“I’ll have a job for you in a couple of weeks. Now remember, there are a couple of rules in this kind of work: One, you never hit a man in his own home or in front of his children. Two, you never hit a man in a house of worship. Three, you only hit the man himself, nobody else.”
“Whose rules are these?”
“These are the rules of the people who make the rules.”
“Then they can fuck themselves—I’m coming for them, too.”
“I know that. I know what Carmine wanted. I’m just telling you so’s you know how to act in front of them if that ever happens.”
“What you mean, in front of them?”
“You never know, right?”
“I’ll do good work, you understand?”
“Them, too?”
“They’re the real ones, right? Rich people?”
“Yeah, rich people ... very fucking rich people, Wesley.”
“Good. Now show me the rest.”
30/
It took another ninety days for the place to fill up completely to Pet’s satisfaction. The generator he installed would enable the place to run its electrical systems without city power. The freezer held enough for six months, and the old man installed a five-hundred-gallon water tank in the basement and slowly got it filled from outside sources. A gas tank the same size was also added, as was a complete lathe, drill press, and workbench. The chemicals were stored in an airtight, compartmentalized box.
Pet fixed himself a place to live in the garage. There was still enough room for a half-dozen vehicles.
Wesley spent the next few weeks practicing; first, inside the place so he knew every inch, especially how to get in and out, even during the daylight. The old man showed him the tunnel he had begun to construct.
“You can only use this once, Wes. It’ll exit in the vacant lot on the corner of Water Street and the Slip. I’m going to fix it so’s it’s got about two feet of solid ground at its mouth, and plank it up heavy. When you want to split that one time, you hit the depth-charge lever down here in your apartment ... and the tunnel mouth blows in, okay?”
Wesley later expanded his investigations, making ever-widening circles away from the factory, but always returning within twelve hours. Pet got him a perfect set of identification. “You can always get a complete bundle in Times Square. Good stuff, too. But the freaks selling it usually roughed it off some poor bastard, maybe totaled him, and it ain’t worth the trouble. I know this guy who makes the stuff from scratch, on government blanks, too.”
Equipped with paper, Wesley could drive as well as walk. He began to truly appreciate Carmine’s “No Parole” advice.
When Pet came back one day, Wesley asked him about another kind of practice. “I need to work with the pieces. Where can I do it?”
“Right here. I got the fourth floor soundproofed. Anyway, with those silencers I got for you, you could blow the wall away and not have anybody catch wise.”
“What about practicing without the silencers?”
“What you want to do that for? The pieces’ll just make more noise, that’s all. Even the long-range stuff has silencers now—I’ll show you later.”
The old man was right. Wesley fired thousands of rounds, making the most minute adjustments before he was satisfied. No one came, no sirens, nothing.
It was easy to make the adjustments since Pet had the fourth floor all marked off in increments of six inches—ceiling, floors, and walls. Wesley worked out a rough formula: the smaller the caliber, the more accurate the shot had to be. The more bullets flying, the less accurate each individual slug had to be. The closer to the target, the less time you had to get ready. Pet came back late one night, pressed the silent warning system to let Wesley know he was there, and was already making himself a cup of the strong, pasty coffee he especially liked by the time Wesley got to the garage.
“I got something for you,” the old man said. “It’s a simple one. I think they want to see if I can deliver.”
“They think it’s you going to be doing it?”
“Yeah, me and my ‘organization,’ right?”
“Right. Good. Tell me.”
“It’s a pawnshop on Lenox Avenue, near 131st Street. The guy who runs it is a front for them. He’s making good coin where he is, but he’s a greedy fuck—started selling dope out of the place, and The Man got him. It’s about a hundred years in the can for what they nailed him with; he rolled over like a dog. He don’t really know all that much yet, so they’re leaving him out there to get more. He’s also got an undercover working for him—right in the shop.”
“What’s that?”
“A cop, from the CIB; a Puerto Rican kid, he looks like, but he’s a cop for sure. Supposed to be a stockboy or something like that, but he uses that phone too much ... and he’s not placing bets.”
“The cop, too?”
“Maybe more—the beat bulls are getting paid off by this creep, and they keep a close watch on his store so’s he won’t get taken off.”
“Can we get him over here some night?”
“Forget that! The first rule is that nothing gets done down here. We got to protect this territory completely. No dope fiends, no freaks, no fucking nothing. This is the safe house, right? No, he’s got to be hit right in his shop.”
“Why not at his house, where he lives?”
“Too much pressure on the boys, then. The Muslims have been giving this rat bastard hell because they know he’s dealing. We make it look like they did it.”
“A white man in Harlem?”
“You thinking about him or you?”
“Me.”
“Good. You ever use dynamite?”
“Just grenades. In the Army.”
“Same stuff. You light it, you throw it, and you get the fuck outta the way, right?”
