The Bomb Maker Read online

  Gwendolyn Barker looked disappointed. Robert Minoso said quietly, “Are you aware that city and police regulations prohibit this conduct?”

  “Yes,” said Stahl.

  “I don’t know what to say,” said Minoso. “You’ve put the city in a difficult position. The city is liable for penalties and damages for sexual harassment, possibly for creating a hostile work environment, and on and on.”

  “I’m very sorry,” said Stahl. “Mostly for the embarrassment I caused. But I wouldn’t worry about Sergeant Hines. She isn’t going to go after the department.”

  Minoso looked deflated. “I’m sorry to have to take a different position, Captain Stahl. Like the chief, I’ve been very glad you agreed to help. But I’ve handled these cases for the city for years. We settle cases every year that started out in similar ways. Right now you’re saying to yourself that Sergeant Hines loves the police force. I’m sure she does, and I know she’s risked her life repeatedly to save other officers. But what we have to worry about isn’t today. What if, five years from now, you’ve broken up, and she’s been passed over for promotions, or disciplined, or even fired? She won’t love the police force then. There are statutes of limitations on most of the injuries she could sue for, but under the continuing violation theory, her attorneys could get around those limitations. Plenty have figured out how. We’re paying damages to plaintiffs from years ago all the time.”

  “I’m sure you understand that neither of us intended to put the department in a difficult position,” said Stahl. “We had expected that the bomber case would be solved and I’d be off the police force by now, and Sergeant Hines would be able to continue her exemplary work for the rest of her career. She’s never had any violations of police policy before, and wouldn’t have except for my failings as a supervisor.”

  Nora Zorich, the assistant DA, said, “Captain, I want to state my agreement with the others. I’m an admirer. And I’m more of an admirer since I’ve watched your behavior today, both in telling us the truth and in speaking of Sergeant Hines with affection and respect that prove to me this wasn’t a supervisor taking advantage of an employee. I’m positive that everyone in this room wishes we could apologize to you for invading your privacy, then forget the issue—or really, advise the chief to let it go. But we don’t have that option.”

  “I understand,” said Stahl. “I’ll go write my resignation and make it effective tonight so it can be released in time for the eleven o’clock news. It will be phrased in a way that makes it clear the force didn’t tolerate my conduct and that the chief acted immediately the evening he heard about it and called me in. I do request that no action be taken against Sergeant Hines.”

  The chief said, “Damn it. We can’t afford to lose either of you. We need help. Who wants to bust a woman who’s a hero to the department for having a normal private life?”

  Gwendolyn Barker said, “I have an idea. It’s unorthodox, but it’s a way out.”

  “What is it?” asked the chief.

  “You accept Captain Stahl’s resignation. Then the police commission contracts with Mr. Stahl’s security company to provide his services during the crisis. Sergeant Hines probably won’t be back on active status for months. If she comes back while he’s still here, she won’t technically be under his supervision, because he’ll only be a civilian consultant and not a sworn officer. We hire outside experts, lawyers, and contractors all the time. Why not hire Mr. Stahl now? And that’s his punishment—that he’s off the force, with no rank.”

  The chief said, “Do you buy that, Dick?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  That night Dick Stahl was waiting in Diane Hines’s room at Valley Presbyterian when she returned from a walk. She had a cane, but she was walking normally when she stepped in.

  She came to him, presented herself for a hug, then kissed him quickly on the lips and sat on the bed.

  “You’re recovering fast,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. “Pretty soon they’ll kick me out of here.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that.”

  “Why?”

  “Lots of reasons,” he said. “Nobody has talked to you about your apartment, right?”

  “No.”

  “That’s because it isn’t there anymore. It’s been gutted and they’re planning on rebuilding something, but it won’t be ready soon. I’d like to invite you to move into my place with me.”

  She studied him. “Why?”

  He met her stare. “Well, there are actually three reasons, but let me mention two out loud. Keep in mind you don’t have an apartment. The reasons are that I want you there, and that my condominium is probably the safest building in Los Angeles, particularly with two veteran cops in it.”

  “You’re worried he’ll try for me again?”

  “It has crossed my mind, but right now I’m just using that to make my place seem inviting.”

  “Have you forgotten that living with you would get me fired? Or are you assuming I’ll never get well enough to handle a bomb again and be on disability forever?”

  “I’m not assuming anything now,” he said. “And by the way, we’re caught.”

  “Captain Almanzo? He told?”

  “No, he didn’t. But a television reporter got a leak, probably from the crime scene people, and sprang it on me at a press conference today.”

  “So I’m hours away from getting fired for being a slut?”

  “No,” he said. “Your job is safe. I resigned from the force today. They’re going to hire my security company so I can keep working as a consultant on the bomber case while you recover.”

  “Jesus, Dick. I caused this. I’m sorry.”

  “For what? I wasn’t going to be a career cop.”

  “For having humiliated you.”

  “I’m not humiliated.”

  She frowned. “I’ve been planning to go stay with my mother in Florida for a while. I have a perfectly nice mother, you know. I think I never mentioned her because we were having a wild fling and it seemed weird to bring her into it.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Grace.”

