A Bomb Built in Hell

to see. Let’s look tomorrow night.”

53/

Wesley went all the way up to the roof and sat, smoking and looking at the Manhattan Bridge. He had enough explosives to lift the building he’d found on Chrystie into orbit—it wouldn’t be difficult to completely mine the place and set it off with a radio-control. But there was just no way that Pet could excuse himself and leave the room, much less the building, not with those kinds of humans inside and mega-tense like they’d be.

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