“They might get out, too.... No, wait a minute ... are they both up front in the place?”
“Usually the cop is in the back—but if he thinks you from the People he’ll drift up just to be able to testify against you later.”
“Doesn’t this guy know who his contact is?”
“No. He’s a small-time weasel—any fucking hood comes in there with a ‘Message from the Boys’ and this faggot’ll listen, you know?”
“Okay, when does the cop leave the place at night?”
“The guy we want opens up around ten. And his cop helper gets there around noon. They work a long day, close up around eleven at night. We’ll take the cab—it cost me twenty-eight large, but they’ll never find it in this city.”
31/
Wednesday night, 9:10 p.m. A yellow medallion cab rolled up in front of the pawnshop on Lenox, the old man at the wheel. Pet slid the cab down about four doors from the target and pulled out a newspaper. He poked a small hole in the middle of the paper with a sharp pencil, adjusted his rearview mirror until he was satisfied. He slipped the cab into gear and rested his left foot lightly on the brake—the rear brake lights did not go on.
Wesley climbed out of the back of the cab. He was dressed in a steel-grey sharkskin one-button suit with a dark grey shirt and light grey tie. His shoes flashed like black mirrors in rhyme-time with the gross white Lindy Star on his right pinky; his watchband matched his cufflinks, which matched his tie clip; his snapbrim fedora was pearl grey. He carried a small, round cardboard hatbox.
The bells above the door tinkled as Wesley entered. The shop was empty of customers and the pawnbroker was up front in the cage.
“Can I help you?”
“No, I can help you, pal. I got a message from the Boys—they want you to take this package and...”
The Puerto Rican drifted toward the front as Wesley’s voice trailed off.
“Who’s this?” Wesley challenged.
“Oh, this is Juan, my stockboy. He’s okay; he knows the score.”
“Get him over here—I want to see his face.”
Juan walked smiling toward the front of the cage. Wesley brought the 9mm Beretta out of th
e hatbox. The silencer made it seem six feet long, but Juan caught two slugs in the chest before he had a chance to wonder about it or make a move (“Always take the hard man first—it’s tougher on your guts that way, but if you take the soft man first, you won’t be fucking alive to feel good behind it,” Carmine had told him years ago) and Wesley immediately turned the gun on the other man who flung his hands into the air. Wesley said, “Open the cashbox!” so the target would relax, and blew away the side of his face as the man bent toward the drawer.
Wesley put the hatbox down on the floor, clicked the snap-fuse open, and wheeled toward the door. He flipped the sign from OPEN to CLOSED and set the spring lock behind him as he went out. He was into the back seat of the cab in another second and Pet had pulled smoothly away before Wesley could get the “Eight seconds!” out of his mouth. They caught the first light and were buried in the traffic at 125th and Lenox when they heard the explosion. Traffic stalled. Everyone tried to figure out where the noise had come from, but the cop, who empathized with any white man’s desire to get the hell of out Harlem before dark, waved them through.
32/
They hit the FDR in minutes. The meter showed $4.65 by the time they neared the Slip.
“When we going to switch?” Wesley asked.
“We’re not—nobody’s following us. I got a car buried on Park and 88th and another in Union Square but we don’t need them—I’ll pick them up tomorrow. I’ll change the numbers of this one tonight—nothing to it. We don’t want to make problems by getting too cute.”
The eleven o’clock news had a story about a firebombing in Harlem; the reporter said it looked like a “terrorist act.” The film clips showed the entire front of the pawnshop and the stores on either side completely obliterated. The firemen were still battling the blaze, and it was not known if anyone had been inside at the time of the explosion. An informant had told the police that two men, both Negro, of average height, were seen running from the shop toward Eighth Avenue just before the explosion and the police expected arrests to follow.
“Were you the informant?” Wesley asked.
“You must be kidding, Wes. There’s always some righteous asshole who pulls that kind of number. Every job I ever knew about had fifty fucking leads called into The Man that didn’t have nothing to do with what went down.”
“Don’t the cops know this?”
“And you Carmine’s son! For Chrissakes, kid ... don’t you know they only want to make the arrest? They could give a fuck about who’s really guilty. Didn’t you get bum-beefed when you went down?”
“No. I did it alright. I got ratted out by a scumbag clerk in a hotel.”
“Don’t you want to pay him back?”
“Someday, when it ties in with something else I’m doing. But I can’t risk what we’re doing just for payback.”
“Good. Where is he?”
“Times Square.”
“I can fucking guarantee you that sooner or later we’ll get into his territory. I always hated to work down there, though. Those fucking freaks, you never know what they’re going to do.”
“I know what they’re going to do.”
“How the hell do you know?”
“One of them told me.”
33/
“How come they’re paying a hundred K for this guy? What’s so hard about him?”
