“That’s okay,” Town said quickly. “Can’t be too careful here. Someone might force their way in and try to sell you some band candy.”
Jonathan Town had got a journalism degree at Iowa State and done time on some newspapers in Minneapolis and Chicago. He had come back from this sojourn with a quick, sarcastic wit that eternally set him apart from most of Forks County. Clyde always had to remind himself not to be offended by it; in a way, Town was giving him some credit, assuming Clyde was smart enough to get the joke. It was just a difference in style, nothing more.
Clyde reached up above the sun visor with his free hand and took out a scrap of paper on which he had written the words, Car is bugged—just small talk for now, please. He handed it to Town, who pulled a face and looked askance at him. “Soon as Maggie finishes her bottle,” Clyde said, “I can take you out and show you that property.”
“Okay, whatever,” Town said, and settled back into his seat, prepared for a long spell of boredom. But this was nothing new for Town, who always acted bored.
“How’s things at the school newspaper?”
“The usual. My football reporter forgot to mention some third-stringer in his story about the Waterloo game, and I heard about it from the parents. Someone’s been sneaking into the darkroom to smoke pot. And the yearbook is already in crisis.”
Maggie pushed the bottle away. Clyde shifted the wagon into drive and pulled out of the parking lot, glad to be out of sight of that breezeway. They made small talk. A few miles out of town, the road plunged into the Wapsipinicon Valley. For the most part it was thickly forested, with big old hardwood trees that had lost most of their autumn color several weeks back; most of them were just naked black sticks now, though the oak trees held on to their dead brown leaves tenaciously. The road became rather steep and then broke from its ruler-straight trajectory and began to wind. Outcroppings of shale and sandstone, poking out through the thick carpet of fallen leaves, could be seen among the trunks of the big trees. Down below them in the river bottom, the Wapsipinicon had carved a meandering path deep into the sandstone.
“I guess we can talk now,” Clyde said. “They say the radio can’t make it out of the valley.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” Town said. In the corner of his eye Clyde could see his passenger giving him a searching look.
“I suppose you think I’m a paranoid maniac now,” Clyde said.
“Crossed my mind,” Town said. “What makes you think Mullowney is bugging you?”
Clyde laughed out loud for the first time in a few weeks and whacked the steering wheel with the flat of his hand. In the backseat Maggie echoed him, greatly relieved to see her saturnine father behaving so. Clyde turned around and smiled at Maggie, then returned his gaze to the winding road. “It’s not Mullowney,” he said. “Actually, I’m not sure who it is. First, I figured it was some foreign students down at the university.”
“Ah,” Town said, seeming to find this slightly less implausible. “Well, I’d believe it. But you’ll have to make your case to my readers.” He shifted position for the first time since he’d got into the car, rummaging in the breast pocket of his blazer for a reporter’s notebook and a ballpoint pen. “Why would some foreign students want to do that?”
“Well, but then I decided it was the FBI, because they knew more about me than they ought to,” Clyde said. “And then I decided it was some other folks just pretending to be FBI agents.”
“Uh-huh,” Town said quietly. “I hate it when that happens.”
Clyde downshifted the big wagon and let its weight pull them down into the valley at not much more than a jogging pace. He told Jonathan Town an edited version of the story, leaving Fazoul out of it.
This shifted attention away from the truly wild part about fake FBI agents and toward more down-to-earth elements of the story, such as Tab, who had been a tried-and-true news item for decades—ever since he’d become the heaviest ninth-grader in the history of Iowa. Town wrote it all down and asked the inevitable question: “You told your boss about this?”
“FBI handles anything that crosses state lines. They also handle counterespionage. So I told them about it a couple of weeks ago, right after the election.”
“How do you think Mullowney would feel about your going over his head?” Town asked, smiling at the thought of it. Clyde cracked a smile, too. “It don’t much matter what he thinks,” he said. “He couldn’t like me any less than he already does.”
“How can you stand to work for him?”
“I can’t. Went ahead and handed in my resignation. But that’s another story.”
“When’s your last day as a deputy sheriff, then?”
“End of the year. But I got some vacation days stored up, so it’ll really be sometime around Christmas.”