Shock Wave

Cocktails at nine o’clock in the morning? All of them?
     
     
    THE SECOND BOMB, planted at the construction site, had been much, much better. Everything had gone strictly according to plan. He’d come in from the back of the site, carrying the bolt cutters, the pry bar, a flashlight, and the bomb. In his bow-hunting camo, he was virtually invisible.
    The trailer had two doors: a screen door, not locked, and an inner wooden door, which was locked. He’d forced the inner door, cracking the wood at the lock. Inside, he’d set up the bomb in the light of the flashlight. When he was ready to go, he’d flashed the light once around the inside of the trailer, and caught the reflection off the lens of a security camera.
    There had been no effort to hide it. If it worked in the infrared . . .
    He was wearing a face mask, another standard bow-hunting accessory, but he disliked the idea of leaving the camera. He walked back to it, got behind it, and pried it off the wall. A wire led out of the bottom of it, and he traced it to a closet, and inside, found a computer server, which didn’t seem to have any connection going out.
    The server was screwed to the floor, but the floor was weak, and he pried it up and carried both the server and the camera outside.
    The rest of it had taken two minutes: he placed the bomb on the floor next to the door, reaching around the door, and then led the wires from the blasting cap under the door, and then closed the door.
    The switch was a mousetrap, a method he’d read about on the Net. One wire was attached to the spring, the other to the top of the trap’s wooden base. A piece of fish line led from the trap’s trigger to the inside doorknob on the screen door. When the door was opened, the trap would snap, the two ends of the copper wire would slam together, completing the circuit, and boom .
    Which was exactly what happened.
    He remembered walking away from the trailer, thinking about the lottery aspect of it: Who would it be, who would open the door? Some minimum-wage asshole hired to pour the concrete? Or maybe the building architect?
    He’d tracked through the night, enjoying himself, until he got to the river. The camera and server were awkward, carrying them with all the tools he’d brought for the break-in, pushing through the brush along the track. He listened for a minute, then threw the server and the camera out into the middle of the river, a nice deep pool, and continued through the dark to his car.

    HE HAD THE TECHNIQUE, he had the equipment, he had the balls.
    Thinking about the earlier missions, he smiled again.
    This night would take perhaps even more balls, and he looked forward to it. Creeping through the dark, wiring it up . . .
    One thing: if a single dog barked, he was out of there. The first target was on the edge of town, not many people around. He’d spotted a parking place, at the side of a low-end used-car lot, a block away from the target. There were no cameras at the lot; he’d scouted it carefully. He could park the car, making it look like one of the used cars, cross the road into a copse of trees, and sit there for a bit and watch. Then he’d walk through the trees and across a weedy vacant lot, right up to the target car.
     
     
    AND THAT’S WHAT HE DID, at two o’clock in the morning, dressed in camo, with a bomb in a backpack, a gun in his pocket. He’d already killed, and if the owner of the house caught him planting the bomb, he’d shoot him and run for it. Nothing to lose.
    The night was warm, for early June, when it could still get cold; but not this night. He left the car, as planned, sat in the trees and listened and watched: a small town, trucks braking on the highway, or speeding up as they headed out; the stars bright overhead; no sirens or dogs to break the silence.
    He could see the target car, sitting across the vacant lot like Moby-Dick: there’d been no sign of activity from the house next to it. He gave it the full half hour, then began a slow stalk across the lot.
    He was a deer hunter, a stalker rather than a sitter, and he knew how to move slowly. He took ten minutes to cross the hundred-foot lot. He was satisfied that even if there’d been a dog, it wouldn’t have heard him.
    At the car, he sat and listened, one full minute, letting his senses extend into the night, and then he slid beneath it, next to the axle. He’d taped the end of a deer hunter’s LED flashlight, so only a single LED could shine through: a red