Night Raider (3 page)

Wulff looked at the two of them, moaning, retching on the seat covers of the 1971 Eldorado, full power gear, power door locks, tinted glass and sliding roof panel. He felt himself to be on the verge of an enormous decision, just the second of the decisions he would have to face in his new life but possibly the more important. The first had only been a matter of what he was going to
do
whereas this was a matter of life and death, not only for these two but for who knew how many in the future. He peered again toward the parapet and saw the patrol car still hanging there, no sign of movement inside. So they were merely observing. They had picked up something but they were not going to move in at all. That was the New York city cop for you. Wulff had been one and more than that. He did not know if he could blame them. Who was he to reckon judgement? Who was he to reckon judgement for any of them?

He reached inside his pocket and took out the caliber thirty-eight police special. His souvenir from the department and they could keep their badges, their pension. He considered it and looked at the two in the car for the last time. Then, very quietly, he cocked the pistol and pointed it, first at the one on the front seat.

“No!” Ric Davis said, “no, don’t do it!” catching the glint of the gun, sensing rather than seeing the heft of the barrel as Wulff pointed it Savaged, he nevertheless churned on the seat like a trapped animal. “Please,” Davis said, “oh please man, don’t do it.”

Wulff put the gun against the dealer’s forehead and fired. A good silencer, good control; only a dead, dull
thunk!
and a small, opening hole in Davis’s forehead as he fell away from there.

He turned. Jessup was cringing on the seat in the far corner, his hands also upraised. “You can’t do this!” Surprise seemed to have overtaken him even through all of the pain. The man looked quizzical. “You can’t do it!”

“Yes I can,” Wulff said, “you see, this is just the beginning. Leave a clean trail.”

He shot the man through the heart.

Jessup died beside him on the back seat. Clean, only a little streak of blood showing outside. Wulff put the safety on, put the gun away, leaned forward to open the driver’s door and pushed the seat forward moving the corpse wedged behind the wheel. He tugged Jessup’s body by the ankles, the man surprisingly light in death, and eased him out of the car in little wads of clothing and blood, like a serpent, dropped the body to the pavement beside the car. Let passing traffic get a good look at that. Let the patrol car enjoy it too. Yes indeed, Wulff thought, for better or worse he might as well approach the issue as if he were on stage. That was it: he was on stage now and the theatre was the world. And despite the cops and the traffic, there was no audience at all.

He worked himself out of the car quickly, took the dead Davis by the shoulders and yanked him out of the car. The corpse fell on top of Jessup’s. They held one another in death as never in life, the bodies locked together in a horrid intimacy: dealer and contact man, little spots of blood pooling around them, growing on the pavement. Wulff looked at them for an instant even as traffic seemed to slow and drift around him.

It was satisfying. There was just no doubt about this. It was a satisfying thing to see.

For the first time in weeks, Wulff permitted himself, looking at the bodies, to draw a breath unencumbered by bitterness, by dread, by loss. Then, as cars skittered around him and ever so slowly and gracefully, the patrol car abandoned its position to sweep toward a highway entrance, he got into the front of the Eldorado, closed the door, started the engine and got the hell out of that spot at eighty miles an hour, keeping the transmission locked into second for acceleration.

Cadillacs had a good reputation as road cars but the acceleration was for shit, Wulff decided. Any Plymouth, even without heavy duty shocks and the high-compression engine, could beat the hell out of them. Still, riding in this big car was just like it must be to surmount Harlem on a heroin jag: it shut out everything.
Everything.
He was a corpse riding in a big, dark, painted-white-on-the-outside coffin with red leather interior and nothing, not even the eulogists, would get near him.

Yes, Wulff decided, patting the wheel and shooting the car through a closing gap into the 155th Street exit, there was no question about it. For making a meet with a man like Jack Scotti, there was simply nothing like an Eldorado. Meet the stylish, go in style. A pity that he would have to ditch the thing before he got to St. Nicholas Avenue.

Somewhere far behind, Wulff heard the keen of a siren but it didn’t bother him. He took up the power windows all the way instead. The car was virtually soundproof.

Like the place where he had sent Jessup and Davis.

