He reached for his radio, but it was gone. He’d dropped it back when Purdy fired at him and it was still there, on the ground. He asked Greer if he had a radio, and Greer nodded and handed it to him, and Lucas said into the radio, “Davenport—Purdy is down. Purdy is shot and down. We’re by some gate . . .”
“Behind the museum by Gate Four,” the guard said.
Lucas repeated that.
“Gotta get an ambulance,” Greer blurted.
“Not right away. He’s gone, man,” Lucas said. He handed the radio back to Greer. “We need ambulances at the other places, we don’t want one here if it pulls it away from somewhere else.”
“Okay, okay,” Greer said.
“Really, really dead,” said the guard. And, “I think I shot him, too.”
“You did,” Lucas said. “I think you hit him in the butt—that stopped him. Hell of a shot.”
Greer had broken into a heavy sweat, looked like he might faint: “How many guys did he hurt?”
Lucas said, “Three. At least three. All cops . . . man, you did so good. Listen, we . . .” He was suddenly aware of the distant sound of a band playing “Happy Days Are Here Again,” and said, “Is that the march? Are they marching?”
“Yeah. It was about to start when you spotted Purdy . . .”
More cops were running up and a squad car pulled in. Within a minute or so there were cops everywhere, and Lucas slipped his .45 back in its holster and said, “We’ve still got to find Marlys.”
“I don’t think she has a gun,” Greer said. “We found that .357—”
“I better get over there, though,” Lucas said. “You gotta stay here and sort this out. If I could borrow your John Deere . . .”
“Sure,” Greer said. He waved at the Gator. “It’s still running.”
—
LUCAS JOGGED forty or fifty yards over to the vehicle, figured out the shift, and shifted it into gear and turned it around and almost ran into a fire hydrant.
Then he had to figure out how the reverse worked and he backed up, and as he did, noticed that he was sitting on bright corn-kernel-yellow seats with that dark green cornstalk color of the machine itself, and on the other side of the hood was the light pastel green and yellow of the fire hydrant.
And he still had those two big nuts in his pocket that he’d picked up from the Purdys’ barn workshop, the one with the green-and-yellow overspray on the floor, a green-and-yellow spray that didn’t match the hard green and yellow of the John Deere, but did match the green and yellow of fair fire hydrants . . . and those nuts in his pocket. Why would you need a whole bag of big nuts, but no bolts?
You wouldn’t—unless they were shrapnel.
And that nagging intuition he’d had by the Varied Industries building: he’d been walking by fire hydrants all morning, the same yellow and green as the overspray on the Purdys’ barn floor.
A bomb.
The Purdys had built a bomb. The farm kid who’d been brain-injured by IEDs in Iraq had built himself an IED.
A bomb disguised as a fire hydrant that was probably standing on the Concourse, right where the candidates would be marching by, right on the curb.
He no longer had a radio. He turned and looked at Greer, couldn’t see him in the cluster of cops . . . He screamed, “Greer! Greer! It’s a bomb! It’s a bomb!”
And he put the Gator into gear and wheeled it onto the closest street and accelerated down toward the sound of the band, and thanked God he’d done the tour that morning and knew where he was going, in fact right down a feeder street to the Concourse . . .
He fumbled his cell phone out of his pocket as he went, hoping against hope that Greer had understood him, and he speed-dialed Neil Mitford, who answered, but when Lucas shouted at him, said, barely intelligibly, “I can’t hear a fuckin’ thing over these bands, Lucas.”
Lucas thought, Shit, dropped the phone, and tried to make the Gator go faster, but it was going as fast as it could, which wasn’t a lot faster than he could run . . .
No time left, no time.
THIRTY
Marlys hurried head-down out of the ladies’ room, Caralee clutched to her chest, the girl’s arms around her neck, and out the back of the building. The plan had been for Cole to pull the pin on the bomb, but he wouldn’t be doing that now: he had to focus on escape.
Marlys was the backup.
“Up to me now,” she said aloud.
Caralee: “What, Grandma?”
“We’ve got to go,” Marlys said. “Can you walk with Grandma?”
