A Bomb Built in Hell (8 page)

“They think it's you going to be doing it?”

“Yeah, me and my ‘organization,' right?”

“Right. Good. Tell me.”

“It's a pawnshop right off Pleasant Avenue. The guy who runs it fronts for them. He's making good coin where he is, but he's a greedy fuck. When he started selling dope out of the place, he was stepping too close to the locals, and they dimed him out. He's looking at about a hundred years for what they nailed him with—he rolled over like a dog. But none of them know
we
know, so the feds are leaving him out there to get more—when it comes to info, they're as greedy as he was. They've even got an undercover working for him, right in the shop.”

“Who's doing that?”

“A cop, from the CIB; a Puerto Rican kid, he looks like, but he's a cop for sure. Supposed to be a stock boy or something like that, but he uses that phone too much … and he ain't placing bets.”

“So him, too?”

“Maybe more—the pawn guy's on the pad, and the beat bulls keep a close watch on his store. You know, so's he won't get taken off by some kid with a pistol.”

“Can we get him over here some night?”

“Forget that! The first rule is that
nothing
gets done down here. We got to protect this territory completely. No dope fiends, no freaks, no fucking
nobody
, never. This is the safe house, understand? No, he's got to be hit right in his shop.”

“Why not at his house, where he lives?”

“Too much pressure on the boys, it happens there. The Muslims have been giving this rat bastard hell because they know he's dealing. So we make it look like they did it.”

“A white man in Harlem?”

“You thinking about him or you?”

“Me.”

“Good. You ever use explosives?”

“Just grenades. In the Army.”

“Same stuff. You light it, you throw it, and you get the fuck outta the way, right?”

“They might get out, too. No, wait a minute … are they both up front in the place?”

“Usually the cop stays in the back—but if he thinks you from the People, he'll drift up. So he'd be able to testify against you later.”

“Doesn't this guy know who his contact is?”

“No. He's a small-time weasel. Any fucking hood comes in there with a ‘message from the boys' and this faggot'll listen, you know?”

“Okay, when does the cop leave the place at night?”

“The guy we want opens up around ten. His cop helper gets there around noon. They work a long day, close up around eleven at night. We'll take the cab. Cost me twenty-eight large, but it's like being invisible.”

W
ednesday night, 9:10 p.m. A yellow medallion cab rolled up in front of the pawnshop, the old man at the wheel. Pet slid the cab down about four doors from the target and pulled out a newspaper. He poked a small hole in the middle of the paper with a sharp pencil, adjusted his rearview mirror until he was satisfied. Then he slipped the cab into gear and rested his left foot lightly on the brake; the rear brake lights did not go on.

Wesley climbed out of the back of the cab. He was dressed in a steel-gray sharkskin one-button suit with a dark-gray shirt and light-gray tie. His shoes flashed like black mirrors, in rhyme-time with the oversized white Lindy Star on his right pinky. His watchband matched his cufflinks, which matched his tie clip; his snap-brim fedora was pearl gray. He carried a small, round cardboard hatbox.

The bells above the door tinkled as Wesley entered. The shop was empty of customers. The pawnbroker was up front in the cage.

“Can I help you?”

“No, I can help you, pal. I got a message from the boys—they want you to take this package and …”

The Puerto Rican drifted toward the front as Wesley's voice trailed off.

“Who's this?” Wesley challenged.

“Oh, this is Juan, my stock boy. He's okay; he knows the score.”

“Get him over here—I want to see his face.”

Juan walked toward the front of the cage, smiling at the idea that this petty mobster wanted to see
his
face.
Wesley brought the 9mm Beretta out of the hatbox. The silencer made it seem six feet long, but Juan caught two slugs in the chest before he had a chance to wonder about it or make a move.

“Always take the hard man first—it's tougher on your guts, but if you take the soft man first, you won't be fucking alive to feel good behind it,”
Carmine had schooled Wesley, years ago.

