Shock Wave (29 page)

Shepard, who'd been arrested, sat in his chair and wept, and Virgil had to look away. Good Thunder kept passing Shepard paper towels from a roll, which he pressed against his eyes. Shepard's public defender kept saying, “C'mon, Pat, it's gonna work out.”

A BCA technician, who'd brought the sound equipment, sat in a corner and read a new copy of
Sail
magazine.

“Wife gone, job gone, gonna lose everything. My life is over,” Shepard said.

“Can't do the time, don't do the crime,” Wills said, and Good Thunder's eyes touched Virgil's with a slight disgusted roll.

Bill Check, the public defender, said, “Jesus, Theodore, you wanna take it easy? You're getting everything you wanted.”

But, Virgil thought, as he watched Shepard, Wills was essentially correct. The guy had been entrusted to take care of the town, the best he could, and he'd sold his vote on a critical issue. His confession had been taken down by a court reporter, and had been signed and sealed. For his cooperation in bagging the rest of the gang, he'd get no jail time.

Wills said to Check, “No, I'm
not
getting everything I wanted. I wanted the sucker in jail for at least a year and Good Thunder talked me out of it. He's the last one that's getting a break like that. Everybody else goes down.”

Virgil leaned across to Shepard and said, “You've got to pull yourself together. You need to tighten up. If you can't do this, if you blow this meeting with Burt Block, then the agreement won't hold, and you
will
do time.”

“No, no,” said Check, the public defender. “There are no guarantees that this is gonna work. . . .”

“But he has to make a good-faith effort, and if he goes in there fumbling around, and Block smells a rat, then the deal's off,” Wills said.

Virgil reached over and patted Shepard on the shoulder. “Being upset is okay. If you show Block you're upset, that's fine, that's what he'd expect. Upset's okay, but you have to have your head under control. C'mon. Why don't you and I take a walk and we'll get you calmed down and talk about it.”

“Good idea,” Good Thunder said.

“I'm not so sure,” Check said. “Leaving him alone with a police officer . . .”

“I'm not taking testimony,” Virgil said. “I'm just trying to get him some fresh air.”

 

 

SO VIRGIL AND SHEPARD
took a walk around the courthouse. Shepard looked around, at the sky and the sidewalks and at some kids walking down the other side of a street toward a Dairy Queen, and said, “Everything looks just like it did when I went to work yesterday and I was a happy guy. Today, everything's gone.”

“You know what? It's bad now, but three years from now, you'll have another job, probably in another town. You'll probably have a new wife, and it'll all start over,” Virgil said. “I see this all the time. You're basically not a bad guy, but you made one big god-awful mistake. You'll pay for it, but then, you'll be done. If you can hold yourself together, you won't go to jail. That's huge. Not going to jail . . . that's a big deal. If you can hold together.”

Shepard sniffed and said, “I can hold together.”

“Well, you look like shit,” Virgil said. He handed over a couple more towels. “Stop for a minute and press these on your eyeballs, and while you're doing that, stop crying. Let's get this over.”

Shepard pressed the wads of paper into his eye sockets, and when he took the towels away, he asked, “You think I'll really get back?”

“Look. You're a smart guy,” Virgil said. “You'll move to some place like Tucson, where they just really won't give a shit about your problem here, and you'll get a job. I'd bet you in three years you're making twice as much as a schoolteacher in Butternut Falls. I mean, that's what people make now—twice as much as teachers.”

“Ah, man,” Shepard said. But he didn't start crying again, and they walked back. “All my students are going to find out. I keep talking to them about good citizenship and all that . . . and look what I did. Now I'm going to drag everybody else down with me, just to save my ass. I'm such a fuck-up. I mean, even if I get another job, I can't stay here—I have to leave home. Leave my daughter, go someplace strange. I
like
it here.”

Virgil asked, “Is this Burt guy an old friend?”

“No. I don't know him that well. I don't much like him, though.” Then, thinking about what he was going to do, he said, “I'm such an asshole. I don't like him, but I don't like . . . dragging him down.”

