Andrew Vachss - A Bomb Built in Hell

When Pet came back one day, Wesley asked him about another kind of practice. “I need to work with the pieces. Where can I do it?”

“Right here. I got the fourth floor soundproofed. Anyway, with those silencers I got for you, you could blow the wall away and not have anybody catch wise.”

“What about practicing without the silencers?”

“What you want to do that for? The pieces’ll just make more noise , that’s all. Even the long-range stuff has silencers now—I’ll show you later.”

The old man was right. Wesley fired thousands of rounds, making the most minute adjustments before he was satisfied. No one came, no sirens, nothing.

It was easy to make the adjustments since Pet had the fourth floor all marked off in increments of six inches—ceiling, floors, and walls. Wesley worked out a rough formula: the smaller the caliber, the more accurate the shot had to be. The more bullets flying, the less accurate each individual slug had to be. The closer to the target, the less time you had to get ready. Pet came back late one night, pressed the silent warning system to let Wesley know he was there, and was already making himself a cup of the strong, pasty coffee he especially liked by the time Wesley got to the garage.

“I got something for you,” the old man said. “It’s a simple one. I think they want to see if I can deliver.”

“They think it’s you going to be doing it?”

“Yeah, me and my ‘organization,’ right?”

“Right. Good. Tell me.”

“It’s a pawnshop on Lenox Avenue, near 131st Street. The guy who runs it is a front for them. He’s making good coin where he is, but he’s a greedy fuck—started selling dope out of the place, and The Man got him. It’s about a hundred years in the can for what they nailed him with; he rolled over like a dog. He don’t really know all that much yet, so they’re leaving him out there to get more. He’s also got an undercover working for him—right in the shop.”

“What’s that?”

“A cop, from the CIB; a Puerto Rican kid, he looks like, but he’s a cop for sure. Supposed to be a stockboy or something like that, but he uses that phone too much ... and he’s not placing bets.”

“The cop, too?”

“Maybe more—the beat bulls are getting paid off by this creep, and they keep a close watch on his store so’s he won’t get taken off.”

“Can we get him over here some night?”

“Forget that! The first rule is that nothing gets done down here. We got to protect this territory completely. No dope fiends, no freaks, no fucking nothing. This is the safe house, right? No, he’s got to be hit right in his shop.”

“Why not at his house, where he lives?”

“Too much pressure on the boys, then. The Muslims have been giving this rat bastard hell because they know he’s dealing. We make it look like they did it.”

“A white man in Harlem?”

“You thinking about him or you?”

“Me.”

“Good. You ever use dynamite?”

“Just grenades. In the Army.”

“Same stuff. You light it, you throw it, and you get the fuck outta the way, right?”

“They might get out, too.... No, wait a minute ... are they both up front in the place?”

“Usually the cop is in the back—but if he thinks you from the People he’ll drift up just to be able to testify against you later.”

“Doesn’t this guy know who his contact is?”

“No. He’s a small-time weasel—any fucking hood comes in there with a ‘Message from the Boys’ and this faggot’ll listen, you know?”

“Okay, when does the cop leave the place at night?”

“The guy we want opens up around ten. And his cop helper gets there around noon. They work a long day, close up around eleven at night. We’ll take the cab—it cost me twenty-eight large, but they’ll never find it in this city.”

31/

Wednesday night, 9:10 p.m. A yellow medallion cab rolled up in front of the pawnshop on Lenox, the old man at the wheel. Pet slid the cab down about four doors from the target and pulled out a newspaper. He poked a small hole in the middle of the paper with a sharp pencil, adjusted his rearview mirror until he was satisfied. He slipped the cab into gear and rested his left foot lightly on the brake—the rear brake lights did not go on.

Wesley climbed out of the back of the cab. He was dressed in a steel-grey sharkskin one-button suit with a dark grey shirt and light grey tie. His shoes flashed like black mirrors in rhyme-time with the gross white Lindy Star on his right pinky; his watchband matched his cufflinks, which matched his tie clip; his snapbrim fedora was pearl grey. He carried a small, round cardboard hatbox.

The bells above the door tinkled as Wesley entered. The shop was empty of customers and the pawnbroker was up front in the cage.

“Can I help you?”

“No, I can help you , pal. I got a message from the Boys—they want you to take this package and...”

The Puerto Rican drifted toward the front as Wesley’s voice trailed off.

“Who’s this?” Wesley challenged.

“Oh, this is Juan, my stockboy. He’s okay; he knows the score.”

“Get him over here—I want to see his face.”

Juan walked smiling toward the front of the cage. Wesley brought the 9mm Beretta out of the hatbox. The silencer made it seem six feet long, but Juan caught two slugs in the chest before he had a chance to wonder about it or make a move (“Always take the hard man first—it’s tougher on your guts that way, but if you take the soft man first, you won’t be fucking alive to feel good behind it,” Carmine had told him years ago) and Wesley immediately turned the gun on the other man who flung his hands into the air. Wesley said, “Open the cashbox!” so the target would relax, and blew away the side of his face as the man bent toward the drawer.

Wesley put the hatbox down on the floor, clicked the snap-fuse open, and wheeled toward the door. He flipped the sign from OPEN to CLOSED and set the spring lock behind him as he went out. He was into the back seat of the cab in another second and Pet had pulled smoothly away before Wesley could get the “Eight seconds!” out of his mouth. They caught the first light and were buried in the traffic at 125th and Lenox when they heard the explosion. Traffic stalled. Everyone tried to figure out where the noise had come from, but the cop, who empathized with any white man’s desire to get the hell of out Harlem before dark, waved them through.

32/

They hit the FDR in minutes. The meter showed $4.65 by the time they neared the Slip.

“When we going to switch?” Wesley asked.

“We’re not—nobody’s following us. I got a car buried on Park and 88th and another in Union Square but we don’t need them—I’ll pick them up tomorrow. I’ll change the numbers of this one tonight—nothing to it. We don’t want to make problems by getting too cute.”

The eleven o’clock news had a story about a firebombing in Harlem; the reporter said it looked like a “terrorist act.” The film clips showed the entire front of the pawnshop and the stores on either side completely obliterated. The firemen were still battling the blaze, and it was not known if anyone had been inside at the time of the explosion. An informant had told the police that two men, both Negro, of average height, were seen running from the shop toward Eighth Avenue just before the explosion and the police expected arrests to follow.

“Were you the informant?” Wesley asked.

“You must be kidding, Wes. There’s always some righteous asshole who pulls that kind of number. Every job I ever knew about had fifty fucking leads called into The Man that didn’t have nothing to do with what went down.”