Bombed Read online

  Should they be standing this close to it?

  Bull and Wheeler paid no attention to the wires and drums. “We’re coming in after you,” Bull yelled at Fleep as he and Wheeler shouldered their way to where Fleep was crouched behind the seats.

  At least now the people at the parade were safe. That must have been why Michael had driven the float out of town.

  Fleep swung a huge knife. “Careful,” Wheeler said. “You’re going to hurt yourself.” He grabbed the knife out of Fleep’s hand.

  “Whoops, looks like you already did,” said Bull.

  Annie watched those three wrestle inside the float—oblivious to what it was? And she knew Michael had brought the float to the parade too. So he hadn’t been concerned about the people there then? She turned to him. “What have you been doing? You came home last night, you fed Lisa, but then you left!” She’d never questioned him this way. She’d never felt she should. But now!

  He still didn’t answer her though. He just kept staring at the ground.

  Was it possible he hadn’t known it was a bomb until he got in the float to drive it?

  Bull and Wheeler dragged Fleep out of the float. They threw him up against it.

  “We’re going to tie you up in this chicken wire,” said Bull.

  “We’re going to cut off your ears,” Wheeler said. “Or was it your nose?”

  “We’re going to do everything you put in your ransom note,” said Bull.

  “Hey, I was only joking,” whimpered Fleep.

  Then Wes said, “Everybody step back,” and he closed the rear doors of the float with him inside. Wheeler pulled Fleep away from it. Michael kind of shambled off. Annie stumbled backwards. The float began to move.

  It turned off the road, plowed through a barbed wire fence, and trailing barbed wire and a few fence posts, it bounced into the field there. It kept on going across the field. With Wes in it.

  Annie found she was no longer numb. Her heart and mind were racing again. Why hadn’t the bomb gone off yet? What could make it blow up now? A bounce that would knock one of those drums over? A wire thrown across another wire? Or maybe a spark from the barbed wire fence clicking against the body of the van?

  The float stopped in the middle of the field, still intact. Wes got out and started walking back to the road. Her heart jumped one more time, and she sucked in air. Then she turned away, while telling herself she would have felt the same for anyone who had done something like that. Besides, risking your life for the safety of others was what cops were supposed to do, right?

  And now the school bus was here. Gary and Mercedes were asking her about Michael and the kidnapping. Annie was busy explaining what she could about that. She found Russ and Char were here too. They must have come in Bull’s crew cab. Several other people poured out of the school bus including the anthropology professor, Mercedes and Gary’s landlord. He was apparently a friend of Russ and Char’s. He joined them, and the three of them joined Bull and Wheeler in harassing Fleep. Bits of their tirade boomed over all the other conversations with the professor frequently shouting, “What?” Amidst all this she overheard Buzzard apologize to Michael for his role in the kidnapping.

  Michael still just stood there staring down.

  But then Buzzard said, “You know, I thought your float was one of the best. Second best right after the cut-in-half car,” and Michael lifted his head, which got Annie’s attention.

  “Did you get to hear it?” he said. “The loudspeaker part. I just added that this morning.”

  “Yeah, that was what made it for me. But I really liked the Ferris Wheels too.”

  So Michael was still proud of the float?

  Annie wondered if she would ever know what her uncle had thought he was doing—what went on in his peculiar mind.

  The FBI’s Jeep Grand Cherokee drove up now too and parked. The agent named Cooper got out along with the pointy-faced one who had freed her and Wes. Then out of the backseat came the two thugs who had been with Michael.

  Neither of them was handcuffed anymore.

  Wes had reached the road by then, and when he saw those two men, his face went hard and grim again. And Michael, who had been talking to Buzzard as sociably as Annie had ever seen him—about something like alien weaponry, as if he and Buzzard had somehow become friends through all this—he stopped talking and dropped his head again.

  “I thought I had you safely tucked away in the equipment van,” Cooper said to Wes. “This is Agent Sanders, Agent Dix.” He pointed to the two thugs. “I believe it was your partner who shot Dix.”

