“What are we going to do,” Keyes asked, “when he tells us to go beat our meat?”
Mulcahy stroked his chin. “We could talk to Jenna.”
“Forget it,” Keyes said sharply. “Lost cause.”
“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.”