Andrew Vachss - A Bomb Built in Hell

Risk against gain. Wesley sat and thought about some political pamphlet he’d read in prison. Lee had given it to him and everyone respected Lee for being in the know, but it had never begun to make sense to Wesley. How could the writer talk about the lumpen proletariat being the vanguard of the revolution when the fucking lumpen proletariat couldn’t even understand the fancy-ass words the man used in a book they’d never read? Or was that a criticism of Marx by some other fucking lame who thought the lumpen were terrific? Lee read those tracts like they were comic books—he kept chuckling over them, and nobody ever understood what he was laughing about.

“An ox for the people to ride....” Who wanted to be a fucking ox? Work all your life and then have them eat your flesh when you’re too old to work or breed. The prison-reform freaks had it all wrong. Wesley remembered when the cons threatened to riot behind their demand for conjugal visiting, and Lee told them they had conjugal visits in Mississippi, where he’d done time before. Wesley asked him why Mississippi , of all places, would treat prisoners so good.

“Because the cons is nothing but motherfucking work animals. You feed them and you keep them serviced, or they turn mean and lazy on you. Prisons is a big business down there, Wes,” Lee told him.

Wesley thought about the plate shop and all the bogus dealer plates the cons made for sale to the guards who, in turn, sold them to the mob and used the money to buy dope to sell back to the cons who stabbed each other to death over the distribution rights and ended up locked in solitary, watched by the same guards.

He remembered Mao’s “The guerrilla is the fish in the water; the leaf on the tree” (another contribution from Lee’s library) and thought you had to be a damn slimy fish to swim in this city.

Finally, he faced it. Wiping out Carmine’s employers wouldn’t end it. He couldn’t let Pet go just for that. Wesley was deep into his second pack of cigarettes when he got to his feet to go downstairs. It was nearly dawn and the street was starting to lighten, but it was still as deserted as ever.

It would have to be gas.

54/

The two men looked at the building the next night. It was easy enough to get into the back once Pet torched off the bolts. He replaced them with his own, adding fresh locks for which he had good keys.

When they got to the top floor, Wesley asked, “Can you make this room airtight?”

“In a couple of weeks, sure. But we won’t be able to do it quietly.”

“Have we got enough to buy this building?”

“Yeah, but if you’re going to leave them all here...”

“Buy it in Carmine’s name.”

“Come on , Wes. Be yourself. We need only clean paper on something like this.”

“Can you get that?”

“Sure. For about ten large, from the Jew on Broome Street.”

“I heard of him, but I don’t know where he is, exactly. Do you?”

“No, but I can find him—he’s a professional.”

“Okay. Try it that way first. Buy the building and get us all the stuff we talked about.”

“I don’t think you should work on that part, Wes. Let me use the kid—it’s really only a two-man job, anyway.”

They found the kid inside the garage, sitting in the Ford. The dog was standing by the entrance to Wesley’s hallway, watching—he sat down when Wesley came in. The kid looked at the floor.

“The old lady’s dead,” he said.

“What old lady?” Wesley asked him.

“The lady who addressed the envelopes for us, remember?”

“Yeah. You had to...?”

“I called for her this morning, and they told me she killed herself last night. Took about fifty sleeping pills. She must of been saving them for weeks.”

“You think she knew?”

“Yeah, she knew, alright. She was old, not stupid. I told you she’d never give me up.”

Pet put his hand on the kid’s shoulder. “I never thought she would, kid. She was just being sure they’d never come for you through her.”

The kid nodded.

Wesley never changed expression. He abandoned his plans to visit the old lady, snapped his fingers for the dog, and went to his apartment, leaving Pet and the kid alone to plan the building project.

55/

Wesley spent the next five days on the top floor, the next four nights on the roof. He read the papers carefully, as he always did. The news carried a small column about the new methadone clinic being opened up on Pike Street. It was directly across from the Projects and only about six blocks away from the factory on Water Street. Wesley felt an overpowering sense of encroachment, as if a stranger had just entered his apartment.

He went back into his newspaper file, thinking it through. The headlines formed a story-sequence on their own: Addicts Overrun Residential Community ... Citizens Up In Arms Over New Methadone Clinic ... Arrests Triple Near New Clinic, Citizens’ Committee Reports ... Community Group Complains of Lowered Property Values ... Vigilantes Threaten to Burn New Methadone Center.

Wesley reflected, deep within himself. Cocaine was going way up in price. Methadone didn’t block reaction to Lady Snow, the way it did with heroin. Freebase was the coming thing. Carmine had told him, hundreds of times, that no government policy was ever an accident, but...

Methadone. A way to register every dope fiend in the country. A way to control habits, supplies, prices ... lives.

Wesley thumbed through the laboriously titled “Methadone Maintenance Treatment Program of the New York City Health Services Administration: Policy and Procedure Manual,” and finally found what he was looking for on page E-1.

Although the Program does not consider detoxification as the ultimate goal which defines “success,” some patients do see this as their own, personal objective....

Wesley had asked the librarian for any official publications on the program, but was bluntly told such information was not public. Three days later, a junkie had met Wesley in front of the Felt Forum and gotten into the Ford.

“I got it, man,” he had said, handing over the manual. “You got the bread?”

“Yeah,” Wesley told him, tucking the bills into the junkie’s shirt pocket. “You want to make another fast hundred?”

“Sure, man. I need—”

“I know. Just hang on now.”

Wesley swung the car into the Eighth Avenue traffic stream and took Eighth all the way to 57th. From there, he went crosstown and got on the upper roadway of the 59th Street Bridge. They crossed the bridge in silence, the junkie unaware they were bracketed by Pet in the cab and the kid in the Fleetwood.

Carmine had told him, “You ever go to a meet with a junkie, you remember two things: One, go with cover; and two, don’t go heeled. Every fucking junkie is a potential rat, and an ex-con, packing, in this state, you’re down for the whole count.”

The junkie was already nodding off the free cap Wesley had laid on him—his tolerance was for heroin, not Thorazine. He was drifting into unconsciousness as Wesley parked on the bridge between Northern Boulevard and Skillman Avenue in Long Island City, overlooking Sunnyside Yard. The Yard was once the world’s biggest railroad center, but it was largely abandoned now. The only business the neighborhood did was the giant Queens Social Services Center—the city’s euphemism for “Welfare”—on the corner.

Wesley hauled the junkie out of the car. He leaned them both against the railing. The street was empty. A cab cruised by slowly—Pet at the wheel. The junkie was barely breathing. Wesley had read about people so relaxed that they didn’t die even when falling from great heights. He slammed the icepick into the back of the junkie’s neck and shoved him over the railing in one smooth motion.