A Bomb Built in Hell

by Andrew Vachss

  “I wanted to get rich.”

  “So’s you wouldn’t have to...?”

  “Work ... yeah. Okay, old man.”

  The money they got in exchange was perfect: old, used, no way to distinguish it or connect it with any job or payoff. “Steam-cleaned,” they called it. Such money always came with a lifetime guarantee—the lifetime of the laundryman.

  So the half-million was clean. They could pass it all day, anyplace, without trouble. Pet had made some water-tight containers for the cash, and Wesley had memorized the locations. And the bank accounts and safe-deposit boxes all had books, keys, and papers to grease the way if necessary. So they didn’t have to kill to eat, to survive, even to live in what would amount to a certain degree of luxury and comfort. Wesley often thought about foreign countries, but never with longing. The only piece of land he would give his life to protect was an ugly old warehouse on Pike Slip.

  So why kill Norden ... why meet him at all? What could another fifty thousand mean to either of them now?

  But Carmine had built a bomb in hell—a bomb that had somehow learned how to explode and kill without destroying itself. Wesley sat on the roof, thinking: Is that the only fucking thing I can do now?

  Carmine had spent hours examining, probing, destroying Wesley’s once-treasured genetic misconceptions. “The only color I hate is blue.” And Wesley spent still more hours wrestling with them on his own. What made Carmine hate the men who had perished in their custom-made gas chamber was easy to see. They had left him to die without a cause, without a culture—so the old man forged his own out of his hatred and Wesley’s need.

  But what had made the men that Carmine hated? They weren’t born like that.

  The only common thread in all the humans Wesley had been paid to kill had been their wealth or their threat to those who had wealth. That same thread ran through all the humans Wesley killed intentionally for himself and Carmine and Pet—but it wasn’t in every one of the victims. The woman on Sutton Place had died because she was a way to kill others—that she was rich was incidental. The Prince had had money—he must have had some serious money stashed someplace—but he was killed because he was an enemy. The people in the crowd on West 51st who got bombed by the grenade ... the junkies blown up by the booby-trapped bag ... whoever was within the fallout range of the building on Chrystie ... the methadone clinic ... the girl in the massage parlor...

  War casualties. Very fucking casual.

  When the jets strafed a village in Korea, they left everybody there on the ground, burning. Women breed children; children grow up to hunt their parents’ killers. Blood into the ground, seeding the next wave.

  They hit a village way up north once, before Wesley got on the sniper team. When his squad charged the smoking ruins, Wesley was on the point. The lieutenant wasn’t shit, a ROTC-punk kid that the whole platoon hated, so Wesley just up and took the point because he wanted to stay alive. The silent backing of the rest was enough to educate even a human with a college degree on that miserable slice of earth.

  Wesley crashed through first, but the place was empty. In the next-to-last hut, he heard a baby’s cry and he hit the ground elbows first, rifle up and pointed at Oriental-chest level. No more sound. Wesley crawled toward the hut ... slowly.

  He saw the woman then; she looked about thirty and was coming at him with a tiny knife as quickly and quietly as she could. As he came to his knees, she launched herself at his face. Wesley spun his rifle and slammed it against the side of her head. She went down hard. He ran past her toward the hut; he got about ten feet when the woman landed on his back and the knife pricked into his upper shoulder. He rolled with the thrust—the woman went flying over his back, still holding the knife.

  Wesley held the rifle at his waist and their eyes met ... and time stopped. He motioned with the barrel for her to split ... get into the fucking jungle before he blew her head off. It took her only a second to understand what he meant. The woman got to her feet holding the puny knife between herself and Wesley, as though it were a cross to a vampire. But instead of running into the jungle, she backed toward the hut.

  Wesley’s ears picked up the sound of other soldiers systematically working their way through the burning ruins ... shots fired, an occasional scream.

  The woman kept backing toward the hut. Stupid bitch, he thought. She was going to die or worse if she didn’t get into the brush fast. The woman ducked into the hut and came out in a second holding a naked little male child under her left arm. The right hand still held the knife. Wesley watched as she faded into the jungle. He was still staring at the spot when the others came up behind him.

  On the way back, Wesley forced himself to think about what had happened. He finally realized the only reason he didn’t blow her away at first was because it wasn’t consistent with his image of himself to kill a woman. And besides, it was the motherfucking colonel that talked about wiping them all out and he never went with them, so fuck him and his orders—that was consistent.

  But when Wesley saw her face, he had been afraid for just a split second. It wasn’t until she came out of the hut that Wesley realized the crazy woman was willing to die to protect the little kid. He remembered her face and her look. If his mother had looked like that, maybe he wouldn’t have been raised by the State. But he had never seen his mother as far as he could recall, so he just didn’t know....

