Bombed Page 23

  Even better, while Gary and Mercedes had been dragging their chairs up and down the route, trying to pick the best spot to watch the parade—with the sun just so and maybe the stars aligned perfectly too—he believed he’d seen Michael. The old coot had been walking away from him, but it had sure looked like Michael with the mad scientist hair and the loony slouch, his head bent down, never looking right or left. As Fleep had suspected, some early-to-bed-early-to-rise farmer must have noticed the dead car, and even with Michael hidden in the trunk, the do-gooder had found him. Which was just as well since Annie had turned out to be as big a liar as her uncle and not come through with the gold.

  The geezer was walking with two beefy guys who seemed odd buddies for him. Could he have hired a couple of body guards?

  Still, Fleep was hoping to get a second chance at that rich uncle.

  *

  Mosley watched Cooper watch the parade. Cooper did this with the detachment of a scientist studying an experiment. Mosley was enjoying today’s hangover more than any hangover he’d ever had before, and he felt Cooper was missing out by being so serious and analytical when they were surrounded by iridescent green hills and what seemed a fantastical carnival.

  He loved the music. He loved the costumes, and everyone was so happy. He found he was happy too in a lazy way that reminded him of summer days when he was a kid and he would spend long afternoons at the swimming hole, sometimes swimming but a lot of the time just lying on the bank staring up at the sky.

  He also loved the floats, if you could call them that. One outlandish contraption after another rolled by. But one of the floats, in fact the one that Cooper was watching the most intently, even using binoculars since it was still some distance back in the parade, didn’t seem as silly and happy as the rest. It was colorful, with lots of crepe paper flowers, but when Mosley had seen it up close on the high school lawn, he’d found the flowers were shaped into gears, and it looked like pipe cleaner people were twisted up in those gears, being pulled around and around even though the gears weren’t actually turning.

  What made that float even more troubling was it was the one that had been made by Michael Dobbins, the subject of their investigation. Mosley had met Dobbins last night. Until then, he’d been only a name, a picture, a lot of data about his Internet behavior, and a voice that came through the microphones they’d set up in his house. Now he was an elderly quiet man who maybe had some odd ideas, like he’d warned Mosley that there was something spooky about his car. Still, it was hard for Mosley to believe the guy was a terrorist.

  The gears on the float weren’t really turning, but Mosley knew other gears were turning here at the parade. Dobbins’s niece as well as the DEA agent, who had not only not disengaged the way he’d been told to do but clearly wasn’t exactly doing his job either anymore, had been locked in the equipment van to prevent them from interfering with the gears.

  The next time Cooper raised his binoculars to his eyes, Mosley walked away from him. Cooper was so involved in his science experiment he didn’t seem to notice. Mosley thought Cooper was a good man, hard-working, and principled, but today he seemed to be caught in the gears too.

  While Mosley himself didn’t feel so caught in them anymore. He cut back to where the equipment van was parked and opened the rear doors.

  *

  Yelling at Wes always made Annie feel a lot better. Especially now when she had to deal with being in this van with him where she was getting those annoying leftover twinges again.

  She went back to looking for a key, or a hacksaw, or something to get out of here. Then the back doors of the van swung open. The FBI agent with the pointy face, the one who had seemed fairly baked when he was up at the camp, climbed in.

  “Turn around,” he told her. “Let me unlock those cuffs.”

  He released Wes too. “Now you’re letting us go?” said Wes.

  “Seemed like the right thing to do,” said the man.

  Annie didn’t waste any time wondering about this. She jumped out of the van.

  It took her only a moment to reorient. The van was parked on the gravel road beside the high school. It was just a short run back to the high school lawn. But only the last couple of floats and a woman herding kids on bicycles were still inching their way to the parade route. Annie ran on to the town’s one paved road where the motley bands, dogs, horses, and assorted wheeled vehicles were singing, dancing, and rolling their way along. Now there were even more people than before lining both sides of the road with their chairs, coolers, and water guns. Candy and water were flying everywhere. Kids were dashing out into the road to pick up the candy while dodging the water, the horses, and wheeled vehicles. People were laughing, pointing, and snapping pictures with their cameras, phones, and tablets. Every once in a while a firecracker went off, but she’d heard no huge explosion. No one was screaming or panicking yet.

  She couldn’t see Michael or the creeps who had been with him, but she could see his float about a quarter of the way up the route. She headed for it, unable to think what else to do.

  Wes was still with her.

  *

  “Where’s your phone?” asked Hank.

  “Right here in my pocket,” Michael said. He was standing with Hank and Smith on the bed of the flatbed truck, which did give him a fairly good view of the parade, although, as he’d feared, it was a distant and quiet view. But today he wouldn’t have been able to enjoy the parade much anyway because he was too busy driving his float.

  “Then go ahead and make the call,” said Smith. “Give me the controller.”

  “Hank told me I could run it,” Michael said.

  “Let Smith run it while you make the call. He’ll give it right back,” said Hank.

