Andrew Vachss - A Bomb Built in Hell

The man’s voice was loud and obnoxious. “Hey, sport, it’s a dime for the pencil!”

Wesley never changed expression; he reached in his jacket pocket for another dime and paid the man. Outside, he moved toward the track, looking for the target. He had plenty of time; Mansfield was a known railbird, and he’d be glued to the finish line before the first race went off. The mob guys usually sat up in the Clubhouse and had flunkies bet for them, but Mansfield liked to see the action up close.

That didn’t make things easier for Wesley, just different.

He drifted away from two old ladies on the rail. Experience taught him that the elderly were the most observant, next to children. At 7:30, Wesley went to the $2 Win window and bought five tickets on the Number Five horse, Iowa Boy. The jerk just in front of him screamed, “The Six horse, ten times,” and threw down his hard-earned twenty bucks as though he had just accomplished something.

Wesley drifted over to the Double window and saw Mansfield just turning away with a stack of tickets in his manicured hands. Probably wheeled the Double , Wesley thought to himself, watching to see if anyone else was paying attention.

No point following Mansfield. Wesley went to the men’s room. It was filled with the usual winos, misfits, and would-be high rollers, all talking loudly and paying attention to nobody but themselves. Too crowded; it would have to be outside after all. Wesley had watched Mansfield for three weeks and time was getting short. The sucker might be leaving for the Coast any day now, and that would end the contract; Wesley could only operate in New York.

Back trackside, Wesley saw Mansfield in his usual spot, right against the rail. Iowa Boy was parked out for most of the race but closed like a demon and paid $16.80. From the way Mansfield tore up his tickets and threw them disgustedly into the air, Wesley concluded that the fucking loser was running true to form. It wasn’t really dark enough yet, but Wesley knew that Mansfield always stayed to the bitter end. The fool liked to bet the Big Triple in the ninth race. When he went into the men’s room, Wesley followed right behind, but as he had expected, it was impossible to work there.

The crowd kept getting denser and more excited. Wesley hoped for a hotly contested race to really get the crowd moaning with that sexual roar—the one amateur sociologists mistake for greed—when the horses come around the paddock turn for the final time. The seventh race had a few real dogs running—a couple of hopefuls up from Freehold and a couple more on the way down. The tote board showed a possible payoff of almost a grand on a deuce if you coupled the right nags—there was a lot of money bet. Mansfield had gone to the $20 Exacta window, so he’d have something to think about this race for sure.

This kind of thing would be better worked with a partner, but Wesley didn’t work with partners. He had been down twice on felonies and had noticed that not many men who worked in teams went to prison alone.

Wesley pressed right behind Mansfield, but the target never noticed. He may have been a top professional on his home ground, but at the track Mansfield’s nose was wide open with a jones for Lady Luck.

The crowd started screaming as soon as the pace car pulled away with the gate, and got louder and louder. A pacer named E.B. Time was trying to go wire-to-wire at 35-1, and the crowd was berserk. At the paddock turn, the roar swelled and all eyes were glued to the track. The horses thundered down the stretch, with the drivers whipping the nags and bouncing up and down in the carts as though the race hadn’t been decided in the Clubhouse hours before. Wesley slipped the icepick from the screwdriver pocket and held it parallel to his right leg, point down.

Five horses hit the wire together as Wesley slammed the poison-tipped icepick deep into Mansfield’s kidney. The crowd screamed “PHOTO!,” straining forward to see the board.

Mansfield slumped against the rail, which kept him from falling completely down as the weight of Wesley’s body pressed against him. The icepick was back in Wesley’s pocket a microsecond after doing its work. Wesley backed through the crowd, which was still trying to see who the winner was.

He had already wiped the icepick and tossed it softly into the grandstand shadows when he heard the first tentative scream. He knew Mansfield had been dead before he hit the ground. The poison on the tip would make sure the sucker had no luck that night. A knife did more damage, but sometimes they got stuck in the victim. Wesley was out of the gate and already shifting the Ford into drive when he heard the sirens. By that time, thousands of losers were leaving too.

4/

The towel he had previously soaked with kerosene completely removed the decal-tattoo before he was out of the parking lot. Wesley drove the Ford back across the Triborough, but turned toward Queens instead of Manhattan. Just before the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, he pulled the car over to the side, where a red Chevy sat with its hood up and no driver in sight. Wesley got out of the Ford, quickly removed his jacket, stuffed both rings and the watch into the pocket, and left it on the front seat. He reached back in and turned off the Ford’s engine, pulling the key out of the ignition. He entered the Chevy, grabbed a new jacket from the front seat, reached in the pocket and put on the gold Accutron and the sterling ID bracelet he found there. The jacket fit perfectly.

Wesley slammed down the hood of the Chevy and got back inside. The Ford’s ignition key started the Chevy immediately, and he pulled it off the shoulder and onto the road. As he glanced back in the rearview mirror, he saw the Ford cutting across traffic to the left-hand lane.

Wesley took the BQE to Roosevelt Avenue and turned right, followed it to Skillman and took that street right across Queens Boulevard to the upper roadway of the 59th Street Bridge. He crossed the bridge and took Second Avenue all the way to the Lower East Side, and then slid into the maze of ugly narrow streets near the Slip.

As he turned onto Water Street, he pushed the horn ring. No sound came from the horn, but the door of the garage opened quickly and quietly, closing the same way behind him as soon as he was inside.

The old man stood in the shadows holding a sawed-off shotgun. As soon as he saw Wesley climb out of the car, he put the gun back into its rack. He was already wiping down the Chevy by the time Wesley closed the basement door behind him.

Wesley walked up the back stairs without a sound, automatically checking the security systems as he approached his apartment. He reflected ruefully on how much all this protection had cost. The lack of obvious luxury depressed him sometimes, and he thought about the ugly chain of inevitability that had set him up in business for himself.

5/

Seventeen years old and facing a judge for at least the tenth time. Only this time Wesley wasn’t a juvenile and couldn’t expect another vacation in the upstate sodomy schools. It was the same old story—a gang fight, with the broken and bloody losers screaming “assault and robbery” at the top of their punk lungs. Cops always waited until the fights were over before moving in to pick up the survivors. They arrived with sirens and flashing lights, so that anyone even slightly disposed to physically resist arrest would have more than enough time to get in the wind instead. Wesley had taken a zip-gun slug in the leg, and couldn’t limp off quickly enough.

It was the summer of 1952, before heroin was discovered as the governmental solution to gang fighting, and with the Korean War to occupy the attention of the masses.

Wesley was waiting in the sentencing line—they had all pleaded guilty; Legal Aid didn’t know what to do with any other plea. He was standing next to a stubby black kid who had ended his engagement to a neighborhood girl with a knife. The black kid was in a talkative mood; he’d been this route before, and he wasn’t expecting anything but the maximum worst.