Lone Wolf #6: Chicago Slaughter (8 page)

Versallo had been a methodical man. Even dying, the blood still storming from him, he was methodical; going about the business of dying as wholeheartedly and with as much energy as he had with the question of drug distribution. Wulff looked at him, looked away then, revolted. No kill had ever shaken him as much as this; no kill had been dirtier and yet somehow as purifying.
He had called Marie a cunt.
Was that some trigger within Wulff of which he was himself unconscious? He had no memory of leaping. He had made no decision whatsoever to attack the man. It had simply happened and now Versallo, against all of his planning and intention was dead. It must be a great surprise to him. Versallo, in one form or the next, would never get over it.

The question was, what the hell was he going to do now?

He had to get out of here, the sooner the better, but Versallo, no fool he, had been operating on his own terrain and surely every conceivable exit, every aspect of flight had been covered. He had no more chance of walking out of this place alive than Versallo now did. Sooner or later, probably sooner, they would come checking around here, see why the boss had not reported in and that would be the end of Wulff. He had one gun and there were probably a few clips in the desk that he could locate but how was he going to hold off ten, twenty, fifty men? All of them would be in on it once they gauged the situation.

He had no chance.

And yet, he thought, this was not so. He had every chance because he held one advantage; they did not know that Versallo was dead. That was his trump card, that Versallo to them would be alive right up until the moment they saw him, and if he were able to manage this quite right they would not see him, not until Wulff was out of the building and on his way.

He wanted to get out of the building. He wanted to get out of here. He certainly had struggled hard enough to get this far; it would be better to keep on going.

He checked the body out once more, the features of Versallo’s dead face almost completely shrouded by blood and then he went over to a side door, opened it, found himself in the private bathroom which had probably been Versallo’s one concession in this building, to the way he thought a man of his station should live. The bathroom was surprisingly elegant, walls and mirrors gleaming, a medicine cabinet, half-ajar showing an array of sprays, deodorants, shaving concoctions and male perfumes with which Versallo had doubtless covered himself for certain important interviews. But Wulff ignored all that, concentrated on using the basin and a discovered towel to clean himself off as much as possible. His appearance must be unremarkable; he would be able to get out of this building, if he did, only by cultivating an appearance so unremarkable that he would look like any of the men who had been working on the level below. He doubted if he could do this but at the least he could try.

The water revived him marginally and he was able, by stroking a towel rapidly across his face a few times to bring himself back to a condition of some alertness. Coming out of the bathroom, the taps still running—let there be as much noise in here as possible now—he looked at Versallo; seeing the corpse again sent lurching waves of sickness through him all over again. Of all the kills this had indeed been the worst: the ugliest and the most painful. The manner of that way in which a man gave up life was some comment on how he had held on to it during his time, and Versallo had wanted very much to live. Now, lying still in the posture of death the mouth had fallen open, rigidified into a pained bark of dismay and horror as if Versallo had caught some glimpse of the actual form of death during his passage and had screamed out against it, was maintaining that scream even now. A mystery, Wulff thought, a mystery—life, death, the intertwining of the two, none of it to be ever understood; and yet men attempted to control death in the way that they did, inflicting it, holding it off because only that gave them a feeling of immortality. The heaves started deep in his gut again and he turned away, went to the door. His hands fumbled on the bolt and then he lifted it, pushed it aside and spun the knob until it opened. He eased the door back and very carefully looked down the hall. Empty, murmurous sounds filling the corridor; no note taken of what had happened here. Soundproofed, of course. It would stand to reason that Versallo would have soundproofed his office thoroughly.

Wulff held the gun tightly, made his way slowly down the hall. Nothing interfered with him. He reached the staircase. To the first level then.

He was on the way out. And this time, too, he even thought he knew where he might be going.

