Logic had spoken: had to be the middle one.
Peck was sweating even more heavily now, fear adding pressure to the heat, all of it still ameliorated by the residual Xanax in his brain. Do it, or not?
The residual Xanax won.
He fumbled the jar out of the backseat, unscrewed the top enough to leak some gasoline onto the apron rag, made sure he had his Bic lighter, left the car running, got out, ran across the yard to the side of the house-ran so he wouldn’t have a chance to change his mind-fired the Bic lighter into the rag, which ignited with a low-running yellow flame, and heaved the jar through a side window.
There was an instantaneous mushroom of fire inside the house and he ran back to the car and took off, turning the first corner he came to.
Now he was exultant. “Did it, did it,” he said aloud. “People sometimes meet guys like Winston Peck the Sixth, and they say, ‘I didn’t think he could do it, I guess I just didn’t know.’ Yeah, you just didn’t know, you asshole…”
An hour and a half later, still talking to himself about the bombing, and after another encounter with the yellow-gutted bugs crossing back over the Minnesota River, he found a parking spot six blocks from his house in St. Paul, and did a reentry that was exactly the opposite of his exit.
Once in the house, he peeled off the ski mask and went into the bathroom to wash his face. There, he caught sight of himself in the mirror: he’d never seen anything like it. Winston Peck the doctor had been replaced by Winston Peck the terrorist-attack survivor.
His thinning hair, soaked with sweat and dirt, stood away from his head like the Cowardly Lion’s in The Wizard of Oz. His face was a fiery red, and a rash had broken out across his nose and cheeks. His mouth hung open, and he really couldn’t seem to keep it closed.
He stood in a cool shower for five minutes, dried off, collapsed naked on his bed, but his mind was still screaming. He lay rigid for three minutes, maybe five minutes, his brain rerunning the gasoline explosion, then crawled out of bed and found the tube of Xanax.
“Just one more,” he said to himself. He popped two, on second thought, and went back to the bed and was out before he had time to pull a sheet over himself.
27
Virgil was on his way home when Frankie called: “I was going to wait for you to get here, but I’m exhausted. I’ve got to get to sleep. Everything is okay at the farm, right?”
“Yeah, Sparkle said she talked to you…”
“Some kids out skinny-dipping.”
“Yup. I had to talk your boys out of going down there,” Virgil said. “If they’d gotten a good look at those girls, they’d have been locked in the bathroom for the rest of the summer.”
“But that wouldn’t apply to you?”
“Nah. I’m well taken care of.”
“Thank you. I’m taking a couple of painkillers and going to sleep. Try to be quiet when you come in.”
–
Virgil stopped at a convenience store and bought a bottle of orange juice, rolled his truck windows down-it was finally beginning to cool off-and put his elbow out and drank the juice.
With the windows down, he could hear the sudden blast of sirens from Mankato.
If it was cops, Virgil thought, there’s a riot going on. More likely the fire department. He rolled across the Highway 14 bridge into town and realized that the sirens seemed to be heading toward the general area of his house, which didn’t worry him much, until he got off at the North Riverfront exit and realized that the sirens, and now the flashing lights, were really close to his house, and when he turned onto his street and saw the lights straight ahead, and a cop blew past him with sirens screaming through his open windows, he thought, Holy shit, that IS my house.
He instantly thought of Frankie, who’d taken those painkillers to knock herself out, and he floored his truck and blew through a couple of stops signs until…
Wait. That’s not my house.
It was, in fact, the house next to his house. He couldn’t get all the way down to it, because of the fire trucks, and he had to park on the block behind his house. All the neighbors were out in the yards watching, and Virgil saw the couple who owned the house behind his, and he called, “Jack, hey, you guys-what happened?”
Jack’s wife, Emmy, said, “We thought it was a gas explosion or something, but when we ran out here, we could smell gasoline. Not natural gas, car gas.”
“Did the Wilsons get out?”
“Yeah, we talked to them. They said something blew up in their kitchen. I think they’re around in the front.”
Virgil trotted over to his house and let himself in through the back, and Frankie called, “Virgie?”
“Yeah. I was afraid it was here, and you’d be asleep.”
She was standing in the front room, wrapped in a terry-cloth robe, looking out through the side windows. “The firemen came pounding on the doors, said I might have to leave, but they put the fire out and they came back and said I was okay. For ten minutes, it was like the end of the world around here.”
“You okay?”
“Not entirely. I gotta go back and lie down. I’m not sleepy anymore, but those pills got me feeling like the undead.”
Virgil took her back to the bedroom, tucked her in, and said, “I gotta get out there and find out what happened. Jack and Emmy made it sound a little strange.”
“Like how?”
“Like there was gasoline involved. I’m gonna talk to the fire guys.”
“Careful.”
–
A fire lieutenant named Carl Beard saw Virgil walking through the crowd of neighbors and came over and said, “You gotta quit this shit, Virgil.”
“What happened?”
“The Wilsons were sleeping and something blew up in their kitchen, and Kyle went running in there and found the whole place on fire. Janet called us and Kyle sprayed it with his fire extinguisher and knocked it down a little, and then the extinguisher ran out and they went outside and waited for us. We shut it down, but you could smell gasoline all over the place-and Kyle said there was no gasoline in the house.”
“It’s like when…”
“Yeah. Like when that preacher firebombed your garage. Same deal. After we put the fire out, I looked in the kitchen, which is pretty scorched, and the kitchen sink is full of broken glass and there’s a piece of burnt rag in there… It was a bomb.”
“Goddamnit. You think it was aimed at me?”
“Kyle sorta hinted at that. He said nobody’s mad at him, but a lot of people might be mad at you. You’ve been in the newspaper, a little bit, with your girlfriend.”
Wilson worked as the service manager at a car dealership and was generally known as a friendly guy. He had, on occasion, mown Virgil’s grass when Virgil had been out of town a few days too many, and they’d always been invited to each other’s barbeques.
“I better talk to him,” Virgil said.
“Maybe you better-but I’ll tell you, Virg, this wasn’t any prank or anything like that,” Beard said. “The dipshit who threw the bomb wanted to burn the place down and he didn’t care who got hurt.”
–
The Wilsons were standing on the other side of the fire trucks. Virgil went over and found them talking to their insurance agent, who was also Virgil’s agent and who lived in the neighborhood. When Kyle Wilson saw Virgil coming, he prodded his wife with his elbow and said, affably enough, “We were thinking about remodeling anyway.”
Virgil said, “Hey, Kyle, Janet. Uh… I kinda know what you might think. I hope it’s not true.”
Janet said, “Who knows? We can’t think of why anybody would do this to us. If it really was a firebomb.”
Kyle said, “We’re pretty sure it was a bomb. We actually heard it hit, we heard the window break and glass shatter, then whoosh.”