Bombed Read online

  Johnson wasn’t really a town. There were no stores. The high school was still standing but maybe only because it was built of stone so too hard to tear down. It hadn’t housed classes for more than sixty years. When Wes made the turn off the highway, and the town first came into view—the high school, a grain elevator, a little cluster of houses with a few shade trees, all of it fitting in a hollow surrounded by the rolling green hills—he said, “That’s not even a wide spot in the road. Why would anyone want to blow that up?”

  But they were in a stream of cars all making the same turn. By the time they were a mile from the town, cars were parked on both sides of the road and so many people were walking on the road they had to slow to a crawl.

  “I don’t like this,” he said then. “We’re going to get blocked in here. Is there another way out?”

  “Not really,” Annie said. After the parade, there was always a traffic jam getting back to the highway. Still, any other time she would have inched through the crowd as far as she could, hoping to find a parking spot where she could watch the parade from right by her car, with her lawn chair and her cooler.

  But that wasn’t what they were doing today. She could see his cop logic about getting trapped. “We should park by the grain elevator,” she said.

  The grain elevator stood on a small hill that marked the beginning of the town. There were maybe five acres of gravel around it, room for the wheat trucks to line up when it was that time of year. After it the road leveled out and ran straight through the town—what there was of it—until both the road and the town ended at the high school.

  “The parade sets up on the high school lawn,” she told Wes once they were parked. They got out and started for the high school.

  But here the crowd was even thicker because this was the parade route. The parade would run from the high school to this hill, and since that was barely half a mile, it would make a wide U-turn in the gravel at the base of the hill and head back, then completely filling the road with the parade going both ways. So all around the base of the hill people were setting up their chairs, coolers, and jugs of water—ammunition for their water guns—while others were hauling all that gear on down the route, looking for some other place to set up their stuff, and often stopping in the middle of the road to talk to friends. Plus there were still cars trying to push through to a better parking spot, and anyone who was going to be in the parade, including a few late-arriving floats, were, like Annie and Wes, weaving through all of this to get to the high school lawn.

  It was not only an obstacle course, it was like plunging into a silly cartoon. They passed people in all sorts of costumes and playing all sorts of music that didn’t go together well at all. A group of women in wide-brimmed purple hats were practicing their ukuleles right next to a bagpipe band dressed in kilts that looked to be made from old bedspreads.

  “On second thought, maybe someone should blow up this place,” said Wes. “Starting with those guys in the skirts.”

  Annie looked over at him, shocked that he could make a joke. But his smile was still grim, and he said again, “We’re going to take care of this.”

  What if they couldn’t? They shoved past another makeshift band, this one armed with tubas and trombones and sporting on their heads long green pompom antennae. There were horses and dogs, many of them in costume too. One horse was dressed up as a cow, a long-teated udder swinging underneath it. Normally all of this would give her a wonderful lift. She loved the zany things people would do just to make themselves and others happy. But today the darker side of human nature lay over the parade, making these people and their fun seem as fragile as sand castles just before high tide.

  “Annie!” Bull was waving to her. She waved back, but she couldn’t stop. “Hey, Annie!” This time it was Wheeler. Most of people from the camp were here, setting up their chairs, calling to her—and at risk of being killed by a bomb. She just had to hurry on. That small distraction and Wes was ahead of her, the kids and dogs and spectators loaded with gear closing between them.

  She saw Russ and Char were here too, with some other older folks, Meg from the Caterpillar Lounge and several professor types. Gary and Mercedes waved to her. Buzzard was with them. She almost stopped to deal with him. But no, later for that. Some of the people who waved to her wore costumes that included masks so she couldn’t always tell who they were, but some wore Orphan Annie masks, so they must have been fans of the band.

  Should she warn all these friends and fans? She wondered as she hurried by them. But she didn’t feel she knew enough yet to cause that kind of panic. And if she could find Michael, then she and Wes should be able to stop him from setting off a bomb—if in fact he was planning to do that.

  Now she could barely see Wes way in front of her, and only because he was taller than most everyone else. By the time she reached the high school lawn, she’d lost him in the rows of “floats” that were lined up there.

  She wove through the floats, which were basically anything with wheels decorated with just about anything from junk metal to an outhouse perched on a flatbed. The women with the purple hats were just getting to the high school too. They jostled by Annie looking for a place in line. Next came the bagpipe band, followed by the aliens with tubas. All sorts of groups were lining up, blocking her way, as well as kids on bicycles and, of course, the horses and dogs.

  Then splat! She was drenched. She turned to see a guy in a George Washington mask complete with the three-pointed hat wielding what could have been a musket except it was chartreuse. He was hosing everyone and laughing until somebody drenched him. Then he turned on his attacker.

  She pulled her wet T-shirt away from her chest. And finally she spotted Michael.

  That was a huge relief, just to see him again. He was standing by one of the more intricate floats, a van that was completely covered with pink, yellow, and green paper flowers. But two men were with him. His new friends? And she didn’t like the look of them. Not that she wasn’t used to tattoos and baggy camo shorts. Musicians sometimes shaved their heads too, but the combination of all these things plus the bulging muscles on these guys made her think they could be terrorists.

