Lone Wolf #3: Boston Avenger

by Barry, Mike

  The driver, a young man, barely out of his teens came through the door raving. “What the fuck are you, man?” he said. “What do you think you’re doing? Who are you?”

  Wulff showed him the pistol. “Just keep moving,” he said. “I want the car.”

  The boy’s hands twitched. “This is crazy,” he said.

  “I need the car.”

  “It’s my old man’s car. Listen, he’ll kill me if—”

  “Make a full report,” Wulff said, waving the gun. “Go to the precinct. They won’t give you any problems.”

  The passenger door opened, a young girl came out, her face blank and frightened. She saw the gun and screamed, collapsing into the car. Wulff stayed there, holding his ground while the boy came around to grip her. The girl struggled against him momentarily, fluttering, then collapsed. “Oh my God,” she said. “Oh my God.” The young man dragged her away.

  Wulff got into the car, slammed the door. “You’ll pay for this,” the boy said, leaning in on the passenger side. He had guts all right; Wulff could give him that much credit. “You won’t get away with this kind of thing.”

  “Get on line,” Wulff said, holding the gun on the boy as he drove away one-handed. “Join the club.” He rolled up the window and threw the gun beside him on the seat.

  The car was a ‘60 LeSabre, not the ideal stolen car from any point of view—would anyone want to go to jail for theft of an automobile worth a hundred dollars, when for the same sentence he might as well steal a new Cadillac?—but it worked well and someone, probably the boy himself, had done some clever work with the engine. It picked up fast, shifted far more alertly through the automatic transmission than was characteristic. Spoiler mufflers underneath, customizing around the dash, a devil’s head dangling on string from the rear-view mirror, grinning at him. The boy had put a lot of work into this one-hundred dollar car. Well, good enough, Wulff meant him no harm at all. He would ditch it, finally, in a well-travelled area and leave the plates on, not that there were many customized ‘60 LeSabres in the Boston district.

  He took the bridge, heading across the Charles River. Revere Beach, that was where Tucci lived. He could have suspected as much. Revere Beach was where the people like Tucci in the Boston area would go. In Brooklyn it was Sheepshead Bay, in Northern New Jersey it was Teaneck; further south, for the more elegant, there was Deal but Deal was a different world altogether. Some day, Wulff thought mordantly, he might be able to make it into Deal if only to lay a few land-mines; it was simultaneously the most beautiful and corrupt residential area he had ever seen, the corruption springing from the beauty which was seen only as magnificent, rolling estates located perilously near the sea. Drugs and pain had bought those estates but the walls shut them out just as the sea shut off the estates on all but one side. Deal was another way of life altogether, but the Boston dealers had their Revere Beach and that for them was probably enough. It was a question of settling at your proper level. If they were not satisfied with Revere Beach then they were not smalltimers: they would never have staked out Boston in the first place. They would have fought for their place in the sun to the south.

  Coming into the suburb, Wulff saw the houses jammed one upon the other, thin walls making them separate, all of them shapeless in the darkness. No space in Revere Beach, here the houses were huddled, but there was height and the walls gave their own version of impermeability. The LeSabre was the only car moving on the streets at this time. He cut the lights down to park, eased the throttle. The exhaust system growled thanks to the work that had been done on it, but he was relatively inconspicuous. No one would notice him driving near dawn on the streets of this suburb unless Tucci, of course, had kept a watch.

  He drove two blocks, approaching Tucci’s home. There were cars parked around it, cars wedged into the driveway, spilling out into the street, littering the block up and down and the house, the only one on the block was blazing with light. Driving by at slow idle, hunched over the wheel, Wulff saw that the door was open, in that abcess men stood, half in the house, half on the street smoking, talking. He drove to the end of the block, not breaking the rhythm of his pace, cut right at the corner, began to circle. This was improbable.

