A Bomb Built in Hell

“How many of their women you gonna hit?”

“Two’s enough, I think. If it’s not... Get the stuff from outside—I’ll meet you back here tonight. And get hold of the kid too, okay?”

49/

11:30 p.m. The three men sat in Wesley’s apartment; the dog was on guard in the garage. Pet had assembled his materials on the workbench. Along with the spring-detonator and the flat-explosive charge, he had a package of hundred-percent rag-content bond paper and envelopes. The stationery was a soft lilac, the fine-line italic script a dark purple. The envelope was so stiff it resisted any attempt at bending. Its deep flap said:

Dr. & Mrs. John I. Sloane III

707 Park Avenue

Penthouse 2

New York City, New York 10028

The three men looked admiringly at the embossed calling cards.

“How come you didn’t get the invitation printed, too, Wes?” the old man asked.

“Amy Vanderbilt says you always handwrite these things.”

“Who?”

“In the library, Pet. There’s not but one way to do these things.”

“She’ll never see the writing, anyway,” the kid put in.

“That’s not the point,” Wesley replied. “What if they got an x-ray thing going, or something else we don’t know about? No risks if you don’t need to, right?”

“Who’s going to write the invitation?”

“None of us can do it, that’s for sure.”

The kid was studying the stationery. “I know an old woman who used to do this,” he said.

“Go to these parties?”

“No, write these invitations. She’s in a nursing home where they put me to work when I was on parole once. Those places are just like the joint, if you’re old. Anyway, she used to make money addressing these things for some rich people—it was part of her job before they said she got too old to work. Then they dumped her into that home. She’s still there.”

“How d’you know?”

“I go and see here every once in a while—she tells the other old people I’m her grandson. She used to sneak me extra food when I was doing time there.”

“She’ll address this for you?”

“Sure.”

Wesley looked at the kid. “After that, you got to leave her there.”

“No, the fuck I do! They already left her there—she’s already dead as far as the motherfuckers are concerned. She’d never rat me out.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure. She don’t care about living anymore anyway—she knows what’s happening ... what happened to her, right? I could fucking tell her why we was doing this and she’d be okay even then. Wesley, she knows I steal; she’s old, but she’s not slow. She’s just doing time.”

“What’s she know about you?”

“Just what she thinks my name is, that’s all. And that I give a fuck about her. She’s not giving that up.”

Wesley looked at Pet. The old man nodded: “When I was Upstate, the only people who you could ever count on visiting you was your mother, or your sister, or your grandmother. What’s she got to gain by giving the kid up? Besides, they’re never going to find that envelope.”

Wesley gave the kid several envelopes and some stationery. “Here’s the address of the broad, okay?”

“Okay. I’ll tell her that I got a job for her, get her to address a whole bunch of them. She’ll never know what’s happening.”

The kid went out the door alone. He was back in ten seconds. “Wes. That dog...”

“I know. Be right there.”

50/

8:00 a.m., Thursday morning. Wesley stood in front of the giant mirror in his bedroom. He had shaved extra carefully; Pet had given him an immaculate haircut and a professional manicure. On his left hand was a heavy white-gold wedding band, on his right a college ring from Georgetown University, 1960. He wore a dark grey, summer-weight, silk-and-mohair suit, a soft green shirt with a spread collar, and a tiny-patterned grey tie with a moderate Windsor knot. He carried a slim attaché case, complete with combination lock and owner’s monogram; the initials were “AS.” Wesley checked the gold-cased watch; it was right on time.

The El Dorado looked as if it had been polished with beige oil, gleaming even in the dim light of the garage.

Wesley was ostentatiously parking right in front of a plug on Sutton Place by 9:30, well within the doorman’s line of sight.

The doorman noted the El D with genuine approval. Too many of the high-class creeps in his building drove those foreign cars for his taste, anyway. He liked the looks of the guy getting out of the car, too. Calm and relaxed, not like those rush-rush faggots who breezed by him like he didn’t exist. And the way the guy parked the hog right in front of the plug and never looked back? That was real class, too.

Wesley smiled at the doorman—they understood each other.

“Will you please ring the Benton suite? Tell them Mr. Salmone is here.”

“Yessir!” snapped the doorman, pocketing Wesley’s ten-dollar bill in the same motion.

The lady in 6-G asked him to repeat the name a couple of times, then to describe the waiting man ... and finally said to allow him up. Wesley walked past the doorman and into the lobby. The elevator cages were both empty. He stepped in, pushed the button, and rode to the sixth floor.

“What about the elevator operator?” Wesley had asked. Pet answered, “No sweat, the cheap motherfuckers fired them both a year ago. They said it was for efficiency, right? But they left a couple of old guys without a job to do it.”

6-G was all the way in the right-hand corner, just as the floor plan had shown. Wesley raised his hand to the bell, but the door was snatched open before he could make contact.

“Who are you?” the woman demanded.

“I’m from your father, Mrs. Benton.”

“He knows better than this. I don’t have anything to say to him.”

“I only need five minutes of your time, Mrs. Benton. It’s just some papers he wants you to sign.”

“I thought I already did that years ago. How come he...?”

“It will only take a moment,” Wesley said, as he gently pushed the door open and stepped past her and into the apartment.

The place was quiet except for the raucous meow of a Persian cat reclining on the velvet sofa. Wesley walked toward the wall-length sofa as though he intended to sit down. The woman followed close behind him at a quicker pace, nervously patting her piled-up hair into place.

“Look! I told my father and I’ll tell you, I—”

Wesley wheeled suddenly and slammed his right fist deep into the woman’s stomach. She grunted and fell to the rug, retching. He slipped the brass knuckles off his hand and knelt beside the woman. She was struggling to breathe, her face a mottled mask of red and white. Wesley reached into his pocket and brought out anaesthetic nose plugs. He inserted them into the woman’s nostrils, put a handkerchief over her mouth, and watched closely until her breathing became slow and measured. He put on the surgeon’s gloves, then carefully removed all his clothing, folding it neatly into the opened attaché case. A thin stream of blood ran out of the corner of the woman’s mouth.

Wesley laid the Beretta on the rug beside the woman, fitted the tube silencer, and doubled-locked the front door. The cat vanished. Pet had told him that the husband was a gourmet, so he knew what to look for.

He found the butcher knives—hollow-ground Swedish steel with rosewood handles—and the portable butcher block on the stove island. He brought the whole set back into the living room.

Wesley gently laid the woman’s head on a couch pillow and placed the butcher block under her neck. When he pulled the pillow out from under her head and tugged back on her hair, the skin of her throat stretched taut, the veins in her neck leaping out against the pale skin. He held the heavy chopping knife poised eighteen inches from her throat and mentally focused on a spot three inches beyond the butcher block. Wesley took a deep breath. The butcher knife flashed down like a jet and blood spurted from the neck arteries. It took three more full-strength blows before the head fell off.

