A Danger to Himself and Others: Bomb Squad NYC Incident 1 (10 page)

The bathroom had heavy chrome bars installed three feet up the wall, the only apparent concession in the apartment to Horn’s disability. O’Shea pictured the vet dragging himself there without his legs attached. There was a soft chair near the other side of the bed. That’s where, O’Shea was told, the EDC had pointed. He wondered whether Horn rested his prostheses there when he retired for the night.

Payne went through the dresser drawers. Among the clothing she found a blue butter-cookie tin filled with a few pictures from the army and held them up one by one as O’Shea snapped photos with his cell phone. The tin also contained an oak leaf cluster that Horn had never pinned to a medal ribbon and an old army ID. O’Shea remembered that Horn had had a VA card in his wallet.

In another drawer Payne found a few syringes. “Morphine,” she said. “Pretty miserable life, I’d imagine.”

“Pain...discomfort—yes. But if the guy was angry, there are no outward signs.”

“There’s a stain on the sidewalk in Times Square,” she said.

They went to the side yard through the outside door. Making a move to close it, O’Shea noticed that the wood by the strike plate had a fresh splinter.

“Hmm. Could’ve been jimmied,” he said. “And not long ago.”

Payne lifted her dark eyes to meet O’Shea’s. “Maybe he locked himself out recently.”

“Yeah.” O’Shea frowned. “That’s a possibility.”

THE CANDY HAD DONE NOTHING
to improve Diaz’s energy level, so he decided on a nap before dinner. He found Jennifer in the apartment, moving about. They exchanged a few pleasantries and he went to lie down, interlacing his fingers behind his head on top of the pillow. He stared up at the ceiling, thinking of Kahn and O’Shea and the Times Square case, but his eyes felt heavy and he drifted in and out of sleep, vaguely aware from time to time of Jennifer’s movements on the other side of the door. He heard cabinets opening and closing, creaks on the floorboards, water flowing…

The water carried Diaz’s mind to those puddles that formed on the coroner’s tarp. He pictured Albert Horn in his winter coat, hobbling along the sidewalk on Broadway, turning onto Forty-Third Street. He saw him hesitate in front of the recruiting station. What went through the suspect’s mind when he saw the sign on that building? Anger? Resentment? Or nothing you could put a finger on?

Although Diaz had spent most of his three tours in Iraq dismantling bombs, he’d also participated in a few firefights. He knew when the violence started that you were no longer fighting for abstract concepts like patriotism or freedom. You fought to save yourself and the soldiers in your unit, and maybe not even in that order, because the only thing worse than having to imagine your own end was feeling responsible when the other guy went home in a body bag. So maybe, thought Diaz, when Albert Horn returned to the States, despite all he gave for his country he carried that survivor’s guilt.

A man might want to end his life. Diaz could see that. And maybe he didn’t want to do so in a manner where his family would come home to find him. But a bomb on the street that might bring harm to innocent passersby? Didn’t an American soldier always risk his own life rather than endanger a single innocent?

The ceiling had an old water stain, looked like a cloud formation to Diaz, or the smoky shadow of fireworks. He closed his eyes as a far-off sound rose in the back of his head, like a bee buzzing, growing closer. It was a tune...took awhile for him to recognize it…“America the Beautiful.” A lyric that most people never reach drifted up to Diaz now:

O beautiful for heroes proved

In liberating strife,

Who more than self their country loved,

And mercy more than life.

Mercy.
He fell back to sleep with the tune stuck in his head, the lyric repeating.

When he awoke, he didn’t know whether he’d been asleep for two hours or two minutes. The bedroom window airshaft, ever cast in dirty darkness, didn’t tell him anything. Still groggy with sleep, he stumbled to the bathroom, where the door stood ajar, and pushed in. Jennifer’s hand caught the door before it hit her. She was standing in her underwear, topless, one breast flattened under the forearm that held the door, the other one right there in pink glory. The sight of it sent a shock through Diaz, clutched his throat.

“Jesus! Jennifer!”

“Excuse me,” she said with nonchalance. She made no effort to cover herself at first. Then, seeing the look on her roommate’s face, she snatched her bathrobe off the hook.

By the time she got it on he’d backed into the living room. She followed him.

