Copyright 2001 by Morris Rosenthal
Anthony was scared. He waited at the pickup spot, a donut shop at the corner of Oak and Memorial, for two hours. The truck with the taciturn driver had never showed, his repeated phone calls to PDC were answered by the machine, and O'Flahthery's car phone was 'experiencing technical difficulties'. He gave up at noon, and drove by Foster Printing in his own car, to check if the pickup had been made without him. The safety engineer was furious. When he hired PDC, his father-in-law had been so pleased with the fifteen hundred a week in savings, that he'd given him a healthy bonus on the spot. Two months hadn't gone by yet and they were already screwing up.
"How the hell can you people guarantee twenty-four hour emergency services when you don't even answer the phones!" he accused, barely in control of himself.
"I'm told that everyone is out on an emergency even as we speak," Anthony lied, as much a comfort to himself as to the other man. Maybe that's all it is, he thought with relief. Maybe an opportunity for some instant cash came up, and O'Flahthery was short on trucks. "The company sent me to apologize in person," he was on a run now, "And to assure you that pickup will be by tomorrow at the latest."
"Tomorrow!" the engineer ejaculated, not taken in by the lie. This kid doesn't know what's going on either, his intuition told him. He knew that there would be a risk dealing with PDC, but he had figured that at least they would show up on time to take the shit away every week. If they couldn't do that, how could they possibly stay out of regulatory trouble. Their paperwork had looked in order, so his own ass was covered, but he couldn't justify any risk for a bunch of jokers who couldn't keep a schedule.
"Listen," he hissed at Anthony, his mind on the bonus, "You tell your boss that if he doesn't make the pickup by 10:00 AM tomorrow, the deal is off. And this is the only fuck-up you guys get."
"Yes sir," Anthony affirmed that he understood and retreated to his car. From a pay phone, he tried O'Flahthery's cellular phone again, the emergency number where he said he could always be reached. This time the message reported that the number was no longer in service. Had he skipped? But why bother disconnecting the phone. Anthony headed over to John's apartment. He answered the door in his underwear, his eyes puffy from partying late and oversleeping.
"Hey Ant, you missed a hell of a bash last night," he rasped. "Had a keg and a couple bottles of tequila and..." his voice trailed off, as if invoking the memory brought back his stupor. The kitchen was a mess of fast food debris surrounding a half keg floating in a garbage pail full of melted ice and spilled beer. "Oh shit," John moaned, his eyes fixed blearily on the keg, "Someone ripped off the tap!"
Anthony strode over to the broom closet and rummaged around the back. He returned with the missing tap in his hand. "I didn't miss the party, I came after work. The first thing you did when I showed up was put me in charge of the keg, so nobody would steal the tap when it went dry." His amusement temporarily overcame his nervousness, "You don't remember a thing, do you?" He sighed, "I'll make some coffee, you fucking waste."
John sank slack jawed into a chair, and whimpered as Anthony began savagely rustling through the dirty dishes. "All the money you got and you couldn't buy a couple more mugs?" he asked grumpily, "I gotta do your dishes to get some java?" Despite the complaining, Anthony proceeded to do just that as they waited for the water to boil. Doing the dishes relaxed him, plus he knew that the noise bothered John. When the kettle began to whistle, he made a show of banging through all of the kitchen cupboards before locating the instant mix. When he finally dropped a cup on the table in front of his friend, he saw to his disgust that John had gone back to sleep sitting up.
"Wake up you bum!" Anthony screamed in his ear, and was gratified by the violent reaction. John shot halfway into a standing position when the dizzieness hit him and he sank back down again. His head came up, his red shot eyes spotted the coffee, and he went for it immediately. The steaming coffee scalded his throat and burned his tounge.
"Muhverfugger," he sputtered, rubbing pitifully at his chest. "I'th kith youth." he threatened the waiter.
"I'm not that kind of boy," the Ant replied mincingly, "But you could kill me if you like." John glowered at him, rubbing his abdomen now, for whatever relief it gave him. "At least you're awake," Anthony continued, "O'Flahthery's split." The words dropped like a bomb in a covert war, no surprise to anyone, but no less explosive for the fact.
"You thure?" John said, almost able to properly utilize his tounge again.
"The truck never showed for the pickup today, and I can't reach him. I think he heard about the story in the Post and decided to go while the getting is good." Anthony's expression soured further. "Wouldn't have cost him anything to warn us."
"What story?" John asked.
"I explained the whole thing last night, oh right," Anthony remembered. At least John wasn't a talkative drunk, he reflected. Forgetting is better then bragging. "I told you last week that the city was thinking of knocking down the place I work and putting up a school. Well, this reporter is doing a whole series on it, and yesterday he wrote that the place is full of toxic waste, and that the state would have to declare it a hazardous site and try for federal cleanup money."