Wesley grabbed the headless body by the ankles and dragged it toward the bedroom, leaving a thick trail of blood and paler fluids. He dumped the body on the bed and left the bedspread to absorb the mess while he went back for the head.

Wesley turned the body over on its back. He spread the woman’s legs as far as they would go, quickly lashing each ankle to a leg of the matching teak bedposts with piano wire so they wouldn’t close during rigor mortis. Then he took the head and pressed it down on the bed, moving it backwards in its trail of fluid until it was squarely between the woman’s legs, staring straight ahead.

Wesley dug his right hand into the gaping neck and worked his fingers until they were completely smeared with blood. He walked to the off-white wall behind the woman’s body and wrote:

WEASELS ... THE WAGES OF DEATH IS SIN! this is the beginning ...

He went looking for the cat and found it under the rolltop desk in the den. Wesley pulled it out, careful at first so as not to be scratched, until he saw its claws had been removed, probably to protect the furniture. He stroked the animal to calm it down. And then pushed it into the den, closing the door behind him.

Wesley entered the Japanese-style bathroom and took a shower; first blazing hot, then icy cold. When he was completely clean and all the blood had gone down the drain, he left the water running as he dried himself with a towel from his attaché case. Then he dressed, first putting the surgeon’s gloves into a plastic bag and returning them to his case.

Before he left, he used the black silk handkerchief to wipe every surface. The library had told him that twelve points were all that was necessary for a legally sufficient identification of a fingerprint. But Wesley knew his case would never reach a courtroom if there was any identification at all.

Everything went back into the attaché case.

It was 10:26 when Wesley let himself out of the apartment, the handkerchief still in his hand as he turned the doorknob. The hallway was empty. He took the elevator downstairs, got off, and walked across the deserted lobby to the doorman.

The street was quiet. The sun was already boiling the concrete, but the people from that neighborhood went from their air-conditioned apartments to their air-conditioned cars to their air-conditioned offices or air-conditioned shops. Nobody walked; they even paid people to walk their animals for them.

The doorman smiled at Wesley’s approach. Wesley motioned him over.

“I have a package in my car for Mrs. Benton.”

“Just bring it around to the back entrance, sir. The super will— ”

“Mrs. Benton said she would like you to deliver this to her personally. Would that be all right?”

“Certainly, sir. If you’ll just bring it inside here to me, I’ll—”

“It’s a little too big for that. Could I drive around to the service entrance and give it to you there?”

“Yes, sir, you could, but I don’t like to leave the door unattended.”

“Mrs. Benton said to give you this for your trouble,” Wesley said smoothly, handing the man a pair of twenty-dollar bills. “She understands how it is. Can you bring it right up after I give it to you?”

The doorman all but saluted. “I’ll just wait here a couple of minutes to give you time to get around back—I don’t want to be off my post too long.”

“Appreciate it.”

Wesley walked out the front door and climbed into the El Dorado. He drove off to the corner and turned right; the alley was only about eighty feet away. Wesley deliberately drove past the alley and then backed the big car down to the service entrance. He left the motor purring and quickly assembled the Beretta-and-silencer combo.

The service door opened in less than a minute. The doorman moved quickly toward the open window of Wesley’s car, smiling. Wesley shot him twice in the chest. The impact drove the doorman back against the building; he slumped to the ground. Wesley opened his door, leaned out, and he put three more slugs into the man’s skull. After the first shot, there was only a human omelet to aim at. He was out of the alley and into the side street in another few seconds.

Wesley drove crosstown without haste until he spotted a grey Fleetwood, just pulling out of a legal spot on Fifth Avenue as if it had been waiting for him.

He walked three blocks, then hailed a cab which took him to the corner of Houston and Sullivan. A short hike down Sullivan toward Bleecker took him to Pet’s Ford. As the Ford pulled away from the curb, the Fleetwood took its place.

The two men drove back toward the Slip. The kid hailed a cab to go pick up the El Dorado.

51/

The news screamed BIZARRE MURDER ON SUTTON PLACE! The story went into gruesome detail, but there were no photographs of the murder scene itself and the facts were altered. Wesley and Pet stayed in the building all that day, waiting for the Four Star edition. They weren’t disappointed—the headline blared MURDERED SOCIALITE WAS MAFIA CHIEFTAIN’S DAUGHTER! with the kind of followup “color” stories that humans like Salmone had come to hate ever since Columbo got himself vegetablized.

Pet was reading between the lines. “Christ, Wes, what’d you do to her?”

“It’s better you don’t know, right? You got to look surprised when they tell you about it. And if they polygraph this one, the murder method’ll be one of the keys.”

“You don’t forget a thing anymore, huh?”

“I’ll tell you what I did forget. I was going to fuck her when she was unconscious—or at least beat off onto the body. It’d freak them out even worse. I just forgot.”

“Like fucking hell you ‘forgot.’ You couldn’t do that, Wes—you’re a man.”

“I’m a bomb, old man,” Wesley said. “And they lit the fuse a long time ago.”

52/

Wesley went out that night, leaving Pet behind. He took the Ford and drove up and down Allen Street. The whores approached the car at every light. It was quicker to look them directly in the face than to pretend to ignore them—they moved away when they saw his eyes.

It took hours of prowling before he found what he wanted.

When he returned to the Slip, Pet was gone. The haphazard-appearing scrawls in the dust on the garage floor told Wesley the old man had gone to meet with his employers.

Wesley picked up the newspaper Pet had left for him. Page three had a story about a letter bomb that had exploded in the face of Nancy Jane DiVencenzo of Cape May, New Jersey. The police had no clue to the sender—the letter had been blown into microscopic particles, along with the young deb’s face.

Wesley went to his own place and let himself in. He took the dog up to the top floor and let it run free on the hardwood for an hour while he focused on the white wall. The dog alternatively loped and ran in vicious bursts of speed—he kept at it until Wesley drew a deep breath and sat up. They went down to the apartment together, the dog taking the point, as always.

The soft, insistent buzzing woke Wesley at 3:25 a.m., telling him the old man was back. Wesley dressed and went down to the basement garage. The dog acknowledged his passage with a throaty growl and Wesley realized that he had never seen the animal sleep.

The old man was smoking one of the black, twisted cigars he liked. He almost never did this inside the garage. The exhaust fan was running like Vaseline flowing through oil, so silent it could only be sensed, not heard.

“You got them, Wes—you got them all. I almost threw up behind just hearing about it. The woman’s husband is in Bellevue—he just flipped out. They can’t agree on who ... but they know some sicko’s after them all. The Jersey guy got the phone call in the middle of last night—he was already in the city for a meet on the Sutton Place thing. He went fucking crazy. They tied it in, like we expected.”

“The cops—”

“—’re probably laughing. What the fuck do they care?”

“Leads?”

“Forget it. The big man said it was a fucking ghost what did it.”

