A Danger to Himself and Others: Bomb Squad NYC Incident 1

by J. E. Fishman

  “Stop bringing that up.” He waved at the candles. “You’re ruining the atmosphere.”

  “See? Multiply it times ten. Or times a thousand. That’s how it feels to him.”

  “What are you, a secret FBI profiler?”

  “I just know men and women. Can I ask you something, Manny?”

  He went for the wine bottle but found it empty. The second bottle. “Is it about the apartment rules?”

  “Uh uh.”

  “You want me to do the dishes?”

  “Later.” She reached across the table and ran her fingers over the top of his hand and between his knuckles. “Let’s go lie down.”

  “I told you the score on that.”

  “I don’t mind.” She stood up and led him by the arm to her bedroom.

  He followed her, half feeling that he owed her something. How crazy this life could be—she so hot and sensual, he made by circumstances into such a reluctant suitor. A few years ago, he’d have killed for this.

  Killed. The thought brought him short. He kissed her and her mouth fell open, her lips and tongue like butter. Her dress clung like a second skin. She pulled him down to the bed. Twice in one day he would fail to deliver.

  “I want you, Manny.”

  She guided his hand between her legs, but he pulled it away.

  “You know I can’t, J-Fo.”

  “I got that.” She kissed him, ran her fingernails through his stiff hair, across his chest. “There are different ways to get a woman off.”

  She guided his hand down again, this time to her bare thigh and used it to hike up the front of her dress. She placed his palm atop the mound of her underwear, which was warm and damp.

  “You still got something to offer, Manny,” she said. “Maybe not all the parts are perfect. But I’m not asking for perfect.”

  “What are you asking for?” He buried his face in her hair. She smelled like hot olive oil.

  “Well, you still got the rest of your body, don’t you?”

  MANIS STOOD BY A WIRE trash bin on the corner of Avenue B and East Third Street. From that vantage point he had a view both of the ornate front of St. Euphrosyne and the plain side door that the homeless men used. They’d started lining up for the soup kitchen at half past four, but the shelter itself hadn’t opened until six. Some of the men had wandered off after dinner, but others went back inside only to come out again. He figured they’d copped their squat for the night and wanted to wait until the last minute before entering the shelter for good. Besides, they were passing around some bottles and a few cigarettes.

  Keeping count in his head, calculating that there were still plenty of beds available inside, Manis hung back. He didn’t worry too much about looking suspicious. Lurking around was typical behavior in this part of town. Despite the cold, there were plenty of people on the street, and any new recipient of church services would naturally be hesitant to step forward out of self-preservation.

  By eight-thirty it had grown frigid and the tips of Manis’s fingers were cracked and blue. The things I do for that bitch, he thought. But there was no point feeling bitter. His goal lay within sight.

  Ten minutes later, he watched Salinowsky shuffle across the avenue, oblivious to traffic. Manis ducked his head and pretended to be digging through the trash, but that didn’t matter. Salinowsky’s glassy eyes seemed to perceive little around him.

  High on smack, Manis thought. Perfect.

  With the mason’s satchel in hand, Manis turned and followed his target at twenty paces. Unlike the other vagrants, Salinowsky didn’t pause at the threshold, just marched right down the steps and into the building. But at the next doorway, someone brought him up short, a man with a large kitchen tongs in his hand. The man had a red face that was flushed further from the heat of the kitchen. At first, Manis thought he was making friendly conversation with Salinowsky, but he became more animated as things progressed. Salinowsky, rocking on his heels, pulled out the ashen pockets of his tattered coat to indicate he carried nothing. The red-faced man said something else and Salinowsky did the same with his pants pockets, showing only some small change and a few trinkets. That gesture had little more effect than the first, and the red-faced man denied Salinowsky access to the kitchen.

  “I asked your name, buddy,” said a voice next to Manis.

  He perceived for the first time a young man standing there, short and pale and gaunt with an elaborate tattoo that ran up his neck. He carried a clipboard in his hand.

  “Everyone needs to check in.”

  Manis made up a name.

  “You got ID?” the man asked.

  “I got mugged this morning. They took everything.”

  “What’s in the bag?”

