Acid Rock td-13 Read online

  «That is the most brilliant explanation I have ever heard of a bomb,» said Edelstein. «Brilliant in its simplicity.»

  «Now there are two basic ways to use one. One is to use it to send something else into the hit or another is to make the hit part of this very fast burning fire. Now, take a car for instance. Most of these guys go putting it in the engine. Do you know why?»

  «No,» said Edelstein.

  «Cause they only know how to hook up to the ignition and they don't want no one to see the wires. Right in the engine they put it and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. You know why it doesn't. It doesn't cause there's a frigging fire wall between the driver and the engine and all you get sometimes is blowing off some poor guy's legs.»

  «Incompetent,» said Edelstein, who secretly despised prosecutors who did not give him a good professional battle.

  «Yeah, that,» said Bombella, knowing from the tone of the voice that incompetence was something not nice. «Now the place to put a bomb is under the seat. You use a mechanical device that works on pressure, maybe eighty pounds pressure tops, no more.»

  «But who weighs that little?»

  «Some guys slide in and you get the torso.»

  «But some torsos must weigh less, especially women's,» Edelstein said.

  «The brake does it. The brake drives the body into the seat, so you're guaranteed your blast at the first stop.»

  «Brilliant,» said Edelstein. «But then why did you use the ignition last May.»

  «I didn't do the job last May,» said Bombella.

  «Funny,» said Edelstein. «That's what you told me then too.»

  «Now for a car I don't like to use no material like metal shards, nails, or a hand grenade kind of thing. I like a clean explosion. Especially in the summer, when the windows are up for air conditioning. The whole car acts like a casing.»

  «Brilliant,» said Edelstein.

  «The air pressure created is amazing. It'd take off someone even without breaking 'em up. Just by the concussion.»

  «Brilliant,» said Edelstein.

  «I could make a bomb out of a pack of cards,» said Bombella. «You see that tree there? I could take it off exactly where you want it and land it where you want it. You could put a home plate anywheres near that tree and I'd get you a strike.»

  «Can you throw a curve?» asked Edelstein, jesting.

  «Nah. I can't do that yet,» said Willie, after thinking a moment. «But if it was a wet day with some heavy air and if we had a good wind, maybe eighteen to twenty-three miles an hour, and it was kind of a good-shaped tree like a young maple, and you let me put the plate where I wanted, I might be able to get a strike on a curve.»

  «You're beautiful, Willie.»

  They drove leisurely, and a day and a half later neared Pittsfield, Mass., the general area of the rock festival where Vickie Stoner was to show up.

  «Is this the right way?» Edelstein said.

  «A little detour I was told about when I made that phone call,» Bombella said. Outside Pittsfield, Willie stopped the Continental near a large sign that read Whitewood Cottages. He went to a mailbox and took out a package that looked like a rolled magazine. The computer printed name on it said «Edelstein.»

  «I'm not supposed to be involved like this,» said Edelstein when Willie returned to the car. «What's in the package.»

  «It's supposed to be money and a note.»

  «I'll read the note to you,» said Edelstein.

  «I can read,» said Willie. And he could. Edelstein watched the lips move as Willie the Bomb formed words. Edelstein tried to get a peek at the letters pasted on the paper, but Willie defensively shielded the note.

  «Count the money,» said Willie, tossing the package to Edelstein and slipping the note into his pocket.

  «Fifty thousand,» said Edelstein.

  «A lot of money,» said Willie. «Give it to me.»

  «It's half of what you owe me,» said Edelstein.

  «I'll give you everything at the music show. There'll be some money there for us.»

  «And then perhaps I might sort of leave cause you don't really need me, right, Willie. I'd only get in the way.»

  «Right,» said Willie glumly. «You want to see something really great in the way of bombs?»

  «What is it?» asked Edelstein suspiciously.

  As they passed a country store, Willie suggested Edelstein get a jar of Prosco homemade pickles and, as he suspected, Edelstein couldn't open the bottle. They drove on through Pittsfield with Willie refusing to stop for lunch and Edelstein eyeing the pickles sitting there unopened between them.