  By then he and his three companions had surrounded Michael. “And you, Mr. Dobbins, are under arrest for attempting to detonate a weapon of mass destruction,” Cooper said.

  Chapter 36

  “No!” Annie cried. Whatever her uncle had done, the thought of him in prison seemed worse. She tried to shove through the wall of FBI surrounding him, but she couldn’t get back to him.

  Buzzard was still beside him though. “Wow, that seems unlikely,” Buzzard said.

  “You two were with him!” Annie yelled at the massive backs of the men who had been with Michael at the parade. They were federal agents? But they were Michael’s “new friends.” They must have been with him when he was building the bomb. “Was the FBI really going to risk a bomb at the Johnson Parade?”

  “No, of course not.” Cooper looked over at her as if she must be incredibly dense. “The material in the drums is inert.”

  “Really?” said Michael. “It isn’t a bomb? I thought it was.”

  And for Annie the kaleidoscope thing went spinning again. But Wes didn’t act at all confused. He said, “Michael, anything you say can be used against you in a court of law.”

  “That’s my line,” Cooper said. “You’re butting in again.”

  “Then say it,” said Wes. “Make it clear he doesn’t have to incriminate himself before you completely trample any semblance of justice here.”

  “But I don’t understand that part,” Michael said, “about it not being a bomb. Hank, you said you wanted to set off a bomb at the Johnson Parade. And you, Smith, you built the bomb.”

  Now Annie remembered him calling the two muscle-bound goons by those names, and they still looked more like thugs to her than any kind of cops, especially the one who had his arm in a sling. “So one of you actually built the bomb? And you’re arresting my uncle?”

  Bull came over with Fleep in a headlock. “Who’s getting arrested?” he said.

  “Some kind of weird misunderstanding going on here,” Buzzard said.

  Was that all it was? For Annie the numbness was back, the disbelief, but Wes not only didn’t seem confused, he was clearly angry. “If you agents built the bomb,” he said, coming down hard on the word agents, “then what exactly did Michael do?”

  “I made all the crepe paper gears,” Michael said. “Smith, he made the flowers. He didn’t want to, but he did, but he wouldn’t help with the gears. I made all the pipe cleaner people too.”

  “Am I getting this right?” said Bull. “You’re arresting Michael for decorating a float?”

  Now everyone here had gathered around and were asking much the same thing, with the professor shouting, “What?” some more, and the looks they were giving the FBI were hostile. Still, Annie didn’t doubt these FBI guys could handle this crowd, even Bull, since any guns he might have brought were probably still in his truck.

  But, possibly in the interest of avoiding what could have become a violent altercation, Cooper said, “What Mr. Dobbins did is he made a call from his cell phone that he believed would detonate a bomb. So he intended to detonate a bomb, whether it was a bomb or not.”

  “Although there was kind of a glitch with that,” said the bruiser Michael had called Hank.

  Cooper gave that man a steely look. “I wasn’t told about a glitch.”

  “Because it was only a glitch. The call didn’t register. So I asked Mr. Dobbins to make it again, and that time I watched
. He keyed in the numbers. He made the call.”

  “And then it registered,” Cooper said.

  Now Annie had managed to squeeze through into the circle of men surrounding her uncle, so she saw the ones he’d called Hank and Smith exchange uncertain looks.

  “I’m getting the feeling there was still a glitch,” Cooper said.

  “No, it worked fine,” Michael said.

  “Michael!” Wes shouted. “You’re not helping yourself. Don’t say anything more!”

  “But Wes, I think I understand. My call was supposed to activate a switch.”

  “No, you don’t understand. This is serious.”

  And suddenly Annie saw just how serious this was. As mixed up as it had turned out to be—with no one having ever been at risk of being hurt by a bomb—Michael might spend the rest of his life in prison for making a phone call. This was a different kind of horror than the bomb itself, and somehow much closer to her.

  This horror sank deep into her bones.

