balding man in his late fifties or early sixties, with glittering rimless glasses and a soft oval face. He wore a white jacket like a doctor, and pointed Virgil into a wooden swivel chair that might have been taken from a nineteenth-century newspaper office, while he sat on a similar chair behind his desk.

  “There’s some pretty damn mad people in town, and I know all of them-heck, I’m one of them-but I don’t know which one is crazy enough to do this,” he said.

  “I don’t know exactly how to ask this,” Virgil said, “or where the ethics come in… but of all those angry people, do you know which ones might be using anti-psychotics? Or who should be?”

  “Mmm.” Long hesitation. “You know, it probably would be unethical to give you that information, though I don’t doubt you could get a subpoena. Just between you, me, and the doorpost, I’d tell you if I thought one of them was the bomber. But the people I know of, who are getting that kind of medication, are not really involved in this whole thing. I suppose they could be picking up some reflected anger… If you want to come back this afternoon, and if you don’t let on where you got it, I could get together a list.”

  “If you’d prefer, I could get Sheriff Ahlquist to give you a subpoena, just to cover your butt, if there were any questions,” Virgil said.

  “That might be best-but I’ll get started on the list,” Kline said. “You ought to go out to Walmart and check with them, too. They roll a lot more pills than I do, now.”

  Virgil asked him who he’d have been most worried about, of the angry people. Kline thought for a moment, then said, “Well, there are about three of them. And goddamnit, now, I have to live in this town, so this has to be between you and me.”

  “That’s fine,” Virgil said. “Nobody needs to know where the names came from.”

  Kline slid open a desk drawer, pulled out a pack of Marlboros, and said, “I can’t have people seeing me smoking. I only smoke a couple a day… Come on this way.” He led Virgil out of the office, through a stockroom, up an internal stair to the roof, where four chairs, an umbrella, and a two-foot-tall office refrigerator were sitting on a deck.

  Kline took a chair, lit up, blew a lungful of smoke, and said, “First up would be Ernie Stanton. Ernie’s a redneck, a hard worker. Doesn’t show it, but he’s smart. He started out with nothing, and now he owns two fast oil-change places. Ernie’s Oil. He got hurt when Walmart came in. They’ve got that Lube Express thing. But Ernie’s faster and just as cheap, so he got hurt, but he hung on. I don’t think he’ll get past PyeMart. He’s a guy with a temper, he’s a hunter, he’s got guns and all that, and he’s spent thirty years scratching his way up. Done a lot of roughneck work-might know about dynamite. He’s gonna lose his livelihood. He’s gonna lose it all.”

  Virgil made a note of the name. Kline had two others, both businesspeople. Don Banning, who ran a clothing store selling work clothes; he’d also been hurt by Walmart, but he’d moved to somewhat higher-end stuff, brand names that Walmart didn’t carry. “As I understand it, PyeMart carries the same brands he does. He won’t be able to match the prices,” Kline said.

  The least likely one, in Kline’s opinion, was a woman named Beth Robertson, who ran the Book Nook. “She says she’s gone. She’s gonna try to make it through Christmas-PyeMart won’t open until spring-but then she’s getting out. But she’s crazy mad about it. The bookstore is her life. She swings back and forth between this cold acceptance, planning to sell out, and this red-hot screaming anger. It’s like watching somebody who just found out they got terminal cancer. The thing is, she’s mad enough, but I don’t think she could work a hammer, much less make a bomb. She’s the kind who doesn’t understand how a nut and bolt go together.”

  “Any more?” Virgil asked.

  “Well, there’s me,” Kline said. “I’m done. I’m gonna retire, sell out the store while I can still get some money for it. Got a good location, maybe somebody’ll think of something they can do here.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” Virgil said.

  “Nothing lasts forever,” Kline said. “I can’t match the big boys when it comes to peddling pills, and I’m not even sure that’s a bad thing. People already pay too much for medicine. And, my kids are gone, they’re not interested in the store, and I’ve got some money. I think my wife and I might move up to the Cities. Buy a condo, go to some plays, that kind of thing. Be useless old farts for a while. Then die.”

  Virgil said, “As a city councilman… you might have noticed that there were some unusual vote changes on the PyeMart zoning.”

  Kline snorted, and smoke came out of his nose. “No kidding? Where’d you hear that?”

  “You know… around.”

  “Those boys got bought, is what happened,” Kline said. “Three of them, anyway. The fourth one, he thinks PyeMart’s a good idea: jobs for kids and low prices. They didn’t have to buy him. Those other three, Pat Shepard, Arnold Martin, Burt Block… well, they’re not exactly friends of mine, but I’ve known them for a long time. And I’ve got to say, they’d take the money. That’s my bottom line on them. They’d take the money. I doubt that you could prove it.”

  “I’m gonna have to talk to them,” Virgil said. “They could be targets.”

  “You haven’t asked about the mayor. Geraldine.”

  “What about her?”

  “Geraldine was probably the bag man on the whole deal. Bag woman. She’s the one who talked the others into it. She is the personification of greed,” Kline said. “As mayor, she had a veto, and then it would have taken five votes to override her. But that’s not what happened.”

