Slaughter

Defeated by a gadget.

Pearl thought maybe they would bury the Gremlin with that same astounded expression on his face. She hoped so.

She hoped they would bury him deep.

Epilogue

Two weeks later, a man in a wrinkled gray suit and no neck came into Q&A, stood just inside the door, and glanced around. He was average height but broad, and had about him the look of a bill collector who loved his work. He walked directly to where Qui

But the broad man smiled and offered his hand to Qui

“What can I do—”

“Listen,” Henry Safire said. “That’s all I want. Just . . . listen.”

Qui

“There’s something we thought you should know.”

“You’re off to a bad start. Who are ‘we’?”

Safire drew a badge from his pocket and flashed it at Qui

Qui

“You might have some of this info,” Safire said, ”but I’m here to keep you up to date. We’ll start with Ethan Ellis, the architect-engineer who died in that car accident. He committed suicide.”

“Yes, I know that.”

“You know about the envelope with your name on it tucked into his car’s seat cushion,” Safire said. “We read it and don’t want anyone else to ever know about it. Ethan was into some pretty bad behavior. Compulsive. Illegal. Harmful. There is proof of that, but no point in letting the tiger out of the bag. Ethan Ellis was being extorted. Compromised. He had to obey orders, or some things harmful to him would have been given to the media and sensationalized. You were part of what Ethan pla

“To be brief,” Safire said, “someone owned and instructed Ethan Ellis. For several years Ethan studied the architecture and engineering of certain Manhattan buildings. He wanted to make sure that what was pla

“The Gremlin,” Qui

Henry Safire seemed not to have heard. “Someone like Ethan Ellis could be made to determine exactly how the structures would fall, in strings of up to a dozen or more. Since he’d designed many of the buildings, he could also plant the explosives. Small, powerful charges, expertly applied, that could be detonated from a short distance. All that was needed was a driver to take a certain route at a certain speed through the city, sending out intermittent signals via a cell phone.”

“What would keep this driver from being killed as half of Manhattan fell?” Qui

“The signals would activate timers on the bombs so they would detonate in precise sequences,” Safire said. “This wouldn’t happen until well after the driver, who activated the timers while keeping a constant speed, was far away.”

Qui

“Let’s face it, Qui

Qui

“Besides,” Safire said, “they had to have something profound on the driver. Something they could hold over his head that would scare the hell out of him. Something dearer to him than life itself. Even his own life.”

“Then the car crash was suicide?”

“No doubt about it,” Safire said. “We’ll keep the motive under wraps as long as we can, but you know how it is with secrets.”

“Secrets?” Qui

Postscript

Demolition experts, using information contained in Ethan Ellis’s suicide note to Qui

Practically.

It shouldn’t matter that a number of the bombs remained unfound, hidden away or concealed in cast concrete. Within a few years the explosive would become inert and a danger to no one.

In what used to be a car dealer’s service center in Astoria, New York, the devoted son of Ethan Ellis worked assiduously, using mail-order parts and plans to rebuild a small, wrecked helicopter a Midwest TV station had given up on for weather and traffic reports. A home project, he called it, if anyone asked. When finished, it wouldn’t lift or carry a lot of weight. Nor would it fly very fast, with a pilot and passenger limit of two people. But it could fly low enough to pass under radar, yet high enough so that its broadcast signals would reach receivers and detonators, even in buildings with higher floors.

That was enough. Even more than enough. For its final flight, the helicopter was only required to carry one passenger at a certain speed, along with a modem sending out a certain signal in a certain code.

Straight down Broadway.

Photo by Je

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A multiple Edgar and Shamus Award wi

His website is johnlutzonline.com.