A Bomb Built in Hell (15 page)

Wesley thought about the plate shop and all the bogus dealer-plates the cons made for sale to the guards, who,
in turn, sold them to the mob and used the money to buy dope to sell back to the cons, who stabbed each other to death over the distribution rights and ended up locked in solitary, watched by those same guards.

He remembered another contribution from Lee's library: Mao's “The guerrilla is the fish in the water; the leaf on the tree.” And remembered how he'd thought you had to be a damn slimy fish to swim in this city.

Finally, he faced it. Wiping out Carmine's employers wouldn't end it. He couldn't let Pet go just for that. Wesley was deep into his second pack of cigarettes when he got to his feet to go downstairs. It was nearly dawn, and the street was starting to lighten, but it was still as deserted as ever.

It would have to be gas.

T
he next night, the two men looked over the building. It was easy enough to get into the back once Pet torched off the bolts. He replaced them with his own, adding fresh locks for which he had good keys.

When they got to the top floor, Wesley asked, “Can you make this room airtight?”

“In a couple of weeks, sure. But we won't be able to do it quietly.”

“Have we got enough to buy this building?”

“Yeah, but if you're going to leave them all here …”

“Buy it in Carmine's name.”

“Come
on
, Wes. Be yourself. We need only clean paper on something like this.”

“Can you get that?”

“Sure. For about ten large, from the Jew on Broome Street.”

“I heard of him, but I don't know where he is, exactly. Do you?”

“No, but I can find him easy enough. He's a professional.”

“Okay. Try it that way first. Buy the building and get us all the stuff we talked about.”

“I don't think you should work on that part, Wes. Let me use the kid—it's really only a two-man job, anyway.”

They found the kid inside the garage, sitting next to the Ford. The dog was standing by the entrance to Wesley's hallway, watching; he sat down when Wesley came in. The kid looked at the floor.

“The old lady's dead,” he said.

“What old lady?” Wesley asked him.

“The lady who addressed the envelopes for us, remember?”

“Yeah. You had to …?”

“I called for her this morning, and they told me she killed herself last night. Took about fifty sleeping pills. She must've been saving them for weeks.”

“You think she knew?”

“Yeah, she knew, all right. She was old, not stupid. I told you she'd never give me up.”

Pet put his hand on the kid's shoulder. “I never thought she would, kid. She loved you. So she had to make sure they'd never come for you through her.”

The kid nodded.

Wesley never changed expression. He abandoned his plans to visit the old lady, snapped his fingers for the
dog, and went to his apartment, leaving Pet and the kid alone to plan the building project.

W
esley spent the next five days on the top floor, the next four nights on the roof. He read the papers carefully, as he always did. The news carried a column about a new methadone clinic being opened up on Pike Street. It was directly across from the Projects and only about six blocks away from the factory on Water Street. Wesley felt an overpowering sense of encroachment, as if a malevolent force had just entered his life.

He went back into his newspaper file. The headlines formed a story sequence on their own:

Wesley reflected, deep within himself. Cocaine was going way up in price. Methadone didn't block reaction to Lady Snow, the way it did with heroin. Girl had more
kick than Boy, and Freebase was the coming thing. Carmine had told him, hundreds of times, that no government policy was ever an accident, but this …

Methadone. A way to register every dope fiend in the country. A way to control habits, supplies, prices … lives.

Wesley thumbed through the laboriously titled “Methadone Maintenance Treatment Program of the New York City Health Services Administration: Policy and Procedure Manual,” and finally found what he was looking for on page E-1:

Wesley had asked the librarian for any official publications on the program, but was bluntly told such information was not public. Three days later, a junkie had met Wesley in front of the Felt Forum and gotten into the Ford.

“I got it, man,” he had said, handing over the manual. “You got the bread?”

“Yeah,” Wesley told him, tucking the bills into the junkie's shirt pocket. “You want to make another fast hundred?”

“Sure, man. I need—”

“I know. Just hang on, now.”

Wesley swung the car into the Eighth Avenue traffic stream and took Eighth all the way to 57th. From there,
he went crosstown and got on the upper roadway of the 59th Street Bridge. They crossed the bridge in silence, the junkie unaware they were bracketed by Pet in the cab and the kid in the Fleetwood.

Carmine had told him, “You ever go to a meet with a junkie, you remember two things: one, go with cover; and two,
don't
go heeled. Every fucking junkie is a potential rat, and an ex-con, packing, in
this
state, you're down for the whole count.”

The junkie was already nodding off the free cap Wesley had laid on him—his tolerance was for heroin, not Thorazine. He was drifting into unconsciousness as Wesley parked on the bridge between Northern Boulevard and Skillman Avenue in Long Island City, overlooking Sunnyside Yard. The yard was once the world's biggest railroad center, but it was largely abandoned now. The only business the neighborhood did was the giant Queens Social Services Center—the city's new euphemism for “Welfare”—on the corner.

Wesley hauled the junkie out of the car. He leaned himself and the junkie against the railing. The street was empty. A cab cruised by slowly, Pet at the wheel. The junkie was barely breathing. Wesley had read about people so relaxed that they didn't die even when falling from great heights. He slammed the ice pick into the back of the junkie's neck and shoved him over the railing in one smooth motion.

A
big red-white-and-blue sign materialized on Water Street, right across from the factory. It proclaimed
the area to be part of the TWO BRIDGES RECLAMATION PROJECT. Wesley figured that the only thing “reclaimed” would be the fixer's piece of the federal expenditures, and that nothing would be torn down or built there for years. Plenty of time.

But a methadone clinic, that was another story entirely—too close and too much trouble.