She could hear the band down the street, getting closer. Caralee said, “Walk,” and pointed her finger.
Marlys put her down and said, “Hold Grandma’s finger. That’s a girl.”
The aisles of the Varied Industries building had grown too coagulated, so Marlys led the girl around the building, the girl’s legs churning to keep up. They came out directly behind the fire hydrant that they’d planted the night before, separated from it by the dense crowd. Marlys asked a tall man at the back, “Do you see them yet?”
“I see Gardner,” he said. “The other ones are behind him.”
Marlys began edging through the crowd: “Can my baby see? Can we get through?”
They emerged at the curbside rope, a few feet to the left of a cop, a few feet to the right of the phony fire hydrant. Looking down the street, she could see the first band, still a minute or so away, and behind them, volunteers for Gardner in his jazzy blue and white campaign colors.
There was another band beyond them, and then the Bowden marchers with their “Mike for Pres” signs and banners. They were what, three or four minutes away? Five minutes? Did she have that much time?
Then she heard the shooting from the far east end of the fairgrounds, from the area of the campgrounds, where Cole had been running. Coming from the distance, the rapid-fire shots sounded almost like popcorn being popped in the next room, but she knew what it was, and so did some other people around her—men, mostly, in ball caps and sport shirts, who turned at the sound and lifted their noses to the wind, as they might during deer season.
Marlys pulled the phone out of the baby bag and looked at the screen, willing it to light up. The phone remained silent, and for a moment her vision was dimmed by the tears welling at the corners of her eyes.
Now it was up to her. For sure.
—
LUCAS GUNNED THE GATOR down the street; it was an ungainly machine and slow, and he tried to steer and call Bell Wood at the same time. Wood answered, but like Mitford, he couldn’t hear anything: it sounded like he was actually marching with the band.
Lucas thought the bomb—if there was a bomb—would be somewhere near the beginning of the march. They wouldn’t want to risk having the march cut short, and there was simply no benefit to having it toward the end of the march.
A cop tried to wave him down, to slow him down, but Lucas waved him off and kept going, and then another cop tried to stop him, and the crowd got so thick in the area where the march was scheduled to end that Lucas finally braked and turned the Gator’s key to shut it down and then plunged into the crowd, headed on foot for the roped-off part of the street.
He was still a long way from the marchers—six or seven hundred yards.
“No time! No time!” he chanted to himself, and pushed harder.
At the end, shouldering his way through the crowd, shouting, “Out of the way! Police! Out of the way!” he emerged at the rope line near two highway patrolmen watching the crowd. He shouted at the closest one, slid under the rope with the ID in his hand, and when the cop asked, “What?” Lucas shouted, “It’s a bomb! Get on your radio, find somebody down there, and tell them it’s a bomb!”
And he ran.
He could see a band dead ahead, a drum major with a six-foot-long gold baton, high-stepping toward him, but a heartbrea
kingly long way down the street . . .
He ran harder . . .
—
MARLYS ASKED THE PEOPLE to her right to trade places with her so Caralee could stand on the fire hydrant and see better. “I’m getting pretty tired of holding her up,” she said good-naturedly. They gave way and she perched Caralee atop the fire hydrant.
On the bomb.
Cole had stolen the hydrant from a group of discarded hydrants that lay in deep grass next to the county shed. Nobody would have noticed in a hundred years. The hydrants were rusted, most beyond repair. He’d gotten the best one, used a wire brush to get rid of most of the external rust, and a grinder to thin down the outlet nozzle cap.
Thinning the cap had been the most delicate operation, and had taken him days. When he was done, the cap wall, which pointed toward the street, wasn’t much thicker than an aluminum cookie sheet, though that couldn’t be seen from the outside.
Into the nozzle he’d fit a four-inch stainless steel pipe, filled with a hundred and thirty-two stainless steel nuts. A fist-sized wad of plastic explosive and a firing cap were packed into the back of the pipe. The firing wires from the detonator were trailed to the base of the hydrant column, where he’d mounted the detonator and switch. The detonator had a timing circuit, currently set to the shortest possible time: fifteen seconds.
