A Bomb Built in Hell (7 page)

Wesley stepped out of the doorway, brought up the shotgun, and pulled the wired-together triggers simultaneously. Both cops were blown backward against a parked car. Wesley had two shots from the Colt into each of them before the sea of don't-want-no-Law-on
-me
people could even start to disappear. He didn't know which cop was his target, so he walked over to what was left of them and placed the barrel of the pistol against the right eye of one and pulled the trigger. The back of the cop's head went flying out in a swirling disc of bloody bone. Wesley repeated the work on the other one, and quickly stepped back into the hotel lobby. The lobby was empty—even the desk clerk was gone.

As he walked calmly up the stairs, Wesley wiped down the guns with a black silk handkerchief. He left them on the bed in his room, picked up the nine-by-twelve
manila envelope lying there, and stuffed it deep into his belt, all the way to the base of his spine.

Then he grabbed the waiting airline bag and climbed out the window. The fire escape took him to the roof, within six feet of the next building. He leaped lightly across and took the next fire escape down the other side, into the shadows on 55th.

He got into the back of a parked cab whose lights immediately went on.

As the cab motored serenely toward Burke Airport, Wesley noted with satisfaction that the meter already read $3.10, just in case.

T
he private plane touched down at LaGuardia. Wesley walked across the huge parking lot and kept moving all the way to Roosevelt Avenue in Queens. It took him more than an hour, but he wasn't in a hurry. He grabbed an IRT Elevated on Roosevelt and changed at 74th Street for an E train, which took him right into the Port Authority. He lit a cigarette with the airline ticket stub and checked his pocket for the stub he had picked up from the cabdriver in Cleveland—half of a round-trip bus ticket between Port Authority and Atlanta, Georgia.

Inside Port Authority, he bought a copy of the
Daily News
, drank some prison-tasting orange juice, and watched the degenerates parade until it was almost ten in the morning. Then he took a cab uptown to 60th Street and, with the expensive leather suitcase he had purchased and carefully scuffed up, checked into the Hotel Pierre. He was not asked to pay in advance; the
suit Israel had picked out for him in Cleveland easily passed muster.

In the hotel bathroom, he examined the envelope for the first time. It held two hundred and twenty thousand dollars in hundreds. The tightly packed bills looked used, and the serial numbers were not sequential.

W
esley settled his bill at the Pierre. They never even glanced at the hundred-dollar notes. The hotel was far more expensive than others he could have used, but the guidebook he'd read in prison told him the Pierre wasn't the kind of joint where the night clerk would be on a police payroll.

He took a cab to the corner of Houston and Sixth, paid the driver, and threw a half-buck tip. Then he walked north until he saw the cab circle back and re-enter traffic, after which he turned around and headed for Mamma Lucci's.

It was four-fifteen in the afternoon, but the restaurant was evening-dark. Wesley didn't know what Petraglia looked like, except that he'd be old. He walked to a table, deliberately selecting a seat with his back to the door. Wesley ordered spaghetti and veal cutlet
milanese
and asked the waiter if Mr. Petraglia was there yet.

“Who wants to know?”

“I do.”

“So? What're you, a cop?”

“I'm from the Board of Health.”

The waiter laughed and left the table. In about ten minutes, an ancient old man sat down silently across
from Wesley. His voice was so soft Wesley had to lean forward to catch all of the words.

“Who're you related to that I know?”

“To Carmine. I'm his son.”

“So! How do I know this?”

“Put your hand under the table.”

Wesley slipped the envelope he had picked up in Cleveland into the old man's hard, dry hand.

“Take that someplace and open it up,” he told the older man. “Carmine said you'd show me a building to buy.”

The old man left the table. He returned within a minute.

“If you hadn't brought it back here, I never would have known. Carmine never said anything to me, never described you, nothing. You could've left the country with that much cash. Carmine told me his son would come here one day. With money—that exact amount. But he told me all this before they took him away the last time. I didn't know what you'd look like or when you'd be coming.”