  Plus Wes was right that Michael seemed determined to incriminate himself. Here he was, usually so shy he hardly spoke to anyone other than herself, rarely even left the house. Now he was surrounded by people, several of them strangers to him. Normally that would make him hang his head in silence the way he had before. Instead, he wouldn’t stop talking no matter how loudly Wes tried to shout him down. Because he felt guilty? Because he believed he should be punished?

  Or was he still so proud of the float he wanted to justify what he’d done.

  “I haven’t had any friends for such a long time,” he said. “And they really seemed to like my posts on the Internet.”

  “Stop right now!” yelled Wes.

  “They said they wanted to wake people up, and I kind of agree that a lot of people could use waking up. They just don’t seem to want to see how screwy some things are.”

  “Buzzard,” shouted Wes. “Put a hand over his mouth. Do something! Make him stop!”

  “And I’ve always wanted to make a float for the Johnson Parade.”

  Buzzard started to put a hand over Michael’s mouth, but Michael glanced over at him with a questioning look, and Buzzard let his hand drop.

  “Then, of course, I realized what they planned to do with the float.”

  “Did you really?” Annie struggled through the horror and numbness to say. “How could you have gone ahead with building a bomb?”

  “Now you’re butting in too,” Cooper said to her.

  But it didn’t matter that she’d spoken up. Michael just kept on. “Well, I guess I didn’t understand at first. When I was trying to make the gears just right. But later it became pretty obvious. I mean, they asked me to look up stuff for them about how explosives work.”

  Yes, he had done that. So did he deserve this?

  Hank was holding onto Wes, but other than some scuffling going on with them, now there was only silence from everybody else, their faces showing just how much they all wished this wasn’t happening.

  Except for the FBI, of course, who were looking smug.

  “You might think I would’ve told them no,” Michael said. “And I thought about it. But they called me Old Red. They said they were my friends.”

  “Please,” moaned Wes.

  And Annie had to speak up one more time. “But did you want to hurt anyone?”

  “No, of course not, Annie.”

  “So how could you—”

  “You’ve butted in enough,” Cooper barked. “We’re done here. We’re making the arrest. Go lawyer up if you want.” He pulled out handcuffs.

  “I switched the switch,” Michael said.

  Cooper had been reaching for him with the cuffs, but he stopped. “You did what?”

  “I made that recording, this morning. I bought the loudspeaker and recorder. I used your bank card, Annie, I hope you don’t mind. Then I tried to remember all those classic quotes, but I may not have got them all right, and I made the number I was supposed to call turn on the recording instead. Because I thought all those quotes might have the same effect . . . of waking people up, you know.”

  By the end of that speech, he’d dropped his head. His voice had dropped too, but for Annie the numbness and the horror were fading. She could feel the brightness of the day again.

  “We’ve been working on this for months!” said Hank.

  “He’s got the science background. He’s a paranoid nut. He’s a threat!” said Smith.

  “I thought, as long as I had the controller,” Michael continued, but so quietly now he may have been speaking only to himself. “As long as I was running the float, it would be safe. Because it does take electricity to detonate this kind of bomb, and I’d switched the switch, but then I lost the controller, and I didn’t know if Hank and Smith could override it, but now—”

  Cooper spoke over him. “Mosley, are you sober enough to check out the switches in that van? See if that call properly registered so we’ve got some evidence of a crime?”

  “I’m the bomb expert,” said Smith.

  “But you’re on leave right now due to a gunshot wound. And I don’t see the need for any overzealous manipulating of evidence here.” Then Cooper waited, looking very tired, his handcuffs dangling at his side, while Michael mumbled at the ground some more.

  A few minutes later the agent with the pointy face poked his head out of the back of the float from where it was parked out in the field and yelled, “Nothing here!”

  Cooper shook his head and started back to his Jeep.

  “That’s it?” said Annie. “You do this to my uncle and just walk away!”

  Several people started shouting much the same thing.

  “Hey, do something useful,” Bull bellowed with Fleep still tucked under his arm. “Arrest this jackoff.”