  “But I already made the call,” Michael said. Couldn’t they see he had to concentrate? He had to watch the screen on the controller, then look up at the float itself, then look back at the screen. He’d had only a little time to practice at the storage facility, and the float right in front of his was especially difficult to follow. When they’d been lined up on the high school lawn, it had looked like just an old car. But the car was cut in half! The front and back halves would sometimes separate, making the thing fifty feet long or more. He would have to brake to keep from hitting the back half. Then the two halves would come together, it would look like a regular car again, and he would have to accelerate to catch up with it.

  “No, you didn’t make the call,” said Smith.

  “Yes, I did,” Michael said. “A few minutes ago.”

  “Do it again,” said Hank.

  Chapter 33

  “Now that’s an epic float,” Buzzard said.

  It was an old Fiat that had been cut in half. The rear half had stopped some distance back while the front half was still coming this way.

  “Wonder how they did that.” Then maybe because it was an old car, and kind of a faded red color, it reminded him of his Valiant. “By the way, what’d you do with my car?” he asked Fleep.

  “It died. What did you expect. What float?” said Fleep.

  “Right there in front of us,” Buzzard said.

  Fleep tipped his head one way and then another. He was apparently having trouble with the Orphan Annie eyeholes. With his neck craned sideways, he said. “It’s just an old car.” He scratched at the red curly wig. “No, it’s half a car.”

  “You know, that mask looks really stupid on you,” Buzzard said. “So where’d my car die?”

  “Why do you care?”

  “I might want to fix it someday.”

  “I told you I don’t want to talk about last night. And you’re calling me stupid? Why would you want to fix a puke bucket like that?” Fleep scratched at the wig again and twisted his head another way. “Hey, there’s the other half.”

  The two halves of the Fiat were now moving on, and the next float came along, jerking weirdly as if the driver’s foot was kind of spastic on the gas.

  “Wow!” said Buzzard. “That one mu
st’ve taken a lot of work too. Look at all the Ferris Wheels.” There were little guys made out of pipe cleaners riding on the Ferris Wheels. He wondered if the float was promoting the County Fair.

  But it had a loudspeaker on it, and the loudspeaker wasn’t talking about the Fair. It said, “‘A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul.’”

  “Isn’t that weird?” Buzzard said.

  “Yeah, what’s the point of saying something everybody already knows?” said Fleep.

  “No, I mean it sounds like Annie’s uncle.”

  “Um, I believe that was George Bernard Shaw,” said the float in Annie’s uncle’s tentative, kind of flat voice.

  “You’re right! That’s Michael!” said Fleep.

  “‘The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates,’” said the float now that it was right in front of them. “Believe it or not, that was Tacitus way back during the Roman Empire. And ‘How fortunate for governments the people they administer don’t think.’ Adolf Hitler said that.”

  “No, that wasn’t Hitler. That was Michael!” Fleep jumped up from his chair. “He must be in that float!”

  Fleep ran up to the float, which was really a van, and started digging through the crepe paper flowers that covered the driver’s door. “Come give me a hand!” he called back. “It’s got chicken wire all over it.”

  But Buzzard, even if he’d been inclined to give Fleep any more help with his Michael scheme, thought the loudspeaker sounded more like a recording than a live voice.

  Then Fleep stopped ripping at the chicken wire and shouted, “There he is!”

  Buzzard still didn’t see Michael, and that float was going on down the parade route in its jerky way. Next came a ukulele band that could have used a bass player to keep it on the beat. He looked for Fleep to complain about the out of synch ukuleles, and maybe bitch some more about the loss of his car, but now Fleep was nowhere to be seen.

  *

  Annie excused herself over and over again as she pushed her way through the crowd. She said something quick and apologetic to anyone who tried to strike up a conversation with her. More water guns drenched her T-shirt. Kids scrambling for candy almost knocked her down.

  Eventually she reached Michael’s float, and she could hear him.

  “‘Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.’ I believe it was Albert Einstein who said that.”

  Yes, there was no doubt. She was hearing his hesitant voice which never carried enough emotion to seem sure of anything, but this sounded even more mechanical because it was only a recording, of course.

  “‘A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.’ That was Edward R. Murrow, I believe.”

  “What do you think this means?” asked Wes.

  “It’s just the sort of stuff he’s always reading,” Annie said.

  “I wanted to check all these sources, but I’m afraid I didn’t have the time,” said the float. “Still, I think it was old Ben Franklin who gave us this one. ‘They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.’”

  Was Michael trying to rationalize setting off a bomb? “Do you know how to defuse this thing?” she asked Wes.

  “No, that’s real specialized stuff. But honest, the FBI isn’t going to let a bomb go off here.”

  “Fine. You trust them. You think nothing ever goes wrong when the FBI is involved?”

  “I didn’t say I trusted them, but it’s your uncle who’s in danger, and he’s not here. He’s running this with a radio remote.”

  So how far away could he be? Now she tried to look all around, not only at the crowd but at the houses that lined this side of the road. On the other side there was just an open field of wheat, but she scanned it too.

  Then the beginning of the parade, which had doubled back after reaching the far end of the town, came toward them, filling their side of the road and pushing her and Wes further back into the crowd. “‘Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal,’” said the float as it nearly hit the elderly baton twirlers who led the returning parade. It jerkily adjusted its course to the far side of the road.

