Night Raider

OTHER TITLES BY MIKE BARRY

Lone Wolf #1:
Night Raider

Lone Wolf #2:
Bay Prowler

Lone Wolf #3:
Boston Avenger

Lone Wolf #4:
Desert Stalker

Lone Wolf #5:
Havana Hit

Lone Wolf #6:
Chicago Slaughter

Lone Wolf #7:
Peruvian Nightmare

Lone Wolf #8:
Los Angeles Holocaust

Lone Wolf #9:
Miami Marauder

Lone Wolf #10:
Harlem Showdown

Lone Wolf #11:
Detroit Massacre

Lone Wolf #12:
Phoenix Inferno

Lone Wolf #13:
The Killing Run

Lone Wolf #14:
Philadelphia Blowup

Wulff, after two years in the army, most of it in Vietnam, had been entitled to something nice for his trouble, or so the department felt on his discharge, so they had made him a narco. A New York City narcotics cop which was a pretty good detail anyway you looked at it, what with the freedom and the plainclothes and the graft money, but something had happened to this Wulff overseas it seemed: he had gone crazy. He had become a man of integrity. He didn’t like sucking around the piss-ass informants, most of whom he figured would be better off at the bottom of the river and he didn’t want any of the graft.

Eventually he tried to bust an informant which was the one thing you never did on the narco squad and they knew they would have to do something about this wild man. Getting the informant back on the street was easy enough but Wulff was just the kind of guy who might make things really hot, follow him back on the streets and bust him again or worse. He might try going the newspaper route too. So what they did was to put him back on precinct duty in a radio car. Just for a couple of weeks, until they figured what else to do with him.

They never had a chance. Wulff’s first night out in the radio car, riding shotgun next to a tight-lipped black named David Williams who seemed to know all about his background and in a private way found it very funny … his first night out an anonymous tip came into the precinct that there was a girl OD’d out on the top floor of an old brownstone. The caller suggested that Burt Wulff himself might be the one who would like to take the call and then, laughing away, hung up. The tip passed up one level and was sent on to Wulff’s radio car which, as it turned out, was the closest to 93rd Street and West End Avenue where the girl was supposed to be.

Wulff had a girl. Her name was Marie Calvante and they were going to be married. He had last seen her forty-eight hours before this, before all the trouble had started, and he certainly never expected to see her the next time the way they found her. He was supposed to see her the next day. It was all set up. They would make love in her little apartment over in Queens and then talk about the wedding some more. She wanted one; he just wanted to elope. He found her lying on the floor of room 53 in this brownstone. A long time ago it had been a mansion. Horses had been tethered by the trees.

Wulff saw his fiancée OD’d out on the floor. He thought that he might go mad on the spot but quite strangely he did not He was very calm as he checked her pulse, checked gross signs, closed the wide, staring eyes that had swept over him so gently in the night. Only then did he turn to Williams who had followed him at a measured space up the four flights and who was now looking at him impassively. The blacks saw everything but it did not seem to register. “They killed her,” Wulff said.

“Who killed her?”

“The filthy drug-pushing sons of bitches,” Wulff said. He stood, walked away from the body, went to the window. “They wanted to get at me,” he said, “they’re getting to me.”

“How can you be so sure?” Williams said, already turning to leave the room. The thing to do was to get the meat wagon. He liked Wulff all right as much as he knew of him but holding his hand wasn’t going to help. Besides, he did not know exactly what Wulff was talking about.

“I’m sure,” Wulff said. “There are things you can be sure of.”

Very slowly, he took off his badge and tossed it through the window; two hundred feet below it hit the sidewalk with a deadly
ping!
which would have killed anyone there. “I’m going to kill them,” he said, “I’m going to kill some people.”

“Take it easy man.”

“I’m going to kill a
lot
of people,” Wulff said. He was very calm. “Go down and get the wagon.”

“All right,” Williams said. He shrugged and went through the door. Wulff was alone in the room with what had been his girl.

He turned toward the corpse. “They’ll pay,” he said very quietly, “I swear they’ll pay for this.”

Then—no time now or ever for weeping—he went out of the room and followed Williams downstairs. At the patrol car he did not stop, however, but kept on walking east, toward Broadway. Six feet four inches, two hundred and fifty pounds of combat veteran in full street gear, moving briskly toward the place where the sun would rise. People scattered.

