Lone Wolf #6: Chicago Slaughter (7 page)

Mendoza went away from Versallo raging. He had knocked his brains out to get the big clown in. Did Versallo think it was so easy to take on a job like this and bring it off? Then let the son of a bitch try it himself. Let
him
pick up a car disguised as an ordinary city taxicab, get hold of a uniform, time his arrival at the airport, cooperate with the paid-off dispatcher there to make sure that he made the pickup when the guy came off the plane. Let Versallo deal with the bullshit worry of whether that guy was going to walk off the plane in the first place, whether the tip they had gotten out of New York was a blind lead. Mendoza didn’t need this shit. He was entitled to better.

Wasn’t he? Wasn’t he a better man than one who had to put up with this kind of crap? Taking this shit, wiping Versallo’s ass for years and then pulling off this, maybe the biggest job of his life and being thrown out of Versallo’s office like some nineteen-year-old asshole who was getting his first chance to prove himself on a major assignment! That wasn’t right. Versallo had no right to treat him like that.

And taking the guy in. Bringing him into the warehouse with nothing but a gun and guts; a guy like this who had a record of maybe two hundred bodies behind him. What did Versallo think? that this was all in a day’s pay. It was a miracle, that was all, a fucking miracle that he had been able to bring the thing off. Bluffing the thing through successfully every step of the way, holding this guy in check, dealing with the possibility that at any moment he would lose control of the situation and take a slug through his neck. And for what? For what? Did Versallo think that a pat on the back was sufficient? Did he think that Mendoza was indeed that nineteen-year-old asshole and that a word of approval from the big boss was going to keep him happy and off the streets along with maybe a five dollar bonus at the end of the week? The hell with him. The hell with the whole thing.

The rage built within him as he went to the guardhouse. He did not know that so profound a layer of resentment was within him; it was no layer but rather a multiple series of humiliations and resentment, peeling away like an onion—the deeper he got the more rancid, then, the core. He had been putting up with this in one form or another for ten years now, wiping Versallo’s ass, functioning not only as his detail man and hard guy but as the one who held the big man’s hand and wiped his behind when circumstances got the better of him as they so often did. Frankly, he was fed up. He had left the room heading toward the guardhouse with the vague idea that he was going to snatch that valise from them, take it back to Versallo’s office, heave it on the floor in front of him and tell him exactly what he could do with his fucking son of a bitching way of dealing with a man who had given him ten years,
ten years
of the best he had to give.

But by the time he had reached the guardhouse, his mind had worked its way down to a more casual, methodical point of view and he was no longer fulminating but simply
thinking.
This was the way it had alwaysbeen with Mendoza. He alternated between outbursts whose ferocity shocked even him and a methodical, reserved state of mind in which it seemed he was able to see through everything, control everyone. If he had always been the one way he probably would have been killed twenty years ago in a sucker play; if he had been the other all the way he might have been in Versallo’s chair a long time ago. Instead he was neither the one nor the other, neither a leader nor a corpse. Maybe it was best this way. Maybe it really was better. You lived in the middle and you let the two ends split.

He walked into the guardhouse. An evil-smelling place. Coombs, the old man on duty, the shotgun lying across his lap. Coombs thought he was on security detail for a trucking firm that was liable to hijack anytime so he had to keep the shotgun ready and control the traffic in and out. Little did he know. But it would have done Coombs no good to know exactly what he was guarding against or what Versallo was; he would not have done his job any better but considerably worse. And Versallo all along the line preferred people who did not know any more than they needed to do their jobs. Another one of his techniques. Versallo was the man.

“How you doing?” Coombs said and looked at Mendoza in a friendly way. Poor old bastard had little enough to do here during the days. Almost anybody who passed by was a potential security risk. He appreciated company.

“I’m doing all right,” Mendoza said. He pointed to the valise, shoved off in a corner. “I’ll just take that now,” he said, “save you the trouble.”

Coombs’s sunken eyes became strangely calculating. “What trouble?” he said.

“Trouble of having to look at it anymore. I’m going to bring it up to the man now.”

“No you’re not,” Coombs said. “At least I think you’re not. Got a call from him just a couple minutes ago. He said hold it here; he’s going to send a couple of guys to bring it up.”

“Must be some mistake,” Mendoza said, working a smile onto his features, looking at Coombs in an open way. He had never had any trouble talking with the poor senile old bastard. “I’m those guys.”

