The Bomb Maker Read online

  As Stahl reached the hallway, he glanced at the text again. It said, “Dodgers 6, Mets 4, FINAL.” He erased it as he headed back toward the Bomb Squad office.

  16

  When Stahl drove into the underground garage at home, Diane Hines’s car was in his second parking space. He parked beside it, but sat still for a moment. Her car set off a train of thought he had been pushing aside for most of the day. He’d told himself he would think about it later, when he wasn’t handling a crisis. Now he had run out of reasons not to think.

  The car meant Diane was in his apartment waiting for him. Coming over four nights ago had been her idea. But tonight she was here because he made sure she would be—or at least made it clear that was what he wanted. He was living with a woman he had met four days ago, and who was fifteen years younger than he was. And he was in a romantic relationship with a woman he was supervising in a public job.

  Being with her was against the rules, and he was also reluctantly coming to realize it was unethical. He was endangering her career, or helping her to endanger it, which was the same thing. He’d had many relationships with women, but never one like this.

  What was he doing? The first night, he supposed, had been an instinctive attempt by both of them to counteract their near collision with death with a bigger dose of being alive—companionship, liquor, lovemaking. Those were things human beings turned to after a brush with danger, especially if they knew death hadn’t gone away.

  But nothing had ended. Neither the danger nor the antidote to danger had changed. They’d become more intense each day. Their camaraderie and their affection had stopped being transient. Worse, they had become necessary.

  Today he had watched a video recording of four people under his command behaving bravely under fire. He had been concerned for all of them. But for one he’d felt terrified, wanting to protect her. He cringed each time he saw a bullet pierce the side of the truck she was driving. He wanted to shout at her to get down, to get away.

  He tried to put his feelings for Diane in the context of his life. When he was twenty-one he had married a woman he met in the two-year college he attended. Her name was Melanie. They had bonded, partly because they were both poor kids and looked at life the same way. Her father had left when she was five, and his had died in a car crash making pizza deliveries when he was ten.

  Dick and Melanie had both grown up avoiding mistakes. Poor kids knew that even small mistakes destroyed people, because they’d seen it happen. Lawyers and doctors and second chances were things rich people had, but help was never on the way for people like the ones they knew.

  They’d both needed to work when they were in high school, and in college they had to work more. They were very earnest and focused on forcing the future to be better because the past was unthinkable. They worked for their lives, and for each other.

  Now, twenty-three years later, it was not hard to find reasons why the marriage hadn’t succeeded. They had been drawn to each other by a mutual attraction that seemed like fate. She was beautiful and good. He was strong and smart. How could they lose?

  They turned themselves into sleep-deprived drudges who barely saw each other between classes and jobs. They’d both been inexperienced and not very adventurous, so sex was tame, quick, and perfunctory, another chore to be performed efficiently and crossed off the list until next time. Increasingly it came at the end of the list, almost the only chore they could put off without having disaster overtake them.

  Stahl was the one who cheated. But neither of them was the sort to wait for a second slipup, so when she mentioned divorce he agreed it was fair. Their divorce was quick and cheap.

  By the end of the waiting period for the divorce he was prepared to enlist. When the marriage collapsed, he had found himself with little concern for his own welfare. The feeling influenced his choice of Explosive Ordnance Disposal. Now, on the rare occasions when he thought about this decision, he believed he had been discarding the illusion that he could control everything. In working with explosives, if he did badly, he would die. If he did well, he might die anyway. He did well, and as he got more skillful and knew more, he learned to control more and more. Every living EOD man’s failure rate in the field was zero.

  Stahl’s life since then had not made it easy to have long relationships with women. He had spent years in war zones, then more years on a ready response EOD team based at Wiesbaden, Germany, that flew to trouble spots when the need arose. Then he spent more years at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida before he went home to California to take a job with the LAPD.

  His first night with Diane Hines had been like most of his other first nights with women. They were affairs rather than relationships, ignited by chance and proximity. He and an attractive woman would be thrown together, pursue the attraction, and then weeks or months later, one of them would move on to the next job or the next station or the next city. The problem this time was that because of the bombs every feeling had been magnified and intensified and sped up. Some part of his mind seemed to be on Diane all the time.

  Stahl got out of his car, took a step, and put his hand on the hood of Diane’s car as he walked past it toward his apartment. Warm, not hot. She had been in his apartment waiting for a while. He went up the stairs and let himself in.

  He moved through the kitchen to the living room, and then into the back hallway. He found Diane in the spare bedroom. She had a suitcase open on the floor, and she was taking clothes from it and hanging them in the closet.

  She looked up at him. “Caught me. I was hoping you’d be a little later tonight. I wanted time to make your condo swallow my stuff without a trace, then get a bath and be waiting for you, like the vision of loveliness I really am underneath the road grime and dried sweat.”

  He came over and kissed her. “I’m glad to see you took my invitation and brought some extra clothes.”

