Lone Wolf #6: Chicago Slaughter (13 page)

“It’s generally better to do them behind the back,” the cop said, “that way they can’t come up over their head high,” he pantomimed this, “and then come down on your head,” and he made a sweeping gesture which just missed Randall by an inch or so. Randall felt a moment of fury and resisted an insane impulse to seize the gun from his jacket and begin to shoot. He could certainly get Wulff and the cop before anyone here knew what was happening. He decided that he did not want to do this however. He restrained the impulse quickly, noting that five or six cops who had been lounging around the desk were fastening profound stares on him. “That’s all right,” Randall said, “he won’t do anything.”

“You mean, you really know how to take them into custody,” the cop said, “all of that fine training under federal auspices, right?”

Wulff said, “The man’s only trying to do a job, officer. Give him a break,” and the cop gave Wulff a look of hatred, his hands coiling unconsciously into fists. There had undoubtedly been difficulties before he had even walked into this one, Randall thought. Calabrese had done the job but maybe it had not been necessary after all; these cops might have killed Wulff themselves and saved him all of this trouble. He decided not to dwell on the irony of this, it did not appeal to him. He pointed the gun at Wulff. “Come on,” he said, “let’s go.”

Wulff shrugged and began moving. Randall let him pass, then moved in behind him. The cop gave Randall a swat on the buttocks as they moved toward the door.

“You show him the real stuff,” the cop said and all the others around the desk laughed. They really did not like federal personnel here, that was clear. Fuck them. Fuck all of the sons of bitches. Randall fell into line, took Wulff down the steps. Now he was on his own, a strange, vacant barren feeling hitting him along with the wind. At the door Wulff paused, waiting. Randall opened the rear door and Wulff slid in.

“I’m going to let you sit that way without restraint,” Randall said.

“I’ll cooperate.”

“I’ll assume you’ll cooperate,” Randall said. “I’ll be driving one-handed with the gun out and I can see everything in the rear-view mirror. I want you to sit at the extreme right of the rear seat.”

“I’ll do that,” Wulff said, “I’m not going to make any trouble at all.” He sounded almost meek. This was not the man that Randall had been reading about; it surely did not sound like the kind of man who could kill Versallo as Versallo had been killed. “I want to get where we’re going as badly as you do,” he said.

“Then cooperate,” Randall said. “Just be reasonable and there’ll be no trouble at all,” and slammed the door on Wulff, walked around the other side and got behind the wheel, holding the gun in a good, light grip all the time.

How well did Wulff know Chicago? If he knew it well there would be hell to pay when he realized that they were heading in the wrong direction. But even so he had a few moments clearance until he hit the expressway, heading toward the marshes. After that, as Calabrese had said, he was on his own. All right, he was on his own.

Randall started the car. He felt the killing lust once again firm within him. He put the car into gear. He drove.

Wulff knew early on that he had put himself into a box. Who did this clown in front think that he was fooling? He was no federal marshall and this was no federal car. Nor were they going in the proper direction. It was one of the crudest fake-up jobs of a vehicle he had ever seen; on the other hand, maybe it was a pretty good job, it was just that he had seen so many of these doctored vehicles in the NYPD that it seemed laughably obvious to him. Maybe not to the men that had done it though. Give them credit.

He knew that he had been sucked in, phonied in somehow, but he found the situation so interesting that for the time being all he did was sit back, his wrists beginning to ache slightly within the clamp of the handcuffs, and take in the situation. The audacity of the ploy was amazing to him; also if he was not being taken to Patrick Wilson, exactly where
was
he going? And how deeply was Wilson involved in some kind of illegality if a trade-off like this could be maneuvered? It was fascinating; it also, he knew, probably involved his life but he would get to that soon or sooner. In the meantime, he and the driver were working in accord, and that was to their benefit. Both he and the driver shared one overwhelming purpose; they were getting him away from the Chicago cops. That was a good thing. That was really the most that Wulff could have asked, to have gotten out of that precinct house at the time that he did. The situation, menacing at best, had shown signs of deteriorating into an irretrievable ugliness and he was not sure, ultimately, that he would have been able to have gotten free of this one. Maybe. Maybe he would have finally gotten himself booked and thrown into a cell but he suspected that there was a good deal that would happen to him before then. Booked into a hospital bed, most likely.

He leaned back in the seat, his wrists aching progressively from the handcuffs and looked at the back of the driver’s neck. This was not the neck of a federal marshal either; there was a certain aura which came off people like this which, dealing with them as he had, no one could miss. It would be just possible, he thought, to lean forward and strike the man before he would have a chance to react. This could be done. But what then? The car would lurch out of control and the driver would certainly have the presence of mind to make the accident a devastating one. That determination would be communicated to Wulff, as a deterrent of course.

“How soon will we be there?” Wulff said.