“I’m finished in there.”

“That’s all you got to say?”

“I’m sorry. I thought you were asleep.”

“I was lying down, doesn’t mean I was out for the count. There are two people in this apartment.”

“You could knock.”

“The door was open.”

“Just a little. I was almost done. Anyway, it’s only a pair of tits, for God sake. Not World War Three.”

“We’re roommates, not lovers. I don’t need that in my face.”

“It was an accident. You don’t have to be such a prude, either.”

“Goddamn it!” He marched into his room, stepped into a pair of shoes and grabbed his coat.

“You’re storming out in anger again? This is getting to be a bad hab—”

Before she could finish, Diaz had slammed the door.

ATTACHED TO HIS APARTMENT IN
Brooklyn, Warren Manis had a workshop that any machinist would envy. It consisted of a series of small windowless rooms in an old factory, the first of these containing a long lathe, a bandsaw, a drill press, and a plastic fabricator, among other machines. In the second room, meticulously labeled bins lined a series of shelves, keeping the most obscure hardware easily at hand for Manis’s every need. A thick wooden workbench dominated the back room, tools on an expansive pegboard arranged like a planogram, with the most-used within easiest reach and the least-used hanging farther away. Finally, a closed-circuit monitor rested on a shelf, covering each form of ingress and egress.

He’d salvaged all of it over several years, down to the high-backed cushioned stool he found in a restaurant’s trash. That was the easiest to repair of all. It had only required a few screws and some fresh solder.

Manis lived visually. He had little sense of smell or taste, and his damaged hand, while not unfeeling, distorted his sense of touch. But he saw everything instantly in three dimensions, even vague concepts sketched out flat on a napkin. And if he could see it, he could build it. He was a walking CAD machine.

Pictures hung taped to the two short walls on either side of his workbench. To the right hung photos of the love of his life, the sexiest woman alive, the honey pot where his every waking thought got stuck. He wished she were here now, would never tire of her as long as he lived. Why couldn’t she be with him always? She said he was too intense, that she loved that about him but she couldn’t do it all the time. Their lovemaking was like an explosion that would leave them stunned and exhausted with their ears ringing. She needed time to recover from that, to rebuild, to refresh the accelerant.
The accelerant, yes, the dynamite.
They talked like that to each other sometimes, in their own code.

Manis looked at her pictures now and felt an overwhelming jealousy. Who did she let visit her nether regions when he wasn’t around? Who got to see that perfect ass? That perfect— He couldn’t even say it to himself. Did she wear the uniform when she gave it up to other guys? Did she give them anything different from what she gave him? Sometimes she said she gave them less—that there was no comparison—but then she’d leave hints about novelties he hadn’t experienced, torture him with her innuendos. It had always been this way between them, almost from the time of their reborn beginning, but it made him angry—though he knew that she liked that part, too. And that made him angrier still and caused him to do things that excited her.

It was all like a hall of facing mirrors, the illusion of depth with no exit. And yet, even though he knew it could be illusory in that way, he felt the anger rise in him now.

He had a multitool in his grasp. He flipped the blade out and ran the dull side between the space where the index and middle finger had been on his left hand. It felt cold in that sensitive, erogenous place. Made him horny. Stoked his anger.

On the wall hung a picture of her in leather, the bad girl. He approached it and held the point of the knife to the black fringe of her red panties, clutching his own crotch with the other hand. He wanted to pull those panties down with the knife right now, but she was far away. He scratched at them futilely, ink and paper fibers flaking off, felt a surge of bile rise in his throat, spun in a rage and flung his knife into the opposite wall.

He’d taped pictures of all the scumbags there. Now, as always, he saw them in three dimensions, their bright eyes, their animal physicality. The knife had embedded itself two inches into the wall, missing all of the pictures. Manis walked over and yanked it out. He scraped the plaster dust from the knife with the edge of his workbench, thinking that one day the methods of violence he’d chosen would not spare these men the way the knife had just missed their pictures.

