Andrew Vachss - A Bomb Built in Hell

There was a mass funeral for the “methadone victims,” although many of the families of the dead declined the privilege.

Wesley returned to the roof to think.

62/

Seeing the old man didn’t want to talk, Wesley walked through the garage and into his own area. The Mansfield job was the first they had done just for the money. Their employers were fundamentally unchanged—regrouped, cautious, but with the same limited ways of carving out their unique monopolies. Because they thought the old man died in the gas attack, it was now Wesley who negotiated with them directly.

He had handled the Mansfield negotiations just like Carmine had taught him: No questions, just a price. Half up front with the rest on completion. Mansfield had been one of the prime suspects in the gas murders. The people who ordered his death used their paranoia as proof.

Wesley stripped off all the clothing he had worn on the job and stuffed it into a large paper bag. The jewelry came off too, to be filed with hundreds of similar articles. The incinerator would later claim all the clothing—it was part of the cost of doing business.

After a quick shower, Wesley dressed again and headed for the firing range on the fourth floor. He carefully sighted in and calibrated the new M16s Pet had bought from a warrant officer at Fort Dix. A few missing guns from the overall inventory were routinely charged against the manufacturer, who was, in turn, building the guns so far below the specifications agreed to in the government contract that protesting the slight extra charge was unthinkable. Wesley was able to obtain all the military ordnance he wanted and everyone’s illusions were preserved ... even down to the two boots who thought they were delivering the M16s to a government agent who was going to run a “spot check” to make sure they worked well enough to protect our boys in whatever jungle they would be fighting in that year.

Wesley always disassembled each weapon and rebuilt it to the correct specs, using the manual as a guide. He remembered throwing away his own rifle in Korea when he finally got his hands on a solid, reliable Russian AK-47—nobody in his outfit with any brains was carrying Army-issue by then. They all had sidearms, which were supposed to be only for officers. They threw away the cumbersome grenade-launchers (“Lost in combat, sir!”) and even copped the Russian knives when they could.

Something about all that puzzled Wesley, and he finally decided to ask the smartest guy in the outfit about it. Morty was a short, wiry-haired Brooklyn boy who always had his face in a book.

“They want us to win this war, right?”

“This isn’t a war, Wes. It’s a police action.”

“When the police go into action in my neighborhood, it is war.”

“What I mean is, Congress hasn’t declared war on the North Koreans,” Morty explained, patiently. “It’s the United Nations that’s doing this.”

“It’s the North Koreans against the South Koreans, right?”

“So...?”

“So why don’t we let them settle their own beef?”

“Because of Communism, Wes. The North Koreans are controlled by the Reds and they want to take over the whole fucking world— if we don’t stop them here, we’ll have to fight them in America eventually.”

“And we own the South Koreans, right?”

“No. Nobody ‘owns’ them. What the South Koreans want is to be free.”

“So why don’t they fight?”

“They do fight. It’s just that—”

“Oh, bullshit, man. They don’t do shit but rip us off. They let their women be diseased whores and they wash the fucking dishes and do the laundry and all.... I mean why don’t they fight us?”

“We’re on their side—we’re helping them get free.”

“A zip’s a zip, right? That’s what everyone says—once we start blasting, everything yellow goes down.”

“Yeah. Well, look ... why did you ask me if we want to win?”

“If we want to win, why’d they give us such lousy guns?”

“Well, you know the factories ... in wartime, they have to—”

“I thought this was a fucking police action.”

“Man, Wes, you get harder and harder to talk to.”

“You know what I think, Morty?”

“What?”

“I think we’re the bullets, you know?”

63/

Wesley went back to reloading some new cartridge casings. He finished at about 3:00 a.m. and climbed up to the roof. He was dressed in doubleknit black jersey pants and shirt. Socks of the same material went almost to the knee. He wore mid-calf leather boots which closed with Velcro fasteners. The boots had been worked for hours with Connolly’s Hide Food until they were glove-soft, and the crosscut crepe soles gave superb traction without making a sound. He had on a soft, black-felt hat—with the jersey’s turtleneck, it gave an unbroken line of black from the back. Dark grey deerskin gloves hid his hands. The same black paste that football players use to protect their eyes from reflected glare was smeared across both cheekbones and the bridge of his nose. In the roof’s blackness he was just another shadow.

Wesley put the night glasses to his face and dispassionately watched a gang of car-strippers at work under the only remaining streetlight in the area, about two blocks north of Pike Slip. Unlike the junkies, these kids were anxious to avoid contact with the rest of the human race while they were working. They were the same as the birds in the trees in Korea had been—everything was safe as long as you saw them (or heard them) going about their business.

The old man worried him. Pet had tried to check out in the gas chamber. They both knew this, and it made things hard. Pet couldn’t hit the street at all anymore—Wesley had to rely on the kid.

They were working only for money now. Before they put all of Carmine’s employers in the gas chamber Wesley hadn’t thought a minute about the future. He was on earth to do a job, a guided missile ... but now he was a missile that hadn’t exploded when it had connected with its target. He had to think about tomorrow for the first time, and it was a new experience.

Wesley climbed down the stairs. Before he went back to his own apartment, he checked the garage. The old man had a blank look on his face, polishing the cars for the hundredth time—they gleamed like jewels, too bright.

64/

The next morning, the old man was polishing the Ford as Wesley slipped into the garage. For the first time in all their time together, the old man didn’t turn when someone entered. Wesley walked up to the Ford and just stared silently until the old man finally turned to face him.

“What?”

“I want to talk to you, Pet. You want to check out of here?”

“Yeah. I wanted to check out when I had to do that Prince motherfucker ... and you knew it and you wouldn’t let me and that was good, Wes. But you should have left me in that room there on Chrystie.”

“I know it. I know it now , anyway.”

“I waited for you, for Carmine’s son, all those fucking years because I had a reason , you know? We’d either get all of them or they’d get us. Or both ... all the same, right? And that was all ... all I care about was in that room. I can’t even drive anymore, you know what I’m saying?”

“I know, Pet. But...”

“There ain’t no ‘but’ behind this, Wes. If I go out now they’ll hit me. And what’s worse, they’ll fucking know I was involved in that whole thing. They’ll know there was other people. They’ll know, and they’ll smell around and sooner or later...”

“I know.”

“I was going to go out hard , you know? Take some of them with me. But there’s none of them really left ... except a few new guys we couldn’t ever get close to. And the soldiers, the button-men, you know ... they...”