Collateral Damage: A Savannah Martin Novel (Savannah Martin Mysteries Book 19) Page 11

  “Drive,” he told me. “Now!”

  Or maybe he did. “There’s a box—”

  “I know about the effing box. Just drive, Savannah!”

  I had already taken my foot off the brake and moved it onto the gas, so it wasn’t like I wasn’t driving. We’d already moved away from the front of the house and had made it to the next property.

  “I’m…” I began, and that’s the last thing I heard clearly. My voice starting to tell him I was driving. But before I could get the rest of the sentence out, there was a loud noise, sort of like the gunshot from last night, and then a much louder noise, one that sort of rolled over us like a wave, and after that, everything went dark for a little while.

  Ten

  The car moved quite a few feet. It didn’t roll over or anything like that, but it was like a giant hand had picked it up, skewed it halfway around, and dropped it again, ten or fifteen feet away. When I opened my eyes after the shock wore off, we were sitting in the middle of Fulton Street, facing the opposite direction we had been, toward our house.

  Darcy, beside me, was breathing fast. I could see her chest rise and fall rapidly, even if I couldn’t hear her respirations. My ears were ringing too much for that.

  I could hear Carrie, screaming her head off in the backseat. Her shrill cries were loud enough to cut through whatever else was clogging up my ears.

  “It’s OK,” I told her, and my voice sounded funny, sort of big and echoing inside my head. I cleared my throat and tried again. “We’re all fine.”

  “You OK?” Darcy asked. Her voice sounded funny, too, so I deduced that the problem wasn’t our voices, but my ears.

  I nodded, carefully. “You?”

  “My ears are ringing. I think I have some whiplash. Other than that I’m fine.”

  Good. I twisted in my seat—I might have a touch of whiplash, too—and peered at Carrie. She, too, was fine. I hadn’t expected anything different, though. She wouldn’t have been able to scream the way she was if anything had been wrong with her.

  “What the hell happened?” Darcy asked.

  Honestly? I had no idea. Not about the specifics. “I guess the bomb went off. Or whatever was in the box exploded. And took half our house with it.”

  That was a slight exaggeration, although not much of one. We could see the house clearly, and it wasn’t a pretty sight. The front door was gone, along with half the exterior wall, including the window. The coat closet and half the bedroom on the other side of the center wall was also gone. So was the porch roof and posts, and a good bit of the roof above the living room. It was as if a giant hand—the same one that had moved the car—had reached down and scratched the middle twenty feet from the house.

  “It’s a good thing you didn’t leave the car,” Darcy said.

  I nodded. Yes, if I’d left the car when I’d talked about going to check out the package on the porch, I didn’t think there’d be anything left of me.

  That’s when I started shaking. Up until that point, I guess it hadn’t really sunk in. But I’d been a few seconds and a few feet from dying. If Rafe hadn’t called and told me to get the car moving…

  “Does the car drive?” Darcy asked, her voice a lot calmer than mine would have been. “We should try to get out of the street. There are people coming.”

  There were people coming. We could see flashing lights, blue and red, flickering in and out among the trees around the corner, and as the ringing in my ears subsided—and Carrie quieted from screams to sniffles—I could also hear the sirens approach. And all around us, the neighbors were creeping out of their houses, peering around like survivors of some natural catastrophe after the winds and rain have passed.

  I reached out—my joints felt creaky—and turned the key in the ignition. The engine came back to life. The steering column was locked, and it took a few seconds to figure it out, but by the time the first official vehicle came roaring around the corner, the Volvo was rolling slowly toward the curb on the other side of the street, hazard lights flashing.

  First on the scene was a fire department ladder truck, with an ambulance screaming behind it. They both squealed to a stop at the curb in front of the house, cutting off our view of the smoking wreck.

  Or perhaps I shouldn’t say it was smoking. There was no smoke, and no fire. The stuff floating in the air was dust, I thought. Pulverized particles of wood and drywall, blown to smithereens by the bomb.