  Wes was already there, and Michael was saying to him, “Can you see the gears? Can you tell they’re gears? They don’t look like Ferris Wheels, do they?”

  “Yeah, it’s a great float,” said Wes. “But—”

  “Thanks. I really tried,” Michael said. “Can you tell the green flowers are supposed to look like they’re made out of dollar bills?”

  “What’s going on?” Annie said. “Who are these guys?”

  “Oh, hi, Annie,” Michael said. “You came to see my float too? These are my new friends, Hank and Smith.”

  The two muscle-bound thugs frowned.

  “And look at this!” Michael held up what might have been the remote for a radio-controlled car except that it was techier than any she’d ever seen before. “I kind of put too many flowers on it. You can’t see out the windshield. So I get to drive it with this. Isn’t that cool?”

  “I don’t know,” Annie said. “That sounds hard to do, and dangerous with all these people around. Why didn’t you make it so someone could drive it?”

  “What’s inside it?” asked Wes.

  “I told you, the flowers on the windshield are a problem. But really, they’re just paper, of course. And the dollar bills, they’re just paper too. But aren’t they all?”

  Michael was talking too fast. He was proud of the float, but something was wrong.

  Annie went cold and backed away. The float was a bomb.

  One of his “new friends” stepped forward and said, “We’re done here. Let’s get moving, Old Red.”

  “I gotta go,” Michael said, and he started to leave with those creeps.

  “Don’t!” she said.

  “It’s okay,” Michael said.

  No, it wasn’t! But should she try to grab him? What would his “new friends” do then?

  She turned
to Wes. He could handle those thugs. He could shoot them. But he was gone!

  Now she heard his voice booming over the crowd. She saw him up on the bed of a truck. He’d got hold of a bullhorn.

  “Evacuate the area!” he yelled. “I’m a federal agent. There’s a bomb!”

  A couple of people tossed their joints, but no one bothered to move away.

  They must have thought this was just another prank. It didn’t help that the truck he was standing on was wrapped with a huge sign that read, “You Can’t Be Too Safe.”

  Then one of the guys on the truck who looked like an airbag wearing a bicycle helmet, or maybe it was another man, a black football type who had jumped up there, or both of them tackled Wes.

  Annie started to go to them to explain what Wes was saying was true. Then she thought she’d better chase after Michael instead. Maybe she could get him away from those two weight-lifting brutes.

  She turned to go after him.

  But Michael had disappeared. Again.

  She turned back to where Wes had been, and she couldn’t see him either now. The bullhorn had fallen to the ground. She grabbed it and shouted, “This is real! There’s a bomb!”

  Someone hit her with another water gun that looked almost exactly like an M-16 except it was bright pink. Three crop dusters swooped overhead like a World War I, slow motion version of the Blue Angels. Every musical instrument on the lawn struck up some tune. In the midst of all that discord, the first row of the parade began to move.

  A firecracker went off. It felt like a shot to her brain, before she realized it was only a firecracker. But no one else seemed at all alarmed no matter what she yelled into the bullhorn. Right beside her, Michael’s float, which had pipe cleaner people all twisted up in the green flower chains—the thing was grotesque if you really looked at it—started up its engine.

  With nobody in it.

  Then the black football guy came up to her. She realized he was one of the insurance salesmen, the FBI, who had been up at the camp. He knocked the bullhorn out of her hand and took hold of her arm.

  She tried to twist his arm up the way her dad had taught her to do, but that didn’t work with this guy. He shoved her forward off-balance and snapped a handcuff on her wrist.

  *

  “How are you doing, Old Red?” asked Hank.

  “I’m okay,” Michael said even though he was walking away from the parade, which wasn’t the direction he would have liked to go.

  He was still going to get to see the parade, but by taking this gravel road that ran alongside the high school all the way to where it ended at the edge of a field, he and Hank and Smith were going to be able to circle behind the houses of the town. They would avoid the crowd along the parade route and loop back to where they’d parked the flatbed, the one they’d used to bring the float here since you couldn’t drive it—since he’d put too many flowers all over the windshield. Plus there wasn’t much room for a driver in it, what with the fifty-five gallon drums and batteries and such.

  Hank had carefully parked the flatbed up on the hill by the grain elevator so it would have a good view of the whole parade route. He’d done that so they would be able to see the float most all the time. The controller gave a view from the front of the float, but Hank had said it would be best, and Michael had agreed, if they could also see the float while driving it with the remote.

  Still, his view of the parade would be from way up there on the flatbed. He wouldn’t get to be close to the parade the way he liked to be. The music would be far away. He wouldn’t get hit by any of the water fights. He wouldn’t get to catch any of the candy people threw. Hank and Smith hadn’t even let him walk around the high school lawn so he could see the floats up close there. Hank and Smith seemed to want to keep him with them all the time.

