by Steven Henry
Erin fumbled on the floor for her dropped phone, keeping her eyes on Corky. “Danny? Get outside right now,” she said. “Get everyone back, away from the building.”
“She’s right, Danny,” Carlyle said. “We’ll be fine. Go.”
The bartender, eyes wide, nodded and hurried out of the pub, followed by the waitress and the other patrons.
“Speak for yourselves,” Corky said. “I’m the one with my bloody hand in a bloody bomb.”
“Rolf, raus!” she ordered, pointing. “Danny? Take him clear of here.” The dog was confused, but orders were orders. He trotted out of the Corner behind the bartender, the door swinging shut behind them.
“Erin? You there? Everything okay?” Skip’s voice came through the phone.
“Yeah, Skip,” she said. “We have a situation here. I’m at the Barley Corner. I think we’ve found your bomb.”
“Okay, great!” Skip said. “I’ll be right there. Don’t touch it. Get everyone out.”
She closed her eyes. “It’s a little late for that. We’ve got a guy holding it right now, and I think it’s armed.”
“Jesus Christ,” the bomb tech said. He put his hand over the phone and snapped some orders to the rest of his squad, then came back on the line. “We’re rolling. Get the hell out of there. Tell your guy to stay calm. Five, ten minutes tops, we’re there.”
Erin turned to Corky. To her disbelief, Carlyle was walking toward his friend. “Get away from him!” she snapped. “You want to get killed?”
Carlyle ignored her. “What’ve we got?” he asked Corky calmly.
“Something bit my hand,” Corky said. “I’m thinking it’s a rat-trap. Snapped right on my fingernails, hurts like a bloody bastard.”
“The bomb squad’s on its way,” Erin said. “Just hold still, five minutes.”
Corky’s smile was a little shaky. “I’ll try, love,” he said. “But I’m not sure I can manage it.”
Erin’s anger had been buried under a wave of renewed adrenaline and professionalism. “You’re gonna be okay,” she said. Disregarding her own and Skip’s advice, she closed the distance to the man. “We’re gonna get you out of this.”
“Dammit, Erin,” Skip said. In the background on the line she heard car doors slamming and an engine starting up. “Get clear!”
“Can’t do that, Skip,” she said, taking a close look at Corky. His arms were trembling slightly and sweat was running down his face. His posture was an awkward half-crouch, his hands extended, left hand on the lid of the case, right hand inside. He wasn’t going to be able to hold it much longer. “We’re gonna have to try to disarm it now.”
“Shit,” Skip said. “Who’s there with you?”
“Two wiseguys,” she said. “James Corcoran’s got his hand on the bomb, Morton Carlyle’s here too.”
“Cars Carlyle? Good. Great. Put him on.”
“I’ll put you on speaker,” she said, touching the screen and setting the phone on the bar.
“Cars?” Skip called.
“Right here,” Carlyle said softly. He was bent over, staring into the case. “Erin? If you’d be so kind, there’s a flashlight under the bar, by the register.”
She scrambled around the bar, found a flashlight, and handed it across the bar. Carlyle flicked it on and looked past Corky’s arm.
“Skip Taylor, NYPD bomb squad,” the tech introduced himself. “It’s probably a nitro bomb, homemade, unstable.”
“Grand,” Carlyle said. “I see a wire strung to the lid, attached to a rat-trap. The trap’s taped to the foam packing. There’s six bottles inside.”
“Okay, the nitro’s going to be in the bottles,” Skip said. “It’s a carrying case of some sort?”
“Aye,” Carlyle said. “Wine case, for transporting glass bottles.”
“Okay,” Skip said. “So there’s an open circuit. The metal of the trap connects, it completes the circuit, and boom.”
“That’s my thinking,” Carlyle agreed.
“Have you got wire-cutters?”
“Aye, in the cellar,” Carlyle said. “But we’ve no time to fetch them. How far out are you?”
“Goddamn traffic,” Skip said. “Another six, seven minutes.”
“No good,” Erin said.
“I’ve a knife in my pocket,” Corky said.
“Which one?” Erin asked.
“Right hip.”
