The Detonator Read online

  “So why even bother going after me and my family? After all these years?”

  He cocks his head over his shoulder while a seagull dives into the water headfirst, comes flying back out like an ICBM with a small fish caught in its bill.

  “I’ve been studying killings and killers almost all my life, so I feel like I’m pretty good at sizing up their profiles by now.”

  “Educate me, Miller, before my hand falls off at the wrist.”

  “Okay, here goes. The beef she had with you was entirely personal. My guess, and this is a fairly educated guess based on everything that’s exploded tonight, is that she’d been planning this night for a long, long time. She’s not the type to explode with anger. She’s more the kind of person who holds everything inside while putting on a happy face, knowing that one day, she would implode.

  “She always kept in mind that when the time was right, she would go after you. But she wasn’t about to do it with something so banal and garden variety as a gun or a knife, or two or three pressure cooker bombs for that matter. That’s the stuff for amateurs and lone wolf terrorists. She was going to use special explosives. High-tech explosives. Explosives that possess more power than anyone can imagine. Her motives were double-edged. I believe she was testing out the thermite rounds, plus her other nano-scale IED goodies, in order to demonstrate their effectiveness and their ultimate worth to her Chinese buyers.”

  I turn quick. So quick, an electric shock–like pain from my broken wrist shoots up my arm, up my face, into my brain.

  “You saying my family and I were guinea pigs in this setup, and that’s all?”

  He shakes his head. “Not at all. Like I said, this was also very personal. She had a hard-on for you for a very long time. She knew that explosives would be a language and a world you understood, and something you feared and respected more than anything else. The master blaster becomes the master bomb disposal man. What better way to torture you than with nanoscale thermite tech? What better way to illustrate that no matter how much you wronged her, her mother, and her father, in the end, she came out on top. She was a direct extension of that power and she wielded it not only over your life and death, but that of your wife and sick son.”

  I feel winded at his explanation, but I suppose it makes perfect sense. For a psychotic woman obsessed with revenge. Or, what the hell, maybe she was just a nutcase and that’s that.

  Miller goes on, “An unmarked and unidentifiable chopper was spotted flying off the grid between the Massachusetts coast and Albany at the exact same time the Wellington went up with you and your family inside it. My guess is they were coming to retrieve her and provide transport to mainland China where she’d be granted asylum, probably under a new identity. We’ve seen this kind of thing before. But that’s really for the FBI to make sense of at this point.”

  “Nothing much to retrieve inside the Wellington, Miller.”

  “Somehow the guys in the chopper figured that out, and abandoned their mission before they got blown out of the air by some trigger-happy air/army reservist scouring the area for terrorists. Don’t forget, bombs have been going off inside the city all night. The whole world is watching us.”

  “Where’s the chopper now?”

  “From what I’m told, it made a U-turn, headed back out to sea, most likely landing on a boat somewhere offshore. Coast Guard is working on intercepting the vessel now.”

  We sit and stare out at the water for another minute.

  “I’ve strayed only once in my marriage,” I say after a time, my eyes focused on my broken wrist. “It was wrong. Dead wrong. I never should have done it to Ellen or to Henry. But how the hell could I have known that it would lead to something as complicated and deadly as this, sixteen years later?”

  “I can’t answer that for you. But what I can do is offer you some advice now. Look into a better security system for your house. Alison had the run of the joint for the week you were gone.” He shoots me a look. “You can’t go back there until the place is swept. You realize that, don’t you?”

  I nod, the throb, throb, throb in my wrist now resonating in my temples.

  Miller turns the engine over.

  “Who knows what she planted inside and out of the farmhouse,” I say. “But those landmines in the driveway…they must have been planted when I was still in Massachusetts getting the Suburban repaired.”

  He shakes his head. “I didn’t blow up when I came out to see you that night. Your pizza man didn’t light up either.”

  It strikes me then. “She must have been there the whole time. Out in the woods at the front of the property. Waiting us out. Waiting to start her deadly game. No wonder the patches of gravel where the charges were buried appeared to be freshly disturbed.”

  Miller looks at himself in the mirror, adjusts the ball knot on his tie as if it needs adjusting, and then slaps me on the thigh. The slap makes my wrist hurt, but I don’t say anything about it.

  He says, “She was right there, only a few feet away from us the entire time. Shit, she could probably smell that pizza from Smith’s.”

  “I still feel entirely responsible for what happened. For all those deaths tonight.”

  “Listen, pal,” Miller says. “You’ve heard it before but I’ll say it again. Takes two to tango. We all make mistakes.”

  “Ellen,” I say. “Tell her that.”