Everything must have a beginning.

Wulff ditched the car at 125th Street and Eighth Avenue where it looked as inconspicuous as it ever would, blending right into the general scene, and took the subway downtown. Riding in the crowded car of the local, pressed hip to hip with people who looked utterly beaten, he had a brief fantasy that all of them knew who he was; that they would turn on him somewhere around 110th Street and beat him to a pulp but that fantasy went away fast when he realized that no one was paying attention. No one paid any attention to anyone else in the New York subway. It was the only way to get through; start with eyeball-to-eyeball human contact and you were dead. Human beings could not survive being locked into something like this, only machines. He got out of the subway at West 79th Street and Broadway, checked his watch, walked briskly toward the Half-Moon Lounge. Two twenty. If he had sized up his man right and Wulff guessed he had, Wulff would find him there already. The Scottis always killed time for the money.

Walking there, the pressure of the revolver coming in waves against his ribs from the inner coat pocket, Wulff found himself looking at the city for the first time in many years, really seeing it instead of just cutting through around and on the edges in the cop’s way. He could see the city plain: the battered, bleak faces of the men hanging from doorways, the protective scuttle of better-dressed men and women making their way in and out of the apartment houses and brown-stones, the filth on the streets: the look, in short, of a war zone. It looked, Wulff thought, something like the way Saigon had in 1966 with an important difference: Saigon had been backed up right against it, the civilians in that town could
see
the enemy, knew exactly what they were dealing with, could see their future plain.

But that was the front lines, a healthier situation. New York was tucked back of the combat zone: the civilians here did not know what was actually doing it to them. They could see the effects upon the landscape, upon their lives, lived like hunters and hunted in this place but the enemy was far afield and there was almost no point at which they could get hold of him and break the situation through to reality.

Drugs had done it to this city. The city was a map of devastation; not only the people but the landscape was shattered. Drugs had cleaved out a neighborhood there, knocked out a shopkeeper here, broken down the fabric of the city and in some places had thrown up gleaming twenty-five story prisons where the more affluent could lock themselves away or think that they had locked themselves away from the terror. Further uptown drugs had leaped and snarled their way through the older neighborhoods of Harlem, destroyed an area for square miles, paused for a minute to throw up a bleak, filthy fortress of housing projects, then run away, the job done, taking the bridge to New Jersey, the other bridge to Riverdale, spreading the stain of roads which were the network of flight. Drugs had come into the vein of the city and had filled it with poison, then in a kind of high-pressure reversal had pulled the plunger
out
filling the phial with everything that had made the city functional and had pulled it through that network of roads to the opening spaces to the north and the west, the east and the south of the city, anywhere but the city itself, that throbbing, beaten heart which at the center lay there stripped and dying.

Oh yes: you could see it plain. The Scottis would come into the Half-Moon Lounges of this city to pick up the take as middlemen for people who wouldn’t even come in this far, the Davises and Jessups would run around the bowels of the city like roaches sneaking into a hidden sugar dish but what was happening was to Wulff quite clear: the city was being worked over now by only two kinds of people: those who put the junk in, those who took the money out. Crossing Amsterdam Avenue Wulff found himself walking with his hand on his service revolver, feeling the cold barrel, repressing an impulse to pull the gun out and start shooting.

Shoot them. Start and end with the indiscriminate kill. Kill the junkies, kill the dealers, kill the dark men who sat hunched over in double-parked cars unmoving for hours. Work the city like a trapeze of the kill, moving from one level to the next, taking them out by tens and twenties and finally by the hundreds so that the city would be free again.

No. It would not work. Old people shambling by him on the sidewalk, the only people in New York City that even bothered to look around because it was an old habit, these old people looked at him with terror: a six foot four, two hundred and fifty pound, compactly built angry man storming along the pavement, gripping something inside of himself. If anyone except the old people looked would there be any concealing his intentions? Wulff slowed, released the revolver, tried to make his pace more deliberate and offhand, restricted his gaze to what lay directly ahead of him like any city dweller. Better this way. He was in for the long haul. Lose control now and he would never make it to Scotti let alone up the line from there.

