Lone Wolf #6: Chicago Slaughter (4 page)

He held the revolver steady. He could kill them. He could certainly kill them. In terms of the lives they led it would probably make no difference. They might not notice the difference themselves. What was the difference between life and death for a freelance federal narcotics agent? He looked into the eyes of the near one and saw furnished rooms.

“Don’t do it,” that man said. He must have seen the decision forming in Wulff. If nothing else, working for the federal authorities gave one a certain acuity, a heightened sense of awareness and possibilities. “You can’t do it.”

Wulff looked at his gun and then he looked at the men again. Traffic was pouring by on the Grand Central Parkway. No one cared. It made no difference to anyone as long as the lanes stayed open and they kept on moving along. He could kill these two men, strip them naked, probably bugger them in sight of the traffic lanes and the Triborough Bridge. As long as the traffic moved. That was the important thing.

“Fools,” Wulff said again. “Fools.”

He shot the near one in the forehead, high, above the ridge between the eyes. The man gasped once. It was less agony than surprise; a vaulting surprise which momentarily gave him an impression of health, vigor. Blood sprang to the wounded part and then made its passage elsewhere. The man raised a hand to his forehead, wiped at the blood as if he was wiping sweat. Then he fell straight forward like an actor practicing tumbles at a rehearsal, blocking his fall at the last moment with an extended wrist. He did not look injured at all. He croaked once and died.

“No,” the other one said. He backed away from Wulff. Wulff had lost track of identities. Speaker or driver? Driver or speaker? In the car they had defined themselves very clearly but outside of that they were interchangeable. He moved toward a clump of bushes. A truck cut into the right hand lane seeking to pass, horn screaming. The driver’s face was a pale vegetable behind glass, staring, screaming. Mufflers cut out, the truck went by, got ahead of the car in the middle lane with which it had been struggling and moved out of sight. “No,” the man said again. “You can’t do this. You’re not a killer.”

“Yes I am,” Wulff said. “I’m a killer.”

“But you only kill pushers,” the man said. He had the false calmness, the control of the man who as the result of some intricate calculations had decided that he was already dead. Wulff knew that feeling; he had died himself several months ago and now everything was being played on the margin. Still, it was interesting to see in someone else. “You don’t kill people who work for the law.”

“You work for the law?” Wulff said. “You’re the law?”

“Of course,” the man said. He skittered toward a pile of stones. “I
am
the fucking law. I’m a federal agent. You shoot me and you’re messing with the federal government. You’re not a fool, Wulff. You can’t be.”

“You don’t understand,” Wulff said again. Tiredly, feeling the edge of hopelessness even in the act of killing. Because you could not change. You could change neither yourself nor them; the combinations and relations merely shifted. At the base was the same ignorance. “If you represent the law,” Wulff said, “if you represent the government, then we’re all dead. You’re not the law. You’re an outlaw.”

“Now listen,” the man said as if calling upon some reserve of authority, “if you think—” and extended a finger toward Wulff. Wulff was able to make the individuation then; this was the one who had presented him with credentials. The speaker. The voluble one.

“I think,” Wulff said. “I think a great deal.”

He shot the man in the head.

Unlike the other, this one seemed eager to die. The concept of death might have excited him the way that sex was supposed to excite most men. In the abstract anyway. In any event he died as if he had been practicing it in his bed alone for a long time, rehearsing all the gestures of a graceful expiration. He had worked on it. He fell straight down, kicked once and then rolled on his back to display his empty face to Wulff. “Ridiculous,” he said then as if this had just occurred to him. “This is ridiculous. I can’t—”

“Yes you can,” Wulff said and put another bullet into his gut. This one finished off the speaker. He died without another word, his eyes not even blinking. It was as if a series of assumptions, long suspected, had been confirmed.

The two dead men lay in the mud off the Grand Central Parkway. Wulff put his gun away feeling that in a way it was almost like old times. Home. A returning. He had left his first corpses in New York, two of them on upper Madison Avenue in Harlem. Now he had come full-circle, another two on the Grand Central Parkway. Nothing changed. The blood ran, it mingled. All of the blood of the cities. Havana, San Francisco, New York, it was all the same. The same blood.

