by J. M. Hayes
“He’s right,” the sheriff said. “Mr. Chairman, I think we’ve got to cancel Buffalo Springs Day.”
“We can’t do that.” It was Finfrock, this time. “It’s almost noon. People are already setting things up over at the Buffalo Springs Non-Denominational Church. Folks will start arriving with their pot-luck dishes any time now.”
“So,” the sheriff countered, “if you wanted to place a bomb where it would do the most damage to the most people in this county today, where would you put it?”
Finfrock reluctantly agreed. “Okay, I’ll grant you that, but what can we do? There’s no way to get word out this late. People will show up anyway. And if we don’t let them in, they’ll just mill around outside. Maybe take their food over and eat it in the park.”
“Say,” the chairman mused. “That might be the answer. Move the celebration out of the building and into the park.”
“Maybe,” the sheriff conceded. “But you’ll still have too many people in a concentrated space. There’s nothing to keep our bomber from moving his bomb.”
Chairman Wynn swung around in a quick circle, as if he expected someone to hold up a cue card with the answer on it. “Finfrock’s right,” he finally said. “It’s too late to stop Buffalo Springs Day. We’ll move it to the park, and get us more security. Can you bring in any other deputies?”
“It’s possible,” the sheriff said. “A couple of them were planning to attend the event, but I’ve had Mrs. Kraus trying to get hold of them since the bomb went off in the Farmers & Merchants. No luck so far.”
“What about help from outside?” Finfrock wondered.
The sheriff nodded. “Yeah, I’m going to try that, but I wouldn’t hold out too much hope.”
“Come on. When we’re under assault from al Qaeda?” Finfrock obviously didn’t believe him.
“We’ll see,” the sheriff said. “Maybe those al Qaeda claims and the new Homeland Security Department will work in our favor. But none of the other jurisdictions I know have large enough budgets to cover their own problems right now, let alone ours.”
“Now we’re talking politics, Sheriff.” Haines said, shaking his blond mop up and down with pleasure at coming to the rescue once again. “The Benteen County Board of Supervisors is all but straight Republican. I’ll bet we can grease a few wheels out there, even up to the national level. I’ll lay you odds we’ll have federal investigators and maybe some National Guardsmen headed this way before lunch time. Only we got to get ahold of our other two supervisors right away. Then we can make those calls and address some other business associated with this crisis.”
The crowd muttered its approval. The sheriff thought Haines was in for a rude awakening, but whatever, he needed to get back to his investigation. If the supervisor took on the responsibility of calling for outside help, it was one less thing he had to do. He didn’t get to tell them that, though. His cell phone rang and he grabbed it. “English.”
“Dad, what’s going on?” It was Heather and she sounded concerned.
“A bomb at the Texaco,” he said. He’d love to take the time to explain things to his daughter, but not in front of this crowd and not with so much needing his attention. “Nobody hurt, though. You needn’t worry.”
“We already know that,” One said. “What we want to know is why there’s a pile of luggage and your passport by the door? Are you going somewhere?”
Judy had packed for the trip and laid his passport out. Any last hopes he’d had of reasoning with his wife and talking her out of this drifted away on that news.
“No,” he said. “We might have, but too many things have come up.” That was true for him, but maybe not for Judy. Still, this wasn’t the time to explain it to his daughters.
“When were you going to tell us?”
He was struggling with the answer when she spoke again. “Wait, here’s Heather.”
Two came on the line. Her voice was shaking.
“Englishman,” she whispered in his ear. “I just found more bombs.”
***
“Sometimes, it doesn’t seem like any kid has a soul,” Janie said. “I mean, I remember some awful things I did when I was little—feeding live bugs to spiders, taking red ants to black ant hills to watch them fight, and pushing Dale Miller in the Claytons’ pond when we were six because I thought he was lying about not being able to swim.” She smiled, remembering how hard it had been to get Dale back out. “You aren’t surprised when kids get upset and maybe shed some tears because the butterfly they chased ends up crumpled and dead and not pretty and part of their game anymore. Sam wasn’t like that. There was never any empathy in him—no connection with the creatures he injured.