“I’ll get it.” Erin moved around behind him. “Hold still.” She eased a hand into his pocket and felt a handle.
“Well, Erin,” Corky said. “After the way our conversation started, I didn’t think you’d be putting a hand on me there.”
“Shut up,” she said. She pulled out a spring-loaded OTF Scarab knife from the pocket and flicked the switch, extending a three-and-a-half-inch double-edged blade. “Nice knife. What’d it set you back?”
“A good thousand. It doesn’t pay to skimp on quality for this sort of thing. Careful; it’s fresh-sharpened.”
“Okay, Skip, I’ve got a knife,” Erin said.
“That should do well,” Carlyle said.
“Can you see an anti-tampering device?” Skip asked.
“Nay,” Carlyle said, staring hard into the gap between lid and case. “This is a homemade device, nothing fancy. If we cut the wire, it should deactivate the trigger.”
“Okay,” Skip said.
“This is beginning to hurt more than a little,” Corky commented, still trying to keep his voice light and cheerful.
“I can get my hand in there, put something in place of your finger,” Erin said.
“Is there any slack on the lid?” Skip asked.
Carlyle panned the flashlight. “Nay,” he sighed. “There’s a second wire.”
“Not a good idea, Erin,” Skip said. “Don’t jostle the lid. Everyone just relax and move slow.”
“If the trap’s already been sprung, why can’t you open the lid the rest of the way?” Erin asked.
“There’s a fail-safe,” the Irish bomb-maker explained. “I think the second wire is a manual trigger. I don’t know how much give it has without opening the box, which renders the point rather moot, as that will trigger the bomb.”
“You have to cut the manual-trigger wire, and the wire from the trap to the detonator,” Skip said.
“You’re right,” Carlyle said. “But my hand’s too large for the space.”
“I can manage it,” Corky said.
“No,” Erin said. “You might move your other hand. I’ve got the smallest hands. I’ll do it.”
“You certain?” Carlyle asked. “How steady can you be?”
She looked down and saw no tremor in her fingers. “I’ve got this,” she said, feeling oddly calm. The shakes would come later, assuming she survived. “Hold the light and tell me what to cut.”
“All right,” Carlyle said. “You see the wire wrapped about the baseplate of the trap?”
“Yeah.” It was a thin copper wire, shining bright and new in the flashlight beam.
“You need to cut that wire. But be very careful not to touch the blade to the arm of the trap when you do it.”
“That’ll complete the circuit,” Skip said, adding unnecessarily, “You don’t wanna do that.”
“Once you’ve cut that wire, there’s another to the left side there,” Carlyle said. “You have to cut that one, too.”
Erin nodded. She took a slow, deep breath, and eased the knife into the case. She tried not to think about the fact that her hand was hovering above a very large amount of powerful homemade explosive. She understood now why Skip didn’t like wearing the bomb suit. If she screwed up, she thought, they could forget about open versus closed casket; they’d be burying an empty one.
Corky’s breath was coming in shaky gasps. “I think… my nail’s tearing,” he muttered. “Bloody trap’s…. cutting through the middle. If the nail goes, that’s all she… bloody well wrote.”
“Hold on,” Erin said. The knife was a little over eight inches l
ong all told, and was tricky to maneuver. She had it inside the case, but was having trouble getting the blade into the right place.
“When we… get out of this,” Corky said, “what do you say… to another drink?”
“Corky, just because I grabbed your ass doesn’t make us a couple,” she said, trying to keep him distracted. “I’m still pissed at you.”
“I’m sorry… about the confusion… regarding my occupation,” he said. “Still, they say… tense situations… bring people closer.”
“Is he always like this?” Erin asked Carlyle. The tip of the knife snagged in the packaging foam for a moment, but the sharp blade sliced clear of it. It clinked against one of the bottles for a heart-stopping moment, but again nothing happened.
“You’ve no idea,” Carlyle said. “In all my time with the Brigades, I never knew a one like him for encouraging the patriotism of Irish lasses.”
Erin felt the blade scrape against the copper wire. “You failed to mention that,” she said to Corky, gritted her teeth, and cut the wire.
There was a breathless moment. “Got it,” she said.
