A Bomb Built in Hell

by Vachss, Andrew

  Wesley laid the Beretta on the rug beside the woman, fitted the tube silencer, and doubled-locked the front door. The cat vanished. Pet had told him that the husband was a gourmet, so he knew what to look for.

  He found the butcher knives—hollow-ground Swedish steel with rosewood handles—and the portable butcher block on the stove island. He brought the whole set back into the living room.

  Wesley gently laid the woman’s head on a couch pillow and placed the butcher block under her neck. When he pulled the pillow out from under her head and tugged back on her hair, the skin of her throat stretched taut, the veins in her neck leaping out against the pale skin. He held the heavy chopping knife poised eighteen inches from her throat and mentally focused on a spot three inches beyond the butcher block. Wesley took a deep breath. The butcher knife flashed down like a jet and blood spurted from the neck arteries. It took three more full-strength blows before the head fell off.

  Wesley grabbed the headless body by the ankles and dragged it toward the bedroom, leaving a thick trail of blood and paler fluids. He dumped the body on the bed and left the bedspread to absorb the mess while he went back for the head.

  Wesley turned the body over on its back. He spread the woman’s legs as far as they would go, quickly lashing each ankle to a leg of the matching teak bedposts with piano wire so they wouldn’t close during rigor mortis. Then he took the head and pressed it down on the bed, moving it backwards in its trail of fluid until it was squarely between the woman’s legs, staring straight ahead.

  Wesley dug his right hand into the gaping neck and worked his fingers until they were completely smeared with blood. He walked to the off-white wall behind the woman’s body and wrote:

  WEASELS ... THE WAGES OF DEATH IS SIN! this is the beginning ...

  He went looking for the cat and found it under the rolltop desk in the den. Wesley pulled it out, careful at first so as not to be scratched, until he saw its claws had been removed, probably to protect the furniture. He stroked the animal to calm it down. And then pushed it into the den, closing the door behind him.

  Wesley entered the Japanese-style bathroom and took a shower; first blazing hot, then icy cold. When he was completely clean and all the blood had gone down the drain, he left the water running as he dried himself with a towel from his attaché case. Then he dressed, first putting the surgeon’s gloves into a plastic bag and returning them to his case.

  Before he left, he used the black silk handkerchief to wipe every surface. The library had told him that twelve points were all that was necessary for a legally sufficient identification of a fingerprint. But Wesley knew his case would never reach a courtroom if there was any identification at all.

  Everything went back into the attaché case.

  It was 10:26 when Wesley let himself out of the apartment, the handkerchief still in his hand as he turned the doorknob. The hallway was empty. He took the elevator downstairs, got off, and walked across the deserted lobby to the doorman.

  The street was quiet. The sun was already boiling the concrete, but the people from that neighborhood went from their air-conditioned apartments to their air-conditioned cars to their air-conditioned offices or air-conditioned shops. Nobody walked; they even paid people to walk their animals for them.

  The doorman smiled at Wesley’s approach. Wesley motioned him over.

  “I have a package in my car for Mrs. Benton.”

  “Just bring it around to the back entrance, sir. The super will— ”

  “Mrs. Benton said she would like you to deliver this to her personally. Would that be all right?”

  “Certainly, sir. If you’ll just bring it inside here to me, I’ll—”

  “It’s a little too big for that. Could I drive around to the service entrance and give it to you there?”

  “Yes, sir, you could, but I don’t like to leave the door unattended.”

  “Mrs. Benton said to give you this for your trouble,” Wesley said smoothly, handing the man a pair of twenty-dollar bills. “She understands how it is. Can you bring it right up after I give it to you?”

  The doorman all but saluted. “I’ll just wait here a couple of minutes to give you time to get around back—I don’t want to be off my post too long.”

  “Appreciate it.”

  Wesley walked out the front door and climbed into the El Dorado. He drove off to the corner and turned right; the alley was only about eighty feet away. Wesley deliberately drove past the alley and then backed the big car down to the service entrance. He left the motor purring and quickly assembled the Beretta-and-silencer combo.

  The service door opened in less than a minute. The doorman moved quickly toward the open window of Wesley’s car, smiling. Wesley shot him twice in the chest. The impact drove the doorman back against the building; he slumped to the ground. Wesley opened his door, leaned out, and he put three more slugs into the man’s skull. After the first shot, there was only a human omelet to aim at. He was out of the alley and into the side street in another few seconds.

  Wesley drove crosstown without haste until he spotted a grey Fleetwood, just pulling out of a legal spot on Fifth Avenue as if it had been waiting for him.

  He walked three blocks, then hailed a cab which took him to the corner of Houston and Sullivan. A short hike down Sullivan toward Bleecker took him to Pet’s Ford. As the Ford pulled away from the curb, the Fleetwood took its place.

