John Sandford - Shock Wave

“I’ll get the guy this afternoon. Or maybe tomorrow, depending.”

“Depending on what?”

“I’ll let you know about that,” Virgil said. “In the meantime, keep your mouth shut about this. I only told you, because he tried to kill you.”

Pye bobbed his head, and Chapman nodded.

Virgil said, “So, you’re pulling the store out?”

“Sounds like it. I been all over Ahlquist, and what he says is, three city councilmen and the mayor have been suspended, and under state law, the governor is going to appoint replacements until there can be an election. The first order of bidness is gonna be to reverse the zoning changes on grounds that the former council was bribed. I don’t believe it, I still gotta talk to my boy.”

“Tell you what, Willard: just between you and I and Marie’s potential two million readers, you bribed their asses. You know it, I know it, and Marie’s two million readers know it. There’s gonna be a trial, and it’s all gonna come rolling out.”

“Well, there will be if there’s a trial-but who knows what might happen, between now and then?” Pye said, showing the slightest crinkle of a smile. “Anyway, it’s time for me to get the crap outa town.”

“You’re not gonna stay for the ass-kissing ceremony?”

Pye looked at his watch, then asked, “When you gonna get him again?”

“Today or tomorrow. Tomorrow at the latest.”

“And you won’t tell me who it is?”

“Not yet,” Virgil said.

“Can you tell me how you knocked it down?” Pye asked.

“Two things. You almost had a birthday party, and I was in the right place at the right time. I’ll tell you the rest of it tomorrow.”

Virgil was getting his fly rod out of the truck when he took a phone call from Sandy the researcher. “You were right,” she said. “We’ve got a receipt, but they’ve got no video.”

“Goddamnit. I don’t suppose he signed his own name,” Virgil said.

Sandy said, “Not unless his real name is Mick E. Maus.”

Virgil put the fly rod away and called Ahlquist from his truck, and said, “I’m coming over. I can tell you who the bomber is, but we have to talk about how to catch him. Probably ought to have Good Thunder there, if you can get her. Somebody from the county attorney’s office, anyway. Anybody you think should know. I’ll call Barlow, get him in, and my two guys from the BCA.”

“Fifteen minutes?” Ahlquist asked.

“Yeah, that’s good. I’ll see you there.”

He called Jenkins and told him to bring Shrake, and Barlow. “I got my call. I think I can tell you how it happened, and who did it.”

Virgil pulled into the parking lot outside the county courthouse, left his car in a slot near the door. Shrake and Jenkins went by in Shrake’s Cadillac, Jenkins lifting a hand to Virgil, and found a spot farther down the lot. Preoccupied with his thoughts about the bomber, Virgil didn’t see Geraldine Gore come through the courthouse door until she shouted at him, “You dirty sonofabitch.”

She was accompanied by a man in a gray suit, white shirt, and pink tie; he might as well have had an ID patch on his back that said, “Lawyer.” He said, “Geraldine, Geraldine,” and tried to catch her arm, but she twisted away and came steaming toward Virgil. She was carrying a big leather purse and Virgil had the feeling that she was going to swing it at his head.

She did. He stepped outside the swing, and said, “Take it easy, Mayor, for Christ’s sakes.”

She said, “You motherfucker,” and came back in, angrier and angrier, swung again and missed. Shrake and Jenkins came up and Shrake said, “I bet she takes him.”

Jenkins said, “You’re on for five. That fuckin’ Flowers has got the reach on her and twenty pounds. Okay, three pounds.”

Her attorney was on her by then, shouting, “Geraldine, Geraldine, stop it, stop it!” He wrestled her away, then turned to Virgil and said, “I hope you’re not offended.”

Jenkins jumped in: “Offended? You mean, because she committed aggravated assault, assault on an officer of the law, extortion of a witness, obstruction of justice? And those are just the felonies.”

Gore screamed, “Shut up, you asshole.”

Virgil said, “I forgot you guys had been introduced.”

Shrake said, “Oh yeah, the three of us go way back.”

The attorney: “Agent Flowers…”

Virgil said, “Just don’t let her shoot me, when I turn my back, okay? I’m going inside.”

“So we’re okay?” the lawyer asked.

“Yeah, except now I need an aspirin,” Virgil said.

Gore shouted, “You’re gonna need more than an aspirin, you shit, you shit, you shithead, you peckerhead, you…”

The lawyer hauled her away, sputtering and screaming.

Shrake watched them go, then said to Virgil, “You find the most interesting crooks.”

“You got an aspirin?”

They gathered in a courtroom, Virgil, Ahlquist, Barlow, Good Thunder, Shrake, Jenkins, O’Hara, and a tall fat deputy that Virgil didn’t know, but who turned out to be the chief deputy, and whose name was Jeneret.

“So who is it?” Ahlquist asked. They were sitting in the court pews, with Virgil on a chair in front of them.

Virgil held up a finger. “We thought, when we started, that we could figure out who did it if we could only figure out how he got the bomb in the Pye Pinnacle. If it was an accomplice, finding the name would give us a human tie. If he placed it himself, he had to have some special skill.”

“Like flying in with a motorized paraglider,” Barlow said.

“Exactly,” said Virgil. “A brilliant way to get in there. There was only one big problem with it.”

Ahlquist: “What was that?”

“That we’d figure it out sooner or later, and it’d take us straight to the bomber. And we would figure it out. We looked right at a clue at Erikson’s house: a garage with a pipe, Pelex, and some detonators, plus, it had a broken propeller hanging right there on the wall. A propeller from a motorized paraglider, right in front of our eyes. That, all by itself, would hang it on Erikson, except for one thing-the real bomber couldn’t know where Erikson was the day before the Pye Pinnacle bombing. And he couldn’t ask, because then somebody would wonder why he asked. But, it would point us at the idea of a motorized paraglider. Shrake, here, mentioned the paragliders to me, and I jumped in my truck and hauled ass out to the soaring center. One minute later, we had Erikson, and one minute after that, Wyatt.”

“What about Wyatt’s motive? All that money?” Barlow asked.

“Great motive, the best motive of all,” Virgil said. “And hard to see. But, once we had Wyatt’s name, we’d go scouting around, and we’d find the motive. Just a matter of time. See, the thing is, we were supposed to see that Erikson was a setup. Because that would take us to Wyatt, and nobody would believe that there were two setups.”

“So who is it?” Ahlquist asked again.

Virgil held up his finger again. “So we’ve got means and motive. A paraglider, and land that would be worth a fortune, if PyeMart went away. Wyatt was known to be something of an asshole and something of an adrenaline junkie, somebody who could fly a glider onto the Pinnacle. I bought it. I did. But then, we searched his house, and we searched the old farmhouse out at the farm, and we found nothing at all. Nothing.

“So we send John Haden to Wyatt, with a tip that we were looking at him, hoping he’d move. We followed him around the clock, and the day after John tipped him off, Wyatt goes out to the old farmhouse, and… boom.

“I can tell you several things about that boom,” Virgil continued. “First, the bomber had no idea that Jim and I had been inside the farmhouse. Second, Wyatt went in there empty-handed. Third, the bomb was in the basement-Jim says it was, anyway.”