“Now the other one,” Carlyle said. “You’re doing grand.”
Sirens were audible, rapidly closing. Erin hardly heard them. She saw the other wire, anchoring the lid of the box, and slashed across with the knife. Corky was right. The Scarab’s double-edged blade was as sharp as anything she’d ever held. It went through the wire with no resistance at all.
Carlyle took hold of the handle on top of the lid and opened it, revealing the interior of the case. He grabbed a packet of napkins off the bar and thrust a folded bundle into the rat-trap beside his friend’s fingers. Corky jerked his hand free of the trap and sank onto a bar stool, cradling his injured hand.
“Clear,” Erin said, stepping back from the bomb.
She heard Skip’s sigh of relief. “Okay, good work, Erin,” he said. “Now will you please listen to the expert and get the hell away from the bomb?”
Chapter 17
An unbelievable number of police officers descended on the Barley Corner. Since the bomb was still technically armed, everyone had to evacuate to a safe distance. Unfortunately, since no one knew exactly how powerful the device was, this meant setting up a perimeter a full block away, evacuating the surrounding buildings, and generally screwing up the day of everyone in the neighborhood.
Skip Taylor arrived before the exodus had really gotten started. He didn’t bother with the bomb suit. He just walked into the pub like any customer, examined the device, pronounced it safe, then had to wait anyway while the evacuation proceeded. Protocols had to be observed, and some bureaucrat had decided not to believe the guy who’d deactivated IEDs on a daily basis in Iraq.
“Is this Don’t Listen to Skip day?” he grumbled to Erin as they watched uniformed officers sweeping the block. “Hell, I could’ve built a damn bomb by now.”
“How dangerous is it?” she asked. Rolf was back at her side, Danny having handed the leash to her as soon as she’d left the pub.
“I wouldn’t want to drop it,” he said. “But otherwise, it’s no big deal. I’ll need to take it apart to make sure, but it looked like three bottles of nitro, a road flare rigged to the detonator, and two bundles of roofing nails.”
Erin couldn’t suppress a shudder. “What sort of damage would that do?”
He shrugged. “It would’ve wiped out the bar,” he said. “Killed everyone in the place, everyone upstairs. The windows would’ve been gone for sure, which would’ve propelled broken plate glass, bottle glass, and nails on the blast wave, taken out everyone for oh, thirty or forty yards at least. Maybe more. Depends how good a job our guy did mixing the stuff. If it’s pure? The building would’ve probably come down.”
Erin shivered again, sorry she’d asked. “Skip, I had my hands in that box.”
He scratched the back of his head. “See, that’s why you gotta listen to the bomb-squad guy.”
“O’Reilly!”
The shout was like the voice of God, if God smoked too many cigarettes and needed to go to anger-management therapy. Erin took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and turned to face Lieutenant Webb.
Erin’s CO was coming down the street toward her, fists clenched. The rest of the Major Crimes squad hung back a little, letting their boss take the lead.
“Here, sir,” she said wearily. She suddenly felt unbelievably tired, as the effects of adrenaline leaked out of her. Every muscle was sore. She stood at attention the best she could.
“I don’t know how you did things down in Queens, but here in the big city, we don’t practice disarming bombs by ourselves, without even telling our squad-mates where we are!” Webb was right up in her face, flushed and furious. “Do you want to get killed? Do you want a transfer? Because it’s against departmental policy to kill you, but I can absolutely toss you back on Patrol so fast your head will spin!”
“Sir…” Erin began.
“Jesus Christ!” Webb shouted. “You could’ve blown up the whole block! When you found out about the bomb, did it ever cross your mind that maybe, just maybe you ought to talk to someone before running off on your own?”
“I didn’t know about the bomb,” Erin interrupted.
“You what?” Webb stopped mid-rant. “What do you mean, you didn’t know about it?”
“The FedEx guy dropped it off in the middle of things,” she said.
“Then why… what the hell were you doing there in the first place?”
That wasn’t a question Erin wanted to answer. She tried to come up with something that wouldn’t be a lie. “I was looking into a connection of Mr. Carlyle’s. I thought maybe there was some information I needed that I hadn’t gotten.”
