Naomi stopped the car. The reassuring BMW purr clicked off.
Marin covered her ears.
I exhaled.
Marin had stopped screaming as suddenly as if someone had pulled the plug on her power source.
Her voice now hollow, she said, "It didn't… He didn't… Mom, Mom. You're okay, Mom."
She may have actually finished those first two sentences, but I was still on the porch, fifteen or twenty feet behind her, and I couldn't hear her well.
Naomi climbed out of the BMW and stood on the street right beside the still-open door of her car. She took a moment to straighten her clothes, tugging down the bottom of a short-sleeved jacket. Her shoulders were stiff. I thought that she wasn't happy to see her daughter. Shaking her head emphatically, she said, "Not now, Marin. We'll talk later. Go on back home-wait for me there. I'm serious about this-wait there."
Marin held her hands out, palms to the sky. "Mom, I… I came to warn you…" Her tone grew plaintive.
"About what? About him?" Naomi's tone was derisive, cutting. I recognized it instantly; she'd certainly used the same tone often enough with me. "It's a little late for that, isn't it? I just talked to him. He came by the office to plead with me, called upstairs and waited outside by my car. I just left him in the parking lot five minutes ago. So I already know what's going on. All of it. The party the two of you have planned is over as of right now, do you understand? I'll do what I can to help you both, I promise. Now go on home. I can't believe you did this. I just can't believe it."
Marin was frozen in place, standing on the sidewalk ten feet from her mother's car. I couldn't see Marin's face, though I could tell from her posture that the tension wasn't quite gone. She said nothing; she didn't seem to have a response for her mother's words.
Naomi leaned back down and reached into the car, grabbed the big Vuitton bag she always carried with her, and slung it over her shoulder. She slammed the car door. The noise it made was a solid, Bavarian thud. "Go home," she told her daughter. "I'll be there in an hour. We'll decide what to do then."
Either Naomi had not seen me eavesdropping on the porch or she was ignoring me. Either way, I was grateful not to have much of a role in this new act of the Bigg family drama.
For a moment, neither woman took a step. When Naomi finally walked with determined strides toward the sidewalk, I decided that the time had come for me to go back into my office and let this scenario between mother and daughter develop however it was going to develop.
I think I turned my head first.
But I'm not sure.
Maybe I'd even completed turning all the way around so that I was facing the door. But the ragged piece of metal that I caught on the outside of my right thigh argued against that.
Regardless, I remember seeing the flash in the periphery of my vision, and I think I heard the boom. Maybe it was the other way around. I know I felt the concussion. The evidence of that was irrefutable. It threw me against the front door of the old brick house with enough force to crack oak.
When I woke up, or cleared my head, or whatever it was that I did, I could finally hear the sirens. I wanted to tell Marin Bigg that I could finally hear the sirens.
I tried to stand up to go find Marin and Naomi, but a young man with a ring between his nostrils and a tattoo of a black flower on his throat kept a firm grip on my shoulders.
He said, "I don't think you should get up, man. Someone's coming to help you. I don't think you should get up, man. I'm serious, here. Come on, now. Cooperate with me."
"Where's Marin? Tell her I hear the sirens."
"Hey, whatever. I'll tell her. I'll tell her."
Up close, his nasal ring captivated me. I wanted to ask him what it had felt like to get that part of his nose pierced. Did they go through the cartilage with the needle or did they slide the metal in front of it in that soft skin that always got so sore when I had a cold? But it didn't seem like an appropriate question to a stranger, so I kept my musings to myself.
Then I recalled Naomi's message.
There's another bomb. That lawyer.
I tried to sit up. I said, "There's another bomb. That lawyer."
He kept his hands on my shoulders. "What? I don't think you should get up, man. You're not real stable."
That understatement was the last thing I recalled until the ambulance ride.
CHAPTER 32
There's another bomb. That lawyer.
I spilled the beans about the wouldn't-it-be-cool games about five minutes after I arrived at the hospital. It took that long for me to collect my wits. Lauren had been called but she wasn't yet at my side, so Sam Purdy was my first confessor. For some reason, he'd been the one elected by the medical staff to inform me that what little was left of Naomi Bigg was dead.
Come to think of it, it was more likely that Sam's position as town crier was self-appointed. At that moment he'd be more concerned with bomb facts than with my feelings.
I asked him about Marin. The nurses and doctors who'd been treating me had been unwilling to tell me her condition.
Sam, on the other hand, didn't blink at my question. Marin Bigg was on her way to surgery. Her condition wasn't critical, though he didn't know the details. He'd let me know when things changed.
I proceeded to tell Sam about Naomi's message. There's another bomb. That lawyer. I tried to put it all in context by telling him everything I remembered about Paul and Ramp and the wouldn't-it-be-cool games. When I got around to mentioning Ella Ramp and Jason Ramp Bass and shaped charges and the explosives vault near Limon, he barked, "What?"
"The things that Lucy called you about a few hours ago. Ramp's grandmother is Ella. Jason Ramp Bass is Ramp's real name. Lucy and I met with the grandmother early this afternoon."
Sam's eyes shimmered with a frightening blend of anger and alarm. "I haven't talked to Lucy today, Alan."
"She didn't call you a few hours ago?"
"No."
"You don't know about our trip to Agate?"
"No."
"Oh, shit," I said. I tried to get up. "Oh… shit."
I told Sam that I thought Lucy must be out looking for Ramp on her own, and told him everything that she and I had learned that afternoon in Agate. As I related the story, he used his cell phone to repeat the information almost word for word to someone at the police department.
At his urging I offered him my guesses about the list of people that Paul Bigg might have been targeting in Boulder. Unfortunately, every one of the potential targets was a lawyer, so my list didn't narrow the realm of potential targets very much. Sam took careful notes and asked good questions. I made him promise to track down Lauren and to get Grace and her babysitter over to Adrienne's house right away. He said to consider it done.
When I was through with my story about the Biggs and Ramp and the Agate ranch, he told me in a soft voice that my judgment was "goofy."
Listening to Sam over the years, I'd learned that "goofy" is an all-purpose Minnesota word that includes connotations ranging from "odd" to "totally fucked up." In these circumstances, I was assuming Sam's intent fell somewhere at the very profane end of the spectrum.
Once he was convinced that he'd accumulated all the salient details about the bombs and the boys, Sam left me to go confirm that protection was in place for all the people who might possibly have been targeted by Paul Bigg in Boulder.
All the lawyers.
I assumed he was also doing whatever had to be done to make sure that every possible stone was being turned in the search for the man named Jason Ramp Bass in Denver.
Adrienne joined me in the ER minutes after Sam departed. When she saw my name on the ER board, she had just finished doing some emergency urological procedure that I was sure would make me cross my legs if she shared the details.