Night Raider (13 page)

“I see,” the short man said, “I may have to discuss this with Mr. Vincent of course.”

“Of course.”

“In the meantime, while I am discussing it, would you like to wait inside the vestry?” The short man seemed very amused. He seemed on the verge of winking. “No harm can come to you in the vestry, Mr. Terello,” he said, “and we do prefer to keep the door closed.”

“Do you?”

“We dislike the street traffic that might come in otherwise, with an open door,” the short man said. His robes wafted in the night. He giggled.

“All right,” Terello said. He stepped inside. What the hell could they do to him? He felt the gun swaying reassuringly inside his clothing. He almost touched it but decided not to. Too risky to call attention to it in that way. Better to save it for the crucial moment if it ever came.

The short man closed the door, locked it, opened the inner door which appeared to lead into a long hallway which had carpeting not only on the floor but the walls and ceiling in mottled red hue. “Wait right here, Mr. Terello,” the short man said, “and I will be back quite promptly.” He closed the door. Again there was the sound of a sliding lock and Terello, now free to hold onto the gun, was left in the vestry.

He stood there holding it loosely, balancing on the balls of his feet, prepared for anything. After a few moments he noticed that it seemed to be becoming a little bit hot in the vestry which well it might since, he saw, there was no ventilation. A moment after that he noticed that it was becoming much hotter in the vestry and, as a matter of fact, due to the absence of any ventilation he was having difficulty breathing. He loosened his tie, sighed, exhaled, wished that the little son of a bitch would come back already and give him the word. Wasn’t he aware of the fact that he had sealed Terello in here?

Well yes, Terello realized, it was possible that the man was aware. It must have been over a hundred and twenty degrees in here now and he could not breathe, he simply and absolutely could not breathe.
They were trying to suffocate him.

They were trying to kill Terello.
It was a new thought; this Peter Vincent, whoever the hell he was would have to be
crazy.
He was serious. Terello had come over to try to have a reasonable discussion and Vincent wanted to
kill
him.

What kind of people were these? Terello did not have time to ponder the question. Panic began to gnaw at his edges; he felt as if a huge, black cloak had been dropped over his body. Swaddled within the folds of this cloak he simply could not breathe. He went for the gun, the point thirty-eight caliber that had never failed him and could not possibly fail him now. He began to shoot, methodically but desperately at the lock toward the outside. The bullets hit metal, spanged back, the second hit him on the hand, grazing bone and drawing blood. He gasped with fear and pain, dropped the revolver. He scrambled for it, his knees hitting the plain boards painfully, sending small circuits of pain wafting through him but he could not seem to find the gun. He felt as if a scarf was being tightened across his neck. He could not breathe. He literally could not breathe.

The lights began to go out. Consciousness whisked away from him the way that life had whisked itself away from his wife. Scrambling on the floor of the vestry Joe Terello knew that he was a dead man. He had been stupid, incredibly stupid, and now he would never see the light again.

And then, giving him the first and last break of a lifetime—because after giving him a glimpse of the light it killed him and sealed him to the darkness forever—the whole house blew up.

Wulff had done the best he could. The incendiaries he had given up on pretty much. Simple household devices, that was what he would need to blow up the Vincent mansion. Start getting spectacular about it though and that mansion would blow up in his face. Professional results through amateur techniques, that was the ticket.

He got the metal cutter in the hardware shop along with the instant coffee heater; the Eveready batteries came from the cigarette store right around the corner. The only other stuff he needed was in his own head. He needed patience and a good deal of discipline. The luck part of course was in a different territory.

He thought that he could bring it off. He was no explosives expert but he had fiddled around here and there in Vietnam, he knew land mines, grenades, the sense of an explosion and what constituted an ignition point. Any man who hangs around the ordnance depot out of simple curiosity for a couple of days is one step ahead of the game right there. Wulff had confidence. He had reasonable confidence in himself.

Back in the room he got to work. Most of the work would be done on the site but a dry-run was important, he had to see if he could manipulate the materials, if they would go together in the right way. It looked okay on paper but what the hell was paper? On paper the drug war was working too and there were seventy million worth of drugs, street value, safely locked away in the department property room. The metal cutter, an intricate little saw with sharp tiny teeth cut a neat swathe in the door of his medicine chest, attacked the steel door of the room itself with some efficiency. With pressure and luck he would be able to cut a swathe the size of a man’s arm. The coffee heater worked fine from standard current, producing a neat, mean little glow within a minute and a half that would have turned anyone’s flesh to water. He timed it from plug-in to glow, it came down to eighty-three seconds, give or take a few and it seemed to work just as well when the cord was cut, the lines exposed, and the lines worked around the batteries, but at that point you moved into unknown territory. The batteries worked fine now but heater and batteries wrapped together would have to survive a drop of something like six feet. Would the splicing hold? Well, you could only hope so.

