Lone Wolf #2: Bay Prowler (9 page)

“Let her breathe,” Wulff said, “let her breathe or I’ll shoot anyway. You’re going to suffocate her.”

Understanding seemed to penetrate the man’s eyes. Subtly he relaxed his grip on Tamara. He felt the rasping intake of her breath more than he heard it and color seemed to return. She was crying.

“I’m going to take this girl out of here,” the man said, “her and me down the stairs.”

“With that leg? Are you kidding? You take one step and it’ll go out from under.”

“You shot me in the
leg,
” the man said. Like the issue of Willie’s death, it seemed that he was rediscovering it. The only reason that Wulff was here was because both of these men were profoundly stupid. Couldn’t Severo find better personnel than this? Or were they free-lancers, looking for a bounty? Everybody was going to come at him now.

“You need help,” Wulff said calmly. He felt edges retract, felt suddenly in control. The worst that could happen was that all of them in this room were going to die. It was too bad that Tamara was part of it but this had been her decision. “That’s a fast-flowing wound. You could bleed to death.”

In confirmation, the man looked down at his leg. The blood was coming out of a vein in the calf like milk being wrenched from a container; staining rivulets of it already flowing into the panels of the floor. “You son of a bitch,” he said.

“Please help me,” Tamara said, breath back in her. She sounded as she had the first time he had seen her; in that other damned room. “He’s hurting me. He’s—”

“I’m trying,” Wulff said quietly. “I’m doing what I can. You have to stay calm.”

“Your cunt,” the man said, his face twisting. “Tell your cunt to stay calm.”

“Quiet,” Wulff said. He felt a shroud of detachment settling over him. He had literally nothing to lose. Tamara was dead, the man was dead, all of them were gone anyway. Anything that happened was a benefit.

“I’m going to walk this cunt over to the stairs,” the man said, “and I’m going to take her downstairs and into a car and you’re going to let us go. She’s going to be wrapped around me all the time, just like she was wrapped around you.”

“I can’t be hurt anymore,” Tamara said, “I just can’t be hurt; I’ve had too much.”

“Do what he says, Tamara.”

“You’re going to let him take me out of here?”

“We’re in a bad position. I have no choice.”

“You can’t do this to me. You can’t.”

“Yes he can,” the man said. He began to lead her with difficulty toward the door, stumbling. “He’s going to go along with me because he has nothing else.”

“That’s right,” Wulff said soothingly. He allowed the gun to fall, let the man’s eyes follow it, “I have no choice.”

“We’re going to get into that car and drive away,” the man said, “if you try anything I’ll kill you.” He extended an arm behind him, pulled the door open, the maw of the hallway seeming to leap toward them, “and then I’ll figure out what to do with you.”

“I thought you cared,” she said. “I thought you cared for me.”

“He doesn’t care for anyone, cut. He doesn’t even care for himself. All he wants to do is to get out of this alive. You shot Willie. You shot him down. You’re going to pay for this.”

The man backed Tamara into the frame of the door. Wulff let the pistol hang by his side. He felt the weight of it dragging him clear up into the neck muscles. The girl’s eyes were open, desperate. She was right. She had not been lying to him. She had been hurt too much; she could not take any more. And the odds were that she would never get in or out of that car alive.

“Come on, cunt,” the man said. He increased the pressure; Wulff could see the blackening start in Tamara’s face again. He was cutting down her wind. Her physical reserves were almost exhausted; he saw her begin to slide toward unconsciousness again. No. Do not warn him.

He stepped her into the door, retreated toward the hall. The man was in even worse shape than Wulff had figured; the leg bleeding more freely now with the slight motion, his balance precarious. He would probably never make it down those steps, not carrying the girl. He would stumble, pitch and fall before he ever got to the street. What would the difference be, however? The fall could kill Tamara as easily as a gunshot. The odds were only slightly improved.

Her face convulsed, mouth fell open. Her eyes seemed to hang from her head. She collapsed in the man’s arm, unconscious, slumped forward slightly.

The weight pulled him off balance. That and the leg were too much, he could not handle the alteration. He stumbled, shifted a leg, grabbed for purchase on the floor. Tamara’s leg locked behind him.

