Lone Wolf #6: Chicago Slaughter (9 page)

But then he found the keys—see? he told himself, stop looking for the worst explanations for everything—and slammed one into the door, fumbled, sweated, and pushed his way in and there he felt himself seized by the smell, the smell took him by the scruff of the neck and shook him like a puppy. He had never, never under any circumstances, smelled anything like this. It sent him reeling back. He folded up against a wall, shaking his head like a fighter who had been hit hard but still came back. He came off the wall, his only thought being that he had to open a window.

A window, had to open one, get some ventilation in here, get out the
smell.
A smell of such corruption and decay that it overtook his senses and momentarily his very perception was altered, altered to the degree that he did not even know what he had stumbled against. Something was against his
foot.
Very delicately he took his foot away so that the thing underneath should not trip him again, still thinking about getting to a window so that he could ventilate this place. But this time he looked down, anxious to see, or at least interested in seeing what had tripped him, and it was in that posture, holding his foot clownishly, hopping around, looking away from the window which he was going to open in just an instant …

… That he saw Versallo and the condition to which he had come.

Randall was not a coward and he had seen death many times in his life, but he had never seen anything like this. I’ve never seen a man so
killed,
was his first foolish thought and then the horror hit. He did not need to open a window after all. A window would do no good. He went instead to the bathroom and the sickness contracted into one electric wave of pain and shock which went through him and for just the next few moments … until the cops came on the heels of the firetruck to see exactly what the hell was going on in these offices … for just those next few moments Randall gave in to a sensation of grief and terror unlike any he had ever before known. Versallo, the un-killable was dead, and only he, Randall was left. And somehow it was all his fault because he had been fucking instead of vigilant.

He
knew
that it was not his fault. He knew that vigilance had nothing to do with what had happened to Versallo and that the fucking was the least of all his sins. Nevertheless he felt that way. He battered against himself. He had a difficult time.

But when the cops came in he became quite composed all over again—cops were always able to bring him back to earth—and he answered everything that they asked quite levelly, explaining as truthfully as he could, leaving out only the matter of the fucking and what he really thought Versallo did for a living. And inside him a crazed little heart of purpose kept pounding, pounding, pounding away: he was going to get the man who had done this to Versallo and he was going to do the same thing to him.

Wulff found himself in a light van driving toward downtown and the federal office building complex. He did not even know about the fire at the guardhouse which had spread into the warehouse itself until he put on the radio to listen to any kind of background noise which would take him out of himself for a moment, firm up his purposes. He listened to the bulletins with amazement, struggling with the traffic flow on the parkways, struggling with the floor-shift and trying to understand what he had heard. There must have been a struggle in the guardhouse, that was quite clear, and that struggle had something to do with the valise. The valise, of course. Versallo had sent it away from him before they talked and it must have been conveyed there by someone who had tried to take it away. Or from someone else who had wanted it. It all came down to the valise, though, that was clear. He wouldn’t be surprised if Mendoza, the man who had escorted him in, had not decided that he wanted that valise, had been blocked, and had precipitated this. Not that it mattered. The valise was gone. He had resigned himself to that before he had killed Versallo.

He didn’t want it anymore. He didn’t care; he seemed to have lived the better part of his life linked to a valise and now no more. He was not a valise. He was not a million dollars worth of smack and after the confrontation with Versallo he wasn’t sure that he was the avenger anymore either. He was sick of killing. The kill on Versallo had been vicious, bitter, almost sick in its intensity; looking at Versallo in that first horrid aftermath, seeing the true impact of death not only upon the man but upon himself, Wulff had realized something: he detested death. He had seen enough of it, precipitated enough, now he wanted to perpetrate no more. Death provoked death and the price was too high. So someone else would have to do it.

