The Second Explosion

The explosion occurred at dusk of the day after we had fully upgraded the safehouse.

Angela and I were seated on the living room couch, which had been pulled away from the wall in order to place it where it would not show through the picture window. We had just turned on the floor standing room lights and were discussing Emily’s progress at the PISS gun range. She could now reliably hit a stationary man target at room length distance even if she wasn’t able to put multiple rounds reliably in the heart area known as “center of mass”, so Angela had the PISS Armorer issue her a Glock 43 and a kydex plastic paddle holster, the same set up I was using in my stretch waisted and snug leisure capris with a kydex paddle holster I borrowed from him as well. Elizabeth had the Ruger wheelgun. We were carrying openly and outside the waist band and I had been trying out various locations since I’d always purse carried up to now. At the moment I was using Ralph’s style with the gun behind my back cheated right.

I was nervous about arming Emily this early, but Angela insisted we needed as many guns and shooters as possible. I also made a mental note that I was going to need, rather quickly, more concealed gun friendly leisure clothes than I currently possessed.

Emily and Lady Chief were in the kitchen sharing recipes and superintending our dinner: fresh Pacific sandab fish stew, fresh baked bread, with Romaine and Endive salad. Lady Chief had found a can of lard in the pantry and had made her superb apple pie, which was cooling on the kitchen counter. In the end, she insisted, lard was still the best shortening for real pie crust. Two more bottles of Saskatchewan, Pinot Gregorio this time, were airing out.

Elizabeth and Ralph were napping, in her bedroom, and on a basement cot, respectively. Since Ralph would be on evening and night duty immediately after
dinner so Angela could nap early for late night to morning duty before our next trip to the gun range, he was napping in his clothes. Elizabeth, however, from long years as whore and madam, where you either did an underwear strip tease or let the John get erect by undressing you, was stark naked in her bed. Because of her 75 years, she took an early evening nap regularly to be refreshed for dinner and after.

Both David and Donald were headed to the safehouse to join us for dinner and for continuing to interview Lady Chief in the evening. Since the monitor block had finally been installed to the far left of the living room window, Donald left PI first, bringing 3 technicians for 24/7 coverage of the CCTV monitors and an interior alarm on the new monitor block. The watcher on duty would activate it in the event of an intrusion into the light path surrounding the entire house. The automatic and doorstop alarms were still on order, so we needed constant human eyes on the problem. And two extra cots for them were coming with them in the electrocar trunk.

The bomb was on the undercarriage, just below the driver’s seat, of Donald’s fresh PI electrocar. How it got there is still unknown, but the best guess, given Donald’s chronically sloppy tradecraft, is that he had slipped into the habit of changing cars in the same sequence. A watcher who knew the current car could reliably predict the next for the bomber. We had finally broken his habit of parking directly in front of the house on the opposite side of the street. His protocol now was to drive several blocks past the house, use the four left turns maneuver to check for tailing cars, and, if he was clean, to stop briefly in front of the safehouse walk when a passenger needed to disembark, then park several blocks away in the same direction he was traveling.

The Truth Team must have been hiding within sight of the house, since they detonated the bomb as soon as Donald stopped. Once again the bomb was far larger than necessary, shattering a block’s worth of windows facing the blast wave. There were no neighborhood casualties. The electrocar was lifted up, flipped over, and landed upside down on the safehouse lawn. No one in the car survived. The blast blew out both picture windows, knocking over the heavily bottom weighted indoor plants and throwing the dining room screen into the overturned dining room table.

The living room screen smashed into the rear wall and hundreds of razor sharp glass shards flew through each room. Angela and I were both thrown ass over teakettle backwards as couch rolled over and this, luckily, protected us from the glass. The two cooks were knocked to the floor and dinner was blown off the stove with hot fish stew flying everywhere. The wine bottles didn’t break, but they remained on the floor slowly gurgling their contents off. The apple pie landed in a classic and perfect pie fight slapstick circle, then slid down the wall.