thing: he wasn't a handyman. C.D. visited the house after the arrest and didn't see a single piece of home-built furniture, not even a bookshelf. In the basement there were no tools at all, just boxes. He knew there was a vast gulf between men who did things with their hands and men who didn't: he didn't believe a man who didn't would actually take it upon himself to build a bomb.
“The FBI was all over the newspapers with their big triumph,” C.D. said.
“But to me, the thing smelled to high heaven. They couldn't find no trace of explosive residue in the house or office. I don't know much about bombs, but if they're trying to tell me he built it, I got to satisfy myself that he'd have the confidence in his manual skills to do such a thing without leaving a crater over one half of Cleveland County.”
So C.D. set to work: first piece of evidence—insurance policies over $35,00, not over $100,000.
“To city boys like the FBI, used to working organized crime, white-collar crime, drugs, that sort of thing, nobody'd do nothing for less than a hundred grand. But to a country person or a small-time middle-class shop keep or just-barely-making-it professional man who’s not got by on much his whole life and is way deep in debt, thirty- five thousand or so can sound pretty damned big.”
This yielded him not twenty-three names but forty-seven.
Now he cross-referenced for some kind of explosives experience or exposure and achieved… nothing. None of the new names had any identifiable explosives experience.
So he figured the person must have gone to the library to learn. He called the Oklahoma City library and learned that of the forty-seven, thirty-one held cards in its system; computers were just coming in to use, and he was able to examine the records of the thirty-one cardholders. He discovered that one of them had checked out a book two months earlier called Principles of Explosive Exploration: a Guidebook for Petroleum Geologists.
This happened to be one Freddy Dupont, thirty-eight years old, of Midwest City, Okalahoma… a dentist.
“A dentist, I thought,” C.D. told his listeners.
“Now why the hell is a dentist checking out books on oil field explosives? And isn't a dentist by the very goddamned nature of his job the kind of manual tinkerer that would have the skill necessary to put something like a bomb together?”
But it wasn't enough. He needed a third piece of evidence.
So he took the book to an oil geologist he knew and said to the man, 'I know what this book tells me. What don't it tell me?”
The geologist examined the volume for several minutes, scanning the table of contents and the index, and then said one word that sent a shiver down CD.'s spine.
“'Fuses.” That's what he said. It didn't say nothing about fuses. How to set the thing off.”
“Where'd a feller go to learn about fuses?” C.D. had asked him.
“Only one place I know. The military,” was the reply.
“He ain't been in the military.” But then C.D. had a moment. The military puts every damn thing it knows into . field manuals.
It was pretty easy after that. Calling the U.S. Government Printing Office, he learned that a dental hygienist named Rose Fluerry, in Dr. Dupont's office for less than a year, had ordered a field manual entitled Special Forces Improvised Field Munitions Detonation Techniques. An examination of the book yielded a blueprint for 'Timing Device Simple, with Expedient Materials,” which looked pretty goddamn much like the one the FBI said blew the airliner.
A day's worth of surveillance revealed that in fact the dentist had moved in with Rose Fleurry; another day's investigation showed he'd moved in the day after the blast that had claimed the lives of, among others, his wife and three children.
C.D. had picked up Rose, interrogated her gently for an hour, and she had rolled over on her lover just that fast.
Turned out she didn't care for him much anymore by that time. He didn't put the toilet seat down. And the fifty thousand dollars in insurance money on the wife and three kids?
Strictly an afterthought, a little fun money for a fling in Mexico that he never got to take.
“Put him in the death house, proud to say, though goddammit, the sentence was later reduced to life. The funny thing is, when we arrested him—he had model airplanes everywhichgoddamnwhere. He loved airplanes. But it was that third piece of evidence that done the trick.”
This final observation fell on largely deaf ears, for by now the old man had begun to bore the younger crowd.
C.D. felt it happen all the time. They pretended to want to know, but somehow they just didn't have the patience, the concentration.
As they turned away to sleep for tomorrow, C.D. pretended to go back to the data, the OSBI file on Lamar.
But he reached into his coat pocket and slipped out the I. W. Harper bottle. The lid was loose; with deft fingers he removed it. He hunched, seemed to shift in his old man's dry-boned way, and managed to draw a large, fiery swig from the bottle. It tasted like charcoal, gun smoke, and old plums. It knocked him where he wanted to be, which was into a state of blur.
Bud rolled over, trying to get to sleep. On this job it was six on the damn block, peeking into cars, then twelve on the road for what was called 'aggressive patrolling,” and then six off, and his six off was three gone and goddamned if old C.D. wasn't holding court with a bunch of Bureau boys a couple of bunks on down the goddamned way. There were dog teams outside, yowling, just in case. An OSBI helicopter made a buzz overhead every once in a while. The communications center, in one corner, crackled and yammered.
Men were cleaning guns that hadn't yet been fired. Sleep was a hard bargain tonight.
Yet Bud wasn't an unhappy man. He and Ted alternated on the driving, and after close to twenty-five years of driving himself. Bud hated it when someone drove him. And was it his imagination, or was Ted's ambivalence about his life somehow expressing itself in his driving? Made Bud pretty itchy to sit there while the boy diddled with the accelerator.
You go trooper, you got to love to drive a car, because that's 98 percent of the duty day: you'll see death in all the ways it can come to drivers and you'll give chase and maybe kill, but it all turned on the powerful automobile.
You had to love that bitch on wheels or get another line of work.
But in three hours it would be his day to drive again. A certain secret part of him responded to the pleasures of the wheel, and he hoped they wouldn't nab those goddamned boys until after he had his eighteen.
But that was only a surface thing. Truth was, Bud felt another deeper pleasure, though he could put no name on it.
For now, in the temporary suspension of normalcy that the statewide manhunt brought, he felt something singing and vibrant. It was freedom, or the illusion of freedom, from It.
That's how he thought of it: It. It was It, that was all It was.
It, being the thing, the mess, the situation. It, meaning Jen and the boys and the placid pleasures of duty versus the sweetness of renewal as experienced in young Holly, and all the pleasures it promised, all the places to go, all the ways to be.
Bud was no romantic. His idea of reading was the new Guns & Ammo or Car and Driver, and his idea of fun was to go to a high school baseball game and watch Jeff play or to zero in the .270 for deer season. He went to the movies once a year, which was one time too much. He didn't watch TV since they took Johnny off for that other goof, and it still pissed him that they went and did such a goddamned fool thing. Mainly, he just did his duty as he saw it, hard and fair, and expected otherwise to be left alone.
Then It happened and all craziness broke out. Three months ago he'd been cruising 44 near to shift's end and had pulled off at a favorite place, a diner called Mary's in the little town of Cement, where the coffee was hot and black and the hash browns crispy, the way he liked them.
He was sitting at the counter, taking his twenty, when he heard his name.
“Bud? Sergeant Bud Pewtie?”
He turned, and there she was. He remembered now.
When he'd been partnered up with Ted during Ted's six-month provisional, he'd met Holly off and on, and when Ted got his First Class stripe, he and Jen had the younger couple over to dinner to celebrate with a barbecue.