  «I could blow the top off that jar,» boasted Willie, as they sped down Route 8 to North Adams.

  «Really?»

  «Bet your ass I could. I could blow it clean off without even a crack in the glass.»

  «Do it now, Willie. I'm starved.»

  Willie pulled over to the gravel shoulder of the road, reached into the back seat of the car and from under a magazine removed the bomb made of playing cards. Into its side he pressed a penlike device and where it protruded he very carefully wrapped a straightened paper clip into a coil.

  «Get out of the car,» said Willie and when Edelstein had stretched himself outside the car, Willie handed him the jar of pickles. «Hold this in your left hand.»

  Edelstein took it in both hands.

  «Left hand,» said Willie, and Edelstein took the jar in his left hand.

  Willie thought a moment, then said, «Put the pickles on the rock over there.»

  When Edelstein had and returned to the car, Willie gave him the bomb.

  «Now do this just right,» he said. «Put the part with the paperclip on top of the jar, then walk back. Don't wait. It will start when I start the car.»

  «Brilliant. How does that work?»

  «Just do it,» said Willie, and Edelstein scampered back to the rock, his shoes spitting gravel behind him.

  He gingerly dropped the bomb on the jar and ran back to the car.

  «Okay. Start it, genius. I'm hungry.»

  «You didn't put the clip against the top of the jar.»

  «How could you see?»

  «I know. Watch. I'll start the car and nothing will happen,» and Willie turned the ignition and sure enough the jar of pickles and the bomb were there.

  «Well, I'll be. You're a genius.»

  Edelstein went back to the jar of pickles, picked up the bomb, and even though it wouldn't balance that way, pressed the paperclip against the metal top of the jar.

  And within an instant his stomach was filled with pieces of pickles and glass shards and the metal jar cap. So was what was left of his face.

  The glass shards spit, cracking into the side of the car and even making a nick in the windows. They shouldn't have.

  «Trigging Prosco pickles,» said Willie the Bomb Bombella. «They're subcontracting out their jars again to those cheapie manufacturers.»

  And he drove off along the road toward the rock concert, where he hoped to be able to cash in on the million dollar open contract himself. The $50,000 in his pocket had been for a side job. As the note had said: «Kill Edelstein. He talks too much.»

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Vickie Stoner was alive and rapping on the side of Route 8 just outside Pittsfield when she could have sworn she heard an explosion down the road.

  «It's the revolution,» wheezed one of the boys, a lanky blond with shoulder-length hair wrapped tight around his forehead with an Indian band that somehow combined the signs of the Mohawk and Arapaho, an accomplishment that eluded history but not Dibble manufacturing of Boise, Idaho.

  «Not now. Maggot's at North Adams,» said Vickie. «I'm going to ball Maggot.»

  «Maggot's bitchen,» said another young girl, her legs straddling a knapsack. They had been waiting in the Berkshires' morning sun for hours, as processions of bicycles, painted Volkswagen buses, and straight cars passed them by. Some of the girls suggested they were passed up because the boys did
n't paint the signs with the right karma. The boys said it was because the girls didn't get up on the side of the road and do some work.

  «Like what?» asked Vickie.

  «Show a boob or something,» said one of the boys.

  «You show a boob,» one of the girls said defensively.

  «I don't have one.»

  «Then show what you've got.»

  «I'd get busted, man.»

  «Well, I'm not getting up there like some piece of meat.»

  So in the early afternoon, they waited for transportation just twelve miles short of the end of their journey-the rock festival known as the North Adams Experience. The town may have claimed it as its own. The promoters may have claimed the profits. But the experience belonged to those who would be part of it. You didn't attend it like some movie, sitting in a seat and letting the screen lay all sorts of stuff on you. You were part of it and it was part of you and you made it what it was with the Dead Meat Lice and the Hamilton Locomotives and the Purloined Letters.

