Shock Wave

17

Butternut Scuba was a storefront on the edge of downtown, around the corner from a bakery. Virgil stopped at the bakery and after some consultation with the baker, got a couple of poppyseed kolaches. He stood on the corner and ate them out of a white paper bag, a little guilty that he should be feeling so relatively well fed, so shortly after that poor bastard had been blown to bits in his own car; and guiltily thankful that it hadn’t been him.

When he was done with the pastry, he threw the bag in a trash can and walked around the corner to the scuba shop. A blond woman, thin as a steel railroad track and about as solid, was in the back room filling a scuba tank. When Virgil came through the front door, the overhead doorbell jingled and she yelled, “Hey, Frank-I’m back here.”

Virgil clumped through the shop, with its displays of tanks and buoyancy control devices, masks, finds, and regulators, to the back, said, “I’m not Frank.”

“That’s for sure,” she said, looking him over. She had a white smile and one-inch-long hair. A snake tattoo disappeared down the back of her neck, into her T-shirt. “Be with you in a minute.”

Virgil went back into the shop and looked at a Cressi Travelight BCD for $460. He’d used a BC a few dozen times when he was on leave from the army, diving in the wine-dark Aegean; and he’d gone diving a bit back in the Midwest, with a DNR biologist who was researching the habits and habitats of large muskies. Virgil had gotten a nice In-Fisherman article out of that, but he hadn’t had a tank on since the summer before.

“Can I get you one of those?” asked the blonde, who wore a name tag that said Gretchen.

“Actually, I need some divers. I’m a cop and I’d like somebody to dive a couple of pools on the Butternut.”

“You don’t look entirely like a cop,” she said, in a friendly way.

“Well, I am, Virgil Flowers with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.”

“Okay, I’ve read about you,” she said. “We do dives for the police… Somebody drown?”

Virgil shook his head: “We’re not looking for a body. We’re looking for some electronic equipment.”

“Uh, will we get paid?”

“We can work something out,” Virgil said. “It’s the state, so it might take a while to get the check.”

A short, square, red-haired man with a red British RAF mustache came through the door, looked at Gretchen, then at Virgil, and Virgil said, “Hey, Frank.”

The deal was done in five minutes, and Frank called a guy named Retrief and told him to bring his gear up to the PyeMart site, and make it quick. Thinking that he might rent some equipment and go in the water, Virgil dug out his certification card, and Frank asked him how many dives he had in. Virgil said, “Maybe a hundred… maybe. Haven’t been down for a while.”

Frank said, “We’d spend more time making sure you’re okay, than it’d be worth. You get down there, and you can’t see more than about two feet. Blind diving’s a whole new thing. It’s easy to get tangled up in shit.”

That made sense to Virgil, since visibility was one of the reasons he quit diving in Minnesota; so he helped Gretchen and Frank load their gear in the back of Frank’s truck, and they followed him out to the PyeMart site, and then back along the track to the river, Virgil plowing down the weeds in his government truck.

When they got to the river, Virgil found that a second truck had fallen in behind Frank’s: Retrief, a balding man with tattoos on his neck, and an Australian accent. To Gretchen: “Workin’ for the jacks now, izit?”

“They’re paying us,” she said.

“That makes for a change,” he said. To Virgil: “Howya doin’?”

Virgil said, “You sound like you’re from New Jersey.”

They wanted to know more about the bombings, and about Erikson, and Frank said, “You get this guy, you oughta string him up by his balls.”

“Right on that,” Retrief said, and Gretchen said, “But what if Erikson did it?”

The water in the stream was cold, and the three divers pulled wet suits over swimming suits, doing a quick change in their trucks, then slung on tanks, masks, BCDs, and swim fins, and waded down the muddy banks to the end of the first pool.

While they were changing, Virgil dug his Nikon out of the truck, with a medium zoom, and started shooting. “How cold?” he called.

“Freezing,” Retrief muttered.

“Not too bad,” said Gretchen.

In waist-deep water, the divers popped in their mouthpieces and went down; Virgil could track them by watching for bubbles as they moved slowly upstream, turned, and then swept back downstream, and then up, back down, and up one more time. At the end of it, they popped up, and Frank called, “Nothing here. How far to the next one?”

