Free Shock Wave by John Sandford

for sure,” Barlow said. “A smart guy, with good intel.”
    “Maybe there’s more than one,” Pye suggested.
    “I don’t think so,” Virgil said. “Nuts don’t come in bunches. Only grapes do.”
    Pye said to his assistant, “Put in your notebook that I said that. The grape-nuts thing.”
     
     
    PYE WANTED A CLOSER LOOK at the car, and Barlow said, “I’ll take you over there, but I’d rather your assistant didn’t come along. I’ll talk to you as a courtesy, but I don’t want anything written down. It’ll wind up in court, with me being cross-examined because I used the wrong adjective or something.”
    Pye agreed, and they walked over to the car, and the woman said to Virgil, “You are a tall drink of water.”
    “You’re pretty much of an ice cream cone your own self,” Virgil said. “What’re you doing working for Pye?”
    “Oh, I do it for the money,” she said. “It’s not uninteresting.”
    “Huh. I notice you say ‘uninteresting,’ rather than ‘disinteresting,’ ” Virgil said.
    “That’s because I have at least an eighth-grade education,” she said. “And Willard pays me for my grammar.”
    “I wouldn’t do it for a million bucks a year,” Virgil said.
    “Neither would I,” she said.
    Virgil: “Are you serious?”
    “Yes. I’m selling him three years of my life,” she said. “He pays me one-point-two, which is about point-seven-two per year, after state and federal, plus all expenses. For that, I follow him around everywhere, take down everything he says, verbatim, and provide him with both the original text and a polished narrative. In another year, I’ll have a bundle tucked away. Then I’ll write a tell-all book about him, and make another bundle.”
    “I guess it’s a plan, though I’m not sure that many people would read a tell-all book about a short fat guy,” Virgil said.
    “How about a short fat guy with thirty-two billion dollars?”
    “Maybe,” Virgil said. “I personally wouldn’t buy it.”
    “Since you’re not going to buy my book, why don’t you buy me a margarita tonight?”
    “Who should I ask for?”
    “Marie Chapman. Room one-nineteen at the AmericInn.” She got off around seven o’clock, right after Pye finished dinner, she said. “Give me until eight.”
    “Are your eyes green or brown?” Virgil asked.
    “Depends on my body temperature,” she said. “As I get hotter, they turn greener.”
     
     
    THEY CHATTED FOR ANOTHER TWO MINUTES, trying out movie lines on each other—“I’m outa here like a cool desert breeze,” she said, when Pye walked back toward them—and then Virgil wandered off into the crowd. He knew nothing about bombs, so standing around looking at a bent wheel didn’t seem likely to produce either a clue or a bomber. The crowd, he thought, might be a different story. There was some chance that the bomber might be there, checking out the results.
    So he sidled through the rubberneckers, looking at faces, looking for signs of furtiveness, guilt, the wrong kind of excitement. A tall stout man with a shiny red face asked, “You Flowers?”
    “I am,” Virgil said.
    “Saw your name in the paper this morning. You got any ideas about who’s doing this?”
    “Must be somebody who’s trying to stop the PyeMart,” Virgil said. “Either for financial reasons, or it’s somebody upset about the runoff into the river.”
    “Or somebody who just hates Pye,” the man said. “He’s that little short fat fella, right?”
    “That’s him.”
    “He don’t look like twenty billion dollars to me,” the guy said.
    “Thirty-two billion. I got it on good authority,” Virgil said.
    A guy in a post office uniform said, “You could have fun with that kinda money. Go to Vegas.”
    “Go to Vegas in your own jet airplane, and then buy it, the whole town,” the stout man said. “Hookers’n all.”
    A woman in running shorts and a cut-off sweatshirt said, “It’s not just the runoff in the river. The river