Lone Wolf #2: Bay Prowler (3 page)

San Francisco was a beautiful city. It was built over the San Andreas Fault of course, and someday, probably within the next ten years, was going to fall into the sea. But it was still a beautiful city and Wulff could appreciate it. It had the best climate in the country even counting the rain, which was good for the jungle animal from which man had evolved. It had hills and beaches and views and wealth, the best landscape in the country, and vaulted straight into the ocean and that clear escape from America for which Americans had always yearned. It had good sex, good bars, good colleges, good restaurants and, barring the San Andreas Fault, almost every natural advantage which men could seek or want. But Wulff could not enjoy it. Not even for a moment.

He had not come to San Francisco for relaxation; now, in the town for no more than four hours, he could feel the old tension and terror beginning to leak from his gut into all the other places. Of course he was scared. He had been scared all his life and he would go on being scared; it was a myth that people like him did not feel fear. Of course they felt fear. It was the fear which kept them going, drove them forward, saved them time after time from accidents which would have finished off courageous men because it was the fear which kept you on the move.

He felt it now. Looking over the two large furnished rooms with kitchen he had hastily rented, looking at Tamara who had collapsed into one of the single beds and was now, finally, in a deep, wistful sleep, he could feel the little hedges and outcroppings of the fear. Here in San Francisco he was perhaps coming closer to the enemy than he ever had before. San Francisco was a transfer point; lying on the ocean, nearest point of access in the country to the major supply routes, everything probably passed through here before heading east and south. San Francisco then was the major node; it was the vein into which the poison was introduced and it spilled it all through the body of the country.

Looking out the window Wulff could see through the mist the familiar wreckage and devastation, the signs of what junk had done to the country. It could only be junk that was doing it. The organized, massive drug trade was the only new element since the beginning of the 1960’s, and as the one wild card in the deck, Wulff thought, it had changed everything. It was not his country any more. Like a burned-out tenement it was
no one’s
country; it existed only for the looters and the vermin.

There were a few people shambling on the streets, there to the south were the grey buildings which signified the downtown district. There again in the distance he could see the bridge, gateway to the West, he guessed they had called it, but he did not know if the mist through which he stared was climate or drugs; probably it was a little bit of both. The factories had spilled the poisons into the air, that was true, but there was a deeper poison running on the surface and underground, infesting every crevice of life, and that was what had put the stink up. Pollution and industry were only the excuses they had given for what had happened to the country. What had really happened to the country was more obvious and irrevocable than that.

He looked at the bed where Tamara was sleeping. That was one sign of what was going on. Multiply it by millions, Wulff thought, and you could begin to see what had happened. Part of a whole generation, maybe all of it had been permanently removed from the line of succession because of what the manipulators at the far end were doing. In Harlem it was heroin, in the college and bohemian scene it was speed and hash, scattered all through this was pot, clouds of it, the easiest and most insidious drug of all because it set them up for the harder stuff. Pot was to heroin, Wulff knew, like that first ceremonial beer the neighborhood bartender used to give you when you were eighteen was to hard gin. It established the mood, it opened you up, it got you going. Once you could accept pot you found the next steps easy; you were just trading in a mild high for a series of shorter but more thrilling ones. At the end it was all the same. He looked at the sleeping girl. She came from a culture where pot was handed around the way beer had been drunk in Wulff’s living room a long time ago. She could not understand. None of them could understand. That was the key.

Enough of this. He could feel the restlessness edging within him. What he needed to do was to get out and begin to smash, hit San Francisco the way that he had hit New York, but he felt an undertow of reluctance. Gerald’s papers had already yielded one bad item, the distribution point in the Oakland Hills. Did he dare to trust it for another? The first place he had hit had turned up a sick girl and a dealer who had tried to kill him; now this girl was in his room and the dealer lay dead. One hour in town, one corpse. Wulff had nothing against killing, killing was necessary if you were going to get anything done against these people—just the price of the operation, so to speak, kill or be killed—but it was time to retract, be cautious if only for a few hours, until he had figured out a game plan. A lot of people were going to be out looking for him, he knew. Half of them would be from the East, the remainder would be local talent. They would be coming at him in waves.

Well, he had not expected to live a long life, anyhow. Most of his life had been given away in a furnished room on West 93rd Street in Manhattan; he had not been kidding when he had told the New York people time and again that they could not scare him or buy him off because they were already dealing with a dead man. Wulff was dead. He walked and talked, breathed and thought, functioned and conceived but something was gone, gone for good. Could a dead man be killed? Not really, he supposed.

Nevertheless, he felt the fear.

He opened the attache case and looked through it idly. San Francisco was on top because, according to these notes anyway, there was some kind of massive shipment expected in here within the next few days, a million dollars, a million and a half of heroin, the notations had not been specific. The man named Gerald who looked like a stockbroker and had worked on a high floor in the Wall Street district had never been specific, not even to himself. All that had been clear was that something big was moving in here, that it was expected around early September, and Wulff had figured that it might be a good idea for him to be here as well, because a big shipment keyed up everyone, brought them into focus and alignment the way a strategically placed lump of sugar could draw the roaches, skittering, from tabletops and basins to start lapping away. The Oakland Hills address, noted by Gerald as a transfer-point, had seemed to be a very good place to start: his mistake. Maybe he should have started off instead with a man named Nicholas Severo who, according to what he deduced, was one of the keys to the transfer. An address in Sausalito, twenty miles north. He was obviously one of the most important men in this section; he seemed to be the one arranging and controlling this deal. He should have gone, he guessed, right to Severo.

But Severo, any top man, was going to be difficult to hit and he had thought that it would be better to ease his way up the line, starting with an actual reconnoitering of the proposed transfer point. He was pretty sure that that
was
the proposed transfer point. Oh well. Live and learn.