Randall was about to fuck the girl when the distress signal came in from the guardhouse. It was an ordinary trip signal of the type which set off a blinker and a buzz in the setting on the opposite wall, and he saw it as he was literally poised over the girl, seeking entrance. Her pants were down around one ankle, sweater pulled up to the neck and she was regarding him with an intense look which seemed to work between fascination and terror, which was fine with him. He liked to scare them a little. He didn’t actually like to hurt them, that kind of thing wasn’t his bag at all, leave it to Versallo, but he
did
like to give them the feeling that they
might
be slapped around; he liked to see the fear rising within them. What the hell. It wasn’t like he couldn’t get a good hard-on anyway, it wasn’t that he couldn’t come any way he wanted, he was no pervert for God’s sake … but he liked a little rough stuff or at least the threat of it. It did something for him.

But the light was going crazy, the buzzer was whining. Something had happened down there, that was for sure. “Oh shit,” he said, locked against the girl in the posture of entrance. She looked at him dumbly, another secretary, another one of the series of cheap little cunts who Versallo liked to bring in on a fast turnover to keep the troops entertained. All of them fucked. If they didn’t fuck they were gone, it was a condition of employment. This one had promised to be one of the best he had fooled around with in months, tense and tight below, the needful suction of her little cunt contrasting with the fear in her eyes in a way that really excited Randall….

But there was the fucking alarm. Something was going on down there for sure. Coombs was a reasonably competent old guy and he wouldn’t have set it off unless things were really going crazy or unless the dead-man backup had been used and someone, not knowing about that alarm, had triggered it simply by standing in the wrong place in the wrong posture. “Oh shit,” he said again, closing his eyes, hoping that it would all go away, but of course it did not. These things never did.

Let Versallo deal with it. Except that Versallo would not; the alarm went off in his office and in Versallo’s but by clear right of seniority Versallo was the man who would sit back, make preparations while Randall had to go in there and see exactly what the hell was coming off. It wasn’t fair, of course. Nothing was fair. Still, that was the employer-employee relationship for you.

All the time he was involuntarily pumping. He was really sealed within her now, he couldn’t get out easily. But without his mind on it he couldn’t come either.

“What’s wrong?” the girl said. Her voice was curiously level for someone who was actually being fucked. Probably she wasn’t feeling anything at all; if she was so alert to Randall’s reaction it meant that she had been faking participation, faking even the fear maybe. This infuriated him. He felt the rage throughout him and it coalesced, all of it, in his erect penis, making the juncture of the bodies even tighter and more frantic with the need to get out of her, frantic with the need to investigate the emergency. But at the same time, locked into the desperate need to climax, he flailed on top of her, his body contracting like a fist, thrust his teeth against her cheek and then biting, gnawing away at the smooth flesh, battering himself against those surfaces that seemingly he could not enter, Randall climaxed, groaning and emerging in great spurts, each contraction recoiling in a sense of gloom, desperation and waste. He pumped himself dry, the girl lying underneath him, and then slowly he withdrew, his organ already limp, his mind already far away from her, speeding into some alley of circumstance. He had to see what was going on down there.

“All right,” he said to the girl, getting off her, going for his clothing, “that’s all.”

She lay there unmoving, making no attempt to pull her clothing into place. “That’s all?” she said. “Just like that?”

“I’ve got troubles,” Randall said, pointing to the wall where the light was blinking, the buzzer continuing its sonorous mumble. “No time for anything now.”

“You’ve got a hell of a lot of nerve,” the girl said, still lying there. “You jump on top of me and go in and out, out and in a few times and then tell me to get the hell out. What am I, furniture?”

“I don’t know what you are.”

“You know,” she said, “I’m as willing as the next one to cooperate. I don’t really have anything against fucking at all but this is not the way you treat a woman.”

“Come on,” Randall said. He was already dressed. “Get out of here.” Her semi-nakedness offended him now; somehow seeing a woman nude in the aftermath of fucking always bothered him. It was as if their bodies had only one function and they should be covered except when they were performing it. He went to a file cabinet under the window, fumbled around with the catch and opened the second drawer, took out a thirty-two. The girl looked at him with amazement.

