Judas Horse_ An FBI Special Agent Ana Grey Mystery - April Smith [57]
Laumann’s wife is running downstairs with the baby wrapped in a blanket. The baby’s face is pomegranate red and she is making rasping coughs.
“Croup,” she says. She is a nurse; she knows.
“Get her in the shower.”
“I did. We have to go to the emergency room.”
“What about Alex?”
“Drop me and come back for him. Remember to take his tennis bag—he’s got a tournament.”
Laumann stops typing mid-sentence, reaches for his car keys, lopes up the navy blue stairs, pulls on pants, runs downstairs, runs upstairs again for the car keys he left on the bed, checks on Alex, beautiful and asleep, runs downstairs, to find his wife already out, the back door banging behind her.
They’ve been through this twice before, and each time the panic is the same. That is the real uneasiness. Damn it to hell. Rosalie’s tiny lungs. Damn, it almost makes him cry. Which impurities of the modern world are making her sick? What weakness did his father pass along? He stumbles through the early-morning air, icy cold, like mountain water, and thinks irrationally, I must provide.
The Explorer pulls out of the driveway and accelerates fast.
There is a pause, ten seconds of negative time, long enough for the dust to settle, and then a hard percussive shot and one side of the Laumann house volcanoes out, spewing lumber and new carpeting with orange fire-tongued breath, raining down the unspeakable.
Eighteen
The screen door in the kitchen opens hard, banging against the wall.
“Attack of the vegetables!” Slammer shouts, lunging through with the energy of an entire basketball team. “Destroy all humans!”
He is carrying crates of fresh-picked produce, wearing a denim jacket with the sleeves cut off to show a colorful swirl of tattoos on both arms, as if he dipped them up to the elbows in Easter egg dye.
Sara takes the weight of one of the crates, heady with damp earth fragrance, and looks past his shoulder to the organic garden, where the sun has deepened the morning shadows. She stays a foot against the screen door, gazing at the beds of violet-tipped lavender. Her breath forms in the cold country air.
“What?” Slammer asks.
“Reminds me of home.”
“Your parents must live in a pile of goat shit.”
She smiles ironically. He stamps his filthy boots. Draping an arm over my shoulders, he whispers, “The feds are here.”
“Really? Where?”
“Look.”
Peering through the kitchen window, we can see the utility truck. A repairman is up in a cherry picker.
Slammer had a good look when he went into the garden.
“The feds wouldn’t be that stupid,” I say.
“They’re on to us. The BLM dude’s house got vaporized, dog.”
“Yeah, but why would they care about us?”
He grins. “We blow shit up.”
Me, innocent: “Did we blow up Laumann’s house?”
The bomb was detonated by a cell phone. Same as the device that killed Steve. Herbert Laumann and his wife and baby escaped by minutes. Twelve-year-old Alex, asleep in bed, sustained third-degree burns. He is expected to survive. Angelo considers Bill Fontana and Dick Stone both suspects in the bombing. Fontana is in custody. The motive would be murderous rage. No question the hero of the movement was humiliated when the deputy state director invaded the stage.
“I didn’t do that bomb,” Slammer says warily.
“Was it FAN?”
“We are FAN,” Sara says, wanting my attention. “But so are a lot of people.”
I have noticed sibling rivalry never ends, even when you’re not related.
“Allfather says they’re tapping our phones,” she jabbers on. “I hear clicking all the time when I’m talking, don’t you?”
Yes, and that’s why we’re up in the cherry picker for the second time this week. Why can’t they get it right?
“Sometimes I say, ‘Hey, Fed? Are you listening?’”
I chuckle, but my throat is dry. “Make sure you only talk about embarrassing personal stuff.”
Slammer, teasing: “Not Sara. Sara’s a little prude.”
Sara’s cheeks turn pink. “You suck.”
He gives