"Then it's over. Bloodbath or not, we go to the cops."
"Yup." Keyes glanced at the telephone.
"Imagine the headlines, Cab."
"God help us."
The phone rang. Once. Twice. Mulcahy swallowed hard and answered on the third ring.
"I see," he said after a few seconds.
Keyes excitedly pointed to the speaker box. Mulcahy shook his head unhappily. Then he hung up. His face was like gray crepe.
"That wasn't him," Mulcahy said. "It wasn't Wiley."
"Then who was it?"
"Sergeant Garcia," he said gravely. "Apparently the Nights of December just blew up the one and only Richard L. Bloodworth."
The bomb that exploded in Ricky Bloodworth's lap was powerful by Little Havana standards, but not utterly devastating. To build it, Jesus Bernal had hollowed a round Styrofoam lobster float and packed the core with generous but unmeasured amounts of Semtex-H, C-4, and old gunpowder. Then he ran a fuse through the middle and plugged the ends with gasoline-soaked Jockey shorts and two Army blasting caps. Next Bernal had meticulously embedded into the Styrofoam ball hundreds of two-penny nails (the sharp ends facing out), as well as assorted slivers of rusty cola cans and soup tins. It was not a bomb designed to wipe out embassies or armored limousines; this was, in the terrorist vernacular, an antipersonnel device. Bernal had packed the bristling lobster buoy into an empty one-gallon paint drum and threaded the fuse through a hole in the lid. The fuse became part of the magnificent bow that adorned the deadly brown box—an inspired touch of which the Cuban was especially proud.
Yet, as always, Jesus Bernal had a problem with quality control. He had envisioned a weapon that would fire shrapnel in all directions at an equal force, leaving no square centimeter of human flesh unpunctured. The paint can, Bernal had determined, would itself disintegrate into jagged fragments and become part of the lethal payload.
Fortunately for Ricky Bloodworth, that is not what happened. Fortunately, Jesus Bernal had failed to seal properly the bottom of the paint can, which blew off at the instant of explosion and gave the bomb something it was never supposed to have: rocket thrust.
In what the Metro-Dade Bomb Squad calculated was no more than two-thousandths of a second, Jesus Bernal's prize package blasted off from Ricky Bloodworth's lap on a nineteen-degree trajectory, passed cleanly through three plywood toilet stalls, and detonated in the men's urinal. The rest room was gutted.
An hour later, when Cab Mulcahy and Brian Keyes arrived, men in white lab coats were balanced on stepladders, scraping what appeared to be chunks of pink bubble gum off the charred rest-room ceiling.
"Mr. Bloodworth's fingertips," Al Garcia explained. "We've found seven out of ten, so far."
"How is he?" Mulcahy asked.
"He's got a nosebleed like Victoria Falls," the detective said, "but he'll make it."
Luckily, the police station was only five minutes from Flagler Memorial Hospital. Ricky Bloodworth had arrived in the emergency room semiconscious and suffering from hand injuries, lacerations and second-degree burns over his face and groin.
"The tip of his cock got fried—don't ask me how," Garcia said. "He's also deaf, but the doctor says that might be temporary."
Mulcahy stepped gingerly through the smoky chamber, his shoes crunching on a carpet of broken mirror, splintered wood, and powdered tile. Pretzeled by the blast, naked water pipes sprouted from the walls and floor, dripping milky fluid.
Brian Keyes knelt next to the bomb-squad guys as they picked through the ceramic ruins of the urinal. "Look at all these damn nails," Keyes said.
"Two hundred seven," said one of the bomb experts, "and still counting."
Keyes looked up and saw Mulcahy with his black tie loosened and French sleeves rolled up. He had a notebook out, and was descending on Al Garcia. Keyes had to grin: the old boy looked right at home.
Mulcahy asked Garcia: "How do you know this was the Nights of December?"
"Your Mr. Bloodworth's been working on the story, right? That makes him a prime target." Garcia eyed the notebook uneasily. "Besides, the boys here tell me this looks like another Jesus Bernal special."
"What was Ricky doing down here?" Keyes said.
"Probably taking a dump," Garcia said.
"Come on, Al, this is Traffic. Why wouldn't he be upstairs in Homicide?"
" 'Cause I kicked his sleazy ass out when I caught him trying to tape-record me. Had one of those little James Bond jobs tucked in his vest."
Mulcahy frowned. "I'm sorry about that, Sergeant. That's strictly against newsroom policy."
"Fucking A."
"When you saw him last," Keyes said, "did he have a package?"
"Nope," Garcia said. "But here's my theory, Brian. After I chase him out of here, he goes home, finds this hinky package in the mailbox, freaks out, and comes racing back to show me. On the way upstairs he stops in the John and bang!"
"How'd he get the box past the security desk in the lobby?" asked Mulcahy. A damn good question, Keyes thought.
But Garcia just chuckled. "You could waltz a Pershing missile by those bozos downstairs and they'd never look twice."
At first Keyes didn't want to believe that Bloodworth himself had been the target, or that Skip Wiley might have ordered his execution. It was something Wiley had threatened for years around the newsroom, but then so had almost every other reporter. Bloodworth was always on somebody's shit list.
Yet Keyes couldn't deny that the bombing made perfect sense, considering what Bloodworth had written about Las Noches,and considering what had happened to Wiley's Christmas column. Keyes felt guilty about his role in the Bahamas scheme; Cab Mulcahy felt much worse. Across the rubble the two men exchanged anguished glances and shared the same chilling thought: Skip wasn't kidding about a bloodbath. Imagine a bomb like this, in a crowd ...
If this was Wiley's way of warning Keyes and Mulcahy to keep their silence, it worked.
With a gloved hand, one of the bomb-squad guys displayed a twisted scrap of tin which still bore a red-and-white soup label. "Minestrone," he announced. "This baby was sharpened with a diamond file."
"Cute," Mulcahy said, pocketing the notebook. "Come on, Brian, let's go see Ricky."
Within minutes of the explosion, the emergency room of Flagler Memorial had been occupied by a clamorous army of journalists, each resolved to make Richard L. Bloodworth a hero of the Fourth Estate. News-wise, it would have been a better story (and certainly less work) if Ricky had been killed outright, but near-martyrdom was better than nothing.
The mere fact that the Nights of December had bombed a news reporter guaranteed international headlines, and the event was sure to draw the Big Boys from New York—the networks, the Timesand Sixty Minutes,all of whom would do anything to get out of Manhattan in the winter. The locals realized that now was the time to score the big interview, before Diane Sawyer strolled into town and scooped them all.
Two policemen escorted Brian Keyes and Cab Mulcahy through the mob and hustled them into a laundry elevator. Five minutes later they stood at the door of Bloodworth's private tenth-floor room.
The hospital's official press release had listed Ricky in satisfactory condition, but in no sense of the word did he seem satisfactory. He looked like he'd stuck his head into a bonfire—burnt ears curled up like fortune cookies, hairless eyelids swollen tight, the seared nose and cheeks stained burgundy with surgical antiseptic. He looked like a barbecued mole.
Cab Mulcahy quaked at the sight of his wounded reporter. Like a stricken father, he stood at the side of the bed, lightly touching Bloodworth's arm through the sheets.
Bloodworth made a singsong noise and Keyes edged closer. It was hard to tell through the bruised slits, but Ricky's eyes seemed to be open.
"Grunt if you can hear me," Keyes said.
Bloodworth made no sound.
"Brian, he's deaf, remember?"