  “You’re alive. Your son is alive. She’s alive. My guess is she’ll forgive you given time.”

  Time that Henry doesn’t have.

  He backs out, then throws the tranny in drive, takes off across the wide open empty port parking lot.

  “So what now, Ike?” he says, as we approach Broadway in the direction of the Albany Medical Center. “You gonna leave the APD for the building blasting business once more?”

  Recent memories flash through my mind. Duct-taped to an I-beam up on the top floor of the Hotel Wellington. My family duct-taped to the I-beams beside it. The blasting caps detonating, the charges about to blow, running for our lives, coming within a single step of being buried by tons and tons of concrete and steel rubble.

  “The true implosion,” I whisper. “A perfect true implosion.”

  “Excuse me?” Miller says, hooking a hard right onto Broadway.

  “The true implosion. It’s what I had always wanted to accomplish with Master Blasters. What my partner and I had always wanted to accomplish. Only a handful of demo experts in the world can make it happen. Alison Darling made it happen.”

  “With you inside the building.”

  I nod. “Maybe it’s not what I had in mind, but in a way, I feel like I achieved the true implosion and now it’s finally time to call it a day on the dream. Because the dream is over. The bad dream anyway. It’s the least I can do for Ellen.”

  He shoots me a look, forms a crooked grin.

  “You still have a job with the department,” he says. “Far as I know.”

  “That job is boring,” I say, not without a laugh. “Excuse me. Used to be boring.” But then, knowing that innocent lives were lost tonight, I suddenly realize there’s nothing to laugh about.

  “What will it take to make you stay on, Ike? You wanna become a permanent part of the force?”

  “A raise would be nice.”

  “I’ll talk to the chief, and he’ll talk to the mayor, and Albany will make it happen. You’ve earned it.”

  He hooks a left onto State Street, in the direction of the pile of wreckage that used to be the Wellington Hotel, and the Family Court Building, which is now mostly a blasted away ruin. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say the place looks like a war zone.

  “Safety first and last,” I whisper.

  “’Scuse me?” Miller says.

  “Safety first and last. It was the Master Blasters motto. Something that died along with Alison inside all that blasted concrete.�
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  But something else dawns on me then. Something pleasant in the midst of all the destruction.

  “Knock knock,” I say after a beat.

  Miller looks at me like I’ve lost my marbles.

  “Who’s there?”

  “Itsmy.”

  “Itsmy who?”

  “Itsmy boy’s twentieth birthday today, Detective Miller.” Me, smiling. “Kid has beaten the odds, and beat the reaper for another year.”

  He looks at me quick, a grin plastered on his face.

  “Isn’t that all any of us want, Ike?” he says. “Because who the hell knows how much time any one of us has got?”

  “No truer words, Detective,” I say. “No truer words.”

  We take it slow up the State Street hill, a white smoke and dust-filled plume from the Wellington Hotel true implosion rising up through the clouds, like the hand of God touching heaven itself.

  THE END

  AUTHOR’S NOTE: Some information specific to the making of IEDs and other homemade explosives has been deliberately left out and/or fabricated for the sake of both safety and the overall protection of innocent individuals.

  About the Author

  Winner of both the 2015 PWA Shamus Award and the 2015 ITW Thriller Award for Best Original Paperback Novel, Vincent Zandri is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of more than 30 novels including The Remains, Moonlight Weeps, Everything Burns, Orchard Grove, and When Shadows Come. He is also the author of numerous Amazon bestselling digital shorts, Pathological, True Stories, and Moonlight Mafia among them. Harlan Coben has described The Innocent (formerly As Catch Can) as “…gritty, fast-paced, lyrical and haunting,” while the New York Post called it “Sensational…Masterful…Brilliant!”

  Zandri’s list of domestic publishers includes Delacorte, Dell, Down & Out Books, Thomas & Mercer, and Polis Books, while his foreign publisher is Meme Publishers of Milan and Paris. An MFA in Writing graduate of Vermont College, Zandri’s work is translated in Dutch, Russian, French, Italian, and Japanese. Recently, Zandri was the subject of a major feature by the New York Times. He has also made appearances on Bloomberg TV and FOX News. In December 2014, Suspense Magazine named Zandri’s The Shroud Key as one of the Best Books of 2014.

  A freelance photojournalist and the author of the popular “lit blog” The Vincent Zandri Vox, Zandri has written for Living Ready Magazine, RT, New York Newsday, Hudson Valley Magazine, The Times Union (Albany), Game & Fish Magazine, and many more. He lives in Albany, New York. For more go to www.VincentZandri.com.