“Hundred yards or so,” Virgil called back.

“Best ride in the truck,” Frank said. They all piled in the back of Frank’s Chevy, and Virgil bumped through the weeds west along the bank to the next pool.

The second pool was longer and narrower than the first, and looked deeper and murky and even nasty. Virgil thought of snakes, which was another reason he didn’t dive much in the Midwest; not that there were poisonous snakes, just that murky water made him think of them. The second pool went just like the first one, for ten minutes. On the first downward sweep, though, the bubbles stopped for a full minute, coalescing in one spot, then all three of them popped to the surface.

Gretchen pulled her mouthpiece and called, “Got them,” and held up a camera, just like the one Virgil had seen in the second trailer; Virgil took three quick shots of her holding it up, and then shot the others, as the two men did one-armed sidestrokes to shore, towing a black metal box with wires dangling off the back.

And Virgil laughed out loud with the sheer pleasure of being right. He shouted down, “That’s it, guys. Beer for everybody.”

“You’re a good man, Virgie,” Retrief called back, and Frank said, “The paper’s gonna eat this up. I love this shit.”

“Better’n pulling out a body,” Gretchen said. She climbed the bank, dripping river water, straining against the weight of her equipment, and handed the camera to Virgil.

They all drove back to the scuba shop, where the divers took turns taking showers and rinsing down their equipment, including the camera and the console. When they were done, they walked down the street to Mitchell’s, a bar, carrying the recorder and camera. Virgil ordered beer, and when it came, called Barlow.

“Hey, I got that camera and the recorder from the first trailer,” he said.

“You got what?”

“The camera and recorder from that first trailer, the one that was blown up.”

After a moment of silence, Barlow asked, “Where’d you get them?”

Barlow got there in ten minutes, ordered a Coke, looked at the still-damp electronic gear. Virgil explained it all, and the grinning divers chipped in their bit, about finding the stuff in the murk-Frank had first found the recorder, and then a minute later, Gretchen found the camera-and finally Barlow asked Virgil, “How in the hell did you ever think of that?”

“I was just thinking about this guy stumbling around out there in the dark, carrying all this crap, and whatever tools he had to break into the trailer, and I thought, Why would he take them home? Why not just get rid of it? Where would he get rid of it? He was walking right by this river, and he was apparently familiar with the area, with these deep pools…”

Barlow shook his head. “Dumb luck, that’s what it was.”

“Ever notice how dumb luck seems to follow smart people around?” Retrief asked.

“Where you’re gonna need the luck is, the recorder,” Gretchen said. “It’s been underwater for days.”

“It’s a hard drive, and most of them are sealed units,” Virgil said. “I think we’re eighty percent for recovering the images. I’m more worried that he bashed it around than about the water. If he physically screwed up the disk, it’ll be harder to get at the pictures.” He looked at the case on the table. “It looks okay. He didn’t hit it with a hammer or anything.”

“How long before we know?” Barlow asked.

“I’ll get it back to St. Paul today,” Virgil said. “They’ll pull the unit, and take a look. If it’s not broken, we’ll have images this afternoon. Or tonight.”

“That’s something,” Barlow said. “That really is.”

“What happened with Sarah Erikson?” Virgil asked Barlow.

“She’s back,” Barlow said. “She’s pretty messed up, says her husband would never do anything like that. Wouldn’t know a bomb from his elbow, is what she says. She says she’ll come down and talk to us this afternoon. I’ll call you.”

“I gotta go talk to the paper,” Frank said. “We oughta get a picture. I think they fired their only real photographer.”

Gretchen demurred: “I don’t think I want this bomb guy to know I was involved. I live alone.”

Frank said, “Mmmm… you could move in with me.”

“No, I couldn’t,” she said. She looked at Virgil and lowered her eyelids.

Retrief said, “Fuck ’im, if he can’t take a joke. You gonna be in the picture, Frank?”

“I guess.”

“Then it’s you, me, and Virgie,” Retrief said.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Barlow said to Virgil.

“I want him to know; I want him to feel me coming,” Virgil said. “I want to shake him up. At the moment, I got nothing else.”