“It was.”

“I know. I used to light candles for Carmine. Until I realized that it was just another club he couldn’t join.”

“What’d you tell them?”

“I told them it had to be a freak from the cesspool. I said I’d hit the area and nose around until I came up with something, put a lot of my people on the street, all that bullshit. Then I gave them a whole bunch of crap about the security arrangements they’d need for their families. Like we said, right?”

“Perfect. I found a building. On Chrystie, south of Delancey on the west side of the block. The whole building’s empty—three stories. It’s got buildings on either side, both higher, both abandoned.”

“Abandoned, my ass. You got people living in every fucking x-flat in this city.”

“That’s no problem. They don’t see nothing going in. And going out, there won’t be nothing left for them to see. Let’s look tomorrow night.”

53/

Wesley went all the way up to the roof and sat, smoking and looking at the Manhattan Bridge. He had enough explosives to lift the building he’d found on Chrystie into orbit—it wouldn’t be difficult to completely mine the place and set it off with a radio-control. But there was just no way that Pet could excuse himself and leave the room, much less the building, not with those kinds of humans inside and mega-tense like they’d be.

Risk against gain. Wesley sat and thought about some political pamphlet he’d read in prison. Lee had given it to him and everyone respected Lee for being in the know, but it had never begun to make sense to Wesley. How could the writer talk about the lumpen proletariat being the vanguard of the revolution when the fucking lumpen proletariat couldn’t even understand the fancy-ass words the man used in a book they’d never read? Or was that a criticism of Marx by some other fucking lame who thought the lumpen were terrific? Lee read those tracts like they were comic books—he kept chuckling over them, and nobody ever understood what he was laughing about.

“An ox for the people to ride....” Who wanted to be a fucking ox? Work all your life and then have them eat your flesh when you’re too old to work or breed. The prison-reform freaks had it all wrong. Wesley remembered when the cons threatened to riot behind their demand for conjugal visiting, and Lee told them they had conjugal visits in Mississippi, where he’d done time before. Wesley asked him why Mississippi, of all places, would treat prisoners so good.

“Because the cons is nothing but motherfucking work animals. You feed them and you keep them serviced, or they turn mean and lazy on you. Prisons is a big business down there, Wes,” Lee told him.

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 the same guards.

He remembered Mao’s “The guerrilla is the fish in the water; the leaf on the tree” (another contribution from Lee’s library) and 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.

54/

The two men looked at the building the next night. 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—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 in 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 of been saving them for weeks.”

“You think she knew?”

“Yeah, she knew, alright. 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 was just being 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.

55/

Wesley 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 small column about the 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 stranger had just entered his apartment.

He went back into his newspaper file, thinking it through. The headlines formed a story-sequence on their own: Addicts Overrun Residential Community ... Citizens Up In Arms Over New Methadone Clinic ... Arrests Triple Near New Clinic, Citizens’ Committee Reports ... Community Group Complains of Lowered Property Values ... Vigilantes Threaten to Burn New Methadone Center.

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. Freebase was the coming thing. Carmine had told him, hundreds of times, that no government policy was ever an accident, but...

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.

Although the Program does not consider detoxification as the ultimate goal which defines “success,” some patients do see this as their own, personal objective....

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 euphemism for “Welfare”—on the corner.

Wesley hauled the junkie out of the car. He leaned them both 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 icepick into the back of the junkie’s neck and shoved him over the railing in one smooth motion.

56/

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 fat man’s part of the federal expenditures, and that nothing would be torn down or built there for years. Plenty of time. But a methadone clinic was another story—too close and too much trouble.

Methadone meant government-inspected dope. It meant sales-and-service. And too many greedy people.

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 problems.

57/

The 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 in 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 by a pocket-door. But instead of the usual four-inch penetration, this door went two feet into the frame, activating a series of snaplocks with each six inches it moved.

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 shorthanded as it was.

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

“Wes, maybe we’ll never got 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.”

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

58/

Tuesday, 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 with a .45 automatic 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, 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.

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’re not 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 comes 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 semi-circle 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. Long hairs. 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 and 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 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 that their backs were covered, they focused all their attention on the street. They were taking their job seriously—the fear that gripped their bosses had trickled down.

The kid found the three-foot tripod and felt around in the dark until he located the three mounting holes Pet had drilled deep into the concrete. He assembled the tripod and jammed it into the holes, attached the rifle and sighted along the barrel. There was more than enough light to see by.

The kid held the rifle steady on the back of the guard to his left, then swung it to his right toward the back of the second man. He did this several times, then adjusted the socket under the tripod’s head so that the rifle stopped dead at the place where he would sight the second man. He tested the socket by slamming the rifle hard to the right—it held solid.

The rifle was sighted into the spine of the first guard, just above his waist. Both men were roughly the same height, so it was even easier than they had planned—the kid only had to adjust for lateral movement. He focused hard until the first guard’s back was the only thing in his vision, then slowly squeezed the trigger. As the first guard slumped, the kid slammed the rifle hard to the right, simultaneously pulling the trigger so that the shot came when the barrel was pointing directly at the second guard.

The kid checked to be sure the street was quiet, then he began to drag the bodies inside. A faint rustling from the shadows sent him springing cat-footed into the alley. On autopilot, he slid his knife between the ribs of a wino who’d made the error of stirring in his alcoholic sleep.

Wesley crawled from the roof into what was once a ventilation shaft, holding the dog on a short lead. When they reached the corridor leading to the top floor, Wesley could just make out the two men. They were standing alertly, listening for any sound, not talking. And clearly visible to the dog. Wesley unsnapped the lead.

The Doberman shot down the corridor, as quiet as cancer, its claws never slipping on the roughened floor, hitting the nearest guard like a 90-pound razorblade and bearing him silently to the ground. The other guard whirled. He screamed once before the silenced Beretta took him down. The dog ripped out the first guard’s throat and flew down the stairs ... his charge carried both men coming up the stairs back down—they all tumbled to the second floor, landing in a mess of blood and screams. The kid was working his way up the stairs with a machete, hacking a path toward Wesley, who had switched to a similar weapon.

It was over in seconds. The place was as silent as the tomb it had become. Not a sound penetrated the upstairs chamber where Pet was holding forth.

Wesley snapped “Stay!” at the now-calm dog, and sprang over the bodies to the first floor. He took out a plastic box about the size of a pack of cigarettes and flipped the single tiny toggle switch. A red light flashed on Pet’s desk, readily visible to most of the assembled men.

“Relax!” Pet called out. “That just means we’re giving off too much static electricity and we could get monitored. I’m going to spray this stuff on the floor around your chairs—it’ll just take a second. Remember: please don’t talk.”

