A Bomb Built in Hell (18 page)

“Last time I was here, he said he'd taught me all he knew … and that you'd teach me the rest.”

“The rest of what
I
know. And then you …”

“I know.”

“From now on, I'm the outside-man, right? You're gone—nobody sees you, got it?”

“Yes.”

“You got your stuff?”

“All my weapons are here already, except my carry-piece. All my clothes, too.”

Wesley led the kid to the now indistinguishable spot on the floor under which the old man lay buried.

“The old man's there,” he said, pointing.

“Seems like he should have—”

“What? A fucking headstone? A monument? He left his monument on Chrystie Street.”

“I know.”

“Then
act
like you know,” Wesley told him, unconsciously imitating the old man.

The kid turned away without another word. “Who fucked up the Ford? It's too shiny for—”

“Fix it. Fix all of them. You know what to do.”

“You going to do what Pet did?”

“I can't. I can't talk to people like that. But for right now I don't have to. You know all the systems?”

“Pet showed me last week.”

Wesley faded from the garage, leaving the kid alone.

T
hat same night, Wesley wheeled the back-to-matte Ford down Water Street and took the FDR toward the Brooklyn Bridge. He met the man with the money from the Mansfield job in front of City Hall, on lower Broadway. The man climbed into the back seat of the Ford and handed twenty-five thousand across to Wesley as the car pulled away.

“You want another job?” the man asked.

“Who, how much time I got, and how much?”

“You hit kids?”

“Same three questions,” Wesley said, flat-voiced. “Answer them or split.”

“It's not actually a hit—it's a snatch. You got to—”

“No good.”

“No good? You haven't even
heard—
”

“Get out,” Wesley told the man as he pulled over to the curb.

“Hey! Fuck you, man. I'm not getting out, and you're
not blasting me in the middle of the fucking city, either. Now, just—”

Wesley pulled a cable under the dash and the back seat of the four-door sedan whipped forward on its greased rails, propelled by twelve five-hundred-pound test-steel springs. The front seat was triple-bolted to reinforced steel beams in the floor—it weighed six hundred pounds.

The effect was like being thrown into a solid steel wall at forty miles per hour.

The man's entire chest cavity was crushed like an eggshell. Wesley turned and shoved the seat backward with both hands; with the steel springs released from their tension, it clicked back into place. The dead man remained plastered against the plastic slipcover of the front seat. Another quick shove and he was on the floor. Wesley tugged at a pull cord, and the body was covered with a black canvas tarp. The whole operation took well under a minute.

Wesley had never turned off the engine. He put the car in gear and moved off. His first thought was simply to drive the car into the garage as it was and let the kid handle the disposal. But then he remembered that the kid had to be protected, as Wesley himself had been protected.

He deliberately drove the Ford under the shadows of the Manhattan Bridge. It looked like a prowl car “undercovers” would drive—there was some immediate rustling in the shadows when he pulled in.
Too
much rustling.

Wesley pulled out again and hit the Drive. He rolled along until he came to the Avenue D Projects, took the off-ramp, and turned back the way he'd come. Back at the Projects, he pointed the car down the private path that only the Housing Authority cops were supposed to use. No one challenged the car.

Wesley drove until he saw an unoccupied bench. He stopped the car and got out. After a quick scan, he pulled the dead man out and propped him up convincingly on the bench. The man's head fell down on his crushed chest—not an unfamiliar sight after dark.

Wesley drove out of the Projects without trouble and was back inside the garage in minutes. The kid came out of the shadows with his grease gun; he lowered the barrel when he saw the Ford.

“Don't ever drop your guard unless you see it's me, understand? Don't be looking at any fucking
car
!”

The kid said nothing.

“It might've been seen,” Wesley told him. “I had to use the springs. It's got to be painted with new plates and maybe some—”

“I know what to do,” the kid interrupted, on surer ground now.

Wesley went back to his own place.