It was interesting work, whatever else you had to say about it. He was going to try to knock over a fucking guarded townhouse with a couple of five and ten cent tools. If he brought it off the deed should live forever but then again he could not go around looking for praise or awards. He looked through the materials Williams had given him, carefully, using his fingers, tracing the gas lines, the point at which they entered the basement. It
looked
all right. Of course the plans were old and Vincent himself might have made changes in those points of entrance, not being anyone’s fool. But Wulff doubted that. People who bought guards and constructed elaborate doors just didn’t think of little details like gas lines.

No. No indeed. They just did not know, as Wulff did, what it was like to get behind the enemy lines. He would get behind them. Part of it was a matter of desperate efficiency—Wulff was now dealing with an enemy who was aware of him and he would have to strike before that enemy or not at all—but another part of it came from a feeling that if he did not deliver this killing punch immediately, everything that he had already done would be meaningless. Jessup, Davis, Scotti, Marasco, the blond, all of them would have died in vain. Aborted mission. He owed it to these corpses to carry out the job just as far and fast as he could.

So Wulff ran through it again, over and over again until everything was mechanical and he could do it even in the dark. Cut steel, tie in the batteries to the heater, drop the heater. It worked every time but on a softer surface. Still, how hard could the floor of Vincent’s basement be? He waited for dark. He was ready to go, more or less, but nothing to do until he had darkness and that meant, in late August, waiting until at least eight o’clock to go.

He couldn’t hold out. At seven-thirty he was ready to go, the hell with it. Fog and soot had rolled in from the river, the city was reeking and stinking anyway as only the city could at the end of summer, no one would be looking for him in the haze if it was still light when he began to work. Wulff tossed the materials and the prints into the empty suitcase and got out of the room carrying nothing but that and a gun. The suitcase was amazingly light Demolition equipment fit to blow up a townhouse and it could not have weighed, all of it, more than two pounds. The gun wouldn’t hurt although the way things were set up now he doubted that it would do him much good. He would either bring this thing off, in which case the gun would not be necessary, or he would fail and if that happened, the gun or even a full machine clip weren’t going to make much difference. They would wipe him out. The gun was only for security because actually he was going in there unarmed.

He walked the suitcase down Lexington Avenue into the eighties and then all the way over to the river. The six-eighteen block was empty of course. No traffic on it at all, no people, no cars. Nothing. It was as if the medium-to-bigger-fish like Peter Vincent or Albert Marasco made sure that their own areas were clear of the cancer which was otherwise poisoning the country, the cancer which they had themselves created. It was a pact between the Vincents and other parties to keep it the hell out of their part of the world. Just like he had figured it before, things had long since reached the point where the enforcers were merely another part of the overall operation. They were getting their share too. For a healthy little piece of the action, they could make sure that the Vincents would live undisturbed. Virtually invisible.

He went to the building and reconnoitered briefly. Then he went to the empty lot, squatted in the place where the blues had shown him the line rested, and went to work, ripping up the soft dirt with his hands.

The line was there. He tracked it downrange to the side of the building where it fed directly into the basement.

Risky. Very risky of course, all of it was. He was up against the house now, so tight to the wall that they might not see him except by leaning through a window and peering, but how close did he want to come to Peter Vincent? But then again, Wulff told himself, even if the guards did take to scrambling around the windows which probably wasn’t in their employment contracts, what would they make of a man in faded army fatigues working obscurely against the building? Who could he be? He could only be a maintenance man, someone from the gas company, checking out the lines. Of course. Men like this were invisible in New York. They were and were not there like the filthy river and the darkening sunsets. Nobody made anything of them at all.

All right. Take the chance. Up and down the block he might be noticed but no one was going to call the cops on a faceless maintenance man. The Peter Vincents and their employees, generally speaking, liked as little to do with the cops as possible. They were not going to call cops to the site unless they had something they clearly could not handle themselves. What was a maintenance man? As a general rule the Vincents were great citizens, they wanted to co-exist with the cops and you certainly did nothing if you could to offend them but you didn’t call police to investigate maintenance men even if they were starting to poke around your walls. Who would try to get into a fortress? If his luck held he’d be all right, Wulff thought. Otherwise forget it. He kept his shoulders hunched, dug in the suitcase for the cutter and folded into himself. Fuck being observed. He just couldn’t worry about it; he had work to do.

He began to work on the basement wall, at the point where he was sure the gas line entered. The saw made little chattering noises in the night; he held it steady. The wall was concrete which crumbled rather easily; all in all it was easier to cut this than it had been during the dry runs. Vincent had everything protected but way down below the walls were falling apart. Vincent would not think of that It was like the cities themselves; at the bottom they were rotten.

He cut a ragged hole into the basement wall large enough to get his arm through.

He should have brought a flashlight, he realized that now. He hadn’t because he was afraid of the beam but the angle of thrust would have been invisible to anyone not actually in the basement. So be it. He took his arm out and carefully, letting the little light drifting in from the west to work over his shoulder and into the hole, he peered into the basement.

He was in the meter room. Looking across he could see the meter on the wall opposite, letting go cheerful little ticking noises. The gas line that he had tracked ran about two feet off the floor, right into that meter. It was well within reaching distance.

