I finished the conversation as quickly as I tactfully could and went up to the third floor. No one was lurking there. I called a small local rental company to arrange for a car. They had an ′84 Tempo, no power steering, fifty thousand miles. It sounded like a clunker but it was only twenty dollars a day, including taxes, usage fees, franchise charges, and all the other items the big chains stiff you for. I told them I’d be by around one.
My long deep sleep had worked wonders on my sore shoulders. They were stiff but the needles of pain had gone. While waiting for Jerry I got out my small hand weights and did a light set of exercises to loosen them further.
The bright yellow tow truck finally honked in front of my building a little before one—I should have remembered the laws of relativity that apply to garage time and multiplied Luke’s estimate of an hour by three.
I couldn’t find my car keys. Finally I remembered stuffing them into the backpack, where they’d clattered against the Smith & Wesson. I picked up the whole pack and fished the keys out on my way down the stairs. Mr. Contreras stuck his head out the door.
“Just turning my car over to the tow service,” I said brightly, waving good-bye. Sometimes it was easier to tell him everything than to fight him.
Jerry was a small, wiry guy in his late twenties. He owned a towing service but had a contract with Luke and did most of the garage’s work. In his spare time he raced slot cars. We chatted a few minutes about an amazing race he’d won in Milwaukee the previous weekend.
“Let me see if she’ll turn over this morning, Vic. Save you the price of a tow.”
“The car’s dead, Jerry. I had to push it the final three blocks home last night.” Why can’t a car jock admit that a woman might at least know whether her own automobile starts or not.
“Well, maybe we can jump it then. Just open the hood a minute, okay, Vic?”
“Oh, all right.” I stomped ungraciously across the street and undid the hood release. It was already loose, which seemed odd. I wondered if I might have pulled it by mistake while I was fumbling around trying to push the car last night.
Jerry turned his truck around and backed up parallel with the Chevy. Whistling between his teeth, he pulled a set of cables from the back of the truck and came over to join me.
It was the looseness of the catch that made me look inside the engine before he hooked up the cables. Still whistling, Jerry was moving to attach one of them to the battery when I yanked his arm down.
“Get that thing away from the engine.”
“Vic—what—” He broke off when he saw the twin explosive sticks laid near the coil.
“Vic, let’s get the fuck out of here.” He spoke with a casualness belied by his white face. He grabbed my arm and shoved me into the truck. Before I’d shut the door he was at the corner of Belmont.
I was trembling so violently, I’m not sure I could have moved without his pulling me. I tried to stop my teeth chattering long enough to tell him to get the police on his truck radio.
“We can’t leave that bomb there for any passerby to touch,” I said through clenched jaws. “We’ve got to get the cops.”
His face was still so white that his brown eyes looked black, but he coasted to a stop in an empty loading zone near a hardware store. “I don’t want to go near that thing again. Dynamite scares the shit out of me. Who you get so pissed off at you, Warshawski?”
While he dialed 911 I opened the truck door and threw up my eggs and toast in a neat little heap on the curb.
It was three-thirty by the time I finished with the cops. After a squad car duo had taken a quick, fearful look at the bomb, Roland Montgomery showed up with young Firehorse Whiskey, whom I’d seen briefly in his office two weeks ago. As the day wore on I never did get the young man’s real name.
Montgomery sent for a bomb-removal team. They arrived after half an hour or so in something that looked like a moon mobile. In the meantime a half dozen more squad cars roared in to seal off the area. For a few hours the street had more excitement than it usually gets in a year, what with police cordons and lots of guys in space suits moving in on my car. The networks all sent their vans, and children who should have been in school appeared miraculously to wave at their playmates on the four o’clock news.
When he saw the TV crews pull up, Montgomery got out of the car where he’d been questioning Jerry and me and went over to talk to them. I ambled over to join in. He liked that so little that he tried grabbing the mike away from me when I started to explain how Jerry and I found the bomb.
“We don’t have anything to report to the media yet on this device,” the lieutenant said roughly.
“You may not”—I smiled limpidly for the camera crews—“but I’m the owner of the car and I have a lot to say about it. I think my downstairs neighbor heard them putting the bomb in around three this morning.”