Shock Wave

luck, it’ll keep the bomber laying low,” Virgil said.
    “Speaking of which, you oughta lay low yourself,” Ahlquist said. “You’re the most obvious threat to him. You could wind up with a bomb in your boat.”
    “I don’t think he’s that kind of a monster,” Virgil said. “Bombing a man’s boat.”
    “I’m serious,” Ahlquist said. “I’d ask the people at the Holiday to move you to another room, one that opens to the inside, over the pool, where he’d be seen if he went to your door.”
    Virgil said, “I’ll do that. I’ll be back at eight o’clock or so, to pick up the responses. If I can collate the list we get back tonight, and get the second letter out to however many people we have—Peck thinks a couple hundred would be good—we could start getting a list together tomorrow night.”
    “Be interesting,” Ahlquist said. “What’re you doing for the rest of the day?”
    “I got a couple of guys I want to talk to, and, uh . . . you got any fish in that lake?”
     
     
    VIRGIL FOUND CAMERON SMITH, president of the local trout-fishing club, at work at the Butternut Outdoor Patio Design Center. Smith was busy with a female customer when Virgil walked in, so he spent fifteen minutes chatting with a nice-looking blond bookkeeper who worked in the back office. When Virgil introduced himself, she called Smith, who was thirty feet away, on the other side of a door, on her cell phone. Smith said he’d be there as soon as he could get away.
    “That’s a big order out there,” the woman said. Her name, according to a desk plaque, was Kiki Bjornsen. “She’s looking at spending over nine thousand on patioware and a spa.”
    “Is that PyeMart gonna sell patio stuff?”
    “Not like ours,” Bjornsen said. “I mean, they might sell some rickety old aluminum chairs, but they won’t be selling any Sunbrella products.”
    “Good for you.”
    “And I can tell you for sure that Cam didn’t blow anything up,” she said. “He just got back from Canada last night. He was up there with about six college friends. He was up there for a week.”
    “Well, shoot, there goes my day,” Virgil said. “I was planning to drag him kicking and screaming down to the county jail.”
    “That’d be something to see,” she said.
     
     
    SMITH WAS A CHUNKY, sunburned man who said he’d just spent five days getting blown off Lake of the Woods, and Virgil told him that he’d been blown off Lake of the Woods himself, on several occasions.
    “Fishing out of Kenora?” Smith asked.
    “Yeah, most of the time. I really like that town,” Virgil said.
    “Got the most vicious, impolite, asshole game wardens I ever met,” Smith said. “We were out five days, got stopped three times. Hell, we’re fishing on a conservation tag, not keeping anything, and they’re tearing our boats apart.”
    “They do that,” Virgil said. “But the fishing is good.”
    “And they got some good pizza,” Smith said. “So, what can I do for you?”
    “Is there anybody in your trout club that might be setting off these bombs?”
    “I been thinking about that ever since I heard about the bomb, the first one,” Smith said. “I call my wife every night to tell her I didn’t drown, and she told me about it, about that poor bastard getting blown to pieces. I mean, jeez, nobody deserves that.... Anyway, no. I don’t think any of our guys would do that. We’ve got some rednecks, but you know, they’re all . . . fishermen. Fishermen don’t kill people.”
    “Well, maybe muskie fishermen,” Virgil said.
    “Okay, I’ll give you that,” Smith said. “But not us trout guys. Crappie guys might be bombers, but I don’t think walleye guys, or bass or bluegill guys. Bullhead guys . . . well, we don’t talk about bullhead guys. I don’t think they’d go violent, but they’re not quite right in the head, if you know what I mean.”
    Virgil nodded: he tended to agree with Smith’s characterizations.
    “You know Larry Butz,” Virgil said.
    “Yeah, and he’s the one everybody would point at, because he’s got a loud mouth. But he’s really a good guy,” Smith said. “The paper this morning said that a group of kids were crossing the street just before Harvey’s limo blew up, and that’s the kind of thing that Larry would have thought of. About other people getting hurt. He’s got five kids, and there’s no way he’d ever take a chance like that. That he’d hurt a kid. I mean, I don’t think he’d hurt