  Cooper turned back, looking even more weary, but when there was enough of a break in the outrage that he could be heard, he said, “Herbert Fleep. Embezzlement and fraud. Not my priority, but I can take him off your hands.”

  Chapter 37

  “Garage sales?” Wes said in disbelief.

  Cooper had asked Michael to come in and talk to him, said he needed to fill out some reports, but Michael had said, maybe some other day. Because he wanted to go to garage sales now?

  “Yeah, after the parade, the whole town, it’s part of the celebration,” Michael said.

  Here he’d just been driving what he’d thought was a bomb, taken it out of town since he’d feared his “friends” might detonate it, then narrowly escaped arrest as a terrorist, but now that he’d explained all that and hung his head a while, he was ready to go shopping? Annie looked more like what Wes would expect, totally wiped out. Also in shock, maybe not over the garage sale idea but over what the FBI had done, while he’d had enough experience with stings to see their actions here as just one more non-surprise.

  But she said to Michael, “Sure, if you want. I’ll ask Gary and Mercedes if they can take us back to Johnson.”

  Which didn’t surprise Wes either, the fact that she didn’t ask him. She’d let him help when her uncle had been in danger. She’d seemed to appreciate his help. He might have even seen a look of concern when he’d been driving the float out into the field. Of course, that had turned out to be unnecessary and not risky at all. He hadn’t even managed to “save” Michael. Michael had saved himself.

  So whatever her feelings might have been when they were both caught up with Michael and the bomb, that didn’t mean she wanted to have anything to do with him now—now that Michael was safe and there was no bomb.

  If only he’d met her some other way.

  Then Mercedes said, “I’m sorry, Annie. We’re not going back to Johnson. The professor needs to get home for his afternoon nap.”

  So Wes said, “I can take you to the garage sales.”

  “You don’t need to. Maybe Bull.” Annie looked over at Bull.

  But Bull was busy with Cooper handing off Fleep.

  Wes won by default. “Okay,” she said.
“But you can just drop us off. There’ll be lots of people there we know who can take us home.”

  So this was only postponing the inevitable. “Okay,” he said.

  “You should check out the garage sales though,” Michael said. “I’ve found some really great stuff at those things.”

  At least he was happy. Wes started for his car. But he glanced over at the hippie couple who were probably the makers of the LSD, and the woman winked. At Annie? No, Annie wasn’t looking that way. The woman had winked at him.

  Because she knew he wasn’t going to go after them now?

  As it turned out, he wasn’t. Even if he hadn’t totally blown his job by arresting some FBI agents—and getting one of them shot—he knew there would no longer be any evidence at the location of the lab. Which was a perfect example of why you had to set up a sting. It was next to impossible to know when or where you would find evidence as long as criminals worked only with people they knew.

  These thoughts ran through his head, the justifications he’d learned, but they seemed muddled now, maybe even ambiguous—kind of like his thoughts about Iraq.

  Annie told Michael to sit in the front. “Your legs are longer,” she said.

  “No, you and Wes, you need to be together,” he said.

  “No, we don’t,” she said.

  Luckily, Michael stayed talkative all the way back to Johnson. Wes sure didn’t know what to say. And Annie, in the backseat, clearly she was just putting up with him for one last car ride.

  “I hope I’m not too late to get any of the good stuff,” Michael said. “See all this traffic? The parade must be over. And the minute the sales open, the dealers are right there.”

  There was in fact a lot of traffic for this country road, and all of it heading away from Johnson, just as there had been an unusual number of rigs heading there in the morning. But when Wes drove on past the grain elevator down into the cluster of houses, it looked as if plenty of people had stayed in Johnson too, and there was still stuff stacked on tables on just about every lawn. It wasn’t too hard to find a parking spot now, but people swarmed the tables. Michael practically leaped out of the car, and as soon as he found a rusty tool, he began haggling over it, apparently losing his shyness at garage sales much like he did on eBay. Annie wandered over to a rack of clothes and fingered them idly.