A Bomb Built in Hell (16 page)

The kid found the three-foot tripod and felt around in the dark until he located the three mounting holes Pet had drilled deep into the concrete. He assembled the tripod and jammed it into the holes, attached the
rifle, and sighted along the barrel. There was more than enough light to see by.

The kid held the rifle steady on the back of the guard to his left, then swung it to his right toward the spine of the second man. He did this several times, then adjusted the socket under the tripod's head so that the rifle stopped dead at the place where he would sight the second man. He tested the socket by slamming the rifle hard to the right—it held, solid and silent.

The rifle was sighted into the spine of the first guard, just above his waist. Both men were roughly the same height, so it was even easier than they had planned—the kid only had to adjust for lateral movement. He focused hard until the first guard's back was the only thing in his vision, then slowly squeezed the trigger. As the first guard slumped, the kid slammed the rifle hard to the right, simultaneously pulling the trigger so that the shot came when the barrel was pointing directly at the second guard.

The kid checked to be sure the street was quiet, then he began to drag the bodies inside. A faint rustling from the shadows sent him springing cat-footed into the alley. On autopilot, he slammed his knife between the ribs of a wino who'd made the error of stirring in his alcoholic sleep.

Wesley crawled from the roof into what was once a ventilation shaft, holding the Doberman on a short lead. When they reached the corridor leading to the top floor, Wesley could just make out the two men. They were standing alertly, listening for any sound, not talking. And clearly visible to the dog. Wesley unsnapped the lead.

The Doberman shot down the corridor, as quiet as cancer, its claws never slipping on the roughened floor; it hit the nearest guard like a ninety-pound razor blade and dropped him silently to the ground. The other guard whirled. He screamed once before the silenced Beretta took him down. The dog ripped out the first guard's throat and flew down the stairs. His charge carried both men coming up the stairs back down—they all tumbled to the second floor, landing in a mess of blood and screams. The kid was working his way up the stairs with a machete, hacking a path toward Wesley, who had switched to a similar weapon.

It was over in seconds. The place was as silent as the tomb it had become. Not a sound penetrated the upstairs chamber where Pet was holding forth.

Wesley snapped “Stay!” at the now calm dog, and sprang over the bodies to the first floor. He took out a plastic box about the size of a pack of cigarettes and flipped the single tiny toggle switch. A red light flashed on Pet's desk, readily visible to most of the assembled men.

“Relax!” Pet called out. “That just means we're giving off too much static electricity and we could get monitored. I'm going to spray this stuff on the floor around your chairs—it'll just take a second. Remember: please don't move.”

Pet walked into the midst of the mobsters. When he reached the back wall near the bar, he began to spray a heavy silicon mixture all over the floor, always being careful, although not obviously so, to spray the area he had just vacated. He seemed to run out of spray when he got to his own area, and took another can off his
desk to continue. The whole operation took less than a minute. When he was finished, he pushed a wide, flat button under his desk with his knee and quickly resumed speaking:

“So, like I said, the scumbags can be wasted, but it's got to be in Times Square, where they hole up. I'll need at least twenty soldiers.
Good
ones. It's going to splash all over the papers. I know that's not what you
want
, but there's no choice, not anymore. Those hippies are psycho, and they'll rip up every one of your …”

The hissing of the hidden jets was masked by the hum of the air conditioner. Cyanide is colorless, but the dim lighting masked even the slight air movement.

After about ten seconds, Salmone took a deep breath and hissed, “Gas!” He leaped from his chair toward the door and fell flat on his face—the surface was as slippery as Teflon. One of the bodyguards clawed his way to a window and battered it frantically with his gun butt; the bars held firm. The fattest don swam his way through the grease to the door; it held against the full magazine in his pistol.

Within another five seconds, all the men in the room were on their knees or flattened. Only Salmone remembered what he had lived for. He held his breath and carefully leveled his fallen bodyguard's pistol at where Pet had been, but the old man was as safe behind the steel-lined desk as he would have been outside the room.