  She held on to him so the kiss didn’t end. “I found none of the other girls’ stuff fitted me, so I threw it out.”

  “You’ll have to work that out with the rest of the harem.”

  She said, “I’ll rent an auditorium so we can all have a meeting.”

  Stahl said, “You went on a call again. Tell me what you learned in the bomb call today that might help us.”

  She pursed her lips. “He was different today.”

  “Different how?”

  “Different than I thought he’d be. In the first few calls, he was just a set of plans for a device. Everything was thought out and cold and intelligent. But today I could feel his rage and frustration aimed at me. He had to know that once the truck was parked in his line of vision his chance of hitting his bomb with a rifle was zero, and hitting me was near zero, but he kept firing.”

  “Do you think he’s getting reckless, or is he trying to get close so he can see his device go off?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She closed the empty suitcase, put it on the floor inside the closet, and shut the door. “There. Now the day of our big fight I can just toss it all back in the suitcase and walk out within three point six minutes. No fuss, no embarrassment.”

  “Good breakup planning. Odd that you’re not more self-protective about getting into relationships.”

  “I can’t resist a man who would make my mother scream.”

  “I’m grateful for that.”

  “Besides, I’m learning from you,” she said. “This is on-the-job training.”

  “So you’re studying me?”

  She laughed. “I don’t want to be you. I want to be able to do what you do.” She looked at him and smiled. “You get that, don’t you?”

  “Sure. But if I die on a call tomorrow, you’ll get a few surprises.”

  “I hope the other surprises are better than that one.”

  “You’ll suddenly realize you’re about as good at this as I am. You just haven’t given yourself permission to know it yet.”

  “That’s because I don’t think it’s true yet. I think I need more t
ime with you.”

  “You’ll get tired of me,” he said.

  “Maybe,” she said. “But there’s no longer much of an argument against living for the moment. And this is what I want to do for the moment.”

  “Me too.”

  That evening he had dinner delivered to the condo. The food was from an old-fashioned steak and chops place where he was a regular customer, but the restaurant had no private entrances or even quiet, out-of-the-way tables. As soon as Stahl had called in their order, he walked through the living room and dining room to search for signs that he had a woman visiting. They had both been too visible lately, and he didn’t want Diane recognized.

  When he heard the buzz at the gate and looked out, he recognized the man carrying the bags and boxes. He was a busboy at the restaurant. He asked the man how he was, thanked him, and gave him a generous tip. Even though he knew him, he didn’t leave the door to put away the food until he had locked it again.

  Stahl knew there was no doubt in the man’s mind that Stahl was entertaining a second person, or who was going to eat the second meal. But since he had not seen her or her car or heard her name, he had no way of knowing who the woman was. Stahl thought about her appearance, and was glad the man hadn’t seen her. Diane was too attractive, too memorable.

  Stahl wondered if Diane was a product of his imagination. Had he met a pretty woman and imposed on her a set of features and qualities of mind that would make her perfect, rather than simply spending time with an ordinary woman and learning about her? But each day she surprised him. How could he have invented her when he couldn’t even predict her?

  Stahl watched Diane closely for the rest of the evening, but the scrutiny only made him feel more affection for her. They made love again late in the evening and fell into a deep sleep together.

  He woke the next morning about a yard away from her on the edge of the bed. He crawled closer to lie beside her. He studied her face, looked down along the bedspread at the graceful curves of her body where the fabric was draped, and stared at the way her dark hair swirled on the pillow.

  Just a casual glance at her showed that she could never have trouble attracting men. How long could she stay interested in him?

  She opened her eyes and stared at him. “Well? What do you think?”

  “About what?”

  “You were staring at me. Am I losing my looks already?”

  “No. But I have been thinking. I’m—”

  “Oh, shit. Not that. You’re not too old. You’re not getting me on the rebound. I don’t have daddy issues. Or mommy issues either. You’re the man of my dreams. Etcetera.”

  “Etcetera?”

  “You know. All the things men like to hear. You’re great in bed. The best of my life. Except that’s actually true, but don’t get complacent.” She sat up. “Women don’t really think much about those things, you know. We think about them if they cause trouble, like bumps in a road.”

  “I wasn’t fishing for reassurance.”

  “Hmm?” She seemed to be daydreaming, staring at the wall.

  “I said—”

  “I know what you said. I was just thinking about what I said. Maybe moving clothes over here wasn’t enough. Maybe I’ll move in an armoire and a grand piano. Then you won’t be able to face the work of throwing me out of here.”

  They showered and got ready for work. While they sat at breakfast, he said, “Did you come to me because of the danger, the chance you were going to die?”

  “Of course. Everything I do is because I’m going to die. But that will be true if it happens eighty years from now. I don’t want to waste a day.” She got up and put her dishes in the dishwasher. “Got to go. I’m not a captain. I work for a living.”

  She stepped to the door and stopped. “And I absolutely will be here tonight. Unless our bomber has an exceptional day.” And she was gone.