Coombs shook his head. He looked confused but determined. “Can’t do,” he said. “The man specifically said that you weren’t to take it. He was sending two from dispatch. I don’t know what he had in mind.”

Mendoza looked at Coombs. He was the same ignorant, agreeable old bastard he had been nodding to, bullshitting with for three years now. Picked him up out of an alcoholic stupor a couple of times and rolled him home. He could not believe it. “Come on now,” he said, “don’t be ridiculous. Give me the valise.”

He walked toward it, a hand extended. Coombs came to life suddenly and extended the shotgun toward him, more alertness in the old man’s expression than Mendoza would have ever suspected. “Cannot do,” Coombs said, “I have my orders.”

“Now wait a minute,” Mendoza said, pointing to himself. “Just forget all of this for a moment and look. This is me, right. Jim Mendoza. You don’t know who the hell you’re talking—”

“Sorry,” Coombs said. The shotgun seemed to have erected like a penis, it was much longer and more menacing than it had seemed to Mendoza when he walked in here. It was just not possible but it seemed as if Coombs might shoot him. Might shoot. Might shoot Jim Mendoza. “Cannot do,” Coombs said, “please get out of the way. I don’t want to be responsible.”

Was this what Versallo did to men? Apparently. Apparently this was exactly what Versallo did. Gentle old Coombs. Who would have believed it? For just a moment Mendoza reconsidered. Maybe not. Maybe it was too risky after all. But no. Coombs would not shoot him. It was impossible for this to happen. “Just stay cool, old man,” Mendoza said and reached for the valise, “and let me handle this.”

“I warned you,” Coombs said, “I warned you—” and levelled the shotgun. In that sickening, compressed instant Mendoza realized that Coombs indeed
was
going to fire and right on the heels of this knowledge the burst came. It unloaded into his guts like a fist and then he felt coins. Of all things, jingling coins were spreading in his belly, moving up and down and he felt a warmth.

“Godamnit,” he heard Coombs say, “I told you not to do it. I told you I had my orders. What the hell are you doing this for? Look what you made me do!” The old man lifted the shotgun above his head and threw it violently against the wall. Mendoza heard it snap and then fall in several pieces. The old man covered his eyes. “I didn’t want to do it,” he said. “I had to do it. What the hell am I going to do now?”

“I’ll tell you what you’re going to do now,” Mendoza said. He was weak, probably shot mortally—his professional sense told him exactly what he had taken—but his strength was not ebbing that rapidly, and if he died it would be from hemorrhage or internal complications, not from the actual impact. Missed the heart, then. He reached inside his jacket and took out his pistol. He pointed it.

“This is what you’re going to do,” he said and shot Coombs right in the teeth.

Coombs’s face pulped, exploded. In an intricate stop-action Mendoza could see the various parts of the old man’s features—teeth, lips, cheeks, hair—implode like a tennis ball squeezed roughly and then cascade outward. They showered throughout the cabin. Little pellets of hair or blood hit him.

“Holy shit,” Coombs said with what was left of his larynx and palate and fell to the floor in front of Mendoza. He screamed once, quite loudly as he felt the floor and then, as Mendoza stood looking at him, he died.

Mendoza moved slowly toward the valise. Coombs was dead. Get the valise. He felt himself still moving in that sensation of stop-time, his motions infinitely careful and extended. It seemed to take seconds to will the impulse from brain to nerve synapses to fingers. Extend. Extend the arm. Get the valise. He moved toward the valise and stumbled over something. Something was lying on the floor. A man. It was a man lying on the floor.

Mendoza fell over the thing on the floor, his palm against the valise. It was funny what was happening to him. He had been shot a couple of times before and thought that he knew how to come to terms with the wound—shit if it didn’t kill you you were all right—but this was something different. Something. Different. Everything before his eyes was in colors, various shades of red, green, pink, yellow, nothing grey anymore although the interior of the cabin had always been dim.

So this was death. This was death, then. Death, like coats, arrived in many colors. He had always thought of dying as a rather dull, flavorless kind of thing but this was exciting. Very interesting. He was dying in the midst of a rainbow.