“He used to run the ‘Family Business’ in Queens, and now he’s pulled out. There’s got to be a war over this, because he still controls Queens and they don’t let you do that. This guy is sharp now. No telephones, no mail. He lives in a fucking fortress out near the North Shore on the Island and he runs the show from there.”
“Can we get at him?”
“No way. I was out there myself a few times, and you’d have to fucking bomb the place from a plane to hit it. And he’s got himself an air-raid shelter, too. Left over from the Fifties. But he has to stay in touch. Every month, he meets his capo on the 59th Street Bridge to talk.”
“What? Right out in the open?”
“Yeah, Wesley, right out in the open. But it ain’t just him that’s out in the open. And we don’t know what night he meets on—it’s always late, and he always gets a ride to the Queens side and meets the capo halfway across. He has men on the Queens side and the capo has men on the Manhattan side.”
“Couldn’t we just drive past and hit him?”
“How? We don’t know when he’s coming and if they see the same car pass back and forth, we’re the ones who’ll get hit. Besides, he stands with his back to the girders and you couldn’t get a decent shot at him, even if you could get on the bridge.”
“How much time have we got?”
“If we get him before he wins the war, we get paid. If he loses the war, we don’t. If he wins the war, we don’t.”
“How long before the war starts?”
“It may not start at all—they’re still trying to negotiate. But they also want to cover all their bets, you know?”
“How come they don’t try and cover you, with all the work you been doing for them?”
“They think they have. I never know if I’m coming back from a meet with them. But also, they think I got a nice little organization of my own, with all old guys like me, and they don’t want to start a war to prevent one. They’re very slick, right?”
Wesley smiled. “Can you get me onto Welfare Island after dark?”
The old man nodded and got up to leave. Wesley climbed up to the fourth floor and took the .219 Zipper from the gun rack. The cartridge had been originally designed for a Marlin rifle, but its lever action was too sloppy and inaccurate. Good enough for a varmint gun, but not for Wesley’s work. He had spent hours fitting the barrel into a rechambered format and attaching it to a better stock. Now it was single-action, and magnificently accurate. But he still couldn’t make it hold a silencer, and he had more practicing to do.
Wesley squeezed off another round—as he fired, he noticed the orange light glowing just past his range of vision. Smoothly and calmly, he pulled the massive Colt Trooper .357 magnum from his shoulder holster and spun to face the door. It opened and Pet stepped inside, a wide grin on his face. Wesley put the gun down and waited.
“Wes, I got a present for you,” Pet said, displaying another rifle.
“What’s that? I already got a good piece.”
“You got nothing compared to this. This here’s a Remington .220, the latest thing. It’s got twice the muzzle velocity of that Zipper and it’s more accurate, every time. And that’s not the best part. I know a guy who works for the bullet people—he’s a ballistics engineer. You know what he told me? He said that the engineers test fire some slugs from every batch that the factory manufactures, just to see if they’re building the slugs up to the specs. Well, every once in a while they come across some that’re just perfect, you know? They call these bullets ‘freaks,’ okay? And the engineers always take the whole batch and fire them themselves to see if they can figure out why these bullets work so good. Anyway, I got fifty rounds of those ‘freaks,’ for this piece.”
“I can make a five-inch group at three hundred yards with the Zipper,” Wesley said, doubtfully.
“The man told me you could double that distance and still group the same with this piece. And he’s no marksman.”
“Let me see it.”
“Okay, kid. But remember, I only got fifty rounds.”
“I’ll test fire it with some over-the-counter stuff first.”
Pet left Wesley alone. Four hours later, Wesley came down to the garage.
“Is it as accurate as the man said?” Pet asked.
“Better. But it’s the loudest damn thing I ever heard.”
“So what? No point in silencing it anyway from the Island—the chumps on the shore’ll think it was a backfire. We hit a guy like that once, years ago, me and Carmine. I set the car up so’s it would backfire like a sonofabitch, right? So we’re driving down the street with the car backfiring and the creep ducks
behind his bodyguards ... but then they get wise it’s only the car and he starts laughing like a fool. He was still laughing when Carmine sent him a message and the bodyguards couldn’t figure out what happened until we were around the corner.”
“The engineer was sure right about this piece,” Wesley said. “Any chance of getting some more slugs from him?”
“No. It was in the papers yesterday. Somebody must have wired his car. It blew up when he turned on the ignition.”
34/
Wesley and Pet replaced the stock of the new rifle. With a new cheek-piece, hand-sanded to micro-tolerances, it fit Wesley’s face perfectly. Wesley had the latest nightscope: U.S. Army issue, and only to jungle-sniper teams. Pet built a long, black anodized-aluminum cone to hide the flash. Wesley mounted the piece on a tripod and sat comfortably behind it for a while. Then he disassembled the unit and climbed to the roof.
A Bomb Built in Hell Page 6