T
he sun had dipped below the horizon when Cole Purdy paid the price, got his ticket, and walked onto the grounds of the Iowa State Fair. It was a good hike past the grandstand and through the midway, past the Ferris wheels and the Gravitron and the Scorpion, past the ranks of stuffed animals, the offers for henna tattoos and old-timey photos, through the odors of popcorn and dry grass and hot cotton candy, into the heart of the fair.
And it was hot, especially on the back of his neck. He’d been to a chain-store barber, told the lady haircutter to take it all off. She had. The top of his head now felt like a cactus, and every couple of minutes he’d take his hat off and run his hand across it.
Cole was looking for a truck, a particular truck. He didn’t know where it was, or what it looked like, but it was out there, somewhere.
In fact, there were trucks all over the place, but generally locked with the windows up, or with people close by. He wandered past the Triangle and down Grand Avenue, cut between some buildings, always looking.
The place was packed with people: no matter where he went, he would never be out of sight of somebody, and usually that person was eating something, and often enough, on a stick. Chicken on a stick. Snickers on a stick. Wiener schnitzel on a stick. On the other hand, there were so many people around that almost nobody was paying attention to anyone else.
Or that’s the way it seemed.
A couple of teenage girls went by, laughing about something, cell phones clutched in their hands, ignoring him. A guy with a rodeo belt buckle the size of a dinner plate went by, and a woman with a pink plastic cowboy hat on her head, carrying a cob of sweet corn on a stick, butter running down her fingers.
He spotted his truck by the Pioneer Livestock Pavilion. It was moving slowly along a pedestrian walkway, the guy in the cab talking on a cell phone as he rolled to a stop outside the pavilion. He stopped, talked for another minute or so on the phone, then hopped out of the truck and walked quickly into the building, the phone still pressed to his ear.
A man on a mission. He’d shut the truck door when he got out but hadn’t rolled up the window. Cole eased over to the truck, checked the door where the guy had disappeared, then popped the unlocked door and slid into the driver’s seat. An employee’s pass was taped to the inside of the windshield, down in the far left corner just above the dashboard. Cole carefully pulled it off, folded it, stuck it inside his hat, got out of the truck, and wandered off, never looking back.
He walked past the Triangle and back through the midway, didn’t stop to look at a middle-aged man who was vomiting into a
trash can after getting off one of the rides, then continued on through the gate to the parking lot.
—
MARLYS AND CARALEE
were waiting on the far side of Des Moines at the Jordan Creek Town Center, well away from the fair. A place to kill time . . .
He found Marlys and the kid staring in a window at a Victoria’s Secret.
“Like that, huh, Ma?” he asked.
“It’s . . . ridiculous,” she said.
“Don’t see those women hanging around Pella, not that much,” Cole said, inspecting a six-foot-tall photo of a Dream Angel in a red demi-bra.
“Get a card?” Marlys asked.
“Of course. Never was gonna be hard to do,” Cole said.
Marlys looked at her watch: “Two hours.”
“Let’s go get something decent to eat,” he said. “I saw a steak house coming in.”
“Okay, if it’s not too expensive,” she said.
“Got to live a little, Ma,” Cole said. He added, “I gotta tell you, though, you look strange. Even stranger than you looked with the brown hair.”
“I feel bad enough about it,” she said. “So shut up.”
On the way out to the truck, Cole put his finger on Caralee’s nose and wiggled it until she started to laugh, and Marlys said, “This kid . . . it’s like carrying around twenty pounds of potatoes.”
Caralee said, “Potatoes.”
“That’s right, honey,” Marlys said. “If that goddamned Willie hadn’t been flyin’ around town . . . We needed her to be at home.”
“Willie doesn’t like to stay home and she doesn’t much like havin’ a kid,” Cole said. “I believe after the divorce, she’ll try to unload Caralee on Jesse.”
“Jesse’ll be a good dad, if he can quit drinking,” Marlys said.
“He’ll quit, if it comes down to takin’ care of Caralee,” Cole said.
“I think he will. He’s a good boy,” said Marlys, changing arms with the kid. “Here, you carry her for a while. My back’s killing me.”
—
THEY ATE STEAKS
and fries, hung out some more, and rolled through the state fair gates just before nine o’clock, Caralee asleep in the child seat. They’d fed her and changed her at the steak house, so she should be good for the evening. The guard glanced at the dashboard pass, at the kid in the back, and then looked into the bed of the pickup and said, “Looks heavy.”