Pet walked into the midst of the mobsters. When he reached the back wall near the bar, he began to spray a heavy silicon mixture all over the floor, always being careful, although not obviously so, to spray the area he had just vacated. He seemed to run out of spray when he got to his own area, and took another can off his desk to continue. The whole operation took less than a minute. When he was finished, he pushed a wide, flat button under his desk with his knee and quickly resumed his sentence:

“So like I said, the scumbags can be wasted, but it’s got to be in Times Square, where they hole up. I’ll need at least twenty soldiers. Good ones. It’s going to splash all over the papers. I know it’s not what you want, but there’s no choice. Those hippies are psycho, and they’ll rip up every one of your...”

The hissing of the hidden jets was masked by the hum of the air conditioner. Cyanide is colorless, but the dim lighting would have prevented identification in any case.

After about ten seconds, Salmone took a deep breath and hissed, “Gas!” He leaped from his chair toward the door and fell flat on his face—the surface was as slippery as Teflon. One of the bodyguards clawed his way to a window and battered it frantically with his gun butt—the bars held firm. One of the fat dons swam his way through the grease to the door—it held against all six bullets from his pistol. In another five seconds all the men in the room were on their knees or flattened. Only Salmone remembered what he had lived for. He held his breath and carefully leveled his fallen bodyguard’s pistol at Pet ... but the old man was as safe behind the steel-lined desk as he would have been outside the room.

The door popped open. Wesley and the kid stepped through the slot wearing gas masks with oxygen backpacks. They skidded over to Pet, got a good grip—his part of the floor wasn’t slippery. The kid pulled Pet toward the door and closed it behind him, leaving Wesley inside. He slapped the portable oxygen mask onto the old man’s face and started the compressor. Pet still had a feeble pulse, but his skin was bluish and bloated. Wesley had told the kid you could beat cyanosis with oxygen and adrenalin—the kid found the vein in the old man’s arm, slapped on the Velcro tourniquet, and pumped in five cc’s.

Inside the room, Wesley was hacking his way through tons of flesh with the machete as the triplex continued to pump its deadly fumes. It took almost five minutes before he was sure. He pounded three times on the door. It opened enough to show the kid, holding the grease gun. Wesley held up his left fist and the kid slid the door the rest of the way open. Wesley stepped out. The old man was already sitting up.

“I fucking forgot to hold my breath after I hit the fucking switch.... How the fuck could I...?”

“Shut up!” the kid told him angrily.

Wesley and the kid carried the old man downstairs. When they got to the first floor, Wesley and the old man sat down to wait until the kid returned with the car. Wesley said, “Guard!” to the dog and went all the way back upstairs to the big room.

He shut off the pump and reconnected it to another tank. He threw the switch again and the triplex started throwing raw gasoline all over the building at two hundred gallons per minute. Wesley took a mass of putty-colored substance out of a plastic pouch and carefully molded it to the side of the pump, running a thin trail of the same stuff to a wooden box about ten feet away.

The place reeked of gasoline by the time Wesley got downstairs. The kid pulled into the alley with the car and they gently laid Pet across the back seat. The old man struggled and, with a powerful effort, pulled himself erect. The dog got into the back with him and laid down on the floor.

At 1:20 a.m. the Ford turned down Houston heading for the East River. Wesley reached for the switch on the radio transmitter—before he touched it, he felt the old man’s gnarled hand on his. He looked back at the darkness in the back seat for second. Then they threw the switch, together.

As the car slowed for a light on Houston, the sky above Chrystie fired to a brilliant orange-red. The car purred east.

For the first time, the kid came inside the garage with them to stay. The old man was able to reach his bed by himself. The kid slept right beside him.

Wesley and the dog went to their apartment and they were all asleep within minutes.

59/

The News said the fire had claimed the lives of “at least thirty-one people,” and had caused another eleven to be hospitalized. The authorities were strongly divided as to the cause of the homicidal arson. They sifted the ruins for nineteen days, and if they found anything besides miscellaneous flesh and bone, it never made the papers.

Minor wars soon erupted among mob factions throughout the city, eastern Long Island, and northern New Jersey. They soon escalated, and bigger people were called in from outside to settle things. Paranoia was running wild, and everyone was so busy distrusting and plotting that even those who knew who had been at the meeting never thought to look for Petraglia. It was assumed he died in the blaze with the others.

A voodoo church that had been meeting in a cellar under one of the movie houses in Times Square was dynamited, with four people killed. The police had more informers than they could pay. Crackdowns on drunks took place from one end of the Bowery to the other. The law said it was okay to be a drunk, but a flaming menace to society was something else.

It was popularly assumed that a wino had fallen asleep with a lit cigarette until some bright boy leaked the identity of the bodies inside the building. The columnists had a field day and the florists felt like they were back in the heyday of Dion O’Banion in the Roaring ’20s.

60/

Wesley worked days on his project. The compounding was easy—a four-to-one mixture of ammonium nitrate and TNT produces a good facsimile of Amatol, the best military-industrial explosive for large-scale demolition work. He made the mercury-fulminate detonators himself, packing each one inside a sealed aluminum tube about the size of a mechanical pencil. The explosives were hermetically sealed inside zinc boxes, then packed into wooden crates. Pet had drilled each of the boxes so that the mercury-fulminate pencils snapped into position instantly.

Nights, Wesley spent on the roof. Alone. There was a lot to think about. But first the area had to be clean. There were already too many cops around during the day—junkies were a magnetic force to them.

Wesley finally admitted to himself that he had expected Pet to check himself out in the gas chamber they had built. But he hadn’t let the old man go....

He waited patiently until the rehab of the building on Houston was nearly complete. Then he and the kid went to the site in broad daylight, each carrying two of the wooden crates. He had made the kid practice until he could handle thirty-five pounds on each shoulder like it wasn’t much of anything. The crates were clearly marked GENERATOR PARTS: THIS SIDE UP! and they had no trouble placing all four of them in corners of the top floor.

They made the same trip several more times, until there were twenty boxes of the mixture in place.

The last night, they returned again—this time with the Doberman. They left the dog near the door and went downstairs. The place was ready-made for junkies, alright—as easy to break into as a glass vault. They planted sixty sticks of fuseless dynamite in the basement. Harmless, unless there was a massive explosion in the immediate vicinity. On the top floor, Wesley rigged a magnesium fuse from each of the fulminate of mercury pencils. The trails crossed at several points and met in the center of the empty floor, forming a giant spider’s web.

As they went down the back stairs with the dog, Wesley reflected that it wasn’t much use writing slogans on a wall if you planned to total the building. The tiny propane torch had been placed with its tip pointing right into the middle of the spider’s web, joined by seven others exactly the same. The hard part had been the trip mechanism, but the salesman at Willoughby-Peerless had been only too happy to demonstrate how the motor-driven Nikon F could be activated at distances up to a full mile with a radio transmitter, especially when he spotted Wesley for the kind of chump who would pay retail. The whole tab came to over three grand and the salesman went home happy. Wesley went home with exactly what he wanted, too.