  But after the parade was over, many of the people would still be in costume. Many of the floats would stay here in Johnson for a while. Some of the bands would still play wherever anyone would listen, and just about every one of the houses here would have a garage sale. Michael liked the garage sales too.

  “You have your cell phone with you?” asked Hank.

  “Sure, I’m all ready,” Michael said.

  Chapter 32

  Annie found herself handcuffed and manhandled into the back of the white van that had been parked on her street for at least a couple of weeks. She fought this as well as she could. “Am I under arrest? For what?” The huge and forceful but polite man had identified himself as Agent Cooper, but he hadn’t read her her rights.

  “No, you’re not under arrest,” he said wearily.

  “Then I must be free to go.”

  “Do you feel free to go?”

  She’d never been handcuffed before. It was infuriating. And in this case wrong. “Why aren’t I free to go if I’m not under arrest?”

  “Just get in. Watch your head. This is for your own protection.”

  “Yeah, right.” Once she was inside, he slammed the back doors of the van, and she found Wes was in there too. Also handcuffed. “How could they do this to you?”

  *

  Wes wasn’t surprised when Annie was shoved into the van with him. Clearly, the FBI were determined to let Michael go ahead with whatever he and his friends had planned, at least to some point when they would make their move. “Anymore, they can do whatever they want,” he said.

  He’d made himself as comfortable as he could, sitting cross-legged, his back against one side of the van. He’d already been through what a fool he’d been to go yelling into a bullhorn about a bomb that the FBI were fully aware of. He should have gone after Michael instead. Tried to get him out of this mess. Now he’d failed at that.

  But this was all woulda-coulda-shoulda stuff. It was time to resign himself to the fact that the FBI had taken this out of his hands. But he could see Annie was going to put up a fight and bruise and shred her wrists.

  She was scooting around on her knees, turning her back to each door so she could reach the handles, but none of them would open, of course. “They want that float to blow up?” she said while torturing herself like this. “Did you see all those people here!”

  “Please sit down and stop hurting yourself,” said Wes.

  “I can’t just sit here and wait for some awful explosion! I have friends out there! And what about Michael! What have those thugs done to him!”

  There were several boxes in the van. Now she had her back to one struggling with the latch. She was definitely going to bloody her wrists. “Don’t you do this handcuff thing too?” she said. “Do you have a key on you?”

  “Yes,” he told her. “But no. Today I brought PlastiCuffs.”

  She sprang the box open and turned to look inside. “Just a bunch of techy stuff.”

  “Look, I’m sorry about your uncle, but they’re not going to let a bomb go off here. In spite of the way your parents indoctrinated you against law enforcement, the FBI aren’t monsters. Please try to sit this out.”

  “Don’t talk about my parents,” she snapped.

  She started working on another box even though the chance of her finding a handcuff key was next to zilch. She tugged on it anyway. “Youch!” she said, not surprisingly.

  “Stop it!” he said.

  “You don’t know anything about my parents!”

  “But I thought you told me all about them and how idyllic your childhood was.”

  “Only because I was a fool! A total fool!”

  She was hopelessly bullheaded. She would never listen to him. That box popped open with another “Youch!” She studied its contents. “One of these gadgets might work as a hacksaw.”

  He could just see her trying that, hitting the ulnar artery, blood spurting everywhere. “I’ll talk about your parents as much as I want. I think it’s all their fault.”

  She glared at him, hatred so hot in her eyes he almost flinched. “Don’t you dare blame them!”

  “Come on, if it hadn’t been for them, you’d be just one m
ore starving musician instead of an incorrigible felon.”

  “You are so wrong. My parents were never in the drug trade.”

  At least this had distracted her from wrestling with more latches or taking a sharp piece of steel to her wrists. But, “Let’s both quit lying,” he said.

  “You read in some file that they crashed their plane in Mexico so you think you know all about them.”

  “That does say dope to me.”

  “Because you’re an ignorant, arrogant DEA agent!”

  Yeah, she was definitely sidetracked from maiming herself. Instead, she looked ready to maim him. Which was probably a good trade-off since she already hated him.

  “They were smuggling stoves and refrigerators. Microwaves and computers.” She said this while looking at him with triumph as well as loathing. “They were smuggling that stuff into Mexico. Before NAFTA the tariffs were astronomical. Only the rich could have a lot of those things we take for granted.”

  Okay, it wasn’t what he’d expected. Maybe he was actually surprised? Or maybe, the way things were going, he wasn’t. Maybe it fit perfectly with all the other non-surprises of the day.

  *

  Fleep’s jaw still hurt, the raw spots on his feet had turned into bleeding wounds, and the Little Orphan Annie mask complete with curly red wig itched. The eyeholes were weird too. Apparently the comic book character had had white eyeballs, so this mask had some kind of white film over the eyeholes. Sometimes he could see through them fine, and sometimes the sun hit the film just like a dirty windshield and totally blinded him. But Buzzard had insisted the parade would improve his mood, and this had been the only mask he and Buzzard had had in the house. And the mask was working. Other fans of the band were wearing theirs, and no more irate hippies had waved shotguns at him.