Stephen White - Warning Signs

"She's talked about him some, but I've never met him." Sam was exceeding the grocery store speed limit now, not even pausing to see whether the shelves he was passing had anything at all to do with the items Sherry had penciled on his grocery list. I caught up with him only because an elderly man was blocking the aisle with his cart while he tried to retrieve a can of guava juice from the top shelf. I helped the man get the can of juice down and he pushed his cart away. I think Sam's driving was scaring him.

Sam argued, "She couldn't have been screwing Peterson. If Lucy loves her fiancé enough to marry him, why would she be having an affair with Royal?"

"We don't know that she was having an affair, Sam. But people do strange things."

"Royal has a reputation. But Lucy?" he muttered. "I don't get it. She's too smart to get involved with somebody like Royal."

"She was obviously involved with him somehow. She was at his house, right? People don't always do what's smart."

"Tell me about it."

I guided him to a stop in front of the condiments and picked out some ketchup. Sam was shaking his head.

He said, "Don't get that kind. It's runny."

"You're giving me grocery advice?"

"Believe it or not, I know about some things. If it goes on hot dogs or bratwurst, I know about it."

I wasn't ready to digress into discussing meat on buns. "What kind of reputation did Royal Peterson have, Sam? Indefatigable crime fighter? Justice superhero?"

Sam laughed before he said, "Cad."

I raised my eyebrows. "Cad?" I wasn't questioning the concept, just Sam's choice of descriptors.

"It means he screwed around. I think it's a British thing."

"Screwing around is a British thing?" I said.

Sam hit me on the arm. It hurt.

"You know what I mean."

He waited until I looked up and nodded before he spoke again. "It's my nature to chew on you about what you don't tell me, you know that. That doesn't mean that I'm not grateful for what you do tell me. I'm guessing that the tip you gave me about the explosive means you crossed a line that you're not real comfortable crossing. Finding the bomb in Royal's basement will complicate the case against Lucy. I'm grateful to you for that. But"-he smiled in a way that made both of his lips disappear up into his mustache-"I'm not done trying to get you to tell me what else you know. It doesn't stop here, Alan. Friend or no friend, it doesn't stop here."

R amp flipped among the Denver news channels about a hundred times between the hours of four and six-thirty Friday afternoon. The only breaks he took from thumbing the remote control were to check his computer to see if any of the TV stations had updated their Web sites with fresh information about the explosion in Denver's Dahlia neighborhood.

Two mistakes in one job.

Ramp couldn't figure out what had gone wrong.

When the local news programs were over, he retrieved a Zip disc from its hiding place in a hollowed-out section of the trim that skirted the floor around the perimeter of his small apartment.

He inserted the disc into his computer and retrieved a Microsoft Word document he'd labeled Log 7.

He didn't really need to see the written record; Ramp could have recited the data that was recorded in Log 7 from memory. But he checked the log anyway. It took him no more than five minutes to review the details of the series of trials he had done at the ranch near Limon.

The device had worked properly all four times that he'd tested it.

All four.

"So what went wrong with number five?" he said out loud. "And why was she driving his car?"

He called Boulder.

"It's me," he said when his call was answered. "You saw the news?"

While he listened to the answer to his question, Ramp stood and moved back to his computer. He linked to the KCNC Web site. It hadn't been updated. He clicked over to KUSA and then to KMGH. Nothing had been added to either site.

You call this news?

Ramp tried to keep the irritation out of his voice when he spoke out loud again. "Like I told you, I followed him twice before I placed it. Both times he was in that car. It was definitely the car he drives to work. I don't know why she was driving it this morning. Bad luck for her is all I can say. I don't feel bad I got her. I only feel bad that I didn't get him and that the message was lost. I'll have to make up for it."

He tucked the phone between his shoulder and his ear as he removed the Zip disc from the drive and tucked it back into its hiding place in the floorboard trim. The trim slid back into place like a hand into a glove.

He shook his head as he said, "No, it was almost all solid state. It shouldn't have shorted. I don't think that's it. I'm thinking it was a rogue radio signal that set it off. The odds are astronomical that another device would be on that frequency in that vicinity, but that's all I can come up with. I've been glued to the news all afternoon. It doesn't look like the police understand the target. And the ATF will waste some time piecing together the device. I'm thinking we're okay. What about the thing at your end? Any fallout from them discovering the bomb in that guy's house?"

Out the front window, Ramp watched a white Denver Police cruiser crawl slowly down the road in front of his Pennsylvania Street apartment. He tracked it with his eyes as it moved south and turned the corner.

"Yeah, I think so, too. Finding the device in Boulder won't point to us at all. I think we're still on track. My guess is that we've had as much bad luck as we're going to get. I say that we both go ahead with tonight's work. You agree?… That's right, we should keep the faith."

Ramp pressed the button disconnecting the call. To no one in particular, he said, "Wouldn't it be cool?"

In this phase, Ramp had one more device to place. The schedule called for him to install it that night.

He decided not to alter his plans.

S aturday morning brought Lauren, Grace, andme back to our weekend routine. We left the house early, met our friends Diane and Raoul for breakfast, and did the usual round of errands on North Broadway. During breakfast I tried to maintain a conversation with Raoul, pretending I gave a whit about his newfound passion for fly-fishing while I was simultaneously eavesdropping as Lauren responded to a question about her health from Diane. Raoul was rambling about feathers and string and tying flies; Lauren was saying that she was in less pain and that her brain mud had eased, but that her vertigo was still giving her fits, and, fearing that she might fall, she wouldn't carry Grace more than a few feet. Lauren usually didn't go into such detail about her health with friends.

Or with husbands, for that matter.

When I said "Yes" in answer to a question I didn't really hear from Raoul, he seemed pleased. He said, "Diane didn't think you'd come with me. I told her I thought you would."

I was afraid I'd just agreed to go fly-fishing.

A lthough April hadbeen warmer and dryer than usual along the Front Range, the weatherpeople were predicting the midday arrival of a cold front from the north preceded by strong winds. It turned out that the meteorologists were wrong by at least a couple of hours. As we were driving home from our errands the winds began to sluice down from Cheyenne with a force that would cause alarm in most places on the North American continent. But not in Boulder. Winds in the fifty- to one-hundred-miles-an-hour range were frequent events in the winter and spring seasons. Only in the upper reaches of the range did the populace seek shelter. In the moderate, fifty- to seventy-five-miles-an-hour range, the primary impact of the winds was inconvenience.