James Born - Shock Wave

Alicia squeezed him and laid a long, deep kiss on him until his mind melted. He could only wave as the car pulled away, carrying his own little agents of anarchy off to safety. At least for a while.

Camy Parks stretched her legs and arms like she was Supergirl. A naked Supergirl with massage oil on her back. She felt her body let go as she willed the tension out of her toes and fingers. Hands worked her trapezius muscles and then her neck. She couldn’t control her sigh.

She kept explaining her day. “Then I took the little bottle from Billy Tasker and turned it into the lab. But it looks like it’s not going to make a hell of a lot of difference, at least for me. The SAC told me point-blank to my face that he doesn’t care if Wells blows up the Queen Mary 2 right in front of me-I can’t touch the guy. The Justice lawyers expect a major media-grabbing lawsuit filed by Wells any day, and they say this will look like a vendetta.”

“So Tasker gets to run with your case? After all that?”

“Yeah, if our lab makes a match.”

She sighed. Enough. She enjoyed massages, but wasn’t keen on talking about work after hours. She barely wanted to talk cases at the office gym. Too bad only other ATF agents worked out there. Work was all she seemed to have in common with any of them. Her dad had worked for Jack Daniel’s for years and she never once heard him mention the office or other Jack Daniel’s employees the whole time she was growing up. When he was home, it was to be with her and her five brothers. It was a good lesson to learn.

She rolled over, allowing her back rub to move to the front. She loved the light oil splashed over her breasts, pleased that they were real and everyone noticed. She said, “You got to hand it to Billy, though. He certainly kept at it.”

“Yeah,” came the reply. “Some people don’t know when to quit.”

Wells slowly padded back up the slight slope to the front door after he watched his family drive away. Often he’d lock himself in the shop and catch up on work when the kids were gone. Or, better, work on his own special projects. That was his one fear: one of the kids might be hurt inadvertently by something he did or was working on. He didn’t think they would just wander into the garage and find something. He’d trained them too well. He thought about what might happen if a timer went bad or some of that unstable shit just decided to blow. That was why he had fire alarms and smoke detectors all over the garage and house.

He wandered through the quiet house. It unnerved him. He needed noise and confusion. The only order he liked was in the shop. That gave him his baseline for the rest of his life. There was nothing more orderly than the little detached garage where he affected other people’s lives. And it was getting to be more and more people every time.

The phone’s single ring cut through the silence, making him jump.

“Hello,” he said, half-expecting it to be Alicia saying she couldn’t go with the kids.

“Daniel, you okay?”

He recognized the voice.

“No thanks to you. Were you just gonna let me rot in jail?”

“Don’t you worry, I had it well in hand.”

“Hope so. That Tasker fella is smart. I don’t want him figuring anything out.”

“That’s why I’m calling.”

Daniel Wells listened, glad he’d already sent the kids away.

Bill Tasker stared at the red numbers on the alarm clock next to his rumpled bed, making a game of trying to guess how far they’d advanced every time he opened his eyes. When he was a student at Florida State, he’d been a subject of a psychology grad student’s test of internal clocks. At the time he’d done it for extra credit; now he found it interesting, if for no other reason than it took his mind off how he’d let Daniel Wells walk. All he could think about was getting to the ATF lab and finding out what the results showed. He looked at the clock again: 4:43. Shit. He decided to make use of the early hours and go for a run.

Thirty minutes later, with no hint of the sun arriving any time soon, Tasker picked up his pace, cutting through the Kendall neighborhood he knew so well. No women in bikinis like at Haulover Beach or calm water like at Biscayne Bay-just some simple, efficient exercise to get him in the right mind-set for the day. He went through the details he might have to put into the search warrant for the Wells house. He could already provide an accurate description, and he knew the layout for tactical considerations. In comparison to some drug warrants, it was easy. He didn’t have to rely on some informant with no eye for what cops needed to know when they came through the door. Tasker had been inside the small house a couple of times. His main concern was the kids and Alicia. If Wells was a mad-dog bomber, would he be calm when they knocked on the door? Tasker still had a hard time believing the whole thing. Daniel Wells appeared to be a normal, decent guy. There was nothing about him to indicate he was capable of something like trying to blow up a cruise ship. Why? What would drive a man to do something like that? Had he been paid by someone else? Had he been pissed at someone in the cruise industry? Tasker was going to have to do some digging on this one.

He was showered, shaved and had finished eating just as the sun started to peek over the house across the street. He used the early hour for a quick drive by Daniel Wells’ house. It was as quiet as every other house in the south Dade neighborhood. He just made a few quick notes about the placement of street numbers and colors in case he needed to put it all in a search warrant.

Near noon, Tasker was finally able to get Sutter to meet him. As usual, part of the inducement was food. They met at the La Carreta near the International Mall, off 107th Avenue.

Sutter glowered at his half-eaten Cuban sandwich. “I don’t know why I let you talk me into these places. I hate foreign food.” He held up the sandwich and then tossed it back on the plate. “I like hamburgers and pizza. Shit like that. I should boycott foreign food. Then maybe every white guy I know wouldn’t drag me to places like this all the damn time.”

“How many white guys do you eat with?” asked Tasker.

“Counting you? One. And I don’t want no more foreign food.”

Tasker had been raised in South Florida and never considered Cuban food as foreign. It was more just a different local flavor, like barbecue. He kept picking at his chicken fricassee while Sutter bitched. It was actually relaxing hearing the Miami cop complain about everything from food to television shows. To Tasker it meant the world wasn’t too far off its axis. He was still free and able to work. No one was going to indict him, even if the FBI wanted to. But he had to do everything he could to arrest Daniel Wells if he was guilty of the Krans-Festival cruise-ship bombing. If Tasker did nothing and Wells struck again, he wouldn’t be able to live with himself.

Sutter looked at his friend. “What are you so bent out of shape about?”

“Wells killed a guy and could kill someone else if we don’t do something.”

“So could I. Doesn’t mean I will. If that good ole boy did set the bomb on the ship, then we’ll be able to pin it on him. Those kinds of techno-freaks don’t strike every day. Look at the guy the FBI chased for so long.”

“Ted Kaczynski?”

“No, man, the crazy guy, lived in a cabin.”

“Theodore Kaczynski.”

Sutter couldn’t hide his irritation. “No, the Unabomber. Took him months to set up another attack. Only killed two or three people. Shit, we got crackheads kill more than that on a weekend.”

Tasker shook his head. “I think Wells could be a real menace.”