to the music.
The car in front of him turned right after four blocks, and the one behind turned left a block later. Terry Franklin paid no atten- tion. He drove out onto an old boulevard now lined with small strip businesses and proceeded about a mile before he swung the car onto a side street. He liked to drive through these quiet residen- tial streets because they had so little traffic and he thought he made better time, though he had never clocked it.
At the first stop sign he came to, a little girl was crossing the street pushing a miniature baby carriage containing her doll. That she had chosen to cross the street at just this time and place proba- bly gave Terry Franklin another minute of life.
One minute was just about the time it took for him to wait until the little girl was clear, depress the accelerator and cruise down to the next cross street. He glanced both ways, no traffic, and took his foot off the brake to roll on through. “… like a bat outta hell …”
That’s when the bomb underneath the vehicle, directly under the driver’s seat, exploded.
Terry Franklin felt a concussive impact as his knees came up to smash into his chin, but that was the only sensation that he was conscious of in the thousandth of a second he had left to live. The floor of the car came apart and the seat springs and fabric and padding were all forced explosively upward. His skull popped like a ripe melon when this rising, accelerating column on which he sat smashed into the roof of the car and bowed it upward. The win- dows exploded outward as the fireball continued to expand, show- ering the area with glass. Fragments of springs and plastic and fabric were forced deep into Terry Franklin’s now lifeless corpse, which began to sear from the intense heat
The car, still in gear and torn almost in two, moved like a wounded crab diagonally across the intersection and lightly im- pacted a parked vehicle. Then the engine quit from fuel starvation. The severed fuel line dumped its liquid into the molten mess in the center of the vehicle and the smoldering wreckage became an in- femo. In ten seconds the fire was so hot the fuel tank exploded.
Coming around the corner four blocks away, FBI agent Clar- ence Brown saw the rising fireball from the exploding gas tank. He grabbed the dash-mounted mike. “Holy shit, his car blew up. It blew up! The subject’s car blew upt”
The voice on the telephone had a hollow, metallic sound, like it was coming through a long pipe. “Little development I thought you would want to know about, Luis. Probably nothing important- Terry Franklin just went out with a bang. His car blew up.”
“Anybody else hurt, Dreyfus?”
“Not another soul. We had an agent following him, keeping tabs per your instructions, and he saw the gas tank go poof. The lab guys are on the way. The agent at the scene. Brown, says it looks like a bomb.”
“What time, exactly?” “Sixteen fifty-seven.”
Camacho looked at his watch. Seventeen minutes ago- “Get a search warrant for his house.” “Already doing the affidavit”
“Send a man over to the house to watch it. And you’d better alert somebody out in California that they’ll have to do a next-of- kin notification when we get a positive ID from the medical exam- iner.”
“The ID’S gonna take a while. The corpse is still in the car, roasted like a Christinas turkey.”
“Have the people in California quietly check to see that his wifes’
in-laws are physically there.”
“You knew this was going to happen, didn’t you?”
“I just follow orders, asshole,” Camacho snarled. “Why don’t you do the same?” He slammed the phone onto its cradle.
Two minutes later it rang again. “Yes.”
“Dreyfus again. Already we’re getting calls from TV stations. There’s a chopper overhead now. It’s real visual with the smoke column and all. Evening news for sure, distraught housewives and sobbing kids, the whole bit. What’s the official hot screaming poop?”
“We’re investigating, cooperating with the local police. Off the record, hint at drugs.”
“Roger hint.”
“Is local law on the scene?”
“Yeah. Couple cruisers and a big red fire truck.”
“Don’t let ‘em touch anything.”
“Roger Wilco, over and out”
Luis Camacho pulled into his driveway at five minutes after mid- night and checked the jury-rigged bulb in the hole in the door panel. Still off. Amen.
The night air retained some of the heat from the day. The FBI agent stood in his shirt sleeves beside his car and breathed the deep, rich scent of the earth.
The neighborhood was quiet. He could hear crickets.
All the lights were off in Harlan Albright’s house. Only a gleam of the hall light was visible through the window of his own door. Camacho picked up the package on his front seat and locked his car, then used his key on the front door. He shot the bolt behind him.
There was a note by the phone. Albright had called.
Camacho poured himself a bourbon and added three ice cubes from the tray in the freezer. He opened the kitchen door and stood there sipping his drink and looking at the shadows in the backyard. The dog whined and wagged its tail.
Taking his time, Camacho strolled the length of the yard and seated himself in the tire swing hanging from the old oak. He absently petted the dog and made comforting noises as he sipped the Uquor and let the alcohol take effect
It would be interesting to see how many of those servos were still in Albright’s mad bomber kit. And the batteries and fuses.
You sure had to take your hat off to Peter Aleksandrovich, a-kA good ol’ Harlan, Terry Franklin’s sudden end had been a nice tidy job. No loose ends. No secondary casualties that might fester into an eventual murder indictment that would make a spy swap impos- sible, should the worst happen and he get arrested by the FBI. Terry Franklin had been very neatly and permanently silenced. Scratch one asset-turned-debit. Clean up that balance sheet. Wipe off the red ink, and, mild! we have a profitable enterprise, as any- one can plainly see.
Good ol’ Harlan’s house was as dark as a tomb. The big maples in front shielded it from the streetlights and the oaks and beeches here in back performed a similar service with that little alley light So the house was just a looming black shape.
Camacho thought about the stairs up to the bedroom, pictured himself once again slipping up there, careful as a mouse, looking for booby traps, prying open the trapdoor to the attic — he shivered as he thought about it. Good ol’ Harlan would probably rig some more unpleasant surprises, like plastique that goes boom when the someone coming into a room steps in the wrong place, or forgets to turn the light on and off three times in three seconds. Good ol’ Harlan would be just the man for a little rig like that
Wonder if Harlan’s found the blank film in the camera? Had Camacho been careful enough with the operation? Had he tripped a camera he didn’t find? If so, that bulb in the door would come on very soon.
His fatigue hit him all at once. It was all he could do to walk back to the house, lock the door, and ascend the stairs. He stripped off his clothes and fell into bed.
“I don’t want to ever get married,” Rita said.
“Me neither,” Toad Tarkmgton agreed fervently. “Half the mar- riages fail, kids in single-parent households, everybody broke— who needs it?” It was a pretty Saturday morning and they were on their way to a restaurant for breakfast, with Toad at the wheel.
“People should be free to have a relationship without being bound,” she said.
“When two people break up they shouldn’t have to hire lawyers to fight over the dog.”
“Marriage is an obsolete institution.”
“It’s doomed,” Toad pronounced, sounding a good bit like Sam- uel Dodgers denouncing sin, which was probably unintentional. But to prove he wasn’t a bigot he added, “Of course, my parents are happily married. Thirty-five years this July. It’s a lot tougher nowadays, though. My sister was only married three years, one kid — the divorce was real messy. My dad had to help her with the legal fees.”