FRIGID AIR HAD SETTLED OVER
Manhattan, and puddles from the previous night’s rain showed it—shallow puddles frozen solid, a layer of veined ice glazing the tops of the deeper ones. Where water sat on the parkway, the relentless thrumming of car tires had deposited the ice in a filthy frothy slick. Walking along the greenway path, Diaz sensed moments of driver panic in each thud and skid through those potholes, watched them wrestle their steering wheels back into alignment. He wished he were driving on that road just now, feeling the thrill of recovery from that momentary loss of control.

Was that what the bomber thought, just before the blast seized him—that somehow with that final act control would arrive? Whether he pressed the button himself or someone else did, was that feeling the same in the fractured moment?

Diaz thought about having opened the door on Jennifer. He’d seen plenty of women that way before. So why did seeing her there half dressed make him feel as if everything was slipping? Why did he react in anger to a simple misstep like that? She must think he had a short fuse by now, and he supposed she was right. He’d lose his roommate if he weren’t more careful.

Traffic was light on the Henry Hudson. Diaz, still thinking of Jennifer, felt the air seep out of him. He stepped over the jersey wall and began walking along the edge of the parkway, losing himself in the rush of passing cars.

A few minutes later, down by the Ninety-Sixth Street ramp, a Crown Victoria swung around him and screeched to a stop. Cop in an unmarked, blinkers going. The guy jumped out, tall and strapping.

“That you, Diaz?”

Shit.
It took him a minute to recognize the guy, Peter Hernandez, another detective on the squad.

“Yeah, hey, Pedro.”

“This is no place to be, my man, hardly any shoulder. What’re you doing out here—car trouble?”

“Nah. Just taking a walk.”

Hernandez pointed to the park. “That’s what the path is for.”

“I know. I—I thought I saw something.”

“What?”

“Turned out to be nothing. Funny coincidence, you being here.”

“I spotted you from the other side. I did a U-turn. You want a lift?”

“No, thanks.” Diaz climbed back over the divider. “I needed the fresh air. Had a fight with my roommate, if you wanna know the truth. Better to walk back, cool off.”

“Okay.” Hernandez hesitated. “Be careful out here. They fly on this road.”

From the greenway Diaz watched him get back into the Ford and pull away. His tires spun out when he first hit the gas.

Diaz squinted into the night. He stuck to the park path on the way back home.

A WIND HAD PICKED UP
in Crown Heights, and the cold made Warren Manis’s eyes water, reinforcing his alertness. This was another big night. Adrenaline streamed through his chest, and his heart thrummed with excitement.

He’d had to wait only half an hour for Littel’s bedroom light to go off. Then another hour, walking up and down the block, keeping moving not only for the cold but also to remain as inconspicuous as possible on a quiet neighborhood street. Yet he couldn’t go far because he couldn’t allow his eyes to drift away from Littel’s window.

When the time came to act, Manis settled his black backpack on his shoulders, walked with authority toward the house, flipped one leg then the other over the low fence, and disappeared under the stoop. He peered through the glass of the basement door, seeing no sign of movement, just the blue-green glow from the night-lights. It took a matter of seconds for him to jimmy the door. He closed it behind him most of the way but didn’t allow it to latch.

Inside, he slipped off his shoes and set down his backpack and slid open the zipper, leaving the backpack closed just enough not to let it splay apart. He hooked it over one shoulder and in stocking feet climbed the stairs to the hallway outside Littel’s room. He listened at the open door, heard Littel wheezing in sleep, and proceeded down the hall to the bathroom.

There it was: that beautiful machine, resting on the towel. Manis shucked the backpack off again, setting it down atop the vanity. He slipped his hand into the pouch and closed his gloved fingers around the familiar curve of the replacement prosthetic arm. He had lived with the parts of this arm for so many hours, tightened and re-checked every screw, tested every micro-motor, shaped the plastic to match the original by every measure. Most important, he’d carefully reduced the essential core to its most elegant basics, managing not even to include an entire cell phone, just the parts that he needed. Being lighter, this arm was more of a challenge than the leg. He had many fewer grams to work with, and if his calculations were off by even a couple percent, Littel would immediately notice. To make room for his load Manis had to make the casing extra thin, the mechanisms less sturdy. It wouldn’t hold up to much abuse. In a week it would likely crack or begin to malfunction. But long before then it would already have served its purpose. He knew the most likely route that Littel would follow tomorrow.