“Well,” she said, “I’ve seen a lot of ways to end something like this but that’s certainly a new one.” She lifted a hand protectively to her face, sat clumsily. “You don’t have to shoot me,” she said. “I was just leaving.”

Fucking Versallo and his personnel practices. Bring in women for entertainment but you’d think that he would use at least a little ingenuity in screening them; this one was a fucking lunatic. She had to be crazy, talking that way. Just knowing that she was crazy made Randall feel a little better then. She may have seen his vulnerability but her mind was in such bad shape that she had nothing to hold against him. “Come on,” he said, putting the pistol away, turning toward the door, “I’ve got to get out of here. I want to lock this place up.”

“Sure,” she said, “sure.” She tugged up her pants, brought the sweater down in one motion, somehow the two met in the vicinity of her navel and she tucked one against the other, looked under the couch for her shoes. “This is a crazy place,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever worked in a place like this. Are you all the same way?” She found her shoes, put them on standing, crossing a leg over and then went to the door, tried it, found it locked.

“All right,” she said standing there, not looking at Randall. “I give up. What’s the magic word?”

Suddenly he was filled with rage, everything coming to that one pinpoint. This little cunt with her sharp mouth, the fucking alarm going off just when he was beginning to enjoy himself, fucking Versallo himself with his security system and surveillance and his demands that Randall, as his chief of security, function as nothing more than a hired gun, ready to jump into action whenever the alert was sounded. Who the fuck did Versallo think he was? What kind of place was this anyway? How had he gotten himself into something like this?

And all the time the fear beating underneath because he had a feeling that the business in the guardhouse was really bad. You developed instincts after a long time if nothing else, and his instincts told them that this was real trouble, not Coombs getting nervous or someone trying to run the gate. No. It was much worse than that. He went past the girl, yanking at the bolt, tearing away at the knob until the door reluctantly opened, put a hand in the small of her back and pushed her out into the hall.

“Go,” he said, not caring if anyone was there to see this, “get the hell out of here.” Her weight was slight against his thrust, she felt frail, weak and, as she stumbled into the hallway, tripping, losing her balance to fall with a little squeal, he realized that he had lost his temper, had pushed too hard. The hell with it. He pushed by her, pulling his jacket around him. She wasn’t going to be here come tomorrow anyway. He might have to take shit from Versallo and jump when the man sneezed, but he had a few little prerogatives of his own, godamnit and one of them was that he could decide who he was going to fuck. She was getting out.

He ran down the hall in the direction away from Versallo’s office. His instructions on this were very clear. He was to respond to an alarm by going directly to the point of origin, not pausing to check with Versallo.

The hall was filled with activity. It had not been caused by the alarm which was linked into only two offices, Versallo’s and Randall’s. Nevertheless it was jammed; secretaries had come out of the offices fluttering like birds, supervisors, clerical personnel, all of them, thirty or forty people were in this hallway now, milling around, talking. Randall could catch only a few phrases as he went out there but the clamor stopped, they looked at him, then away, then slowly the clumps began to break up as people went toward the stairwells.

What the hell is going on? Where the hell is Versallo?
he wanted to bellow at them, scream, demand response but of course this could not be done. Versallo had always insisted that distance be cultivated. Fucking the secretaries was all right, a necessary condition of the job, as he put it; but otherwise he was to have nothing to do with the people who worked on the floor (he did not even know what the hell most of them did; they were tied in with the clerical aspect of the trucking firm which was Versallo’s cover, and Randall was not there for the cover-operation of course).

Now it was beginning to tell. They all looked at him as if Randall was merely another aspect of disturbance. What the hell was going on? he did not know; he charged the stairs, two at a time, using his arms like wings to beat employees aside and came onto the first floor, the huge, musty area where the trucks and loaders congregated to find that it too was empty. He went through the dead air of that enclosure, through an open door and then at last Randall was able to see what had happened.

