He straightened the logo, got behind the wheel, backed out of the space, and headed off. Forty minutes later, out beyond the palm-tree nurseries and tomato fields, he cruised through a grubby rural neighborhood, located the street, and parked the van under a power pole a block from his target house.
He climbed back between the seats and pulled on coveralls with the same telephone-company emblem on the back and the breast. He put on a yellow hard hat, tucked the heavy, insulated gloves into his rear pocket, and jumped down from the back of the van.
He unhooked the aluminum stepladder from the roof of the van and tucked it under an arm and started down the broken sidewalk toward 11777. All the sevens in the world weren’t going to save this unlucky guy.
Concrete-block houses, graffiti. Peeling paint, cracked windows. A few houses completely boarded up, several with blue tarps on their roofs, covering missing shingles blown away in the last hurricane, which for christsakes was two years ago. A few with stunted trees and some half-assed hedges.
No dogs barked, no one looked out any windows, no children playing anywhere. It was barely light, and most of the crappy cars were still parked in the driveways. He left the sidewalk and followed a dusty path to the side of the house where the electric meter was. The old-school analog model had four display dials across the top, and a wire loop held together with a yellow piece of plastic was supposed to prevent tampering. The aluminum rotor wheel wasn’t revolving.
He walked down the north side of the house and found the main transmission line, which ran through the branches of a mango tree to the power pole, a single transformer serving this house and three of its neighbors. Claude looked back at the curtained window and thought he saw the shadow of someone moving behind it.
Claude opened his stepladder and climbed up to inspect the connection. And, yes, there it was, as he knew it would be. Marcus Bendell was diverting current, using an illegal hookup that was as crude as they came.
He’d shaved open a two-inch section of the service drop line and peeled back the heavy insulation. Both clamps of a twelve-foot red jumper cable were fixed to the service drop, and on the other end the two clamps were attached to the house line. Bypassing the meter.
Twenty-two thousand volts came out of Turkey Point, which the transformers upped to over two hundred thousand volts for cheaper long-distance transmission, then the substations dropped that down again, and the local step-down stations lowered it even more. The transformers on the pole behind Bendell’s house cut the power back to the standard 240 volts, which, with the right amperage, was still plenty enough juice to fry someone’s guts.
The red cables were hidden in the branches, but weren’t well concealed. Claude had spotted them right away when he’d done his recon on this dwelling, scouting the neighborhood, deciding how to take out Bendell. Soon as he saw the hookup, bingo perfecto, he had his plan.
Claude was a burly guy. Five-nine, 180, with a cue-ball shaved head and a thick Fu Manchu cropped neat. Short of stature, yeah, but thick-wristed, heavy-boned, and possessing extra-long arms. A back-alley gorilla motherfucker.
Back in his twenties, before bucket trucks took over, Claude spent years shinnying up wooden poles like a Jamaican kid harvesting coconuts. Happiest hours of his life were on top of those power poles amid the rat’s nest of step-down transformers and porcelain insulators and bundle conductors and the slender telephone lines, doing his delicate surgeries while thousands of volts buzzed around him.
Because Claude was efficient and reliable, he’d been promoted down from the sky to a ground-floor cubicle, then came another promotion and another, until now he had his own computer screen, a twenty-man staff, and a cell phone on his belt that put him on twenty-four-hour call. But his true calling was out here, working the street like today. Following his own righteous duty roster.
Claude drew out his yellow insulated gloves, pulled them on, then unclamped the battery cables from the house’s drop line.
He climbed down the ladder, clamps in hand, and tucked them carefully in a clump of weeds. He took off the gloves, crammed them in his pocket. The Spectra gel came in a blue tube. He ordered it from Amazon, kept it in his medicine chest. You never knew when you might want to glop some on your heart monitor or defib paddles.
He squeezed out a handful and wiped it up and down both sides of the ladder’s handrail. Probably not necessary, but Claude wanted to be extra sure this worked. He smeared a little more of the electro gel, then wiped his slimy hands on the sleeves of his jumpsuit and stepped away from the ladder.
All set, ready to go.
Reaching a hand to the window, Claude knuckle-rapped the glass, and a few seconds later the curtain swept aside and a guy’s bleary face appeared. Claude gave the kid a two-finger come-here wave, and the curtains fell closed.