Lone Wolf #6: Chicago Slaughter (6 page)

Wulff had decided to go along with it. That was the only way. Mendoza was no fool; he was a professional and professionals had one trait in common down the line; they were consistent. They might make mistakes but they were moment to moment, small lapses of consciousness; overall they had a fine, consistent line of purpose and you simply could not count upon those lapses extending into a chasm through which you could throw a knife of interference. No, he had to go along with Mendoza; the alternative, which was hurling himself at the man, attempting an all-out attempt for freedom would probably result—this was his best and most calculated decision—in getting both of them killed. He could probably seize the man, choke him, get the car thrown irrevocably off-course but Mendoza would be able to get off the killing shot and even if he did not, if the shot was merely a wounding one, they would both die in the ensuing wreck. It was no percentage. Mendoza knew it too; he knew that Wulff was thinking along those lines and that there was a certain element of risk for him in this too. But with the calculation of the professional he had decided that Wulff knew what he was doing too; he was just not going to attempt anything like this. So, standoff.
Pax difficle.
Balance of terror. They drove through the Loop and into the parking area of a large, dismal warehouse on the South Side.

Here was familiar territory for Wulff. Chicago had been a strangeness, the elegance of the river, the high buildings along the waterfront looking like nothing in New York, only San Francisco could compare with this. But the South Side was pure Hunts Point; it looked like the Bronx might at the end of a murky, greasy afternoon and Wulff, looking at the way that the doors of the warehouse, streaked with obscene lettering, were closed against the afternoon, felt that he was at home for the first time since he had hit this town. He understood this warehouse, and by implication he understood the man who worked in it. It was a contrived ugliness; they were here because the man who ran things wanted to be here and would have picked a place like this given any alternative. It was the proper kind of cover. And the scene, stretching away from the warehouse on all sides was pure Hunts Point too; there was a feeling here of abandonment so profound that it had moved beyond the few stumbling human forms he saw here into the landscape itself, a landscape streaked and exhausted, wrecked and ruined by assaults compounded over fifty years. Nothing could live here. Nothing could even die here. There was not even the energy to support transition from the one state to the other.

“All right,” Mendoza said, pulling into a flat, open space at the back of the parking area, removed from a bank of trucks, “that’s it. End of the line. Let’s go.” He tapped the valise and then took it by the handle, waved the gun and showed it to Wulff. “Don’t give me any trouble,” he said.

“I wouldn’t think of it. I wouldn’t think of giving you any trouble.”

“Because,” Mendoza said waving the gun, “we’ve gone this far, it would be a shame not to wrap up the job and deliver you nice and safely. Not that I’m not willing to knock you off, you understand. I’ve been given a lot of latitude. But I’m a man of surpassing neatness.”

“Of course,” Wulff said. Not looking at the man, he got laboriously out of the taxi, felt ground under his feet, stood unsteadily. His cramped position in the cab, the tension of the drive had taken more from him than he might have calculated; for an instant Wulff thought that he might pitch to the ground. Mendoza must have seen it too because he smiled distantly and said, “Nerves will get you even if fright doesn’t, eh, Wulff?”

And they had exchanged another of their looks then, the third or fourth since all of this had started, a look which said that they both knew exactly what was going on and indeed were so deep into it that either could have played the other’s role. But in spite of that understanding they would act as if this were exactly serious instead of repertory theatre and not make any sudden moves against the grain. Professionalism. Wulff could understand this, he could respect a man who had this competence, this control of a situation. What it came down to at the root, he supposed, was that Mendoza was quite willing to die if he had to and the communicability of this resignation made him more threatening rather than less; there was very little you could do against a man who was willing to die and understood death this well. It was this power in himself which had made Wulff so effective. They walked, Wulff a few paces ahead of Mendoza, into the bottom level of a huge warehouse, a scattering of trucks on this level, sacks, leading bins, one of the trucks muttering away at low idle, men scurrying through the open spaces.