  “She buy a new house?” Virgil asked.

  “No, nothing like that. She’s not dumb. I can tell you what I suspect-my theory. Her husband has a seasonal business, renting out golf carts, and selling some.”

  “That’s not an everyday business,” Virgil said.

  “Well, it’s not uncommon, either,” Kline said. “Probably a couple of them in every big city, the cart rental businesses. You get these golf courses, they have weekend tournaments, and they don’t have enough carts of their own-so, they rent from Dave Gore. He pretty much services a tournament every weekend, is the way I hear it. It’s a legitimate business.”

  “So what’s your theory?” Virgil asked.

  “This could just be bs. But: I was up in the Cities two weeks ago, and stopped in a Goodwill store to drop off an old chest of drawers,” Kline said. “There’s a PyeMart right there, and as I was pulling out, here comes a PyeMart employee, driving across the parking lot in what looked like a brand-new golf cart.”

  “Hmm.”

  “That’s what I said: Hmm. Wikipedia says there are two thousand four hundred PyeMart stores in the U.S., and about one thousand one hundred in other countries. If you bought a new golf cart for only one store in ten, and bought th
em through Dave… that’d be a nice little chunk of change. Just about invisible. Not only that, if you’re PyeMart, you’d have the golf carts, and even a business write-off.”

  “You got any proof?” Virgil asked.

  “Proof? Hell, all I got is an idea, from driving past a PyeMart store.” Kline snubbed out his cigarette, and snapped it off the roof into the alley behind the store. “I gotta get back. Who knows, a customer might wander in.”

  They stood up and Virgil looked across the top of the building, out onto the lake. A single sailboat cruised a few hundred feet off the waterfront, and Virgil asked, “That’s not, uh…” He dug in his memory, found the name. “… Arnold Martin, is it?”

  Kline looked out at the sailboat and said, “Nope. I’d say Arnold’s boat is about half that big.”

  Back downstairs, Virgil thanked Kline for his time, and Kline asked, “Was I any help?”

  “Well, you know, the possibility of municipal corruption is always interesting, if you’re a cop,” Virgil said. “But it’s not the PyeMart supporters who are blowing stuff up. Not the crooks on the city council. I’ll probably go around and talk to some of these people you told me about.”

  “Let me add a name to your list: Larry Butz. He’s one of the trout guys. He said publicly that we had to stop the PyeMart any way we could. This was in a city council meeting, and Geraldine jumped right on him and said something like, ‘You don’t mean that; we’re civilized people here.’ And Butz said, ‘I did mean it. We got to do anything we can.’ ”

  “Good guy? Bad guy?”

  “Not a bad guy. But I happen to know that he’s taken a pretty wide variety of anti-depression and anti-anxiety pills. He has some problems.”

  “Thanks for that,” Virgil said. “I’ll stop by later and get the rest of the list.”

  “Get me a subpoena and get one for Walmart, too,” Kline said. “I don’t want people thinking I’m a rat.”

  Virgil’s next stop was at city hall, where he talked to Geraldine Gore, who had an office the size of the smallest legal bedroom. With just enough space for a desk, four file cabinets, two visitor chairs, and an American flag, she pointed him at one of the two chairs, but didn’t seem all that excited to see him.

  Gore was a short woman, but wide, the kind who might have stopped a hockey puck without moving too much. She had stiff magenta hair over mousy brown eyebrows, and suspicious blue eyes.

  She said, “I have to tell you, I have no idea what this is about.”

  Virgil pushed his eyebrows up: “Well, it seems simple enough. You guys approved PyeMart, a lot of people think it’ll damage the town and its environment.”

  “That’s nonsense,” she snapped.

  “So what?”

  She frowned: “What do you mean, so what? We had environmental impact statements, we had economic studies-”

  Virgil interrupted what threatened to become a PowerPoint presentation. “I mean, it may be nonsense, what people think-but they think it anyway. One of them apparently is so mad about it that he’s killing people. As a potential target, I’d think you’d be pretty anxious to get this straightened out.”

  “I’m not a target-”

  “Tell that to the bomber,” Virgil said. “You’re the one single person who could have stopped the PyeMart, if you’d vetoed the city council’s approval of the zoning change. You didn’t. The feds think the bomber is probably already building his next bomb, and thinking about a target. Between you and me, they say that if he put all the explosive he’s got into one bomb, he could reduce the city hall to flinders.”

  “Flinders?”

  “You know. Bits and pieces.”

  “That’s nonsense.” She looked around her office, suddenly nervous. “This building… this building…”

  “Mrs. Gore, this Pelex explosive is used in quarries,” Virgil said. “It turns solid rock into gravel.”

  She looked at him for a moment, then said, “The two people you should talk to are Ernie Stanton and Larry Butz. They are completely irrational about this. I can get you their addresses.”

  “I’ve already got them,” Virgil said. “Who else?”

  Virgil came away with four names that he hadn’t had before: eight names altogether; but she’d named all the people mentioned by Kline.