  “Pretty,” he said. “Was it a wild fling?”

  “Hell yes, it was,” she said. “Every minute we weren’t working we were fooling around or drinking.”

  “Good for us,” he said. She could see that his face looked sad.

  “Did calling it a fling hurt your feelings?” she said. “Be honest with me.”

  “I didn’t think about putting it in a category before. During those few days, my life consisted of getting through a tough day, and then making up for it with you at night. It was death all day and life at night with you.”

  “I know what happened, and I understand everything up to the point when my apartment blew up. But what now? I’ve been trying to figure out what happens next. I think I need you to tell me what you’re thinking.”

  “We move you into my place. We try to stop leaving things out when we talk. We don’t pretend that being together was a fling.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Tomorrow when you come, bring me some of the clothes I left in your closet. All I own now is this nightgown with nothing in the back, and I have to hand it over when I leave.”

  29

  The bomb maker would have to be leaving in a few days, so he began with the drill press. He would have to order it and get it delivered before he left. That way it wouldn’t be left boxed up and sitting in the driveway while he was gone. He also wanted to keep this purchase as distant in time from the other purchases as possible.

  He found a drill press advertised online that was almost new. A metalworking business had gone under, and the shop equipment was being liquidated. This one was perfect for precision work. It was laser guided, with a one-and-a-half-horsepower motor that turned at 4,200 rpm, and it had a work light over the oversize table. He had to drive to Santa Ana to pick it up, but that meant he would be able to install it in his garage workshop right away. When he got to
Santa Ana he also saw a lathe for sale, so he bought that too, and set both up in his shop.

  The next day he planned his trip. There were a surprising number of AK-47 rifles for sale by licensed dealers across the country, but he couldn’t afford to let them make background checks. Instead he looked for gun shows in states where a seller who didn’t earn most of his living as a gun dealer didn’t have to report sales.

  In a couple of hours he had plotted a route between large gun shows. He would start in Las Vegas; go next to the Crossroads of the West Gun Show in Phoenix at the Arizona State Fairgrounds; then stop for a show at the Tucson Pima County Fairgrounds, one in Tucumcari, New Mexico, one at the Reno-Sparks Convention Center, and then one in St. George, Utah. He added a few running across Texas in Lubbock, Houston, and San Antonio.

  He judged he would probably have what he needed long before he ever got near Texas. And if he didn’t by then, he could continue on through Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. None of those states required private gun sellers to report anything to anybody.

  When he was ready, he packed a suitcase and put it in a metal storage box in his van. He also had four empty metal storage chests running along the floor. He had locks for them, but to start out he didn’t use those. Sometimes a lock just attracted attention.

  As he drove along Interstate 15 toward Las Vegas he reviewed his strategy. He would walk around the show looking for AK-47s on the tables. He had selected big shows, so there would be at least a hundred tables with guns of all kinds lying on them. It would be fairly easy to tell which sellers were licensed gun dealers with lots of merchandise and which were private collectors with a few pieces they wanted to get rid of for cash or trade for something better. He would select a likely seller and watch for a while. Sometimes a licensed dealer might be willing to run checks on customers for a nearby collector, or even serve as a middleman for a modest cut of the profit. The bomb maker would watch and see if anything like that was going on before he inquired about an AK-47.

  After his first circuit of the Las Vegas show, he made his first inquiry to a man about sixty-five years old who had a row of AR-15-style rifles of various makes with a range of configurations. Beside them he had five AK-47 rifles. The bomb maker said, “Can I take a look at your AKs?”

  The man nodded, and said, “Help yourself.”

  The bomb maker was excited. He could feel that, of the usual three positions, the selector lever had only two: the Safe position and the third, lower one that permitted semiautomatic firing. There was no fully automatic position. The older man said, “They’re semiauto only. You can’t bring one into the country until it’s been modified.”

  “Where are these from?”

  “What used to be Yugoslavia. All of them were made for the army, but they were never issued.”

  The bomb maker could see from the wear patterns that two of the rifles had been fired a lot, and carried in the field. The wooden butt pieces and forestocks had lighter places where being touched had rubbed and discolored them. The bomb maker decided not to mention that. He said, “How much for all of them?”

  “A thousand apiece.”

  “I’ll give a thousand each for these three,” he offered.

  “No thanks, they’re sort of a collection, and I want to get rid of the lot.”

  “How about eight hundred each for all five? That’s four thousand bucks, in cash.”

  “All right,” the man said.

  The bomb maker counted out the cash and the man began bundling them up in a tarp for him. The man threw in four extra thirty-round magazines, but charged him three hundred more for the five hundred rounds of 7.62 × .39-mm ammunition. He made three trips to load his car.

  A couple of days later at the Arizona State Fairgrounds he noticed a woman selling off a collection of rifles and pistols. Her sign said: DIVORCE SALE. Each of her weapons had a sticker with a price written on it with a magenta-colored marker. She was about forty years old, blond with skin that had been in the sun too much. She wore tight jeans and a Western shirt with pearl snaps instead of buttons. When she turned in his direction he saw she had blue eyes that were almost startling in her reddish face.