Wulff went back toward the Fleetwood. The driver, thoughtfully, had left it in idle, the motor knocking. Lifter trouble, common with Oldsmobiles and Cadillacs of the late 1950’s, a clatter in the cylinders, the high, dense sound of metal working against itself without enough lubrication. They had worked out that problem, the GM engineers, by the sixties and now you didn’t hear lifters. What you heard was the uniform gasping of engines struggling under emissions control. Progress. They were rapidly moving toward that point where nothing would work.

Well. Something would work. Death still worked, Wulff thought. He got behind the wheel, put the Fleetwood into gear. Traffic went by and no one cared what was going on in the little marshes by the side of the road; chalk one up for death. Death was the true urban phenomenon; its dwelling place was the cities. Here it could stalk. If it would ever be noticeable on the Grand Central, it would only be as an obstruction to traffic.

Wulff looked at the card that the speaker had given him. Patrick Wilson. Patrick Wilson of Chicago and his merry men, the federal grand jury. All right, Wulff thought, the car rolling at fifty. All right. All right.

He had the valise. Williams was in the hospital. The two men who had been appointed to take it away from him had run into a very little difficulty of their own.

So all right and all right again. Patrick Wilson was making a presentation to a federal grand jury? Patrick Wilson wanted a look at a valise?

Don’t send messengers, Wulff thought.

Wilson wanted it?

All he had to have done was to ask.

Now he was going to get it. Directly.

At around eleven that evening, give or take an hour—he was drifting in and out of the drug haze, he simply did not have at that time the cop’s keen chronological sense—the phone next to Williams’ bed rang. Williams picked it up, not even thinking about it. Coming out of the screen of drugs he took himself to be in a station house and here was another damned squeal coming in. The phone never quit. “What is it now?” he said.

“This is Wulff,” a voice said.

Wulff? Who was Wulff? Williams had to make an effort, pull memory like a sheet around him and adjust it before it finally, laboriously, began to come clear. With the clarity was pain. The drugs could not shield the pain no matter how deep they went. “Oh,” he said. “I heard about you.”

“Your wife told you?”

“Not much,” said Williams. His head hung back, he looked at the ceiling, for a moment he found himself falling back into the tunnel of dreams. No sound from the other end of the wire. “It’s hard,” he said. “It’s hard to talk, man.”

“I know that.”

“It’s very hard to talk. I got my self cut. I almost got killed.”

“I heard about that.”

“You got Stone’s valise. You got the smack taken out of the property bureau. You nearly blew up Vegas and then they hijacked you to Havana but you got out of there too. You got out of everything. You’re too much, man.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” Wulff said. His voice sounded strange, a hard edge to it as always, but underneath it an anxiety which even through the deadening phone wire Williams could catch. “You don’t know the third of it.”

“All right,” Williams said, A flare of pain went through his ribs, reaching with fingers toward his heart. He shifted in the bed, seeking a better position. Out in the hallway, the two new ones, the four to midnight shift, were sleeping. He could hear their snores sounding through the hallway like children waving rattles. Two fresh ones would come on at midnight. Two by two by two. Six men a day, one hundred and forty-four man hours to guard David Williams. About twelve hundred dollars a day, figuring in the fringes. Eight-thousand four hundred a week, almost thirty-five thousand a month. If he was hospitalized for a year the NYPD would go over four hundred thousand dollars just for this detail. That was very moving. It was a testimony to his value. It would be nicer, of course, if they could give half the money to him and invest the rest in an alarm system, but that was not the way the PD worked. Why should they? He shifted again. “I don’t want to know anything about it,” he said, “I’ve had it.”

“No you haven’t. Don’t cop out now, Williams. The fun is just beginning.”

“For me it’s ending,” Williams said. “I don’t think I’ll ever have any fun again.”

“Don’t be pessimistic,” Wulff said. “You’ll get yourself a desk job and you’ll be fine. Don’t worry about the knife, it won’t have any lasting effect. You’ll get double disability.”

“I don’t need this man,” Williams said softly. “I do not need to be called at eleven at night to hear
your
fucking pep talk. Any fucking moment you’re going to start singing, aren’t you?
Semper Fidelis.
Get off the wire.”