I
t wasn't hard to find humans who wanted problems disposed of and expected to pay for the service, but the process was hard on Wesley. All the bargaining—they
always
tried that—the jabber-jabber, the need they all had to “explain.”

It wasn't like before, when Pet had fronted it off. Wesley tried the Times Square bars first, but he couldn't mesh, even with the freaks. The way they looked at him, the way they moved aside when they saw him coming—it told him his face was still too flat and his eyes still too cold.

The stubby blonde hustler was working her way down the end of the long bar, her flesh-padded hips gently bumping anyone who looked remotely like he'd go for a minimal financial investment. When she got to Wesley, he turned and tried a smile.

“Sit down,” he told her. “Have a drink.”

“Aw … Look, baby, I got to go to the little girls' room. Order me a Pink Lady and I'll be right back.”

Less than ten minutes later, the truth came to Wesley. He went back out into the night.

I
nside the warehouse, Wesley methodically went through all the papers the old man had left. He found a fine-ruled notebook with a black plastic cover. The first page said “CLIENTS,” and each succeeding page was devoted to a single individual: name, addresses, phone numbers—business and home—and other miscellaneous information. He also saw prices next to each name:

It took Wesley a long time to go through the book, figuring which people he had already worked for—he
had never known names except when it was absolutely necessary to the job. Slowly and carefully, he extracted enough data to put together a list of the jobs they had never done. Had Pet kept a list of potentials?

The only area codes Wesley saw next to the phone numbers were 516, 914, 201, and 203. Long Island, Westchester, northern New Jersey, southern Connecticut. The seven-digit numbers Wesley assumed were 212—anywhere within the five boroughs.

The next night, Wesley prepared to try all the 516 numbers. He didn't take the Ford—it was
too
nondescript. And the Eldorado was a little too hard to miss. He couldn't drive the cab like Pet, make it seem as if he belonged behind the wheel, although the kid could.

Finally, he settled on the Firebird—a chocolate-brown 1970 model with a worked-over undercarriage and very sticky radial tires. He checked the electromagnets, releasing the pistol they held in place, then returned it under the dash. He put six rolls of dimes and five rolls of quarters in the glove compartment and stashed a long, rectangular gray metal box full of equipment in the console between the seats.

Wesley took the Brooklyn Bridge to the BQE, connecting to the Long Island Expressway. He was wearing a dark blue J. Press summer-weight suit with a light-blue knit shirt, no tie. It all fit well with the car, as did the complete set of credit cards that matched his comeback-clean driver's license and registration.

“You can't fucking beat that American Express Gold for impressing the rollers, Wes. Any sucker can cop the
Green, but the Gold is for high-class faggots. The Man sees that, he figures you not the right guy to roust.”
If Wesley was surprised that Pet's words ran through his mind the way Carmine's did, it didn't show on his face.

He kept the car just past the speed limit all the way to Exit 40. From there it was only a mile or so to the giant Gertz parking lot. He picked out one of the outdoor phone booths near the back. The area was empty except for a gang of kids listening to their car radios, all tuned to the same station. It was loud, but it wouldn't disturb conversation inside the booth.

Wesley quickly swept the booth with the tiny scanner Pet had shown him how to use—it was clean. A hard twist removed the mouthpiece; then Wesley inserted the flat metal disc with its network of printed circuits and perforations which exactly matched the original. Voiceprints were getting to be as much of a problem as fingerprints, and staying ahead was the same as staying alive.

The first number was a busy signal; the second, no answer. The third was in Hewlett Harbor. A soft-voiced woman picked up the phone.

“Hello.”

“Could I speak with Mr. Norden, please?” Wesley asked, just politely enough.

“May I tell him who is calling?”

“Mr. Petraglia.”

The phone was silent for almost thirty seconds; Wesley was going to give it forty-five and then hang up. A
clipped, hard voice came on the line: “Do you think it was wise to give your name like that?”

“Would you have come to the phone otherwise?” Wesley replied.