Down range, both dull and bright against the tent of sky, the guardhouse was burning.

It was flaming, sheets of flame reaching up like fingers toward the sky, and the first floor was empty of men because they were already down there, ringing the guardhouse, trying with factory equipment to get the blaze under control. And even as he watched this, the hooter at the top of the gate began to scream—emergency-cut-in from incineration no doubt, summoning the fire department. For Chicago’s finest or second finest it would be a routine enough job; for the forces at work, however, it appeared to Randall to be too much. Splinters, pellets, really, of force were being hurled from the heart of the flame, filling the air like shrapnel and the fire was lunging across the gates as well. Randall did not care. He was stricken suddenly by an idea.

It was that idea, not fear of the flames which wheeled him around, sent him storming back into the huge, flat building. The fire meant nothing except that somehow the guardhouse had been overcome, Versallo’s point of control had been destroyed but it was merely property and as far as the old man who tenanted that guardhouse during the day,. fuck him, Randall was not paid to worry about the lives of lower-echelon employees. His condition as chief of securityhad been clearly mapped out for him by Versallo a long time ago:
you take care of me, you protect me, you don’t give a fuck about what’s going on in this building; its got nothing to do with you at all.
Of course. Randall suddenly understood what had happened. As he ran through the huge, reeking enclosure once again, he did so with dread.
Someone had gotten through to Versallo.

They had been laying for him for a long time; now they had broken the ring of protection, had gotten to him. There were a lot of people who wanted Versallo. Randall was no fool, he knew exactly what his boss was into. What did Versallo think he was, some kind of idiot? All of it was a cover, the factory, the secretaries, the dispatchers, the clerks—merely a means of providing a cover for the real business in which Versallo was engaged, and Randall knew this perfectly well. Why wouldn’t he? He was charged with the man’s safety. Versallo was into drugs. He was at the virtual top of the midwestern drug trade.

Randall felt the animal of fear bursting within his throat. It was going to be bad. Oh my God, it was going to be very bad.

He sprinted the stairs, groaning. He knew that they had somehow gotten to Versallo. It all tied together. His groin ached as he ran, little flares of pain like bursting buds along the heel of his thigh, opening sores. Too old for fucking, he thought. Forty years old; he couldn’t screw around like this anymore and still expect to do the job he was counted on to do. They had probably broken through while he was fucking. Right when he had been in the saddle they had destroyed security and moved upon Versallo. It was going to be hell. There was going to be hell now.

Back on the second floor. He ran past all the open doors, through the whirring and chattering sounds of electrical equipment which had been abandoned in mid-operation, and toward the end of the hallway. The end of the world would probably be this way. The machinery would continue to hum, only the bodies would be missing. The world was created for machinery now; the bodies incidental. That was where they lived. Even Versallo probably carried on his work by computer.

He came up against the closed door of his employer. For just an instant old instinct prevailed; he felt a hesitancy at jamming himself through and possibly finding Versallo whole, untouched, swearing at him over the desktop. “What are you doing you crazy son of a bitch?” and so on: “you fucking Anglo-Saxon prick….” He could hear it all, the obscenity spurting like semen from the man’s open mouth and then the explanations, the apologies, the babblings from Randall. He would have to tell Versallo that he had been fucking a girl and had not heard. Because Versallo knew everything, you could not lie to him; he would have to confess his shame and the resulting scene would be terrible. There was no saying what Versallo might do then but some colder, harder, more ancient part of the brain pushed away a few levers in there and told Randall, that underneath it all he was full of shit. He was not going to find Versallo in there in any condition to berate him. He knew that, didn’t he? Of course he knew it.

He tried the door. Locked. He could have expected that, he dug into his pockets for the spare set of keys, didn’t find them, felt an instant of panic when he thought that he might have had them stolen when he was screwing the girl—she was an agent or infiltrator of some sort and that was the only reason she had gone down for him, who else would go down for Randall but someone knowing who he was and needing his confidence?