"Destroyer 013 - Acid Rock.pdb" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Remo)

Outside, Willie the Bomb Bombella sat in his Continental, an artist frustrated, a craftsman who sees pernicious fate destroy his work. The tower went right. It went fine. It went beautifully. But then along the edge of the crowd was the little red-headed broad with the big mouth and the faggy looking guy with the thick wrists. She was alive. A million dollars from Willie. Right out of the mouths of Willie's children, he had stolen it. Right out of Willie's mattress at home, he had stolen it. Like he had broken into Willie's house or rifled his pockets, he had stolen it.
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Willie had to get even, despite the fact that they were in a motel with such shoddy structure that the retaining walls hardly retained, and what held it together was sometimes the plaster. There was nothing really good to work against, like brick, or even wood. Wood was good. It gave you splinters like a hand grenade if you did it right. But what was this motel? It was nothing. Might as well blow up an empty field. It gave the creative genius of Willie the Bomb Bombella all the inspiration it needed.
Suppose he handled the motel like an empty field and considered each room a giant gopher hole with gophers as his goal? Perhaps a combination of concussive effect and propelled missiles. He could probably get the girl too. Still make the million.
Willie went to the trunk of his car and started stringing wires, mixing chemicals, and adjusting templates in the small motor device he began to construct. He whistled a tune he had heard in a Walt Disney movie. The tune was "Whistle While you Work."
From the corner of his eye, he saw the door of the thief's room open. It cast a whitish light into the motel parking area. He saw the thief, the guy with the thick wrists who had saved the redhead, walk out. The guy had the nerve to even walk right up to him.
Willie straightened up. He stood almost six inches taller than the little guy and topped him by almost a hundred pounds.
"Whaddaya want?" asked Willie in a tone that in others usually triggered unplanned release of bowels or bladder.
"To break you," Remo said gently.
"What are you talking about?"
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"I'm going to break you into little pieces until you beg me to kill you. What are you doing?"
Since Willie had no intention of letting this square squirt walk away, he decided to tell him.
"I'm going to blow you, that little broad, and that gook into next week's garbage."
"Really?" said Remo, honestly interested. "How are you going to do that?"
And Willie explained about his problems with motel construction, his idea about an open field, and how he intended to create a concussive effect to loosen everything, followed by a trio of consecutive explosions that would use the motel debris in a sort of breaking up and burying process.
"That's very tricky," Remo said. "I hope you have the timing devices worked to a very small tolerance."
"That's just it. They ain't. No timing device could be sure to hold. These explosions are set off by the concussion from other explosions, kind of like a chain."
"Nice," Remo said.
"Too bad you ain't gonna feel anything, thief," Willie said, and he clubbed, or thought he clubbed, the side of Remo's head with a swat of his right hand, but his right hand felt funny. It felt as if it were in molten lead, and he found himself lying on the asphalt of the parking lot with the tailpipe of the Continental over his head.
He could feel the vibrations of the Dead Meat Lice against his chest and the oil of the lot was in his nostrils. What seemed like burning lead crawled up his right arm. The pain made him scream and he heard the thief tell him he could stop the burning if he talked, so Willie said he would talk.
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"Who were you working with?"
"No one." Something seemed to split the elbow tip into little pieces and Willie screamed again, although nothing had really happened to his elbow. His nerve endings were causing him the awesome pain. Properly manipulated, nerve endings cannot tell the difference between masterful fingers, broken bones, or molten lead.
"I swear, no one."
"What about the blond kid?"
"I was only told to do the job on the redhead."
"Then he wasn't working with you?"
"No. He musta been a free-lance."
"Who gave you the job?"
"Just a voice on the phone. A Chicago number. Oww, stop that. Stop that on my elbow. I'm talking. Jeez, what are you, a pain freak or something? I'm talking. This voice said go to a mailbox."
"Is that all?"
"No, he said that Vickie Stoner was gonna be here and the million dollars was for real."
"What about the mailbox?" Remo asked.
"Well, that was to show good faith," Willie said. "There was fifty thousand there and another assignment for me. The guy I was with. They paid me to do him. Cash. Fifty thousand. Hey, stop it with the elbow."
Willie the Bomb Bombella felt the pain sear his shoulder, then his chest. He tried to answer how the bomb thing really worked but no one understood, really understood. To make the pain stop, he told this bastard how to set off a simple explosion from the materials in his car, and he told him honestly because he would do anything to stop the pain, even die. That would be better. He felt himself trundled into the trunk and then
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there was darkness as the car bounced along with the bombs banging around his ears and temples. There was one at his right foot and just a tap would set it off and take care of that thiefbastard pain freak. So Willie tapped his foot.
CHAPTER SIX
Pie wide. She does it like she loves it. Pie wide, sucking on a cloudstick.
Boom!
The Dead Meat Lice rule over all. What a walkaway. First the tower and then that far-out, faroff explosion. Dead Meat Lice rule over all.
Some explosions rip bodies by actually mashing them against air resistance. But if the body can move through the air resistance, then it becomes a missile in no more danger of destruction than a bullet-if it doesn't hit something.
When the car exploded, Remo was careful not to hit anything. He missed a stand of birch and kept fingernail, toenail tipping, like a spinner, a rudder, knowing that if something even as wide as a palm should touch surface, he would be grated against Route 8 like Parmesan cheese. It didn't and he wasn't.
But it was during that incredibly rapid spin that Remo for a few brief moments understood what sucking on a cloudstick meant. He forgot it, however, when the blood returned to his head.
The next morning, two messages reached the office of Dr. Harold W. Smith. One, from Remo,
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was that Vickie Stoner had been tagged and was waiting delivery to the Senate hearings. The other came from a clerk in Lucerne, Switzerland, who earned extra income by providing information.
He reported that a special bank account of a million dollars had been increased to $1.5 million. There were calls from all over the world about the account and there was a great mystery about it, but his educated guess was that the money was on deposit as payment for someone who could perform a specific task. Yes, he had heard of the last call. It had come from Africa, from a man named Lhasa Nilsson. He hoped the information might be of some value.
Nilsson. Nilsson. Smith had heard that name but where? He ran it through the giant computer complex at Folcroft, where hundreds of people fed it small packages of information, not really knowing what they were for, and only one outlet issued information, and that only to Smith.