John Sandford: Shock Wave

“You’re saying that they might have been encouraged to change their positions.”

“ I’m not saying that, but some people are. And not in private. One of the councilmen, Arnold Martin, lived here all his life, doesn’t have a pot to piss in. Never has had. He’s worked retail since he got out of high school, he’s now a stock manager out at a car-parts place. Him and his wife took a winter vacation last February, took off in their car and went to Florida, Arnold says. The Redneck Riviera. But the rumor is, they went to Tortola and took sailing lessons, and this spring they’ve got a nice little sailboat out on the lake. Not a big one, and it was used, but, it’s a sailboat.”

“You look into it?”

“Not the Tortola part. But I was chatting with a guy over at Eddie’s Marine, and he said the former owner wanted fourteen grand for the boat. It’s called a Flying Scot, it’s two years old, and I’m told it’s got a high-end racing rig. I had one of my deputies, who can keep his mouth shut, talk to the former owner, and he said Arnold financed it through the Wells Fargo. I got a friend there, and I found out Arnold did finance half of it, over three years, and he’s been making regular cash payments on the deal.”

“So what does that make you think?” Virgil asked.

“What it made me think was, Arnold got some money from somewhere, but wasn’t dumb enough to just go plop it down on a boat,” Ahlquist said. “He financed the boat, and is making payments out of the stash.”

“That’s not very charitable of you,” Virgil said. “Maybe he saved the money.”

“And maybe the mold on my basement door will turn out to be a miracle image of Jesus Christ, but I doubt it,” Ahlquist said.

A waitress dropped a basket of bread on the table, took their orders, and Ahlquist got another bourbon.

Virgil said, “So there might be a little informal economic assistance going on… but the bombs wouldn’t be coming from those guys. The bombs would be coming from somebody who doesn’t like those guys. So who would that be?”

“If I knew, I’d be on them like lips on a chicken-but I don’t know,” Ahlquist said. “There’s always been rumors that this-or-that councilman or county commissioner took a little money under the table, for doing this-or-that. Who knows if it’s true? Impossible to prove.”

“But this is different.”

Ahlquist nodded. “It is. See, Virgil, you know about these big-box stores all over the place. You get a bunch of them in a small town, and it can wreck the place. Drive out half the merchants, and their families, who always made decent livings, and the downtown dies. In exchange you get a bunch of minimum-wage jobs. You hollow out the town. Well, we’re big enough that we could take a Walmart and a Home Depot. It hurt, but we took it. People adjusted. You throw in a PyeMart, which is a little more upscale, and it doesn’t leave people with anywhere to adjust.”

He shook his head. “A lot of these folks are going to lose their businesses. Going to lose their livelihoods. Some of them have been here a hundred years, their grandfathers and great-grandfathers started their companies. They’re bitter, they’re angry, they’ve said some crazy things.”

“Crazy enough that there might be a bomber amongst them?”

“Yeah, that’s one place he could be coming from,” Ahlquist said. “Then, there’s the trout-fishing cranks.”

“Careful,” Virgil said.

Ahlquist grinned at him. “I know. I see you’re dragging your boat. Anyway, the Butternut runs a half mile or so behind the PyeMart site, and then makes a big loop down to the south, and then comes back north and runs into town. Some people think that the runoff from the PyeMart parking lot is going to pollute their precious crick. If it does, it’d be the whole bottom two miles, before it runs into the lake. That’s the best part, I’m told. Some of the trout guys, they were screaming at the council meetings. They were completely out of control.”

“Could I get some names?” Virgil asked.

“Sure. I can get you a list. People you can go around and talk to.”

“If I’m gonna handle this fast enough to get my ass kissed, I’ll need the list pretty quick.”

Ahlquist nodded, fished in his oversized uniform shirt pocket, and pulled out a black Moleskine reporter’s notebook. “I can give you a good part of it right now. I’ll think about it overnight, and give you the rest tomorrow.”

“Works for me,” Virgil said. He slid down in the booth a bit, yawned, and asked, “So how’s your old lady?”

“Pretty damn unhappy right now, since the housing bust,” Ahlquist said. He wrote a couple names in his notebook. “She can find people who want to buy, and people who want to sell, but the buyers are having a hell of a time getting loans. Goddamn banks.”

“Maybe she could just find a place to sit down and chill out for a while,” Virgil suggested. He’d eaten several partial dinners with Ahlquist’s wife; she was eternally on her way to somewhere else.

Ahlquist snorted: “Like that’s going to happen. Woman hasn’t sat down for fifteen minutes since she got her real estate license. Five years ago, it was glory days. You could sell a shack on the lake for the price of a castle. Now you can’t sell a castle on the lake for the price of a shack.”

“Somebody’s going to make money out of that situation,” Virgil said.

“You’re right,” Ahlquist said. “Just not none of us.”

They spent the rest of the meal chatting about life, speculating about the bomber and the nuts Ahlquist knew, and which of them had both the brains and the motive to get into, and then blow up, the boardroom at the Pye Pinnacle. “That there’s a tough question,” Ahlquist said. “I was talking to Barlow about that, and he said that penetrating that building took time, planning, and maybe an insider.”

“You give a list like this to Barlow?” Virgil asked.

“No, and he hasn’t actually asked for one. He’s more of a technical guy, going at it from the computer end. He cross-references stuff. That could work; and maybe not. He’s not so much of a social investigator, like you,” Ahlquist said.

“I didn’t even know that’s what I was,” Virgil said.

Virgil got back to the Holiday Inn after dark. He unloaded the loose stuff in his boat, locked it in the back of the truck, dug his pistol out of his gun safe, and carried both the pistol and the shotgun into the motel room. A pistol was as good as money on the street; he was determined not to contribute.

When he was settled in, he looked at the clock-nearly ten-and called Lee Coakley, in Los Angeles. He and Coakley had been conducting a romance for six months or so, until a production company began making a TV movie about Coakley’s part in breaking up a huge, multi-generational child-abuse ring in southern Minnesota. Coakley, as the local sheriff, had been the media face on the whole episode.

The production company had rented an apartment for her in West Hollywood, for the duration of the shoot. The duration had recently lengthened, and Coakley had grown evasive on the exact time of her return.

So Virgil called, and her oldest son, David, answered the phone. “Uh, hi, Virg, Mom’s, uh, at a meeting of some kind. I don’t know when she’s getting home.”

He was lying through his teeth, Virgil thought; he was not a good liar. Mom was somewhere with somebody, and you probably wouldn’t go too far wrong if you called it a date. “Okay. I’ve got a deal I’m working on, out of town-a bomb thing. I’m going to bed. Tell her I’ll try to give her a call tomorrow.”

“Yeah, uh, okay.”

Virgil hung up. Little rat. Of course, she was his mother. If you wouldn’t lie for your mom, who would you lie for?