It couldn't be so easy.

In the lean-to I found a bright yellow hard hat, some earm.u.f.fs, and a set of keys attached to a billet of wood on which was carved "Crane." When I walked over to the crane I found that the batteries were ninety percent charged and that the diesel tanks were more than half full, so I got into the cab and stared at the sixteen separate levers and nineteen separate b.u.t.tons.

The engine started with a half twist of the key and I lowered the crane until it was parallel to the ground with the deactivated electromagnet maybe two yards above. It was kind of funny, really; you can learn lots of stuff in prison. I know how to build a bomb out of what I can find in most janitor's closets. I know four ways to kill a man with a piece of newspaper. No, five.

I know how to torture and kill, maim and wound, steal and con. I can hot-wire most cars, build a gun out of pipes and some duct tape, and sew a knife wound shut with fishing line and wax. I learned how to drive a Caterpillar tractor while working in Drumh.e.l.ler Prison, moving a prefabricated greenhouse to the right place a piece at a time.

Avoiding the access road was simple. I backed out through the three-yard-high plywood fence and turned right. The ground, though, was soft and slippery, so I angled up onto an unused railway bed and drove on the pebbles and gravel with the rails themselves far under the treads.

It took ten minutes to reach Walsh's house and then I reversed again and plowed through his backyard towards the house. When I was close enough, I maneuvered the crane with the parallel switches and finally lowered it until it was almost, but not quite, touching the roof of his house.

Then I turned the electromagnet up to full power and snapped the key off in the starter.

I hopped out and wrapped the chain around to seal the cab and then I put the padlock on the chain and locked it. That key I pitched over my shoulder, then walked into the field and started a roundabout route home.

I wasn't sure what an industrial electromagnet would do to Walsh's computers or files or toys, but I suspected it wouldn't be good. As I walked away, I wondered how long it would be before someone called someone.

According to Mildred Penny-something's news report later that night, it took four hours until a neighbor realized maybe the giant crane in Walsh's yard shouldn't be there. During that time the magnet completely erased the hard drive of six computers and more than six thousand floppy and CD-Rom discs. It also irretrievably damaged three TVs, a microwave, a short-wave ham radio receiver/transceiver, and sundry other devices.

On the bus ride downtown the next day, I thought about bombs and stared blankly into s.p.a.ce. Wiring, detonator, timer, shrapnel ...

"What the f.u.c.k are you smiling at?"

There was a man standing beside me in the corridor of the bus. He looked to be in his early twenties with black hair cut short, a nose frequently broken, and eyes hidden behind dark sungla.s.ses. He wore blue jeans and a denim jacket covered in copper studs. His right hand was behind his back and his left hand was on the rail in front of me. His fingers were covered in thinly drawn, organically shaped tattoos, designs whose name I had forgotten.

"Was I smiling?"

He leaned down and I could smell cigarettes and stale sweat and just a hint of gra.s.s. "Yeah, you f.u.c.k."

I looked mildly at him. Could this be a set-up? If so, cops or Robillard? Did it matter? No, so I said it quietly. "Well, then I will."

He stared at me through the sungla.s.ses and I stared back until he flinched and I knew he was going to back down. And he mumbled out loud, "Alright then."

He fled the bus and I went back to thinking about bombs. There were other things to worry about, like the casing or body of the device, anti-tampering devices, back-up fuses. ... All in all, easy as pie. I had a few good ideas so I stopped at a convenience store and bought a huge mug of thoroughly toxic coffee along with a pad of generic graph paper and some pens. With that in hand, I went back and found a bench in a small park about two blocks from the house and started to sketch.

38.

Near as I can tell, it was an accident, it certainly wasn't due to my own observation or alertness, I was just in the right place. Blind luck.

I was sketching on a bench at the rear of the park where there were deep shadows cast by big elms and small pines. After a while a very old-model, dark blue station wagon pulled up and parked. There were four adult figures in it, one driving, one riding in the pa.s.senger seat, and two in the back, and, as I watched, one of the ones in the back seat climbed into the cargo s.p.a.ce in the rear.

A sedan full of adults was warning enough, but a couple of seconds later the windows on one side rolled down and I heard the ratchet-click of a pump-action shotgun being loaded. Before I knew it, I was off the bench and moving around to the side, keeping close to the trees and next to the redbrick front of a Baptist church that bordered the park. The last elm was about three yards from the van and I moved up beside it and waited in the shadow.

"... so where the f.u.c.k is he?"

The man was young with a tinny, nasal voice.

Another voice answered, older, still male. "No idea. No idea at all."

