Shock Wave

were notoriously goofy, right there with crappie fishermen, but it was a harmless kind of goofiness. A lot of trout fishermen wouldn’t even hurt a trout, much less a human being, talking to the fish gently as they put them back in the water. He suspected a few of them had kissed their trout on the lips.
    As a muskie fisherman, Virgil had to laugh at the thought. Try to kiss a muskie on the lips, and you’d lose your fuckin’ lips. They were all fishermen together, he supposed, but trout fishermen really were weird.
    Anyhoo . . . the trout fishermen were out.
    Which made him feel better.
    Sex and greed.
    He’d made some progress, fueled by three beers.
     
     
    BACK AT THE COUNTY COURTHOUSE, he told that to Ahlquist, who said, “Hold that thought, and let me tell you this: they’ve got Block upstairs, and they’re squeezing him like an orange in a hydraulic juicer.”
    “Is he going to cave?” Virgil asked.
    “Wills is starting to scare me,” Ahlquist said. “This case has done something to him. He used to be this overweight frat boy. Now he looks like he’s on cocaine, or something. His eyes are all big and he’s got white circles under them, and he stood on the table and told Block that if he didn’t cooperate, he was going for twenty years. Twenty years. You can kill somebody for half that. I saw Good Thunder coming out of the ladies’ can, and she said he’s serious.... So, I wanted you to know.”
    “Okay.”
    “Now what’s this about greed and sex?” Ahlquist asked.
    “The bomber’s blowing stuff up because of greed or sex—I’ve eliminated trout—and I don’t see how sex would fit into an attack on Pye,” Virgil said. “So, it’s greed, and there seems to be a load of money going around. The question is, how did the money lead to bombing? We need to talk to this expediter guy, the guy who bribed Geraldine. Is he being blackmailed? Did anybody ever try to blackmail him? Maybe we could get Wills to threaten him with twenty years, and see if he comes up with something.”
    “The guy isn’t here,” Ahlquist said. “He’s long gone. Last I heard, he’s down in Alabama, bribing somebody else.”
    “We need to get him back,” Virgil said. “Subpoena him. Put the screws on Pye—maybe threaten to arrest Pye himself. Money is the root of this evil.”
    “Did somebody say that? The money thing?”
    “Theodore Roosevelt, during the 1911 presidential campaign.”
    “Yeah? We gotta think about how to go about this. I’ll get Wills as soon as he finishes breaking Block’s balls.”
     
     
    VIRGIL DECIDED HE HAD to go somewhere and think, and he wound up in the chambers of a vacationing judge. Ahlquist said, “This is where I take my naps. You can lock the door from the inside.”
    Virgil went in and lay on the couch, his feet up on one arm. Lot of stuff going on. Had to think about it. After five minutes, he hadn’t thought of anything, so he called Davenport and told him what was going on. Davenport summarized it: “So you cleaned up the town, but you don’t have the bomber.”
    “Not yet.”
    “Well, let me know when you do. I gotta go.”
    “Why’d he try to kill me? That’s what I want to know. If he’d killed me, he would have gotten a whole storm of cops in here.”
    “Maybe he was making a point of some kind, about resistance,” Davenport said. “Or maybe he wanted a whole storm of cops in there.”
     
     
    NO HELP THERE.
     
    He was still on the couch when the governor called. “Hey, Virgil, I talked to State Farm, and you’re good to go. You haul the boat to the State Farm place up there, and they’ll resell what they can—scrap, I guess—and you get a check for the boat and motor and a thousand in personal property.”
    “Ah, jeez, Governor. Thanks, I guess. There’s nothing criminal in this, is there?”
    “Criminal? This is the least criminal thing I’ve done this week,” the governor said. “The second-least-criminal thing I’ve done is, I talked to an old buddy up at East Coast Marine in Stillwater. He’s got a Ranger, there, a beauty, used, but not hard, owned by some rich guy who went out about once a year.... Anyway, your check exactly matches the asking price, including sales tax. You gotta go look at it.”
    “A Ranger?” Virgil’s mouth started to water. “Jeez, Governor, I don’t know—”
    “Hey, don’t worry about it,” the governor said. “Everything’s totally on the up-and-up. Well, as much on the up-and-up as these