Aphrodite

20

The first thing Wendell Touay ever blew up was a rat. He was thirteen years old and caught the rodent as it was scampering over a rusty drain-pipe in a construction site that had been emptied out for the July Fourth weekend. The rat, struggling to escape the boy’s grip, bit Wendell on his thumb, which not only pissed him off, but hurt like hell. Wendell had simply been going to strangle the animal but now that he was angry he decided it deserved a more elaborate send-off. He was carrying several cherry bombs—M-80s and M-100s—was planning on setting them off at the site, his own private celebration. He decided to ratchet up the celebration a notch. He shoved one M-100 as far into the rat’s rectum as he could manage, watched in delight as the ugly, furry thing twisted and clawed and snapped, furiously trying to escape, then he lit the fuse, tossed the thing high in the air, and toasted America’s birthday under a rain of sparks and flesh and fur and blood.
Ever since then, he had been addicted to explosions. Gordon liked to touch the things he killed. Wendell much preferred watching them get blown to pieces. He read books on explosives, had late-night Internet chats with fellow devotees, spent hours upon hours on the dozens of international Web sites devoted to all things that explode, and studied everything he could about homemade bombs. He’d had to buy several copies of The Anarchist’s Cookbook and The Poor Man’s James Bond because he’d read them both so often that the spines had broken and the pages had fallen out. He considered himself an expert and took quite a bit of pride in the scope of his knowledge. He could tell you the difference in the rate of detonation between tetrytol and TNT and, for any primary or secondary explosive, he could rattle off its color, its detonation rate, and any quirks that one had to watch out for when handling it—sensitivity to static electricity, degree of water resistance, any danger that might arise from as little as a three-degree drop in temperature.
So when he and Gordon worked out their plan, he was not only pleased to have the opportunity to indulge his passion, he was confident that his skills were up to the task. Gordon’s plan had failed on the back roads of Long Island. This plan would not fail. Wendell had created explosives before for them to use in their exclusive line of work, and the success rate had been one hundred percent. A small piece of Wendell was excited at the chance to surpass his seven-minutes-older brother. But what excited him even more was the anticipation. When Wendell first began to picture exactly what was going to happen to Justin Westwood and his two charges, a tiny drop of anticipatory spittle formed on his lower lip and he had to lick it away. The thought of seeing the three people blown to bits actually made him drool.
While the cop, the woman, and her kid were inside the old-age home—just about now, Wendell thought—discovering that Lewis Granger was not going to be very much help to them, Wendell was crouched down behind the piece-of-shit Buick, busily attaching four surprise packages underneath the frame.
Each package was identical. And he was proud of them. They were not only clever, they would be devastating.
Everything had been assembled in a highway rest-stop parking lot midway between the airport and the Leger Retirement Home. They had picked up their rental car and gone straight to a hardware store. There Wendell had purchased a kitchen timer—he picked one in the shape of a rooster that crowed when the timer went off—two packages of double-A batteries, duct tape, five industrial-power magnets, electrical wire, industrial-strength fast-drying glue, a plastic bucket, a two-gallon plastic jug, and a large ball of string. After that, they stopped off at a liquor store and bought five bottles of a good Bordeaux. Before paying for them, Wendell checked to make sure that the bottoms of the bottles were all dimpled in the center. He had brought his own electric blasting caps, which had required some ingenuity since they were flying and security was supposedly tighter than in years past. Still, it was no problem. He’d taken apart the DVD case in his laptop computer, removed the mechanism, and inserted the caps—which were similar in size and resembled the tubes of ink that fit inside fountain pens—in its stead. He then replaced the casing for the device and slipped it back into the computer, attaching it in its proper place. He was able to carry it right on the plane in his overnight bag. The caps set off no alarms and caused no special search.
After buying the supplies at the hardware store, they’d driven toward the Leger Retirement Home. Wendell directed Gordon to the rest-stop parking lot, which was fairly empty. He could do everything he needed to do there, and he assured his brother that the assembly wouldn’t take more than a few minutes. While Gordon kept an eye out for any overly curious travelers, Wendell built his bombs. He had decided to make shape charges. For one thing, they were subtle, much subtler than something that would just total a car and blow everything around it to smithereens. For another, they required a very small amount of plastic explosives. He had decided to use C-4, a military explosive that looked like a bar of soap and was easily malleable. He could carry it, undetected, in a soap case, lumping it together with his toothbrush, toothpaste, and small bottle of mouthwash. A shape charge, he knew from his Gulf War days, was capable of piercing the armor of a tank, incinerating everything inside that tank, and leaving the shell practically unscathed. Its appeal was that it focused nearly all of an explosive’s energy into a very narrow, extraordinarily hot jet. And it was easy as pie to make.