The door popped open. Wesley and the kid stepped through the slot, wearing gas masks with oxygen backpacks. They skidded over to Pet, and then got a good grip—his part of the floor wasn't slippery. The kid pulled
Pet toward the door and closed it behind him, leaving Wesley inside. He slapped the portable oxygen mask onto the old man's face and started the compressor. Pet still had a feeble pulse, but his skin was bluish and bloated. Wesley knew you could beat cyanosis with oxygen and adrenaline. The kid found the vein in the old man's arm, slapped on the Velcro tourniquet, and pumped in five cc's.

Inside the room, Wesley was hacking his way through tons of flesh with the machete as the triplex continued to pump its deadly fumes. It took him almost five minutes to be sure he got the job done. He pounded three times on the door. It opened enough to show the kid, holding the grease gun. Wesley held up his left fist, and the kid slid the door the rest of the way open. Wesley stepped out. The old man was already sitting up.

“I fucking forgot to hold my breath after I hit the fucking switch.… How the fuck could I …?”

“Shut up!” the kid told him angrily.

Wesley and the kid carried the old man downstairs. When they got to the first floor, Wesley and the old man sat down to wait until the kid returned with the car. Wesley said “Guard!” to the Doberman and went all the way back upstairs to the big room.

He shut off the pump and reconnected it to another tank. He threw the switch again, and the triplex started throwing raw gasoline all over the building at two hundred gallons per minute. Wesley took a mass of putty-colored substance out of a plastic pouch and carefully molded it to the side of the pump, running a thin trail of the same stuff to a wooden box about ten feet away.

The place reeked of gasoline by the time Wesley got
downstairs. The kid pulled into the alley with the car, and they gently laid Pet across the back seat. The old man struggled and, with a powerful effort, pulled himself erect. The dog got into the back with him and lay down on the floor.

At 1:20 a.m., the Ford turned down Houston, heading for the East River. Wesley reached for the switch on the radio transmitter. Before he touched it, he felt the old man's gnarled hand on his. He looked back at the darkness in the back seat for a second. Then they threw the switch, together.

As the car slowed for a light on Houston, the sky above Chrystie fired to a brilliant orange-red. The car purred east.

For the first time, the kid came inside the garage with them to stay. The old man was able to reach his bed by himself. The kid slept right beside him.

Wesley and the dog went to their apartment. In minutes, they were all asleep.

T
he
News
said the fire had claimed the lives of “at least thirty-one people,” and had caused another eleven to be hospitalized. The authorities were strongly divided as to the cause of the homicidal arson. They sifted the ruins meticulously. If they found anything besides miscellaneous flesh and bone, it never made the papers.

Minor wars soon erupted among mob factions throughout the city, eastern Long Island, and northern New Jersey. They quickly escalated, and bigger people were called in from outside to settle things.

Paranoia was running wild, and everyone was so busy distrusting and plotting that even those who knew who had been at the meeting never thought to look for Petraglia. It was assumed he died in the blaze with the others.

A voodoo church that had been meeting in a cellar under one of the movie houses in Times Square was dynamited, with four people killed. The police had more informers than they could pay.

Crackdowns on drunks took place from one end of the Bowery to the other. The law said it was okay to be a drunk, but being a flaming menace to society was something else.

It was popularly assumed that a wino had fallen asleep with a lit cigarette until some bright boy leaked the identity of the bodies inside the building. The columnists had a field day, but nothing compared to the florists—they hadn't done such lavish, cost-no-account displays since Dion O'Banion was doing that kind of work.

W
esley worked days on his project. The compounding was easy enough—a four-to-one mixture of ammonium nitrate and TNT produces a good facsimile of Amatol, the best military-industrial explosive for large-scale demolition work. He made the mercury-fulminate detonators himself, packing each one inside a sealed aluminum tube about the size of a mechanical pencil. The explosives were hermetically sealed inside zinc boxes, then packed into wooden crates. Pet had drilled each of the boxes so that the mercury-fulminate pencils snapped into position instantly.