Cole had attached an ordinary metal meat skewer to the switch, through a small hole that led outside the hydrant casing. The skewer had a loop on the outside end. To fire the bomb, all Marlys had to do was pull the skewer out, which would trip the timer switch.
She’d actually seen it work, out behind the barn, with a fingernail-sized chunk of plastique.
Once she pulled the pin, she had fifteen seconds to get away from the bomb. They’d designed it to work as an ultra-powerful shotgun, blowing the stainless steel nuts across the street, directly at the splotch of white paint they’d poured on the street’s centerline. If everything worked perfectly, she’d time it so that Bowden would be close to, or on, the white paint when the bomb fired.
When it went off, she and Caralee had to be well away from it. They were sure that the nuts would blow across the street in a deadly fan shape, but weren’t so sure what would happen with the rest of the cast-iron hydrant. It might also blow like a bomb shell—and she had to be behind the building when that happened.
—
THE MARCHERS were moving right along. The first band went past, and then the Gardner people, waving their placards and trailing their banners, and blowing their horns.
Then another band, this one, Bowden’s.
The bands were setting the pace, and Marlys counted the steps as they moved along. Then down the street, she saw Bowden coming. Mike Bowden was wearing an orange-ish dress, smiling and waving, a TV cameraman running backward in front of her, his soundman facing forward, holding on to the cameraman’s belt to guide him.
Thirty seconds out.
Twenty-five seconds.
Twenty.
Marlys dropped the baby bag, reached down to pick it up, counting to herself. Her finger was down in the dirt. She found the loop on the firing pin.
Fifteen. She pulled the pin, stood up, said, “We gotta go, Caralee.”
She lifted the child off the bomb and the woman behind her said, “You’re gonna miss Mike,” and Marlys said, “I’m for Gardner,” and pushed her way through the crowd, to the back, and started to run.
—
BELL WOOD WAS STANDING at the corner of the Varied Industries building, trying to make some sense out of what some cop was shouting at him on the radio, when he saw the woman in pink, in one of the breast-cancer crusader outfits, running toward him. He didn’t recognize Marlys at first, but then he eye-clicked on Caralee, who was openmouthed and bilious, as though she’d been severely put-upon, and there was something really unusual about this bald old lady running so hard, and then he saw the rimless glasses and the small bud-like mouth, and she turned and looked in his eyes . . .
He took a couple of steps toward her and then heard Davenport screaming, and turned his head and saw Davenport go by and finally caught what the cop was saying on the radio and what Davenport was screaming . . . “Bomb . . . it’s a bomb, everybody run away, it’s a bomb . . .”
Wood said, “Shit!” and looked after Marlys, who was scuttling away into the crowd behind the Varied Industries building . . .
And the bomb blew, a noise so loud, a flash so bright . . .
Like the end of the world . . .
—
LUCAS WAS RUNNING as hard as he ever had in his life. Two cops had tried to slow him but he had the ID in his hand and he screamed at them, “Bomb!” and they let him go and he saw Marlys, from two hundred feet, appear to stand up next to a fire hydrant—he knew it was her, saw the bald head and knew what she’d done—and then saw the white paint on the street and recognized it as a target . . .
He screamed, “Run! Run!” at the band that was marching over the white paint. “There’s a bomb, run, run . . .” and he ran on to Bowden where the big black bodyguard, what was his name? Jubek! Jubek was staring at him and he shouted, “Bomb! Get her out of here! Get her out of here . . . Go back! Go back!”
Jubek turned and physically picked up Bowden and started to run and Lucas’s momentum carried him almost up to them . . .
And the bomb blew.
—
LUCAS DIDN’T KNOW what happened until it was reconstructed later, but a Bowden supporter named Randy Pence, not a security man but an organizer from Council Bluffs, had seen him dashing toward Bowden and thought it might be an attack on the presidential candidate and attempted to stop him, and in doing that, hooked an arm around Lucas’s waist, and was between Lucas and the bomb when it blew.