  17

  The bomb maker was seeing things in gray this morning. He had slept badly, staying up too late, then finally falling asleep for an hour, then waking up again, always in the middle of a nightmare. After one of these awakenings he realized he’d been dreaming about the female bomb technician who had driven the truck in front of him so he couldn’t shoot and detonate the bomb vest.

  In the dream she stared straight into his eyes, and that had given her complete knowledge of everything about him. He began to run along the streets and became breathless and tired. But every time he stopped, she was there ahead of him, pointing her finger and saying terrible things, which attracted angry people. He didn’t wake up but finally acknowledged that he had been awake, listening to the insistent sounds of daylight for some time—birds, a distant train whistle, cars—and swung his feet out of bed.

  The bomb maker once had a wife, but now he was alone. He continued to hate her as though he still had her. He smoothed over the sheets and blanket on her side of the bed, and once again noticed that her side of the mattress was still firm, while his side had begun to develop a shallow valley. All he had to do was spin the mattress around, and his side would be the good side. But he never did it.

  Her name was Carla. They had met when he worked at a soft drink bottling plant in Illinois. By then he had two years invested in an engineering degree, and she had been in an art therapy program for a year. They were both employed in the bottling plant for the summer because they had relatives who worked there, and it was the sort of place that hired relatives.

  Near the end of that summer he got a good look at her after work when she didn’t have her long hair stuffed into a hairnet, and her body was not rectangularized by the white coats they wore on the bottling line. She looked at him with her eyes no longer behind protective goggles, smiled, and said hi. After a second of contemplating her voice he realized that she was both women, the one he had worked with and this one. She had straight golden hair, bright blue eyes that looked better unprotected, and a lithe female body. He asked her to go out with him to dinner and a movie, and she agreed and kept agreeing.

  After another summer in the bottling plant and another year in school they graduated and got married. The church was the one Carla had gone to as a kid, where she had her first Communion, then seldom entered except on Christmas Eve and Easter morning.

  Her parents were not enthusiastic supporters of the marriage. They owned a new-and-used car lot in a southern suburb of Chicago and noticed right away that he didn’t own anything, and his parents didn’t appear to either. His parents were more supportive because they had been eager for him to grow up and move out of their house. He had always been sullen and solitary, and they didn’t like him much. He got a job at a company in Cincinnati that made valves and control systems for pipelines. Moving away from their families was a relief to him, but Carla seemed to dislike the lowering of her standard of living.

  After a year of searching in vain for art therapist positions, Carla took a job with a company that sold medical supplies. Her territory included not only Cincinnati but a wider slice of southern Ohio. On Mondays she would put a small suitcase full of clothes in the trunk of her car along with another small suitcase full of samples, order sheets, and inventory lists, then drive off, to return on Wednesday. She would be off again on Thursday and return on Friday.

  In her second year, he began to notice that her work schedule became erratic. She sometimes came home from work very late in the evening or even the morning after she was due. She began to be too tired to have sex with him, even when she was home for a couple of days at a time.

  He was an engineer, a man accustomed to measuring and evaluating things mathematically. He decided to investigate Carla the same way. He had kept accurate records for tax purposes, so he used them. He plotted graphs comparing her monthly paychecks, which were partially based on sales commissions, with her checks from the previous year. He made another graph comparing the hours she was away at work with the hours the previous year. The results indicated that his subjective impression had been correct. She was away more, but
selling less.

  One morning he picked up her cell phone while she was in the shower, but found it now had a password. The next day he began to follow her when she left for work. He learned nothing whatever from that practice, so he began to leave his own job early on days when she was working out of the company office and visiting Cincinnati pharmacies. He’d sit in a rental car and wait for her to pass by when she left work. He followed her to a restaurant, but only found she was meeting a group of colleagues that included both men and women having drinks.

  Her company’s next quarterly sales conference was to be in Cleveland. His study of her movements inspired him to go to the hotel in downtown Cleveland where her conference was held. He went to the front desk with a suitcase, showed them his identification, and asked for a second key card to her room, which he called “our room.” Since the name and address on his license matched her reservation, he got the card.

  Later, during the string of afternoon meetings of the conference, he went into Carla’s room and installed three small digital cameras. Two were electric clocks with the cameras built in, which he put on the two nightstands. The third was a white circular box with a glowing red light that looked like a second smoke detector. He installed this on the ceiling above the bed. Then he went home to wait until the day the conference ended. Early that morning he went to the hotel and waited until he saw Carla walk across the lobby for breakfast accompanied by a man. Then he slipped into her room and retrieved the cameras.

  When he saw what the cameras had recorded he sent copies to the e-mail addresses of her parents, four of her female friends, her employers, and another to himself. He sent the videos through a mail service in Moldova that existed to receive e-mails and send them on to their final recipients anonymously. He changed all the locks in the house. He collected all of Carla’s belongings, drove them to her parents’ house near Chicago, and left them in their driveway. Then he filed for divorce.