A Bomb Built in Hell

It took Israel only a few hours to come up with everything Wesley asked for. Wesley spent an entire day making a silencer for the .357 Magnum and then he decided he couldn’t take a chance with a homemade job and unscrewed the tube with regret. He knew you could only silence a revolver but so much anyway. The pistol was a Ruger single-action—good enough for the first shot, but Wesley had to dry-fire hundreds of rounds before he got the hang of making the piece repeat quickly enough. It reminded him of how the Army taught him to use a .45. They made him drop the hammer endlessly with a pencil jammed down the barrel, so the eraser cushioned the firing pin.

The target patrolled Central Avenue four-to-midnights; his route took him right by the front door of the hotel. Wesley managed to get up on the roof of the tallest building across from the King, but it was no good. The lighting on the street was lousy. And, anyway, the cop always walked with a partner—he wouldn’t be able to tell them apart at that distance.

Wesley went back to Israel and told him he needed two things: a good double-barreled shotgun—a .12 gauge that could handle three-inch shells—and a telephone call.

Thursday night. Wesley had been in the hotel for four weeks without going outside more than once. The patrolman and his partner turned off Euclid and started walking up Central toward 55th. Israel came up to Wesley’s room and knocked softly.

“They’ll be out front in five to ten minutes.”

“Sound like a real nigger on the phone.”

“Don’t worry about a thing, man—I am a real nigger.”

Israel picked up the phone and deliberately dialed the police emergency number. When the Central Exchange answered, they heard: “Lawd have mercy! Po-leece! Dem niggahs got dat nice detective an’ his friend bleedin’ in da street! They gonna kill ‘em—they all crazy! You got to... What? Right next to dat Black Muslim place on Superior. Dey gonna... No, ah cain t hang on, ah got to...”

Israel rang off just as Wesley passed by his door with the shotgun under a brown raincoat. The barrels had been sawed off down to fourteen inches, and the gun fit comfortably.

The two officers walked by the front entrance to the hotel, past the winos and the junkies and the hustlers and the whores and the idlers and the vermin. Mr. Murphy and Mr. and Mrs. Badger and Miss Thing ... all waiting on Mr. Green. Business as usual.

Wesley stepped out of the doorway and brought up the shotgun, pulling the wired-together triggers simultaneously. Both cops were blown backwards against a parked car. Wesley had two shots from the Ruger into each of them before the sea of people could even start to disappear. Wesley didn’t know which cop was his target. He walked over to what was left of them and placed the barrel of the piece against the right eye of one and pulled the trigger—the back of the cop’s head went flying out in a swirling disc of bloody bone. Wesley did the same to the other cop and stepped back quickly into the hotel lobby. It was empty—even the desk clerk was gone.

As he walked calmly up the stairs, Wesley wiped down the guns. He left them on the bed in his room, picked up the envelope lying there, and stuffed it deep into his belt over the tailbone. Then he grabbed the waiting airline bag and climbed out the window. The fire escape took him within six feet of the next building. He climbed across and took the next fire escape to the roof. He went down the other side into the shadows on 55th and got into a parked cab whose lights immediately went on.

As the cab motored serenely toward Burke Airport, Wesley noted with satisfaction that the meter already read $3.10, just in case.

26/

Wesley caught the 2:30 a.m. flight to LaGuardia, walked all the way across the huge parking lot and down to Roosevelt Avenue in Queens. It took him more than an hour, but he wasn’t in a hurry. He grabbed an IRT Elevated on Roosevelt and changed at 74th Street for an E train, which took him right into the Port Authority. He lit a cigarette with the airline ticket stub and checked his pocket for the stub he had picked up from the cabdriver in Cleveland—half of a roundtrip bus ticket between Port Authority and Atlanta, Georgia.

Inside Port Authority, he bought a copy of the Daily News, drank some prison- tasting orange juice, and watched the degenerates parade until it was almost ten in the morning. Then he took a cab uptown to 60th Street and, with the expensive leather suitcase he had purchased and carefully scuffed up, checked into the Hotel Pierre. He was not asked to pay in advance; the suit Israel had picked out for him in Cleveland easily passed muster.

In the hotel bathroom, he examined the envelope for the first time. It held two-hundred-twenty-thousand dollars in hundreds. The tightly packed bills looked used and the serial numbers were not sequential.

27/

Wesley settled his bill at the Pierre. They never even glanced at the hundred-dollar notes. The hotel was far more expensive than others he could have used, but the guidebook he’d read in prison said the Pierre wasn’t the kind of joint where the night clerk would be on the police payroll. Wesley took a cab to the corner of Houston and Sixth, paid the driver and threw a half-buck tip. He walked north until he saw the cab circle back and re-enter traffic. Then Wesley turned around and headed for Mama Lucci’s.

It was 4:15 in the afternoon, but the restaurant was evening-dark. Wesley didn’t know what Petraglia looked like, except that he’d be old. He walked to a table near the back, deliberately selecting a seat with his back to the door, and waited for the waiter to take his order. Wesley ordered spaghetti and veal cutlet Milanese and asked if Mr. Petraglia was there yet.

“Who wants to know?”

“I do.”

“Who’re you, a cop?”

“I’m from the Board of Health.”

The waiter laughed and left the table. In about ten minutes an ancient old man sat down silently across from Wesley. His voice was so soft Wesley had to lean forward to catch all of the words.

“Who’re you related to that I know?”

“To Carmine. I’m his son.”