They were fifteen feet short of the blotch of white paint, on the edge of the kill zone, and Pence soaked up three of the stainless steel nuts and bits and pieces of cast iron from the hydrant itself; and together they went down in a heap. Jubek was two or three steps farther down the street and took two of the nuts in the back, and went down, Bowden beneath him.
The crowd across the street from the bomb took a hundred hits, spread over thirty or forty feet of rope line; the TV cameraman who’d been running ahead of Bowden was hit many times and died instantly. His soundman was not hit by nuts, but by a large fragment of the hydrant, and died a few seconds later. More people were torn up by hydrant fragments that cut through the crowd behind the ropes; a cop was nearly decapitated, and lay spread-eagled in the street, the top part of his skull gone.
The band that had been marching over the paint spot had gotten a few feet clear of it, but two of the bass drummers in the back were killed instantly, four more grievously wounded.
—
A HUNDRED COPS were on the scene within a few seconds. Lucas pushed Pence off him, realized that he was relatively unhurt, looked across fifteen feet of concrete at Bowden, who was pushing out from under Jubek. She caught his eyes and seemed to mouth, “Help me,” and he crawled over to her and she mouthed something else and he realized that he could barely hear what she was saying, that he’d been partly deafened by the explosion, and he shouted, “How bad?” and she shouted back, “I’m not hurt, but Dan’s hurt bad . . .”
Lucas lifted his head to look around and saw that dozens of people were dead or wounded; and that cops were flowing in from everywhere, that fifteen civilians were filming the chaos with their iPhones, that two TV crews were already working it, and that people everywhere were screaming in pain . . . He and Bowden knelt next to Jubek and Jubek’s eyes were open and he said, “Hurt,” and Lucas could hear more clearly now and said, “Hang on,” and Jubek almost laughed and said, “I’m trying, dumbshit. Get me something . . .”
Then two cops were there with first aid kits and they found big entrance wounds on Jubek’s back but no exit wounds and they plugged the ho
les in his back as best they could . . .
Henderson came jogging up, knelt next to Bowden and asked, “How bad?” and she said, “I’m okay,” and Henderson said, “We gotta help these people.” She said, “Yes,” and they duckwalked across the street to a swatch of the wounded people and then Lucas lost track of them as Bell Wood came up and asked, “You hurt?”
Lucas had gotten to his feet and he looked down at Pence, who was being covered by a cop with trauma bandages, and said, “I got lucky again.”
Wood said, “I think I saw Marlys Purdy with that kid . . .”
“Pink dress? Bald? I think I saw a woman . . .”
“Yeah, that’s her. She was running back behind the building there.”
“Let’s get her,” Lucas said. “They’ve got enough help here.”
—
THERE WERE STILL COPS running toward the bomb scene. Wood and Lucas flagged down four of them, told them that they couldn’t help at the scene, and spread them out to sweep toward the south fence, where Wood had seen Marlys Purdy going.
“Don’t think she could have gotten out yet,” Wood said. “She’s not a fast runner and she’s got that kid.”
“Block the gates. Can you do that?”
“I can have our communications guy do it,” Wood said. He called, and ordered the gates sealed immediately, nobody in or out unless they had a cop’s ID or were carrying the wounded out. He added that they were looking for a bald woman in a pink dress.
—
WHEN THE BOMB BLEW, Marlys realized that she’d been recognized by at least one cop, and here she was carrying a baby and wearing a pink dress that was like a billboard. Instead of continuing across the fairgrounds she hooked back into the Varied Industries building, which was in chaos, people fleeing through the aisles, some trying to get out the back, some trying to get out the front, some dropping to hide under the display tables.
She went past a heap of women’s clothing, a little of everything, under signs that said “S,” “M,” and “L,” and snatched a pair of medium shorts and a blue blouse and crawled under a table with Caralee and told the girl, who’d started crying, “You be quiet just a minute for Grandma.” She still had the baby bag, and dug in it for the sippy cup, found it, poured a miniature can of apple juice into it, and gave it to Caralee, who took it and stopped crying.
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