The ATF-its full name, seldom used, was the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives-instantly got involved. An ATF supervisor in Washington called the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and asked for a local liaison in Butternut Falls.
The request got booted around, and at an afternoon meeting at BCA headquarters in St. Paul, Lucas Davenport, a senior agent, said, “Let’s send that fuckin’ Flowers up there. He hasn’t done anything for us lately.”
“He’s off today,” somebody said.
Davenport said, “So what?”
2
Virgil Flowers was sitting on a bale of hay on a jacked-up snowmobile trailer behind Bob’s Bad Boy Barbeque amp; Bar in North Mankato, Minnesota, watching four Minnesota farm girls duke it out in the semifinals of the 5B’s Third International Beach Volleyball Tournament.
The contestants were not the skinny, sun-blasted beach-blanketbingo chicks who played in places like Venice Beach, or down below the bluffs at Laguna and La Jolla. Not at all. These women were white as paper in January, six-three and six-four, and ran close to two hundred pounds each, in their plus-sized bikinis. They’d spent the early parts of their lives carrying heifers around barnyards, and jumping up and down from haylofts; they could get up in the air.
Well, somewhat.
And when they spiked the ball, the ball didn’t just amble across the net like a balloon; the ball shrieked. And the guys watching, with their beers, didn’t call out sissy stuff like, Good one! or No way! They moaned: Whoa, doggy! and “Let that ball live. Have mercy!”
Of course, they were mostly dead drunk.
Sitting there in the mixed odors of sawdust and wet sand, sweaty female flesh and beer, Virgil thought the world felt perfect. If it needed anything at all, nose-wise, it’d be a whiff of two-stroke oil-and-gas mixture from a twenty-five-horse outboard. That’d be heaven.
Johnson Johnson, sitting on the next bale over, leaned toward Virgil, his forehead damp with beer sweat, and said, “I’m going for it. She wants me.”
“She does want you,” Virgil agreed. They both looked at one of the bigger women on the sand; she’d been sneaking glances at Johnson. “But you’re gonna be helpless putty in her hands, man. Whatever she wants to do, you’re gonna have to do, or she’ll pull your arms off.”
“I’ll take the chance of that,” Johnson said. “I can handle it.” He was a dark-complected man, heavily muscled, like a guy who moved timber around-which he did. Johnson ran a custom sawmill in the hardwood hills of southeast Minnesota. He’d taken his T-shirt off so the girls could see his tattoos: a screaming eagle on one arm, its mouth open, carrying a ribbon that said not E Pluribus Unum, but Bite Me; and on the other arm, an outboard motor schematic, with the name “Johnson Johnson” proudly scrawled on its cowling.
“Personally, I’d say your chances of handling it are slim and none, and slim is outa town,” Virgil said. “She’s gonna eat you alive. But you got no choice. The honor of the Johnsons is at stake. The honor of the Johnsons.”
Virgil was thinner, taller, and fairer, with blond surfer-boy hair curling down over his ears and falling onto the back of his neck. He was wearing aviator sunglasses, a pink Freelance Whales T-shirt, faded jeans, and sandals.
They were just coming up to game point when his cell phone rang, playing the opening bars of Nouvelle Vague’s “Ever Fallen in Love.” He took the phone out of his pocket, looked at it, and carefully slipped it back in his pocket. It stopped after four bars, then started again a minute later.
“Work?” Johnson asked.
“Looks like,” Virgil said.
“But you’re off.”
“That’s true,” Virgil said. “Hang on here, while I go lock the thing in the truck.”
Johnson tipped the beer bottle toward him: “Good thinkin’,” he said. And “Man, that’s a lotta woman, right there.”
The woman hit the volleyball with a smack that sounded like a short-track race-car collision, and Virgil flinched. “Be right back,” he said.
As he walked down the side road to his truck, carefully stepping around the patches of sandburs, he was tempted to call Davenport. That would have been the right thing to do, he thought. But the day was hot, and the women, too, and the beer was cold and the world smelled so damn good on a great summer day… And he was off.
The fact was, the only reason that Davenport would call was that somebody had gotten his or her ass murdered somewhere. Virgil was already late getting there-he was always the last to know-so another few hours wouldn’t make any difference. The powers that be in St. Paul would want him to go anyway, because it’d look good.
He popped the door on the truck, dropped the phone on the front seat, locked the door, and went back to the 5B.
Virgil was based in Mankato, Minnesota, two hours southwest of St. Paul, depending on road conditions and the thickness of the highway patrol. He routinely covered the southern part of the state. On non-routine cases, he’d be picked up by Davenport’s team and moved to wherever Davenport thought he should go.
A couple of hours after Davenport first called, Virgil left Johnson at the 5B, romancing the volleyball player. Their attachment was such that Virgil would not be required to drive Johnson back to his truck, so he headed home, across the river into Mankato.
Once on the road, he picked up his phone and pushed the “call” button, and two seconds later, was talking to Davenport.
“We got a bomb early this morning,” Davenport said. “One killed, one injured, in Butternut Falls. We need you to get up there.”
“What’s the deal?”
Davenport told him about the explosion and the casualties, and said that the ATF would be on the scene now, or shortly.
“I’ll be on my way in an hour,” Virgil said. “Wasn’t there another PyeMart bomb, killed somebody in Michigan a couple weeks back?”
“Yeah. Killed one, injured one. If it’d gone off twenty minutes later, it would have taken out the board of directors along with Pye himself,” Davenport said. “This guy is serious, whoever he is.”
“But if he started in Michigan, he could be a traveler. Unless we’ve got fingerprints or DNA.”
“We’ve got two things on that,” Davenport said. “The first thing is, the explosives are tagged by the manufacturer. The ATF has already identified the tags in the Michigan bomb as Pelex, which is TNT mixed with some other stuff, and is mostly used in quarries. In April, somebody cracked a quarry shed up by Cold Spring-that’s about an hour northeast of Butternut Falls-and two boxes of Pelex were taken. Other than the theft in Cold Spring, the ATF doesn’t have any other reports of Pelex theft in the last couple of years. So, the bomber’s probably local.”
“Okay,” Virgil said. “What’s the other thing?”
“Butternut is having a civil war over the PyeMart. People are saying the mayor and city council were bought, and the Department of Natural Resources is being sued by a trout-fishing group that says some trout stream is going to be hurt by the runoff. Lot of angry stuff going on. Over-the-top stuff. Threats.”
“There’s runoff going into the Butternut? Man, that’s not just a crime, that’s a mortal sin,” Virgil said.
“Whatever,” Davenport said. “In any case, the DNR okayed their environmental impact statement. I guess they’re already building the store.”