  A black and white Columbia PD squad car followed the fire department vehicles around the corner. It hesitated for a second after it navigated the turn, before zipping across the street and stopping with a squeal of rubber in front of the Volvo.

  The driver’s side door opened, and Patrick Nolan stepped out, looking shell shocked. Darcy gave a little sob as she fumbled for her seatbelt.

  Rafe didn’t stop to take in his surroundings. He had his door open before the squad car had come to a stop, and by the time Nolan had both feet on the ground, Rafe was already at my door, reaching for the handle.

  I pushed the button to unlock it, and had it yanked open. In the time it took me to unhook my seatbelt, he had stuck his entire upper body through the opening, ascertained that Carrie was all right, and squawking in the back seat, and withdrawn, taking me with him.

  “Dammit, Savannah.” He pulled me into his arms, roughly enough that I could tell he’d been worried.

  “I’m fine,” I said, into his shoulder. “The baby’s fine.” Probably better off than Darcy and me. She’d been better protected, strapped into her padded infant seat. “We’re all fine.”

  He didn’t say anything, just kept his arms around me and breathed, slowly and deeply, into my hair.

  “The house is not fine,” I added. “Somebody blew up our house.”

  “No shit.”

  “If you hadn’t called and told me to drive, I would have been blown up, too.”

  He didn’t say anything to that, just held on.

  “This is crazy,” I told his shoulder. “Vandalizing the place is bad enough. But blowing it up? And almost blowing us up with it? That’s nuts.”

  Rafe didn’t answer, but now that I was getting a little calmer myself, from being safe and in his arms, I could feel the tension in his body. It permeated every muscle, every part of him almost pulsing with what was probably suppressed anger and need for action. The need to rip someone’s head off, if he could just figure out who.

  I extricated myself from the embrace. “I’m going to grab Carrie. She’s going to need some comforting, too.”

  He let me go, and nodded.

  “Why don’t you go across the street, meanwhile, and see what you can find out.”

  The firefighters, in full firefighting gear in spite of there being no flames to contend with, were swarming around the front of the house, peering at the ground and probably looking for clues. And they weren’t alone. Rafe and Patrick Nolan must have brought half the SWAT team with them, because a lot of burly cops in SWAT gear were also milling around. If anyone had wanted to take out a bunch of first responders, this would have been a golden opportunity to start shooting.

  “Not like we can stay away, though,” Rafe pointed out when I said so.

  No. It wasn’t. When something went wrong, these were the guys—and women—who ran toward the danger instead of away from it.

  “Go,” I told him, giving him a nudge in the direction of the house. “See what you can find out. I’ve got Carrie.”

  He dropped a kiss on my mouth. “Don’t go anywhere.”

  I promised I wouldn’t, and then he walked across the street, the deceptively leisurely saunter covering ground fast, while I headed around the car to the back door and rescued my now hiccupping daughter and cradled her close.

  A few feet away, Nolan still had his arms around Darcy. I recognized Tamara Grimaldi, also in SWAT black, talking to a big firefighter with a grizzled mustache, who I assumed, mostly from his age, was the fire chief or at least the captain.

  Farther down
the street, some of the neighbors had gathered. I recognized Nancy and Gary Allen among them, and decided to go see what, if anything, they had seen or heard. When Rafe had told me not to go anywhere, I didn’t think he’d been talking about a few yards down the street. Besides, I was sure he’d want to know what they had to say.

  “Evening.”

  They both nodded as I came closer. So did the people they were standing with, a younger couple with a tow-headed toddler sitting on her mother’s hip, while a slightly older boy, maybe four years old, was clinging to her leg. Everyone, including the kids, looked like they’d had a shock. Gary Allen’s complexion was almost green, unless that was just a feature of the streetlight. Maybe I looked faintly green, too. I wouldn’t be surprised, since I still felt a bit shaky, if I were honest.

  “Any idea what happened?”

  “A box in front of the door exploded. I have no idea what’s going on. Last night someone broke in and vandalized the place, and now this happened.”

