Lone Wolf #3: Boston Avenger

by Barry, Mike

  “Who killed a lot of people?”

  “Don’t give me that shit, Wulff,” Cicchini screamed. Abruptly, he abandoned all pretense of control. “I know what the fuck’s going on here, I know your fucking methods! You bombed out that house! You’re trying to take all of Boston with you.”

  “I don’t know a thing about it,” Wulff said. “How many did you say were killed?”

  “Forget it,” Cicchini said, “that’s under the bridge. If I were going to shoot you for that you would’ve been dead in that car. I’m willing to make a clean slate starting from now. I want you to get your fucking valise and get out of my area, Wulff, and stay away permanently. What you do elsewhere is your business. I don’t care. I’m responsible for my area and that’s the end of it. You take that valise and get out of here and never come back again.”

  “That sounds like a promising offer,” Wulff said quietly. “It really does. Why should you trust me?”

  “You know why?” Cicchini said, “because you’re crazy. I can trust a crazy man. The most important thing to you is this crusade of yours and nothing’s going to stop you from going on. If you figure that it pays the rent, you’ll pick up that valise and get out of town. I don’t give a fuck what you do with it. You can drop it in the fucking Atlantic Ocean for all I care. Just get it out of my life and keep it there for good.”

  “You’re going to let me walk out of here,” Wulff said almost unbelievingly. “You’re just going to turn me loose and send me off to Sands.”

  “Would you prefer that I shoot you?” Cicchini said and showed him the gun, spun the barrel absently, clicked it once. “I’ll do that if it would make you any happier. The fact is that people like you want to die, Wulff, you don’t want to get along, you don’t want to live your lives. Deep down the most satisfaction I could give you would be to shoot you dead and put you out of your misery, but I’d rather not unless you make me. I think that we can do business together. This is purely business, there’s no sentiment, I don’t like you, I don’t want to get involved with you on any level, but it looks like our purposes could mesh here. You want the valise and I want it out of here and I don’t want to touch Sands.”

  Wulff stood. Heavily, awkwardly, but he stood and felt the better for it. He had been sitting since he had entered the room, now, standing, proportions seemed reduced to more manageable size. Cicchini no longer loomed over him, the ocean was no longer a malevolent presence through the window. He was merely looking at a tired man of normal height who had troubles that he could not handle, and at a ragged strip of beach, pebbled and rock-strewn, falling into the ocean. “You’ll have to give me information,” he said quietly. “If we’re going to do business at all you’ve got to give me a lead or two here.”

  “I don’t have to give you shit,” Cicchini said, holding the pistol levelly and then flicking it, making a dismissive gesture. “Just get out of here and do your job. The stupid son of a bitch is listed right in the phone book.”

  X

  Wulff remembered how it had been on the squad. The squad was big during the late sixties until the new Commissioner came in and the real shakeups had begun. But straight through to the moment of his bounce the squad had still been golden. If you were on it you could have an income for life. The work was interesting and not too challenging and all in all it was the kind of job that a young man just getting out of high school, say, would have been well advised to take.

  Of course it wasn’t that easy to get on the narco squad; you had to get into the department in the first place, and in the second you had to politic it all the way. A post like this had to be preferential; no merit system was going to be able to point out who would fit in and who wouldn’t, and anyway nine-tenths of the department, easy, would be filing into the examination center if you threw it open competitive. Wulff was one of the few who hadn’t politicked his way in; when he came back from Vietnam two years later he had made a lot of people feel guilty in and around the precincts and they had decided that the least they could do was to work out something nice for him. The narcotics squad was about the best they could do; it was plainclothes and you could pick your spots, also you could use your own transportation and to a certain extent make your own hours, because so much of the thing was based on coaxing up informants.

  Needless to say the vice squad would have been even better. The vice squad was what every cop in the department, homo- and heterosexual dreamed about at night: it was harmless, lucrative and there was the possibility of some pretty good sex in the bargain if you wanted to play it that way, but even a combat veteran couldn’t have everything. The department thought that they had done pretty well by Wulff, setting him up for narco. What did he want? Blood?

