More deputies came in, and rubberneckers, and then the fire truck, and Virgil stood on a curb and watched them foam the gasoline. Barlow arrived, and came trotting over, followed by one of the crime-scene technicians. He put a hand on Virgil’s shoulder and asked, “You okay?”
“More or less,” Virgil said. “I’d like to get the truck away from there, so I can stay mobile. I didn’t want to do anything until you got here.”
“Give us a few minutes to look at it,” Barlow said. Then, “I wonder why he didn’t put it under the truck…?”
Virgil told him his theory on that, and the ATF man nodded and said, “You’re probably right.” They’d been drifting down the line of the wrecked boat, still well away, as the firemen finished up. Barlow said, “I bet it was another mousetrap and it was set to go off when you opened that locker. It would have taken you apart. It would have been like somebody stuffed a hand grenade down your shirt. You were lucky.”
Ahlquist showed up, red-faced and angry: “Man, he’s going after us now. He’s completely off the goldarned rails. You okay? Man…”
Virgil wandered off and took his cell phone out of his pocket and called Davenport. “Did I mention to you that I brought my boat along, you know, in case an after-hours fishing opportunity came up?”
“Tell me something surprising,” Davenport said.
“Okay. This fuckin’ bomber just blew it up.”
“What?”
“It’s gone, man. Cut in half. Truck’s okay.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m a little freaked. He set it to kill me, no question. Goddamnit, Lucas, I’m shakin’ like a shaved Chihuahua.”
“You want some guys? I could get Shrake and Jenkins and be up there in a couple hours, help you tear the ass off the place.”
“Nothing to tear up right now. Maybe tomorrow-I’ll let you know. I just gotta get organized here, I gotta get the truck and get going.”
“Hey, Virg-go get a beer, or a cheeseburger, or something. Sit down for a while. That’s what I do when some shit happens. Man…”
Virgil rang off and walked back to where Ahlquist was standing, talking to Barlow, and asked, “Anybody hurt inside?”
“Two windows got knocked out, that big one on the front, and then there’s a small one, upstairs, in an empty room,” Ahlquist said. “So. .. no. Nobody hurt.”
“But he was trying his best,” Barlow said. “When he put the bomb in that rod locker, he did you a favor-there are about six aluminum walls between the bomb and the truck, and they soaked up the blast going forward. Didn’t even knock the windows out of the truck. But if somebody had been standing on the sidewalk when it went, they’d be dead.”
“It’s been sheer luck that he hasn’t killed a whole bunch of people,” Ahlquist said.
“We can move the truck, if you want it,” Barlow said. “We’re not going to get much out of this bomb-all that gasoline and foam would have taken out most of the evidence.”
Ahlquist: “I wonder why the gas didn’t blow?”
“Not much fire involved,” Barlow said. “That’s why most cars don’t burn when they’re hit.”
“I’ll take the truck,” Virgil said. “I gotta get some breakfast. I’m just, uh… I gotta get some food.”
“Sure you’re okay?” Ahlquist asked. “You’re sorta mumbling at us.”
“I was scared,” Virgil said. “But now, I’m getting pissed. Really, really, royally… I gotta get some food.”
He ate what he thought was about a three-thousand-calorie breakfast at Country Kitchen: French toast with hash browns, eggs over easy, regular toast, and two orders of link sausage, gobbling it down like somebody was going to take it away from him. When he was done, he felt a little sick from the grease, but his head was clearing out.
The bomb wasn’t the first time somebody had tried to kill him, but this one had shaken him. He hadn’t been kept alive by skill, or by reflexes, or by fast thinking; he was alive because he got lucky. If he hadn’t driven over a curb, he’d have died sometime during the day.
Simple as that. The coldness of the fact shook him. He was finishing the third of his three Diet Cokes when Davenport called him.
“You sure you’re okay?”
“Except for the fact that I just swallowed about a pint of grease, I’m okay.”
“ ’Cause I just talked to Hendrix, and he said if you’re too close to an explosion, the atmospheric pressure overload can screw you up, all by itself. Even if you don’t get hit by any of the shrapnel. They’re seeing that with guys coming back from Afghanistan.”
“I’ll take my pulse three times a day,” Virgil said.
“Seriously, keep it in mind,” Davenport said. “They say that what happens is, the next time you’re under a lot of stress, a vein pops in your brain. Usually, when you’re having sex. You get really worked up, and your blood pressure goes up, and just when you’re, you know, getting there, pop, there goes the vein, and you’re dead.”
“Now you’re lying,” Virgil said.
“I did make up that last part, about the sex,” Davenport said. “But seriously, if you start getting funky, talk to someone. It’s called ‘blastrelated traumatic brain injury’ or ‘blast syndrome.’ You can look it up on the Net. They see it even in people with no obvious physical injury.”
“Lucas… thanks. I’m more pissed off than hurt. I’m so mad, I
… Now it’s personal.”
“Glad to hear it,” Davenport said. “Things move quicker that way.”
13
Virgil went back to the scene of destruction: because of the mess caused by fire suppression, preservation of the crime scene wasn’t as important as it otherwise might have been, and the boat and trailer had been towed out of the street and parked at the far end of the Holiday Inn lot, where one of the ATF crime-scene techs was working through it.
“The guy’s giving us a lot of business,” he said, when Virgil walked up.
“You find anything good?”
“Got one end of the pipe. It blew right through the front sidewall on that locker, and the wall of the next locker, but then the hull stopped it. Same pipe as before. The guy went into that college and cut it up, and he’s using it one piece at a time. If we can find him, we can hang him with the rest of it.”
“We’ll find him,” Virgil said.
“Sorry about your boat. I thought maybe you could salvage the engine, but some shrapnel went right through the cowling. The electronics are toast.”
“Wonderful.” Made him want to cry.
The boat was an older Alumacraft Classic single-console model with a fifty-horse Yamaha hung off the back; a decent boat, usable on big water only on calmer days, but fine for most smaller Minnesota lakes. Virgil had bought it used, with a state credit union loan, and had only just finished paying it off. He wasn’t sure, but if he remembered correctly his insurance policy had some kind of caveat about payment in case of “war or civil insurrection.”
Was a bomb the same as war?
He was still looking at the boat when he got a call from Ahlquist: “The paper got a crazy note, supposedly from the bomber. You need to come take a look at it. We’ve got it down at my office.”
“Are they sure it’s from the bomber?”
“Yeah. They’re sure. It mentions, I quote, ‘state Gestapo agents.’ The state Gestapo agents would be you,” Ahlquist said.
“I’ll be over,” Virgil said. “Listen, have you had anybody checking the motel and the other buildings around here for witnesses?”