Wesley immediately turned the gun on the other man, who flung his hands into the air. Wesley said, “Open the cashbox!” so the target would relax, and blew away the side of his face as the man bent toward the drawer.

Wesley put the hatbox down on the floor, clicked the snap-fuse open, and wheeled toward the door. He flipped the sign from “OPEN” to “CLOSED” and set the spring lock behind him as he went out. He was into the back seat of the cab and Pet was smoothly pulling away before Wesley could get the “Eight seconds!” out of his mouth.

They caught the first light and were headed east when they heard the explosion. Traffic stalled. Everyone tried to figure out where the noise had come from, but a cop, who empathized with any white man's desire to get the hell out of Harlem before dark, waved them through.

T
hey hit the FDR rolling. The meter showed $4.65 by the time they neared the Slip.

“When we going to switch?” Wesley asked.

“We're not. Nobody's following us. I got a car buried on Park and Eighty-eighth and another in Union Square, but we don't need them now. I'll pick them up tomorrow. Change the numbers of this one tonight—nothing to it. We don't want to make problems by getting too cute.”

The late news had a story about a firebombing in Harlem; the reporter said it looked like a “terrorist act.” The film clips showed the entire front of the pawnshop and the stores on either side completely obliterated. The firemen were still battling the blaze, and it was not known if anyone had been inside at the time of the explosion.

A full-regalia NYPD spokesman announced that a confidential informant had told them that two men, both Negro, of average height, were seen running from the shop heading west just before the explosion. The police expected arrests to follow.

“Were you the informant?” Wesley asked.

“You must be kidding, Wes. There's
always
some righteous asshole who pulls that kind of number. Every job I ever knew about had fifty fucking leads called in that didn't have nothing to do with what actually went down.”

“Don't the cops know this?”

“And you Carmine's son! For Chrissakes, kid, don't you know all they care about is making an arrest? They could give a fuck about who's really guilty. Didn't you get bum-beefed when you went down?”

“No. I did it, all right. I got ratted out by a scumbag clerk in a hotel.”

“Don't you want to pay him back?”

“Someday, when it ties in with something else. But I can't risk what we're doing just for payback.”

“Good! Where is he?”

“Times Square.”

“I can fucking guarantee you that sooner or later we'll get into his territory. I always hated to work down there, though. Those fucking freaks, you never know what they're going to do.”

“I know what they're going to do.”

“How the hell do
you
know?”

“One of them told me.”

I
t was slightly more than a year later when Wesley asked, “How come they're paying a hundred K for this guy? What's so hard about him?”

“He used to run all the family business in Queens, but they had a sit-down and told him he's out. He took it the way he was supposed to, but there's still got to be a war over this—he still controls Queens, and they don't let you do that.”

“Do what?”

“Keep tapping the till. He says he's not the boss, but his crew isn't going for that. This guy is
sharp
, now. No telephones, no mail. He lives in a fucking fortress out near the North Shore on the Island, and he runs the show from there.”

“Can we get at him?”

“No way. I was by there myself a few times, and you'd have to fucking drop a
bomb
on the place. And even
that
might not work—he's got himself an air-raid shelter, left over from the Fifties.

“But he has to stay in touch. Got no choice. So, every month, he meets his capo on the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge.”

“What? Right out in the open?”

“Yeah, Wesley, right out in the open. But it ain't just
him
that's out in the open. And we don't know what night he meets on. All we know is that it's always late. He gets a ride to the Queens side and meets the capo halfway across. On the walkway. He's got men on the Queens side, and his capo has cover on the Manhattan side.”

“Couldn't we just drive past and hit him?”

“How? We don't know when he's coming, and if they see the same car pass back and forth,
we're
the ones who'll get hit. Besides, he stands with his back to the girders, and you couldn't get a decent shot at him, even if you could get on the bridge.”

“How much time have we got?”

“If we get him before he wins the war, we get paid. If he loses the war first, we don't. If he wins the war, we
sure
don't.”