  Actually he didn’t even want narco. All that he wanted when he came back was to be in a quiet room alone for a while where he could work out his thoughts and impressions carefully. In three months or six he might have been ready for the world that way. A desk job on the precinct would have been ideal for his purposes, but he never made the suggestion—he was a good cop, his policy was that he would go where they told him to in those days—and since desk duty was mostly for cardiac cases or men who had proven themselves spectacularly unworthy on the streets, but in no way which the department wanted to make public, narco it had been, and Wulff had spent two and a half interesting and complex years enforcing the law, fighting the drug trade in New York City. He figured that he personally had contributed over fifty thousand dollars worth of stuff of varying street quality to the stash room over that period. It was a little embarrassing to find out later that the stash room had merely been another drop and that the cops who had unlimited access to the center were carrying it out of there in car loads and replacing it with sugar; but there had been a time, at the beginning of the assignment anyway, where every small bag or box of stuff he had dropped in there had to him been another step in the right direction, in fighting the enemy, in cleaning out the city.

  Well, you lived and learned. After a while if you were the wrong kind of cop the idea might occur to you that the best thing would be to bust the informers. The informers in those days were functioning as if the squad worked for them, they were setting up the appointments and naming the conditions and they even had a selected list of bars and restaurants which were the only ones they would patronize. It had gotten that bad. Wulff began to feel that the informants were laughing at them; that more often than not they were manipulating the cops so that the cops went along with the trade, became subcontractors themselves—but that kind of thinking just did not take you very far in the department. It was a very dangerous thinking as a matter of fact and that was what had gotten him into trouble.

  What you were supposed to do when you got on the squad was to go along with it, it was a sinecure, a good post, and although it didn’t have much of a future it sure as hell had a lot of presence. Wulff knew that he should have considered himself fortunate. All over the city cops were busting their asses to get onto the narco squad, those who had made it would go through their days with quiet eyes and complicated expressions except when there was one or another of the periodic investigations which even then were coming two or three times a year.

  That was the only thing you really had to watch: the investigations. Men got transferred or thrown out of the department like fleas when the press began to shout, and one or another idiot on the lowest level would confess to having taken a dollar here or there. For three weeks to three months things would be distinctly uncomfortable; it would be impossible to meet an informant in a place and have a quiet drink, get any real business done at all—and then the press would go on to something else, usually the vice suqad, and things got back to normal, except for a turnover of about ten percent. Wulff had gone through five of those in his time and had survived every one. It was not only a question of keeping a low profile which everybody did anyway, it was a matter of honestly not caring, of not allowing the troubled periods to shake you or take you out of the modus operan
di. Since Wulff, as far as he knew, had been the only man on the squad who was not overtly or covertly on the take, things never bothered him too much.

  His troubles began when he busted an informant. Informants just did not get busted; that was one of the principles of the game. Occasionally it was necessary to warn them when a raid was coming up in case it was in their area: otherwise in addition to a few hapless college kids and a couple of junkies who were mostly glad to go to the Tombs since at least they were familiar with it, you were likely to get yourself an informant in the net and that meant going to all of the trouble of having him turn evidence and getting him out quietly. You could do it, you could work that kind of thing out, but unless you played it very subtly you were likely to lose the services of the informant permanently. It was just too pat the way that they would get out of it while the others stayed in—and sometimes their connections could turn damned nasty. Informants could even get killed that way, not in the Tombs (the junkies might take to occasionally hanging themselves but that, the guards insisted, was only because they needed a way to get warm) but outside of it, on the streets. The fact that this kind of thing might happen to them made informants very reluctant to be a raid altogether and therefore it was sound policy to make sure that they were tipped off in advance. If they couldn’t be, there had been more than a couple of raids in the history of the department on which all charges had been dropped before arraignment, simply because it was easier to handle it that way than to get into risky territory. The system did not work, it hardly functioned at all, but it was through ten years or so about the best system that anyone could think of or want to use—it kept the squad, the informants, the big fish and the Commissioner if not the press quiet—so the policy held. Informants just did not get themselves jailed.

  Except that Wulff jailed one. He couldn’t let it go. He knew that the son of a bitch was dealing with left and right hands together while he used his mouth to pass on messages that would undercut the competition. He was only twenty-two years old this kid, quite young for an informant, but he had a history of involvement with the department, being an old valued friend from the age of fifteen, when he had been caught in car theft and grand larceny, and he was able to graduate, as it were, to the status of informant quite easily. His information was worthless, now and then he would turn up a bunch of West Siders smoking hashish on a Saturday night or some half-dead men crawling around in alleys, but then almost all of the information was worthless. Wulff had caught him with a deck of heroin in the right pocket of his sport jacket. It fell out when the informant, at the bar, had been in the process of extracting a pack of cigarettes while he laid some more bullshit on the cop about the general scene uptown and downtown but not in midtown where he operated. The bartender saw it and half of the seven or eight people at the bar saw it, and the couple dancing to the jukebox, staggering around in a haze of either lust or downers saw it as well.

