John Sandford - Shock Wave

She shuddered. “I never heard of such a thing. They’re chicken salad on caraway rye. There are two of them.”

His eyebrows went up. “Deputy O’Hara: that’s one of my favorite sandwiches in the United States.”

“I’m happy for you. You owe me seven dollars.”

He paid her, unwrapped a sandwich-damn good sandwich, too-and said, around a mouthful of chicken salad, “All right. Here’s what we’re trying to do.”

He spent a couple minutes explaining, and she said, “So if he takes the bait, we might follow him right out to where he’s got, like, twenty pounds of high explosive, right?”

“Yeah.”

“And he’s already killed three people, attacked a cop and one of the richest people in the world, and injured or scared the crap out of a bunch of other people. Right?”

“Yeah.”

“So, I don’t want to seem obstreperous, or anything, but… you do have a gun?”

“Yes.”

“Could you get it out? And check it? Where I can see you do it? I don’t mind going in on something like this, but I don’t want to have to look after your ass, as well as mine.”

Virgil said, “Let me finish the sandwich. I’ve got a gun. Really.”

He got a call from Haden: “I feel like Judas, but I did it. He was interested.”

Virgil said, “Thank you,” and hung up.

Deputy O’Hara asked, “You gonna eat that other sandwich?”

“You can have it, for three-fifty,” Virgil said.

“I only want a half.”

“Then one-seventy-five.”

Deputy O’Hara, it turned out, was an art freak, and on her weekends off, worked as a docent at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. She also worked an off-duty second job at the local mall, an hour before and after closing time. “Those are the high shoplift times; and then, I make sure everybody gets out of the place with their money.”

“Are you doing this because you really need the money? Or is it simple greed?” Virgil said.

“Every penny of my off-duty work, except what I need for taxes, goes in my travel fund,” she said. “Then every fall, I take off for Europe. I go to museums.”

Virgil said, “Hmm.”

“What? You’re against culture?”

“No. I was thinking that’s a great way to go through life,” Virgil said.

She looked at him suspiciously: “But not something you’d do.”

“Not exactly,” he said. “But I could probably be talked into it.”

Shrake called: “Anything?”

“We’re watching his car, but haven’t seen him yet,” Virgil said. “You okay for midnight?”

“Yeah, I talked to Jenkins. We’re all set. You by yourself?”

“I got a deputy with me,” Virgil said.

“See you at midnight.”

O’Hara said, “I gotta call my night job, tell them I can’t make it.”

“If he goes back home, I could probably drop you,” Virgil said.

“No, I’d rather have the overtime. Earl said overtime is okay, as long as it’s not too much.”

“Good of him,” Virgil said.

Wyatt finally walked out of the college building an hour after his last class ended. Virgil worried a bit that he’d snuck out some other exit, and walked somewhere, but there was nothing to do about that.

Wyatt stood blinking in the sunlight for a moment, looking around the lot, then spotted his car and walked over to it, jingling his keys. He was carrying a big leather academic briefcase, which he put on the passenger seat, then walked back around the car to get in the driver’s side.

“He was being pretty careful with that suitcase,” O’Hara said.

Virgil said, “Huh,” and when Wyatt was moving, pulled out behind him.

They took him to a supermarket, took him home, took him to tae kwon do, took him to a movie, alone. Virgil followed him in, at a distance, and caught him as he was settling in for Pirates of the Caribbean. Virgil watched the movie from the back row, occasionally texting O’Hara to keep her current. He left ten minutes before the end, no longer caring what happened.

“Like it?” O’Hara asked. “The movie?”

“No,” Virgil said.

Wyatt came back out ten minutes later, drove to the Applebee’s, spent an hour there, sitting at the bar, talking with people. He looked like a regular. They took him home at ten o’clock; he put the car in the garage.

He hadn’t moved at midnight, when Jenkins and Shrake took it.

O’Hara lived in a modest clapboard house not unlike Virgil’s: “I will pick you up at fifteen minutes to eight tomorrow,” Virgil said, when he dropped her. “Be ready.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, and saluted.

And Virgil thought, as he drove away, that Lee Coakley hadn’t called. She must’ve meant what she said: didn’t want to talk.

Thor was working in the office as he went through, and called, “Hey… looks like Mr. Shepard is going away, huh?”

“I wouldn’t count on it,” Virgil said.

“Everybody’s heard that he was arrested, and that he ratted out everybody else,” Thor said.

“Yeah, but first he’s got to recover, and then there’ll be negotiations,” Virgil said. “So… how’s everything going with the hot Mrs. Shepard?”

Thor’s eyelids lowered a quarter inch. “She took the pizza,” he said.

Virgil went straight to bed, with both his alarms set, and a wakeup call. He lay awake for a while, thinking about how God played with people’s lives, and thinking that Coakley might call yet. It was still not past eleven o’clock on the West Coast. He was still waiting when he went to sleep.

He woke at seven-fifteen, cleaned up in a hurry, got O’Hara, who was standing in her front yard, waiting, and made it to a McDonald’s drive-through, got Egg McMuffins with sausage for both of them, a coffee for her and a Diet Coke for himself, and made it to Wyatt’s at exactly eight o’clock. Working in a town where almost nowhere was more than a mile from anywhere else, and there was almost no real traffic, had its benefits.

Shrake and Jenkins had nothing to report.

“We’ll do this one more night, if we have to, and then you guys can go back to the Cities tomorrow morning.”

“We won’t be going to bed until this afternoon, so if anything comes up, call us,” Jenkins said.

Virgil said he would, and he and O’Hara settled in with their McDonald’s bag, to watch.

Virgil was reading a Michael Connelly novel on his iPad when O’Hara poked him and said, “Garage door.”

Virgil shut down the iPad and watched as Wyatt backed his Prius out of the garage. He drove to the same McDonald’s where Virgil and O’Hara had gone, rolled through the same drive-through, then headed south through town. “He’s going out to his farm,” Virgil said.

But he didn’t. He went to Home Depot. O’Hara said that as far as she knew, Wyatt didn’t know her, so Virgil sent her inside to see what he was doing. She came back out ten minutes later and said, “He’s in the checkout line. I couldn’t get close enough to see what he was getting, but it was in the ‘fasteners’ section. Window latches, or something.”

“Wonder if you could use them in a bomb, you know, to detonate one?”

“Don’t know,” she said. And, “Speaking of bombs, I can still taste that Egg McMuffin. Wish I hadn’t got the sausage.”

Wyatt came out a minute later, and again, turned south. “Toward the farm,” Virgil said again.

This time, he was going to the farm, taking the turn on the county road toward the track up the hill. Virgil pulled over onto the side of the highway, past the county road, and said, “I’m going.”

“I’m coming.”

“Gotta run,” he said. “There’s nothing in the house, so he’s probably got the stuff ditched outside.”

They ran across the highway, across the roadside ditch, climbed a barbed-wire fence, and jogged into the cornfield. They were coming at the house from the side, and couldn’t see anything below the exterior windowsills… which meant that Wyatt couldn’t see them, at least until they got higher on the slope. Halfway up, Virgil could see the top of Wyatt’s car, and said, “We gotta get lower.”