  “Sorry about the divorce,” he said.

  “Not me. How can I help you?”

  “I like AK-47 rifles. You don’t have any, do you?”

  “I got one,” she said.

  “Oh?” he said. “I didn’t see it.”

  “Bobby?”

  A man about fifty-five who sat at the next table looked at her.

  She said, “You going to be around for a while, Bobby? Can you watch my table?”

  “How long were you thinking of?”

  “Half hour or so.”

  “Sure.”

  The woman tapped the bomb maker’s solar plexus with the back of her hand. “Come on.” She started walking fast along the aisle in front of her table. The bomb maker followed her outside onto the vast parking lot and up to a red pickup truck. He veered toward the cargo bed, but she got into the driver’s seat. “It’s not back there. Get in.”

  He climbed into the passenger seat and she drove across the lot, turned right, and then drove into the lot of the closest hotel. She jumped down. “It’s upstairs.”

  He followed her into the hallway and into an elevator. She took him to the third floor and through the door of a room that was littered with clothes, an open suitcase with the clothes mixed up and hanging out of it, and several gun cases and some cardboard cartons. She dragged a gun case into the center of the floor, unzipped and opened it so he could see the AK.

  “Where’s it from?”

  “It says Bulgaria on it.”

  He looked at the lower receiver and saw something written in the Cyrillic alphabet and some Arabic numerals. “Can I touch it?”

  She smiled. “You can touch anything you can reach.”

  His eyes met hers. “A half hour?”

  She shrugged. “So it won’t be a long courtship.”

  He stepped close and put his arms around her, and she leaned into him to kiss him. He pulled the sides of her Western shirt apart so the snaps all opened, and then she was working the buckle of his belt apart while he unhooked her bra. She shrugged it off and backed onto the bed. He pushed her over and tugged off her cowboy boots, so she could wriggle out of her tight jeans.

  “You’ve done a cowgirl before,” she said.

  “No, you’re my first.”

  She laughed. “Cowgirl is the name of a position, dumb ass. It’s a joke.”

  He flopped onto the bed beside her, naked, and touched her, his hands moving everywhere, arousing them both.

  “Use a condom,” she said.

  He paused, panicked.

  “In my purse,” she said wearily, and nodded toward the desk across from the bed.

  He swung his legs off the bed, stepped to the desk, and riffled through the purse. He felt a familiar square packet and the ring shape inside, tore the pack open, and unrolled the condom onto himself before he returned to the bed. As he began to find his way she thrust her hips forward, clutched his buttocks, and seemed to climb his body to take him in. The sex was eager and rushed, almost violent.

  It occurred to him that he had not had intercourse with anyone since he caught his wife cheating and threw her out of the house. It explained to him why he felt so excited. But then the thought of her made his lust for this woman less compelling, and he found the distasteful memory of his marriage was helping him control his sexual urge, delaying the end.

  He tried to reestablish a friendly feeling about this woman. He tried their one joke. “Cowgirl.”

  She giggled and pulled away, pushed him on his back, and straddled him.

  “Oh that,” he said. “I didn’t know there was a word for it.”

  “But you’ve done it?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then shut up and do it again. Hard.”

  About ten minutes later, her little cries and moans increas
ed in frequency, and he speeded up to help her. When she climaxed, he let himself go too.

  She lay still on top of him for a count of ten, then craned her neck and squinted to see the electric clock on the nightstand. She disengaged from him, crawled off the bed, and began putting her clothes back on. “Old Bobby will be wondering what’s taking so long. He’s an old guy and has to pee a lot. I watch his table when he goes, so he had to watch mine.”

  The bomb maker sat up and began to dress too.

  She pulled on her right boot, stood, and stomped once to make her foot settle into it. “Do you still want the AK?”

  “How much?”

  “A thousand.”

  “That’s the price for brand-new.”

  “This is brand-new.”

  “It’s been fired, right?”

  “Once or twice.”

  “Then it’s not brand-new. It’s secondhand.” He stood, picked up the rifle and examined it, opened the chamber, and then set it down on its open case. It was in very good condition, but it had been fired a few times.

  She sat beside him and put her hand on his thigh. “You just got free sex that you had no right to expect, and didn’t even know was coming. If you were a gentleman, you would appreciate that and give me the benefit of my generosity. If I weren’t a lady, I could claim you forced me, get somebody to kill you, and take all your money.”

  He laughed. “You can have the thousand. Want to go out to dinner tonight?”

  “Gee, I’m sorry, but Bobby is a relative of my ex-husband. Some kind of half-ass cousin, but he calls him his uncle, which isn’t possible. He’d be capable of causing trouble.”

  “Want to give me your cell number so I can give you a call another time?”

  “Nope. It’s been fun, but I don’t want to get hooked up and moved in with my next guy and then have you calling me up in a month. You know what I mean?”

  “Sure,” he said. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a stack of hundreds, then counted out ten on the bed. Then he put another hundred down and said, “Here’s a hundred for that carrying case.”