So these people were in the dispatching business, Wulff thought, keeping a few paces ahead of Mendoza, noting that no one looked at him. Each man seemed quite absorbed in his own task which for the most part seemed to be loading the trucks, although one group of men was working frantically on the idling engine, apparently trying to repair it before the fumes blanked them out. “That’s nice,” Mendoza said behind him, “that’s very nice, just keep on walking that way and everything will be fine. You’re a cooperative gentleman, do you know that? Really quite a cooperative gentleman,” and then prodded him once, guiding him right. Wulff found himself walking into an enormous service elevator, the cage open, the handle unattended. Mendoza poked and prodded him into a corner, closed the gate one-handed and then cranked on the handle, meanwhile holding the gun poised on him in that single, absent gesture. The man knew what he was doing. The man was not to be faulted; he did his job about as well as any Wulff had ever seen. The elevator went up to the second level, hovered there for a moment and then with a crack Mendoza stopped it, opened the cage. Wulff found himself looking into a long, low hallway, oddly stark and well-lighted for a building of this sort. Whoever worked on this level obviously had a good sense of his prerogatives. “Come on,” Mendoza said, standing by the handle. “Start walking.”

Wulff went past him. For a moment there was an opportunity; the gap between them was only a couple of feet and he might have been able to have extended an arm, closed that gap, knocked Mendoza off his feet. It was at least a possibilty and for a moment Wulff indeed did consider it but then kept on walking. He did not like the odds. It was even money or a little better then that that he might have been able to overpower Mendoza, wrest the gun away, take control of the situation … but fifty percent or a little more was not good enough. Simply stated, he was not that desperate. He had a fair chance of getting out of this alive or at least staying alive for a while, he did not have to do anything drastic. Besides, Mendoza had the valise. The valise was somewhere in the man’s possession; he had left it with the men in the booth controlling access to the parking area but it wasn’t going to stay with them too long at all. He was sure that Mendoza was going to get it back and transfer it up the line. Funny thing about this man; Wulff did not think of him as a messenger but as a quality in his own right.

Mendoza snorted now as if he had gauged everything in Wulff’s head, had calculated it so well that he knew what Wulff was going to think before it had been thought. Of course. A professional: he had left that possibility of attack open to Wulff—not really to taunt him because he knew that Wulff was too much of a professional himself to try it. Only one professional could do it to another; it was a tribute that Mendoza had given him. A weaker, a less intelligent or experienced man might have sprung at his abductor then. Wulff shook his head with disgust and walked down the hallway.

At the end, a door opened before him as if this had been prepared, as if his coming had been observed. He walked through into an office. He saw the man who had held the door for him and then he saw Mendoza come through and close that door as the man went back to his desk, sat, sighed, put his hands behind his head and looked at Wulff with cold, measuring eyes. Then the man sighed again, the coldness in his eyes turned into a soothed pleasure and he leaned further back, put his feet up on the desk, smiled and said, “Mendoza, that was good work. It really was.”

“Thank you,” Mendoza said. “It was my pleasure.”

“I knew you would do it all the time. I never doubted that you would bring the son of a bitch in. Someone else, yes, I wouldn’t have been sure. But not with you. I’ve just had the feeling coming over me for hours that you had scored.”

“I scored,” Mendoza said. “That’s for sure.”

“Where’s the smack?” the man said. His eyes gleamed. Wulff, looking at him, thought that he had never seen such corruption before, not of this variety, but then again there was no judging from appearances. The man in front of him, heavy, in his early fifties, dressed in a blue business suit that seemed to cover rather than to shape him looked like he had spent half his life in the process of breaking people and now, at this stage of the game, had just begun to move into the period where he could have other people do this work. Still, he thought again, if you could look at a man and fully judge him there would be no need for painstaking detective detail work, there might be no need for a police force at all. Maybe the man in front of him was a saint who operated this warehouse to give the handicapped a station in life and was kind to animals and small children. Of course. Absolutely. The pressure is getting to me, Wulff thought, it is really getting to me and this much he knew was the truth; fatigue was one part of it and the other was that he had already spent too much time in too many rooms, confronting people like this. There were limits to what one could take and he found himself wondering almost clinically if he might have passed them. But then what?

“Where’s the smack?” the man said again, more hoarsely. He brought his palms together. “Come on, Mendoza, where’d you stash it? Don’t tell me that you didn’t—”

“I gave it in at the gate,” Mendoza said. He pointed toward Wulff. “I didn’t want to carry it up here with him; I thought that I had enough to handle here.”

“Well,” the man said, his palms beginning to rub together in an unconscious gesture of tension, “that was good thinking. Mendoza, why don’t you get out of here? I think I’d like to have a conference with this man.”

“I wouldn’t advise that,” Mendoza said.

“Oh?”

“Let me keep him covered. It’s better that way.”