Wulff went straight home and discarded everything except his gun and a spare. They were hardly the equipment he would need but they were a beginning. He did not bother calling in his resignation. They would get the idea on that soon enough. Let the personnel department worry about it. They could keep their fucking pension monies.

By dawn he had cleared out of his apartment completely. He found another place and rested for a few weeks while he put all the pieces together in his mind. There was no one to explain himself to because except for Marie there had not been anyone for many years. Finally, by mid-summer, he thought that he had the beginnings of an operation in his mind. The rest he would have to play by ear.

Wulff hit the streets to kill a lot of people.

So you start at the beginning. Nothing else ever worked. There is always, somewhere, a beginning…

• • •

Ric Davis parked the Eldorado at the intersection of 137th and Madison, easing it into an open space near the curb, shoving the lever to
P
but leaving the engine at idle, an old, old habit which stayed with you no matter where you went. Unless you were leaving that car for a period of time you kept the keys in the slot and the engine running and preferably enough open space in front of you to get it out fast into traffic without wrenching the wheel. He held the wheel now loosely, easily, looking at the northeast corner and then at his watch. Twelve minutes until rendezvous. Early again, time to kill.

Well, so be it. Better early than late, that was how the Ricker thought and promptness in any business was an asset. Davis manipulated the wheel slightly, admiring the power of the car, its consistency, the faint, purring sounds of the idle at the heart of the hood, just a little throb under his ass to tell him that the car was alive. No, you couldn’t beat Cadillacs, particularly the Eldorado. It was true that they fell to shit inside of three years and it was also true that a Mercedes as a performance car had it all over even a new Eldorado but, and what the hell, a Cadillac was a Cadillac. No getting away from it; better to swing with the tide. Who wanted a shitbox Mercedes when for less than ten you could pick up something like this?

Davis smiled to himself, waved a gloved hand at the windshield acknowledging someone that he knew, but the guy on the corner, returning the wave, kept his distance: that was right and fine, it proved that Davis had established. the approach-level just right, and raced the engine gently. He had had the car for four months now, had put over twelve thousand miles on the rack but, still, getting into it each time was like the first. He guessed that in many ways he was still a kid, mooning over his first Cadillac. All right, so be it. Lots of kids had to settle for a ‘59 Fleetwood with scars and horns. Ric Davis had an Eldorado. He patted the wheel again, put a hand into his inside pocket, touched the envelope, reassuringly solid against him. In place.
Rikky-tik.
He dropped the car between reverse and low, feeling the imperceptible rise of the shift, then dropped it into neutral again, turned on the radio very low hoping that he might catch the Four Tops. He loved the Four Tops. Years in the darkness but now bigger and better than ever just like Ric Davis.

No Four Tops but instead something from the fifties on NBC, the Shirelles or maybe it was the Four Seasons, singing close, pushing the theme alone. Davis tapped the wheel in rhythm, put the volume on a little higher, sang along under his breath. Attracting no attention. Just grooving along. Shit, if he wasn’t at 137th Street and Madison Avenue he would take the top down and look at the sky but here it would just make him conspicuous and anyway, what the hell was there to look at? This wasn’t a good looking place and no getting around it.
Someday in the country
, Davis murmured. A man opened the door to his right and came in. Slammed the door behind him, sat knee to knee with the Rikker.
On the Rikker’s seat covers; his ass covering the seat covers
,
his wide hands tooling across the leather-crafted dashboard.

“Hello Davis,” the man said quietly, “been a long time.”

Davis gave him a cautious sidelong glance, then took the man in from tip to stern. Big, heavy, healthy mother fucker this one, six feet four or so, two hundred and fifty pounds or even a little more but no fat on him anywhere, the kind of frame that seemed built for violence. Clear, undistinguished face except for the one thing that Davis saw and which made him lurch inside; the clear, luminescent almost mad penetration of light coming from those eyes. He had never seen eyes like that before. The man leaned toward him, cleared his throat. “I said it’s been a long time, Davis,” he said. “Hasn’t it now?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Davis said carefully. Gently he pumped the accelerator again, listened to the contained whine of the motor. “I want you to get the fuck out of my car.”

“In time,” the man said softly. He patted Davis’s hand, gently. “What you doing up here at 137th and Madison, Davis?” he said, “this isn’t your territory as I recall. You’re a downtown man.”