It would not matter anyway. He could kill every addict, dealer, supplier, crooked politician and cop in the city and all that he would have done would have been to clean it out for twelve to twenty-four hours before the next wave moved right on in. The quiet men who lived in their castles on the rim of the city did not care. It meant nothing to them. In the morning they would lift their fingers and the next wave would come on in to pick up the corpses and start it all from the top.

Better to take it as one thread, one bright single thread of purpose and trace it all the way through. Right? Of course he was right. And being right did not make you feel any better; it did not even necessarily make you more effective but one thing it did do: it resolved a lot of conflicts.

Wulff walked into the Half-Moon Lounge,
Bar & Grille, Ladies Welcome
and felt the strange, dense coolness of the enclosure assault him. The place felt like an aquarium. It looked like an aquarium too, a strange, dense greenish cast thrown by the lights, the gaping, flat face of the bartender as he came up over the edge and looked at him.

The front room was deserted. One middle-aged woman sat at the bar, rattling ice in a glass, holding an unlit cigarette; two obscure types who might have been salesmen were deep into conversation at the other end of the pit. The television set was tuned to one of those game shows which seemed to Wulff to make sense only to the announcers or the networks. Even the contestants were having trouble.
I just don’t know
a short woman was saying, beaming a bright, empty, idiot’s smile into the camera,
I don’t know if I should go for the double naturals or stay at rest. What do you think?
The audience seemed divided on the proposition. Some said yes and some said no.
I don’t know what to do
the woman said again. Maybe that makes two of us, Wulff thought. The bartender stood slowly, wiping a glass and looked up at the television set. “I think you really ought to go for the doubles,” he said. The middle-aged woman nodded at this. “Even triples,” she added. The bartender put down the wiped glass and took another, adjusting his glasses for a better look at the set. “Tough decision,” he murmured.

Wulff went to the bar and stood there, shutting off the sounds of the game show. It was like drugs themselves, this stuff although, of course, it did not kill. Not directly. The bartender looked his way, ambled over slowly. The middle-aged woman gave him a more calculating look, then a visible half-shrug and turned back to the set. Such was life it would seem in the Half-Moon Lounge these days.

“Beer,” Wulff said and the bartender shuffled off to the taps, got a glass, came back. In a place like this it would always be tap beer; no sense even asking a customer if he wanted a bottle. Wulff put a dollar carefully on the bar and slid it across. “Jack Scotti,” he said.

The bartender gave one imperceptible twitch and then his eyes became round and full. He took a towel from waist level and began to run it over the wood. “Who’s that?” he said finally.

“I’m here to see Jack Scotti.”

“I don’t know anything about names,” the bartender said. “People come in here I serve them. Who I’m serving I don’t know. Do I know your name?”

“My name is Wulff. Now you know my name.”

The bartender blinked. “I still don’t know any Scotti.”

Wulff looked casually through the partition separating bar from lounge, the panelling cutting off all but a little tunnel-vision into the other room. “In there?” he said quietly.

The bartender twitched again. “I told you, I don’t know names.”

“In there,” Wulff said with satisfaction. He took another dollar from his wallet, laid it carefully on the bar and held his hand on it while he locked gazes with the bartender. This was easy. If you could do the procedural stuff, if you could do a Miranda, you could certainly handle a fat, aging bartender in the Half-Moon Lounge. “I’m going in there to see a guy,” he said, “I’d appreciate it being a private conversation.”

“I don’t care,” the bartender said, looking away, down at the dollar, “I don’t care about any of that stuff.”

“It’s a very private conversation and I don’t want it to be interrupted.”

“Listen, this is a public place. I can’t tell you—”

We won’t be long,” Wulff said gently. “Just a little bit of reminiscence and we’re done.” He took out yet another dollar bill, laid it on the counter. Three dollars for a glass of tap beer; now that was really a little stiff. Then again he had taken four hundred and fifty dollars out of Ric Davis’s wallet, another forty out of Jes-sup’s before he had bid them goodbye forever. In that sense the operation looked like it might at least be self-financing. “Give me another beer,” he said very gently not to panic the bartender, “just one to walk in on.”