That night, he and the kid set up the Nikon so that its mirror mechanism flipped the series-wired little torches into action. Then they closed the door behind them, and Wesley smeared several tubes of Permabond back and forth across the seams which they had hand-sanded to the smoothness of glass. They knew that a single drop would hold a car door shut against a man trying desperately to get out—what they applied would hold against anything short of an explosion. They stuck the aluminum sign with its skull-and-crossbones in black on a white background on the door and left. In bright-red lettering, it said:

KEEP OUT! DANGER! POISON GAS USED FOR EXTERMINATION!

The papers promised a “gala event” at the new methadone clinic. All the public supporters of methadone maintenance—actors, politicians, anyone wealthy enough or famous enough to rate a photo-op—would be hosted to a superb lunch prepared by the addicts themselves. It was widely hailed by the Times as:

... one of the few remaining issues around which New Yorkers remain united. In spite of dissident factions which oppose methadone clinics on NIMBY—Not In My Back Yard—grounds, those with a vision for this city recognize that methadone maintenance programs are a necessary element in the fight against narcotics addiction. The clinics are here to stay.

The gala was scheduled for noon on Thursday, a slow news day. Extensive press coverage was expected.

61/

Thursday, 12:35 p.m. The newly christened Methadone Maintenance Center was open for business and the joint was packed. In an attempt to “involve the community,” as the Times duly reported, the doors had been thrown open to the public. The chance to mingle with all the celebrities was too good to pass up— mothers brought their children, housewives drove in from far-flung suburbs, and businessmen with no more interest in narcotics-control than in socialism flocked to the center. Wesley took the radio transmitter to the roof on the Slip so that there would be minimum signal interference, as the helpful salesman had suggested. He went up there alone—there was a tacit agreement between Wesley and the old man that he would be the only one to go up on the roof.

The range was right—but if it didn’t fire, he’d just have to move it closer. Wesley pressed the switch. There was a dead silence in his head. He mentally counted backwards from one hundred, like the time they’d operated on his leg in the Army and they had pumped the Sodium Pentothal into him.

He was all the way down to eighty-two when a dull, booming roar rose out of Houston Street and swept across town toward the river in thundering waves. A much larger explosion followed—the sound deeper, resonating at a different harmonic. All the sounds that followed were indistinguishable from the general madness that came close behind.

Surviving spectators said that the roof of the building had literally jumped into the air—then the entire front of the building had simply vanished in smoke. TV programs were interrupted with horror-struck announcers saying there was nothing but rubble where the Center had been. Seven different precincts responded to the fire calls. Squad cars were clogging traffic on the street until well past dark. A roving reporter interviewed a long-haired young man just back from gunner duty on a helicopter in Vietnam—he asked if the young man had ever seen anything like that before. The young man just shrugged: “There’s more bodies, that’s all.”

The papers were full of estimated body counts and the FBI was invited to participate in the case by an anguished mayor. In spite of the fire trucks, the ruins smoldered for several days—water pressure was low in the area, due to all the open hydrants. The blast had blown several buildings completely apart and had thrown death-dealing chunks of concrete and steel as far as a hundred yards. Ninety-three persons were known dead by the third day of counting.

The mayor dismissed persistent rumors that the bombing was the work of some group that was opposed to a methadone clinic in their neighborhood. “There have been minor incidents elsewhere, but the people of my city know they can always get a redress of their grievances at City Hall.”

The News’ “Inquiring Photographer” did a street survey on reactions to the explosion. The results were never printed.

At least six political groups anonymously claimed credit for the bombing, calling it everything from “bringing imperialistic war home to the pigs,” to “a manifesto written in dynamite.” None was taken too seriously by anyone but the FBI, which was already counting the increased budget appropriations.

Every columnist had his favorite candidate, although “terrorists” remained the front-runner. Rumors of a cult surfaced occasionally, but never gained much strength.

There was a mass funeral for the “methadone victims,” although many of the families of the dead declined the privilege.

Wesley returned to the roof to think.

62/

Seeing the old man didn’t want to talk, Wesley walked through the garage and into his own area. The Mansfield job was the first they had done just for the money. Their employers were fundamentally unchanged—regrouped, cautious, but with the same limited ways of carving out their unique monopolies. Because they thought the old man died in the gas attack, it was now Wesley who negotiated with them directly.

He had handled the Mansfield negotiations just like Carmine had taught him: No questions, just a price. Half up front with the rest on completion. Mansfield had been one of the prime suspects in the gas murders. The people who ordered his death used their paranoia as proof.

Wesley stripped off all the clothing he had worn on the job and stuffed it into a large paper bag. The jewelry came off too, to be filed with hundreds of similar articles. The incinerator would later claim all the clothing—it was part of the cost of doing business.

After a quick shower, Wesley dressed again and headed for the firing range on the fourth floor. He carefully sighted in and calibrated the new M16s Pet had bought from a warrant officer at Fort Dix. A few missing guns from the overall inventory were routinely charged against the manufacturer, who was, in turn, building the guns so far below the specifications agreed to in the government contract that protesting the slight extra charge was unthinkable. Wesley was able to obtain all the military ordnance he wanted and everyone’s illusions were preserved ... even down to the two boots who thought they were delivering the M16s to a government agent who was going to run a “spot check” to make sure they worked well enough to protect our boys in whatever jungle they would be fighting in that year.

Wesley always disassembled each weapon and rebuilt it to the correct specs, using the manual as a guide. He remembered throwing away his own rifle in Korea when he finally got his hands on a solid, reliable Russian AK-47—nobody in his outfit with any brains was carrying Army-issue by then. They all had sidearms, which were supposed to be only for officers. They threw away the cumbersome grenade-launchers (“Lost in combat, sir!”) and even copped the Russian knives when they could.

Something about all that puzzled Wesley, and he finally decided to ask the smartest guy in the outfit about it. Morty was a short, wiry-haired Brooklyn boy who always had his face in a book.

“They want us to win this war, right?”

“This isn’t a war, Wes. It’s a police action.”

“When the police go into action in my neighborhood, it is war.”

“What I mean is, Congress hasn’t declared war on the North Koreans,” Morty explained, patiently. “It’s the United Nations that’s doing this.”

“It’s the North Koreans against the South Koreans, right?”

“So...?”

“So why don’t we let them settle their own beef?”

“Because of Communism, Wes. The North Koreans are controlled by the Reds and they want to take over the whole fucking world— if we don’t stop them here, we’ll have to fight them in America eventually.”

“And we own the South Koreans, right?”

“No. Nobody ‘owns’ them. What the South Koreans want is to be free.”

“So why don’t they fight?”

“They do fight. It’s just that—”

“Oh, bullshit, man. They don’t do shit but rip us off. They let their women be diseased whores and they wash the fucking dishes and do the laundry and all.... I mean why don’t they fight us?”

“We’re on their side—we’re helping them get free.”

