John Sandford: Shock Wave

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.

Virgil patted him on the back. “You’re a pretty smart guy, Harvey. I think you’re probably right. We’ll see what the feds have to say about it.”

Virgil stood up and O’Hara said, “The bomber knows his way around. Harvey lives out on the edge of town, and there’s not much out there. If he was seen, people out there will remember.”

“Makes me think he probably wasn’t seen.”

O’Hara nodded. “Why’d he blow up those pipes? That won’t stop anything.”

“If you come up with an answer, let me know,” Virgil said.

Barlow arrived, looked at the car, and agreed that Greene was probably right-the bomb had been under the car, rather than in the trunk. If anyone had been sitting in the rearmost seat, he would have vaporized.

Barlow had left one of the crime-scene techs at the construction trailer, while the other one worked the city maintenance yard. When the sheriff arrived, he asked for, and got, two deputies to guard the bombed-out trailer, and ordered that tech into town to work the limo.

To Greene, he said, “As soon as I’ve got this place settled down, we’ll go over to your house and take a look at where you parked the car. That’ll be another crime-scene site. Is there anybody out there now? Your wife…?”

“Not married anymore,” Greene said. He added, “And now, I’m unemployed.”

The perimeter of the bomb scene had turned into a circus: a hundred people had gathered to watch and more were coming in. There was a pizza place across the street, and slices were beginning to circulate. Then Pye showed up with his assistant, and when Barlow saw them arguing with a deputy, he said to Virgil, “You handle Pye better than I do. Be a good guy, and go over and talk to him.”

Virgil walked over and said to the deputy, “Let them through, will you? My responsibility.”

Pye came through and said, curtly, “Thank you. And thank the good Lord that I wasn’t in that car. That would have really screwed up my whole happy hour.”

Virgil told him what he knew, which wasn’t much. “Barlow can probably tell you about a detonator, but you can see… they were trying to kill you, man.”

“No kidding.” Pye raked his lower lip with his upper teeth a few times, looking thoughtfully out at the blast zone, then said to his assistant, “Pye spoke to Flowers for a minute, getting the lay of the land, then resolved to hunt down this monster no matter what it took.”

She took it down in shorthand, and Virgil asked, “Are you writing a book?”

“I take down everything Mr. Pye says,” the woman answered.

“Is that possible?” Virgil asked.

“Barely,” she said.

“She damned well better get it all,” Pye said. “I pay her enough.”