“I denied it for a long time. The difference between boys and girls, I convinced myself. And he was so smart and clever. And manipulative. Sometimes he convinced me he hadn’t really done what I’d just seen him do.” She pushed herself back in the booth and Mad Dog followed her with his eyes.
“Then somebody gave him a pet bunny. Sam killed it. I should have made sure he could only get near it when he was supervised. I guess by then I already half expected him to hurt it. What surprised me was the way he did it. Slow, Mad Dog. He did it slow, not with some cold curiosity about what was inside that made it tick. He wanted to watch it suffer, see how much pain it could endure.” There were tears on her cheeks now. “Did you know a rabbit can scream? I didn’t until I heard it. That’s when I caught him with the garden shears and a harmless little creature pumping out the last of its life’s blood.”
“I should have been there with you.”
She rubbed a sleeve across her cheeks and shook her head. “No. It was my choice to bring him up on my own. I didn’t want you there.”
“I’m sorry,” Mad Dog said. And this time, she noticed, he was smart enough not to say anything else.
“He couldn’t charm me out of that one. Jesus! He’d documented what he was doing, filmed it with our eight millimeter movie camera. Oh God, it was so sick.
“From then on, he was constantly in treatment or in trouble. Then he was in institutions, as things got worse. Finally, I just couldn’t keep him around anymore. He hurt kids in our neighborhood. I was afraid he might kill one of them, or maybe even me.
“Some good people tried hard to get through to him. I had lots of help, the best money could buy. I look back and I don’t think there was anyone inside him to save. He really should have been aborted.”
“No,” Mad Dog protested.
“Oh yes,” Janie said. “You see, eventually he did kill someone.”
Mad Dog didn’t say anything this time. Even the man with all the answers was finally out of them. So was she. But she wasn’t through with her confession. The dark and empty bar seemed the ideal place for it.
“Sam went to prison. He was still a juvenile. What he’d done was bad enough for them to hold him longer than they would most kids. He got his GED while he was doing time, then a couple of college degrees. Got to be a member of the Aryan Brotherhood, too.
“He disappeared when he was paroled, but not before he left some poor girl pregnant, Jackie’s mother. She was just a kid, so I took her in and supported her and finally raised Jackie myself. She’s a troubled girl, but I think she’ll turn out all right.”
“What happened to our son?”
“I wasn’t sorry to have him out of our lives, Jackie’s and mine. I never heard of Sam again, not until a few months ago when I got a letter. It was from that White supremacist group in Oregon, the one that preaches about the mud peoples and how they’re stealing the earth from God’s chosen Aryans?”
Mad Dog nodded.
“I guess he’d applied for some position with them. Makes a mother so proud. They weren’t prepared to accept him without some information about his genealogy.
“What I did was stupid, but he caused Jackie and me so much pain I wanted to hurt him back.”
“So you told them about me,” Mad Dog finished for her.
“I told them Sam’s father was part Indian, part Black, and part Mexican. And I told them if they wanted to do a DNA check, they should contact a man named Mad Dog who lived in Buffalo Springs, Kansas.”
“I’m all those things through one grandparent,” Mad Dog said. “I don’t suppose they’d care that the other three were lily white.”
“He wrote me then. I won’t tell you all the vile things he said. But he ended by warning me, if I wanted to stay alive, never to let anyone else find out about you. Some of what he said made me think he planned to make sure nobody could find out from you.”
“So you think he’ll come looking for me.”
“Mad Dog, Jackie called me a couple of days ago. She said she’d seen her father. Your patricidal son is already here in Benteen County.”