I could vaguely see that all the men in the car were white, mostly young, and wearing dark blue Nike track jackets with the white piping on the sleeves and black toques sitting high on their heads. Gang bangers? Cops?

"I feel like an idiot."

A third voice. Was this a hit? A drive-by? A home invasion? I chanced another look. The car was idling. The guy in the pa.s.senger seat was fiddling with something between his legs.

The guy in the back bench was leaning against the door nearest to me with his legs stretched out on the bench itself and a towel stretched across his lap. The last guy was crouched in the trunk area, holding two, big, gallon gla.s.s pickle jars full of fluid with rags stuffed in the tops. Molotov c.o.c.ktails? Simple to make, gasoline and dish soap, and I wondered if the f.u.c.kers had scored the jars with a gla.s.s cutter to let 'em fragment when they landed.

"So where the f.u.c.k is he? His b.i.t.c.h is there, so's the brat. Should we just go ahead? I mean, the wheels is hot, right? I mean, we gotta do this, right?"

I realized the whole neighborhood was quiet, no kids on the street, no one working in their yards. Nothing. Some kind of ESP, maybe. Some kind of group consciousness.

"Shut up."

Not cops and not a home invasion, which meant a hit. I looked down the street and saw that my house was on the same side the guy in the bench seat was facing, along with the guy in the shotgun seat. Funny that name, not enough to laugh but funny anyway, aptly named. In my head I could imagine them driving up with the windows down and parking across from my house. Guy in the back seat opens up (he probably had the shotgun), guy in the pa.s.senger's seat opens up (a pistol, maybe), driver just drives when he has to, parks when necessary, so boom-boom-boom, then, after a second, the guy in the rear opens the door, hops out, lights the c.o.c.ktails, tosses them through the blown-open window.

My house. Shot up and burned with my wife and my son inside.

I moved in a rush. There was half a red brick on the ground, fallen and half-rotten from the church wall, and I scooped it up in my right hand and took two steps forward as I wound up and let fly. It hit the half-open driver's side window like a bomb and blew it into a cloud of safety gla.s.s that still managed to razor away about half the driver's face.

"s.h.i.t!"

I was still moving and I opened the rear door with brutal force. The guy in the back fell halfway out of the car. There was a shotgun on his lap and I plucked it from his nerveless fingers as the station wagon surged forward three feet into a cargo van parked in front of the church. Someone else in the car swore.

"s.h.i.t-s.h.i.t-s.h.i.t ..."

Pump shotguns are all the same. Slide the fore-end back to put a round into the chamber, pull the trigger, and fire. Then spray and pray. I aimed at one guy in the rear of the car and caught a glimpse of his terrified face as I changed the point of aim.

The gun was loaded, which was nice.

"Boom!"

It was smaller than a twelve-gauge, maybe a twenty or a sixteen, and the tongue of fire from the muzzle flash went into the Molotov c.o.c.ktail in his right hand. With a whoosh it went up and filled the back of the wagon with flames and screams.

The pa.s.senger in the front had retained his cool and now he was leaning around the screaming driver and shooting at me with a short-barrelled semi-automatic pistol, one of those useless nine-millimeters cops are always b.i.t.c.hing about. "Crack."

The bullet hit the tree beside me and peeled off a big square of bark. "Crack-crack."

The bullets went past me on the other side as the wagon was bucking and grinding against the van, but by that time I had the shotgun re-aimed.

"Boom! Ratchet-click."

The barrel was almost touching his hand as it went off and took off about half his forearm. For a brief moment I could see the twisted chunk of plastic and alloy that had been his pistol buried in his arm up around his elbow. He started to scream and lost interest.

"f.u.c.k. f.u.c.k. f.u.c.k."

The guy with his head on the ground was fumbling at his belt for something, a gun, a knife, who knew?

"Boom."

The barrel was actually touching his right knee and suddenly the guy had more and better things to worry about than me.

The heat was unbearable so I stepped back to the tree and looked at my handiwork. Guy in the back, still screaming, cooking and howling, guy on the ground, holding a knee that wasn't there, guy in the pa.s.senger seat minus an arm, driver silent now, either bled out (maybe), or hit by stray pellets/bone fragments/bits of the pistol and out of it. I flipped the shotgun into the rear of the wagon just as the fuel tank cooked off.

Time to go. I went through the park, fast as I could sprint. The park ended in a chain-link fence and I went up over it and down the alley.

As I walked downtown, cop cars and ambulances pa.s.sed me, and I walked and thought and in about an hour, I reached a thrift store that sold me new-used blue jeans, a black turtleneck, black runners, and a generic black baseball cap. Once my original clothes were in a garbage bin, I sat back and counted money before taking a cab back to the archery shop, where three teenagers were using recurve bows to make small holes in paper targets. I watched them for a moment while Frank did something under the level of the counter by the cash register.