"Holy shit," John had a fit of coughing, and groped for a cigarette. Anthony gave him one of his own, and lit it. John greedily sucked down the smoke, and hacked a few times more. "When are they coming? There's no way they'll miss that stuff."
"After tonight it'll be gone," Anthony said grimly. "I've made up my mind. It's time to let the fire department earn their money."
"You really built a bomb?" John asked, awed. Anthony nodded, his finger to his lips. "How can you be sure it will work?" he whispered.
"I'm sure," Anthony responded, "But just in case," he added with a touch of melodrama, "You have the goods on O'Flahthery, and you know what to do with them, right?"
"Yeah, Ant. It's pretty simple," John replied. They had packaged a bunch of items that Anthony believed carried O'Flahthery's fingerprints into a parcel, and prepared a note from words clipped out of newspapers that read
"These items have the fingerprints of the president of PDC Corporation who stored illegal chemicals at Wilkins Valve."
They'd worn gloves pasting the note together, and Anthony had been careful to pick up all of the items by their edges. The plan was for John to wait near the downtown police station, and pay some kid to bring the box in. It was a last resort, to be executed only if John didn't hear from Anthony for twelve hours after being warned that something was up. This counted as something.
"I'm going to set it to go off in the middle of the night," Anthony blurted. "That way it will fit in with the frame we put on the third shift guy."
"You set him up good, Ant?"
"All I did was drop his name around when dealing with our customers." He mimicked himself being servile. "I'll have to check with Mr. Levy, sir," and "I'm new at this, sir. Perhaps you dealt with Eric Levy in the past?" He laughed at the memory. "The real icing is the checks that PDC gave him for writing 'environmentally aware' poetry. O'Flahthery showed one to me. I can't believe Levy thought someone would actually pay for that shit. Almost done with his second college degree and the guy's an idiot."
Now that the coffee was cooling, John had forced some down and was slowly coming awake. He forced himself to concentrate on the problem at hand, which was to keep the Ant, and by association, himself, out of trouble. He studied Anthony, slowly becoming aware that he was pretty rattled. Probably hadn't expected the end so soon, or maybe the newspaper coverage had him pumped up. Not like Anthony to tell him details ahead of time.
"So everything is still cool, Ant," he reassured him, "We stick to the plan. Odds are that the explosion takes out the building, right? No evidence, no investigation of PDC, no tie to us." He spoke as soothingly as he could with a pounding headache and several bales of cotton in his mouth. "Don't worry about the package or this Levy guy. That's just for if things go bad."
"We should add him to the note," Anthony said, always expecting the worst. "Where's a newspaper. You got a newspaper?"
"In the living room," John gave up, still feeling too lousy to get up and get it himself. Anthony was on his feet before John finished, his flapping ears adding providing extra lift. The next room in the railroad flat served as the living room, although entertainment room would have been a more apt description. With the money he'd picked up working with Anthony the past month, John had bought a 60" TV and a new stereo system with speakers that could shake the house. They'd kept the volume down last night because it was a weeknight and all the girls there were minors, so they didn't want the cops showing up. Anthony couldn't find any newspaper that wasn't sodden with beer, but he did find a copy of "Sports Illustrated." He returned to the kitchen in triumph.
"Oh man," John made a futile grab for the magazine, "There's a picture of Cindy in there. Don't chop it up."
"I'll cut her out for you," the Ant responded. He immediately went to the right drawer for the scissors and driving gloves. "This'll work better then the paper anyway. There's a ton of football and basketball players named 'Eric'"
"Where you going to find a 'Levy', smart ass?"
"Fall Football Preview," Anthony read, "You don't think they might mention the ex-head coach of the four time super bowl losers, do you?" he asked sarcastically.
John got up and began rummaging through the refrigerator, eventually seizing on a plate plied with pizza slices congealed into an amorphous lump that resembled a failed lasagna. He tried to peal the layers apart, and failing this, tried to cut through the mass with the side of a fork. It bent like a psychic's spoon. He gave up, and put the whole mess into the microwave to soften. While the pizza bubbled and popped, he searched the fridge for soda or beer. Nothing. He put the kettle back on for more coffee.
"Hey, put these on and get the package," Anthony threw him the gloves. "And don't forget to wear them when you deliver it."
"If," he replied mildly, catching one glove in mid-air, and the other on the rebound off his face. The package was cleverly concealed under his bed, and after a nervous minute of pawing through his winter clothes, he found it and returned to the kitchen. Anthony had taken the pizza out of the nuker, and divided it with a knife.
"This is gross," he said, pushing the larger half onto a wet plate for John.
