Torched (18 page)

“Killing someone is crossing a line, and once you do it, you can’t go back,” Coyote said. “You’ll hurt MED and every person in it. We’ll lose any bit of credibility we’ve built up over the years.”

“Fighting one evil doesn’t give you the right to create another,” Blue said. “I can’t be any part of this.”

“Neither can I,” Coyote said. He held out his hand to me. “Come on, Sky, let’s go.”

I dug my fingernails into my palms. “Sometimes,” I said, more to myself than to Coyote, “you have to do things you don’t want to. Yesterday, I saw the lynx and her kit. I think it was a sign that we have to do something.”

Blue begged me. “Sky—come with us!”

“I can’t.” My voice cracked.

She knelt at my feet. “Don’t you see? We can still stop the logging without resorting to violence. We’ll check the traps I set, and once we find fur, we’ll get a judge to grant a moratorium on the logging.”

“Like that will work,” Hawk said, waving one hand dismissively. “Go ahead, though. Be my guest. The rest of us will be making a real difference.”

But Blue kept looking at me until I slowly shook my head. Her eyes filled with tears.

The room went quiet as Hawk found Blue and Coyote’s cell phones and handed them back. “I’m going to get rid of the rest of these,” he said, hefting the pillowcase, along with a grocery bag filled with old newspapers. “When I come back, I expect to find you both gone.”

In silence, Blue and Coyote gathered up their things. As they were about ready to leave, Meadow suddenly burst out, “Blue, can you take me to the bus station?” She gestured to her injured ankle. “I’m not in any shape to do anything dangerous. And after yesterday, I know I can’t do jail time.”

“Go, then!” Liberty said fiercely. “It doesn’t matter!” But her voice wobbled, belying her words.

As Blue helped Meadow to her feet, Coyote picked up his backpack and came back to me, his voice low so that no one else could hear. “Sky—Ellie—please come with us.”

“I can’t,” I whispered.

He touched my cheek, and I felt it all the way to my toes.

And then he walked out the door.

“So what are we going to do now?” Liberty asked when Hawk came back.

Hawk must have noticed that Meadow was gone, but he didn’t ask about her. “We’re going to do what we should have done in the first place. We’re going to take out Gary Phelps.”

“But will killing Gary Phelps really solve anything?” I tried to sound cold and rational, as if it didn’t matter either way. “Won’t someone else just step up and fill his shoes?”

“Any new CEO will think twice before they order PacCoast to start clear-cutting again. Stonix has a dozen other businesses. They’ll look somewhere else to maximize their profits.”

Now that we could all picture a real person and not a faceless enemy, Grizz seemed to hesitate. “Like, okay, can’t we just firebomb PacCoast’s offices at night, you know, when they’re closed?”

“It’s too late for that,” Hawk said. “If we want them to stop logging, we have to send them a message they
can’t
miss. A million people die every day. But this one time, it will mean something.”

I kept a calm face. But inside I felt frantic. How could I get word to the FBI? My phone was in a Dumpster someplace, and my watch with its GPS unit was in Blue’s Volvo driving down the road.

“The newspaper finally asked Gary Phelps about the lynx sighting,” Hawk continued, interrupting the frantic buzz of my thoughts. “Of course, he said there aren’t any lynx in the parcel and that we are liars, but he did say he was meeting with PacCoast tomorrow to make sure they continue to harvest responsibly.”

Hawk’s thin lips twisted. “We don’t know what time the meeting is, but that doesn’t matter. We’ll be there first thing in the morning. And after Phelps parks in the parking garage, what we are going to do, ladies and gentleman, is plant a bomb under his car. A pipe bomb. And tonight I’m going to teach you how to make one.”

Grizz looked interested, Liberty looked energized, and I tried to look as if I weren’t terrified. How could I short-circuit this plan?

Hawk had us line up on the long end of the bed closest to the kitchenette. He stood on the tiny square of linoleum. At his feet was a cardboard box filled with a blender, tinfoil pie plates, two open bags of garden fertilizer and a half-empty bag of charcoal briquettes. Plumbing supplies, a drill and what looked like a half-dozen phone earpieces spilled from Wal-Mart bags next to the box.

“Welcome to Pipe Bombs One-oh-one.” Hawk had a strange look on his face, almost like he was happy. “To make a pipe bomb, you pack an explosive into a closed metal pipe and then detonate it with a fuse.” From one of the Wal-Mart bags, Hawk took a foot-long piece of metal pipe and two metal caps that screwed onto the ends of it. “Once you detonate that material, it doesn’t have anyplace to go. So it ruptures the pipe with a huge amount of force.”