The first thing he did was go into the rest-stop complex and fill the plastic bucket with cold water. He also bought a five-pound bag of ice and a corkscrew. He then walked to the gas station right outside and put two dollars’ worth of gasoline into the jug. Before he got in the car, Wendell opened and emptied four of the wine bottles into the bushes that partially hid the rest area from the highway. Inside the car, working in the backseat, he soaked several pieces of string in the gasoline, then tied pieces of the soaked string around the four empty wine bottles, approximately three inches from the dimpled bottoms. He lit a match, set the strings on fire one by one, and watched to make sure that the bottles heated evenly all around where the string had been tied. When the string was burned down, he instantly immersed each bottle into the bucket that was filled with cold water and ice. Within seconds, each bottle broke perfectly at the point where the string had been tied and the bottles burned. Wendell now had four pieces of glass the size of small juice glasses, each with an inverted cone at the bottom.
He packed the explosives tightly into each glass, then inserted one blasting cap per container. He sealed the tops of the glasses with duct tape, allowing the wires of the blasting caps to stick through. After that, he duct-taped a magnet to the bottom of each glass. The magnets were circular with a hole in the middle. This configuration suited his needs perfectly as it would create a standoff for the explosive jet to form.
That’s all it took. Wendell encased each of the packages in several feet of bubble wrap, which he’d carried in his overnight bag. He got out of the car, opened the trunk, and placed the bombs in the small niche on the side where the jack would normally be kept. He gently closed the trunk, got back in the car, told Gordon to drive very carefully— even though he knew there was no danger of the things exploding until he attached and set the timer; he just thought he’d have a little fun at his brother’s expense—and half an hour later they were at the Leger Retirement Home, where they had plenty of time to break in, smother Lewis Granger, go back to the car, and wait for their next three victims to show up.
Wendell had had a little more work to do in the Leger parking lot. Once they saw Westwood pull up and go inside—“New car,” Gordon muttered. “This guy’s not bad”—the younger twin took the leg wires from the blasting caps in each of his four bombs and connected them together in a parallel circuit. Half of these wires were then twisted together onto another wire, whose opposite end was glued to the zero point on the kitchen timer. One more wire was glued to the actual timer part of the clock, the dial that moved around and kept track of each passing minute. The other end of this wire was run, in series, to the double-A batteries and remaining blasting-cap leg wires. Wendell was careful not to let the wires on the kitchen timer touch. Since he hadn’t bothered to include a safe arming switch, he knew that if the exposed wires came in contact with each other, the device would detonate in his hands. The last thing he did was duct-tape another magnet to the base of the kitchen timer.
As he secured his bombs, via the magnets, to Justin Westwood’s car, Wendell had a clear and delicious vision of what was going to happen.
He would set the rooster timer for one hour. Sixty minutes later, the wires attached to it would touch each other, completing the circuit. The batteries would supply enough energy to initiate the blasting caps, and the resulting shock would set off the C-4. Due to the inverted cone at the bottom of each glass, most of the explosive force would meet at the center of the cone and be directed upward, forming a molten jet of glass and energy. This was called the Monroe Effect; it would cause each bomb to drill a tiny hole up into the car, through the frame, through the body of anyone sitting inside over the hole, literally drilling all the way up through the person’s head, and melt whatever was in its path. This was why Wendell had decided to use four devices. Two for the front seat, two for the back. The entire inside of the car would incinerate and, except for the windows shattering with enormous force and the possible exception of the roof mushrooming out a bit, the outside would be left relatively untouched. At that point, he would open the fifth bottle of Bordeaux, he and Gordon would toast to their success, and then they would head back home.
A shape charge was a thing of beauty, Wendell knew. And, anticipating the results, he began to drool again at the thought of such beauty.
From the rear of the ’97 Buick, Wendell looked up at his brother, who was sitting in their rental car halfway across the lot. He nodded at Gordon, checked his watch, then bent down a final time to twist the timer on the plastic rooster, setting it to the sixty-minute mark. He walked back to the rental car, got inside, leaned back in the passenger seat, closed his eyes, and told Gordon to wake him up when something happened.
Something happened twenty minutes later.
Justin Westwood came out of the Home with Deena and Kendall Harper. They headed toward their car, stopped, the mother and daughter seemed to argue for a moment, then they all got into their car. Sat there for several moments. The engine started up and they pulled out of the parking lot.
Gordon leaned over, gave Wendell a gentle two-finger nudge in his side.
“Are you just going to sit here?” Wendell asked when his eyes opened.
Gordon shrugged. “The job’s done, isn’t it? We can go home.”
“I want to see this one,” Wendell said.
“That’s not a good idea.”
“I want to see it, Gordon. It’s going to be magnificent. You get to see your handiwork. I want to see mine.”
“It’s not a good idea,” Gordon said again.
“I want to! And I deserve to!”
Gordon waited another fifteen seconds or so before he started up his own engine, pulled out of the parking lot, and began to follow the Buick.
Wendell looked down at his watch. Thirty-nine minutes until the explosion.
“It’s going to be so beautiful,” he said. “Wake me up in thirty-eight minutes.”