 

 

HE'D CALMED DOWN
by the time Virgil got him back to the county attorney's office, and they talked about his meeting with Block. “Don't lead him. Just refer to stuff that you've done,” Virgil said. “You want to be a little shaky, a little remorseful. Tell him that sad story about Jeanne leaving you. He'll believe that. He'll try to pull you together, and when he does that, he'll give himself up.”

They wired him up, and tested him for sound, and headed downtown, Virgil, the tech, Good Thunder, and Wills in one truck, with the sound equipment, Shepard on his own, in his Chevy.

Shepard was to meet Burt Block in Block's office—Block ran a temp service and employment agency in downtown Butternut. The tech, whose name was Jack Thompson, said, on the way over, “Wish we had a little more time to set this up. Be nice to have some video.”

“I thought you hid cameras inside of briefcases and like that,” Virgil said.

“Not so much. Tape recorders, we do.”

“Yeah, I used one of those, once,” Virgil said.

“Cameras would have been nice,” Good Thunder said. “Juries like to see faces. I just hope the audio works through brick walls, or whatever.”

“It'll be fine. This is state-of-the-art stuff,” Thompson said. “Long as he doesn't fall in the lake.”

Virgil told him about the recorder at the bottom of the Butternut, and Thompson said, “If he didn't punch a hole in the hard drive, you're good.”

“Hope so,” Virgil said.

The wire they'd put on Shepard was strictly one-way—they had no way to communicate with Shepard, except by cell phone. As Shepard pulled into a diagonal parking space in front of Block's office, Thompson started the recorder. Shepard sat in his car for a full minute—they could hear him breathing—then slowly got out. “I'm such an asshole,” he muttered.

“C'mon, c'mon, move,” Wills said, impatiently, from the backseat.

Shepard looked across the street at Virgil's truck, then turned, reluctantly, and said, “I'm going in,” and went inside.

Inside, he said hello to a woman, who said, “Hi, Pat. Burt's in the back, go on in.”

 

 

Block: “Hey, Pat. What's up?”

Shepard: “Hey, Burt. Man . . . I gotta sit down. I'm really screwed up here, man. My wife bailed out on me last night. She found out I . . . I've been fooling around. She's so pissed, she knows about the PyeMart deal, she knows about the money.”

Block: “Whoa, whoa, whoa . . . She knows about me? She knows about all of us?”

“Got him,” Wills said, gleefully.

Thompson said, “Shhh.”

 

 

SHEPARD:
“She doesn't know exactly about you or Arnold, but she knows about Geraldine.”

Block: “But she doesn't know about me?”

Shepard: “She
knows
. . . you know . . . but I never said your name or anything. But she knows.”

Block: “Ah, man, you gotta shut that bitch up. If she talks, we're toast.”

Shepard: “I
can't
shut her up. She
left
me. She took what was left of the money, and she knows where it came from, so . . . maybe we're all right, but I don't know. I was thinkin' . . . I was lookin' for a way out.”

Block: “Like what?”

Shepard: “If we got to . . . maybe we could buy her off? I mean, she's gonna need money. I only got twenty-five, I figured you guys got a lot more, you could help out—”

Block: “Whoa, whoa, whoa, that's
my
money. We all got exactly the same. You're gonna have to find some other way to shut her up.”

Shepard's voice broke: “I wish I'd never seen any of you. Geraldine said it was no problem, but now, oh my God . . .” He began blubbering.

Block: “Jesus, man up, Pat. If we just find a way to shut her up . . . Maybe we go back to the PyeMart guy, tell them that we've got a problem, need to smooth it out.”

Shepard: “That might work. Maybe. You think Geraldine only got twenty-five? I figured that you guys all did a lot better than that.”

Block: “I don't know about Geraldine, but Arnold and I only got twenty-five. I mean, that's all there was. Maybe Geraldine clipped a little off our shares, she's crookeder than a bucket of cottonmouths. . . .”

They went on that way for a while, then Shepard asked, “So what do you think I oughta do? Talk to Geraldine? See if she'll talk to PyeMart? I'm not that tight with her.”

