Jack of Spades

“I’ve come to the right place then. You can’t forget the smell of soldering, can you? The little puff of smoke. The acrid burning smell. The slight irritation in the eyes. One whiff and you are back there, a young teenager, in your bedroom, wiring up your first project. Mine was a radio. What was yours?”

“Who are you? Did my Mum let you up here?” The boy brandished the soldering iron like a weapon, but I ignored it.

“Yeah, she let me come up here,” I said, stretching the truth. “Well, what was it? Your first project?”

The boy’s room was cluttered. Several component boards were piled haphazardly on his workbench. Plastic bags of small components peeked out from under them in places. At the back was the main chassis of an old radio, and pinned to the wall were component identification charts and circuit diagrams. A computer monitor showed that under the chaos there was a computer somewhere. There were chairs in the room, but they held piles of magazines, books and printed papers. A big spool of three-core cable lay on the unkempt bed. I was tempted to ask if he had any adult magazines hidden under the mattress.

“A siren. Well, a simple oscillator, actually, with a small speaker. Out of a magazine. What do you want?”

I peered at the small board that the boy had been working on.

“What’s this? I must say your soldering skills have improved. The first bomb, the one at the school, the soldering on that was terrible. Several bad joints. You had also used the wrong components in some places. No wonder it didn’t work.”

“It did! I heard the explosion from the other end of the school!”

“Uh, huh. What’s this?” I asked again. I tapped the circuit board and picked it up in spite of the boy’s attempt to stop me.

“Let’s see. Oh, mains powered. Nice power supply. Trigger circuit. Yeah, I’ve seen that one before, I think. And a radio transmitter circuit. This is a remote trigger. You’re using a slave device to set off the actual blast?”

“Give it back!” The boy grabbed for the board and I let him have it.

“Where did you find the design? You didn’t design it yourself, did you?” In my opinion, the boy was not capable of designing it.

“It’s off a website. You know...”

I nodded. “You know that they can trace you from that?”

The boy was shocked. “Really?”

“Yeah. So, where are you targetting this time? School hall? Dining room? How about the jocks changing room?”

“Why should I tell you? You’ll only stop me!”

“Nah. If I was a police officer, I would have arrested you already. There’s enough evidence here to get you locked up for years. If you had managed to kill someone and they caught you, you’d skip juvenile and go straight to a senior prison or a Young Offenders Institution. Can you imagine it? You’re very young. Vulnerable. Among all those older boys!”

“Who are you? What do you want?”

“Let’s just say I have similar interests to you.”

“What?”

I gave up. “Why do you want to kill people?”

A glint came into the boy’s eyes. He took off his glasses and wiped them.

“Because they are all bastards! They laugh at me!”

“All of them?”

“All of them. The girls are the worst. I tried to kiss... never mind. She got her friends and they surrounded me. Pushed me. Called me a pervert. Me! You should have seen what she and Kenny did in the store room at the gym! Some of the girls are bigger than I am, and they knocked me into the mud! They all laughed! I ran away.”

“For that they need to die?”

“Them and the boys and the teachers. The boys bully me, so I keep away from them. They called me stinky! Said I didn’t wash. They steal my books and stuff. Pull my hair. The teachers? They never help me.” The boy raised his head. “But I’ll get them! I’m smarter than they are! I’ll show them!”

I considered my own schooldays. There were the scared ones, the ones who scuttled through the hallways, heads down, possessions clutched to their chests. I was bigger and beefier and was never teased. But I still hated them. All of them.

“And then?” I asked.

“Huh?”

“After you’ve got your revenge, what then? After you’ve bombed the school, what then​?”

“Then everyone will be scared of me!”

I sighed inwardly. “Only if you tell them. What would they do then? They’d toss you into prison and throw away the key.”

The boy paused. “I’m going to kill my stepdad, He’s always getting at me. He always wants me to go for walks with him and Mum. ‘Getting to know each other’ he calls it. Smarmy git! I’m busy!” He waved at his workbench.

“What about your mother?”

The boy scowled. “Her too. She’s doesn’t love me. Always lovey-dovey with my stepdad. It’s disgusting and it’s all her fault! She drove my Dad away, then married that loser! After I’ve blown up the school, I’ll blow them both up!”

I stood up. “I have to go. Oh, by the way, your trigger circuit won’t work. The logic chip is the wrong way round.”

“What?” The boy spun round, and started examining the circuit, comparing it to the diagram. He didn’t notice when I left.

I descended the stairs, and stepped over the body of the boy’s Mum. She’d bled a little after I had stabbed her, but I easily avoided the small pool of blood. At the front door was the stepdad’s body. One eye had been destroyed by my knife and I had also punctured his throat. He’d coughed up blood before he died, and was lying in it. I stepped over him and opened the door. Closing it behind me, I put the key back under the flowerpot.

I was three streets away when I heard the explosion and smiled. The boy’s terraced house was now a pile of rubble. Hopefully the police would decide that the boy had accidentally triggered the explosion while he was building his device, thus killing himself, his mother and stepdad. I’d been careful when I had killed the parents, so that the police wouldn’t have reason to suspect that the explosion wasn’t an accident.

I could not tolerate competition. True, the boy was a novice, and I had had to set off his first bomb for him, but his bombs looked promising, and he’d somehow acquired a box of high explosive. That showed cunning and initiative. But he might find, as I had myself, that one explosion and one killing was not enough. Best to kill him, now, I thought, before he gets a taste for it like I did.