The City Under the Skin

36. A BIGGER BANG

Zak Webster had never given much thought to dynamite, but if he had thought about it, he’d have assumed that today’s mining and demolition engineers, such as those blasting the tunnels for the Platinum Line, the ones parking in Billy Moore’s lot, would have something rather more sophisticated, more modern, in their trucks. Billy Moore, repeating what he’d very recently learned from Sanjay on the way to the hospital, was able to tell him he’d have been wrong about that.

Billy had gone from the emergency room back to the lot, and then to Zak’s apartment, and even though it was the early hours of the morning, he found Zak all too awake, twanging with anxiety, debating if he should try to call or text Marilyn, wondering if he should go over to the Telstar Hotel, where he assumed she now was. Billy was able to tell him he was wrong about that too. He explained what needed explaining, that one way or another — and he knew it was wrong, and it was largely his fault, and he took full responsibility for his part in it, and yes, he was kind of ashamed of himself — both Marilyn and Carla were now inside Wrobleski’s compound, but terrible though that was, he had a plan for getting them out.

“You see, Zak, there’s no big mystery about dynamite,” said Billy. “My man Sanjay just enlightened me; it’s stuff geologists know, apparently. It turns out dynamite is just sawdust and nitroglycerin, stuffed into a tube, with a blasting cap and a fuse added.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Zak asked.

Billy Moore pulled a single stick of dynamite from the inside pocket of his newly reinstated leather jacket and placed it gently in Zak’s less than willing hand. Zak looked at it with some disbelief, amazed by the absurdity and what felt like the danger of the situation, even as Billy explained that the stick was harmless until the blasting cap and fuse were in place. As Zak held the stick, he felt a little like Wile E. Coyote, and the dynamite itself had an unreal quality about it. It looked so rudimentary, so provisional, wrapped in buff paper like a homemade firework, though the warnings printed on the side looked authentic enough.

“You place the stick,” said Billy. “You walk away, you detonate the dynamite, and you’re in business. I think we can do those things, can’t we, Zak?”

“I can certainly walk away. I might even run.”

“You actually don’t have to walk all that fast. We’re not talking about lighting the fuse, throwing it, and hoping for the best. See here.”

He handed Zak a device that looked like a cross between a cell phone and an antiquated channel changer.

“It’s a remote electronic trigger,” said Billy. “Self-explanatory, yeah?”

“I guess so,” said Zak.

“And really, you don’t even have to get all that far away. Sanjay tells me that a single stick, put in the right place, is enough to move one cubic yard of rock, which weighs about a ton, depending on what kind of rock it is. When you’re blasting a tunnel, like in the Platinum Line, you drill a hole and you put the stick in the hole, because that gives you maximum destruction: something to do with compression.”

“Sounds reasonable,” said Zak; then he wondered if he’d gone even further out of his mind than he realized. There was nothing even vaguely reasonable in what Billy was saying. Billy hadn’t explained the details of his plan yet, but Zak suspected there would be little that was sensible or logical or even recognizable in what he was about to propose. Zak got the feeling that he was living somebody else’s life.

“But we won’t be in a tunnel,” said Billy. “And in the wide-open spaces it’s a whole different story, apparently. There’s a lot of math involved, and I didn’t really follow that part. But anyway, in the not quite so wide-open spaces, Sanjay tells me that one stick isn’t that big a deal. It wouldn’t be enough to completely destroy, say, a house, and definitely not Wrobleski’s compound, but it would make one hell of a mess of a car, say, a big black SUV.”

“You’re going to blow up Wrobleski’s SUV?”

“That’s part of what I’m going to do, yes. There’s more. That’s where you come in, Zak.”