  When they kill only the male children, they make one big motherfucker of a mistake, he thought.

  73/

  The next morning, Wesley told the kid they weren’t even going to meet Norden, much less cancel his ticket or his wife’s. He watched the kid’s face closely, pleased to see no trace of disappointment ... or happiness. It was always bad news when the bomb started to need the target.

  But the kid was still puzzled. “What’s the next thing?”

  “I don’t know, kid. There’s a reason why I didn’t want to go out with Pet. The methadone clinic was part of it ... and some other stuff, too ... just before that creep at the racetrack.”

  “What stuff?”

  “That sicko, the freak who went around here cutting little kids with a razor, you know who I mean?”

  “Yeah. They never caught him, right? He’s still out there?”

  “He’s in the morgue. I hit him on the Slip the night I brought the dog home, a long time before you came.”

  “That was the right thing to do. If I was the fucking heat and I came on him, I’d never bring him in.”

  “They wouldn’t bring me in either, right? And I didn’t hit him for that. Remember: all dead meat brings flies. He was the same as the methadone clinic to me.”

  “Because?”

  “Because baby-rapers bring the law—they always do, just like the dope fiends bring it. So he had to go. I thought he was cutting on a kid out there, but after I hit him it turned out to be the dog.”

  “How’d you know where to look for him?”

  “I learned in prison. If I was a cop, there’d be a whole lot of sorry motherfuckers out there.”

  “How’d you hit him?”

  “With the target pistol, at about fifty feet.”

  “That don’t seem right to me. Like you showing him too much respect, you know? You maybe should of slashed his fucking throat.”

  “He’s just as dead this way. You think they’d pin a fucking medal on me for whacking him out?”

  “No, I know they don’t do that.”

  “They used to do it, right? I got a couple of medals in Korea for shit like that ... stupid.”

  “For giving you the medals?”

  “Me, for doing their fucking killing for them.”

  “You did Carmine’s killing for him....”

  “Carmine made it my own killing.... And even if it wasn’t, I had to kill them so I could do my own.”

  “At the racetrack?”

  “No. I thought that was it. But, if it was, I’d go on this Norden thing, right? In fact, that’s the one thing been on
my mind for a long time.”

  “Why just that?” the kid asked.

  “Meaning...?”

  “Why just killing—there’s other things.”

  “That’s all I know how to... Look, you got a woman?”

  “No, not right now. I mean, there’s a girl I go and see sometimes, but I can’t make anything regular out of it....”

  “But you can have one if you want, right? You can talk to them? Talk to all kinds of people out there,” he gestured with a wide sweep of his hand to encompass the city. “Right?”

  “Just some kind of people, really....”

  “What kind?”

  “Guys that have been Inside, women on the track.... I don’t know ... maybe you’re right. I could talk to anybody I wanted, probably.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Can’t what?”

  “Have a woman, talk to a man, be around people and not have them know about me.... I did it when I went out to see Norden but that’s not because I fit in. I was invisible to those people. In Times Square, they all knew. And when they don’t.... You believe that three punks tried to take me off in a parking lot on the Island?”

  “Heeled?”

  “No!” he snorted. “Three punks and one little knife between them ... and I’m already sitting in the car with the engine running.”

  “Jesus! They must of been...”

  “They just couldn’t see, kid,” Wesley explained. “I could walk right up to them and they’d never know ... but I couldn’t talk to them.”

  “The women ... maybe I could...”

  “No. I left that ... I left it in the jail, or maybe before.”

  “You could get it back.”

  “It would cost too much now—what would I do with it? I know what I have to do ... just not who to do it to.”

  “I don’t know either,” the kid said.

  “Well, you better fucking find out. Carmine sent me to the library to find out how—I guess you’d better start going to find out who.”

  “I haven’t had a woman since I moved in here.”

  “You better stay in touch with that too, kid. Stay in touch; stay close to it all. After I go, you don’t want to be all alone.”

  “Wesley...?”

  “Carmine and Pet were always together, right? I was alone until I had them. When Carmine checked out, he left Pet behind. And Pet left me behind for you, right? When I go, you’ll be alone ... and we don’t have enough bullets for them all, kid. It was all for fucking nothing unless you can make it happen—I know that now. I came out to avenge Carmine. I did that. Why aren’t I dead and home with him?”

  “I don’t know, but...”

  “Pet wouldn’t have gone unless he knew that I was okay to leave. I can’t go either until you are.”

  “I’m not ready ... you’ve still got stuff to show me.”

  “Show you what? I’ve taught you just about everything I know about how to kill.”

  “But...”

  “But there has to be something more, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, that’s the mystery, kid. The part I don’t know about. But I’m going to figure it out before I leave.”