  Nancy nodded. “Your husband talked to us last night. We were afraid maybe there’d been another death.”

  I shook my head. “No death this time. Although if I’d gotten out of the car and gone up to the porch to look at the box that was there, I doubt I would be standing here right now.”

  Nancy’s eyes widened. Gary looked over at the house, and the porch that was no longer there, with an expression like he was going to be sick. The young couple looked interested, although the husband took a step closer to his wife and kids.

  “That’s terrible,” Gary said.

  “Yes, it is. I don’t suppose you’ve seen anyone around the house this afternoon? I was here just before two, and the box wasn’t here then.”

  But they all shook their heads.

  “And I suppose neither of you texted me that something was going on, either?”

  “We didn’t know that anyone was going on until a few minutes ago,” Gary Allen said. “Someone texted you?”

  “I figured it was one of the neighbors. Although it might have been the person who put the box there.”

  “What would be the point of that?”

  To kill me, if I’d gone up on the porch to look at the box? Or—since that hadn’t happened, and they couldn’t be sure I would—just to have me here when the box blew?

  “What’s going to happen now?” Nancy asked, with a glance at the house.

  I honestly had no idea. It could be fixed, probably. Most of it was standing. But it would take money and patience—neither of which I had a lot of at the moment—and part of me just wanted to wash my hands of it and move on. “I guess it’ll depend on the insurance company. Someone will have to come out and assess, I assume. And then we’ll see if they give us enough money to fix what’s broken, or whether we’ll just have to level the whole thing and start over.”

  In some ways, it might be a benefit. We hadn’t bought a stigmatized property, but we’d ended up with one. One that could prove hard to sell, at least according to Arlene Woods’s clients. Maybe knocking it to the ground, scraping up the pieces, and selling the land to someone who’d build a new house on the lot would be a better option than trying to repair the damage.

  Over by the house, Grimaldi and Rafe had finished their conversation with the guy I’d assumed was the fire chief, and were going their separate ways. “I should go see what’s going on,” I said.

  The Allens and the other neighbors nodded.

  “Somebody will probably be by to talk to you. About anything you might have heard or seen.”

  “Nothing,” Nancy said. “We heard what sounded like a pop, and then the explosion. I didn’t see anything at all. We were on the other side of the house. Watching TV in bed.”

  “I was reading to Jerry here,” the young mother said, patting the pajama-clad boy clinging to her leg. “Sadie was already in bed.” She jiggled the toddler, who had her head on her mom’s shoulder, and her thumb in her mouth. Her eyelids were heavy. “Rick was in the garage.”

  “Workshop,” Rick said. “I do a little woodworking on the side.”

  “So neither of you saw or heard anything, either.”

  They both shook their heads. “Like Nancy said,” the wife told me, “first there was a pop. Sounded like a backfire, or maybe even a shot. And immediately, the big boom. Sadie woke up and started crying. Rick came running in. And we all went outside to see what was going on.”

  I nodded. It all sounded straightforward. And no reason to think any of them knew anything more than they were telling me. “I appreciate it.”

  “Let us know how it goes,” Nancy said politely.

  I said I would, and then I carried Carrie toward the place where Rafe and Grimaldi were standing in the middle of the street, talking.

  “—when this shit’s available to any shithead with access to a computer,” Rafe was saying when I got close enough to hear. Grimaldi didn’t seem shocked by the vocabulary, and they weren’t words I hadn’t heard before, either, but he reined them in when he saw me coming. “Darlin’. Everything all right?”

  “Fine,” I said. “She’s fallen asleep again.” And my arms were screaming. Although she didn’t weight above fifteen pounds, that’s plenty when you have to keep holding it up.

  “I’ll take her for a minute.” He plucked her out of my arms before I could protest. And while I thought the jostling might wake her up and she’d go into another screaming fit, she just grunted a couple of times, and then went back to sleep, nestled in the crook of her daddy’s arm. The sight of him, that big, strong warrior in SWAT black, cuddling his tiny, defenseless daughter, turned my stomach to goo, and probably gave every other woman of childbearing age who saw him a jab straight to the ovaries.

