A Bomb Built in Hell

Wesley put the hatbox down on the floor, clicked the snap-fuse open, and wheeled toward the door. He flipped the sign from OPEN to CLOSED and set the spring lock behind him as he went out. He was into the back seat of the cab in another second and Pet had pulled smoothly away before Wesley could get the “Eight seconds!” out of his mouth. They caught the first light and were buried in the traffic at 125th and Lenox when they heard the explosion. Traffic stalled. Everyone tried to figure out where the noise had come from, but the cop, who empathized with any white man’s desire to get the hell of out Harlem before dark, waved them through.

32/

They hit the FDR in minutes. The meter showed $4.65 by the time they neared the Slip.

“When we going to switch?” Wesley asked.

“We’re not—nobody’s following us. I got a car buried on Park and 88th and another in Union Square but we don’t need them—I’ll pick them up tomorrow. I’ll change the numbers of this one tonight—nothing to it. We don’t want to make problems by getting too cute.”

The eleven o’clock news had a story about a firebombing in Harlem; the reporter said it looked like a “terrorist act.” The film clips showed the entire front of the pawnshop and the stores on either side completely obliterated. The firemen were still battling the blaze, and it was not known if anyone had been inside at the time of the explosion. An informant had told the police that two men, both Negro, of average height, were seen running from the shop toward Eighth Avenue just before the explosion and the police expected arrests to follow.

“Were you the informant?” Wesley asked.

“You must be kidding, Wes. There’s always some righteous asshole who pulls that kind of number. Every job I ever knew about had fifty fucking leads called into The Man that didn’t have nothing to do with what went down.”

“Don’t the cops know this?”

“And you Carmine’s son! For Chrissakes, kid ... don’t you know they only want to make the arrest? They could give a fuck about who’s really guilty. Didn’t you get bum-beefed when you went down?”

“No. I did it alright. I got ratted out by a scumbag clerk in a hotel.”

“Don’t you want to pay him back?”

“Someday, when it ties in with something else I’m doing. But I can’t risk what we’re doing just for payback.”

“Good. Where is he?”

“Times Square.”

“I can fucking guarantee you that sooner or later we’ll get into his territory. I always hated to work down there, though. Those fucking freaks, you never know what they’re going to do.”

“I know what they’re going to do.”

“How the hell do you know?”

“One of them told me.”

33/

“How come they’re paying a hundred K for this guy? What’s so hard about him?”

“He used to run the ‘Family Business’ in Queens, and now he’s pulled out. There’s got to be a war over this, because he still controls Queens and they don’t let you do that. This guy is sharp now. No telephones, no mail. He lives in a fucking fortress out near the North Shore on the Island and he runs the show from there.”

“Can we get at him?”

“No way. I was out there myself a few times, and you’d have to fucking bomb the place from a plane to hit it. And he’s got himself an air-raid shelter, too. Left over from the Fifties. But he has to stay in touch. Every month, he meets his capo on the 59th Street Bridge to talk.”

“What? Right out in the open?”

“Yeah, Wesley, right out in the open. But it ain’t just him that’s out in the open. And we don’t know what night he meets on—it’s always late, and he always gets a ride to the Queens side and meets the capo halfway across. He has men on the Queens side and the capo has men on the Manhattan side.”

“Couldn’t we just drive past and hit him?”

“How? We don’t know when he’s coming and if they see the same car pass back and forth, we’re the ones who’ll get hit. Besides, he stands with his back to the girders and you couldn’t get a decent shot at him, even if you could get on the bridge.”

“How much time have we got?”

“If we get him before he wins the war, we get paid. If he loses the war, we don’t. If he wins the war, we don’t.”

“How long before the war starts?”

“It may not start at all—they’re still trying to negotiate. But they also want to cover all their bets, you know?”

“How come they don’t try and cover you, with all the work you been doing for them?”

“They think they have. I never know if I’m coming back from a meet with them. But also, they think I got a nice little organization of my own, with all old guys like me, and they don’t want to start a war to prevent one. They’re very slick, right?”