A Bomb Built in Hell (24 page)

“This means you're going home?”

“No. Not now. There's still some of it I do understand.… Some more shit to clean up. When I go home, I'm going to leave you a clean piece of paper to draw on. You stay inside—from now on, I'm going out. And I'm going to look around. The next time I leave here with stuff, I won't be coming back.… Whole
mess
of motherfuckers won't be coming back, either.

“I know this: it's gonna be right here—no more of this overseas stuff. Right here, right in our own country.”

“It's not our country.”

“Then whose is it? If we can't have it, maybe nobody should have it.”

“Nobody can blow up America, Wesley.”

“Right. But I can sure as hell make them
think
somebody can.”

T
he next morning, the Firebird slipped out of the garage and made its way up Water Street and then over to the FDR. Wesley followed the Drive to the 59th Street Bridge and crossed into Queens; he took Northern Boulevard through Long Island City, Woodside, and Jackson Heights, watching the neighborhoods change as he passed through.

He crossed Junction Boulevard and into Corona. By the time he reached 104th Street, it was as much a slum as anything Wesley had seen in Manhattan. A young black man, built like a weightlifter, with huge tattoos on his arms, crossed in front of Wesley's windshield. He glanced into the Firebird and caught Wesley's eye.
He's going to do the same thing as I am
, Wesley thought, but the black man's expression never changed.

Wesley crossed 114th, passed Shea Stadium, and followed the signs to the Whitestone Bridge. As the Firebird climbed over the bridge, Wesley saw LaGuardia Airport on his left. He threw two quarters into the exact-change basket and followed the signs to Route 95 North.

He saw the giant crypt they called Co-op City on his right and thought about dynamite.
It'd take a fucking nuclear attack
, he thought. Anyway, it was full of old people, and they couldn't breed anymore.

Wesley kept driving at a sedate fifty-five until he saw the signs for Exit 8. He turned off then; a right to North Avenue and then another right, driving through
downtown New Rochelle. Moving aimlessly, guided by something he didn't understand but still trusted, Wesley drove past Iona College on his right and then turned right on Beechmont. He followed this up a hill surrounded by some lavish houses until he reached a long, narrow body of water.

This was Pinebrook Boulevard and Wesley noted the “No Thru Trucking” signs near the large thirty-miles-per-hour warnings. He followed Pinebrook until he reached Weaver Street. A furrier's truck passed him, doing at least forty-five. He turned left and followed the street to Wilmot Road, where he noted a pack of long-haired white kids with

SCARSDALE
ENVIRONMENTAL
CORPS

lettered on their T-shirts. They were aimlessly hanging around an open truck with a bunch of earth-working tools in its bed.

Wesley saw a light-green Dodge Polara police car, its discreet white lettering tastefully proclaiming its functions and duties. Wesley saw St. Pius X Church just ahead and turned left onto Mamaroneck Road. He drove steadily down this road until he saw a sprawling, ultra-modern structure on his left. He swung the car between the gates and motored slowly toward the entrance. The sign told Wesley all he needed to know: HOPEDALE HIGH SCHOOL.

The kids hardly glanced at the greaser-class Firebird.
They sat on polished fenders of exotic cars, creatures from another planet to Wesley. But he didn't need that excuse.…

It took fifty-five minutes to get back into Manhattan and only another twenty to get into the garage. The kid was waiting for him.

“I went to your place to see if the dog wanted to go upstairs and run around,” he said. “He wouldn't even let me in the door.”

“I know—he's like me. This time, he
goes
with me, too.”

“What do you need?” the kid asked.

“A refrigerator truck with some very professional lettering on the sides. I need a dual exhaust system on it, and flex-pipe connectors to reach from the back up into the box.”

“Who's gonna be in the box?”

“They all are, this time. Now, listen to me; there's a lot more. I need a two-hundred-gallon tank with a high-speed inlet valve, and I need a mushroom of plastic explosive rigged from the roof … so everything in the truck explodes
down
, toward the ground, not up into the air.