Virgil, Frank, and Retrief posed with the recovered camera and recorder, and Gretchen pushed the button on Frank’s cell phone and when he saw the photo, Frank said, “That’s a thousand dollars in advertising, right here.”

“Really? That calls for another round,” Retrief said to him. “You’re buyin’.”

Virgil took the recorder and camera back to the county courthouse and put them in a box, and Ahlquist dispatched a deputy to take them to the BCA labs in St. Paul. “Man-oh-man, this could be the break we needed. If his face is on that video, we got him.”

“Keep your fingers crossed,” Virgil said. “Where do I go to see Sarah Erikson?”

“She’s coming in here. So’s Barlow. We figured we’d kill all the birds with one stone.”

“We’re birds?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Bad metaphor, Earl,” said Virgil.

“Tough titty. Go investigate your list.”

“Which Erikson isn’t on,” Virgil said.

“Unfortunately,” Ahlquist said.

Virgil pushed himself out of his chair. “I better get investigating.”

“Somebody’s got to do it,” Ahlquist said. “Nice job on that camera, Virgil.”

A few more letters had come back with lists of possible bombers. Virgil spent a half hour going through them, but nothing much had changed. Then Good Thunder called:

“We flipped Pat Shepard, and your guy from the BCA is here with the recording equipment. We’re going to send Shepard to see Burt Block right away: we’re starting to pile up people who know about this, and we need to move. We’d like you to come and help brief Shepard.” Block was the second of the three city councilmen bribed by PyeMart through Geraldine Gore.

“When do you want me?” Virgil asked.

“How fast can you get here?”

The county attorney’s office was upstairs. Virgil looked at his watch: “About twenty-two seconds, if I take the stairs.”

“We’ll leave the light on for you,” Good Thunder said.

Pat Shepard was a middle-sized guy, tanned from the summer golf course, with a tight haircut; and he was pathetic and about the only person in the room who didn’t feel sorry for him was the county attorney, a beefy man named Theodore Wills, who introduced himself as “Theodore.” Wills was openly ecstatic about Shepard’s confession, and scornful of the man himself.

Shepard, who’d been arrested, sat in his chair and wept, and Virgil had to look away. Good Thunder kept passing Shepard paper towels from a roll, which he pressed against his eyes. Shepard’s public defender kept saying, “C’mon, Pat, it’s gonna work out.”

A BCA technician, who’d brought the sound equipment, sat in a corner and read a new copy of Sail magazine.

“Wife gone, job gone, gonna lose everything. My life is over,” Shepard said.

“Can’t do the time, don’t do the crime,” Wills said, and Good Thunder’s eyes touched Virgil’s with a slight disgusted roll.

Bill Check, the public defender, said, “Jesus, Theodore, you wanna take it easy? You’re getting everything you wanted.”

But, Virgil thought, as he watched Shepard, Wills was essentially correct. The guy had been entrusted to take care of the town, the best he could, and he’d sold his vote on a critical issue. His confession had been taken down by a court reporter, and had been signed and sealed. For his cooperation in bagging the rest of the gang, he’d get no jail time.

Wills said to Check, “No, I’m not getting everything I wanted. I wanted the sucker in jail for at least a year and Good Thunder talked me out of it. He’s the last one that’s getting a break like that. Everybody else goes down.”

Virgil leaned across to Shepard and said, “You’ve got to pull yourself together. You need to tighten up. If you can’t do this, if you blow this meeting with Burt Block, then the agreement won’t hold, and you will do time.”

“No, no,” said Check, the public defender. “There are no guarantees that this is gonna work…”

“But he has to make a good-faith effort, and if he goes in there fumbling around, and Block smells a rat, then the deal’s off,” Wills said.

Virgil reached over and patted Shepard on the shoulder. “Being upset is okay. If you show Block you’re upset, that’s fine, that’s what he’d expect. Upset’s okay, but you have to have your head under control. C’mon. Why don’t you and I take a walk and we’ll get you calmed down and talk about it.”

“Good idea,” Good Thunder said.

“I’m not so sure,” Check said. “Leaving him alone with a police officer…”

“I’m not taking testimony,” Virgil said. “I’m just trying to get him some fresh air.”