“How long before the war starts? Out in the open, I mean.”

“It may not start at all—they're still trying to negotiate. But they also want to cover all their bets, you know?”

“How come they don't try and cover
you
, with all the work you been doing for them?”

“They think they have. But they
also
think I got a
nice little organization of my own, with all old guys like me, and they don't want to
start
a war to prevent one. They're very slick, right?”

Wesley smiled. “Can you get me onto Welfare Island after dark?”

The old man nodded and got up to leave. Wesley climbed up to the fourth floor and took the rifle chambered for .219 Zipper from the gun rack. That cartridge had originally been designed for a lever-action Marlin—good enough for a varmint gun, but not for Wesley's work.

He had spent hours fitting the custom barrel to a full-bedded stock. Now it was a single-action weapon, and magnificently accurate. But he still couldn't make it hold a silencer, and he had more practicing to do.

Just as Wesley squeezed off another round, he noticed the orange light glowing immediately past his range of vision. Smoothly and calmly, he pulled the massive Colt Magnum from his shoulder holster and spun to face the door. It opened, and Pet stepped inside, a wide grin on his face. Wesley put the gun down and waited.

“Wes, I got a present for you,” Pet said, displaying another rifle.

“What's that? I already got a good piece.”

“You got nothing compared to this. This here's a Remington .220, the latest thing. It's got twice the muzzle velocity of that Zipper and it's more accurate, every time. And that's not the best part. I know a guy who works for the bullet people—he's a ballistics engineer. You know what he told me? He said that the engineers
test-fire some slugs from every batch that the factory manufactures, to see if they're building the slugs up to the specs. Well, every once in a while they come across some that're just perfect, you know? They call these bullets ‘freaks,' okay? And the engineers always take the whole batch and fire them themselves to see if they can figure out why these bullets work so good. Anyway, I got fifty rounds of those ‘freaks,' just for this piece.”

“I can make a three-inch group at seven hundred yards with the Zipper,” Wesley said, doubtfully.

“The man told me he could double that distance and still group the same with this piece. And he's no marksman.”

“Let me see it.”

“Okay, kid. But remember, I only got fifty rounds.”

“I'll test-fire it with some over-the-counter stuff first.”

F
our hours later, Wesley came down to the garage.

“Is it as accurate as the man said?” Pet asked him.

“Better. But it's the loudest damn thing I ever heard.”

“So what? No point in silencing it anyway from the Island—the chumps on either shore'll think it was a backfire. We hit a guy like that once, years ago, me and Carmine. I set the car up so's it would backfire like a sonofabitch, right? So we're driving down the street with the car backfiring, and the creep ducks behind his bodyguards … but then they get wise it's only the car, and he starts laughing like a fool. He was still laughing
when Carmine sent him a message, and the bodyguards couldn't figure out what happened until we were around the corner.”

“The engineer was sure right about this piece,” Wesley said. “Any chance of getting some more slugs from him?”

“No. It was in the papers yesterday. Somebody must have wired his car. It blew up when he turned on the ignition.”

W
esley and Pet replaced the stock of the new rifle. With a new cheek-piece, hand-sanded to micro-tolerances, it fit Wesley's face perfectly. He also had the latest nightscope: U.S. Army issue, and then only to jungle-sniper teams. Pet built a long black anodized-aluminum cone to hide the flash. Wesley mounted the piece on a tripod and sat comfortably behind it for a while. Then he disassembled the unit and climbed to the roof.

It was shadowy black on the waterfront as Wesley sighted in. He picked up a man and a woman in the scope, lying on the grass just off the river. The range was almost a mile, and Wesley carefully dialed in until he could see the man clearly. The nightscope worked to perfection: the man looked like he was in a spotlight against a dark background. The crosshairs focused on the man's upper chest, then on his face, and then on his left eye. Yes … there. With such a high-speed, low-density bullet, a chest shot wasn't a sure kill.