Gently Davis felt around his pockets. No revolver of course; he would have to be all kinds of fool to come to a routine drop of this sort heeled. But there was always a chance that he had slipped a knife into his inner coat pocket: sometimes he did and other times he didn’t, all depending upon his mood and he never thought about it after he left the apartment. One little glint of the knife would be enough; a little trickling slash up the elbow and this bugger with the big face and the weight would be on his knees screaming, piling out of the car. No. No knife. Well, maybe that was all for the best after all. He hated the idea of violence. Violence was for another part of the Rikker’s life, years ago. Now he was a changed man.

“I do want you to get the fuck out of my car,” he said to the man, grasping his wrist and putting a thumb delicately on a pressure point. “I want you to get out of here right now.” Shit. It was his fault. Why had he left the right door unlocked? It was almost like fate in a way, leaving it open so that this big clown could dodge in and start to throw weight on him. “I said, get out of this car.”

The big clown did something with his wrist, reversed the pressure point and Davis felt a searing pain beginning at the joint, flaring upward then past the elbow and into his neck. Too late he knew that he was in trouble, had taken this too lightly from the beginning. He gasped. His eyes bulged. “Look at me,” the big clown said, “
look at me Davis you son of a bitch and tell me you don’t remember.
”

Davis, through a haze of pain, lifted his head, turned, looked at the man. The staring intensity of the eyes, the cold, dead set of the mouth. He looked into the eyes and then he remembered.

“Let go of me,” he gasped, “you’re hurting.” His foot, in agony, prodded the accelerator, the Eldorado screamed. The big clown put his arm across Davis’s chest, seized the keys, and killed the engine.

“What are you doing here, Davis?”

“Man, I don’t even know what you’re talking about.” Incredibly, he felt tears in his eyes. The Rikker, crying. He hadn’t cried since he was eight or maybe some time before that. He knew at eight that he would never cry again. But he had never felt pain like this before.

“You’re killing me,” he found himself screaming like a child, “let me go, you’re killing me!” He groaned, arched against the seat, flapped like a bird in the man’s grasp.

“Little pain won’t kill you Davis,” the man said, “trouble is that you have a low threshold,” but slowly the pressure was eased on him, eased only to a point where he could speak and see through the pain. The son of a bitch.
The son of a bitch.

“Get out of my car,” he said helplessly, “I don’t know what you’re doing but you get out of my car, you hear—”

A little more pressure on the wrist like a dark reminder of what had just passed, a mere flick and Davis quieted again. Tears flowed down his cheeks like thick droplets of mud.

“When is the meet, Davis?” the big man said. “Tell me when, now.”

Clumps of people on the comer were definitely observing this. They
knew
that something was going on,
had
to know. Why didn’t they come any closer? Why weren’t they helping a man who was being taken over like this, by a white man, in daylight? This could not happen.
Would you?
Davis asked himself reasonably through the pain,
on a hundred and thirty-seventh street and Madison Avenue would you mind anyone’s business?
“I don’t know anything,” he said sullenly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You just came to this elegant neighborhood to give your friends a look at the new car, right?”

“Listen friend,” Davis said, risking a look at the man, “if you’ve got any questions, you can just take me downtown with you and
ask
them. You think you can book me in on what you got, you do that. I’m not answering a goddamned thing here.”

“You fool,” the man said with a thin, mad smile, “you really don’t understand, do you? I’m not taking you downtown. I’m not running you through a booking, Davis. This is man to man now, just the two of us here. When is the meet?”

“I don’t know,” Davis said and then he felt another thrill of pain, more exquisite and terrible than anything so far, like the pain of a tooth extraction but much deeper and moving in waves across his solar plexus. The son of a bitch had hit him directly in the gut, one-finger. He doubled, fighting for air.

“Come on,” the big man said, “you can talk. When? Now? Soon?”

“I don’t know,” Davis said, tears streaming again and the man waved the finger in front of his face. “Five minutes,” he said, “maybe less than that, I don’t know. I can’t get to my watch. For God’s sake, I haven’t done anything! Leave me alone!”

“I’m not the law,” the man said quietly, “so I can’t leave you alone.” He snaked a hand into Davis’s jacket pocket, prodded around in there as if he owned it, and came out with the envelope, running thumb and forefinger over it. “Money this time,” he said, “that means a pickup. I would have bet on delivery. You’re still small time, Davis. You’re still a little, little man. You’re in distribution not supply and you’d probably stay there all your life.”