So Virgil and Shepard took a walk around the courthouse. Shepard looked around, at the sky and the sidewalks and at some kids walking down the other side of a street toward a Dairy Queen, and said, “Everything looks just like it did when I went to work yesterday and I was a happy guy. Today, everything’s gone.”

“You know what? It’s bad now, but three years from now, you’ll have another job, probably in another town. You’ll probably have a new wife, and it’ll all start over,” Virgil said. “I see this all the time. You’re basically not a bad guy, but you made one big god-awful mistake. You’ll pay for it, but then, you’ll be done. If you can hold yourself together, you won’t go to jail. That’s huge. Not going to jail… that’s a big deal. If you can hold together.”

Shepard sniffed and said, “I can hold together.”

“Well, you look like shit,” Virgil said. He handed over a couple more towels. “Stop for a minute and press these on your eyeballs, and while you’re doing that, stop crying. Let’s get this over.”

Shepard pressed the wads of paper into his eye sockets, and when he took the towels away, he asked, “You think I’ll really get back?”

“Look. You’re a smart guy,” Virgil said. “You’ll move to some place like Tucson, where they just really won’t give a shit about your problem here, and you’ll get a job. I’d bet you in three years you’re making twice as much as a schoolteacher in Butternut Falls. I mean, that’s what people make now-twice as much as teachers.”

“Ah, man,” Shepard said. But he didn’t start crying again, and they walked back. “All my students are going to find out. I keep talking to them about good citizenship and all that… and look what I did. Now I’m going to drag everybody else down with me, just to save my ass. I’m such a fuck-up. I mean, even if I get another job, I can’t stay here-I have to leave home. Leave my daughter, go someplace strange. I like it here.”

Virgil asked, “Is this Burt guy an old friend?”

“No. I don’t know him that well. I don’t much like him, though.” Then, thinking about what he was going to do, he said, “I’m such an asshole. I don’t like him, but I don’t like… dragging him down.”

He’d calmed down by the time Virgil got him back to the county attorney’s office, and they talked about his meeting with Block. “Don’t lead him. Just refer to stuff that you’ve done,” Virgil said. “You want to be a little shaky, a little remorseful. Tell him that sad story about Jeanne leaving you. He’ll believe that. He’ll try to pull you together, and when he does that, he’ll give himself up.”

They wired him up, and tested him for sound, and headed downtown, Virgil, the tech, Good Thunder, and Wills in one truck, with the sound equipment, Shepard on his own, in his Chevy.

Shepard was to meet Burt Block in Block’s office-Block ran a temp service and employment agency in downtown Butternut. The tech, whose name was Jack Thompson, said, on the way over, “Wish we had a little more time to set this up. Be nice to have some video.”

“I thought you hid cameras inside of briefcases and like that,” Virgil said.

“Not so much. Tape recorders, we do.”

“Yeah, I used one of those, once,” Virgil said.

“Cameras would have been nice,” Good Thunder said. “Juries like to see faces. I just hope the audio works through brick walls, or whatever.”

“It’ll be fine. This is state-of-the-art stuff,” Thompson said. “Long as he doesn’t fall in the lake.”

Virgil told him about the recorder at the bottom of the Butternut, and Thompson said, “If he didn’t punch a hole in the hard drive, you’re good.”

“Hope so,” Virgil said.

The wire they’d put on Shepard was strictly one-way-they had no way to communicate with Shepard, except by cell phone. As Shepard pulled into a diagonal parking space in front of Block’s office, Thompson started the recorder. Shepard sat in his car for a full minute-they could hear him breathing-then slowly got out. “I’m such an asshole,” he muttered.

“C’mon, c’mon, move,” Wills said, impatiently, from the backseat.

Shepard looked across the street at Virgil’s truck, then turned, reluctantly, and said, “I’m going in,” and went inside.

Inside, he said hello to a woman, who said, “Hi, Pat. Burt’s in the back, go on in.”

DIALOGUE:

Block: “Hey, Pat. What’s up?”

Shepard: “Hey, Burt. Man… I gotta sit down. I’m really screwed up here, man. My wife bailed out on me last night. She found out I… I’ve been fooling around. She’s so pissed, she knows about the PyeMart deal, she knows about the money.”

Block: “Whoa, whoa, whoa… She knows about me? She knows about all of us?”

“Got him,” Wills said, gleefully.