Block: “I'll talk to her. But I'll tell you what. We'd all be better off if, you know, if Jeanne just went away.”

 

 

THERE WAS A MOMENT
of silence in Block's office, but in the truck, Good Thunder blurted, “I don't believe he said that.”

Shepard: “What? Went away?”

Block: “You, know, if she had some kind of accident. Then you wouldn't be getting a divorce, you wouldn't have this threat hanging over you.”

Shepard: “Okay, that's fucking ridiculous.”

Block: “I'm just sayin'.”

Shepard: “I'm getting out of here. Nothing better happen to Jeanne. If it does . . .”

Block: “What? You're gonna talk to the cops? You're in just as deep as we are, you silly shit. Anyway, think about what I said. I'll talk to Geraldine, and we'll figure something out. Maybe if the PyeMart guy gets worried, we could sting him for a little more. Tell him we need a hundred to shut up your old lady, give her twenty, keep the rest. You know, we should have thought of this before.”

Shepard: “I'm outa here.”

Block: “Hey, Pat. Have a good day. Keep your fuckin' mouth shut.”

 

 

GOOD THUNDER SAID,
“He is
so
implicated. We could talk conspiracy to commit murder.”

Wills nodded: “We will. The thing is, if we agree to drop that charge, but leave jail time up in the air for the bribe . . . we could flip him, too, and get him talking to Geraldine. Man. We are looking . . . What's that asshole doing?”

“He's talking to himself,” Thompson said.

Shepard was standing outside Block's office, looking through the window into the office, making an incoherent growling sound, like a nervous collie. Every once in a while, a word would pop out, but it didn't sound good.

Virgil said, “I'm gonna go reel him in,” and he popped his truck door.

Good Thunder said, “Wait. He's moving.”

Virgil stopped and looked over at Shepard. Shepard walked around to the back of his car, looked across the street at them, and lifted a hand.

“Got a flat tire?” Thompson suggested, as Shepard rummaged around in the trunk of his car.

“I don't . . .” Virgil began.

Then Shepard straightened, and in his hand he was holding a largeframe chrome revolver. A Smith, Virgil thought, vaguely, as Good Thunder said, “Oh, no,” and Wills said, “Holy shit,” and Thompson said, “Uh-oh, got a gun, Virgil?”

Virgil thought about his gun in the lockbox, turned to say something about it to Good Thunder, who was essentially sitting on it, but Good Thunder, still looking through the windshield said, “He's gonna . . .”

Virgil looked back in time to see Shepard turn the gun toward his own chest, and pull the trigger.

And Shepard went down.

Shepard was lying flat on his back, his eyes open and focused, and he was making the growling sound, his breaths short and harsh. His arms lay down his sides, and the gun was a few inches from his right hand. Virgil pushed it out of reach, heard Good Thunder shouting into a cell phone, calling for an ambulance. People were shouting on the street around him, and Wills was telling them to stand back, as Virgil pulled open Shepard's shirt, saw the wound just to the right of his breastbone, a small hole through which bright red, frothy blood was seeping.

Virgil looked around, for something soft and plastic, didn't see anything, shouted at Wills, “Keep them away,” jogged back to his truck, got a trash bag out of a seat-back pocket, ran back to Shepard. Good Thunder was kneeling over him, saying, “Ambulance on the way, Pat. Ambulance is coming . . .” Virgil elbowed her aside, ripped a square of plastic out of the bag, and slapped it across the bullet hole and pressed it down.

The audio gear had been tucked under Shepard's belt line, and Virgil pulled it loose, and then ripped off the tape that held the microphone to his chest.

Shepard made another growling, coughing sound, and the first of the deputies arrived. Wills organized them to push back the rubberneckers. The ambulance was there a minute later, probably five or six minutes after the shooting, which was great time; the paramedics put oxygen on Shepard, moved him onto a gurney, and they were gone.

Virgil walked back to his truck and gave the audio gear to Thompson, got some Handi Wipes and washed the blood off his hands as he went back across the street. Good Thunder asked, “What do you think?”