John Sandford - Shock Wave

“Barely,” she said.

When Barlow saw that Pye had calmed down, he came over, nodded, and said, “No sign of the detonator, but the guy’s getting more sophisticated. He must’ve used a mercury switch, or a roll ball, or maybe even an accelerometer of some kind. Something that would set it off with movement. Not a mousetrap or a timer.”

“Could you track it?” Pye asked.

Barlow shook his head: “It’s pretty common stuff. The thing is, you could take a mercury switch out of a fifty-year-old thermostat, wire it up on a pipe bomb, and when the car hits a big enough bump, the mercury gets thrown up on the contacts and boom!”

Virgil said, “That would assume that the guy knew that Mr. Pye would be in Greene’s limo today, which he couldn’t have known before yesterday afternoon at the earliest. He had to manufacture the bomb and get it in place before dawn. So he had what, less than twelve hours? And, he had to know where Greene lives, and how to approach the car.”

“Local guy for sure,” Barlow said. “A smart guy, with good intel.”

“Maybe there’s more than one,” Pye suggested.

“I don’t think so,” Virgil said. “Nuts don’t come in bunches. Only grapes do.”

Pye said to his assistant, “Put in your notebook that I said that. The grape-nuts thing.”

Pye wanted a closer look at the car, and Barlow said, “I’ll take you over there, but I’d rather your assistant didn’t come along. I’ll talk to you as a courtesy, but I don’t want anything written down. It’ll wind up in court, with me being cross-examined because I used the wrong adjective or something.”

Pye agreed, and they walked over to the car, and the woman said to Virgil, “You are a tall drink of water.”

“You’re pretty much of an ice cream cone your own self,” Virgil said. “What’re you doing working for Pye?”

“Oh, I do it for the money,” she said. “It’s not uninteresting.”

“Huh. I notice you say ‘uninteresting,’ rather than ‘disinteresting,’ ” Virgil said.

“That’s because I have at least an eighth-grade education,” she said. “And Willard pays me for my grammar.”

“I wouldn’t do it for a million bucks a year,” Virgil said.

“Neither would I,” she said.

Virgil: “Are you serious?”

“Yes. I’m selling him three years of my life,” she said. “He pays me one-point-two, which is about point-seven-two per year, after state and federal, plus all expenses. For that, I follow him around everywhere, take down everything he says, verbatim, and provide him with both the original text and a polished narrative. In another year, I’ll have a bundle tucked away. Then I’ll write a tell-all book about him, and make another bundle.”

“I guess it’s a plan, though I’m not sure that many people would read a tell-all book about a short fat guy,” Virgil said.

“How about a short fat guy with thirty-two billion dollars?”

“Maybe,” Virgil said. “I personally wouldn’t buy it.”

“Since you’re not going to buy my book, why don’t you buy me a margarita tonight?”

“Who should I ask for?”

“Marie Chapman. Room one-nineteen at the AmericInn.” She got off around seven o’clock, right after Pye finished dinner, she said. “Give me until eight.”

“Are your eyes green or brown?” Virgil asked.

“Depends on my body temperature,” she said. “As I get hotter, they turn greener.”

They chatted for another two minutes, trying out movie lines on each other-“I’m outa here like a cool desert breeze,” she said, when Pye walked back toward them-and then Virgil wandered off into the crowd. He knew nothing about bombs, so standing around looking at a bent wheel didn’t seem likely to produce either a clue or a bomber. The crowd, he thought, might be a different story. There was some chance that the bomber might be there, checking out the results.

So he sidled through the rubberneckers, looking at faces, looking for signs of furtiveness, guilt, the wrong kind of excitement. A tall stout man with a shiny red face asked, “You Flowers?”

“I am,” Virgil said.

“Saw your name in the paper this morning. You got any ideas about who’s doing this?”

“Must be somebody who’s trying to stop the PyeMart,” Virgil said. “Either for financial reasons, or it’s somebody upset about the runoff into the river.”

“Or somebody who just hates Pye,” the man said. “He’s that little short fat fella, right?”

“That’s him.”

“He don’t look like twenty billion dollars to me,” the guy said.

“Thirty-two billion. I got it on good authority,” Virgil said.

A guy in a post office uniform said, “You could have fun with that kinda money. Go to Vegas.”

“Go to Vegas in your own jet airplane, and then buy it, the whole town,” the stout man said. “Hookers’n all.”

A woman in running shorts and a cut-off sweatshirt said, “It’s not just the runoff in the river. The river goes into the lake, and if you fouled up the lake… there goes the reason for the town.”

The stout man said, “They’re talking about a little gasoline, a little oil. Probably leak more gas and oil into the lake from the marinas than you’d ever get off that parking lot.”

“You’re not buying the pollution, huh?” Virgil asked.

The stout man shrugged. “I’m not saying yes, I’m not saying no. I’m just saying, that parking lot is probably a half mile from the river. I don’t see how that could equal all the trucks backing down into the lake to dump off boats, and the boats starting up… I’m just sayin’.”

“He sure is a little fat guy,” the woman said, looking at Pye.

The stout man asked Virgil, “How do you know it’s not just somebody who follows him around, and tries to kill him? Tried in Michigan, set off the bomb here, sucked him in, and then went for him again this morning?”

“Well, for one thing, the explosive came from a quarry up around Cold Spring,” Virgil said.

The stout man’s eyebrows went up. “Okay, give me the pointy hat. I’ll go sit in the corner.”

“No, no. I think you asked an interesting question,” the woman said to the stout man. “It’s something to think about. Is the bomber person trying to stop this store? Or trying to stop Pye?”

“Bomber person,” Virgil said with a smile. “You think it might be a woman?”

“Why not?” she asked. “I’ve got a degree in mechanical engineering from Purdue. I could go down in my workshop and build a bomb in about fifteen minutes, if I had the explosive.”

“Don’t let me catch you in a quarry,” Virgil said.

The stout man asked, “You take a close look at postal workers? They’re supposed to be crazier than an outhouse mouse.”

The mailman said, “That’s real funny.” And to Virgil: “What’s your profiler say about this guy? Age, socioeconomic status, all that?”

“I wish you hadn’t asked that,” Virgil said. “We’re trying to keep that a little close to the vest, for a while.”

“Why? The bomber knows who he is, so it won’t be anything new to him,” the mailman said. “If you put out a profile, maybe you’d get some ideas from the people who live here.”

“I’ll think about that,” Virgil said. He nodded at the three of them, and drifted away, looking at the crowd, and eventually made his way back through the crime-scene tape to Barlow.

“Listen,” Virgil said. “You got a profiler I could talk to? Somebody who could give me some idea of what I might be looking for? Age, socioeconomic status, and all that?”

Barlow shook his head. “We don’t do that so much. We found out most profiles are ninety percent bullshit. If you just look at what this guy’s done, and where he’s done it, you’ll get a better idea than anything you’ll get from some shrink.”