The driver said nothing. He yanked the wheel left and right and they were on a flat open avenue, East St. Louis, Wulff guessed, heading north at forty or fifty miles an hour. “Is this the right direction?” Wulff said.

The driver still refused to talk. Wulff leaned forward, jamming a knee into the seat in front of him and said, “I have a right to know, I think.”

“No conversation,” the driver said. “I told you that.”

“I’m not making conversation. I asked you one question.”

“Keep your fucking questions to yourself,” the driver said. He reached across the seat, hefted the gun, showed it to Wulff by raising it against the windshield. “I mean that.”

“That’s not too bright,” Wulff said, “showing a gun in a crowded area. We might get pulled over. The cops here are very alert.”

“Shut the fuck up,” the driver said and moved the car faster. He seemed to be afflicted with a kind of sullenness, a dangerous, deteriorating gloom spreading out from him. Wulff caught it. That gloom probably had something to do with the fact that the driver was considering the true implications of what lay ahead of him. Up until this moment he had never really confronted the necessity to murder Wulff
mano a mano.
He had been possessed with the excitement of getting him out of the precinct and into the car. My sympathies, Wulff thought, and just to keep the man preoccupied said, “I’ve got a lot of information to give, you know.”

“I don’t know anything.”

“That’s why I wanted to get to Patrick Wilson, you understand. There are a lot of important details I can give him, specifics for the investigation.” Would he really talk this way if he did not know what was truly going on here? Probably not. He warned himself to cool it.

“I told you and I tell you the last time,” the driver said, “I don’t want no fucking conversation.”

He hunched over the wheel, holding the gun like he might a cigar and concentrated on speed. The car burst free of traffic lights and, as was so common in even the densest of the metropolitan areas, found itself on what had become a flat highway, low buildings and barren land around them, flowing out of the city. There was no city that man could construct so complex that it did not, ten to fifteen miles in most directions away from its central point, fall away.

Wulff looked out the rear window where he could see the buildings of Chicago wrapped in smog and filth. If the junkies had their shit, then the cities had pollution. Same thing. Shroud events, corrupt realities. The car swerved to the side. They had come suddenly into a deserted, abandoned area; the car curving on a side-road now almost hidden from the main, a few dismal buildings poking up from the flats around which the car circled. It looked like an abandoned dispatch station of some sort; years ago before the cars and suburbs destroyed public transportation, buses or trolleys must have been sent out of this area; there were still the remains of tracks, gutted and porous, lying half-exposed in the mud and ancient ruts left from tires. Twenty years ago this must have been a very busy place, Wulff thought, hundreds of men must have worked here moving out the network. But now, as they came close on the crumbling buildings, looking through open spaces in the ruined concrete to the patches of darkness inside he decided that it was no such place anymore. Places like this served only one function and that was murder. Thirty or forty years ago the gangs had had to load their victims into cars and take them to Evanston or Joliet to dump them … now they could do it in the inner city. There was an irony in there somewhere, Wulff supposed, if he wanted to bother looking for it.

The car stopped, shuddering a little. The man in the front tilted down the sun-visor, took the pistol, turned on Wulff. The handcuffs were really biting in now. The cop may have laughed in the precinct but the man had done a good job. He knew his work. Clumsily applied the handcuffs had almost stopped circulation not only in the hands but moving up to the shoulders as well. Wulff felt that he was close to losing control of his arms. “All right,” the man said, holding the gun on him, “everybody out.”

“This is no marshall’s office.”

“You noticed that.”

“This is no federal building,” Wulff said, “and you’re no marshall.”

“Is that so?” the man said. With the gun in his hand, turning to face Wulff fully without the distraction of having to handle the car he seemed to have come to some full sense of himself, indeed seemed to be enjoying things. “You noticed that.”

“You must think I’m some kind of fool,” Wulff said.

“Oh no. I don’t think you’re any kind of fool at all. You’re Martin Wulff and the last thing I’d call you is a fool. Get out of the fucking car,” the man said.

“And if I don’t?”

“Then I’ll shoot you right in the back seat and let the bloodstains puddle out. But I’d rather have the car to get back where I’m going and I figure that it’s worth a minute more of life to you to cooperate with me.” The man brushed hair out of his eyes, sweating lightly. “Get out of the car,” he said again.

He was right, of course. You could talk about death as an abstraction, calculate your willingness to accept death in the face of many things or even as a gesture. But people, almost all people, when they were forced right down to it would do almost anything at all for an instant more of life. They would suck cock, dig their own graves, slobber and beg, dance in circles or lie in a terminal bed in a hospital ward somewhere, juice dripping into their veins like heroin while they wheezed and gasped against the life supports for just one more breath. Just one more breath, steer clear of death; we know life, Wulff thought, but we know nothing of what is contained outside of it. Life is only a fraction of experience, this is true, but it is that fraction we know and that is why, righteous or evil, pious or profane, even the most fanatical preacher would deny God under gunpoint just so that he could have enough breath to deliver that denial. Sadness, sadness: he had learned more about death than he ever wanted to know and this man had not misjudged him. Oddly, however, he did not have a sense of crisis. This man was a professional but Wulff was pretty sure that he could not kill him. It was just a question of feeling.

