Shock Wave

have a new wife, and it’ll all start over,” Virgil said. “I see this all the time. You’re basically not a bad guy, but you made one big god-awful mistake. You’ll pay for it, but then, you’ll be done. If you can hold yourself together, you won’t go to jail. That’s huge. Not going to jail . . . that’s a big deal. If you can hold together.”
    Shepard sniffed and said, “I can hold together.”
    “Well, you look like shit,” Virgil said. He handed over a couple more towels. “Stop for a minute and press these on your eyeballs, and while you’re doing that, stop crying. Let’s get this over.”
    Shepard pressed the wads of paper into his eye sockets, and when he took the towels away, he asked, “You think I’ll really get back?”
    “Look. You’re a smart guy,” Virgil said. “You’ll move to some place like Tucson, where they just really won’t give a shit about your problem here, and you’ll get a job. I’d bet you in three years you’re making twice as much as a schoolteacher in Butternut Falls. I mean, that’s what people make now—twice as much as teachers.”
    “Ah, man,” Shepard said. But he didn’t start crying again, and they walked back. “All my students are going to find out. I keep talking to them about good citizenship and all that . . . and look what I did. Now I’m going to drag everybody else down with me, just to save my ass. I’m such a fuck-up. I mean, even if I get another job, I can’t stay here—I have to leave home. Leave my daughter, go someplace strange. I like it here.”
    Virgil asked, “Is this Burt guy an old friend?”
    “No. I don’t know him that well. I don’t much like him, though.” Then, thinking about what he was going to do, he said, “I’m such an asshole. I don’t like him, but I don’t like . . . dragging him down.”
     
     
    HE’D CALMED DOWN by the time Virgil got him back to the county attorney’s office, and they talked about his meeting with Block. “Don’t lead him. Just refer to stuff that you’ve done,” Virgil said. “You want to be a little shaky, a little remorseful. Tell him that sad story about Jeanne leaving you. He’ll believe that. He’ll try to pull you together, and when he does that, he’ll give himself up.”
    They wired him up, and tested him for sound, and headed downtown, Virgil, the tech, Good Thunder, and Wills in one truck, with the sound equipment, Shepard on his own, in his Chevy.
    Shepard was to meet Burt Block in Block’s office—Block ran a temp service and employment agency in downtown Butternut. The tech, whose name was Jack Thompson, said, on the way over, “Wish we had a little more time to set this up. Be nice to have some video.”
    “I thought you hid cameras inside of briefcases and like that,” Virgil said.
    “Not so much. Tape recorders, we do.”
    “Yeah, I used one of those, once,” Virgil said.
    “Cameras would have been nice,” Good Thunder said. “Juries like to see faces. I just hope the audio works through brick walls, or whatever.”
    “It’ll be fine. This is state-of-the-art stuff,” Thompson said. “Long as he doesn’t fall in the lake.”
    Virgil told him about the recorder at the bottom of the Butternut, and Thompson said, “If he didn’t punch a hole in the hard drive, you’re good.”
    “Hope so,” Virgil said.
    The wire they’d put on Shepard was strictly one-way—they had no way to communicate with Shepard, except by cell phone. As Shepard pulled into a diagonal parking space in front of Block’s office, Thompson started the recorder. Shepard sat in his car for a full minute—they could hear him breathing—then slowly got out. “I’m such an asshole,” he muttered.
    “C’mon, c’mon, move,” Wills said, impatiently, from the backseat.
    Shepard looked across the street at Virgil’s truck, then turned, reluctantly, and said, “I’m going in,” and went inside.
    Inside, he said hello to a woman, who said, “Hi, Pat. Burt’s in the back, go on in.”
     
     
    DIALOGUE:
    Block: “Hey, Pat. What’s up?”
    Shepard: “Hey, Burt. Man . . . I gotta sit down. I’m really screwed up here, man. My wife bailed out on me last night. She found out I . . . I’ve been fooling around. She’s so pissed, she knows about the PyeMart deal, she knows about the money.”
    Block: “Whoa, whoa, whoa . . . She knows about me? She knows about all of us?”
    “Got him,” Wills said, gleefully.
    Thompson said, “Shhh.”
     
     
    SHEPARD: