Shock Wave

looked at him for a moment, then said, “The two people you should talk to are Ernie Stanton and Larry Butz. They are completely irrational about this. I can get you their addresses.”
    “I’ve already got them,” Virgil said. “Who else?”
     
     
    VIRGIL CAME AWAY with four names that he hadn’t had before: eight names altogether; but she’d named all the people mentioned by Kline.
    He’d decided to start with Stanton, and was walking down to his truck, when another bomb went off.

6
    V IRGIL HAD HEARD bomb-like devices explode in the past. In the army’s Officer Candidate School, he’d thrown four hand grenades at a wooden post, while standing inside a concrete trench, and later watched from behind a thick Plexiglas screen while other members of his training unit threw more. He’d also had the opportunity to pop off a few rounds from an M203 grenade launcher.
    When the bomb went off—it was somewhere close by, and behind him—he had no doubt what it was. He turned and saw people running along a street two blocks away, got in his truck, and went that way, in a hurry.
    The first thing he saw when he turned the corner was a wrecked white stretch limo, half of it a smoking ruin. The limo was sitting sideways in the street, and a man in what looked like a doorman’s uniform was crawling away from it on his hands and knees.
    Virgil got as close as he could, outside the blast zone, parked, and ran over to the limo and looked inside. It was empty; finding it empty was like having a boulder lifted off his chest. The man in the dark uniform had reached the curb, and he rolled over and sat down, his hands covering his ears.
    Virgil hurried over to him—there were sirens now, and they were coming his way—squatted and asked the man, “You the driver?”
    “Look what they done to my car,” the man moaned.
    “Where’s Pye and his assistant?”
    “Down at the AmericInn. I was just going to get them,” the driver said. He was looking at the car. “No way that can be fixed.”
    Virgil looked at the car: the bomb, he thought, had been in the vehicle’s small trunk, and had blown off most of the back third of it. The middle third was still there, but was a shambles, with all the glass blown out, the seats uprooted and thrown against the back of the driver’s compartment. Anyone seated behind the driver would have been killed, or badly injured.
    “I think you’re right,” Virgil said. “Hope you got insurance.”
    “That was my baby,” the driver said.
    “You’ll get another one,” Virgil said. “It coulda been a hell of a lot worse.”
    The driver said, “Yeah, and you know how? Oh my God, I stopped down the street, two blocks back, to let the kids go by on a field trip. Little kids from the elementary school, looked like they were going to the library. If that’d gone off . . . there must’ve been fifteen of them.”
    A thin young man in a dress shirt and a necktie ran up, stopped a few steps away, peered at them over a weedy mustache, whipped out a camera and took a picture of the driver and Virgil sitting together, with the wrecked limo in the background. “I’m with the Clarion Call ,” he said, running the last few steps up. “Harvey, what’d you think when the bomb went off?”
    “Hey, you’re walking all over the goddamned crime scene,” Virgil said. “Back off.”
    “Who the hell are you?” the reporter asked.
    “With the BCA,” Virgil said.
    “Ah, Flowers. Have you made any progress?”
    A deputy came running up, glanced in the car, then said to the reporter, “Larry, get the fuck outa here.”
    The reporter backed away, brought the camera out again. The deputy asked Virgil and the driver if they were hurt, and Virgil said, “I just got here—I’m with the BCA.”
    The cop was impressed: “Boy, you got here in a hurry, huh?” He stood up as another car came up and shouted, “Block off the street. Route the traffic around. Keep those people away from here.”
    Virgil took a break from the driver to call Barlow. “You hear the bomb go?”
    “What?”
    Virgil told him about it, and Barlow said, “Have them freeze the site. I’ll be there in five minutes.”
    Virgil passed the word to the first deputy, then a fire truck arrived, and another one, and an ambulance, and two or three more cop cars. The whole area smelled of burned tar and leaking oil—there didn’t seem to be any gasoline. Virgil went back to the driver, who said his name was Harvey Greene. Greene