John Sandford - Shock Wave

Virgil drove out to the construction site and found Don Clark sitting in the new trailer, working on a laptop. A burly blond man with a curly blond mustache, he was as tall as Virgil but twice as wide. He took Virgil down the length of the new construction trailer and popped open a cabinet door. “There it is,” he said. “They’re all the same.”

The server was an aluminum box with a couple of switches and an LCD panel. Virgil picked it up: four to six pounds, he thought. The camera was mostly plastic, and maybe weighed two pounds.

He left Clark and repeated his walk across the construction site and down through the brush and weeds to the river. The most obvious path came out at one of the pools where Peck had been fishing; nobody fishing at the moment. He got right down by the black water, startled a green heron out of a tangle of weeds, probably a nest. Couldn’t see anything.

Thought about it.

Cameron Smith had said that there was a bridge to the west, and not too far. Virgil followed the riverside trail, a dusty rut off a gravel county road. There were two more pools between the first one he’d visited and the bridge. He stood on the bridge looking into the water, then got on his cell phone and called Ahlquist.

“You guys got divers for when somebody jumps in the lake and doesn’t come up?”

“Not the department,” Ahlquist said. “There’s a bunch of divers out of Butternut Scuba, they’ve got kind of a rescue team. They help out if we need them.”

“How do I get in touch?” Virgil asked.

“Go to Butternut Scuba-they’re open every day. What’re you up to?”

“Old BCA saying,” Virgil said. “When in doubt, dredge.”

“What?”

“Talk to you later,” Virgil said.

Butternut Scuba was a storefront on the edge of downtown, around the corner from a bakery. Virgil stopped at the bakery and after some consultation with the baker, got a couple of poppyseed kolaches. He stood on the corner and ate them out of a white paper bag, a little guilty that he should be feeling so relatively well fed, so shortly after that poor bastard had been blown to bits in his own car; and guiltily thankful that it hadn’t been him.

When he was done with the pastry, he threw the bag in a trash can and walked around the corner to the scuba shop. A blond woman, thin as a steel railroad track and about as solid, was in the back room filling a scuba tank. When Virgil came through the front door, the overhead doorbell jingled and she yelled, “Hey, Frank-I’m back here.”

Virgil clumped through the shop, with its displays of tanks and buoyancy control devices, masks, finds, and regulators, to the back, said, “I’m not Frank.”

“That’s for sure,” she said, looking him over. She had a white smile and one-inch-long hair. A snake tattoo disappeared down the back of her neck, into her T-shirt. “Be with you in a minute.”

Virgil went back into the shop and looked at a Cressi Travelight BCD for $460. He’d used a BC a few dozen times when he was on leave from the army, diving in the wine-dark Aegean; and he’d gone diving a bit back in the Midwest, with a DNR biologist who was researching the habits and habitats of large muskies. Virgil had gotten a nice In-Fisherman article out of that, but he hadn’t had a tank on since the summer before.

“Can I get you one of those?” asked the blonde, who wore a name tag that said Gretchen.

“Actually, I need some divers. I’m a cop and I’d like somebody to dive a couple of pools on the Butternut.”

“You don’t look entirely like a cop,” she said, in a friendly way.

“Well, I am, Virgil Flowers with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.”

“Okay, I’ve read about you,” she said. “We do dives for the police… Somebody drown?”

Virgil shook his head: “We’re not looking for a body. We’re looking for some electronic equipment.”

“Uh, will we get paid?”

“We can work something out,” Virgil said. “It’s the state, so it might take a while to get the check.”

A short, square, red-haired man with a red British RAF mustache came through the door, looked at Gretchen, then at Virgil, and Virgil said, “Hey, Frank.”

The deal was done in five minutes, and Frank called a guy named Retrief and told him to bring his gear up to the PyeMart site, and make it quick. Thinking that he might rent some equipment and go in the water, Virgil dug out his certification card, and Frank asked him how many dives he had in. Virgil said, “Maybe a hundred… maybe. Haven’t been down for a while.”

Frank said, “We’d spend more time making sure you’re okay, than it’d be worth. You get down there, and you can’t see more than about two feet. Blind diving’s a whole new thing. It’s easy to get tangled up in shit.”

That made sense to Virgil, since visibility was one of the reasons he quit diving in Minnesota; so he helped Gretchen and Frank load their gear in the back of Frank’s truck, and they followed him out to the PyeMart site, and then back along the track to the river, Virgil plowing down the weeds in his government truck.

When they got to the river, Virgil found that a second truck had fallen in behind Frank’s: Retrief, a balding man with tattoos on his neck, and an Australian accent. To Gretchen: “Workin’ for the jacks now, izit?”

“They’re paying us,” she said.

“That makes for a change,” he said. To Virgil: “Howya doin’?”

Virgil said, “You sound like you’re from New Jersey.”

They wanted to know more about the bombings, and about Erikson, and Frank said, “You get this guy, you oughta string him up by his balls.”

“Right on that,” Retrief said, and Gretchen said, “But what if Erikson did it?”

The water in the stream was cold, and the three divers pulled wet suits over swimming suits, doing a quick change in their trucks, then slung on tanks, masks, BCDs, and swim fins, and waded down the muddy banks to the end of the first pool.

While they were changing, Virgil dug his Nikon out of the truck, with a medium zoom, and started shooting. “How cold?” he called.

“Freezing,” Retrief muttered.

“Not too bad,” said Gretchen.

In waist-deep water, the divers popped in their mouthpieces and went down; Virgil could track them by watching for bubbles as they moved slowly upstream, turned, and then swept back downstream, and then up, back down, and up one more time. At the end of it, they popped up, and Frank called, “Nothing here. How far to the next one?”

“Hundred yards or so,” Virgil called back.

“Best ride in the truck,” Frank said. They all piled in the back of Frank’s Chevy, and Virgil bumped through the weeds west along the bank to the next pool.

The second pool was longer and narrower than the first, and looked deeper and murky and even nasty. Virgil thought of snakes, which was another reason he didn’t dive much in the Midwest; not that there were poisonous snakes, just that murky water made him think of them. The second pool went just like the first one, for ten minutes. On the first downward sweep, though, the bubbles stopped for a full minute, coalescing in one spot, then all three of them popped to the surface.

Gretchen pulled her mouthpiece and called, “Got them,” and held up a camera, just like the one Virgil had seen in the second trailer; Virgil took three quick shots of her holding it up, and then shot the others, as the two men did one-armed sidestrokes to shore, towing a black metal box with wires dangling off the back.

And Virgil laughed out loud with the sheer pleasure of being right. He shouted down, “That’s it, guys. Beer for everybody.”

“You’re a good man, Virgie,” Retrief called back, and Frank said, “The paper’s gonna eat this up. I love this shit.”