Thompson said, “Shhh.”

Shepard: “She doesn’t know exactly about you or Arnold, but she knows about Geraldine.”

Block: “But she doesn’t know about me?”

Shepard: “She knows… you know… but I never said your name or anything. But she knows.”

Block: “Ah, man, you gotta shut that bitch up. If she talks, we’re toast.”

Shepard: “I can’t shut her up. She left me. She took what was left of the money, and she knows where it came from, so… maybe we’re all right, but I don’t know. I was thinkin’… I was lookin’ for a way out.”

Block: “Like what?”

Shepard: “If we got to… maybe we could buy her off? I mean, she’s gonna need money. I only got twenty-five, I figured you guys got a lot more, you could help out-”

Block: “Whoa, whoa, whoa, that’s my money. We all got exactly the same. You’re gonna have to find some other way to shut her up.”

Shepard’s voice broke: “I wish I’d never seen any of you. Geraldine said it was no problem, but now, oh my God…” He began blubbering.

Block: “Jesus, man up, Pat. If we just find a way to shut her up. .. Maybe we go back to the PyeMart guy, tell them that we’ve got a problem, need to smooth it out.”

Shepard: “That might work. Maybe. You think Geraldine only got twenty-five? I figured that you guys all did a lot better than that.”

Block: “I don’t know about Geraldine, but Arnold and I only got twenty-five. I mean, that’s all there was. Maybe Geraldine clipped a little off our shares, she’s crookeder than a bucket of cottonmouths. …”

They went on that way for a while, then Shepard asked, “So what do you think I oughta do? Talk to Geraldine? See if she’ll talk to PyeMart? I’m not that tight with her.”

Block: “I’ll talk to her. But I’ll tell you what. We’d all be better off if, you know, if Jeanne just went away.”

There was a moment of silence in Block’s office, but in the truck, Good Thunder blurted, “I don’t believe he said that.”

Shepard: “What? Went away?”

Block: “You, know, if she had some kind of accident. Then you wouldn’t be getting a divorce, you wouldn’t have this threat hanging over you.”

Shepard: “Okay, that’s fucking ridiculous.”

Block: “I’m just sayin’.”

Shepard: “I’m getting out of here. Nothing better happen to Jeanne. If it does…”

Block: “What? You’re gonna talk to the cops? You’re in just as deep as we are, you silly shit. Anyway, think about what I said. I’ll talk to Geraldine, and we’ll figure something out. Maybe if the PyeMart guy gets worried, we could sting him for a little more. Tell him we need a hundred to shut up your old lady, give her twenty, keep the rest. You know, we should have thought of this before.”

Shepard: “I’m outa here.”

Block: “Hey, Pat. Have a good day. Keep your fuckin’ mouth shut.”

Good Thunder said, “He is so implicated. We could talk conspiracy to commit murder.”

Wills nodded: “We will. The thing is, if we agree to drop that charge, but leave jail time up in the air for the bribe… we could flip him, too, and get him talking to Geraldine. Man. We are looking. .. What’s that asshole doing?”

“He’s talking to himself,” Thompson said.

Shepard was standing outside Block’s office, looking through the window into the office, making an incoherent growling sound, like a nervous collie. Every once in a while, a word would pop out, but it didn’t sound good.

Virgil said, “I’m gonna go reel him in,” and he popped his truck door.

Good Thunder said, “Wait. He’s moving.”

Virgil stopped and looked over at Shepard. Shepard walked around to the back of his car, looked across the street at them, and lifted a hand.

“Got a flat tire?” Thompson suggested, as Shepard rummaged around in the trunk of his car.

“I don’t…” Virgil began.

Then Shepard straightened, and in his hand he was holding a largeframe chrome revolver. A Smith, Virgil thought, vaguely, as Good Thunder said, “Oh, no,” and Wills said, “Holy shit,” and Thompson said, “Uh-oh, got a gun, Virgil?”

Virgil thought about his gun in the lockbox, turned to say something about it to Good Thunder, who was essentially sitting on it, but Good Thunder, still looking through the windshield said, “He’s gonna…”

Virgil looked back in time to see Shepard turn the gun toward his own chest, and pull the trigger.

And Shepard went down.