  It wouldn't begin at eight o'clock that night like the ads said. It had already begun. Coming to it was part of it. The wheels were part of it. Sitting on the side of the road waiting for a ride was part of it. The pills and pouches and the little envelopes were part of it. You were part of it. It was your thing and no one else could tell you what it was, man, especially if they tried.

  Vickie Stoner refused to discuss whether the loud noise was the beginning of the revolution, a world war or a car backfiring. She had had enough of that crap, man. Up to here and beyond.

  The whole thing was a bummer, all the problems with her father and now all the mess of the past few days.

  It had started simply too. A simple, reasonable, nonnegotiable demand. All she had wanted was Maggot. She had had Nells Borson of the Cockamamies, all of the Hindenburgh Seven and what she needed, really needed, all she needed, was Maggot.

  But when she told her father, he had locked her in their Palm Beach home. That coffin with lawns. That slammer with butlers. So she split and was brought back. She split again and was brought back again.

  All right, daddy wanted to negotiate. She'd negotiate. She got these papers and ripped off some of the tapes her daddy made of all his telephone conversations and she had said:

  «You wanna deal? Let's deal. What will yon give me for the papers and tapes on the grain deal? What am I bid? I'm bid. I'm bid. I'm bid. Do I hear laying off me? Do I hear laying off me? What do I hear? I'm bid. I'm bid.»

  «Go to your room, Victoria,» was the bid, so Vickie Stoner pretended to go upstairs and then she split. With the tapes and papers, which she took to the U.S. Attorney's office in Miami. And what a trip it was. All of Daddy's friends, all of them, with lawyers, nervous breakdowns and sudden excursions around the world, saying how could anyone do anything like that. That was a high all right, but then the straights started laying it on her and this guy Blake was all right, but he was a downer.

  And then Denver and that crap on the balcony and in the room and the bad vibes, man. So she just split again and here she was on the side of Route 8, waiting for the last few miles of the North Adams Experience. And down the road, maybe that crap was starting again.

  «It's the revolution,» said the boy with the Indian head band.

  But he had said that the night before when the pop bottle fell and cracked open, and when they saw a squadron of jets overhead, he said it was the fascist pigs going to bomb Free Bedford Stuyvesant.

  «Just keep the sign moving,» said Vickie, and she rested her head on her knapsack, and hoped her father did not worry too much about her. At least, though, when she talked to him now, he was becoming reasonable.

  A gray Lincoln Continental with a real straight at the wheel breezed by them and Vickie closed her eyes. Suddenly, there was a screeching of tires. A brief silence. The car backed up,

  Vickie opened her eyes. He was an ugly straight, all right, with a big scar across his nose and he was looking down at something, then back at Vickie, and down at that thing which he then put into his pocket.

  «Youse want a lift?» he yelled through a lowered car window. Funny-looking car, all marks on the right side of it, like someone had gone at it with fifty nails or something.

  «Right on,» said the boy with the Indian headband and they all piled into the luxurious car with Vickie last.

  «You're Mafia, aren't you?» said the boy with the headband.

  «Why you wanna say something like that?» said the driver, his eyes on Vickie in the rearview mirror. «That's not nice.»

  «I'm all for the Mafia. The Mafia represents the struggle against the establishment. It is the culmination of hundreds of years of struggle against oppressive government.»

  «I ain't Mafia. There's no such thing,» said Willie the Bomb, his eyes still on Vickie, his brain now convinced he had found the right girl. «Where you kids gonna sleep?»

  «We're not going to sleep. We're going to be. At the North Adams Experience.» «Out in the air you're gonna sleep?»

  «Under the stars, if the government hasn't fucked that up too.»

  «Youse kids, I like. You know the best place to sleep?»

  «In a hayloft?»

  «No,» said Willie the Bomb Bombella. «Under a maple tree. A nice, straight maple tree. It absorbs the bad things from the air. It really does. You sleep under a maple tree and you're never gonna forget it. Really. I swear to God.»

