Shock Wave

But: I was up in the Cities two weeks ago, and stopped in a Goodwill store to drop off an old chest of drawers,” Kline said. “There’s a PyeMart right there, and as I was pulling out, here comes a PyeMart employee, driving across the parking lot in what looked like a brand-new golf cart.”
    “Hmm.”
    “That’s what I said: Hmm. Wikipedia says there are two thousand four hundred PyeMart stores in the U.S., and about one thousand one hundred in other countries. If you bought a new golf cart for only one store in ten, and bought them through Dave . . . that’d be a nice little chunk of change. Just about invisible. Not only that, if you’re PyeMart, you’d have the golf carts, and even a business write-off.”
    “You got any proof?” Virgil asked.
    “Proof? Hell, all I got is an idea, from driving past a PyeMart store.” Kline snubbed out his cigarette, and snapped it off the roof into the alley behind the store. “I gotta get back. Who knows, a customer might wander in.”
    They stood up and Virgil looked across the top of the building, out onto the lake. A single sailboat cruised a few hundred feet off the waterfront, and Virgil asked, “That’s not, uh . . .” He dug in his memory, found the name. “. . . Arnold Martin, is it?”
    Kline looked out at the sailboat and said, “Nope. I’d say Arnold’s boat is about half that big.”
    Back downstairs, Virgil thanked Kline for his time, and Kline asked, “Was I any help?”
    “Well, you know, the possibility of municipal corruption is always interesting, if you’re a cop,” Virgil said. “But it’s not the PyeMart supporters who are blowing stuff up. Not the crooks on the city council. I’ll probably go around and talk to some of these people you told me about.”
    “Let me add a name to your list: Larry Butz. He’s one of the trout guys. He said publicly that we had to stop the PyeMart any way we could. This was in a city council meeting, and Geraldine jumped right on him and said something like, ‘You don’t mean that; we’re civilized people here.’ And Butz said, ‘I did mean it. We got to do anything we can.’ ”
    “Good guy? Bad guy?”
    “Not a bad guy. But I happen to know that he’s taken a pretty wide variety of anti-depression and anti-anxiety pills. He has some problems.”
    “Thanks for that,” Virgil said. “I’ll stop by later and get the rest of the list.”
    “Get me a subpoena and get one for Walmart, too,” Kline said. “I don’t want people thinking I’m a rat.”
    Virgil’s next stop was at city hall, where he talked to Geraldine Gore, who had an office the size of the smallest legal bedroom. With just enough space for a desk, four file cabinets, two visitor chairs, and an American flag, she pointed him at one of the two chairs, but didn’t seem all that excited to see him.
    Gore was a short woman, but wide, the kind who might have stopped a hockey puck without moving too much. She had stiff magenta hair over mousy brown eyebrows, and suspicious blue eyes.
    She said, “I have to tell you, I have no idea what this is about.”
    Virgil pushed his eyebrows up: “Well, it seems simple enough. You guys approved PyeMart, a lot of people think it’ll damage the town and its environment.”
    “That’s nonsense,” she snapped.
    “So what?”
    She frowned: “What do you mean, so what? We had environmental impact statements, we had economic studies—”
    Virgil interrupted what threatened to become a PowerPoint presentation. “I mean, it may be nonsense, what people think—but they think it anyway. One of them apparently is so mad about it that he’s killing people. As a potential target, I’d think you’d be pretty anxious to get this straightened out.”
    “I’m not a target—”
    “Tell that to the bomber,” Virgil said. “You’re the one single person who could have stopped the PyeMart, if you’d vetoed the city council’s approval of the zoning change. You didn’t. The feds think the bomber is probably already building his next bomb, and thinking about a target. Between you and me, they say that if he put all the explosive he’s got into one bomb, he could reduce the city hall to flinders.”
    “Flinders?”
    “You know. Bits and pieces.”
    “That’s nonsense.” She looked around her office, suddenly nervous. “This building . . . this building . . .”
    “Mrs. Gore, this Pelex explosive is used in quarries,” Virgil said. “It turns solid rock into gravel .”
    She