“(Sigh) What a dump.”
He’d also locate better accommodations. Access to moonlight? Fuck that. He’d shove the whole thing so far underground the ATF would need trained gophers to find it. The town was for the taking. Someday soon, the tiny piece of the world called Potterford would be his.
In the meantime…breakfast.
He emerged from beneath his toasty comforter, rose to his tiptoes, and stretched donning naught but a pair of brown socks.
He wandered about searching for his clothes, noticing with finite interest who else had spent the night in the ward. Bubbs was asleep on the corner couch. No big surprise; his body clock was on a bouncer’s schedule. Indistinguishable, Eric was bundled up and face-down on the cot across from Arthur’s. Traci looked as though she had woken up at some point and tried to throw a sheet over her lower half.
Gonna hit that later. Now where the hell are my pants?
Two short buzzes drew his attention.
“There we go.”
He’d left his phone in the pocket of his tight, leather, sperm-killing, too-many-zipper-having trousers. He’d received a new text message, but he couldn’t tell who sent it.
DUDE I HOPE U GET THIS IN TIME. I’M AT THE PPD. RICK RATTED US OUT. THE PIGS KNOW WHERE U R AND THEYR ON THE WAY. GET OUT!!!!!
“Fuck me! Everybody up!”
There was absolutely no response.
“Wake up, assholes!”
He started picking up debris and throwing it at the cots. Eric was the first to show signs of life.
“What the hell, Artie!?”
“Rick dimed us! This place is going to be tits-deep with cops in about three minutes! Move your ass! Down the stairs and out the back like we practiced!”
As if on cue, sirens from what sounded like 100 police cars fired up in the distance.
A stale beer poured on Bubbs’s face got him moving. Arthur tossed Traci’s cot, sending her tumbling to the floor, but it didn’t seem to affect her sense of urgency.
“Traci! Are you deaf?”
“Hmmm? Where’s my dress?”
“It’s right under you! I threw it at your empty head!”
Arthur scrambled to get dressed. Eric froze with a combination of fear and information overload. Bubbs brainlessly threw things out the window in an attempt to destroy evidence.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Fingerprints man!”
“Are you serious!? Get your shoes on! Eric, snap the fuck out of it!”
Traci had managed to put on her thong and pull her dress up as far as her waist. Her bra was proving to be a struggle.
The sirens stopped. The cops were on the grounds.
“Dammit, Traci! Come on!”
The sound of Arthur’s untied Doc Martin’s slapping heel-toe against the concrete floor filled the room as he dashed for the stairs. Bubbs and Eric followed several feet behind like good little foot soldiers. Traci put herself together as best as she could and got to her feet for a few seconds before blacking out again.
“Wait guys, I’m…”
The back of her head met the edge of her cot. She was unconscious for everything that followed.
23. Hallcroft
For fifty years, Hallcroft was Southeastern Pennsylvania’s premier facility for the mentally ill. Lack of state funding caused it to close in the mid-90’s. It was a sad, poorly executed state of affairs that left the bulk of the patients in the hands of underqualified volunteer host families. It was a vast property with several now-abandoned buildings. The county paid to have the grass mowed twice a year, but, otherwise, Hallcroft was generally ignored.
Not today.
Every car the Potterford Police Department could spare, along with three black sedans, crashed through the entrance and onto the grounds.
Lynch was on point. The sun blinded him for a moment as the clock tower that topped the D Building came into view.
This was it.
The car came to a screeching halt, followed by all the others, as they formed a wide perimeter around their target. Lynch elbowed into his door and put a foot on the ground just as his cell phone rang.
It was Gomez.
“What’cha got, partner?”
“Go in as tight as you want. The bomb isn’t designed to kill; it’s designed to…”
And before Gomez could say the word “castrate,” the first bomb went off.
Then the second.
In the foreboding silence that followed, a voice crackled over someone’s walkie-talkie.
“We’ve got the Reilly kid. He was trying to sneak out the back.”
And then the screams started…like nothing Lynch had ever heard or imagined.
24. Clean Up
The aftermath was, as one might guess, not pretty. Braden’s pipe bombs, due mostly to the fact that they were constructed at 4:00 in the morning by a fifteen-year-old, didn’t perform exactlyas intended. The injuries were, nonetheless, brutal. No major arteries were cut.
The victims would live.
Because Arthur took the first blast solo, his damage was the worst. After some intense surgery, he’d be left with one testicle and scar tissue that would render the rest of the area functional, but horribly deformed. Bubbs took his half of the second device’s shrapnel up the rectum. It would be a long time before he could ride a motorcycle without bleeding, and pooping would be an issue for the rest of his life. With Bubbs as a cushion, Eric’s wounds were primarily on his left leg, with the exception of one bit of metal that went straight through his hand. His souvenirs from the soon-to-be defunct UJ would be a permanent limp and the inability to make a fist.
None of these injuries would serve the three UJs well in prison. Some irrefutable trace evidence, such as the drug in Molly Reilly’s system along with the threat of testimony from four reliable witnesses, including Traci, would bring about three puny plea bargains. Arthur, Bubbs, and Eric would spend the powerful years that Wallace Avery spoke of in a cage, a nasty cage, and with qualified use of their lower extremities.
Traci would have her own problems. Legally, she managed to sidestep all the major land mines by, among other things,