  It was totally improbable: what was going on at Tucci’s house? Surely they were not keeping a watch for him. They could not have possibly anticipated his course of action, and even if they had this was not the way you laid patrol to a house, cars scattered all over, men lounging in the doorway. Wulff shook his head trying to figure it out, took two more rights and came down the street once again.

  This time there was a hearse parked in front of the house. It had backed up to the porch and the rear panels were open. Even as he drove by again he saw a group of men walking from the house toward that hearse.

  Abruptly, he understood everything.

  All of it came together then; he had stumbled into the middle of a wake. Henry Tucci was dead, this could be the only explanation, and now, in the dawn hours, his fraternity was assembling. In Revere Beach it seemed they did things right. There would be no waiting for the morning hours to begin the burial of Tucci.

  Wulff kept on driving, heading flat out this time toward the sea, away from the house. He put his headlights back to full, carefully lit a cigarette, thought about it. His best move, doubtless, was to let the thing go; take another tack, another name out of the stockbroker’s notebook, go hunting in a different direction. If Tucci were indeed dead there would be nothing productive there, he could hardly bring pressure against a cropse and the house was, to put it mildly, well attended.

  “Son of a bitch,” Wulff said. Boston had been a disaster from the moment he had approached it and somehow this was the most ominous signal of all. Wulff’s instincts told him that Tucci had not died of natural causes: natural causes would not bring lights to a house at three in the morning, or such an assemblage. No, it had been something brief and terrible that had brought an end to Henry Tucci; there were forces at work in this city now which Wulff could not yet comprehend. He knew on every level that Tucci’s death had something to do with the quarter of a million dollars of death that had been released into the city. It was the wild card, the unknown equation. He pounded the wheel with mounting fury, accelerated, turned halfway into an intersection to make a screaming U-turn and then headed back.

  It had been a disaster, Boston had; nothing was working. Now things were zooming out of control: if a Tucci had died because of the wild card then there would be others. Whatever fragile balance Boston had had, a balance probably built upon the sharp limitation of supply, it was now over. Open season was beginning.

  Wulff felt around his belt and took out a grenade. No machine gun and clip was he going to take out on the streets, it was too encumbering. But grenades were portable, inconspicuous and could have an even more spectacular effect. He took it from his waist and looked at it, considered what he was going to do for no more than a minute.

  Some innocent people were going to be badly hurt. But he had to remember that there was no innocence in this trade, that anyone and everything touched by junk became irretrievably rotten and then had to pay the price. If he began to think of checks and balances, levels of thought, then he was beginning only to think like a cop or a bureaucrat again. That was why the enforcers were only another component of the disease; because they refused to accept responsibility and follow it through.

  To fight vermin you had to be one.

  He poised the grenade delicately in his hand, gathered speed, balanced the steering wheel with the elbow of the arm holding the grenade, cranked down the driver window all the way and got back on the wheel. The car was now moving at forty, forty-five miles an hour on the quiet street He got it up to sixty. At that speed something came free in the transmission and he had the feeling of floating above ice, suspended. The mufflers cut in and he felt the power building.

  On to Tucci’s block. The hearse had attracted a crowd outside, all of them were watching with interest as five
or six men struggled with a blocky shape that could only have been a casket. Henry Tucci’s last ride. A flasher on top of the hearse which was wedged well out into the street spun, throwing yellow and red into his eyes. Conlan blinked. He pulled the pin.

  Now everything was crucial, it had to synchronize. Seven seconds. He cocked his arm, held the gas pedal steady. Six. He could feel little slivers of heat from the grenade penetrating like splinters into his palm. Nervous reaction. Plenty of time. Don’t throw it yet. Five seconds. Four. He was within twenty yards of the house now and gathering speed. Faces leapt up at him in the light. He could see the casket waver in the air as, distracted, the carriers looked at him.

  The grenade seemed to be growing within his palm. It was just like combat, a bursting flower spreading under his fingers, a feeling of flinch and underneath that enormous power. Three seconds. Two. All of them were looking at him now. The pattern of bodies on the street had broken. They were running away. They were running into the house. The casket, the last receptacle of Henry Tucci bounced on the ground, abandoned. Life was for the living.