“Weighs a ton,” Cole said affably. “Dropping it off at the water department.”
“Better you than me, buddy,” the guard said, losing interest and waving them through.
—
THIS WOULD BE
the first tricky part, they knew. They’d come in on the south side of the fairgrounds, between the swine and sheep barns. There would be cops all over the place—though fewer at
night—and they wanted to get to the machinery grounds, where there were always a number of pickups parked. While they had the truck pass, it wouldn’t stand a real check. If somebody called in the pass number, it’d show up as lost or stolen.
Marlys had worked out the route from memory, and from an online fair map. They rolled slowly down the street between the animal barns, took a left at the horse barn, paused to let a woman lead a steer across in front of them, rolled past the exhibition center. A couple of cops were standing on the corner, chatting, but paid no attention as they took a right toward the machinery grounds. There were four trucks parked in a row on the grass, with space for a fifth. Cole slipped into that spot.
“Good,” Marlys said.
“Want to walk?”
“I guess. Better than sitting in the truck. I’d like to wear out Caralee a little bit, so she doesn’t wake up during the night.”
They’d brought kid food in a cooler, and Marlys poured a can of apple juice into a sippy cup and gave it to Caralee, and put a plastic bag of Honey-Nut Cheerios in her pocket, in case she needed something to eat to keep her quiet. They walked a loop around the fairgrounds, sometimes carrying the little girl, sometimes letting her walk on her own. She was fascinated by the whirling lights of the midway and the crazy carny music. At a DNR exhibit, they walked around looking at the fish, Caralee tracking a beat-up northern pike with a fingertip on the aquarium glass.
The fairgrounds was emptying out by eleven o’clock, though the midway was open until midnight, and the fair guards wouldn’t start running people off until one o’clock.
When they got back to the truck, two of the other four trucks that had been parked next to them had gone. Caralee was exhausted, and when they put her in her baby chair in the backseat, she was asleep almost immediately. Marlys kicked back the passenger seat, for a bed, and Cole pulled a tarp over the truck bed and tied it down, and unrolled a foam camping mattress.
“Least it’s cooling off,” Cole said. “Like to sleep if I can.”
“Empty your head out, you’ll sleep,” Marlys said. “Wish I had my own phone.”
“Yeah. Listen to some tunes.”
Marlys fished a phone out of her jacket pocket, checked the time, and the alarm. The phone was a cheap burner, bought at Walmart, using instructions she’d read on the Internet. The alarm was set for three o’clock in the morning.
“Wonder where that Davenport guy is,” Cole said.
“Shhh. Don’t worry about Davenport. Worry about getting some sleep.”
“Night, Ma.”
“Night, Cole.”
“Hope Jesse’s okay.”
“He’ll be fine.”
“Night, Ma.”
“Good night, Cole.”
—
THE ALARM VIBRATED
against Marlys’s thigh at three o’clock. Her eyes popped open, and she was disoriented for a moment, looking up at the underside of the truck cab. Her back hurt from sleeping
half upright in the truck seat. She groped for the phone, and turned it off. Felt her head. What? Then she remembered. No hair: bald as a cue ball. Caralee was still asleep in the backseat.
She got out of the truck as quietly as she could and rapped on the truck bed. Cole asked in the dark, “Already?”
“Yes.” Marlys smacked her lips, dug in her pocket, and came up with a pack of Dentyne. “You get some sleep?”
“Yeah, I did.”
“Want a couple sticks of gum?”
“Yeah.” Cole pried up one corner of the tarp and got out, took the gum from Marlys, and looked around. It was night, all right, but it was never really going to be dark on the fairgrounds.
“Caralee is still asleep,” Marlys whispered. “Let’s try to keep it that way.”
Cole untied the tarp and pulled it off the truck, and they folded it into a tight square. There were three steel rods lying along the side of the truck bed, and a posthole digger. He pulled the posthole digger out and pushed it under the truck. He was as quiet as possible, but wasn’t entirely quiet, and as he pulled the steel rods out, they clanked against the inside of the truck bed. Marlys hissed, “Quiet!” until Cole whispered back, “If anyone hears you saying, ‘Quiet!’ they’re gonna wonder what the hell is going on.”