  “They took everything but that.”

  “No guns or knives allowed inside. Open it.”

  Manis shook his head. He hadn’t worked out this angle. Of course they’d be worried about weapons.

  “Let me see inside the bag or you can go back out, freeze your ass off.”

  Manis shook his head, but less adamantly this time. If he continued to resist, he’d make himself an object of suspicion. But if he let them look, he reasoned on second thought, they wouldn’t recognize what he had in the satchel as anything dangerous. Homeless people collected the oddest things. Manis knew that to be true and so would they. He’d seen with his own eyes shopping carts full of baby dolls and knotted wigs and bicycle parts. He’d stuffed his satchel full of rags, and if this man saw the prosthesis under them, so what? Manis would look no different than the other junk collectors.

  He unhooked the straps and held open the satchel, but after all that the man hardly looked inside, satisfied just with the gesture. Manis closed it quickly.

  “There’s a locker at the foot of each bed,” the man explained, “but don’t leave anything valuable in there—keep your money under your pillow. Bathroom’s in that direction, showers over there. You got a preference of bunk?”

  “Can I see my choices?”

  The man walked Manis to a doorway around the corner. Men of all ages were settling all about. Most kept to themselves. A few conducted muted conversations.

  In the time it took Manis to work out his entry, Salinowsky had gone into the shelter dormitory and sat down on one of the cots. Manis did a quick calculation. An unmade cot next to Salinowsky was also the last vacant spot on the perimeter.

  “I need the outside row,” Manis said.

  “Twenty six, then. They’re numbered.”

  The man seized an armful of bedding from a rolling shelf and thrust it into Manis’s stomach. “You return your bedding to the bins when you leave. You want to stay more than two nights, you got to agree to counseling.”

  What kind of counseling? Manis wondered, but he didn’t ask. As he wandered to his cot, it occurred to him that a place like this held great advantages for a man who wished to remain unseen. For his purposes, the less he talked the better, but such antisocial behavior wouldn’t capture anyone’s attention. They were all equally damaged. And once Salinowsky lay in pieces on the sidewalk, it wouldn’t matter whether the man at the door had glimpsed the prosthetic leg in the satchel. The important thing was that he’d never remember Manis’s face.

  The dormitory smelled of bleach and human excrement. Manis shed his coat and prepared his bedding, thinking of the inside of an army barracks. He’d served six years and never made it past private first class, but he’d been with the sappers, and that experience had led to a job with an outside contractor in Germany. While there, he had easy if incomplete access to several military bases. Once inside, a shrewd and patient operator could sneak around with a great deal of success. When ready you put your name down on a list, then hopped into a free spot on a transport plane back to the States, no security screening.

  Manis lay atop his cot and waited in silence for lights out. In his peripheral vision, he perceived Salinowsky coming and going, shuffling around the room with heavy eyelids. At times he paused and looked a
s if he’d pass out and fall over, but he managed to stay on his feet until the overhead lights flashed. Then he fell heavily to his cot and undressed, putting his clothes in his footlocker and gently sliding his prosthetic leg under the bed.

  At that moment Manis ventured a turn of his head. The leg looked just as he expected it to look, and Manis concluded that this plan had a high probability of success.

  Two hours later, with everyone asleep or uncaring, in the dark he used a penlight to study the cuff—where Salinowsky’s experience of the replacement leg would be most sensitive. He quietly made a few adjustments to the cushion and used some filth from his own disgusting shoes to get the dirty color as close as possible to the original. Satisfied with this work, he exchanged the real prosthesis for the one with the bomb, knowing that Salinowsky would likely pass the armed forces recruiting station on Beekman Street on his way to or from his post office box. If not today, then tomorrow at the latest. He’d observed Salinowsky for two days now, and the man was a creature of habit.

  When the fluorescent lights came up in the morning, Manis slipped from the shelter without stopping for breakfast. He had the real prosthesis in his satchel and he’d left Salinowsky asleep over the bomb.

  TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK

  11.

  DAY SIX—Light

  LEWIS SALINOWSKY AWOKE FEELING ILL. Nausea stirred in his chest and snot ran from his nose. He had to get off the junk, he thought, just had to. Maybe today would be the day, maybe tomorrow. He’d lost the card for the methadone nun, but he could get another.

