The Smoking Gun by JoAnna Carl

Author:JoAnna Carl
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2014-03-18T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

I jumped about four feet off the ground, and before I landed, I saw what had made the noise.

It had been produced by a large plastic bag loosely filled with aluminum cans and light bulbs.

I examined how it had been fastened to my car. Someone had stuffed the bag—it had once held twenty pounds of potatoes—with cans and light bulbs. A piece of heavy string had been tied to the sack. The cans and bulbs had been stuffed under my car. The string had been taped to the lower outside corner of the driver’s side door with ordinary black electrician’s tape.

When I swung the car door open vigorously, the string dragged the bag out from under the car. And all hell broke loose. On the quiet side street, on an afternoon so hot that everyone was inside under the air conditioning, the aluminum cans had sounded like a car wreck right under my feet. A couple of the light bulbs had popped, sounding like gunshots.

My heart was still pounding as I picked up the bag and ripped the electrician’s tape off the car door.

“Stupid joke!” I said. I felt like a fool. The only good thing was that nobody had seen me.

I looked around to see if the shelter had an outside trash can. I didn’t find one, but I did see something else. A piece of paper was tucked under my windshield wiper.

I pulled it out. It was a piece of 8 1/2-by-11 1/2 paper, folded in thirds.

“Great,” I said aloud. “I got one of those photocopies.”

But my sheet was different. Instead of a high school photo of Mike and Cherilyn Howard, it was only a note, scrawled in what looked like the same printing that had been on the photocopy Lacy and Bob Balke had shown me.

“SURPRISE!” it said. “It wasn’t a bomb.”

I unfolded the rest of the sheet and found more writing. “It might have been,” it said. “Butt out, or you could get hurt.”

I tossed the note and the sack of noisemakers into the trunk. I didn’t feel I needed to call the bomb squad out to check the motor before I left. Oh, I admit that I was a bit nervous as I turned the ignition key over, but mainly I was angry.

I headed for Mike’s house. Should I tell him about this?

I was extremely relieved when I saw Boone Thompson’s car in front of Mike’s house. Maybe I could inveigle Boone outside and show him the booby trap. And “booby” was the right word. “Booby” as in stupid. It was the dumbest thing I’d ever seen.

I didn’t understand why it scared me so much.

My plan didn’t work out. I used my garage door opener, drove inside and came in through the kitchen. Boone and Mike were sitting in the living room. Mike still had some ball game on, but the stands were going wild and he was sitting there like a lump of Silly Putty, so I didn’t think he was paying a lot of attention to it.

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