He heard a car door slam in the street and instinctively was on his feet, stuffing the materials back into the case, going to the window to check it out. There were sounds and sounds; long years of training, of being on patrol in Vietnam, and then New York City again had taught him how to discriminate at some subliminal level between the meaningless noises and those which had significance. Now, immediately, Wulff was at screaming alert.

A Fleetwood had parked across the street. There seemed to be a man at the wheel; small puffs of smoke from the exhaust indicated that the car was at idle. Another man came from the passenger side, checked the street up and down, and then walked toward the rented Galaxie which was parked three car-lengths behind the Fleetwood. The scout looked at the Galaxie intently, then kneeled to check the license plates. He stood abruptly, went back to the Fleetwood, poked his head in and seemed to be in conversation with the driver. Then the scout opened the door, went in, slammed it. The Fleetwood’s motor was shut off then. The exhaust dribbled off.

So. So easy. They had found him.

They didn’t know where
he
was, of course, not just yet, but they had located the car. The rest would be easy for them, they must be figuring. Sooner or later Wulff would come to that car and they would take care of him then. If by any chance Wulff had observed them and made sure to stay away from the car, that was all right too. They probably had a complete make on him by this time, and as soon as he came into view they would take care of him one way or the other.

If he didn’t come into view, that was okay too. They would wait him out. The important thing from their point of view was probably to tie him up indefinitely;

they could kill him at their leisure. Right now, so quickly, they had him bottled up like a fly in a jar.

Wulff walked from the window, looked at the sleeping girl whose sleep, he now knew, was going to be ripped apart. He took out his revolver, pondered some. Sniping at this pair would be ridiculous; sealed in that Cadillac they were invulnerable, they were not going to come out of that Cadillac two at a time. All that sniping would do would be to pinpoint his position to a couple of competent professionals, which he was sure they were. Their employer might even be happy to sacrifice one to draw fire, just to make sure that the other put Wulff away permanently. How that looked to the professionals in the front seat, of course, he did not know.

If he was ever going to get anywhere in San Francisco, he was going to have to take them frontally.

That meant going into the street, going into the line of fire, taking whatever they were willing to offer. Riskier that way but cleaner.
All right,
Wulff muttered,
let it be.
He had not come to San Francisco on a pleasure trip. And everything within him called out now for violence. It was better that way; it was like professional football players beating up members of their own team on the sidelines before kickoff just to get the feeling of contact.

He needed the feeling of contact.

“All right,” he said to the sleeping girl, “Tamara, you’ve got to get up.” He was gentler than he had thought he would be. The girl moved slowly on the sheets. She fluttered an eyelid, seemed about to move purposefully, then collapsed into sleep again.

A hand waved idly in front of her face; she seemed to be trying to put him, along with consciousness, away.

Well, why not leave her that way? Wasn’t that the way that they came off the amphetamine jags? Twelve to twenty-four hours worth of sleep and they were ready to start again, most of the hard edges of the drug cleaned out of their systems. The trick was to be able to come down into sleep in the first place; most of them, when they were as far into the drug as Tamara seemed to be, just went on and on, showing a more highly developed schizoid syndrome until nature finally pulled the plug in the form of a complete collapse, and then there they were, a lot of them poking around mental wards or striding through the streets of the cities with a strange, absent brightness in their mad eyes. But this girl had been able to crash, without the help of any additional drugs (unless she had slipped something into her mouth—Wulff just didn’t know); she had been able to sleep, and when she came out of it she probably would be a good deal better. A healthy young girl this one for all the seeming dissipation: she would be able to take right off again. Yes indeed, Wulff thought, she had a considerable future to look forward to.

So why not just let her sleep? He was tempted. Whatever happened would happen outside of these rooms, and if he was clever enough, the two hit men outside would not even know from where he had emerged. The girl was probably safe here, as long as she kept under cover. Why not simply go on his way, do what we had to do? If he came back she would see him in good time and if he didn’t she probably wouldn’t even miss him. That was the way they were.

He couldn’t do it. He admitted this to himself wryly. He was willing to face the fact: he was involved with this girl at least to the degree that he wanted to say goodbye to her, let her know that he was going. He couldn’t just walk out on her with the small but real chance that he would never see her again, and with her unwarned.

Not half a day into San Francisco and he was more involved than he had been with anyone in months. Not since the day he had seen the girl named Marie Calvante in that furnished room had he been involved with anyone. He had dealings with the rookie cop, Williams, who had been on patrol with him that night and had offered to help Wulff any way he could, but Williams did not really count. If he ever got in touch with the man and he suspected that he would it would be strictly business. That was all. He would be getting in touch with Williams because he needed something out of the man. Whereas this was different. There was nothing this girl could do for him. Anything that she
could
do would lead only to disaster. If nothing else, even if all of his luck had run out, Wulff still had his instincts. His instincts told him that there was no future here at all.

Who needed a future? He had all the past that he could take. He reached out and touched her again, in the sensitive part in the small of the back. She stirred in the deep sleep, seemed to revolve to the finger-point, fluttered her eyes again. “Tamara,” Wulff said, “please get up.”

She rolled toward him, her eyes still closed. “I don’t want to get up,” she said.

“You can go back to sleep in just a minute.”

“I don’t want to sleep either.” She pivoted on her back, opened her arms. “Do you want to hold me?” she said. “I want to hold you, Avenger.”

“Not now.”

“Can’t I hold you, Avenger? I’ve wanted to hold you for so long. You can do anything to me you want.” Her eyes opened then, slightly and suddenly, her mouth poised into a smile more open than he had ever seen, her breasts straining against her sweater. She was very pretty. He should have seen that all along. How had he not been able to see it? Tamara was a very attractive girl.