  The two men drove back toward the Slip. The kid hailed a cab to go pick up the El Dorado.

  51/

  The news screamed BIZARRE MURDER ON SUTTON PLACE! The story went into gruesome detail, but there were no photographs of the murder scene itself and the facts were altered. Wesley and Pet stayed in the building all that day, waiting for the Four Star edition. They weren’t disappointed—the headline blared MURDERED SOCIALITE WAS MAFIA CHIEFTAIN’S DAUGHTER! with the kind of followup “color” stories that humans like Salmone had come to hate ever since Columbo got himself vegetablized.

  Pet was reading between the lines. “Christ, Wes, what’d you do to her?”

  “It’s better you don’t know, right? You got to look surprised when they tell you about it. And if they polygraph this one, the murder method’ll be one of the keys.”

  “You don’t forget a thing anymore, huh?”

  “I’ll tell you what I did forget. I was going to fuck her when she was unconscious—or at least beat off onto the body. It’d freak them out even worse. I just forgot.”

  “Like fucking hell you ‘forgot.’ You couldn’t do that, Wes—you’re a man.”

  “I’m a bomb, old man,” Wesley said. “And they lit the fuse a long time ago.”

  52/

  Wesley went out that night, leaving Pet behind. He took the Ford and drove up and down Allen Street. The whores approached the car at every light. It was quicker to look them directly in the face than to pretend to ignore them—they moved away when they saw his eyes.

  It took hours of prowling before he found what he wanted.

  When he returned to the Slip, Pet was gone. The haphazard-appearing scrawls in the dust on the garage floor told Wesley the old man had gone to meet with his employers.

  Wesley picked up the newspaper Pet had left for him. Page three had a story about a letter bomb that had exploded in the face of Nancy Jane DiVencenzo of Cape May, New Jersey. The police had no clue to the sender—the letter had been blown into microscopic particles, along with the young deb’s face.

  Wesley went to his own place and let himself in. He took the dog up to the top floor and let it run free on the hardwood for an hour while he focused on the white wall. The dog alternatively loped and ran in vicious bursts of speed—he kept at it until Wesley drew a deep breath and sat up. They went down to the apartment together, the dog taking the point, as always.

  The soft, insistent buzzing woke Wesley at 3:25 a.m., telling him the old man was back. Wesley dressed and went down to the basement garage. The dog acknowledged his passage with a throaty growl and
Wesley realized that he had never seen the animal sleep.

  The old man was smoking one of the black, twisted cigars he liked. He almost never did this inside the garage. The exhaust fan was running like Vaseline flowing through oil, so silent it could only be sensed, not heard.

  “You got them, Wes—you got them all. I almost threw up behind just hearing about it. The woman’s husband is in Bellevue—he just flipped out. They can’t agree on who ... but they know some sicko’s after them all. The Jersey guy got the phone call in the middle of last night—he was already in the city for a meet on the Sutton Place thing. He went fucking crazy. They tied it in, like we expected.”

  “The cops—”

  “—’re probably laughing. What the fuck do they care?”

  “Leads?”

  “Forget it. The big man said it was a fucking ghost what did it.”

  “It was.”

  “I know. I used to light candles for Carmine. Until I realized that it was just another club he couldn’t join.”

  “What’d you tell them?”

  “I told them it had to be a freak from the cesspool. I said I’d hit the area and nose around until I came up with something, put a lot of my people on the street, all that bullshit. Then I gave them a whole bunch of crap about the security arrangements they’d need for their families. Like we said, right?”

  “Perfect. I found a building. On Chrystie, south of Delancey on the west side of the block. The whole building’s empty—three stories. It’s got buildings on either side, both higher, both abandoned.”

  “Abandoned, my ass. You got people living in every fucking x-flat in this city.”

  “That’s no problem. They don’t see nothing going in. And going out, there won’t be nothing left for them 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 carefully, as he always did. The news carried a small column about the new methadone clinic being opened up on Pike Street. It was directly across from the Projects and only about six blocks away from the factory on Water Street. Wesley felt an overpowering sense of encroachment, as if a stranger had just entered his apartment.

  He went back into his newspaper file, thinking it through. The headlines formed a story-sequence on their own: Addicts Overrun Residential Community ... Citizens Up In Arms Over New Methadone Clinic ... Arrests Triple Near New Clinic, Citizens’ Committee Reports ... Community Group Complains of Lowered Property Values ... Vigilantes Threaten to Burn New Methadone Center.

  Wesley reflected, deep within himself. Cocaine was going way up in price. Methadone didn’t block reaction to Lady Snow, the way it did with heroin. Freebase was the coming thing. Carmine had told him, hundreds of times, that no government policy was ever an accident, but...