Webb rubbed his temples. “God damn it, O’Reilly. You are either the luckiest or the unluckiest cop in the Five Boroughs.” He turned and waved the other members of the squad over. “Come on, circle up, people.”
Jones and Vic cautiously approached.
“Okay, everyone. Let’s talk this through. I want to know exactly what happened. Who did what to whom, and what can we prove?”
Erin glanced at the other two. Jones raised an eyebrow and gestured for her to go ahead.
“It’s like this, sir,” Erin began. “Billy O’Connell had a problem. He loved to gamble, but Fourth-Place Billy just couldn’t pick winners. He got in the hole, pretty deep. I’m guessing he worked with multiple bookies so he could run up a bigger tab. Anyway, he owed Morton Carlyle and Franklin Fergus. It was Frankie who gave him the solution to his problem.
“At first it was just working off the debt doing collections. But O’Connell wasn’t really cut out for it. He started carrying a gun, sure, but he wasn’t a scary enough guy. Frankie had men who’d do that kind of work for him, guys like Knox and Morgan. Those boys had records and were willing to put the hurt on people. O’Connell needed something better.
“Fergus gave him the idea of offing his wife for the insurance money. Make it look like a mob hit on O’Connell himself. Who’d suspect a guy who’d barely escaped being a victim? It must’ve seemed perfect to Fergus. He’d clear a debt off his books, he’d graduate one of his enforcers to the next level, with perfect blackmail leverage, and he could even pin the crime on his rival, Carlyle.
“I think when we look into gambling in this neighborhood, we’re gonna find that Carlyle and Fergus are working a lot of the same territory, and that doesn’t lead to friendly relations. O’Connell might not have known Fergus was planning to pin the whole thing on Carlyle, but I’m guessing he did. After all, if Cars went upstate, O’Connell wouldn’t have to worry about those debts, either.”
Erin paused, looking for confirmation. Her colleagues were listening. Jones was nodding. Vic ran a hand over his knuckles and smiled thinly.
“Go on, Detective,” Webb said.
“Then O’Connell screwed it up. He botched the bomb. It was nitroglycerin, really unstable stuff, and he was an amateur. Instead of taking out hi
s wife, O’Connell managed to assassinate himself. Fergus didn’t care too much. Sure, he wouldn’t collect on the debt, but at least he could still frame Carlyle and come out ahead. He played hard to get, then he and his guys tossed Carlyle to us in interrogation.
“But Vic and I figured the frame-up job and went after Fergus. Unfortunately, Frankie had already decided we weren’t going to stick Carlyle with the car bomb. I don’t know how he was planning to play it; probably try to pass it off as some other mob making a move on the Irish. If I had to guess, knowing how this guy operates, I’d say he was going to fake an attempt on his own life, too, to throw off suspicion, while Carlyle would still get blown up.
“Fortunately, Skip found the missing bomb materials at Fergus’s place and called me. And my partner,” she scratched Rolf behind the ears, “sniffed out the bomb just in time. One of Carlyle’s guys, Corcoran, managed to get his hand on the trigger and keep it from going off. Then Skip walked Carlyle and me through disarming it.”
“Okay,” Webb said. His face had returned to its normal color, and he didn’t sound pissed off anymore. “Good summation. So, what can we make stick?”
“We can match the bomb chemicals to the lab at Fergus’s place,” Jones said. “That gives us attempted murder and attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction. Everything else is just icing on that, but if we want, we can stick him with obstruction of justice for his false testimony, resisting arrest, conspiracy to commit murder for trying to do in Mrs. O’Connell, and if we can match chemicals with O’Connell’s bomb lab to Fergus’s lab, we’ve probably got him on Murder One for O’Connell.”
“He could bargain that one down to manslaughter,” Vic said, “on account of how O’Connell wasn’t supposed to die in the first place.” He grinned. “Not that it’ll do him much good. Might take one lifetime off his sentence.”
“With attempted murder of police officers hanging over Knox and Morgan, they’ll flip easy,” Jones went on. “We’ve got them cold on that. Fingerprints on their guns.”
“Okay, that sorts Fergus’s gang,” Webb said. “What about Carlyle?”