“So it’s, like, boom!” Grizz said.

“That’s right,” Hawk agreed. “Boom. And even though Wal-Mart is happy to sell every red-blooded American a gun, you can’t buy explosives or even fuses there. That’s why we’re going to have to make them ourselves.”

Making a pipe bomb turned out to be a lot of work. Grizz got assigned the manly tasks. He drilled two holes, one through a pipe cap and one into a flat piece of metal. The second hole would be used to size the fuse so that it would fit through the first hole. Grizz also hammered charcoal briquettes wrapped up in a motel towel. Liberty ran the charcoal chunks through a blender and sifted the results through a tea strainer.

Meanwhile, I became the cook. Most of the ingredients had to be baked to drive out any excess moisture. Following Hawk’s directions, I preheated the oven to two hundred fifty degrees. I put white round beads of fertilizer from an open green gardening bag on a disposable foil pie pan and stuck it on the warped wire shelf of the oven.

“This oven’s so old,” I told Hawk. “What if the temperature gauge doesn’t work right?”

He shrugged. “It’s not heat we have to worry about—it’s fire. If this were a gas oven, it might be a different story.”

After the white beads had been cooked and cooled, they went into the blender, which Liberty had washed and dried. A few pulses of the blender’s blades turned them into powder. Hawk told me to pour the powder back into the pie plate and set it aside. When he wasn’t telling us what to do—and even when he was—he kept pacing.

The next step involved measuring out some of the contents of the brown gardening bag. It smelled like rotten eggs. Liberty wrinkled her nose as the stench seemed to intensify in the oven. “What if somebody complains?”

“Didn’t you notice how it smelled like cat piss outside of room number three?” Hawk asked. “I’m pretty sure our neighbors are making meth. This is the kind of place where nobody notices anything.”

For five or ten minutes at a time, I would be caught up in the minutiae of what we were doing. Then I would remember that all of these ordinary things—the garden supplies, the charcoal briquettes, the metal pipe that looked like the one that ran beneath the sink—they were all going to be used to kill someone. But there didn’t seem to be a way to disrupt the process without Hawk noticing. And even if I did manage to change the proportions or leave some clumps in the powder, the bomb might still work. Or it might all go terribly wrong and kill us instead.

As my thoughts chased themselves, searching for a way out, Liberty said, “It’s pretty sweet to think that not only will we be taking out Phelps, we’ll also be taking out that monster gas guzzler Escalade he’s driving.”

That was it! As the others nodded in agreement, I suddenly remembered the green
e
on the back of Phelps’s Escalade. The
e
meant it was a rental.

What if tomorrow there wasn’t one Escalade in the parking garage, but two?

When no one was looking, I snuck a pencil stub from one of the drawers in the kitchenette and stuffed a scrap of paper in my pocket. I went to the bathroom, locked the door and scribbled a note to my parents, telling them Hawk’s plan. I asked them to rent a black Cadillac Escalade and park it on the top floor of PacCoast’s parking garage, as far away from any other cars as possible. It had to be black, and it had to be an Escalade, even if they had to check every car rental place within a hundred and fifty miles.

If I could get Hawk to plant a bomb under the decoy car, it would blow up, but it wouldn’t hurt anyone. The FBI would have the proof they wanted, Hawk would be in jail, and my parents and I would be free. There were far too many ifs, but it was the best plan I could think of. It was also the only plan I could think of.

After I tucked the note in my jeans pocket and came out of the bathroom, I made a show of pulling a handful of change out of the other pocket. “I’m going to the vending machine,” I said. “Anyone want anything?”

Hawk jerked his head around. “Liberty, why don’t you go with Sky?”

“Don’t you trust me?” I said innocently. My plan depended on it.

“Of course I do. But this is a dicey neighborhood. I don’t want you standing out there in the dark alone.”

We pooled our quarters. In the courtyard, every other room was dark. Had my exhausted parents fallen asleep? I had to have faith that they were watching me, even if I couldn’t see them.

Now I had to figure out how to hide the note under the vending machine the way Matt and I had discussed. I tried to look casual, muttering “crap” under my breath as I dropped a couple of coins. I quickly bent down to retrieve them before Liberty could help. But she was mesmerized by the rows of cookies, candy and chips. I palmed the small square of paper and slid it underneath the machine. Liberty and I each bought a bag of Twizzlers, which Liberty said were vegan.