  In that last second Wulff saw it all, the sweep of bodies, the scattering, bouncing coffin, open doors of the house, the last frantic twitches of an ant colony as it unconsciously realizes that an enormous foot is about to stamp it to death. He put the gas pedal down to the floor praying that the LeSabre would hold. He threw the grenade.

  There was a dull whoomp: and the house went up.

  Sheets of flame carrying ash and splinters were hurled into the night. The roar of impact covered what must have been the lower shouts and screams. But all of this was happening in a tunnel somewhere to the rear: Wulff was in the pipeline, he was already bailing out. Fifty yards, then a hundred, then two hundred behind him; explosion was building upon explosion as the fragments fed the building fire, but he was out of it.

  It was a hell of a wake for Henry Tucci. Surely the dead man would have appreciated it. When his world ended, it ended for so many who had known him. Yes, this would in a way be the ultimate satisfaction.

  Wulff drove out of it all. He was laughing. The laughter came out of him harsh, cruel, devastating, painful in his chest, refracted within him. Death laughter known first as pain and only then as knowledge. He heard the roar of the night. He heard the first sounds of sirens.

  Ditch the LeSabre, sure. But first, get out of there. He drove on.

  VI

  An hour earlier, the two men who had been in Sands’ house edged the old Impala cautiously onto the turnpike and headed west. The road was deserted; occasionally the headlights would pick up an animal scampering in terror or a faint illumination from the hedges that ripped against their eyes. The men said nothing for a while. Paul who was driving had everything he could do to keep the battered car functioning and stable at highway speeds and the stocky man was slumped within himself, still trying to put together the pieces of what had happened. After a little while a mist began to come up against the windshield and Paul put on the wipers. The right one had no blade, it streaked and smeared the windshield and the stocky man cursed. “I can’t see a fucking thing,” he said.

  “Don’t complain. I’m driving.”

  “Yeah? Well how far are we going to drive?”

  “Until we’re the fuck out of Massachusetts,” Paul said. “We’re not going to hang anywhere around Boston while this is going on.”

  “You mean we’ll commute back tomorrow night.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Horseshit,” the stocky man said and when there was no reply he added, “I don’t like this. I don’t like any fucking part of it.”

  “You made that quite clear back there.”

  “I don’t trust the guy. How do we know he just won’t take off with the stuff?”

  “He’s got roots.”

  “How do we know he can even do anything for us? You heard him say that we had him wrong.”

  “Don’t worry about Phillip Sands,” Paul said, playing with the knobs on the dashboard, getting a faster stroke on the wipers, “Phillip Sands is the supply man for this area. If anyone can do the job for us he can.”

  “He’ll screw us blind. I don’t trust the son of a bitch.”

  “You don’t seem to understand,” Paul said quietly. “We’re not in any bargaining position. We can’t get that stuff into channels ourselves.”

  “We didn’t even try!”

  “You’re stupid,” Paul said. “You’ve been stupid all your life, Miller, and you’ll go on being stupid. We come into daylight with a haul like that and we wouldn’t last half an hour. Telephone calls would go right through channels and they’d have a party for us on the spot. A guy like Sands at least gives us a chance. He’s an outsider too.”

  “We could have tried,” Mac said sullenly, “we could have at least given it a go. How do we know it’s a quarter million? It could be twice that. It could be a million!”

  “Sure,” Paul said. He worked his blond hair out of his eyes. His forehead was sweating lightly. “We could have turned the stuff in, too. Remember? You wanted to do that.”

  Very lightly Mac said, “I still think we should have done it Paul. We’re in over our heads now.”

  “We’re not in over our heads if we don’t panic. Let this man handle it. He’ll fence it for us, believe me. We’ll go back there tonight and pick up that fifty grand in cash. You wait and see. He’ll get the stuff tested and he’ll raise the money. He’s not going to let something like that go once he knows what it is.”