Mendoza fluttered like a pennant on the floor, his limbs feeling as if they were extending to enormous lengths, becoming transparent in his convolutions. Gelatinous on the floor he rolled and where he stopped rolling he fell to death and the rainbow collapsed over him like a blanket and pulled tight. Strangled in colors he felt the rainbow tightening around his neck. It was a hell of a thing, he thought. It was a hell of a thing to do a job for ten years and the first time you wanted to grab a little edge for yourself … it was all taken away.

And taken away by a little old man with a shotgun.

Versallo always sent messengers. He would probably die by proxy.

“All right,” Versallo said. He smiled. “What now, Wulff?”

“I don’t know. I was leaving that decision up to you. You seem to have this in pretty good hands and actually I’m more or less free at the moment.”

“You’re trying to be funny, Wulff,” Versallo said. He sighed comfortably and dug for something again below eye level in his desk, emerged with a folder. “The backgrounder on you didn’t say anything about you being funny so that’s a bit of a surprise. They have you marked as a pretty serious guy.”

Wulff said, “May I sit down? I’ve had kind of a tough trip.”

“I guess you have,” Versallo said, looking through the folder idly. “You’ve been all over the place. But what with your background on the police force, all aspects of police work including tactical police and narcotics, and with that wonderful combat background you had in Vietnam, you should be able to stand up under a little interrogation, eh, Wulff? Later on we can get you a suite in the Congressional Hotel so that you can catch up on your rest.”

Wulff looked at the man. The corruption was still there, leaking out in little waves and droplets, but underneath it he sensed something else, a new quality. It was not exactly fear, call it contemplation then or reconsideration, but Versallo was not quite as assured as he had been when Wulff first came in, and Wulff had the clear intimation that he was holding onto the folder in this way to conceal a shaking in his fingers. Maybe. This did not ease the situation; it made the use of the gun in fact only more likely, but it was interesting. It was always interesting to see the advantages shift, to see the way that the balance between people could change. Call it an aspect of police work. “Screw you,” he said.

The man laughed, a simple, empty chuckle that filled the room. “My name is Versallo,” he said, “you can call me by my name if you want. William Versallo but most of the people I know simply settle for Bill.” He paused, shook his head, continued to dig into the folder. “The least you should know is my name,” he said, “so just call me old Bill Versallo when you tell me to fuck myself.”

“I’m not interested,” Wulff said. “I’m not interested in dialogues. What the hell do you want?”

Versallo looked up at him then away, with a restless gesture tossed the folder into the desk drawer and slammed it. “I’ve got what I want,” he said softly, “I’ve got you. I’ve been looking for you Wulff. I’ve been looking for a long time. You’ve been screwing up, you’ve been making life unpleasant for a lot of people and I thought that it was high time that we brought this bullshit to an end. I was really glad to get the news that you were coming to Chicago. That made my day, knowing you were coming here. It was too good to be true.” He stood abruptly, the gun held in his hand, levelled it at Wulff’s chest. “You’ve just made me very happy,” he said. “I’ve been getting happier and happier all day and having you here in front of me just cinches it. Welcome, you son of a bitch.”

Wulff doubted it. He doubted the happiness. He looked at the gun calmly and then into Versallo’s eyes and what he saw was not the aspect of a man who would shoot. No. He did not think that Versallo would do it; this was the kind of man who sent messengers to do the job. If he was going to be shot it would be Mendoza who would do it. This and other things enabled him to meet Versallo’s eyes. “The trucking line is a good dodge,” he said, “it’s an honest cover. Most of the guys I’ve been dealing with so far have been into corporate accounting or stock-brokerage or they don’t really seem to do much of anything at all. But you’ve got a good industry here, you work hard. Why not dump the drugs and get into it all the way? You’d probably do better.”

“Probably not,” Versallo said calmly. “Have you looked over the books recently?”

“Probably not,” Wulff agreed, “because you wouldn’t know what to do with yourself if you weren’t in shit. You love it; you love breaking people’s heads and screwing around. That’s what’s going to finish you off in the long run.”

“I don’t have to listen to your shit,” Versallo said hoarsely. His face had changed colors; the red flush had yielded to a blue undertone and his breathing was suddenly not regular, the smooth flow of his speech pattern broken. “You’re some kind of crazy self-appointed judge and jury who’s going to clean up the fucking world, aren’t you? Well you’re not doing so good, Wulff. Let me tell you something; the world’s as mucked up and filthy as it was before you began.”

“Of course it is,” Wulff said. “You’re still in it.”