***
The Buffalo Springs Non-Denominational Church was on the south side of Veterans Memorial Park, about mid-way between the courthouse and Bertha’s Café. It was a simple brick structure that looked more like a gymnasium from the outside than a church. And felt more like a gymnasium on the inside, the sheriff thought. Fundamentalist Christianity was supposed to be served up without formalities, but this place was so low-church that they used folding chairs and evaporative cooling. The only hint that you were in a place of worship came from the thick beams of the cross that hung on the back wall. Without pews, though, it made for a great place to house large public events. In the sheriff’s experience, the congregation had always been too hard up to turn away anybody capable of paying to rent their space, including, once, an abortive attempt to start an atheists club.
The Heathers met the sheriff’s pickup at the sidewalk. “We cleared everybody out of the building,” One of Two told him. She was wearing too short shorts and exposing lots of skin at the midriff.
“When we said there was a bomb, they got out quick,” Two added. “Word’s out about the bank and the Texaco.” The second Heather was more fully clothed, but her jeans were awfully tight. If they weren’t his daughters, he wondered, would he still feel that way?
“And I need to investigate both of those,” he said. He’d left Wynn Some standing guard over the muck-filled crater across from the Texaco. The sheriff had no training with explosives, other than what Uncle Sam provided before sending him to Southeast Asia. He would have preferred leaving Parker there to investigate it, but she was the only one with real law-enforcement-level training with volatile materials—mostly, she had told him, of the call-the-bomb-squad-and-don’t-touch-it variety. Still, that made her the departmental expert.
“Where?”
“Back by the kitchen,” his first daughter said as she led him toward the front door. “We promised we’d help set tables for the potluck. So we came over here after we knew the Texaco hadn’t been destroyed. We wanted to talk to you and see what was going on down there, but a promise is a promise.”
“The bombs are in a store room,” the second Heather said, getting them back on topic. “They look like huge sticks of dynamite, all connected together with wires and stuff.”
“Just tell Parker and me how to find it,” the sheriff said as they reached the door. “You’re staying out here. Keep everybody way back from the building.”
“Aw, Dad,” One complained.
“Jeez, Englishman,” Two echoed. But they gave him careful directions, then headed back toward the sidewalk to enforce their father’s edict.
“I wish I had a Kevlar vest to offer you,” the sheriff told Parker as they made their way down the hall from the auditorium to the kitchen.
“I’m wearing one,” she told him. “Doing that saved my life once. So I bought my own. I put it on as soon as things started getting wild this morning.”
“Oh.” The sheriff felt more vulnerable than he had a moment before.
“Don’t worry,” Parker told him, as they paused in front of the appropriate door. “If a bomb goes off while we’re near it, I won’t live any longer than you. They’ll just find more of me to bury.”
Suitably comforted, the sheriff put his hand on the door knob. “You ready for this?”
“No,” she said, and he believed her, “but let’s get it over with.”
The sheriff pulled the door open. It was just like Two had described. Great round cylinders were mounted in rows on a wooden rack. Twelve of them, all connected by a series of multicolored wires.
Parker sighed and it didn’t take the sheriff long to realize it was from relief. “I think I know what this is,” she said, “and it’s not bombs. Hang on a minute, while I get some light on it.”
The sheriff reached for the switch by the door and didn’t quite get his hand there before she stopped him with both of hers. “Let’s not flip any switches until I’m sure,” she said.
“Sorry.” He felt embarrassed by his naiveté.
She must have sensed that because she offered an apology. “I’m probably being overly cautious, but after the morning we’ve had, why take chances?
“When I was in Tucson, they had this ritual. Every Fourth of July they set the little peak west of downtown on fire. Not on purpose, exactly. It’s not much of a mountain, though it would draw a lot of interest if you set it down here in Kansas.”
She edged into the closet and began tracing the wires, following them from tube to tube. “They called it Sentinel Peak in the old days, because they used to station people there to watch for raiding Apaches. Then some University of Arizona students whitewashed a bunch of rocks and piled them up into a huge letter ‘A’. Now it’s called A Mountain, and every Independence Day the city holds a fireworks show up there. If there aren’t trees in the way, you can see it from nearly all over town.”