“You're not …”

“I'm his brother. In the same business. He told me to call you.”

“Well, I still have the problem, but time is getting …”

“This is all the talking I do on the phone. Tell me where to meet you.”

“Can you be at the Sequoia Club in an hour? You know where it is?”

“In one hour.”

“Listen! How will I know you? Do you—?”

“Just go in the back and sit down,” Wesley told him. “I'll find you.”

“Look, I—”

Wesley replaced the receiver, first exchanging the voice-alteration disc with the stock item. The shiny chrome of the phone coin box picked up fingerprints perfectly. Wesley knew smearing them was better than wiping them—a pristine surface would be a message all its own. A man wearing gloves in the summer making a phone call would be too much for even a Nassau County cop to pass up. But you could see their orange-and-blue squad cars coming a hundred yards away.

Pet's book had all the information about the Sequoia, and Wesley had thoroughly checked it out on a street map of Norden's area before driving out to the Island. He dialed his mind to dismiss all the information he had
memorized on the first two people he had called, focusing on what he knew about Norden.

There wasn't much, except the price was the highest in the 516 section: “$100K.” And a code: “P/ok,” which Wesley took to mean that Norden had used this service previously and had paid off without incident.

A
s Wesley approached the Firebird, he took in the three kids sitting on its hood and fenders. When he got closer, he looked into their faces and got blank, vicious smiles in return—they were bullies, not predators, still too young to see what the Times Square hustler had instantly recognized. They nudged each other as Wesley came even closer, sliding off the Firebird at the last moment.

They were smiling when Wesley took out the keys and opened the door. They kept smiling as he started the engine. And never noticed that Wesley hadn't fully closed the door—his left foot was pressing out against it with nearly all his strength, held in check only by the slightly greater pressure of his left hand and forearm locked onto the door handle from the inside.

The three kids assembled in front of the driver's door. Still smiling, their leader motioned for Wesley to lower the window. Wesley flicked the power-window switch on the center console with his right hand, and the tinted glass whispered down. The leader came up to the window, flanked by his partners.

“Say, mister, could you help us out?” he sneered. “We need a hundred bucks for a cup of coffee.” The
other two laughed nervously, their hands in their jacket pockets.

Wesley looked up; the veins in his forearm were popping full under the suit coat's jacket. “Get the fuck outta here, punk,” he said softly.

The leader whipped out a switchblade in what he thought was a lightning move. It was so unprofessionally slow and so stupidly flashy that Wesley had to make himself wait—he didn't want to fire any shots in the parking lot. The kid was about two feet from the door when Wesley suddenly released his left hand. One hundred and fifty pounds of reinforced steel swinging on siliconed ball bearings smashed the kid from his knees to his waist, throwing him back against his partners. Wesley flicked the selector lever into gear and the Firebird screamed off, fishtailing slightly to get traction. He was up to fifty in seconds, leaving the two kids bending over their fallen partner.

Wesley turned left out of the parking lot, heading for the North Shore. More trouble to kill them than not to. They weren't about to go to the police, not those kind. They'd lick their wounds, contenting themselves with their punk visions of hot revenge that would never happen. Wesley's mind flashed back to the clerk in the Roxy Hotel. He banished the thought, concentrating.

T
he uniformed parking-lot attendant gave him a “Thank you, sir!” and a stamped ticket in exchange for his car key. Surrendering the key didn't make Wesley uncomfortable—he had a duplicate in his coat pocket.

Pet's book said this wasn't a membership club. Sure enough, Wesley slid through the huge front door without incident. Inside, it was like any other bar. It may have been way upscale, Wesley thought, but there must be places to fade into, just like there were in the Hudson River waterfront joints he had grown up in. The J. Press suit would hold him unless someone tried to strike up a conversation. The part-of-the-package Rolex told him that Norden should have already been there for thirteen minutes, so he went into the large, dimly lit room with the horseshoe-shaped bar looking for a man sitting alone.