Versallo’s face clotted further and he seemed about to scream, then checked himself. That strange smile began again, plucking tentatively at the corners of the mouth, then centering. “Really?” he said. “You really think that that’s so, Wulff? Let me tell you something, I’m answering a human need, that’s all. And that’s all everybody in this business is doing; we’re just servicing people. We didn’t create that need, we had nothing to do with it and if it were to go away or if the government was to handle it promptly we’d go right out of business. But the way it is, friend, if it wasn’t us it would just be someone else and that’s about the size of it. Ex-narco, huh? Then you know all that.”

“London solution,” Wulff said bitterly, “the British policy. Open up a clinic on. every corner. Throw smack into every drugstore, let any twelve-year-old walk in there and buy it to order, give it to all of his friends. That would suit you, wouldn’t it, Versallo?”

“No,” Versallo said, “it wouldn’t suit me at all. It would put me out of fucking business, that’s all that it would do. I wouldn’t get anywhere so I like it just the way it is and so do you, you ex-narco, filthy son of a bitch. Crusader, where would your crusades be if they just gave the stuff away?”

“You tell me,” Wulff said, “I’m not here to solve your life for you.”

“Aren’t you?” Versallo said. He put the gun on the desk neatly, leaned himself across the desk his hands straddling the gun, nowhere in a position where he could not reach it before Wulff’s lunge but wanting the position for emphasis. “Let me tell you something you vigilante Christ-loving son of a bitch. I used to be on the shit myself, do you know that?”

“Good,” Wulff said.

“I was on shit for twenty fucking years,” Versallo said. “
Twenty
years, and I kicked it myself without any help or any drugs or any assistance at all. Probably the only guy in history who ever kicked it cold and all the time went on living his daily life, just like he had before with no one knowing what was going on. And do you know something? That was six years ago, when I kicked it. Nineteen hundred and sixty-eight on June fourth was the last day I ever took any horse and there hasn’t been a day since then, there hasn’t been one fucking minute when I haven’t been dying for it. All right?”

“All right,” Wulff said. “I’m very moved.”

“Dying,” Versallo said again. His cheeks had sunken in; momentarily he looked both younger and older, wrapped in some cloak of recollection which made his face translucent. “
Dying
for a fucking shot of horse. So don’t tell me that I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. I know what I’m doing, I know what I’m dealing with.”

“You’re dealing with death.”

“Maybe,” Versallo said softly, “maybe you could call it that. But death is only part of it.” The translucence faded; his features were again opaque as he took the gun and caressed it. “The thing with you fucking narcos, you Christ-loving clean-up-the-world men,” he said, “is that you ought to take a little shot or snort yourself before you go around taking it away.”

“I know someone who took a little shot or snort.”

“Oh,” Versallo said in an abstracted way. “Oh year, that.” He tapped the desk drawer as if referring to the brochure. “You’re referring to that cunt, Marie Calvante, the one you were supposed to be engaged to, who was found OD’d out in shit city and was supposed to be so very pitiful that it got you started on your crusade. Seeing ain’t doing, friend, and if you had shot it up with the little cunt instead of denying what you probably could have seen, she might be alive today and you might be in some gallery somewhere.”

Wulff did not contrive what he did then. There was no way that forethought could have allowed it; it was an insane act but talking to him about Marie Calvante had been insane too: mad of Versallo to do it, he surely should have known that no one talked about Marie Calvante to Wulff.
No one,
not even David Williams who had been in the patrol car that night, had seen the girl lying on the floor, had been with Wulff to see what had happened, no one talked about it and yet here was Versallo, an armed man standing in a locked office with Wulff, having him totally at bay, calling the girl a
cunt.
This could not be. If it was so, if Versallo could be permitted to get away with this then Wulff was a fool, everything that he had done so far had been a fool’s act because it had been based on a lie. It was intolerable. The man, no man could be permitted to get away with this.

Wulff sprang-at Versallo.

He sprang at him without forethought, without measuring the situation at all, and this is probably what gave him a chance at the start because Versallo was alert and he would have seen the calculation in Wulff’s face an instant before the spring. That would have been all that he would have needed to have used the gun. But Wulff had not calculated; his spring was almost as much of a surprise to him as it was to Versallo and so he was able to take the man off guard, at least a little, rammed a knee over the desk and, with a hand extended, was at Versallo’s throat before the man could prepare himself.