Methadone meant government-inspected dope. It meant sales-and-service. And too many greedy people always sliding around in their own grease.

Pet came back later in the day. He told Wesley that the building on Chrystie had been purchased—he and the kid were going to get to work on it right away.

Wesley just nodded, deep in his own problems.

T
he triplex pump was installed without difficulty. It would work to almost unlimited pressures and function for more than sixteen hours straight at top speed. The pump was connected to a simple tubing system with seventy-two tiny outlets bored into the ceiling. The hydrocyanic acid was easy to obtain. When forced through alcohol, it produced a gas much more deadly than the apple-blossom perfume they used to snuff enemies of the state in California.

The interior rapidly took shape: expensive leather lounge chairs, a wet bar against one wall, a huge blackboard directly opposite, indirect lighting, a highly polished hardwood floor, a large air-conditioning unit prominently displayed in the single window.

The marks wouldn't be remotely suspicious of bars
across the windows of any building being renovated in that part of town. The entrance to the room was only through a pocket door. But instead of the usual four-inch penetration, this door went two feet into the frame, activating a series of snap locks with every six inches it moved down its track.

Wesley and Pet went over the plans dozens of times; revised them again and again; discussed, modified, refined, changed, sharpened, rejected … always polishing. The kid was going to have to be used for this one, too. There wasn't any other way, and they'd be short-handed as it was.

“Remember, unless everything goes
exactly
like we expect, the whole thing is off.”

“Wes, maybe we'll never get another chance,” Pet said. “So what if we …?”

“Forget it. There's a lot more to do now. Stuff I didn't know about before. This is for Carmine, but there's a lot left for me and you, after.”

“I don't get it. I thought we were just going to take them and—”

“We are, but I'm not going with them. And … and you're not, either, Pet.”

“Okay,” the old man said slowly. “Only if everything goes perfect.”

T
uesday, 10:33 p.m. Pet's cab pulled up at the back-alley door to the building on Chrystie Street. The ill-tempered don in the back seat said, “I still don't see why we couldn't bring our own cars.”

“It's security, Mr. G. This way, you have your own bodyguard with you, but if those freaks are watching your home, they'll think you're still there. And they'd never try anything like that on your kids if you
was
home, right?”

The don didn't answer, but grunted in agreement.

He waited in the car while Pet rapped three times sharply on the steel slab. The kid opened the door. He wore a shoulder holster filled with a .45 and carried an M3 grease gun with the stock fully retracted. He saluted Pet, who waved the two waiting men inside.

The kid said, “Please be seated and make yourselves comfortable, gentlemen. The others will be arriving shortly.” The first-floor room was soundproofed. A large-screen color TV took up most of the space in one corner. “If you want a drink or something to eat, or anything at all,” the kid said, “just ask me, okay?”

By 11:45 p.m., they were all assembled. Salmone had been the last to arrive, as befitted his station in the hierarchy. The kid went outside, changed places with Pet, and drove off in the cab.

Inside, Pet addressed the assembled group. “Gentlemen! We are going upstairs to a room where we can talk and where I can show you the things I've discovered about these freaks. They can be hit; but it's going to cost—”

Mumbled chorus of:

“Naturally.”

“Who gives a fuck?”

“
Whatever
it costs!”

“—and I have to insist that, for your own protection,
I be the only one to talk when we're upstairs,” Pet continued. “That way there won't be any need to waste time searching for bugs. You can put your own bodyguards anyplace around the building or inside that you want, but be sure they can't be seen.”

Salmone immediately took over. “Tony, over here. You and Sal stay by this back door; Johnny, come upstairs with me. Okay? Lenny, have your man take the front door with Sam's guy. Al, you leave a couple of men on the stairs. I need at least two more men outside the upstairs door. Everybody else, come with us.”

The men moved silently into position. Pet led the way upstairs. They all filed into the big room. The door slid closed behind them so quietly that it was impossible to judge the depth to which it penetrated into the panel. The air conditioner was the only sound in the room.

Pet walked to the front of the room and seated himself behind a small desk in front of the blackboard. The others arranged themselves in a loose semicircle facing him, the bosses seated and the bodyguards standing. There was no hum of conversation—snapping fingers and impatient gestures indicated desires for drinks, cigars to be lighted, and deployment of personnel.

Pet began to talk. “We got the whole story now. It's a whole fucking crew of freaks. Longhairs. All on drugs. They call themselves the People's Harvest of Vengeance, and they got connections to the …”

As Pet was talking, the kid approached the two men standing outside the back door in the alley. He showed himself clearly, hands spread in the reflected light so the men would relax. There was no sound, but the top
of one guard's head seemed to mushroom from under his hat—he fell heavily to the ground. The kid immediately glanced up toward the roof; the other guard involuntarily followed with his own eyes. The kid was already bringing up his own silenced pistol—the slug caught the second guard full in the chest, killing on contact.

The kid whistled sharply, craning his neck to throw the sound up to where Wesley knelt on the roof, holding the silenced M16. As the kid pocketed his own weapon, Wesley gently tossed the rifle over the edge of the roof; it sailed flat through the air and into the kid's arms. Practicing that maneuver to perfection-certainty had been a bitch.

The kid quickly laid down the rifle and opened the back door. Then he dragged the dead men inside. Taking the rifle, he walked quickly through the building until he came to a blank wall. He pulled a lever, and a portion of the wall slid out. The kid stepped through the opening and kept walking, until he was near the front of the building, facing the street.

There was no glass in the big front window, and the backs of the two guards were clearly visible. Secure they were covered, they focused all their attention on the street. They were taking their job seriously—unlike the cash, the fear that gripped their bosses had trickled
all
the way down.