“A zip’s a zip, right? That’s what everyone says—once we start blasting, everything yellow goes down.”

“Yeah. Well, look ... why did you ask me if we want to win?”

“If we want to win, why’d they give us such lousy guns?”

“Well, you know the factories ... in wartime, they have to—”

“I thought this was a fucking police action.”

“Man, Wes, you get harder and harder to talk to.”

“You know what I think, Morty?”

“What?”

“I think we’re the bullets, you know?”

63/

Wesley went back to reloading some new cartridge casings. He finished at about 3:00 a.m. and climbed up to the roof. He was dressed in doubleknit black jersey pants and shirt. Socks of the same material went almost to the knee. He wore mid-calf leather boots which closed with Velcro fasteners. The boots had been worked for hours with Connolly’s Hide Food until they were glove-soft, and the crosscut crepe soles gave superb traction without making a sound. He had on a soft, black-felt hat—with the jersey’s turtleneck, it gave an unbroken line of black from the back. Dark grey deerskin gloves hid his hands. The same black paste that football players use to protect their eyes from reflected glare was smeared across both cheekbones and the bridge of his nose. In the roof’s blackness he was just another shadow.

Wesley put the night glasses to his face and dispassionately watched a gang of car-strippers at work under the only remaining streetlight in the area, about two blocks north of Pike Slip. Unlike the junkies, these kids were anxious to avoid contact with the rest of the human race while they were working. They were the same as the birds in the trees in Korea had been—everything was safe as long as you saw them (or heard them) going about their business.

The old man worried him. Pet had tried to check out in the gas chamber. They both knew this, and it made things hard. Pet couldn’t hit the street at all anymore—Wesley had to rely on the kid.

They were working only for money now. Before they put all of Carmine’s employers in the gas chamber Wesley hadn’t thought a minute about the future. He was on earth to do a job, a guided missile ... but now he was a missile that hadn’t exploded when it had connected with its target. He had to think about tomorrow for the first time, and it was a new experience.

Wesley climbed down the stairs. Before he went back to his own apartment, he checked the garage. The old man had a blank look on his face, polishing the cars for the hundredth time—they gleamed like jewels, too bright.

64/

The next morning, the old man was polishing the Ford as Wesley slipped into the garage. For the first time in all their time together, the old man didn’t turn when someone entered. Wesley walked up to the Ford and just stared silently until the old man finally turned to face him.

“What?”

“I want to talk to you, Pet. You want to check out of here?”

“Yeah. I wanted to check out when I had to do that Prince motherfucker ... and you knew it and you wouldn’t let me and that was good, Wes. But you should have left me in that room there on Chrystie.”

“I know it. I know it now, anyway.”

“I waited for you, for Carmine’s son, all those fucking years because I had a reason, you know? We’d either get all of them or they’d get us. Or both ... all the same, right? And that was all ... all I care about was in that room. I can’t even drive anymore, you know what I’m saying?”

“I know, Pet. But...”

“There ain’t no ‘but’ behind this, Wes. If I go out now they’ll hit me. And what’s worse, they’ll fucking know I was involved in that whole thing. They’ll know there was other people. They’ll know, and they’ll smell around and sooner or later...”

“I know.”

“I was going to go out hard, you know? Take some of them with me. But there’s none of them really left ... except a few new guys we couldn’t ever get close to. And the soldiers, the button-men, you know ... they...”

“No soldier’s going to hit you, Pet.”

“It wouldn’t be right. I helped kill the sharks, Wes—I don’t want the little fucking fish to eat my flesh. I’m tired....”

“Your family...?”

“Gone. A long time ago. Carmine was my family, and then you.”

“I still am.”

“Then be family, Wesley.”

“That’s why I came here now.”

“Yeah. What was your mother’s name?” the old man challenged.

“I don’t know.”

“Did you learn enough from me to be proud of that?”

“Yes.”

“I want to stay here, right?”

“I wasn’t thinking about no Potter’s Field, Pop.”

“Or Forest Lawn, either. I don’t want to be buried with trash.”

“You want to know in front?”

“Punk! What do you think I am?”

“I’m sorry ... I’m sorry, old man. I know what you are. You’re the most man I ever knew.”

“That’s okay, Wes. I know why you said that. The same thing as pulling me out of that room, huh? It’s no good anymore, son.”

As if by mutual consent, they walked toward the corner of the garage farthest from the street. The old man calmly seated himself in his good old leather chair, lit a twisted black cigar and inhaled deeply. He smiled up at Wesley.

Wesley screwed the silencer into the Beretta and cocked the piece. He held it dead-level pointed at Pet’s forehead.

“Good-bye, Pop. Say hello to Carmine for me.”

“I will, son. Don’t stay out too late.”

The slug slammed above the bridge of the old man’s nose, precisely at the point where his dark eyebrows just failed to meet. The impact rocked the chair against the wall, and the old man slumped to the floor. Wesley picked him up in his arms. He was carrying the old man’s body toward the door to the first floor when he noticed the deep trench cut into the concrete. He laid the old man on his back in the trench and pressed the still-warm Beretta into his hand. Wesley shoveled the earth back into the trench until it was ten inches from the top. Then he began to mix the new batch of concrete.

It was all finished inside of an hour, the floor now smoothed and drying in the heat of the 3400K spotlights attached to the back beams.

Wesley went over and sat in the old man’s chair. He watched the concrete harden, fingering Pet’s cutoff shotgun.

65/

The kid let himself into the garage the next day, silently and quickly, as he had been taught. For the first time in his memory, the old man wasn’t there. He heard the slightest of sounds and whirled in the opposite direction, hitting the floor, his tiny Colt Cobra up and ready. He saw nothing.

“Too slow, kid.”

“Wesley?” the kid questioned, as the other man emerged from the shadows, now dressed in the outfit he last wore on the roof.

“Yeah. Put the piece down.”

“Where’s Pet?”

“He’s gone home, kid.”

“Like he wanted to in the...?”

“You knew, huh? Good. Yeah, like that. Now it’s just me.”

“And me, right?”

“If you want.”

“What else could I...?”

“It’s different now, kid. We got all of them and there’s something else to work on. You know what?”

“I figure I’ll learn that from you.”

“Where’s your father?”

“My father’s been dead for twenty years. At least that’s what they said.”

“Your mother?”

“She went after him.”

“Who raised you?”

“The State.”

“Okay. From now on, you live here. You handle the cars. Pet taught you, right?”

“Last time I was here he said he 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 the 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.”

The kid turned away without another word. He walked toward the row of waiting cars. “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.

66/

That same night, Wesley wheeled the Ford down Water Street and onto the FDR toward the Brooklyn Bridge. He met the man with the money from the Mansfield job right 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 lost.”