  Salinowsky strapped on his leg and pulled on his pants and limped in the direction of the kitchen. Father Igor wasn’t there, thank God. It was all pretty foggy in Salinowsky’s mind, but he felt pretty sure that Father Igor had reamed him out good last night. Not as harshly as a normal person would, but with no hint of his usual kindness. Father Igor, if Salinowsky remembered right, had gone pretty red in the face. He didn’t like Salinowsky missing his time in the prep kitchen and he liked even less seeing the shelter volunteer in an altered state. Salinowsky had to empty his pockets just to prove he didn’t have any syringes on him, but still Father Igor wouldn’t let him into the pantry, where he kept most of his stuff.

  The kitchen door was open now, however, the morning crew getting ready to ply their charges with coffee and danish, then drive them out onto the street. You couldn’t hang around the shelter during the day and you couldn’t goldbrick either. If you woke up too sick to move, they sent for an ambulance and hauled you out on a stretcher. Salinowsky would never let that happen. He couldn’t abide ambulances. They reminded him of war.

  With nobody paying any mind, he limped through the kitchen to the pantry. His legs felt heavy. Both of them—the one of flesh and the composite one, too. He thought he might get another blister on his stump just when the last blister had callused over.

  From the pantry he gathered up a change of clothes, relatively clean ones, Father Igor having allowed him yesterday morning to use the washing machine that was normally reserved for towels. Father Igor had been good to him and in exchange Salinowsky had let down Father Igor for the thousandth time. He knew that and he desperately wished not to have to ask for forgiveness again. There were two ways to accomplish that. The first would be to get clean. The second—maybe easier and maybe harder—would be to move along to another shelter. If his check arrived in today’s mail, he thought, maybe the monthly windfall would help him decide which course to take.

  When he’d cleaned up and changed, Salinowsky ate his breakfast of cheese danishes and coffee at a cafeteria table full of men like him, men who savored bread as others savored candy. Men who spent their days on survival strategies as intensely as others plotted world conquest. Today they were arguing over what neighborhoods had the best balance of paying foot traffic versus fewest hassling cops. Salinowsky didn’t participate. He could think only of his own nausea and the angry redness of Father Igor’s face, plus his desperate need for cash and another bundle.

  At eight o’clock he made sure one more time that his few possessions were securely stowed in the back of the pantry cabinet. Then he hit the street, limping down Avenue B through Chinatown. On Essex Street they were just pulling into place a cart where you could get cheap eats. Salinowsky sometimes did that for lunch to celebrate on days that his check had come. He might double back later if the mood struck him.

  For now, he turned west on East Broadway and waded through the Asian crowds to Bowery, where he crossed to Worth Street and on to Federal Plaza. On days when he picked up his check, he used a check-cashing store on Broadway, then walked down and around the east side of City Hall Park to a spot he liked for panhandling in the Financial District. But he couldn’t focus on plans just now. He felt itchy all over.

  At exactly three minutes past nine, Lewis Salinowsky walked into the shiny office building that held the post office, went straight to his box, and with trembling hands extracted the envelope that contained his VA check. Happy Monday. He stuffed it into his coat pocket and picked up the pace—couldn’t help himself in the excitement—limping briskly along Worth Street up to Broadway.

  The check-cashing store stood on Broadway near Chambers Street, between a Duane Reade drugstore and a Radio Shack. Blue plywood scaffolding covered the sidewalk and masked the store sign, but Salinowsky knew exactly where he was going. He’d been through this routine many times, had used this store ever since he opened the post office box—three years going on four, he thought, although he couldn’t be sure.

  He went through the glass door and got into line behind two Hispanic women and a young black guy wearing baggy jeans and a do-rag. The woman at the cashing window was a heavyset Indian. Salinowsky watched over people’s shoulders as she counted out the first woman’s crisp green bills and turned her attention to the next customer. But something wasn’t right. As she lifted her face, some activity behind Salinowsky drew her attention. Her eyes grew wide and her mouth fell open, like she was going to scream. Then she reached over and flicked closed her Plexiglas window.

