A Bomb Built in Hell

“Pet showed me last week.”

Wesley faded from the garage, leaving the kid alone.

66/

That same night, Wesley wheeled the Ford down Water Street and onto the FDR toward the Brooklyn Bridge. He met the man with the money from the Mansfield job right in front of City Hall on lower Broadway. The man climbed into the back seat of the Ford and handed twenty-five thousand across to Wesley as the car pulled away.

“You want another job?” the man asked.

“Who, how much time I got, and how much?”

“You hit kids?”

“Same three questions,” Wesley said, flat-voiced. “Answer them or split.”

“It’s not actually a hit—it’s a snatch. You got to—”

“No good.”

“No good? You haven’t even heard—”

“Get lost.”

“Hey! Fuck you, man. I’m not getting out and you’re not blasting me in the middle of fucking Brooklyn either. Now just—”

Wesley pulled a cable under the dash and the back seat of the four-door sedan whipped forward on its greased rails, propelled by twelve 500-pound test-steel springs. The front seat was triple-bolted to reinforced steel beams in the floor—it weighed six hundred pounds. It was exactly like being thrown into a solid steel wall at forty miles per hour.

The man’s entire chest cavity was crushed like an eggshell. Wesley turned and shoved the seat backward with both hands—with the steel springs released from their tension, the seat clicked back into place and the man remained plastered against the plastic slipcover of the front seat. Another quick shove and the dead man was on the floor. Another half-second and he was covered with a black canvas tarp. The whole operation took well under a minute.

Wesley had never turned off the engine. He put the car in gear and moved off. His first thought was to simply drive the car into the garage as it was and let the kid handle the disposal. But then he remembered the kid had to be protected, as Wesley himself had been protected, and he deliberately drove the Ford under the shadows of the Manhattan Bridge. It looked like the kind of car The Man would drive and there was some immediate rustling in the shadows when he pulled in. Too much rustling. Wesley pulled out again and hit the Drive. He rolled along until he came to the Avenue D Projects, and pointed the car down the private path that only the Housing Authority cops were supposed to use. No one challenged the car.

Wesley drove until he saw an unoccupied bench. He stopped the car and got out. Satisfied, he pulled the dead man out and propped him up convincingly on the bench. The man’s head fell down on his crushed chest, but that looked even more like Avenue D after dark was supposed to. He drove out of the Projects without trouble and was back inside the garage in minutes. The kid came out of the shadows with his grease gun—he started to put it down when he saw the Ford.

“Don’t ever put your gun up until you know it’s me,” Wesley barked at him. “Don’t be looking at the fucking car!”

The kid said nothing.

“It might’ve been seen,” Wesley told him. “I had to use the springs. It’s got to be painted with new plates and maybe some—”

“I know what to do,” the kid interrupted.

Wesley went back to his own place.

67/

It wasn’t that hard to find humans who wanted problems disposed of and expected to pay for the service, but it was hard on Wesley. All the talking, the bargaining, the bullshit.

It wasn’t like before, when Pet had fronted it off. He tried the Times Square bars first, but even among all those freaks he couldn’t mesh. The way they looked at him, the way they moved aside when they saw him coming ... it all told him his face was still too flat and his eyes still too focused.

The stubby blonde hustler was working her way down the end of the long bar, her flesh-padded hips gently bumping anyone who looked remotely like he’d go for a minimal financial investment. When she got to Wesley, he turned and tried a smile.

“Sit down,” he told her. “Have a drink.”

“Aw ... look, baby, I got to go to the little girl’s room. Order me a Pink Lady and I’ll be right back.”

Fifteen minutes later, the truth came to Wesley. He went back out into the night.

68/

Inside the warehouse, Wesley went through all the papers the old man had left. He found a fine-ruled notebook with a black plastic cover. The first page said CLIENTS and each succeeding page was devoted to a single individual: name, addresses, phone numbers (business and home), and a lot of other miscellaneous information. He also saw prices next to each name:

LEWISTON, PETER .... $25K+

RANDOLPH, MARGARET .... $40K

It took Wesley a long time to go through the book, figuring which people he had already worked for—he had never known names except when it was absolutely necessary to the job. Slowly and carefully, he extracted enough