"Yee-ha!"

He held up a scratch-and-win lottery ticket and waved it in my face.

"Won ten bucks."

His eyes were alight with glee and he barely registered as I counted bills out onto the counter.

"I'm gonna do something nice for myself."

He looked at me suspiciously. "Yeah?"

"Uh-huh. Gonna take the bow home today."

His face split in a grin and he took it down from the rack behind him. "That's great. She misses you."

I looked carefully into his face but he seemed serious so I didn't say a word until he'd put the money away. "I'd also like to get some broad-head arrows."

"No problem. Got just what ya want."

He pulled out some sealed foil packets and I examined them gingerly and poked them with the tip of my finger.

"All right, I don't understand."

He tapped the foil packets. "These are the edges. Surgical steel so sharp they're only good for one shot before they're dull. They're called Thunderhead Broad heads and I can let you have six of them for sixteen dollars each, which is my cost."

I winced and made the exchange.

"Good hunting and remember that deer season hasn't started yet. So don't be caught."

He had provided me with a garbage bag to hide the bow. Outside the shop, a police car whipped past with the sirens wailing and I turned back to Frank.

"Oh, I'm not hunting deer. You still coming to the barbecue?"

"Yessirbob. Wouldn't miss it."

Outside, I used a pay phone. "Hi, Claire."

"Hiya, babe. Still working?"

"Yeah. Still working."

"No problems here. Bit of excitement down the road, though. Car caught fire."

I gave her a chance but she had nothing to add.

"Anyone hurt?"

She sounded concerned. "Four of them. Two dead and two really badly burned."

Hey, I was getting better at this not-killing schtick. "Well, that's good. Talk to you soon."

"Love."

"Love."

39.

With Frank's permission I took over one of the lanes and started to shoot. An hour later my arm was exhausted so I took off and went around to the rear and stashed the carefully bagged bow behind a dumpster.

It was still light outside so I took a bus downtown and started to walk around, thinking about Walsh until it was dark enough to deal with Robillard. Inside, the anger roared for release.

But I didn't let it go.

A block away from b.u.t.tes, I stole a Honda Civic and drove off to pick up my bow, then headed to Robillard's. I parked nearby and walked into the woods beside the road, where I pulled a balaclava down over my head to blur my outline and eliminate the shine of exposed skin. The dark clothes helped and over top I pulled a dark green, hooded, fleece jacket about four sizes too big that the owner of the Civic had left in his trunk. That blurred my outline even more.

But the main thing to being invisible is how you move. It's the hardest thing there is to teach anyone, how to move invisibly. If you want to be unnoticed and invisible, move slowly. Go as slow as you can and as quiet and precise as you can. Are you there yet? Good, now move slower.

Lift your foot an inch, pause, scan slowly by moving your eyes first and then your head, rely mostly on the corners of your eyes, they're more sensitive to movement. Move your foot forward a couple of inches. Put your foot down, toe first, brush any twigs or sticks aside now with the edge only. Scan again. Put the weight on that foot, raise the other an inch. Scan again. If someone is ten feet away from you in the dark, they won't recognize you as being human if you move that slowly. Half the time they'll edit you right out of what they see.

And you can kill them.

It took an hour and a half to cover the hundred yards to the house and another ten minutes to find a window that led into the bas.e.m.e.nt. Crooks don't like alarms in general so I took a chance and popped the latch with my pocket knife and then went in headfirst. It was luck and skill that I caught myself before falling into a sink some a.s.s had put directly under the window. My muscles ached as I held myself there for a good five minutes while I listened for any sign that anyone had heard me. After, I lowered myself the rest of the way through and reached back for the bow on the gra.s.s outside.

Only when it was ready with the arrow in place did I look around the room. It was a small utility area with a washer and drier and a rack for fine clothes that needed to air-dry. The surfaces were so clean that I could see in the pale light reflected through the open window. Off to the side, bright light was shining under a door. I took two steps and listened.

After the noises of the crickets and the frogs, the two human voices seemed strangely pedestrian. One was male and agitated and the other was female and calm. Underlying the voices was a strange sound that took a minute before it finally registered, the tinkle of gla.s.s on gla.s.s, as though something was being drunk. Carefully, I turned the k.n.o.b of the door until it opened a little and pulled it towards me until I could hold it in place with my foot.

No one reacted so I took a deep breath, pulled the string back to full draw, and stepped out into the main part of the bas.e.m.e.nt.