Go to Patrick Wilson then. Go to the federal buildings, see the investigating staff, tell them everything that he could. Surely they would want to listen to him. If the federal war on drugs was at all serious then they could not ignore what he had to say. But even if the war was nothing but a public-relations mockup, even if the war enlisted for its troops people of the caliber he had had to do on the Grand Central Parkway … well, even so. So be it. Let them carry the ball from now on. He was done. He was not going to pay the price anymore. It had brought him from New York to San Francisco, back across the continent to Boston, into Vegas and then to Havana, only to sweep him back to New York and the horrors of Chicago. And the journey was becoming bloodier at every turn, the opposition more vicious, the price exacted increasingly higher. No more. He would tell them his story and let them move on from there. And for the rest of it, someone else would have to continue.

He pushed the van harder. Bulletins were coming in at only minute intervals now as further details of the fire and explosion at the warehouse came off the police ticker and from reporters sent to the scene. Two found dead in the guardhouse, one killed, fourteen injured in the panic which spread through the warehouse. The names of the dead in the guardhouse being withheld by police until the families were notified. Of course. Let them sweat it out. Discovered dead in his office, William Versallo, president of the company and alleged racketeer. Called in by the grand jury some months ago. Narcotics trade. Major international connections. Refused to answer questions to the grand jury. Married. Three children. Identified in federal investigation as businessman, head of the trucking firm. Personal details beyond the sketchy biography not available. Family in seclusion. Of course. Wulff nodded again. The families were always in seclusion. Ancient ploy.

Someone cut in front of him on the expressway, a middle-aged Cadillac, children peering through the back window, several adults in the front. The driver had pulled in from a service ramp without checking. Now, as Wulff came down on them, horn squalling, the driver seemed to take cognizance for the first time of what had developed behind. The Cadillac bucked, lurched and then went off the road in a spectacular flourish, bumping and lurching to a point on the shoulder, making a half-spin and finally coming to rest in a burst of steam; Wulff turned to see what had happened in the aftermath but he was already well down the road, the Cadillac invisible. Stupidity. The self-destructive urge was so great in so many people that they would literally stop at nothing in the effort to kill themselves. This had something to do with the drug business also. Wulff shook his head in disgust, clawed at the wheel, righted the van and kept on going. He had not been in Chicago for many years, the expresswayswere new but the direction was old; he thought that he knew the way to the offices.

Get there. Let Patrick Wilson and his merry men take it from there. Was he being unreasonable? Probably, but Wulff had exhausted any sense of alternative. Here he was on the expressway fleeing yet more destruction; on the expressway were thousands of cars at the same time, any one of which might contain a potential assassin.
They were all out to get him; there was no safety anymore.

He was so engrossed in the effort of driving, battling off like insects the thoughts of how Versallo had looked dead, that he did not even notice the Cadillac until it had speeded up alongside him in the center lane, the driver rolling down the power window on the right side, holding a level pedal which kept him even with Wulff. “You crazy son of a bitch!” he shouted. Between the driver and Wulff was a female passenger, probably his wife who held a hand against her mouth, held herself low in the seat as if to show by the gesture that she had no part in this whatsoever; it had nothing to do with her. Men’s business.

“You want to get me killed?” the driver said. “You some kind of lunatic?” He was a small man in shirtsleeves, his hands bulging on the wheel as he fought for control of the car, his face compressed and reddening. Children in the rear seat bounced and screamed. “I got your license number, I’m going to report you!” the driver shouted.

Just go ahead and do that, Wulff thought, let them trace the van back to Versallo’s truckyard and see where it would get them. The driver of the Cadillac could arrest the world as far as Wulff was concerned. But he could not shake the car, the van had poor accelerationand the Cadillac was able to anticipate his movements, stay side by side as if they were welded together. “You son of a bitch,” the driver said, pounding the wheel. “You crazy son of a bitch.”

Go prove to the man that
he
had cut in, Wulff thought. Well, you could not prove this to him, there was simply no way that you could get people, most of them, to take the responsibility for their own actions. He made a dismissive gesture with his hand, held the wheel of the van steady, waited for the driver of the Cadillac to get tired and pull on ahead, drop back—it made no difference.