  “I spoke to the neighbors,” I added, shaking my arms out. “Nobody saw or heard anything I didn’t.”

  “And what did you hear?” Grimaldi wanted to know.

  I eyed her. “Other than the explosion? Not much. We pulled up. We saw the package. I thought about getting out to look at it. Darcy told me not to. And then Rafe called and told me to drive.”

  “Anything like a shot? A loud pop? A backfire?”

  That was Rafe asking, and I nodded. “We all heard that. There was a loud sound just a second or so before the second, much louder sound when the box blew up.”

  They both nodded like that made sense.

  “What do you know that I don’t?” I wanted to know.

  Rafe smirked, of course. “A whole lotta things, darlin’. But in this case, we know what was in the box.”

  “What was in the box?”

  “A substance called ammonal,” Grimaldi said. “A mixture of aluminum powder with titanium and ammonium nitrate and perchlorate.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.” Chemistry was never my thing. I know enough not to mix ammonia and bleach when I clean, but that’s it. “How does something like that blow up? I mean, it was just sitting there on the porch…”

  “The brand name for it is Tannerite,” Rafe told me. “You can buy it all over the internet, and in fishing and hunting places. There are prob’ly half a dozen places within thirty minutes of here that carry it.”

  Fine. “But what is it?”

  “It’s a binary explosive,” Grimaldi said. Unlike me, she must have excelled in chemistry at school, because she threw these terms around that meant nothing to me.

  Rafe, who hadn’t excelled in anything in school, dumbed it down for me. “It’s a powder. People buy it for target shooting and to do baby gender reveals and that sorta thing. When you shoot at it, you get an explosion.”

  I blinked. “You shoot at it?”

  They both nodded. “Making it go boom makes it more fun than just hitting paper targets,” Rafe said.

  Yes, I could imagine. Booms make everything better. “And this stuff is just available for people to get? Anyone can go into a store and buy it?”

  They both nodded again. “The sheriff sees it all the time,” Grimaldi said. “The first time I ca
me across it, it was more of a shock. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would drive around with a couple pounds of binary explosive in the trunk of their car. But Sheriff Satterfield told me it’s common around here, and that a couple pounds of the stuff isn’t something he’d look twice at.”

  “The Skinners used to use it for target shooting up there on the ridge,” Rafe added. “There were containers of Tannerite in all their trailers.”

  “That’s crazy!”

  They both shrugged, so obviously they’d seen crazier.

  “Who put it on our porch?”

  “We have no idea,” Rafe said. “But whoever it was, they stayed close enough to be able to shoot it and hit it.”

  “That was the sound I heard? Somebody shot the box?”

  They nodded.

  “Why didn’t they just shoot me, if they wanted to blow me up?”

  There was a moment’s pause. Rafe’s expression darkened, but it was Grimaldi who answered. “We assume they didn’t want to blow you up. Or didn’t want you dead. They wanted you to see the explosion. So they texted you, and waited for you to show up, but they set off the ammonal before you got out of the car.”

  “So I wasn’t in any danger? We weren’t in any danger?” Carrie, Darcy, and me?

  Rafe growled, and his arm tightened reflexively around his daughter for a second. She made a protesting little sound, like she was going to wake up, and he relaxed again. At least enough that Carrie settled back down.

  Grimaldi glanced at him, responding both to me and to the comment Rafe didn’t make, but that he’d surely made before. “When we figure out who they are, we’re charging them with attempted murder. If you’d still been parked at the curb when the box blew, you could have been hurt.”

  She hesitated for just a second, and gave Rafe another quick look before she added, “My personal opinion is that murder wasn’t the goal of this, but that doesn’t mean we won’t charge them with it when we find them.”

  I nodded. “Darcy and Carrie were both on the side of the car that faced the house. They’d have been worse off than me. If nothing else, the windows could have broken and cut them.” And while Darcy might have been all right—or relatively all right—had that happened, my tiny baby might not have fared so well.