For the first time Wulff smiled.

He took the metal cutter again, backing out to get it and at the same time a patrol car whipped around the corner, sirens dead but streamers on. It came by him fast. He thought for a moment that it was for him but the car had a downtown disaster in mind. At the intersection, finding traffic, the car cut on the siren and churned out of there, bellowing.

Nothing to worry about there.

He went to work on the gas line itself.

This was a different deal altogether and Wulff thought for a few moments that he was beyond his depth. The line was tough steel, ancient of course and rust spattered which meant that there were weak spots around the joint if you could only get into them but he was working blind, in a cramped position, bunched up against that wall and the line would not yield. The cutter worked on it for a long time without any feeling of progress, once he thought that he had dropped an inch but then again it just could have been an illusion. His arm was exhausted. This line was tough; it was not for nothing that it had been shielded like this for inside that line circulated pure death.

Then he heard a hiss.

It was a pure, high sound, a sound like the ecstatic gasps of a young girl and Wulff found himself more excited by it than he ever had been by any girl but there was no time for calculations of triumph now. He was working on a very, very short margin. The pipe snaffled and wheezed away, pouring gas into the air. Even outside, shielded by concrete, Wulff could smell it. He took his arm out slowly, letting the metal cutter drop with a
ping!
into the basement, now the meter. It would never make any difference now.

He had lost track of time he knew. He gripped the shoulder of the working arm, grunted, worked the stiffness out. His concentration had been so intense that all sense of time had fled. It could be midnight. The gas line had been a son of a bitch in the cutting; he must have been on it for hours. His arm was numb enough. He gritted his teeth with the pain of returning circulation, inhaled raggedly, felt wisps of gas clot his lungs. The basement was filling up fast now.

Now for the heater. He went back for it.

And as he stood over the suitcase yards downrange he dived, held shuddering to the ground as a big cornering car came fast, hit the brakes and then, headlights fading, lay inert across the street. A door thunked and a man came out of the car and looking only casually to either side sprinted up the four steps and hit the knocker of six-eighteen.

Shit,
Wulff said,
shit.

The man took no notice of Wulff at all which was to be expected but how could he not notice the gas? It was already beginning to fill the air with those fine fibers of odor and surely, although the wind was carrying it this way, it would only be a matter of time until the occupants of the house smelled it as well. Lying pinned to the ground in the low-crawl combat position, Wulff had a sudden insight staring at the man: this had nothing to do with him. Peter Vincent had a visitor, that was all. Atrocious bad luck but at least impersonal. He raised his head barely off the ground and squinting through the darkness examined the man. He could not do anything further until he was inside the house, that was for sure. Short heavy frame on this one, thick features glinting with excitement in the pale light. He was armed. He kept on fondling the inside of his jacket.

It sure was taking Vincent a hell of a long time to answer. The man waited and waited, hit the knocker again. The sound of his curses drifted across the lot. Wulff could not get the words but the sense was all there: Peter Vincent was a dirty son of a bitch. Yes he was. He could agree with the guest on that one point.

Wulff stayed on the ground, hoping that the man would be let in. If he wasn’t, then Vincent was probably not at home and this was going to complicate matters. Did he really want to do this if the house was unoccupied by the rat? It had never even occurred to him. Shit, again.

The door opened. A thin streak of light poured into the street. There was muffled dialogue at the door. Could they smell the gas? Apparently not. After a time the visitor went inside holding himself rather stiffly. Wulff felt his bowels tighten a little. The door closed.

He was alone again on East Eighty-Third Street. Nobody had noticed him at all.

He picked the heater off the ground, fumbled in the darkness to make sure that the battery connections were tight and then having done that, loosened them. He didn’t want the thing going off until he had time to get away.

Well, then. Add one more to the equation within the house he thought. From the length of time it had taken that door to be opened and from the way the man at the door had been holding onto his concealed gun, this was an unexpected visit for Peter Vincent. And not a social one for the visitor. Probably it had something to do with Marasco’s death: one of Marasco’s lieutenants, probably, resolved to assert his influence with Vincent as quickly as possible. A stupid man Wulff suspected: any man who thought that he could call upon Peter Vincent unexpectedly with nothing but a revolver for security had not analyzed the situation properly.

Fuck it. That was Vincent’s problem. Wulff picked up the heater and the batteries two-handed and went back to the basement

It would be easier this time. No delicate work, just suture in the power source, toss it and run. He felt, standing there, however, a strange reluctance. Even up until this moment he supposed he could still have gotten out of this. Gas was in the air, choking him, still he could get out of it. The boys surrounding Vincent, Vincent himself, now knew who Wulff was and after a while would come after him but there was margin, decent margin: he had days at least until things got really close again and there was a chance that they might not come after him at all.
They were going to smell that gas soon.
Essentially the Marascos and the Vincents believed in de-complicating things. They had gotten where they were by making as little trouble as possible. Hell, there was a good chance that if Wulff didn’t go looking for them they would return the compliment. Even. Everything evened out.