But the driver, as if he had finally after years of struggle managed to locate the real enemy in Wulff, the one true cause of all his difficulties which had given him a damaged car, a tight-lipped ugly wife, a backseatful of abusive and uncontrollable children … the driver was not so easily satisfied.

He lifted a fist, shook it at Wulff. “You ought to drop dead!” he shouted. He had worked himself, successfully, into a tantrum. “Crazy!” he screamed. “Crazy!” and Wulff tried to pull the van out ahead again but the shift would not get into second, the van hung sickeningly in neutral for an instant, rpm’s hammering at the sheet metal and the Cadillac, over anticipating the spurt came out ahead of him, opened up a couple of car lengths and then began to slide over into his lane. The driver had an idea. He would cut Wulff off, put him off the road.

Wulff went for the brakes, holding the wheel steady, looking for control. If it had not been for the kids in the back seat he would have plowed right into the Cadillac, let the driver fend for himself. He had more weight than the car ahead of him and although there was no hood between him and the point of impact he did not think that the car would risk collision. Rather, by a little leftward manuever he could probably sideswipe the Cadillac off the road. Nothing to it; it was an old police manuever, the kind of thing that he could do in his sleep and had done, in hot pursuit, many times back on the force. In San Francisco, he had put two hoods off the road that way in an old Continental, which had less capacity as a battering ram than this van.

But he couldn’t. He couldn’t do it. The decision was quickly calculated, instantly made; he wanted to hurt this idiot and hurt him badly because in a way the driver of the Cadillac embodied all of the pointless stupidity of human exchange. But the woman next to him had nothing to do with the driver’s insanity and neither did the children, four or five of them scuttling around in the back, visible through the distorted glass of the rear panel. It took him less than a second really to calculate and reject the alternative of striking back at the driver and then he was braking, braking the van down desperately, fighting with the wheel as the light truck responded to the diminished torque by contracting into itself. Wulff had a feeling of reduced dimensions, the truck impacting and then he was coming close to the Cadillac. Too damned close, the brakes were no good on the van and the compression braking was worse, something was definitely wrong with the van’s moter. Ring job.
I’m heading for the ditch and making mechanic’s judgments!
Wulff thought bitterly but by then the van was already swerving right, at the point of lost control, heading—still at thirty or forty miles an hour—toward the guardrail.

He still could have bailed out. That was what he would remember about this the longest. He had the van still marginally under control; by downshifting to first and hoping the clutch would catch he might have regained enough torque to yank the steering wheel left, force response out of the vehicle. He could have come left in the van then, shutting off approaching traffic and bailed out by passing the Cadillac but even as he stared he could see that it would be too close, he would probably sideswipe the old machine, and that would put the Cadillac in the ditch.

In an instant’s calculation he saw all of this and his foot was reaching for the clutch, reaching for the manuever which could keep him on the road but then, staring intently through the windshield, he saw as in close-up one of the children at the rear deck. It was a boy, five or six years old, looking at him with solemn eyes, transfixed by the proximity of the van, the sight of Wulff bearing down upon them. And what he saw in the eyes was, at least in that dazzle of light, that imploded moment, the thing that he had seen in Marie Calvante’s as she lay on the floor: another hurt, vulnerable, tormented creature and he could not do it.

He could not do it. He could do it to the idiot driver and his dumb wife in a moment but not to the child. Not to children. In the two seconds that elapsed from the moment all of this began Wulff came to the realization that there were limits to what he could do, either in vengeance or self-defense and after finding one pole with Versallo, he had found another in the child’s eyes. He held the wheel grimly, tensely, half-saluted in a bizarre gesture and almost majestically the van, bearing right, away from the child and toward the Cadillac’s safety hit the soft shoulder, bounced the guard rail, leaped, flamed, and began to roll.