A Bomb Built in Hell

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.

“Man, the motherfucking judge throwin’ nickels and dimes like he motherfucking Woolworth’s!”

Wesley kept his eyes straight ahead and wondered if there was a way out of the courtroom. But even as his eyes flew around the exits and measured the fat-bellied bailiff, he knew he wouldn’t have any place to go but back to the block ... just to keep building a sin for himself, as he had been doing ever since he could remember. The State’s “training schools” hadn’t trained him to do anything but time. Prison was as inevitable in his future as college was for three other defendants he saw waiting: well-dressed young men, accompanied by parents, friends, and lawyers, who were awaiting disposition on a burglary charge. They’d cop probation or a suspended sentence. Wesley wondered why his gang always fought people just like themselves when it was really privileged weasels like those kids that they hated.

The Legal Aid lawyer ran over, excited, his chump face all lit up. Probably worked a great deal for me to make license plates for twenty years, thought Wesley, who’d been “represented” by the same firm since he was a little kid. The lawyer grabbed him by the sleeve and motioned him to step over to the side.

“Would you like to beat this rap completely?”

“I already pleaded guilty, man.”

“I know that; I know that ... but the judge is going to throw a Suspended at anyone over seventeen who agrees to join the Army. What do you say?”

“How many years would I have to be in the Army?”

“Four years, but—”

“How much time will I cop with this beef?” Wesley interrupted.