Nights, Wesley spent on the roof. Alone. There was a lot to think about. But first the area had to be clean. There were already too many cops around during the day. Junkies were a magnetic force field: if you couldn't find a dealer to shake down, you could always justify your shift by hauling in a few users. Even simple possession could be upgraded to a felony collar; law enforcement courted raw numbers more intensely than any CPA.

Wesley finally admitted to himself that he had expected Pet to check himself out in the gas chamber they had built. But he hadn't let the old man go, and he wasn't sure why.

He waited patiently until the rehab of the building on Pike Street was nearly complete. Then he and the kid went to the site in broad daylight, each carrying two of the wooden crates. He had made the kid practice until he could handle thirty-five pounds on each shoulder like it wasn't much of anything. The crates were clearly marked GENERATOR PARTS: THIS SIDE UP! and they had no trouble placing one in each corner of the top floor.

They repeated the same exact move several more times, until there were twenty boxes of the mixture in place.

The last night, they returned again—this time with the Doberman. They left the dog near the door and went downstairs. The place was ready-made for junkies, all right—as easy to break into as a glass vault. They planted sixty sticks of fuseless dynamite in the
basement. Harmless without blasting caps … unless there was a massive explosion in the immediate vicinity.

On the top floor, Wesley rigged a magnesium fuse from each of the fulminate-of-mercury pencils. Then he and the kid walked backward, both hands full of the trailed fuse wires. They met in the center of the empty floor, forming a giant spider's web.

As they went down the back stairs with the dog, Wesley reflected that it wasn't much use writing slogans on a wall if you planned to total the building. The tiny propane torch had been placed with its tip pointing into the middle of the spider's web. The hard part had been the trip mechanism, but the salesman at Willoughby-Peerless had been only too happy to demonstrate how the motor-driven Nikon F could be activated at distances up to a full mile with a radio transmitter, especially when he spotted Wesley for the kind of chump who would pay retail. The whole tab came to over three grand, and the salesman went home happy. Wesley went home with exactly what
he
wanted, too.

That night, he and the kid set up the Nikon so that its mirror mechanism flipped the series-wired little torches into action. Then they closed the door behind them, and Wesley smeared several tubes of the epoxy back and forth across the seams which they had hand-sanded to the smoothness of glass. Thanks to Hobart Chan, they already knew that a single drop would hold a car door shut against a man trying desperately to get out—what they applied would hold against anything short of an
explosion. They stuck the aluminum sign with its skull-and-crossbones in black on a white background on the door and left. In bright-red lettering, it said:

KEEP OUT! DANGER!
POISON GAS USED FOR EXTERMINATION!

The papers promised a “gala event” at the new methadone clinic. All the public supporters of methadone maintenance—actors, politicians, anyone wealthy or famous enough to rate a photo—would be hosted to a superb lunch prepared by the addicts themselves. It was widely hailed by the
Times
as:

The gala was scheduled for noon on Thursday, a slow news day. Extensive press coverage was expected.

T
hursday, 12:35 p.m. The newly christened Methadone Maintenance Center was open for business and playing to a packed house. In an attempt to “involve the community,” as the
Times
duly reported, the doors had been thrown open to the public. The chance to mingle
with all the celebrities was too good to pass up—mothers brought their children, housewives drove in from far-flung suburbs, and physicians with no more interest in narcotics-control than in socialized medicine flocked to the center.

Wesley took the radio transmitter to the roof on the Slip to minimize signal interference, as the helpful salesman had suggested. He went up alone: there was a tacit agreement between Wesley and the old man that he would be the only one to go up on the roof.

The range was right—but if it didn't fire, he'd just have to move it closer. Wesley pressed the switch. There was a dead silence in his head. He mentally counted backward from one hundred, like the time they'd operated on his leg in the Army and they had pumped the Sodium Pentothal into him.