Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 46, No. 11, November 1982

He gestured tentatively. “It’s Ronnie. I think he’s in trouble again.”

She angrily waved the remark away. “What do you mean, again? You act like he’s always in trouble.”

“Well, isn’t he?”

She snorted, and dusted her face with powder, speaking through the pink haze. “It’s nothing but ordinary youthful high spirits. Every boy gets into a little trouble now and then. Why the way it is today, if Tom Sawyer was alive, they’d have the poor kid in a detention home.”

Martin looked apologetic, but his tone was firm. “It’s more than that, Carolyn. Why won’t you face it. Today it was the principal of his high school. Ronnie was caught stealing from the gym lockers. He’s going to be expelled.”

Carolyn swung angrily around on the vanity bench. “I’ll have a talk with the principal tomorrow. I’m sure there’s some mistake, but don’t bother me with it right now. I’ve got more important things on my mind.”

She turned back to the mirror, relieved to see that Martin was leaving the room. If she hurried, she would have time to grab a bite to eat before the others arrived.

In the kitchen, she poured herself a glass of beer, and picked up a slice of cold, limp pizza. As she stood by the refrigerator, she heard the front door slam.

“Ronnie, is that you?” she called down the hallway.

“Yeah”

“I left frozen dinners in the fridge.”

“I gotta go back out for a minute. I just have to pick up something from my room.”

“Well, don’t be late.”

“Sure, Ma.”

The ritual over, her duty performed, Carolyn turned back to the pizza. Ronnie wasn’t a bad kid really. She didn’t know why Martin kept on so about him. There wasn’t really anything wrong with the kid that he wouldn’t grow out of.

Her mind jumped from Ronnie to the coming evening. It was really going to be something. The fuzz wouldn’t suspect a thing, until it was all over; until their cherished new police station had a large hole where the ladies room used to be. They had rehearsed it several times. She, Carolyn, was to ask to use the John, while they were waiting to see the Chief. She would conceal the bomb in the trash container. They would be long gone before it went off. She smiled at the thought of how clever Denise had been. The bomb was set to go off at a specific time, but if it was opened, or tampered with, it would explode immediately.

She looked at her watch. The others would be there to pick her up any minute now; she had better get her things together. She threw the crust of the pizza into the garbage disposal, wiped off her hands, and hurried to her bedroom.

When Carolyn opened the door to her room, she saw Ronnie standing in the open doorway of her closet. Her purse was in his hands, and evidently she had surprised him in the act of opening it. Surprise, guilt and defiance showed on his face. Feeling as if she was existing in a quick-sand dream, she tried to open her mouth to shout.

There were two thoughts in her mind as the explosion ripped the room: She had been wrong about Ronnie, and perhaps it had not been so clever an idea after all, hiding the bomb in a woman’s purse.

Terrorist by Edward D. Hoch

He tried to explain to them who he really was — but they wouldn’t listen!

* * *

He liked the country, always had.

He liked the colleges especially, with their ivied walls and peaceful classrooms, where he could enunciate the gutteral syllables of his mother tongue without dishonor. It was a good country, and he wanted only to see more of it.

He’d married a woman, married too young, perhaps. Married foolishly. She always wanted a better house, or more money, or some other demand he could not meet. He wanted only the peace of his classroom, and his students. Perhaps some day she’d drive him back across the sea, to that other land he’d all but forgotten though still it was home.

Once he’d decided to leave her, decided while he stood in the morning hallway of their walk-up apartment and watched the rising sun trace little patterns of brightness on the faded carpet. He remembered the breeze in the air that day, remembered how it tinkled the hanging glass chimes over the porch steps. He’d walked all the way to the campus that morning, nodding unseeingly at the neighbors who passed, breathing in the air and squinting at the sun and thinking about leaving the wife he no longer loved.

Between classes they often let him fool about in the chemistry lab, where he daydreamed of inventing an explosive so powerful it would rid the world of war. Surely Joseph Pulitzer would have understood that. And Nobel, who invented dynamite while still trying to tell the world it could live at peace. When he talked of such things to his wife, she merely laughed. Had the atomic bomb ended war? Not forever, surely.

And he thought about his wife, eyes scanning the stoppered bottles on the lab shelf.