But Versallo did have the gun. He had the gun and for a man of fifty-three he had extraordinary reflexes and even as Wulff was in midair, his body arched, one hand extended to seize Versallo by the throat and wrench the life out of him, Versallo had snatched the gun off the desk and had fired. The bullet went high, passing just above Wulff’s wrist and then the second shot came with booming impact, aimed toward Wulff’s belly. Somehow, though, Wulff had been able to turn his body away from the line of fire so that he was falling upon Versallo from a sidewise angle and this shot, too, missed, roaring into the wall opposite. Dull splinters rained out of the ceiling and then Wulff had fallen upon the man, the force of the dive carrying them both to the floor. He had his palm outstretched flat to Versallo’s forehead. As the man hit the floor hard on the back of his head he could feel his palm going into the forehead and could feel something literally
splattering
within there. Softness lurched against Wulff’s palm, he could feel a moistness—which he took for a moment to be brains but it was not, it was only blood—exploding upward from some open part in the rear of Versallo’s skull and quickly he felt his hand palpating with warm, red glue.

At the least Versallo had a concussion; he might have a skull fracture. Nevertheless the man was strong, desperately so; almost reflexively he reared up against Wulff, bringing a knee toward the groin, missing, settling for a dull impact in the belly and Wulff heard a sound like a sack hitting wet sand, realized that it was the sound of Versallo’s knee into his belly and almost simultaneously the pain opened within him as the secondary impact of Versallo’s fist came up from the floor, striking him on the cheek. The man was fighting desperately, singlemindedly, no thought of going for the gun undercutting his counterattack. Versallo, concussion or not, was functioning coolly and splendidly under the circumstances. He was a murderous alley fighter. Now his other knee was battering up, still seeking Wulffs groin, settling for another part of stomach, and Wulff raised his hand, chopped the flat of it hard into the adam’s apple, heard Versallo gag, squawk like a bird and then vomit into his hand as he used his full weight to pin the man like an insect underneath him.

Versallo fluttered and squawked, his feet kicking away at the floor, and then he made one final effort, bringing up both legs simultaneously, getting Wulff in the solar plexus and thus breaking the interlock. Wulff fell away from him, momentarily blinded with pain, went into a full-roll and came halfway to his feet to see Versallo staggering into the corner, all arms and legs and angles, looking desperately for the gun. He was still squawking and cackling but these were the sounds of his breath, Versallo was not the kind of man who would waste his time with cries of pain. Pain would have to be wrung out of him.

He had the gun almost in his hand when Wulff got over there, shambling, crawling and took it away from him by breaking Versallo’s left wrist in two places. He could hear it go, double-break,
one, two,
and now the squawks were no longer breaths but real cries of despair. The man was fighting and bucking against him, the heaves of his body then going suddenly gelatinous and Versallo folded underneath him like a sheet, all of the angles of his body disappearing into that gelatinous huddle, still he was going desperately for the gun, grinning in a rictus of pain and revulsion when Wulff levelled the gun and shot him. He levelled death into the man’s temple and heart, two shots, both of them mortal, compounding death to ease the man’s passage and when that was done Versallo was still, like a dismembered frog, thrashing around on the floor as if on wire.

Wulff threw the gun into the corner with all the force that he could muster, and then, wandering behind the desk in little circles like a pained animal, vomited there, heaves of pain and hatred forcing a mixture of fluid and blood out of him. Weeping he vomited into the carpet, a spreading stain of vomit running through the room and puddling around the corpse’s head and finally he was done. He took out a handkerchief and wiped off his mouth and lips slowly, trying through the deliberate slow inhalation of breath to bring himself back to normal. But the effort was still beyond him; he found himself vomiting again, although this time not so much in wrenching heaves as in gentle sobs and outputs which steadied him, slowly.

After a little while he was able to think once again.

He went over to the place near the wall where the gun had fallen and slowly picked it up. It was warm, still stinking of its discharge and he shook it out carefully, then split the chamber and took out the remaining rounds. A point forty-five, a police revolver, a killer, the best professional weapon, and all oiled up for death. Versallo had planned to kill him; there was no doubt about that. He would have said what he intended, gotten out of Wulff what he could and then he would have disposed of him as casually and definitively as he would have ordered a group of trucks dispatched or put in a requisition for a hundred kilos.