She had been through most of the tubes without apparently finding anything to concern her. She might have skipped to the end but, like she’d said, it wasn’t a day for shortcuts.
“That’s what these are. Fireworks tubes. Probably a few aerial bombs, some star bursts, stuff like that. Smaller than I’m used to in Tucson, but they’d be impressive enough in Buffalo Springs. You hear anything about a fireworks display associated with today’s celebration?”
“No,” the sheriff said. “And I should have.”
“That’s the part that bothers me,” she told him. “These things are dangerous enough. Set them off in here and we’d lose this building. Wouldn’t do you and me any good either.” She reached the last tube and there were no more wires. The fireworks weren’t connected to anything that might set them off. “That’s all these are. Fireworks, and nobody’s rigged them into a bomb, so far anyway.”
The sheriff pulled out his cell phone. He punched in numbers and it rang twice before he interrupted a meeting of the Benteen County Board of Supervisors.
“You forget to tell me about a fireworks display for tonight?” the sheriff asked the chairman.
All things considered, he didn’t think “Oops” was a satisfactory answer.
***
“Sorry about the interruption,” Chairman Wynn said. His voice echoed slightly in the courthouse’s official meeting room. It had been designed for a county that would grow rather than shrink. The architect had expected more supervisors and an audience, and maybe some effort to maintain its former elegance. Today, with all five Benteen County Supervisors present, it simply felt empty and shabby—except for the massive oak table around which they sat.
“The sheriff just discovered our little surprise to climax this year’s Buffalo Springs Day. In light of what he’s been investigating, we probably should have let him in on the secret.”
The rest of the board agreed.
“Think I suggested that from the beginning,” Supervisor Fair said in an I-told-you-so tone. The chairman doubted whether Fair had really cared. As the only Democrat on the board, the man took it as his duty to oppose anything that might otherwise be unanimous.
“Point of order, Mr. Chairman.” Supervisor Babcock was the only woman on the board. She was a little bit of a thing, but the vote
you had to convince on any difficult question. She had a way of persuading others into a majority that reflected her views on nearly every issue. “While I appreciate getting brought up to date on these acts of terror, and agree that we must immediately contact federal and state officials to get Englishman some assistance, I don’t understand the purpose of this special meeting of the board. Hell, boys, I got a casserole out in the car I need to deliver to the potluck. Besides, if this is anything other than an informational session, aren’t we in danger of violating open meeting laws?”
The chairman knew hers was a valid concern, but it wasn’t every day you found your community under assault by international terrorists. He didn’t have to remind her of that. Supervisor Haines did it for him.
“I think we’ve got some latitude under the Patriot Act,” he said, taking it to a level the chairman hadn’t expected. “Not that there’s much we can do about this terror threat other than make those calls for help. And we’ll do that, just as soon as we finish here. But we got us another problem that can’t wait on niceties and it’s related to these bombs.”
“I hardly think…” Chairman Wynn began.
“Nobody’s thought,” Haines interrupted, banging his fist on the table for emphasis. “That’s the trouble. Think now and think wind. Think how much money we’ve raised and committed to the Benteen County Cooperative Wind Farm. It’s more than a million dollars so far. All of us at this table are invested, heavily. We stand to make a handsome profit for ourselves and our friends, and provide tremendous benefits for the community—or we did before these terrorists hit.”
“What’s the one got to do with the other?” Fair interrupted.
“We’ve had to court Windreapers from the get go. You and I know the wind doesn’t blow any harder here than it does in parts of Kansas miles closer to the energy grid. What we’re selling Windreapers is a signed, sealed and delivered package. Ten uninterrupted miles for their turbines, a community that has taxed itself and pulled in a matching grant for economic development that, along with what we’ve raised, will build their infrastructure and a connection to the grid. And a county willing to give them every tax break and incentive under the sun.”