“I got your valise,” Wulff said, “I got your smack. Doesn’t that make you happy? You sent me out and I got it.”

“I don’t give a shit.”

“Don’t go dead on me now, Williams,” Wulff said sharply. “You were the one who set this whole thing up.”

“I do not give a shit anymore,” Williams said. He looked up at the ceiling light; a fly was battering itself against the smooth, dead glass surrounding the dim bulb. A fly in a hospital? Highly unsanitary. But then again flies had a way of getting in anywhere. “Just leave me alone.”

“I’m going to Chicago,” Wulff said. “They are starting a federal prosecution in that town. There were some people who thought that they might be an escort service but I decided to go direct. To save them the trouble. I am taking that valise to Chicago.”

“You’re crazy,” Williams said. It was the first thing he had said with energy in weeks. “You’re out of your mind. You’re turning that stuff over to federal authority?”

“Why not? You’re the one who was talking up the merits of the system. Here’s its chance to prove itself. I’m going to give them Exhibit A. I’m going to give the system a chance to prove itself. You ought to be very happy, Williams.”

“I don’t believe in the system anymore,” Williams said. He put a hand against his side. The fly, driven to some frenzy by the surfaces of the lamp, its heat and stolidity, gave one last lunge and then fluttered to the bed, landed on the back of that hand. Williams flipped it off against a wall; it hit with a
tic!
“Don’t tell me about the system.”

“I don’t believe it. You are the original systems man.”

“Don’t get started on me,” Williams said. “I’m a sick man. I got a shiv in the ribs. I almost died; I’m not out of the woods yet. Don’t start on me, Wulff.”

Wulff said, “I was sorry to hear that, you know. I was very sorry about that.”

“Sure you were.”

“It shouldn’t make you give up. It shouldn’t make you change your mind.”

“No?”

“No,” Wulff said, “it shouldn’t. If you want to give up on the system you should do it because of what you understand, what you’ve learned. The way I’ve learned. But a shiv in the ribs is an accident. It could happen to anyone.”

“Sure it could.”

“Sure it
did.
That’s just rolling the dice, friend. I learned all about odds and percentages in Vegas, friend. All right,” Wulff said after a pause, “I want you to rest. I don’t want to push you. I just wanted you to know that I’m taking this thing into Chicago and I’m turning it over.”

“That’s going to make the PD look like shit,” Williams said. “They’ll love it. They’ve been looking for something like this for years.”

“I want it,” Wulff said. “I want the PD to look like shit. Don’t you?”

“No. Not particularly.”

“Then you still believe in the system,” Wulff said. “Then you’re lying to me and yourself. You haven’t given up on the system, just your own luck. But you still believe in the PD and that’s the crucial part. Think. Think over the whole thing, Williams. I’ll be in touch.”

Williams heard the sound of the phone going down.

For a few moments he just lay there and worked on the pain in his ribs, trying to coax it down, move it away from his heart. He had decided a long time ago—at the worst stages, in the beginning—that if he could keep that pain cresting south, use mental will and concentration to work it toward his groin, away from the delicate and palpitating area of the heart, then he would have a chance, mind over matter, control of his destiny. But if he were to slacken his will for even an instant, lose control over his pain, it would leap like an animal straight north, set its claws into his heart and then he would be gone.

Now it seemed closer than it had been in days. Only through careful breathing, even stroking of respiration through his body was he able to bring the pain down until it nestled in his belly like a kitten, curled upon itself and then went sleepily away. He looked at the ceiling, where the small, dark blood spots left by the tormented fly glowed against the light. Did he believe in the system? Was Wulff right? Had what he taken to have been his new attitude merely been a deception, an armor against more pain and all the time he had merely walled himself off from an excess of feeling until he was ready to deal with it again?

He did not know. It was something to think about, however. It was something that he would have to think about, and now, with the pain sleeping against him, he guessed that he could avoid it no longer.

One of the night patrol came in and asked him how he was doing. Williams said all right. No nurses ever came in to ask him this. Maybe they were intimidated by the presence of police. Or maybe they simply felt that the PD, alert to the task as always, had the situation under control.

He slept and dreamed of the knife—like a snake, arcing like a wish toward his heart.