Стивен Кинг - Later

“Hi, Liz,” I mumbled. I looked down at my shoes and made a right turn onto the street.

“Hold on, I need to talk to you.”

I stopped, but I didn’t turn back to her. Like she was Medusa and one look at her snaky head would turn me to stone. “I don’t think I should. Mom would be mad.”

“She doesn’t need to know. Turn around, Jamie. Please. Looking at nothing but your back is just about killing me.”

She sounded like she really felt bad, and that made me feel bad. I turned around. The blazer was closed again, but I could see the bulge of her gun just the same.

“I want you to take a ride with me.”

“Not a good idea,” I said. I was thinking of this girl named Ramona Sheinberg. She was in a couple of my classes at the beginning of the year, but then she was gone and my friend Scott Abramowitz told me her father snatched her during a custody suit and took her to someplace where there was no extradition. Scott said he hoped it was at least a place with palm trees.

“I need what you can do, Champ,” she said. “I really do.”

I didn’t reply to that, but she must have seen I was wavering, because she gave me a smile. It was a nice one that lit up those gray eyes of hers. They weren’t a bit sleety that day. “Maybe it will come to nothing, but I want to try. I want you to try.”

“Try what?”

She didn’t answer, not then, just held out a hand to me. “I helped your mother when Regis Thomas died. Won’t you help me now?”

Technically, I was the one who helped my mother that day, Liz just gave us a quick ride up the Sprain Brook Parkway, but she had stopped to buy me a Whopper when Mom just wanted to push on. And she gave me the rest of her Coke when my mouth was so dry from talking. So I got in the car. I didn’t feel good about it, but I did it. Adults have power, especially when they beg, and that’s what Liz was doing.

I asked Liz where we were going, and she said Central Park to start with. Maybe a couple of other places after that. I said if I didn’t get home by five, Mom would be worried. Liz told me she’d try to get me back before then, but this was very important.

That’s when she told me what it was about.

The guy who called himself Thumper set his first bomb in Eastport, a Long Island town not all that far from Speonk, one-time home of Uncle Harry’s Cabin (literary joke). This was in 1996. Thumper dropped a stick of dynamite hooked up to a timer in a trash can outside the restrooms of the King Kullen Supermarket. The timer was nothing but a cheap alarm clock, but it worked. The dynamite went off at 9 PM, just as the supermarket was closing. Three people were hurt, all store employees. Two of them suffered only superficial injuries, but the third guy was coming out of the men’s when the bomb blew. He lost an eye and his right arm up to the elbow. Two days later, a note came in to the Suffolk County Police Department. It was typed on an IBM Selectric. It said, How do you like my work so far? More to come! THUMPER .

Thumper set nineteen bombs before he actually killed anybody. “ Nineteen!” Liz exclaimed. “And it wasn’t as if he wasn’t trying. He set them all over the five boroughs, and a couple in New Jersey—Jersey City and Fort Lee—for good measure. All dynamite, Canadian manufacture.”

But the score of the maimed and wounded was high. It had been closing in on fifty when he finally killed the man who picked the wrong Lexington Avenue pay phone. Every kaboom was followed by a note to the police responsible for the area where said kaboom occurred, and the notes were always the same: How do you like my work so far? More to come! THUMPER .

Before Richard Scalise (that was the pay phone man’s name), a long period of time went by before each new explosion. The two closest were six weeks apart. The longest delay was close to a year. But after Scalise, Thumper sped up. The bombs became bigger and the timers more sophisticated. Nineteen explosions between 1996 and 2009—twenty, counting the pay phone bomb. Between 2010 and the pretty May day in 2013 when Liz came back into my life, he set ten more, wounding twenty and killing three. By then, Thumper wasn’t just an urban legend, or an NY1 staple; by then he was nationwide.

He was good at avoiding security cameras, and those he couldn’t avoid just showed a guy in a coat, sunglasses, and a Yankees cap pulled down low. He kept his head low, too. Some white hair showed around the sides and back of the cap, but that could have been a wig. Over the seventeen years of his “reign of terror,” three different task forces were organized to catch him. The first one disbanded during a long break in his “reign,” when the police assumed he was finished. The second disbanded after a big shakeup in the department. The third started in 2011, when it became clear Thumper had gone into overdrive. Liz didn’t tell me all this on our way to Central Park; I found it out later, as I did so many other things.

Finally, two days ago, they got the break in the case they’d been waiting and hoping for. Son of Sam was caught by a parking ticket. Ted Bundy got caught because he forgot to put his headlights on. Thumper—real name Kenneth Alan Therriault—was nailed because a building super had a minor accident on trash day. He was wheeling a dolly loaded with garbage cans down an alley to the pickup point out front. He hit a pothole and one of the cans spilled. When he went to clean up the mess, he found a bundle of wires and a yellow scrap of paper with CANACO printed on it. He might not have called the police if that had been all, but it wasn’t. Attached to one of the wires was a Dyno Nobel blasting cap.

We got to Central Park and parked with a bunch of regular cop cars (another thing I found out later is that Central Park has its own precinct, the 22nd). Liz put her little cop sign on the dashboard and we walked down 86th Street for a little while before turning onto a path that led to the Alexander Hamilton Monument. That’s one thing I didn’t find out later; I just read the fucking sign. Or plaque. Whatever.

“The super took a picture of the wires, the scrap of paper, and the blasting cap with his phone, but the task force didn’t get it until the next day.”

“Yesterday,” I said.

“Right. As soon as we saw it, we knew we had our guy.”

“Sure, because of the blasting cap.”

“Yeah, but not just that. The scrap of paper? Canaco is a Canadian company that manufactures dynamite. We got a list of all the building’s tenants, and eliminated most of them without any fieldwork, because we knew we were looking for a male, probably single, and probably white. There were only six tenants who checked all those boxes, and only one guy who’d ever worked in Canada.”

“Googled ’em, right?” I was getting interested.

“Right you are. Among other things, we found Kenneth Therriault has dual citizenship, U.S. and Canada. He worked all sorts of construction jobs up there in the great white north, plus fracking and oil shale sites. He was Thumper, pretty much had to be.”

I only got a quick look at Alexander Hamilton, just enough to read the sign and note his fancy pants. Liz had me by the hand and was leading me toward a path a little way beyond the statue. Pulling me, actually.

“We went in with a SWAT team, but his crib was empty. Well, not empty empty, all his stuff was there, but he was gone. The super didn’t keep his big discovery to himself, unfortunately, although he was told to. He blabbed to some of the residents, and the word spread. One of the things we found in the apartment was an IBM Selectric.”

“That’s a typewriter?”

She nodded. “Those babies used to come with different type elements for different fonts. The one in the machine matched Thumper’s notes.”