"Don't eat it then," was John's predictable reply. He set the parcel on the table, dropped the gloves on top, and pitched into his portion of the mess standing over the sink. "Oh thit," he tried to spit out the sticky hot cheese. It clung to his teeth, drooping in slow motion into the sink. "I canth fugging belief thith thit."
Anthony almost died laughing. "You're making me feel real confident," he choked out. "Maybe I ought to take my chances with the Post Office." John gargled some tap water, then turned around to see if the Ant could possibly be serious. "Not."
Anthony put the gloves back on, and worked on the note, while waiting for the pizza to cool. The modified message read;
"These items have the fingerprints of the president of PDC Corporation, who put illegal chemicals at Wilkins Valve with point guard Eric Levy."
He hadn't wanted to take the trouble to cut 'point' out, and besides, it gave the note a touch of humor. Anthony resealed the box, then took the gloves off and dropped them on top for John to take it away. There's more pro's in the world than get in that magazine, he thought with satisfaction, then dug into the pizza. It tasted pretty damn good.
Four hours later Anthony had finished his first round, and was in Fourteen building, rigging his 'bomb'. He could still taste pepperoni every time he burped, which was fairly often, jangling nerves having slowed down his digestion to a crawl. The bomb wasn't truly a bomb at all but what an expert would call an 'incendiary device'. Despite a table in the "Anarchist Cookbook" giving common household items as equivalents for the chemicals used in the explosives formulas, he found the whole thing quite beyond him. The frequent warnings that a non-chemist would probably blow himself up had helped him decide against trying.
In the final analysis, Anthony decided that all he really needed was a delayed fuse for a fire, since most of the drums contained highly flammable alcohol and hydrocarbons. He removed all the bungs that he could free with a hammer and a screwdriver, then knocked over a half full drum of benzene. Twenty-five gallons of contaminated solvent gushed out of the floor and spread out rapidly. The fumes drove Anthony away from the puddle, which he saw to his dismay was being quickly absorbed by the thirsty cement floor. He retreated outside to rethink his options.
Gasoline fires he was familiar with, since stealing and burning cars for the insurance claim was an occasional moneymaker for him. That's what I'll use, he said to himself, and decided to give the fumes a couple hours to dissipate. He made his regular rounds, forced down some brown bagged dinner, and gathered some rags while waiting for dark. Then he got the two gallon gas container and the kitty litter tray he used to change the oil from his trunk, and returned to Fourteen building. He jammed his halogen flashlight into the crack in the garage door casement to illuminate his work area. The fumes still brought tears to his eyes, but he filled the tray with gas and set it down on top of several open barrels. He soaked the rags in gas, and draped them from the pan to the barrel openings, like enormous wicks.
He ran back outside to get a breath of fresh air, then returned to set up his bomb. It was about the craziest thing anyone had ever built, and weighed forty pounds, though most of that was the stolen car battery. The timer was built from a cheap old wind-up alarm clock with an actual clapper bell on top, and a regular mousetrap taped to the back. He had tested this part several dozen times before constructing the rest of the device. When the alarm went off, the vibrations had sprung the trap every time. The closing trap completed the short circuit of the battery, the main part of which was a coil of copper wire he had unwound from an old alternator, and wrapped around a rolled up newspaper. He had only tested this part a few times, because he didn't want to damage the battery, but it had been equally reliable. When the circuit was closed, the wire heated up red hot, and the newspaper browned, then burst into flames.
Anthony hoisted the whole bizarre contraption up onto the barrels and laid the wire wrapped newspaper over the kitty litter tray. He had already wound the clock and set it for midnight, and he got the mousetrap set on the first try. He surveyed his work, like an artist finishing a sculpture, then choking on the fumes still emanating from all of the opened drums, ran for the door. He stopped to wrench his heavy duty flashlight out of it's place in the crevice, then stared in horror as his too vigorous pull separated the barely attached wood frame from the wall.
The twelve foot high two by six timber fell into the room, bounced, and clanged against a barrel. Anthony distinctly heard the mousetrap go off like a pistol. Should I try to reset it, or run, he asked himself, then realized that his feet had long since voted for the latter course. He hadn't even reached the back entrance to the administration building, when the overhead door blew out of Fourteen with a tremendous "Whump." He looked briefly over his shoulder to see flames towering a hundred feet into the air, then streaked past the guard post and out to his car.
Before the engine caught, he heard the first explosion. The car started and he drove away with one thought running through his mind. Highway, highway. He made it to the interstate in under two minutes, and started heading south. The night sky was flickering with orange and white, and he stared unbelieving back in the direction from which he had came. The inferno was plainly visible. "Holy Christ, I've burnt the whole city down," he said out loud. A semi blew its horn, and yanked him back to reality, just as the car began climbing the divider. He'd drifted across three lanes, hypnotized by the distant flames. Go south, came into his mind. South.