Andrew Vachss - A Bomb Built in Hell

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.