“But you knew I'd come?”

“Yes. This means Carmine's dead?”

“They buried his body.”

“I understand. You come with me now. I got to set you up until we can get the building.”

The old man's car was a dusty black 1959 Ford with a taut ride. He drove professionally, whipping through traffic without giving the appearance of going fast.

“We'll talk in the car. Nobody hears then, okay?”

“Whatever you say.”

“I got the building all picked out. It's on the Slip.… You know where that is?”

“Over far east, by the river?”

“Yeah. It used to be a shirt factory, but now it's dead-empty. We can get it for less than half of this money and use most of the rest to fix it up right.”

“I'm going to live there?”

“You and me, too, son.”

“My name's Wesley.”

“Pet—my family call me Pet.”

“Carmine said Mr. Petraglia.”

“That was so I could make the decision first, get it? You call me Pet. What if you got to call me in a hurry—you gonna say all them syllables?” The old man laughed high up in his dry throat. Wesley nodded in agreement.

P
etraglia took him to a house in Brooklyn. Its garage led directly into the basement, which was double-locked from the outside.

“You stay here. Maybe three weeks, maybe a month. Then we'll be ready to move into the building. There's a john in the back, plenty of food in the refrigerator, got a TV and a radio. But only play them with the earplugs—nobody knows you're down here, right?”

“Okay.”

“You're not worried that it might take so long?”

“I been waiting a lot longer than that.”

“I figured you had to be Inside with Carmine. We got to do something about that paleface shit—a cop would
make you in a second. There's a sunlamp down here, too, and some lotion.”

“Will the people upstairs hear the toilet flush?”

“Just me is upstairs and I don't hear a thing. I'm not really worried about anybody seeing you—I'd just prefer it, you know? You got a PO to report to?”

“Just you, Pet.”

The old man smiled and went out, leaving Wesley alone. Wesley dialed his mind back to solitary confinement and did the next nineteen days in complete silence. He kept the radio on and the earplugs in most of the time, listening to the news with careful attention. He watched the TV with the sound off and looked carefully at the styles of clothing, haircuts, and cars; the way people carried themselves. He familiarized himself with how the Yankees were doing and who was mayor and everything else he could think of, since there was no library in Pet's basement.

There was no telephone, either. Wesley didn't miss one.

W
hen Petraglia returned to the basement, he found Wesley totally absorbed in the TV's silent screen, lying perfectly motionless on the floor in what looked like an impossibly uncomfortable position. The old man motioned Wesley to turn the set off, ignoring the pistol which had materialized in the younger man's hand when he entered the door.

“How in hell can you lay on the floor like that?”

“I can do it for at least three hours,” Wesley assured him.

“How d'you know that?”

“I already did it yesterday. And I found the piece in the toilet tank.” The old man seemed to understand both Wesley's gymnastics and his search of the premises and said nothing more about it.

They got back into the Ford and drove all the way out to the old shirt factory. It was dark on the FDR, and pure pitch-black once they turned into the Slip. Every streetlight in the neighborhood seemed to be smashed. The old man pressed the horn ring, but no sound came out—the side of a filthy wall seemed to open up, and he drove inside almost without slowing down. Another press on the horn ring and the same door closed silently behind them.

“This here is the first floor. We'll use it like a garage, since it used to be a loading bay. You going to live just below this. The rest of the place is empty, and it's like a damn echo chamber. I got the whole place mined—I'll show you the schematic before we go upstairs—enough stuff to put this building into orbit. We got a phone in the electrical shack on the roof.”

“What's an electrical shack? And what if someone hears it ring?”

“The shack is where they used to keep the compressors and the generators for the factory before they closed this place. And the phone
don't
ring. It don't work until you alligator-clip the receiver. I know what I'm doing, Wesley.” The old man sounded mildly hurt.