“Well, be quiet,” Marlys said.
It wasn’t all that easy being totally quiet while carrying three long steel rods through the gloom, past all kinds of metal objects in the machinery grounds, but he managed as best he could, with Marlys trailing behind with the tarp. They slipped past a building
and got out to the main drag. A couple of trash trucks were working a block away and a car was turning a corner, and even farther down the street they could see a couple of people walking away from them. Cops? Too far to tell. They could hear music nearby: an old Robert Palmer song called “Addicted to Love,” so somebody was up.
“Don’t see anybody,” Marlys said.
There were bright globular lights on the shops all along the avenue, but no lights directly overhead, which was why they’d chosen that spot; they weren’t exactly in the shadows, but they weren’t brilliantly lit, either. Cole walked out to the curb with the three steel rods, forced one of them a foot and a half into the dirt, close to the curb. The other two went out the corners of a wide, shallow triangle.
Marlys unfolded the tarp. They’d practiced back at the farm, but this was for real, and they fumbled around for a minute, and finally got it rigged. When it was up, they were screened from the street, with an open back—but nobody should be walking up behind them.
“Back to the truck,” Marlys said.
They hustled back to the truck, got in, slumped in the seats. They’d wait for ten minutes—see if the tarp attracted any attention. The ten minutes crawled past, and while they saw two trucks pass on the street, neither of them slowed for the tarp.
“I’m gonna do it,” Cole said.
“Gotta be quiet,” Marlys said.
Cole slipped out of the truck, reached beneath it for the posthole digger, pulled it out and trotted back to the street. This would
be his longest exposure and the one that would be hardest to explain. In fact, if caught, or questioned, he wouldn’t try to explain it. He’d run.
Behind the tarp, he listened for a minute, then began to dig. The ground was soft from all the rain and the digging went more quickly than he’d expected. The fresh dirt went on a corner of the tarp: when they took the screen down, they’d take the dirt with them. They’d tied a wire around the handle of the posthole digger, so he’d know when he was exactly deep enough . . .
Car. He stopped digging to listen.
Went by, never slowing.
He started down again, pulling out six inches of dirt each time, screwing the posthole digger into the earth. Took five or six minutes to get down four feet, and when the wire marker was even with the mouth of the hole, he gave it a last turn and pulled out the last plug of dirt.
A minute later he was back at the truck, slipped the posthole digger into the truck bed, and got in the passenger seat.
“Get it?” Marlys asked.
“Yeah.”
“You want to rest a bit, or do it now?” Marlys asked.
“Let’s do it. Bring the paint,” Cole said.
Marlys got an eight-ounce can of paint from under the seat, and a screwdriver. “Okay.”
Caralee made a sleepy sound, and they both froze: they didn’t want to deal with a crying baby. After a moment, she was sleeping soundly again and Marlys whispered, “Okay.”
Out of the truck again, they checked for watchers, took a
fat-wheeled dolly out of the truck bed, then pulled the bomb straight out. The bomb was made of wrought iron and was heavy as a safe. They’d practiced carrying it at the farm, but it was a struggle, so they’d gotten the dolly at Home Depot. Now they lifted the bomb down onto the dolly.
Checked around.
Checked around again, when Marlys thought she heard something; with the bomb lying there, they couldn’t be stopped, or inspected. Cole had a 9mm Beretta in his hand. He’d bought it at a gun show, for cash. Jesse didn’t know about it, as Jesse hadn’t known about the new .223 black rifle. All of Cole’s guns were accounted for back at the farm and in the gun case in the truck.
“Let’s go,” Cole said.
They pushed the dolly, bumping across the ground along the side of the building, and up behind the tarp. Marlys could see the hole waiting for them, and the dirt. Looked easy enough, but wasn’t; they struggled with the weight, but the pipe at the bottom had to go straight down into the ground, and instead, threatened to collapse the side of the hole.
Cole finally whispered, “I’ll pick it up myself, you guide it in.”
That’s what they did: he got it two inches off the ground, staggered a little, but Marlys fit it in the hole, said, “That’s got it,” and he let it slide down. Once a foot into the hole, it dropped straight down the rest of the way.
Perfect fit. Cole reached down along the side, feeling for the ring of the wire trigger. It was in place. He stepped back, felt a pulse of pride in his work: better than anything he’d heard about in Iraq.