“I need fifty hundred-pound bars of pure nickel, and I need around a couple dozen of those pressure bottles they keep helium in. Now, listen:
buy
this stuff if you can. If you got to steal it, leave anyone you find right there. This is the last time, and everything's got to be perfect.”

“I'll get it all, Wesley.”

“And find out when school opens each day at Hopedale High—it's a 914 area code—and class hours, if you can. The Westchester Library'll have a floor plan of the building, too.”

I
t took the kid almost five weeks to assemble all the equipment. Inside the garage stood a huge white refrigerator truck with PASCAL'S FINEST ARGENTINA BEEF lettered in a flowery, blood-red script. The tank was installed inside. Wesley and the kid screwed off the top, laid it on its side on the floor of the truck, and carefully loaded in the nickel bars.

“Those assholes won't think there's something strange about a rich man ordering a whole lot of beef, stock his personal freezer,” Wesley said. “This is what we do now, we extract the carbon monoxide and fill the tanks, then we—”

“Just from the truck's exhaust?”

“No. That crap is only seven percent carbon monoxide—we need pure stuff.”

“I guess seven percent can snuff you all right,” the kid said. “Like when those kids checked out together? In their car, last week?”

“Yeah, but it's not quick enough … and it don't work in the open air. When we play the pure stuff over those nickel bars inside a pressurized tank at exactly fifty degrees centigrade, we get perfect nickel carbonyl, okay? That's one million times as potent as cyanide. It'll work in open air, and it has an effective range of about five miles if there's no wind. But the explosion's got to be light—we don't want to blow this stuff way up in the air, and the extra heat would only screw things up.”

“You want a
steady
fifty degrees centigrade, right?”

“Yeah,” Wesley confirmed. “Can you get this truck to reach it and hold it there?”

“Sure. That's only about one hundred and twenty-two Fahrenheit—I looked it up. These rigs work both ways—they can heat as well as cool, no problem.”

“Okay,” Wesley said, “here's the deal. Under pressure, this gas'll set up in about ten minutes … enough to fill the big tank after the small tanks of carbon monoxide are emptied. I need the explosive so that when I blast it all open, it'll mushroom
low
. It gets too high, it won't do the job for us. This is a nice, heavy gas—it should stay low for a good while.”

“How you know it'll work?”

“We're going to test it first. In one of the small tanks, with just a small piece of the nickel. We'll stuff it into this,” he said, holding up the pressure tank for the miniature blowtorch. “You'll be with me on the test. And then that's all, right?”

The kid didn't answer—he was already at work, silently.

T
wo days later, the experiment was ready. The cab pulled out—Wesley driving, the kid in the back. The kid was dressed in chinos and a blue denim work shirt. A duffel bag sat next to him, ready for a shoulder-carry. In his pocket was a roll of bills totaling $725.

It was 11:15 p.m. when the cab pulled up past the corner of Dyer and 42nd. The kid stepped quickly out of the back seat and walked toward the Roxy Hotel.

He looked nervous as he approached the desk clerk, a gray, featureless man of about sixty. The kid pulled
a night's rent from the big roll—the .45 was clumsily stuck into his belt, not completely covered by his tattered jacket. The clerk gave him a key with “405” on it; without saying a word, the kid turned to climb the stairs.

Wesley entered the hotel just as the kid disappeared up the stairs. He wore his night clothing, the soft felt hat firmly on his head. Under the hat was a flat-face gas mask of the latest Army-issue type. It had replaceable charcoal filters—inserted in the front opening, they could withstand anything but nerve gas for up to thirty-five minutes. It was held on top of Wesley's head by elastic straps and was invisible from the front.

Wesley approached the clerk, whose hand was already snaking toward the telephone.

“Remember me?” Wesley asked.

