"How About a Bomb?" -- An Excerpt from the Novel "A Dancing Bear"

"How about a bomb?" said Warren.

Gus rallied, straightening a finger at him. "That mightiness be more than like it, Wozz."

"How about a nail bomb?" offered Col.

Gus said, "I be given to believe not. I like to believe of myself as a spot of a gentleman bandit. A nail bomb, that's the type of thing could give us a bad name."

Blue said: "What about a suicide bomb?"

"Expand," Gus said.

"You know. You just drive right up to him in a avant garde packed with explosives."

"I'm listening Blue -- provided you're not referring to my Kombi."

"It doesn't even have got to be a van, Gus. You can make it in a ute, whatever. I've level heard of some monster doing it on a motorbike. The bomb was actually strapped to him."

Gus was still interested. "You've got a bike, Blue. You volunteering to be the freak?"

Here Blue's enthusiasm tapering off. He looked solemnly down into his beer. "I can't Gus. My license got suspended mate. I took a joyride while I was pissed."

Gus chuckled dismissively, moving back over to the hotplate. "As if that matters, you spastic." He was turning the steaks again. How many sides did he believe a steak had? "Mind you," he said thoughtfully, "your bike'd most probably take the hogs consecutive dorsum to us. And your body, for that matter. Of course we could always claim you were rogue, I suppose. Acting off your ain bat. Or maybe -- I'm thinking aloud here -- but maybe we could just strap that much gear to you that you just acquire friggin' vaporised."

"Then they'll just utilize his dental records," Col pointed out.

Blue looked on with mounting concern.

"Not necessarily," said Gus. "What if we broke into his dentist's beforehand and taxed all his X-rays? I've often wondered why cipher makes that. That manner they'd have got nil to travel on to do the i.d., would they? Or you could -- and I'm just talking speculatively here, Blue. I'm just thinking out loud. But you could strike hard all his dentition out, couldn't you, before he strapped on the gear..."

Gus drop into a ruminative silence. He tapped his pair of tongs rhythmically against the hotplate. Blue watched him with deep unease, saying nothing. Apparently his fearfulness of displeasing Gus outweighed, for the moment, his fearfulness of becoming a strap-on bike bomber.

"But let's believe about this properly," Gus said. "Let's believe about the whole logistics of it. For one thing, we'd have got to be dead certain the bomb went off at the exact moment the motorcycle hit the bloke. Wouldn't we? I mean, we wouldn't desire it travel off early, would we? Not even by a few seconds. Because then you'd have got the farcical state of affairs of this ablaze fucking skeleton just resonant towards the cat at about two statute miles an hour. And what kind of statement would that make? Frankly, I doubt the bike'd even remain upright. Even if it did, the geezer could just step out of the manner of it."

He pensively tapped the hotplate. He was vexed. "By the same token," he slowly went on, "we wouldn't desire it to travel off too late, either. What would we be looking at then? This true cat on a minibike just Big Dippers into the wall of the guy's house or business office or whatever... And then he just sit downs there waiting to explode. Assuming he's survived the stack. And then maybe 10 proceedings later or so he blows, by which time our target'd pretty obviously be well out of there. Or is Blue meant to dismount from the wreckage and just screen of run after him till the thing travels off? Fuck me. This is actually a batch more complicated than it sounds, isn't it? It's fair dinkum giving me a headache."

He laid down the pair of tongs and massaged his troubled skull. Finally he sighed with resignation.

"You might be in fortune here, Bluey. I'm starting to believe we might have got to shelve this one. There's too many imponderables. I mean, what exactly are we meant to prang the motorcycle into, for starters? Just the presence wall of his house? It doesn't vibe right. There's no class to it. His office? How make we acquire the motorcycle up there? In the lift? It's bloody two floors up. But what other option have got we got? I intend we can hardly just cut down the cat down as he's walking along the street, can we? That'd be ludicrous. Why trouble oneself with a bomb at all, if you're already going to be creaming the geezer with a minibike at top speed? You can't kill the cat twice. But then if you've got no bomb... If you've got no bomb, the whole political component of it
travels out the window. Basically you'd be looking at an mundane hit and run. The lone political ingredient being that the geezer on the motorcycle have maybe got no teeth."