“What do you think?” the man at the desk said to Wulff, abruptly. “Should your friend Mendoza stay here and watch you while we talk? Or can we make this a private conference?”

“That’s up to you,” Wulff said. The man was baiting him. Little saucers of light inverted in his eyes, twinkles of liveliness at the corners of his mouth. He knew that if he could come close to the man he would hear a ragged intake of breath, find irregularities in respiration. It excited him. Fear, pain, hurt excited this one. Of course, he was no exception. Most of them liked to deal with people in this way, otherwise why would they do it?

“I think it would be sensible,” Mendoza said. “He’s a rough character.”

“A rough character,” the man at the desk said softly, “a rough tough character, Burt Wulff. Your reputation has preceded you, you are a famous man.” He moved his hands below eye-level, there was the sound of a drawer opening, and then the man came out with a gun which he showed to Wulff with the same absent tenderness that he might if he were demonstrating it for sale in a firearms shop. “What do you think of that?” he said.

“Nothing,” Wulff said, “I think nothing of the gun at all.”

“Can we have a calm and reasonable discussion here?”

“I never said otherwise.”

“Get out of here, Mendoza,” the man said. There was a sly, cruel overlay in his voice. “We’ll talk privately.”

“In other words I’ve done my job.”

“In other words you’ve done your job,” the man agreed comfortably, “and it’s time to go.”

“All right,” Mendoza said. He left the room abruptly. The man behind the desk made a flourishing gesture to Wulff, half-inclined in a bow and said, “Would you mind checking to see if the door is locked? I’d like this to be a private conversation.” He showed the gun to Wulff again like a demonstrator.

“All right,” Wulff said, “I’ll do that.” He walked to the door, checked the knob, walked back.

“No,” the man said, “there’s a bolt there too. Throw it.” His face was alight. A smile almost genial came from him. “You’ll do that, won’t you?”

“Surely,” Wulff said. He went back to the door, threw the bolt that he found there and went back to the desk. He stood there then while the man made little circles like smoke rings in the air with the point of the gun.

“Good,” he said, “good. Now let’s discuss things, Wulff. Tell me all about your career.”

He leaned back as if to get more comfortable, the gun held lovingly in his hand. “And when you’ve filled me in on all the background,” he said, “then we can discuss your future.”

The man with federal credentials leaned over the bed and said to Williams, “You’ve got to cooperate. You’re not helping us at all.”

“I don’t know a thing,” Williams said. “I tell you I don’t know a damned thing.” He wanted to throw the covers in the man’s face, get out of the bed and stalk away, but of course, he could not do that. Non-ambulatory condition. The surveillance man, standing against the wall in uniform, crossed his legs, sighed, but made no move to come over. “Listen,” Williams said to the cop, “give me a break. I’m a sick man. Tell this clown to get out of here and come back and ask me questions when I’m well.”

“I’m afraid that won’t wash,” the federal man said. He was even younger than Williams, all of twenty-two, Williams estimated, with that strange, bleak cloak over the face which all of them seemed to have, but he was sweating and not quite as impassive as the manual called for. “You’ve got to cooperate with us. This man has apparently murdered two of our agents.”

“I’m sorry about that,” Williams said. “I’m sorry that he murdered your agents. Believe me, I’m sure that he had his reasons. Wulff is a reasonable man.” He turned his face toward the wall, closed his eyes. “Quite a reasonable man,” he said again. “Why don’t you leave me alone?”

“We know that you’ve had contact with him,” the federal man said, “since the time that he left the New York police force. We’re quite aware of that. Don’t you think that it’s as much in your interest as ours to try and cooperate? We simply don’t know what this man might do next.”

“I told you,” Williams said, “I don’t care. I don’t care what he does next and I have no idea of his whereabouts.”

“You admit that you had contact, then?”

“Not recently.”

“There’s been no phone conversation? He never attempted to call you?”

The cop at the door said, “They monitor phone calls coming in. If he called you, they’d probably know about it already.”

Williams shook his head and faced the federal man again. “I got a shiv in the ribs,” he said. “I almost died in the performance of duty. Isn’t that enough for you now?”

The federal man seemed to quail slightly and for a moment the impassivity slipped away altogether and Williams found himself staring at a young, frightened contemporary, probably in over his head and not even sure how this had happened to him. “No one’s out to get you,” he said, “believe me, this really doesn’t involve you and we’re not harassing. We simply believe you had contact with Burt Wulff recently and we’re looking for him. This man is a felon. He’s a murderer.”