  “Politics?” the kid asked.

  “Politics? I don’t know. I know this—when I was overseas I learned some things. Say it takes thirty grains of rice a day to keep a man alive ... what happens if you give him forty grains?”

  “He’s happy?”

  “Enough not to kill you, anyway. What happens if you give him twenty grains?”

  “Then he comes for you.”

  “Okay, sure. But why the fuck should he spare your life for thirty lousy grains of rice? Why shouldn’t he want the whole thing for himself and grow his own damn rice?”

  “People own land....”

  “Is that right? And where’d they get it from?”

  “They bought it?”

  “From who? You keep going back far enough, kid, what you find out is, they fought for it.”

  “So?”

  “So why don’t the sorry motherfucker getting the thirty grains of rice fight for it too?”

  “The law—”

  “Was written by the motherfuckers who got the land now, see?”

  “Yeah. And they got the police and the army and everything else to protect that land.”

  “That isn’t all, kid. What you think the Welfare Department is all about? Or the fucking methadone ... any of that giveaway shit?”

  “I don’t see how it’s the same. If—”

  “The Welfare, that’s the thirty grains of rice. You can live off it but you can’t live on it, you understand? And the methadone, to a dope fiend, that’s the thirty grains.”

  “Dope fiends don’t vote, Wes.”

  “The fuck they don’t—winos vote on election day, right?”

  “Yeah, for a bottle of wine.”

  “So the dope fiends...”

  “I get it.”

  “Yeah. So what? Even I can see that.”

  “What do you mean, Wesley?”

  “That kind of crap just plain hits you in the face. They got to have systems, you know? Like in the joint. Just a few hacks ... and a fucking regiment of cons, right? But nobody ever walks over the Wall.”

  “The Man has the guns.”

  “Bullshit! He don’t have the guns in the blocks, on the tiers, right? The guards are unarmed, but we let him lay, because we don’t even trust each other. It’s real easy my way—black and white, us against them, period. I did it for Carmine ... but now I don’t know who to do it for. It can’t be for me....”

  “Why not? If you risk your life like you do, then...”

  “I’m already dead. I’m tired. I don’t want to be here anymore, kid.”

  “I don’t understand that.”

  “I know. That means you can still be here, you see? It can still be for you.”

  74/

  Wesley went upstairs and focused on the fourth-floor wall for a long while. Then he went down to the kid’s room in the garage.

  “I saw on the news last night that Poppa Doc’s faggot son is coming to this country.”

  “From Haiti?” the kid asked.

  “Yeah. That fat, greasy nigger is running the show down there his way. I knew a guy in the joint that lived under his old man— he said Poppa Doc was the Devil, straight up.”

  “So?”

  “I’m going to blow him up.”

  “Why? I don’t get it, Wesley. You call him a nigger, right? And all that’s going to be getting anything behind you wasting this cocksucker is another bunch of niggers....”

  “Like Carmine said ... that maggot is a nigger, right? An ugly word for a black bastard with a greedy heart and bloody hands. But the others he’s got locked up there, they ain’t niggers, kid— they’re people like us, right? Like you, anyway.”

  “You going to hit him for...?”

  “I wish it was for me. Maybe it will be for me after it happens. If it works in Haiti...”

  “Hit the Boss here?”

  “You know, it’s not that hard. I studied assassinations for years. Every day, every way. The reason we don’t hit presidents here too much is that we afraid to die.... In some countries, they do it all the time. Look at the different styles; you’re going to hit a big man here, how you do it?”

  “A rifle,” the kid replied. “Like at the bridge.”

  “Right. In Latin America, or in the Orient, you take a goddamn machete and you jump right into the bastard’s limo, or up on the stage, or...”

  “But you’d never—”

  “Get out alive, right?” Wesley interrupted. “But, see, you’re not doing it for no money. You got some people you protecting—your mother and your children and your neighbors and all that, right? It’s worth it ... it fucking must be worth it.”

  “It don’t seem to work here—that guy, who shot Wallace...”

  “He was a whacko, kid. A stone freak, probably came behind pulling the t
rigger. He wasn’t a pro. I was that close, I’d have so much lead into him it’d take a fucking crane to get him off the ground.”

  “That clown who shot the black preacher, wasn’t he...?”

  “That was a fix, kid—just like at the fucking track. Let me tell you what happened, okay? Somebody came to him in the joint, told him he was pulling The Book anyway, didn’t have nothing to lose. So here’s the proposition: he hits the preacher and escapes, he’s ahead and he’s rich. He hits the preacher and they snatch him ... and they agree in front not to total him when they make the capture ... all he gets is another stretch. You can’t do no more than one Life, right? And in that joint, he’s a fucking hero behind hitting that preacher, too.