The clerk didn't know Wesley's face, but he knew what those words meant. He whirled for the phone again as Wesley slipped the gas mask into place and pressed the release valve on the miniature blowtorch. The greenish gas shot across the counter and into the clerk's face. He coughed just once as his face turned a sickly orange. The clerk slumped to the floor, his fingers still clawing for the phone. As he hit the ground, the kid came down the stairs with a gas mask on his face, carrying a Luger with a long tube silencer. He walked deliberately past Wesley, who had already stuffed the now exhausted gas cylinder into his side pocket and pulled out a pistol of his own.

The kid slipped the gas mask from his face as he
climbed into the front seat of the cab, the chauffeur's cap on his head; the flag dropped as Wesley hit the back seat.

The cab shot crosstown, toward the East River. The kid spoke quietly. “I had to waste one of the freaks upstairs—he came into my room with a knife before I could even close the door.”

“You leave the room clean?”

“Perfect—I never got a chance to even sit down. Anyway, the charge in the duffel bag will go off in another few minutes.”

“That clerk was gone before he hit the ground,” Wesley said. “The stuff worked perfect.”

“Was he the same one?”

“I couldn't tell for sure. But he was guilty, all right.”

The cab whispered its way toward the Slip. It was garaged by midnight.

T
hursday, 9:30 p.m. Wesley and the kid were completing the final work on the truck.

“Tomorrow there'll be a full house. The Friday assembly period's at eleven-thirty—there'll be almost four hundred kids in the joint.”

“Wesley …”

“Yeah?”

“How come you're taking the gas mask?”

“I'm not going out that way, kid. The gas's for
them
, right? I won't leave them a fucking square inch of flesh to put under their microscopes—no way they're coming
back here to look for you. You're going to keep this place, right?”

“I don't know,” the kid said. “I guess so. But I'm going to find a couple other places, too … and fix them.”

“Good. And be
out
there, right? Everything you learn, teach—there's a lot of men out there who'd listen, and you know how to talk to them.”

“Women, too.”

“They already know, kid. You see how the pillow snapped back into place in Haiti? It was a woman who held it. She must've of been the one behind the old man, and the kid, too.”

“Maybe … It don't matter anyway—I'll know who to talk to.”

“You got to be different from the way we were, kid. We never had no partners, except in blood. I never could figure out how all those black guys run around calling each other ‘brother'—the most that could mean is that the same womb spilled you, and even
that
don't mean a thing.

“You're not going to be alone, kid. You know why? 'cause if you are you end up like me. Carmine thought he built a bomb, but he didn't. I'm a laser, I think. I can focus so good I can slice anything that gets in the way. But I can't see nothing between me and the target. When I was in Korea, I thought I'd be the gun and they'd point me. But that didn't make no sense, even then. So it don't make sense to have any of the other scumbags point me, either.…”

“What other scumbags?”

“Like those Weathermen or whatever they call themselves. Writing letters to the fucking papers about which building they're going to blow up … or blowing themselves up instead. Bullshit. But I know how they feel—they got nothing of their own to fight for, so they made something up. The blacks don't want them; the Latinos don't want them; the fucking ‘working class,' whatever that is, don't want them.… And they don't want themselves.”

“Why didn't the blacks want them?”

“Want them for what? All those nice-talking creeps want is to be generals—the niggers're supposed to be their fucking ‘troops.' The blacks can see
that
much, anyway.”

“I've talked to a few of them—the revolutionaries. But I can't understand what the fuck they're talking about.”

“Nobody can but themselves—and that's who they should stick to. It's like a fucking whore everyone in the neighborhood gangbangs, right? You might get yourself some of that, but you're damn sure not going to bring her home to meet your people.”

“Yeah?
I
would, if—”

“—if you
had
people. But I get it—you're not like them. That's what their asshole ‘system' is like—good enough to fuck around with, but not good enough to bring home, you understand?”

“Yeah. I guess I did even while they were still talking.”

“They're out there, kid. Driving cabs, working in the mills, mugging, robbing, fighting, tricking … in the
Army. Anyplace they think they fit. There's a lot more of
us
than there are of
them
, but we don't know how to find each other. You got to do that—that part's for you.”