  CHAPTER FIVE

  «Is he somebody?» shrieked a blotch-faced girl whose bouncing boobs were causing a great commotion underneath her tie-dyed tee shirt.

  «He's nobody,» said Remo, fishing for his motel room key. Chiun sat on the other side of his fourteen large, lacquered trunks. His golden morning kimono wafted gently westward with a breeze that blew across the North Adams Experience, or what had been Farmer Tyrus's north forty until he had suddenly discovered it could be used for something even more valuable than not growing corn.

  «He looks like somebody.»

  «He's a nobody.»

  «Can I have a piece of that way-out shirt he's wearing?»

  «I wouldn't touch it if I were you,» said Remo.

  «He wouldn't mind if I took just a little piece of his dashiki. Oh, he's somebody. He's somebody».

  «I know it. Hey, everybody. Somebody. Somebody's here.»

  From cars they came and from the backs of trucks they came. From behind rocks they came and around trees they came. First a few and then, when the mass movement from Tyrus's field was noticed, more followed. Someone was here. Someone was here. The high point of every rock event. Somebody to see.

  Remo went into the motel room. There were several possible outcomes to this sudden rush, one of them involved the probable need to dispose of bodies.

  But why not? Why should anything go right, starting now? It had begun badly at the briefing session with Smith, which had bordered on the absurd. First, there had been the girl, Vickie Stoner. Her photograph taken at her debut, her baby pictures, a picture of her in a crowd, a picture of her with her eyes glazed.

  It was Remo's job to protect her from unknown killers. That is, if she was still alive. She might be at the bottom of some lake now, or buried in a cave, or beneath a house, or decomposed in acid-the decomposing kind or the other kind.

  But if she was alive, where would she be? Well, no one knew, least of all her father, but there was a pretty good theory that she would be at a rock festival somewhere, because she was a groupie type.

  Which rock festival? Chances were she would not miss the North Adams Experience if she were alive. After all, Maggot and the Dead Meat Lice were playing there. How many people would be there? From four hundred to one hundred thousand.

  Thanks a lot.

  Remo had then posed this question to Smith: Since the open contract had obviously come from one of the people involved in the Russian grain deal, possibly even Vickie's father, why not let Remo do what he did best? Go down the list of suspects, find the one putting up the money, and
reason with him.

  No good, Smith explained. It would take too much time and it had too many flaws in it. Suppose Remo went after the wrong man. The right man could get Vickie Stoner. No. Protecting her was the answer.

  So that was that and here he was.

  There was a commotion outside the motel room and then the door opened and Chiun's trunks started coming in with acid freaks yanking at their handles, moaning and straining as if they were in chains. Remo heard yelling. He went to the window. A very fat young man whose belly was exploding over blue jeans and whose shirt had a peace symbol on it was swinging at a girl whose shirt said Love, not War. She was clawing at his testicles.

  «I'm gonna carry his trunk. He said I could,» yelled the girl.

  «He said I could.»

  «He said I could.»

  «No, me. You fat pig shit.»

  And so it went in many couples until Remo observed that Chiun might become worried about the safety of his trunks. Chiun rose and stood above one trunk, his hands extended, the long nails reaching to the heavens. And he spoke to them, these children, as Remo saw them. And what he said was that their hearts should be in concurrence with the forces of the universe and they should be one with that which was one. They should be all with that which is all.

  They should be as one hand and one back and one body. The trunks should rise like swans on gilded lakes. The green one first.

  And thus it came to pass that morning that the trunks, one by one, went into the room of the Master of Sinanju. The green one first.

  And when all the trunks were in the room, piled one on another, the green one separate by the window, the Master of Sinanju bade them all farewell. And when they did not wish to leave such an illustrious one, insisting he tell them the somebody he was, he no longer spoke. But a strange thing began to happen. The golden swirls of the kimono rustled, and one and another and another of these followers found themselves hurled out, until the last one, he too, was outside the door. With an ugly welt on his cheek.