John Sandford - Shock Wave

He went in the lobby, to explain, and Thor came out of the back room.

He said, “Hey, Virg.”

“I parked my truck there so nobody would put a bomb in it. Keep an eye on it, would you?”

“No problem. I’m going off in an hour, I’ll tell the night girl.” Then, “So, you talk to Mrs. Shepard?”

Virgil said, “Thor…” He sighed, shook his head, and said, “I need some sleep.”

“Hot damn, you did! I’m going over there.”

“She’s not over there,” Virgil said. “She moved out.”

Thor thought for one second, or less, then said, “She’s at her sister’s. I’m going over there.”

“If you mention my name in any way…”

“You’ll kill me. Got it.”

“She’s in pretty delicate shape,” Virgil began.

“So am I,” Thor said. “You wouldn’t believe how delicate a shape I’m in. And don’t worry about it, dude. I’m not gonna go in there and jump her. I’m gonna offer her my friendship.”

“And a pizza.”

“Well, yeah. A meat lover’s.”

Virgil went up to bed, undressed, lay in the dark, and asked God, “Why did the bomber try to kill me? And how did he sneak into the Pye building? You can answer this question either as a sudden revelation, or you could write it up in the sky, or whisper it to Thor, your namesake. Okay? Deal? I’m going to sleep now, God. Please answer before anybody else gets hurt. Oh-and keep an eye on Mrs. Shepard. She seems like a nice-enough lady. And Thor. Keep an eye on Thor.”

Satisfied, he went to sleep, and slept well, for a man who’d almost been blown up.

The last thing he thought of, as he drifted off, was that Lee Coakley hadn’t called.

The bomber was worried. He’d missed twice in a row, once with Pye, once with the cop. The misses weren’t really the problem. His intention with the cop was to pull more cops into town, to bring more pressure, to tear the place up. That would now surely happen, would it not?

What worried him was not the misses, but his own reaction to them. When he heard about the miss with Pye, he’d been angry about it, but accepted it as just a matter of chance and inexperience. He’d taken a shot-a good shot, a creative one-and it had gone sour. The cop was no different, though he’d taken some extra risks there, in placing the bomb so close to a busy street; but again the reflexive anger came, stronger this time, almost despair.

He controlled it, but… where did that come from? The despair?

He’d started out thinking of the bombs as tools. But now, he thought, it was like he needed them. Almost like he was addicted to them.

The bomber had been addicted to cigarettes earlier in life, and kicking the habit had been a struggle. He could remember the gravitational pull of the cigarette packs, sitting on their shelves in the gas stations and the convenience stores, calling to him. For years after he’d quit, he would wake up in the night, having dreamed that he’d fallen off the wagon, that he’d taken a cigarette… and when he woke, he could taste the nicotine and tar, and feel the buzz.

The bomb thing was almost like that. When he heard that he’d missed the cop, he felt a powerful impulse to get in his car, drive up in the hills, to the box of explosives, and get what he needed for another bomb. To do it right now.

To hit them again.

To kill somebody. That was the problem.

His whole campaign had been a rational effort to solve a serious problem-serious from his point of view, anyway-and the killing was just a by-product of that effort.

If he just let himself go… it seemed like the killing could become the point. If that should happen, if he should need to kill, then sooner or later he’d be caught, and he’d spend the rest of his life in a hole in the ground.

He had to be coldly rational about it: he would need another bomb or two, simply to complete the campaign as he’d planned it. He didn’t need to start building bombs willy-nilly, and hitting everything in sight.

He hadn’t thought of all of this at once, but in bits and pieces as he worked through his day, did the mail, wrote some checks. Late that night, he saw the delivery guy unloading the next morning’s paper at County Market. He no longer got the paper, but glanced at this one because of all the tumult around the bombings, and found an end-of-the-world headline, which said:

State Police ask town: who’s guilty?

Beneath that was a secondary head that said:

Pipe bomb factory found.

And below that, the stub of a story, which jumped inside for a much longer spread. The headline on the third story said: POLICE BAFFLED BY PYE TOWER ATTACK.

He stuffed the paper in his basket with the vanilla-flavored rice drink, the fat-free Rice Krispies, the tofu wieners, the Greek yogurt, the salads, waited impatiently at the cash register for an old woman to write a check for three dollars and fifty-three cents, and finally paid and got out of the place.

He couldn’t wait to get back to the house, so he sat in the parking lot, under a streetlamp, and read the two stories. Flowers, he read, had sent out a letter asking a selected group of people in the town to nominate suspects in the bombings. Some of the people objected to the idea, and a couple of them had sent the letters along to the newspaper, which had reproduced them.

The idea was outrageous. Flowers would get dozens of nominations, and if the very best thing happened, for Flowers, they’d all but one be innocent. Was the cop that stupid? Maybe it was a good thing that he hadn’t killed him.

The second story reported that police had discovered the pipebomb factory where the pipes had been cut, and that “factory” was Butternut Tech. The story said that Flowers refused to comment, which suggested that Flowers was the one who had found the place.

How had he done that? Maybe not so stupid after all.

He closed his eyes and thought about it. Really, how outrageous, he wondered, was this survey the cop was doing? The more he thought about it, the more complicated it seemed, the more intricate the possible outcomes.

Finally, he concluded, it wasn’t crazy at all. It was even… interesting. If he weren’t the object of the hunt, he wouldn’t mind participating in it.

The third story was a long Associated Press piece out of Minneapolis, wrapping up all the bombings so far. One of the most baffling aspects of the case, according to the story, was how the first bomb got into the Pye Pinnacle. “If we could figure that out, we’d know who the bomber is,” an ATF agent said.

On the drive home, the bomber began to wonder: Had anyone suggested his name, in Flowers’s survey? He did have a temper, which flashed from time to time. Would the cops be looking at him? If they did, they would quickly discover his relationship to Butternut Tech.

Not good, not good at all.

He felt the first hot finger of panic. That damn pipe thing… what had he been thinking of? Pure laziness, that’s all it was. The pipe cutter was there, he knew about it, he could get in and out. But he could have cut the pipe the way he first intended, with a hacksaw. He even tried it. The first cut took nearly an hour, and nearly wore out his arm. Still, he could have done one a day, and it would have been time well spent: the hacksaw would now be in the bottom of the river…

He smacked his hands against the steering wheel as he looked up at the red light on a traffic signal. Damnit. Damnit.

One thing he had to do: go over the house and the car with a fine-tooth comb and make sure there wasn’t the slightest evidence of bomb-making activity. He’d stashed the explosives out in the hills, but had actually assembled the bombs in his basement. If there were any chemical remnants about, much less any mechanical stuff, and if it came to a search by the ATF, they might well have the equipment to detect the residue.