  JOSEPH CAPOBIANCO SETTLED INTO HIS desk chair with a cup of black java and a bag containing two jelly donuts. Generally when he ate donuts, he could hear Jill carping at him in the back of his mind. But today he’d have a guilt-free breakfast. First day back in the office in a week and he’d lost ten pounds to the flu in the meantime. He had room for a lot of donuts.

  Before him on the desk, he held a printout of the daily duty roster. If the bird disease progressed for everyone as it had for him, he figured that the squad would finally be restored nearly to full strength next week. Whole damn experience was like a throwback to World War I or something, where disease slaughtered more doughboys than bombs ever could. This being the modern age, of course, he expected all his guys to survive.

  Better than survive, he thought. Involuntary weight loss thrown into the bargain.

  This morning Capobianco had awakened at home feeling washed out but nearly healthy. He’d dragged his feet through his pre-breakfast routine, but the crisp New York morning invigorated him as he drove along Queens Boulevard with the driver’s window of his Ford Taurus half down. The car was a perk of office, and as such it put him in a certain frame of mind. When he reached Manhattan, the honking horns and roaring trucks and rushing pedestrians on the cross streets and on Seventh Avenue South—they all further acted upon him like a stimulant.

  Kahn’s and Diaz’s names were on the duty sheet this morning and he’d checked in with Kahn on the cell phone, getting back up to speed. With any luck they’d have some material for a mayoral press conference later in the week—though to Gowen that might seem like a lifetime from now. Still, Capobianco felt that the kid, Diaz, had shown good instincts on the veterans case, and while anyone might have arrived eventually at their current strategy, he had to give Diaz credit. Kahn had developed a hard-on about the whole St. Patrick’s package thing, and he wasn’t wrong to do so, but sometimes after a guy crosses a line like that he does
his best work. It’s like being shot at, Capobianco thought. The rest of that day you go from disbelief and doubt to exhilaration and back again, but the next morning you wake up with a little more oxygen feeding the brain and a notion that fate put you here to do some good in the world. If getting reprimanded by Kahn wasn’t quite a near-death experience for Diaz, maybe it had achieved that effect regardless. Because the kid was sharp on this, you had to admit.

  Now Diaz had a plan and Kahn approved. Capobianco didn’t doubt his men—not one iota—but the situation itself remained volatile. He picked up the phone and called Gowen.

  “You back in the saddle, Lieutenant?”

  “Roger that. Desk jockey staring at a pile of paper.”

  “What do you know about the recruiting office bombings?”

  “That’s why I’m calling. I think my guys will tie up the big loose end this week. Either they’ll stop this guy or they’ll make him mad enough to screw up.”

  “Which guy?”

  “That’s what we’re about to find out. My only concern is that another agency insisted on participating.”

  “You want me to call off Burbette?”

  “He’s not the one I’m worried about. If Stoltz of ATF gets wise to what’s going down, I wouldn’t bet against him stepping on his dick and screwing up the whole thing.”

  “How did you handle him?”

  “I told those guys to steer him to the wrong neighborhood. In addition to that, we’ll maintain radio silence until the last possible second. What do you think?”

  “I think,” Gowen said, “that when the shit’s gonna be hitting the fan, a smart guy always positions himself upwind.”

  “TURN HERE,” KAHN SNAPPED.

  Diaz tamped down the voice in the back of his head. He expected a long stakeout and this was no time to waste mental energy.

  They were riding in an unmarked vehicle, slated to converge on the vicinity of the Federal Plaza post office a few minutes before it opened at nine o’clock, but they were all late. In order to maintain secrecy, Kahn had Burbette on an open cell phone line and Diaz had done the same with O’Shea—no use of the police car’s radio. As luck would have it, the two Feds that Burbette planned to bring fell ill with the flu that morning, so he had to scramble for two more, which took time. O’Shea got caught up in some administrative bullshit he said wasn’t worth mentioning, but it put him at least fifteen minutes behind. Kahn and Diaz got stuck in the traffic creeping out of the Holland Tunnel. They used their lights and siren, but it still set them back ten minutes.