Shock Wave

kept the limo at his house. “I park it right beside the house.”
    “Are you the only white limo in town?”
    “I’m the only white limo in the county,” Greene said. “Some more come in for the prom and so on, but I’m the only one that’s right here.”
    “How hard would it have been to get in your trunk?” Virgil asked.
    “I don’t think it was in my trunk,” Greene said.
    “You don’t? It looks to me like—”
    Greene shook his head. “Number one, nobody touches my car that I don’t know about it. If I’m not in it, it’s locked. If he’d jimmied my trunk, I would have heard. I park that baby right outside my bedroom. Number two, when I go out, the first thing I do is, I walk around the car with a spray bottle and a rag, and wipe it down. There was no sign anybody had been in the trunk.”
    “If he had a key—”
    “There’re two keys. One’s still in the ignition, and one’s in the console. I saw it this morning: I always check to make sure I’ve got the spare, so I don’t hang nobody up if I do something stupid and lose the one in my pocket. Whoever it is, he had to put the bomb in last night: I didn’t know but yesterday afternoon that Mr. Pye was coming in.”
    The red-haired woman deputy, O’Hara, walked around the car, looking at it, then ambled over to Virgil and Greene and put her hand on Greene’s knee: “You okay, Harvey?”
    “Yeah, I’m okay.”
    “So what do you think?” Virgil asked. “How’d this happen?”
    “I think somebody snuck up to my house with a bomb and some duct tape, and taped it to the rear axle, or something else down there. I never look under the car. Maybe I should,” Greene said.
    Virgil patted him on the back. “You’re a pretty smart guy, Harvey. I think you’re probably right. We’ll see what the feds have to say about it.”

    VIRGIL STOOD UP and O’Hara said, “The bomber knows his way around. Harvey lives out on the edge of town, and there’s not much out there. If he was seen, people out there will remember.”
    “Makes me think he probably wasn’t seen.”
    O’Hara nodded. “Why’d he blow up those pipes? That won’t stop anything.”
    “If you come up with an answer, let me know,” Virgil said.
    Barlow arrived, looked at the car, and agreed that Greene was probably right—the bomb had been under the car, rather than in the trunk. If anyone had been sitting in the rearmost seat, he would have vaporized.
    Barlow had left one of the crime-scene techs at the construction trailer, while the other one worked the city maintenance yard. When the sheriff arrived, he asked for, and got, two deputies to guard the bombed-out trailer, and ordered that tech into town to work the limo.
    To Greene, he said, “As soon as I’ve got this place settled down, we’ll go over to your house and take a look at where you parked the car. That’ll be another crime-scene site. Is there anybody out there now? Your wife . . . ?”
    “Not married anymore,” Greene said. He added, “And now, I’m unemployed.”
     
     
    THE PERIMETER OF THE BOMB scene had turned into a circus: a hundred people had gathered to watch and more were coming in. There was a pizza place across the street, and slices were beginning to circulate. Then Pye showed up with his assistant, and when Barlow saw them arguing with a deputy, he said to Virgil, “You handle Pye better than I do. Be a good guy, and go over and talk to him.”
    Virgil walked over and said to the deputy, “Let them through, will you? My responsibility.”
    Pye came through and said, curtly, “Thank you. And thank the good Lord that I wasn’t in that car. That would have really screwed up my whole happy hour.”
    Virgil told him what he knew, which wasn’t much. “Barlow can probably tell you about a detonator, but you can see . . . they were trying to kill you, man.”
    “No kidding.” Pye raked his lower lip with his upper teeth a few times, looking thoughtfully out at the blast zone, then said to his assistant, “Pye spoke to Flowers for a minute, getting the lay of the land, then resolved to hunt down this monster no matter what it took.”
    She took it down in shorthand, and Virgil asked, “Are you writing a book?”
    “I take down everything Mr. Pye says,” the woman answered.
    “Is that possible?” Virgil asked.
    “Barely,” she said.
    “She damned well better get it all,” Pye said. “I pay her enough.”
    “Barely,” she said.
     
     
    WHEN BARLOW SAW that Pye had