Back in the room, we measured the prepared ingredients and carefully mixed them together with a little bit of water until they formed a black sludge. Grizz dipped a length of cotton string into the mixture. He pulled the string through the hole Hawk had had him drill in the thin piece of metal earlier, squeezing out the excess sludge from the string. Then we put the brand-new fuse on a piece of foil and baked it along with the rest of the sludge.

“Now we turn it into powder again,” Hawk said. “Black powder.” Liberty started to reassemble the blender.

“Damn it!” Hawk yelled. We all jumped. “Use your head for once, Liberty! If you put that in the blender and it threw the tiniest of sparks, you could cause an explosion. For this last step, we have to use a mortar and pestle.”

As Hawk turned away to get the equipment, Liberty glared at his back, her eyes huge and shiny with unshed tears.

Hawk deigned to do the last step himself, using a white ceramic pestle that nested in its own ceramic bowl. He slowly crushed the baked chunks until they were as smooth as talcum, a fine slate-gray powder.

Finally, Hawk twisted one of the caps onto the pipe. Again not trusting anyone else, he made a paper funnel and gingerly slid the powder into the pipe. “You have to be careful not to pack it,” he said, as if we would all be making pipe bombs of our own in the future. “Don’t even tap the bottom of the pipe to make it settle.”

He delicately wiped the uncapped end of the pipe with a damp washcloth. “Don’t want to blow us all up by creating too much friction when I screw on the cap.” He picked up the second cap, the one with the hole in it. Earlier, he had threaded the fuse through, knotting it so that it couldn’t come loose. Hardly daring to breathe, the three of us watched as he gently twisted the second cap onto the pipe.

When he finished, Hawk looked up at us and smiled.

“Ladies and gentleman, we have a bomb.”

It was nearly three in the morning when Hawk gave us permission to sleep. Grizz began to snore immediately. Hawk himself didn’t even lie down. He kept up his pacing. Liberty tried to talk to him, but it was clear he wasn’t paying any attention to her. Finally she curled up on the bed next to me, with her face toward the wall.

It seemed like only a few seconds later when a ringing phone woke me. I sat up, automatically expecting Hawk to answer it, but he wasn’t in the room. I groped for the battered tan telephone on the small table between the two beds.

“Hello?” I croaked.

Hawk came out of the bathroom, running a gray-white towel across his face. Outside, dawn was just breaking. Liberty pushed herself up on one elbow and swiped her dreads out of her eyes. Grizz groaned but didn’t move.

It was Coyote, talking fast. “We did it, Sky! We saved the lynx!”

“What?”

“Tell everyone we found fur in the trap.” Coyote’s voice was jubilant.

“Fur?” I echoed.

“Lynx fur. Proof, Sky, proof! We’ll be at the motel in about twenty minutes. And then we can go to the EPA. You can tell them what you saw, and we can give them the fur for testing. Now they’ll have to put a stop to the logging.”

“Oh, wow!” I said. “That’s great.” I got to my feet. “See you soon.”

“Who was that?” Hawk said as I hung up the phone. He was wearing only boxers, and his chest was bare and as skinny as a young boy’s.

“Coyote. He said they found lynx fur in the trap. They’re coming back here so we can all go to the EPA.” I suddenly realized what this meant. “We don’t need to bomb Phelps. We just won!”

Liberty sat up. “We can save the lynx?”

“They got the proof we’ve always needed,” I said. “Only this is a lot better than a photograph. We can stop the logging without bombing anyone!”

“How long until they’re here?” Hawk asked as he pulled a shirt over his head.

“Coyote said about twenty minutes.” My exhaustion had vanished. Just thinking about Coyote made me aware of how dirty and sticky I was. I hadn’t bathed in days. “Does anyone mind if I take a quick shower?” I asked.

When nobody said anything, I dug out the last of my clean clothes and locked the bathroom door behind me. Once I was finally alone, I started to plan. I would find a way to let the FBI know about the pipe bomb we had built, maybe even while we were still at the EPA. Maybe I could claim I needed to go to the bathroom and then use a phone in an empty office. The FBI would arrest Hawk, Liberty and Grizz. Nobody else would get in trouble. And I could tell them that it had been Hawk’s idea. Maybe Liberty and Grizz wouldn’t even need to serve jail time.