“I’m sure he had his reasons,” Williams said again. “If anybody got killed it was because they were trying to kill
him.”

“Well then,” the agent said, as if dropping one line of discussion, opening up another, “what about the drugs?”

“I don’t know anything about drugs. What are you talking about?”

“We have reason to believe that this man had in his possession at the time of the assault a considerable quantity of stolen heroin.”

“Is that so?” Williams said. “That’s very interesting. What would he be doing with a considerable quantity of heroin? Shooting it?”

The federal man shifted in his chair and then in an abrupt gesture, stood. “I don’t think this is getting us anywhere,” he said, “I had hoped that you would cooperate; this is a very serious affair—”

“I don’t
know
where the fuck he is,” Williams said. “I’m not saying that I’ve had contact with him or not but even if I had, I wouldn’t know where the hell he is.” He felt a pain beginning in his ribs then, moving like a growth toward his heart and lay back stiffly,
deep breaths, easy,
he told himself and after a moment it passed. “And I don’t know if he’s got anything in his possession.”

“He did,” the federal man said. “He had a considerable quantity in his possession. As a matter of fact we believe that the murders were committed when our agents attempted to relieve him—”

“You don’t know anything,” Williams said. He struggled for breath, gasped, grappled with the sheet at the side of the bed and managed to rear into a posture of confrontation. The surveillance man looked at him with dismay but made no move to help him. “You don’t know what the hell’s going on, that’s your trouble; this man took to the streets because people like you didn’t know what was going on. What drugs? What drugs are you talking about?”
But he got it,
he thought,
the son of a bitch did get hold of it and what does that say about the system? What does it say then, eh?

“A large quantity of uncut heroin which was stolen from the police property room in this city,” the federal man said. He was already on his way to the door. “I see that you won’t cooperate, Mr. Williams,” he said, “and I’m willing to accept that. It will be noted that you failed to cooperate but beyond that—”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Williams said. “Who the fuck are you people to talk about cooperation, non-cooperation, you and your fucking damned federal war on drugs. If Wulff shot any of your men it was because they would have shot him if they had the chance; you’ve got a bunch of assassins on that payroll. These aren’t police personnel you got there; I know what kind of men—”

“I won’t discuss it anymore,” the federal man said quietly. He bent over, whispered something to the cop against the wall. The cop nodded briskly, said something back. They went into a short conference and then the federal man, swinging his briefcase was through the door and into the hallway.

Williams lay there in the bed, pulsating with rage. He had only one thought at this moment, that if he ever got well, if he ever survived to get out of this bed, which was not likely if he did not get control of himself, but if he ever lived to see the end of this he was going to go down to headquarters. He was going to go to headquarters and throw their fucking credentials in their teeth because he could not take it anymore. He could not take collaborating in a world in which people like the federal man had power.

No. No way. He would not collaborate. He had reached, it would seem, the end of the line at 137th and Lenox; it was not only his body which had been knifed. They had torn open his sensibility, turned over the clean pan of his consciousness through which he saw the world whole and had shown him instead exactly where they were, where
he
had been every step of the way.

He had been their nigger. That was all. They had used him, even—and this was the cunning of it—made his feeling that he was using
them
part of their scheme.

He thought of Wulff, he thought of the two federal agents that Wulff might have killed and he thought of the valise. Mostly, he thought of the valise. If Wulff had actually dug Stoneman’s stolen drugs out of Vegas then it justified everything, because it showed that Wulff could work where the federal man could not. That was something to hold on to.

Fuck them.

Go get them Wulff, he thought, get them all with their hearings and commissions and surveillance and taps and filthy thugs who work on commission and judges and representatives and businessmen and legal protectorates all of them working toward only one goal which was
to keep themselves going.
And to do that demanded that they hold on to the drugs no less desperately than the meanest junkie would crawl into a shooting gallery with a bag to unload some cheap death in his veins.

Maybe singlehandedly Wulff could clean the whole thing up. If he couldn’t, Williams thought, one thing was sure: it could only be accomplished by a man who worked singlehandedly and who had nothing to gain or lose anymore.

“That guy was really pissed off,” the cop confided, “you get out of this, you’re going to find yourself in a boiling pot of hot water.”

Williams said he hoped so.