The man picked up the bills, shuffled away, came back with a glass and passed it to Wulff looking haunted now. Many things seemed to be in the bartender’s face and none of them involved any liking for the situation. Wulff picked up the beer, took a careful sip and carrying it before him like a shield, walked into the rear room.

A small man, neatly dressed, sad-eyed and restless sat in a booth at the end of the line, smoking a cigarette and toying with a shot glass. It was not the only shot glass on the table; scattered around him were two or three others, one of them half-filled. A man who planned ahead, Scotti obviously ordered his full ration before he got settled. It avoided traffic back and forth into the room, the kind of traffic that might draw attention to the fact that he was sitting there. Also, it kept him in one place with an unobstructed view of the only entrance which meant that Scotti was a man who covered his flanks.

Wulff walked in slowly and when he came to the table, paused. Scotti looked up at him almost wistfully and said, “What do you want?”

“I came to carry a message from a friend of yours.”

“I never saw you before in my life,” Scotti said, “you don’t know any friends of mine.”

“How do you know?”

“I came here not to be bothered,” Scotti said. With an attempt at being casual he took a nail file out of his pocket and began to work on his hands but the little delaying tremble of the fingers told everything. “I’ve got no business with you.”

“No,” Wulff said, “but you’ve got business with Richard Jessup.”

“I don’t know anybody named Richard Jessup,” Scotti said after an imperceptible beat, “I never heard of anyone like that in my life.”

“Jessup thinks you have.”

“Then you and Jessup are crazy,” Scotti said. He made a move, arching his back against the wall trying to stand but the position was no good. Too careful of the line of sight, he had blocked his line of exit. Win some, lose some.

Wulff put the heel of his hand on the table and pushed it into Scotti’s stomach. The little man squeezed his eyes closed with pain, took the blow near the spleen and sat in an exhaling gasp.

“You’re in trouble now, friend,” he said and reached inside his coat.

It was all too easy. If all of them operated like this Wulff would have the city cleaned out before Christmas but the trouble is that he was working on the lower echelons and he knew it. Close to the bottom. He leaned forward quickly like a man trying to read a paper over another’s shoulder in the subway, stretched out his arm and arced toward Scotti’s wrist as it emerged from the coat. The gun lurched in the air, clattered to the table destroying shot glasses and then rolled to the floor near Wulff’s ankle. He kicked it away.

“You’re really in trouble,” Scotti said softly, “now you’re really in trouble.”

“You know what?” Wulff said and reached out his arm again, hit the man in the mouth, knocked Scotti gasping into the booth and then, seizing a chair, dragged it over and sat close to the little man, wedging him in, “I’m sick of guys like you telling me I’m in trouble. I’m not in trouble Scotti, you are; you’re in the worst trouble of your life. The harder you punks are pushed, the closer you get into the line, the more you tell me I’m in trouble but that’s just like a dog being backed into a corner when he’s on a chain and his jaws are muzzled. Just whining, Scotti.” He hit the man across the face. “Jessup was to come here to give you some money,” he said. “Who were you to pass it on to?”

“You’re crazy,” the little man said, “you’ve got to be crazy.”

Wulff hit him again. Once you got into the rhythm of it it was fun. A small plume of blood spread from Scotti’s mouth, arced downward. “Come on,” he said, “be reasonable.”

Scotti rubbed at his chin. His eyes reflected deep pain although behind this light there was a hint of something darker. “Don’t do it again,” he said in a level voice. He struggled to stand, found purchase on the table, reeled to his feet, “I mean that.”

“Why not?” Wulff said and flicked out his hand. This one caught Scotti on the cheekbone, the man groaned and his head slammed into the wall. He came off it looking purposeful, digging into his pants pocket. When the hand came out there was a gun in it.

“All right,” he said. The gun seemed to give him calm and assurance. He even looked two inches taller. The gun must have been for him what a shot of heroin might have been for one of his contacts but then again was it that simple? Was anything that simple? “All right,” Scotti said, the gun, dull metal, wavering, then focussing, on Wulff’s gut. “Now I want you to answer some questions.”