“I know that. Carmine said you were the best.”

“
One
of the best is what Carmine would have said, but he didn't know what was happening out here. The rest are gone, and now I
am
the best.”

Wesley smiled and, after a second, the old man smiled, too. They walked down the stairs to the apartment Pet had fixed up for him, Pet showing the security systems to Wesley as they walked. The walls on the lower level were all soundproofed, but Pet still kept his voice prison-soft as he talked.

“I'll have a job for you soon. Now, remember, there are a couple of rules in this kind of work: One, you never hit a man in his own home or in front of his children. Two, you never hit a man in a house of worship. Three, you
only
hit the man himself, nobody else.”

“Whose rules are these?”

“These are the rules of the people who make the rules.”

“Then they don't mean nothing—I'm coming for them, too.”

“I know that. I know what Carmine wanted. I'm just telling you so's you know how to act in front of them if that ever happens.”

“What you mean, in front of them?”

“You never know, right?”

“Them, too?”

“I mean, they're the real ones, right? Rich people?”

“Yeah, rich people … 
very
fucking rich people, Wesley.”

“Good. Now show me the rest.”

I
t took another ninety days for the place to fill up completely to Pet's satisfaction. The generator he installed would enable the place to run its electrical systems without city power. The freezer held enough for six months, and the old man installed a five-hundred-gallon water tank in the basement and slowly got it filled from outside sources. A gas tank the same size was also added, as was a complete lathe, drill press, and workbench. The chemicals were stored in an airtight, compartmentalized box.

“Off the grid,” was his only response to any of Wesley's questions. Finally, the old man fixed himself a place to live in the garage. There was still enough room for a half-dozen vehicles.

Wesley spent the next few weeks practicing—first, inside the place, so he knew every inch, especially how to get in and out unseen, even in daylight.

The last tile fell when Pet showed him the tunnel he had begun to construct.

“You can only use this
once
, Wes. It'll exit in the vacant lot on the corner of Water Street and the Slip. I'm going to fix it so's it's got about two feet of solid ground at its mouth, and then plank it up heavy. When you want to split that
one
time, you hit the depth-charge lever down here in your apartment, okay? That gives you a good ten minutes to get gone, and you'd better plan on using every second.”

Wesley later expanded his investigations, making ever-widening circles away from the factory, but always returning within twelve hours. Pet got him a perfect set of identification. “You can always get a complete ID bundle
in Times Square. Good stuff, too. But the boys selling it usually roughed it off some poor bastard, maybe totaled him, and it ain't worth the trouble. I know this guy who makes the stuff from scratch, on government blanks, too. A man like that, you pay what his work is worth. You remember that.”

Equipped with paper, Wesley could drive as well as walk. He began to truly appreciate Carmine's “no parole” advice.

When Pet came back one day, Wesley asked him about another kind of practice. “I need to work with the pieces. Where can I do it?”

“Right here. I got the fourth floor soundproofed. Anyway, with those silencers I made for you, you could blow the wall away and not have anybody catch wise.”

“What about practicing without the silencers?”

“What you want to do that for? All you'll get out of removing the front end is more
noise
, that's all. Even the long-range stuff has silencers now—I'll show you later.”

The old man was right. Wesley fired thousands of rounds, making the most minute adjustments before he was satisfied.

No one came around. No sirens, nothing.

It was easy to make the adjustments, since Pet had the entire fourth floor marked off in increments of six inches—ceiling, floors, and walls. Wesley worked out a rough formula: the smaller the caliber, the more accurate the shot. The more bullets flying, the less accurate each individual slug had to be. The closer to the target, the less time you had to get ready.

Pet came back late one night, pressed the silent warning system to let Wesley know he was there, and was already making himself a cup of the vile black mixture he called “coffee” by the time Wesley got to the garage.

“I got something for you,” the old man said. “It's a simple one. Probably just a test—I think they want to see if I can deliver.”