“I can’t move,” he said, “I’ve lost circulation in my arms. Besides, how am I supposed to open the door?”

The man had not thought about it. He was so involved with the gun and murder that the simple logistics of the thing had escaped him. His face contracted with thought, “All right,” he said, “that’s a point. I’ll get out and go over and open that door near you and then you’ll come out.” He turned, opened the driver’s door and ducked to move his head below roof-level. “Don’t try any shit,” he said.

Wulff, poised behind the seat, brought all of his weight down on his buttocks and lashed out with a heel. He had been concentrating on this for several moments, gently working his legs up against the seat, getting his kneecaps almost to the top and then away so that he would have an angle of impact. Now, his foot, pointed sidewise, connected with the man’s neck just below the medulla. It was a sidewise impact, the man seeing it, already ducking away, trying to get his gun on Wulff. But the blow was stunning and he was unable to make coordination between hand and gun, his hand shaking on the trigger, finger palpitating against the trigger; then finally he got off a shot, ill-aimed, smashing into the rear window above Wulff’s head and the recoil of the shot atop the momentum of the kick sent him spinning all the way out into the dirt, head-first. Wulff yanked desperately at the lever on the left side trying to get at the man but his arms had almost been deadened by the handcuffs; from wrists to neck he felt little more than a numbing ache where his arms had been. The man hit the ground and rolled, came up.

He came up slowly with an expression of terror but when he saw what had happened, that Wulff was still battering helplessly at the door, struggling with the lever to get out, the terror went away, running out of him like blood and in place of it came a slow, eager smile which was like the one on the face of a child about to be offered an illicit gift. His eyes were stunned but slowly they came into focus looking at Wulff and then, as if he had all the time in the world the man paused, shook himself and began very casually to knock the dirt from his clothing, brushing from thigh to knee, knee to raised instep, instep to ground and only then, when his appearance had met some internal standard, did he look downward, spot the gun, pick it up and then walk slowly toward Wulff. There was a jauntiness to his step, a brightness to his carriage. He might have been walking forward to receive communion.

Wulff stopped trying to work on the lever two-handed. Instead he remembered an old trick from judo training at Fort Bragg many years ago: find the pressure-point. The least force is the greatest if applied at the proper juncture. He put his index finger into the space between the lever and the door and rather than trying to force it up through arm movement used just the tip of the finger, keeping the finger rigid, using his arm as pivot to ease it up.

It opened and the door unhinged just as the man with the gun was walking toward him, the gun already in the process of being levelled. Wulff inhaled, drew back both legs and in that moment before the door could click closed again, kicked out ferociously, slamming the door so hard that it almost broke free of its hinges to go spinning into the marshes beyond.

Instead, the opening door hit the man.

It hit him squarely across the stomach and he gasped, gave an
uh!
of surprise and pain and then went stumbling back, his eyes wheeling, his mouth opened like a dog’s, struck in the solar plexus. Barely able to breathe he dropped the gun in order to gather breath, the gun twinkling away from him and Wulff leapt upon him then, closing the ground in a heavy, chopping run which tore his own breath from him and then huddled against the man in brief but horrid embrace, looking once again for that pressure-point.

He had no arms, really, and the man, as hard-hit as he was, had two but there was the recollection of judo training once again to remind Wulff that what matteredwas not strength but leverage, not condition but distance … and if he could close upon the man tightly, face to face with him, hold him within that limited range, then he had cancelled out the only real advantage the man had. Distance for the enemy was strength; it would enable him to bring his arms into play, get at the gun again. But if there was no distance there would only be equality and Wulff closed that gap to less than an inch, breathing against the man, feeling the storming, gasping breath of the man hit in the plexus coming back at him. It was an intimacy of a sort, almost the kind of intimacy one might have with a woman, the bodies shoved against one another, engaging in an exchange which was horrid rather than graceful but equally total.

Wulff brought his arms, completely numb now, above his head and used them as a wedge to bring them down upon the man in a battering smash, the man cried out and tried to drop back a pace but Wulff straightened him with a knee to the jaw and now, looking at him in sudden anguish the man’s face exploded blood like a pulped fruit, running. He screamed, a scream of mingled hopelessness and pain as he realized that he would not be able to get to the gun before Wulff destroyed him. He struck out feebly and Wulff dodged the blow, brought a knee up again to the damaged plexus and the man fell to his side in the mud, gasping. He opened his mouth and tried to vomit but absolutely nothing would come out. Wulff was reminded of Versallo. “Son of a bitch,” the man said, grasping for the syllables like twigs, breaking them off, painfully, one by one. “You dirty son of a bitch.”