He swayed. She slid forward exposing an open area of his chest.

It was enough. Wulff raised the revolver and fired.

The man died slowly. First he weaved like a dancer in front of him. Tamara, his partner fell away, fell away, hitting the rug in a heap. The man clutched at his chest as if stricken by heartburn. He began to babble.

Wulff did not have the patience to watch him die slowly. He fired the gun again and hit the man in the forehead. Powder spilled from the gun. He smelled kerosene at the center of the report.

The man groaned, made a watery sound, flipped backward over the staircase. He fell straight down, a plummet. Wulff heard him hit on the next landing, bounce and begin to roll.

He left the stairs as he had mounted them, then, off-balance, scattering.

He knelt over Tamara. There was no sound within the rooming house. There never was when anything like this happened. Rooming houses were for the kind of people who had long since adapted to their lives, if they had adapted at all, by denying anything outside of them. They were people who had found surviving difficult, either because they could not come to terms with the world at all or because the coming to terms had hurt them terribly at sometime in the past and now they simply wanted no part of it.

Either way, Wulff guessed, he could set off a bomb in his rooms and as long as it failed to bring down the quarters of the various roomers, they would stay inside.

He knelt over the girl. Once again her respiration was smoothing out. She was coming around. Healthy, vigorous, for all the abuse that this body had taken, she would get it started again. Wulff at that moment felt all of his thirty-two years. Thirty-two was not so much older than twenty-three, not really, but it was at another stage of life altogether. He just could not take what he used to, what these children were routinely taking now. Maybe it was a kind of evolution. The drug culture was breeding, by elimination, a frame which before it ran out all together could hold up almost anything. He could never have taken, even in his twenties, what this girl had. He knew that.

She stirred, opened her eyes. Alertness, intelligence returned. “He’s gone?” she said.

He nodded. “He’s dead,” he said, “he’s somewhere down on the next landing or the one below that and he’s dead.”

“Too much death,” she said, shaking her head. “There’s too much death.”

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Wulff said. “There’s a dead man in those rooms too. We can’t stay now. We have to leave.”

“Why?” she whispered, “why—”

“I can’t explain,” he said, kneeling by her. “There’s just no time. There’s no time at all.”

“Everybody wants to kill you,” she said, “why does everybody want to kill you?”

“Because I’m dangerous,” he said, “because I’m digging in closer to them than anyone has for a long time.” No time to talk now. He took her thin wrist, prodded her, rose. She came to her feet and fell against him heavily, licking her dry lips. She reached out toward the wall weakly, then balanced herself.

I can’t take much more of this,” she said.

“I know,” said Wulff. “We’re getting out of here. Is there someplace you can go now?”

She looked at him. “What do you mean?”

“Someplace safe you can stay. I don’t mean another crash pad and I don’t mean back wherever you’ve been. Do you have a family? Do you have parents?”

Her eyes narrowed, seemed to calculate. “I did,” she said, “it was a long time ago.”

“How long?”

“Six months. Six, seven months.”

“You’ve got to go back,” Wulff said. He pulled her into the room. The corpse lay there in a solemn pile, unblinking. She gasped and covered her face, then slowly drew her hands down, past her cheeks and held them on her chest.

“I can look at it,” she said. “I’ve seen death before.”

“I don’t want you to see any more now. You’ve got to go back home.”

She shook her head. “I want to come with you.”

“You can’t.”

“Why?” she said.

“Because you see what’s happening. This is the way it’s going to be from now on, right through to the end of my life. You can’t stay. The next time we won’t be so lucky. It’s happened twice already.”

“Why don’t you stop?” she said. “Whatever you’re doing, can’t you stop it, can’t you get out of it before it’s too late?”

He felt her touch against him and the touch made him think about that, if only for an instant. “No,” he said then, “I can’t.”

“You’re the avenger, you mean.”

“I don’t know what I am,” Wulff said. He left her standing there, went to the closet, took down his one suitcase, reached again, seized the attache case. “It doesn’t matter what I am either just as long as I don’t take you all the way down with me.”

“You saved my life twice.”