  “He isn’t?”

  “He’s greedy,” Paul said, “he’s a lot greedier than I am. All I want to see out of this is fifty grand.”

  “Fifty grand is no price, Paul,” Mac said. He shifted on the seat. Behind them he could see headlight beams coming up through the rear-view mirror. A wanderer, travelling fast. “What are we going to do with fifty grand?”

  “I don’t know what you’re going to do,” Paul said, “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do with twenty-five though. I’m going to go underground and I’m going to do it alone. You go your way, I’ll go mine.”

  “I don’t like it,” Mac said, “I just don’t like it. We should have delivered the stuff and let it go.”

  “And picked up a hundred each?”

  “Maybe two hundred each,” Mac said. “Maybe three hundred. It was a big package. We took risks.”

  “Fuck that,” Paul said. The wipers quit suddenly and he cursed, fumbled with the knobs, managed to get them going again before the mist closed in. “I’m sick of living on the margin all my life. You see a chance you take it. Don’t bother me anymore, Mac. You don’t like the route, I’ll stop the car and you can get the fuck out. Walk to Pittsfield, take a furnished room. Tomorrow you can call them and sincerely apologize.”

  “Screw you,” Mac said unhappily. He hated the son of a bitch. All right, he would admit it, he would face the truth. The man was no good. He was crazy. He really thought that he could buck against the echelons above and he had talked Mac into it against every instinct which Mac had. He knew that they would never get away with it. But what was he going to tell the silly fuck when they were driving away, the valise in the back, Paul at the wheel in full control, when Paul said let’s make our own run for it. Was he supposed to get out of the car and run? Pull out his pistol and shoot Paul? Threaten him? No, he had been sucked in; that was all there was to it. There was something manic and poisonous about Paul’s greed, it had infected him.

  It had infected him all the way to the professor’s duplex apartment and even a little beyond that until, sitting in the living room, listening to that smooth bastard talking away, Mac had realized that he was in completely over his head. Paul was crazy, that was bad enough, to listen to a crazy man, but to turn over goods like this to some son of a bitch in tweeds who would not even admit that he could do anything—that was insanity.

  He should have shot them. That was all. He should have gunned both of them down in that living room, gra
bbed the valise and gotten the hell out of there. Turned it over. Turned it back. He would have had a double-murder on his hands but maybe, just maybe, if he had turned over the goods and shown good faith, they would have protected him. His record was clean; he was a good assignment man. He had never gotten into any trouble like this before. They would understand. He would tell them that Paul had pulled a gun on him or something and forced him to go along and he had bided his time until the first opportunity to turn the tables. They would listen to him. They would take him back and put him underground and in four or five months after the headlines over the professor had gone away he would have come out and it would have been just like the old days and he never, never would have gotten involved in anything like this again.

  Too late. That was hours and hours ago that they had been in the professor’s apartment. Now they were headed west, down the road toward Connecticut, and Paul was at the wheel which meant that if he tried anything he would only wreck the car and it was too late. He didn’t even have the goods anymore, which he knew would have been the only way he could have bought his way back.

  He had been sucked in, Mac realized, and there was nothing left to do but play along and hope that Paul’s maneuvers worked out. Maybe they would. Maybe the guy did know what he was doing. Perhaps he was even right: that you had to take the chance when the chance presented itself unless you wanted to live on the margin all your life.

  Mac sighed, glanced at the rear view mirror again. That car behind had come up fast but now it had slowed. It certainly was tailing them close. Going at seventy-five, which was all Paul could coax out of the old machine, the car was no more than two or three lengths behind. Paul’s hands clenched the wheel, his face grim. He seemed paralyzed, locked into the speed which was, of course, fifteen over the legal limit. If it was cops and they wanted to bust their balls they were dead. Mac turned, looked out the rear window. A red light on top of the following car came to life, sent panels of light into his eyes. He heard a siren.