  He’d decided to start with Stanton, and was walking down to his truck, when another bomb went off.

  6

  Virgil had heard bomb-like devices explode in the past. In the army’s Officer Candidate School, he’d thrown four hand grenades at a wooden post, while standing inside a concrete trench, and later watched from behind a thick Plexiglas screen while other members of his training unit threw more. He’d also had the opportunity to pop off a few rounds from an M203 grenade launcher.

  When the bomb went off-it was somewhere close by, and behind him-he had no doubt what it was. He turned and saw people running along a street two blocks away, got in his truck, and went that way, in a hurry.

  The first thing he saw when he turned the corner was a wrecked white stretch limo, half of it a smoking ruin. The limo was sitting sideways in the street, and a man in what looked like a doorman’s uniform was crawling away from it on his hands and knees.

  Virgil got as close as he could, outside the blast zone, parked, and ran over to the limo and looked inside. It was empty; finding it empty was like having a boulder lifted off his chest. The man in the dark uniform had reached the curb, and he rolled over and sat down, his hands covering his ears.

  Virgil hurried over to him-there were sirens now, and they were coming his way-squatted and asked the man, “You the driver?”

  “Look what they done to my car,” the man moaned.

  “Where’s Pye and his assistant?”

  “Down at the AmericInn. I was just going to get them,” the driver said. He was looking at the car. “No way that can be fixed.”

  Virgil looked at the car: the bomb, he thought, had been in the vehicle’s small trunk, and had blown off most of the back third of it. The middle third was still there, but was a shambles, with all the glass blown out, the seats uprooted and thrown against the back of the driver’s compartment. Anyone seated behind the driver would have been killed, or badly injured.

  “I think you’re right,” Virgil said. “Hope you got insurance.”

  “That was my baby,” the driver said.

  “You’ll get another one,” Virgil said. “It coulda been a hell of a lot worse.”

  The driver said, “Yeah, and you know how? Oh my God, I stopped down the street, two blocks back, to let the kids go by on a field trip. Little kids from the elementary school, looked like they were going to the library. If that’d gone off… there must’ve been fifteen of them.”

  A thin young man in a dress shirt and a necktie ran up, stopped a few steps away, peered at them over a weedy mustache, whipped out a camera and took a picture of the driver and Virgil sitting together, with the wrecked limo in the background. “I’m with the Clarion Call,” he said, running the last few steps up. “Harvey, what’d you think when the bomb went off?”

  “Hey, you’re walking all over the goddamned crime scene,” Virgil said. “Back off.”

  “Who the hell are you?” the reporter asked.

  “With the BCA,” Virgil said.

  “Ah, Flowers. Have you made any progress?”

  A deputy came running up, glanced in the car, then said to the reporter, “Larry, get the fuck outa here.”

  The reporter backed away, brought the camera out again. The deputy asked Virgil and the driver if they were hurt, and Virgil said, “I just got here-I’m with the BCA.”

  The cop was impressed: “Boy, you got here in a hurry, huh?” He stood up as another car came up and shouted, “Block off the street. Route the traffic around. Keep those people away from here.”

  Virgil took a break from the driver to call Barlow. “You hear the bomb go?”

  “What?”

  Virgil told him about it, and Barlow
said, “Have them freeze the site. I’ll be there in five minutes.”

  Virgil passed the word to the first deputy, then a fire truck arrived, and another one, and an ambulance, and two or three more cop cars. The whole area smelled of burned tar and leaking oil-there didn’t seem to be any gasoline. Virgil went back to the driver, who said his name was Harvey Greene. Greene kept the limo at his house. “I park it right beside the house.”

  “Are you the only white limo in town?”

  “I’m the only white limo in the county,” Greene said. “Some more come in for the prom and so on, but I’m the only one that’s right here.”

  “How hard would it have been to get in your trunk?” Virgil asked.

  “I don’t think it was in my trunk,” Greene said.

  “You don’t? It looks to me like-”

  Greene shook his head. “Number one, nobody touches my car that I don’t know about it. If I’m not in it, it’s locked. If he’d jimmied my trunk, I would have heard. I park that baby right outside my bedroom. Number two, when I go out, the first thing I do is, I walk around the car with a spray bottle and a rag, and wipe it down. There was no sign anybody had been in the trunk.”

  “If he had a key-”

  “There’re two keys. One’s still in the ignition, and one’s in the console. I saw it this morning: I always check to make sure I’ve got the spare, so I don’t hang nobody up if I do something stupid and lose the one in my pocket. Whoever it is, he had to put the bomb in last night: I didn’t know but yesterday afternoon that Mr. Pye was coming in.”

  The red-haired woman deputy, O’Hara, walked around the car, looking at it, then ambled over to Virgil and Greene and put her hand on Greene’s knee: “You okay, Harvey?”

  “Yeah, I’m okay.”

  “So what do you think?” Virgil asked. “How’d this happen?”

  “I think somebody snuck up to my house with a bomb and some duct tape, and taped it to the rear axle, or something else down there. I never look under the car. Maybe I should,” Greene said.