“I only saved your life because I put you in situations where I almost got you killed,” he said grimly. “It can’t go on this way. I think your gratitude is misdirected.”

She looked at him. Beneath the wall he could see feeling in her eyes. “You’re really serious, aren’t you?” she said. “Whatever you’re doing, you won’t stop.”

“No, I won’t.”

“You
can’t
stop, is that it?”

He nodded once. “Something like that,” he said. “Come on, this isn’t going to last here. We aren’t safe here anymore. We never were.”

She stepped over the corpse delicately, however, went to the window and looked out. This was a girl who could adjust to anything. “I won’t forget this room,” she said, “I won’t forget you.”

“All right.”

“Will I see you again?”

He looked at her, paused. “If I get out of this, maybe,” he said, “maybe you’ll see me again. But I won’t be out of it for a long time.”

“Being the avenger is a full time job, isn’t it?”

His voice sounded strange to him. “It isn’t a job,” he said. “It’s a pleasure.”

“That too,” she said, “I knew that.”

“Will you go back to your parents?”

“I never thought I would. They’ll ask me questions. They’ll ask a lot of questions. They’re not people who can just accept—”

“So tell them. Tell them what they want to know. You’ve got to be safe for a while.”

“And tell them about you?”

“If you want. It doesn’t make any difference at all.”

He hoisted the suitcase, the attache bag. “Let’s get out of here,” he said then.

She turned from the window, stepped back over the dead man and took his arm. “This is ridiculous,” she said, “this is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever lived. There’s a dead man in this room and another one downstairs and ten minutes ago they were going to kill us and now I’m going to walk out of here as if it doesn’t matter. Did you ever hear of anything like that in your life?”

He said, “Of course it doesn’t make any difference. It doesn’t make any difference to them so it can’t to me. You just have to go on.”

“But can people really live that way?”

“I can,” he said. He led her to the door, they walked through. In the hallway she dropped his arm so that they could go down the stairs single file.

The man he had shot twice lay still at the second landing. His hand, clenched in death, was holding his shirtfront, pulling it straight up. His face looked much younger than Wulff had seen it before and seemed to be utterly at peace. For some of them, death indeed was a release.

He stepped over the body. The girl followed him. It was very quiet in the rooming house. No one was looking out at all. As long as events did not infringe upon their lives, these tenants could take anything. It was like the war or the drug business.
Business as usual, just don’t touch me.

He went outside. He had expected, ten minutes ago, never to see the light again but the sight of day did not impress him. Day and night, the landscape, it was just a background against which you carried out the acts of your life. Would the man named Willie have noticed the daylight streaming over Wulff’s shoulder as he shot him?

Tamara came beside him. The street was very quiet. A car which probably had been the one in which the men had come was parked crosswise, front tires nestling against a telephone pole, over the curb. They had not expected to be very long, obviously. An old Plymouth, dented in on both sides. Probably bounty-hunters after all. Regular operatives would have driven a better car.

“I’m going to put you in a taxi,” he said, “and get you out of here as quickly as possible. That’s the best way.”

“You’ll find very few taxis around here,” she said and then one turned the corner, coming up fast. Wulff waved at it, half-expecting that it was carrying someone who would again take a shot at him. But it was empty. The driver brought it to a halt, leaned out, a young bright-eyed man with a beard. All through the country it was a new breed of taxi-driver. The middle-aged men without hope were being phased out.

“I’d come with you,” she said, “you know that.”

“I know that.”

“If you really wanted me to I’d come with you through it all. But you don’t want me, do you?”

“No,” he said.

“You don’t want anyone.”

“I want someone,” Wulff said, “but she died sometime back and that was the end of that.”

She moved toward the taxi. “Did I remind you of her?” she said.

“In a way.”

“I thought so.” She opened the door, then stopped. “Do you want to know where my parents live?” she said, “so you can get in touch with me when this is all over?”

“It will never be over.”

“Do you want to know?”

“Yes,” he said.

She told him. It was just numerals on an avenue in a suburb; it had no significance to him. But he knew he would remember it. “All right,” he said. He reached into his pocket, took out his wallet. “Let me give you some money,” he said.