He threw the envelope over into the back seat with a gesture of controlled violence and poked Davis in the neck. “Point him out to me you son of a bitch,” he said, “show me which one is your man.”

“He’s not there yet,” Davis said frantically, babbling a little, shifting his legs to the recess between seat and door, “I swear to you he’s not there.”

“He’s late then.”

“No he’s not late. He just ain’t there.”

“Finger him,” the big man said, squeezing the neck-bones slightly. Davis felt his eyeballs pop, reflexively. “Finger him for me Davis.”

“Man, this is crazy,” Davis said, “man you are crazy. I never knew any narco that acted like this. You can’t get away with this kind of stuff. They’ll have your ass downtown—”

“I’m not a narco,” the man said quietly, “didn’t I tell you that before, Davis? You’re not dealing with the cops now. This is just man on man. No more policies and procedures, friend. Point him out to me.
Finger him.
”

“Now, Jesus man,” Davis said frantically because he could see his contact stroll out of a shapeless Buick parked near the intersection, one you’d never notice in a million years, and take up space on the corner, the clumps scattering just a little to give him room. If there was one thing about these people, they knew where the power was, just on instinct they would stay clear. His contact looked at his watch, began to pace in even, loping circles. Davis didn’t even know his name. It was much better if you could keep things at that level because names meant identities meant backgrounds meant human beings and at that point you simply couldn’t conduct your business any more but then again if he knew the cat’s name he could have screamed a warning, something of some sort, the words didn’t matter, just to get him off the street.

Something passed down Ric Davis like a cool, grey intake of air. For a moment he thought that the big clown had squeezed him again but then he realized that it was only the shock of insight: the Rikker’s new way of looking at the situation. He wouldn’t warn this cat even if he did know his name. Even if he knew something about him. In this business it was strictly one man against the other and he owed this one nothing. He owed nobody anything except the Rikker and that meant getting out of this anyway he could. He looked at the big clown who regarded him with absolute calm, his eyes full and expectant. For one crazy moment Davis felt that he could get near the man, could touch him, could explain to him somehow that he had the Rikker all wrong and that the Rikker, like the clown himself, was only trying to get a job done, only trying to make out, but that feeling passed away and he pressed back into the cushions shuddering, his eyes locked to the tall, spindly black man pacing the corner in crazy little circles, head bobbing, arms moving loosely within his coat. A bad business: his contact looked like: a user. He had never noticed that before. “Good,” the man next to him said, “I’m glad Davis because this makes things much easier now for all of us. Move the car.”

“What?”

“Start the car and move it,” the man said almost pleasantly. “Let’s close in on this guy and make ourselves a pickup.”

“Listen,” Davis said, “I don’t know who you are or what you’re trying to do but I can’t go along with this anymore. This is my car, my business, you can’t—”

“Don’t you know who I am?” the man said. He leaned close to Davis, let Davis get a good look at him, the full frame, closed face, curiously penetrating eyes and from those eyes then came a shaft of power which Davis felt only as pain. Oh man, he had never seen anybody like this in his life. There were narcos and other narcos but this was something else entirely.

He shrugged, slowly because his body was stiff and also to show the man that he would make no sudden gestures. Fuck it. He wasn’t going to fight with this clown; he knew now that it would only get him killed. Whatever was going on now was beyond the Rikker’s control and nothing to do but go with it and hope that he came out at the other end.
Small fish
, he thought, turning the key and bringing the Eldorado over,
they’re always going to go after the small fish like the Rikker; the Rikker is going to take the heat on this one.
Professional risk. He had known that from the beginning. Black men on the street level were fools if they didn’t understand. Slowly he poked the car across 137th Street, holding the wheel tight. “Okay,” the passenger said, “give him a little horn.”

Davis gave him a little horn, two light blasts from the Eldorado’s fuck-you horn. Nothing like a Cadillac horn. They brought the spindly man’s face around, whipping fast, spotting Davis and then the white man beside him. The spindly man poised on the corner like a dancer before a leap, seeming to decide whether to dodge back to the Buick, stand fast or move over. Davis could see the calculation moving across his face like little animals. The big man raised a hand in casual greeting and motioned for Davis to stop the Eldorado. He did with a little whisk of power brakes. The spindly man who must have been thinking about the money, came over slowly and looked into the window. The big clown used the power switch to roll it down, leaned out.