“Hey! Fuck you, man. I’m not getting out and you’re not blasting me in the middle of fucking Brooklyn 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 500-pound test-steel springs. The front seat was triple-bolted to reinforced steel beams in the floor—it weighed six hundred pounds. It was exactly 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, the seat clicked back into place and the man remained plastered against the plastic slipcover of the front seat. Another quick shove and the dead man was on the floor. Another half-second and he 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 to simply drive the car into the garage as it was and let the kid handle the disposal. But then he remembered the kid had to be protected, as Wesley himself had been protected, and he deliberately drove the Ford under the shadows of the Manhattan Bridge. It looked like the kind of car The Man would drive and 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, and 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. Satisfied, he pulled the dead man out and propped him up convincingly on the bench. The man’s head fell down on his crushed chest, but that looked even more like Avenue D after dark was supposed to. He 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 started to put it down when he saw the Ford.

“Don’t ever put your gun up until you know it’s me,” Wesley barked at him. “Don’t be looking at the 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.

Wesley went back to his own place.

67/

It wasn’t that hard to find humans who wanted problems disposed of and expected to pay for the service, but it was hard on Wesley. All the talking, the bargaining, the bullshit.

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

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 girl’s room. Order me a Pink Lady and I’ll be right back.”

Fifteen minutes later, the truth came to Wesley. He went back out into the night.

68/

Inside the warehouse, Wesley 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 a lot of other miscellaneous information. He also saw prices next to each name:

LEWISTON, PETER .... $25K+

RANDOLPH, MARGARET .... $40K

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 it together that many of the names were 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, 203, and 201. Long Island, Westchester, northern New Jersey, southern Connecticut. The seven digit numbers Wesley assumed were 212—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, an obvious prowler’s machine. The El Dorado was a little too hard to miss. He couldn’t drive the cab like Pet and make it seem like 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 Airweight, and returned it under the dash. He put six rolls of dimes and five rolls of quarters in the glove compartment and stashed a rectangular 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 (“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.”) that matched his counterfeit driver’s license and registration.

He kept the car at 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 payphone 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 showed him how to use—it was clean. A quick twist removed the mouthpiece, and 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.

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 politely.

“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—when 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 his voice-alteration disk for the stock item. The shiny chrome of the phone coin box picked up fingerprints perfectly—Wesley knew smearing them was as good as wiping them, but he took the extra second to do a thorough job with his handkerchief. A man wearing gloves in the summer making a phone call would be too much for even a Nassau County cop to pass up. On the other hand, 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.

69/

As Wesley approached the Firebird, he took in the three kids sitting on its hood and fenders. As he got close, he looked into their faces and got blank, vicious smiles in return—they were too young to see what the Times Square hustler had recognized. The kids nudged each other as Wesley came closer, climbing off the Firebird at the last moment.

They were smiling as Wesley took out the keys and opened the door. They kept smiling as he started the engine. They 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. The leader motioned for Wesley to lower the window, still smiling. Wesley flicked the power-window switch with his right hand and the tinted glass whispered down to the sill level. The biggest kid 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 kids 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 biggest kid whipped out a switchblade in what he thought was a lightning move. It was so unprofessionally slow and 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 as he was releasing his left hand. 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. No, 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.

70/

The uniformed parking-lot attendant gave him a “Thank you, sir!” and a stamped ticket in exchange for his car keys. Surrendering the keys didn’t make Wesley uncomfortable—he had a second set 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. It was like any other bar. It may have been way upscale, but there must be places to fade into, just like there were in the Hudson River waterfront joints Wesley had grown up in, he thought. The J. Press would hold him unless someone tried to strike up a conversation. The 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.

There weren’t many. The brunette hostess swayed over to the space Wesley was occupying. She looked like a high-class version of the Times Square hustler, and Wesley tried hard not to catch her eye. She tried just as hard to catch his ... and succeeded. Her smile was bright and professional, and her appraisal of his clothing was so quick as to seem instinctive. Pet had told him that professional speed with a knife has to come from a combination of breeding and practice—he guessed her skill was acquired the same way. She took his order, brought his rye and ginger to him quickly: “Would you like this mixed, sir?”

“No thanks.”

Wesley didn’t pick up any fear-reaction from her at all. He suddenly realized that he must be as foreign to these people as a man from Venus. They weren’t looking for a shark in their swimming pool, so they didn’t see one. Wesley relaxed and smiled and the hostess flashed him a genuine-looking smile in return. That must take a lot of practice, he thought admiringly. He watched her as she glided away, her hips gently swaying, not wiggling like Wesley had expected.

Wesley had the Norden candidates narrowed down to a field of three, but Pet’s written description could have fit any of them. They all looked alike to Wesley anyway. He was about to look for a pay phone when he noticed the hostess bringing a dial phone with a short cord to another patron at the far end of the bar. She smiled and plugged it in somewhere behind the bar. The man immediately picked up the receiver and started talking.

Wesley had left the change from a twenty on the bar. He didn’t want the liquor, but he needed to get the hostess’ attention. So he threw back the rye, hardening his throat ... but it slipped down so smoothly he felt it must have been watered.

The hostess caught his eye before he could raise his hand or his voice. She was in front of him in a flash.

“Could you refill this?” Wesley asked her. “And get me a phone, please?”

“Certainly, sir.”

She was back with both, reduced Wesley’s seventeen dollars down to fourteen, and was gone again, leaving another smile, before Wesley could even crank up his face to respond.

He noted that there was no number on the phone’s dial. Wesley dialed the Sequoia Club direct, and told the professionally nice voice that answered that he would like to have Mr. Norden paged.

“It’ll be just a moment, sir,” the voice told him, and then he heard the mechanism telling him he was on hold. Wesley signaled the hostess. She signaled back “just a minute,” and went out from behind the bar to carry a phone over to a beefy-looking man sitting at a small round table alone in the back.

She bent over further than seemed absolutely necessary to plug in the instrument, but the man was too detached to notice. Wesley watched him pick up the receiver, then he heard “Yes?” in his ear.

“I’ll be there in five minutes,” Wesley responded.

“Who is this?”

Wesley hung up. He saw Norden speaking into a dead phone for a couple of seconds, then watched as the man gently replaced the receiver. Wesley walked over to Norden’s table—he could get no real sense of the depth of the room and he had to decide between watching the wall behind them or the entrance. He took the second choice and sat down.

Norden looked intently at Wesley: “You’re...?”

“The man on the telephone,” Wesley answered.

“How do I know who you really are?”

“Mr. P. gave me your name and number, you understand?”

“Okay, okay. Look, I don’t want to talk in here.”

“The parking lot?”

“I’ll meet you out there in two minutes.”

“Forget that. We walk out together, or you won’t see me again.”

“I hope you don’t think I would...”

Wesley didn’t answer. He kept both hands flat on top of the little round table, a gesture as incomprehensible to Norden as Wesley’s earlier threat had been. Norden signaled to the hostess, who immediately came over. She gave Wesley an extra-bright smile and took the twenty Norden handed her. She didn’t pretend she was going to make change. Wesley wished he was negotiating with her instead of this weasel.

