Andrew Vachss - A Bomb Built in Hell

“Don’t the cops know this?”

“And you Carmine’s son! For Chrissakes, kid ... don’t you know they only want to make the arrest? They could give a fuck about who’s really guilty. Didn’t you get bum-beefed when you went down?”

“No. I did it alright. I got ratted out by a scumbag clerk in a hotel.”

“Don’t you want to pay him back?”

“Someday, when it ties in with something else I’m doing. But I can’t risk what we’re doing just for payback.”

“Good. Where is he?”

“Times Square.”

“I can fucking guarantee you that sooner or later we’ll get into his territory. I always hated to work down there, though. Those fucking freaks, you never know what they’re going to do.”

“I know what they’re going to do.”

“How the hell do you know?”

“One of them told me.”

33/

“How come they’re paying a hundred K for this guy? What’s so hard about him?”

“He used to run the ‘Family Business’ in Queens, and now he’s pulled out. There’s got to be a war over this, because he still controls Queens and they don’t let you do that. This guy is sharp now. No telephones, no mail. He lives in a fucking fortress out near the North Shore on the Island and he runs the show from there.”

“Can we get at him?”

“No way. I was out there myself a few times, and you’d have to fucking bomb the place from a plane to hit it. And he’s got himself an air-raid shelter, too. Left over from the Fifties. But he has to stay in touch. Every month, he meets his capo on the 59th Street Bridge to talk.”

“What? Right out in the open?”

“Yeah, Wesley, right out in the open. But it ain’t just him that’s out in the open. And we don’t know what night he meets on—it’s always late, and he always gets a ride to the Queens side and meets the capo halfway across. He has men on the Queens side and the capo has men on the Manhattan side.”

“Couldn’t we just drive past and hit him?”

“How? We don’t know when he’s coming and if they see the same car pass back and forth, we’re the ones who’ll get hit. Besides, he stands with his back to the girders and you couldn’t get a decent shot at him, even if you could get on the bridge.”

“How much time have we got?”

“If we get him before he wins the war, we get paid. If he loses the war, we don’t. If he wins the war, we don’t.”

“How long before the war starts?”

“It may not start at all—they’re still trying to negotiate. But they also want to cover all their bets, you know?”

“How come they don’t try and cover you , with all the work you been doing for them?”

“They think they have. I never know if I’m coming back from a meet with them. But also, they think I got a nice little organization of my own, with all old guys like me, and they don’t want to start a war to prevent one. They’re very slick, right?”

Wesley smiled. “Can you get me onto Welfare Island after dark?”

The old man nodded and got up to leave. Wesley climbed up to the fourth floor and took the .219 Zipper from the gun rack. The cartridge had been originally designed for a Marlin rifle, but its lever action was too sloppy and inaccurate. Good enough for a varmint gun, but not for Wesley’s work. He had spent hours fitting the barrel into a rechambered format and attaching it to a better stock. Now it was single-action, and magnificently accurate. But he still couldn’t make it hold a silencer, and he had more practicing to do.

Wesley squeezed off another round—as he fired, he noticed the orange light glowing just past his range of vision. Smoothly and calmly, he pulled the massive Colt Trooper .357 magnum from his shoulder holster and spun to face the door. It opened and Pet stepped inside, a wide grin on his face. Wesley put the gun down and waited.

“Wes, I got a present for you,” Pet said, displaying another rifle.

“What’s that? I already got a good piece.”

“You got nothing compared to this. This here’s a Remington .220, the latest thing. It’s got twice the muzzle velocity of that Zipper and it’s more accurate, every time. And that’s not the best part. I know a guy who works for the bullet people—he’s a ballistics engineer. You know what he told me? He said that the engineers test fire some slugs from every batch that the factory manufactures, just to see if they’re building the slugs up to the specs. Well, every once in a while they come across some that’re just perfect, you know? They call these bullets ‘freaks,’ okay? And the engineers always take the whole batch and fire them themselves to see if they can figure out why these bullets work so good. Anyway, I got fifty rounds of those ‘freaks,’ for this piece.”

“I can make a five-inch group at three hundred yards with the Zipper,” Wesley said, doubtfully.

“The man told me you could double that distance and still group the same with this piece. And he’s no marksman.”

“Let me see it.”

“Okay, kid. But remember, I only got fifty rounds.”

“I’ll test fire it with some over-the-counter stuff first.”

Pet left Wesley alone. Four hours later, Wesley came down to the garage.

“Is it as accurate as the man said?” Pet asked.

“Better. But it’s the loudest damn thing I ever heard.”

“So what? No point in silencing it anyway from the Island—the chumps on the shore’ll think it was a backfire. We hit a guy like that once, years ago, me and Carmine. I set the car up so’s it would backfire like a sonofabitch, right? So we’re driving down the street with the car backfiring and the creep ducks behind his bodyguards ... but then they get wise it’s only the car and he starts laughing like a fool. He was still laughing when Carmine sent him a message and the bodyguards couldn’t figure out what happened until we were around the corner.”

“The engineer was sure right about this piece,” Wesley said. “Any chance of getting some more slugs from him?”

“No. It was in the papers yesterday. Somebody must have wired his car. It blew up when he turned on the ignition.”

34/

Wesley and Pet replaced the stock of the new rifle. With a new cheek-piece, hand-sanded to micro-tolerances, it fit Wesley’s face perfectly. Wesley had the latest nightscope: U.S. Army issue, and only to jungle-sniper teams. Pet built a long, black anodized-aluminum cone to hide the flash. Wesley mounted the piece on a tripod and sat comfortably behind it for a while. Then he disassembled the unit and climbed to the roof.

It was shadowy black on the waterfront as Wesley sighted in. He picked up a man and a woman in the scope, lying on the grass just off the river. The range was almost a mile and Wesley carefully dialed in the right magnification until he could see the man clearly. The nightscope worked to perfection; the man looked like he was in a spotlight against a dark background. The crosshairs focused on the man’s upper chest, then on his face, and then on to his left eye. Yes ... there . With such a high-speed, low-density bullet, a chest shot wasn’t a sure kill.

Wesley thought about the books he had read on triangulation and he concluded that it would be possible for the cops to learn where the bullets had been fired from. He came to another conclusion: so what?

Pet was waiting in the garage.

“I got a kid—a good, standup kid. A State kid, you know? He’ll bring a launch alongside the FDR. I’ll be in the Caddy, pulled over like I got engine trouble. You can be into the launch in thirty seconds, and he’ll bring you back about a mile upriver from there ... and I’ll be waiting again.”

“He’ll see my face.”