John Sandford - Shock Wave

“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 them 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.

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.