They hit the outside door, copping a “Goodnight, sir!” to each of them from several different flunkies, and then they were in the lot. When the attendant left with their tickets and Norden’s five-dollar bill (Wesley couldn’t tell if this was for the both of them and paid nothing), Wesley said, “Drive up the road about a half-mile and pull over. I’ll be right behind you and we’ll talk.”

Norden started to answer, and then apparently thought better of it. His white Cadillac Coupe de Ville was easy to follow; Wesley counted 6/10 on his odometer before the Caddy pulled off to the side. It was a wide field that Wesley thought was a farm until he spotted the stone gate, set in about fifty yards from the road. Wesley pulled the Firebird just in front of Norden’s car, then backed up so that the Caddy couldn’t leave first without using reverse.

“Pull up your hood so it looks like I’m helping you with the engine. In case somebody stops,” said Wesley, opening his trunk.

“Who would stop?”

“The cops, right?”

“Not around here, they wouldn’t. Anyway, that’s not important. It’s my wife, she—” Wesley started to say it didn’t matter ... but some almost-dormant instinct told him that this rich man needed to talk or there’d be no contract—“has all the money, really. It used to be alright, but now she’s getting older and crazier and I can’t... Well, look, will you do it?”

“Yes.”

“Can you make it look like an accident?”

“No. I’m no mechanic—you’re going to be someplace else at the time. It’ll look like a robbery ... or,” watching his face, “a rape that went wrong ... something.”

“It won’t be painful to her? I wouldn’t want—”

“No pain. She won’t feel a thing. For a hundred thousand dollars.”

“That’s ridiculous!”

“That’s what it costs for a perfect job. She goes, and I say nothing if I’m caught ... ever.”

“Oh, I know the Code. Mr. Petraglia told me how you all—”

“Then you know how things are,” Wesley cut him off. “Okay. I need half up front in cash, you understand. You know what to do: nothing bigger than fifties, no serial numbers in sequence, no new bills. And don’t fuck with powders or anything; I got the same lights as the feds.”

“I wouldn’t do anything like that.... But it’ll be hard to raise that kind of cash without making her suspicious.”

The woman was no longer “my wife,” Wesley noticed. “So what? She won’t be around long enough to do anything about it.”

“I need a week. Can I meet you right here next Tuesday night?”

“No. Stay by your phone; I’ll call between nine and nine-thirty one night, tell you where to come.”

“But ... well, I guess that’s the way you—”

“I’ll call you then.”

Wesley slipped back into his car and drove off. He thought the whole thing over. Maybe Norden’s car was wired; maybe they were picking up his conversation with a shotgun mike from behind that stone fence; maybe...

But they’d never play that square with him. Wesley knew he’d never die in prison, because he’d never come to trial. He thought about the mark’s “code” and wondered where Pet had gotten the cojones to shovel that much crap. He remembered Carmine telling him about the “code.”

“What fucking ‘code,’ kid? Here in prison? Shit! The ‘code’ that says skinners can’t walk the Yard? You know DeMayo? That miserable slime fucked a four-year-old girl until she died from being ripped open. He walks the Yard and nobody says nothing. Why? Because he carries and he kills. That much for the fucking ‘code’! You know why cons always target baby-rapers? Because they’re usually such sorry bastards—old, sick, weak ... or young and fucked up in the brain, you know? The kind that can’t protect themselves. And this bullshit that the cons fuck them up because they love kids, or ‘cause they got kids of their own’ ... crap! They kill them and they rip them off because they are fucking weak ... that’s the only rule in here. There’s no ‘code.’ There’s no fucking nothing ... except this,” a tightly balled fist, “this,” a flat-edged hand, “this,” the first two fingers rubbed against the thumb in the universal symbol for money. “And you handle it all with this!” tapping his temple.

“What about this?” Wesley asked, smacking his fist against his chest.

“Kid, all the heart does is pump blood,” Carmine told him. “Listen, take this racial shit, right? A nigger can’t walk certain places, right? So how come Lee, he walks where he wants?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because he won’t be fucked with, that’s why. He don’t mind dying. That’s the only thing they respect, kid ... in here and out there.”

“You said a few things with your hands.”

“They’re all the same thing: power. You got it and you don’t use it, it goes away. You do use it, it grows. You don’t have it, you better get some.”

“Who do you get it from?”

“Power in America is money. You can steal money, but you will never be able to join their fucking rich-man’s club. You could steal a billion fucking dollars and not run for senate ... but you could buy a senator, you see?”

“So what kind of power could I get? My freedom?”

“Not freedom, Wes, freedoom. People like us are never free to say how we live; but some of us can say how and when we die. That’s the only thing really free for us out there ... or in here. And those are the only two places in the world—in here or out there.”

“Is the whole ‘code’ really fucked up that bad? When I was in the reform school, we—”

“It’s all gone, now. Look around the Yard, what do you see? Me, I see maggots—motherfuckers that would sell your life for a carton, never mind a parole. I see junkies, walking around dead. I see colored guys in here for being colored and little kids in here for bullshit beefs, ‘cause they had no coin. The only real criminals are outside anyway. Things have changed ... you don’t see the man who steals anymore, the good clean thief, the professional. No, it’s all ragtime, Wes. It’s all sick and dead....”

Wesley realized that Norden didn’t know any of this—the stupid movie-mythology was gospel truth to the mark.

71/

The kid was waiting for Wesley when he pressed the horn ring and slipped the car inside. He had the grease gun leveled—it didn’t flicker until Wesley stepped out into the soft glow of the diffused spots.

“Okay?” the kid asked.

“Only thing may be a make on the plates and the car color. We can’t use those plates again, but otherwise...”

“I’ll take care of it.”

It took Wesley only fifteen minutes to reach his own place, shower, dispose of the clothing, snap a leash on the dog, and return to the garage. He led the dog to a spot right in front of the garage door, unsnapped the leash, said, “Guard!”

“You got the right kind of clothes for the roof?” he asked the kid.

“This time of night?”

Wesley nodded.

“Yeah. In the chest of drawers over there.”

“Get dressed and meet me up there, okay?”

The kid walked over to the chest, still carrying the grease gun.

“I’m going to meet a guy from Pet’s old client book,” Wesley told the kid later. “A week from tonight. He wants me to hit his wife. I told him to lay fifty K up front and that I’d call him and tell him where to bring it. I figure he’ll be looking for the same car. You follow me with the Caddy. I’ll have him meet me in a field out there. You bring the nightscope and a quiet rifle. Anything happens, you hit him and split ... okay?”

“Why we going to hit his wife?”

“For the money.”

“There’s a risk, right?”

“Always a risk.”

“So why risk? I could just as easy pop him soon as he gets out of his car. Then we got fifty thousand and no risk.”