Shock Wave

nobody was much looking at him anyway, because the mayor squeezed out of her pew into the aisle, the same aisle that Robertson had just gotten to.
    The cops were moving now, nearly too late, and though Robertson was the smaller of the two women, probably giving up twenty pounds, she went for the mayor like a lion after a zebra, teeth and claws. The mayor was right there, ready to take her on, but one of the cops got to Robertson just two feet short of the mayor, grabbed her around the waist and horsed her toward the back of the room, kicking and screaming.
    As the cop wrestled with Robertson, a tall bearded man in a plaid shirt stood up and shouted, “Beth is right, Ahlquist, and you know it. Those sonsof bitches were paid off big-time. Now that parking lot is going to bleed all over the Butternut and we’re gonna leave our children a polluted swamp. A polluted swamp .”
    A television reporter called, “What do you have to say to that, Sheriff ?”
    Ahlquist ignored her and said, “We’re all done here, we’re all finished. Let’s have a little peace and quiet, folks. . . .”
    Robertson started screaming from the crowd in the back, as a deputy cuffed her, and the man in the plaid shirt shouted, “No! We deserve some answers. Who’s investigating the city council, is what we want to know.”
    The mayor shouted, “Shut up, Butz. Just shut up.”
    Chapman leaned over to Virgil and said, “Fistfight in Butternut. Film at eleven.”
    “I better get the fuck out of here,” Pye said. He stood up, and behind him, Chapman wrote it down. Pye said to Virgil as he was leaving, “I’ll tell the pilots you’re flying at seven o’clock. Marie’ll come with you.”
     
     
    OUT IN THE HALL, Virgil bumped into Ahlquist, who had a shiny patina of sweat on his forehead. The sheriff said, “That worked out real well.”
    “Am I gonna be able to talk to Robertson?” Virgil asked.
    “Sure. Why not?”
    “Well, she was being cuffed.”
    “Aw, shit, she just scratched one of my guys,” Ahlquist said. “We all agreed that nothing serious happened, and she’s on the way back to her store.”
     
     
    BETH ROBERTSON WAS one of those bookstore women who wore her hair in a bun, who was a little overweight, but not too, who dressed in shades of brown but referred to them as earth colors, and who always tried to sell you an Annie Dillard when you were looking for a Stephen King. Nice enough, and sometimes a pain in the ass, Virgil thought. She was peering out the front window of the bookstore when Virgil went in; he was the only other person in the place.
    “Virgil Flowers,” she said, turning away from the window. “You were pointed out to me. You seem to be pretty close to Pye.”
    Virgil shrugged. “I’m not, no. But he’s a target of this bomber, and I need to talk with him from time to time.”
    “So, what do you want with me?”
    “I need to scratch you off my list of people who might be making these bombs,” Virgil said.
    She suddenly sat down on a metal folding chair and began to weep. Virgil let her go for a minute, then said, “Is there anything . . . ?”
    “I am completely humiliated,” she said. “I completely lost control back there. They handcuffed me.”
    “That was to keep you from scratching any more deputies,” Virgil said. “You have a lot of sympathizers, from what I can tell.”
    “Ah, God,” she said, wiping her eyes with the heels of her hands.
    “So, about the bombs . . .”
    Robertson said she’d never do anything to hurt a living creature; she neither ate meat, nor wore leather. “I sure wouldn’t make a bomb. Though I could.”
    “Make a bomb?”
    “Sure. All these idiot rednecks run around making bombs, why couldn’t I?” she asked.
    “Well, a lot of rednecks aren’t idiots,” Virgil said. “A lot of them have experience with tools and so on.”
    She waved him off. “I could do it. I just wouldn’t. No: we need to stop the PyeMart, and we could, if anyone would just pay attention to the simple fact that the mayor and the city council were bribed to approve the zoning change. Once that was established, PyeMart would be stopped cold.”
    “If you have any evidence of that . . .”
    “There’s the problem. We all know it, but we can’t prove it.”
    They spent ten minutes talking, and two minutes in, Virgil scratched her off the list. She really wouldn’t hurt a flea, he thought. She told him that she had no idea of who’d done the bombings, but there were