Shock Wave

wrote: You have temporarily lost your hearing because of the blast . Another page: You have many little cuts from glass fragments. Turned the page: Your other eyelid is badly cut, but not the eye itself. Another page: Your vision should be fine. Another: You also suffered a minor concussion and perhaps other impact injuries. Finally: Your vital signs are excellent.
    “What time is it?” she asked. The light in the room looked odd.
    5 o’clock. You’ve been coming and going for almost 8 hours. That’s the concussion.
    There was some more back-and-forth, and finally she asked, “Was it a gas leak?”
    The doctor wrote: The police believe it was a bomb. They want to talk to you as soon as you are able.
    “What about Jelly? She was in the room with me.”
    The doctor, his expression grim, wrote: I’m sorry. She wasn’t as lucky as you.
     
     
    MORE OR LESS the same thing happened all over again, three weeks later and four hundred and fifty miles to the west, in Butternut Falls, Minnesota. Gilbert Kingsley, the construction superintendent, and Mike Sullivan, a civil engineer, arrived early Monday morning at the construction trailer at a new PyeMart site just inside the Butternut Falls city limits.
    Kingsley, unfortunately for him, had the key, and walked up the metal steps to the trailer door, while Sullivan yawned into the back of his hand three steps below. Kingsley turned and said, “If we can get the grade—”
    He was rudely interrupted by the bomb. Parts of the top half of Kingsley’s body were blown right back over Sullivan’s head, while the lower half, and what was left of the top, plastered itself to Sullivan and knocked him flat.
    Sullivan sat up, then rolled onto his hands and knees, and then pushed up to his knees and scraped blood and flesh from his eyes. He saw a man running toward him from the crew’s parking area, and off to his left, a round thing that he realized had Kingsley’s face on it, and he started retching, and turned and saw more people running....
    He couldn’t hear a thing, and never again could hear very well.
    But like Sally Humboldt, he was alive to tell the tale.
     
     
    THE ATF—ITS FULL NAME, seldom used, was the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives—instantly got involved. An ATF supervisor in Washington called the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and asked for a local liaison in Butternut Falls.
    The request got booted around, and at an afternoon meeting at BCA headquarters in St. Paul, Lucas Davenport, a senior agent, said, “Let’s send that fuckin’ Flowers up there. He hasn’t done anything for us lately.”
    “He’s off today,” somebody said.
    Davenport said, “So what?”

2
    V IRGIL FLOWERS WAS SITTING on a bale of hay on a jacked-up snowmobile trailer behind Bob’s Bad Boy Barbeque & Bar in North Mankato, Minnesota, watching four Minnesota farm girls duke it out in the semifinals of the 5B’s Third International Beach Volleyball Tournament.
    The contestants were not the skinny, sun-blasted beach-blanket bingo chicks who played in places like Venice Beach, or down below the bluffs at Laguna and La Jolla. Not at all. These women were white as paper in January, six-three and six-four, and ran close to two hundred pounds each, in their plus-sized bikinis. They’d spent the early parts of their lives carrying heifers around barnyards, and jumping up and down from haylofts; they could get up in the air .
    Well, somewhat.
    And when they spiked the ball, the ball didn’t just amble across the net like a balloon; the ball shrieked . And the guys watching, with their beers, didn’t call out sissy stuff like, Good one! or No way! They moaned: Whoa, doggy! and “Let that ball live . Have mercy !”
    Of course, they were mostly dead drunk.
     
     
    SITTING THERE IN THE MIXED ODORS of sawdust and wet sand, sweaty female flesh and beer, Virgil thought the world felt perfect. If it needed anything at all, nose-wise, it’d be a whiff of two-stroke oil-and-gas mixture from a twenty-five-horse outboard. That’d be heaven.
    Johnson Johnson, sitting on the next bale over, leaned toward Virgil, his forehead damp with beer sweat, and said, “I’m going for it. She wants me.”
    “She does want you,” Virgil agreed. They both looked at one of the bigger women on the sand; she’d been sneaking glances at Johnson. “But you’re gonna be helpless putty in her hands, man. Whatever she wants to do, you’re gonna have to do, or she’ll