  “Martin Luther King reminded us of that.” And it rolled unsteadily on blaring more quotes while the troop of baton twirlers went into a formation dance, their cellulite-curdled legs prancing right in front of Annie. A stray baton flew over her head, lifting her gaze as everyone jostled to try to catch the baton, or at least not be hit by it. That was when she spotted her uncle.

  He was standing on a flatbed truck up at the top of the hill where the grain elevator stood.

  Here she was pressed up against the houses of the town, jammed in the midst of all these people and parked cars, but on the other side of the road there was that open field. She dodged between the dancing baton twirlers and their batons. She skirted around the trailing end of the ukulele band where everyone was playing to his or her own beat. A clown on a motorcycle cut her off, made her hesitate, but then a pair of huge draft horses came clopping right at her. She ran on across the road to avoid their massive skirted feet.

  But once she’d pushed through the barricade of people watching from that side and swung over the barbed wire fence, there were no more obstacles. She ran through the field. Wes was right behind her.

  Then Buzzard yelled, “Hey, Annie!”

  “Can’t talk now!” she yelled back.

  “I gotta tell you about Fleep!”

  That made her stop and turn. “What about Fleep?”

  Buzzard came panting toward her, apparently too out of breath to say more, and watching him run through that field was like watching a sow that had somehow been scared into putting on some speed. All kinds of things were jiggling.

  “I’m in a hurry! What about Fleep!”

  “He’s still after Michael,” Buzzard gasped. “I thought bringing him here to the parade would get his mind off that, but he’s gone crazy and mean.”

  He reached her then and bent over, his hands on his knees, sucking in air. “I’m sorry. I was helping him. I’m still not exactly sure how that happened. But you know how I just like to keep the beat? I never say I don’t like a song, or want to do it differently?”

  “Yeah, sure.” As she’d suspected, his role in the kidnapping had simply been due to his usual reluctance to think.

  “Fleep just saw Michael and headed out for him. So I wanted to tell you.”

  “Thanks.” Although this didn’t seem very important anymore. “Tell Bull and Wheeler, I guess, but I gotta go.”

  “Okay, and hey!” Buzzard called after her. “He’s wearing an Orphan Annie mask!”

  *

  Fleep had come to hate this stupid mask. He’d fallen over a toddler. Then the toddler’s mom had gotten in his face, blocking him until he’d managed to slip between a couple of parked cars to get away from her. Next he’d skinned his shin on some farmer’s homemade rear bumper that had to have been at least a foot wide. These farmers just liked to go nuts with a welding torch. Fleep had to bend forward to see low obstacles like bumpers and short kids. Even to avoid things at eye level, he had to keep turning his head to keep the sun from whiting out the eye holes.

  But now he’d reached the base of the hill where he’d seen Michael. This was where the parade made its U-turn, so he had to work his way through more spectators spread all around that wide turn. Then finally, he started up the hill. Which had become a huge parking lot. But he could see Michael clearly at the top of it, standing on the bed of a flatbed truck. Fleep stepped behind a redneck’s pickup that had at least a two foot lift so it gave him plenty of cover. He slid along its side, watching, trying to think this through.

  The bruisers who were with Michael outweighed him by more than a hundred pounds each. And they didn’t look friendly. He would have to wait for the right time to make his move.

  *

  “No, I can’t give you the controller,” Michael sa
id. “You guys didn’t practice driving the float at all.”

  “I can run the controller,” grumped Smith, who kept trying to grab it away from Michael.

  “Don’t you want to make the call?” said Hank.

  “I told you. I already did!”

  “I want to watch. I want to see you do it,” said Hank.

  “Okay, but not now,” Michael said. “I’m getting to the trickiest part.” Because the float was nearing the end of the town where it had to make the U-turn.

  “Do it now,” and Hank didn’t use his quiet voice.

  At least there were still a few hundred feet before the tricky turn, and the cut-in-half car had pulled itself together, probably to negotiate the turn.

  “All right.” Michael reluctantly gave Smith the controller and pulled out his phone. He keyed in the number, holding the phone so Hank could see the screen.

  *

  Annie ran through the wheat field until she reached the wide gravel area where the parade made its U-turn. She cut behind the crowd there at the base of the hill, the hill where she’d seen Michael and where Wes had parked the car. Now lots of people had parked all around the grain elevator there. She started up the hill, weaving between the parked cars and truck.

  She got glimpses of Wes, who was on ahead since she’d stopped to talk to Buzzard. But she got only glimpses of Wes because he was keeping low. Michael she could see clearly up at the top. He was standing on a big new truck with a long shiny black bed. She should have realized this was where he would be since it gave him the best view for driving the float with the radio control. Like Wes, she tried to stay low, out of sight of the thugs Michael called his friends, but whenever she could, she looked up to see that Michael was still there.

  She saw Wes leap up onto the flatbed. He had a gun in his hand!

  *

  Now Michael didn’t want to be on the flatbed anymore. Smith had just been starting to hand the controller back to him when all of a sudden Wes was here, and Wes had a gun! Then Hank jumped at Wes and started grappling with him.