empty.
“Hi, Liz,” I mumbled. I looked down at my shoes and made a right turn onto the street.
“Hold on, I need to talk to you.”
I stopped, but I didn’t turn back to her. Like she was Medusa and one look at her snaky head would turn me to stone. “I don’t think I should. Mom would be mad.”
“She doesn’t need to know. Turn around, Jamie. Please. Looking at nothing but your back is just about killing me.”
She sounded like she really felt bad, and that made me feel bad. I turned around. The blazer was closed again, but I could see the bulge of her gun just the same.
“I want you to take a ride with me.”
“Not a good idea,” I said. I was thinking of this girl named Ramona Sheinberg. She was in a couple of my classes at the beginning of the year, but then she was gone and my friend Scott Abramowitz told me her father snatched her during a custody suit and took her to someplace where there was no extradition. Scott said he hoped it was at least a place with palm trees.
“I need what you can do, Champ,” she said. “I really do.”
I didn’t reply to that, but she must have seen I was wavering, because she gave me a smile. It was a nice one that lit up those gray eyes of hers. They weren’t a bit sleety that day. “Maybe it will come to nothing, but I want to try. I want you to try.”
“Try what?”
She didn’t answer, not then, just held out a hand to me. “I helped your mother when Regis Thomas died. Won’t you help me now?”
Technically, I was the one who helped my mother that day, Liz just gave us a quick ride up the Sprain Brook Parkway, but she had stopped to buy me a Whopper when Mom just wanted to push on. And she gave me the rest of her Coke when my mouth was so dry from talking. So I got in the car. I didn’t feel good about it, but I did it. Adults have power, especially when they beg, and that’s what Liz was doing.
I asked Liz where we were going, and she said Central Park to start with. Maybe a couple of other places after that. I said if I didn’t get home by five, Mom would be worried. Liz told me she’d try to get me back before then, but this was very important.
That’s when she told me what it was about.
21
The guy who called himself Thumper set his first bomb in Eastport, a Long Island town not all that far from Speonk, one-time home of Uncle Harry’s Cabin (literary joke). This was in 1996. Thumper dropped a stick of dynamite hooked up to a timer in a trash can outside the restrooms of the King Kullen Supermarket. The timer was nothing but a cheap alarm clock, but it worked. The dynamite went off at 9 PM, just as the supermarket was closing. Three people were hurt, all store employees. Two of them suffered only superficial injuries, but the third guy was coming out of the men’s when the bomb blew. He lost an eye and his right arm up to the elbow. Two days later, a note came in to the Suffolk County Police Department. It was typed on an IBM Selectric. It said, How do you like my work so far? More to come! THUMPER.
Thumper set nineteen bombs before he actually killed anybody. “Nineteen!” Liz exclaimed. “And it wasn’t as if he wasn’t trying. He set them all over the five boroughs, and a couple in New Jersey—Jersey City and Fort Lee—for good measure. All dynamite, Canadian manufacture.”
But the score of the maimed and wounded was high. It had been closing in on fifty when he finally killed the man who picked the wrong Lexington Avenue pay phone. Every kaboom was followed by a note to the police responsible for the area where said kaboom occurred, and the notes were always the same: How do you like my work so far? More to come! THUMPER.
Before Richard Scalise (that was the pay phone man’s name), a long period of time went by before each new explosion. The two closest were six weeks apart. The longest delay was close to a year. But after Scalise, Thumper sped up. The bombs became bigger and the timers more sophisticated. Nineteen explosions between 1996 and 2009—twenty, counting the pay phone bomb. Between 2010 and