  Wulff thought that he had no choice. He couldn’t let it go. Maybe he should have let it go, and if he had all of it to do over again knowing everything that had happened, he might have, but the situation at that time seemed absolutely clear-cut and without options. He took the man in.

  Right away he saw that it had been a mistake. They wasted no time in delivering the message. The papers were late in coming through in the first place, and in the second place he and the kid had been separated at the stationhouse and he had never seen him again. Wulff had sat by himself in a large, peeling, grey room for several hours while they told him that the typist would get onto the material as soon as he got back from a lunch break, but by about one o’clock, an hour past his shift, Wulff started to get the idea, and by two o’clock he was certain. He knew then that he had made a mistake but it was, of course, entirely too late. At three in the morning when he was beginning to regret everything about it, he got to a phone and told Marie that he wouldn’t be able to make it to her house as they had planned after all; he had gotten involved in something. As always—she would have made a great policeman’s wife—she said that this was fine and she’d wait to hear from him. No questions. She would never have asked any questions but waited for him to tell her, which he certainly would have, except that this one time he never got a chance. That was just two days before she died and he hadn’t had a chance to see her in between because of the whole mess that came up. At about four in the morning the lieutenant came in and said that he had gone over all of the charges now and Wulff had no case. He had no case at all. They were improperly filed, the information on the suspect did not jive with identification that the suspect had produced and where the fuck was the heroin anyway?

  Wulff said that he had turned it in and the lieutenant said that he didn’t think so because there was no record of it. Wulff offered to get the desk sergeant and the property clerk down there right then to settle this but the lieutenant said that the shifts had long since changed and what the fuck was the point anyway? There were no verification signatures on file. At that point Wulff understood everything or nearly everything, but it was definitely too late for understanding. The lieutenant was incensed. He wanted to know who the fuck Wulff thought he was anyway and didn’t he realize that he had far more important things to do than to get involved in chickenshit like this. Wulff should not have done what he did next but he did it anyway. He slugged the lieutenant.

  Oh, he pulled the punch even as he was throwing it and he didn’t do more than ruffle the man but it was enough, quite enough, and from then on things, as they say, deteriorated. The lieutenant smashed him open-handed across the face and Wulff took it, there was nothing else to do, and then he left the room quickly and told Wulff to wait in there.

  Wulff was half-convinced that they were going to shift the terms of the arraignment; they still needed a body and the body would turn out to be his instead of the informant’s, but that was not the way it worked out. Not quite. After a time, instead, the lieutenant came back with a captain, the captain holding a large bunch of forms and the lieutenant said that if Wulff would now just sign all of them he would be allowed to go home. The lieutenant did not say anything specific about Wulff being held under arrest, because no such thing was possible, but the implication was there. Wulff looked at the papers, which seemed pretty vaguely worded generally, but seemed to have something to do with the fact that he was requesting relief from his present assignment.

  He signed all of them. Really, there seemed nothing else to do and under the circumstances it seemed like a pretty good deal. He was sick of the narcotics squad. He was sick of the informants, sick of the junkies lurking in the alleys, laughing at them when they went in to make their trivial busts, he was sick of the smartass college kids who always seemed to know their rights in the trucks going downtown, and showed no hesitancy in showing the cops what they thought of them. If this was the narcotics squad, if this was the way that the city of New York was going to come to terms with the cancer that was invading it and bring the drug traffic under control, well then he had had enough of it.

  The captain stood there, arms folded impassively while Wulff completed all of the forms and then told him that he was a fool. The lieutenant nodded at this but made no comment. The captain added that Wulff was a damned fool; he thought that he was doing something worthwhile, he was one of those fuckers who thought that they could write their own laws and put them on the statute books but in actuality he had no understanding, no understanding of what the police department had to deal with, and how did he like that? The captain said that Wulff was a disgrace to the department and had fucked up a number of people in the process, but after just a little of this he said no more, leaving Wulff and the lieutenant alone in the room facing one another. The lieutenant yanked the forms out of his hand and told him to get the fuck out of there and go home. He was being transferred.

  By that time it was five in the morning which was no time to visit anyone’s girl, even Marie Calvante—although he should have known better: she would have come out of bed wide-eyed
and opened the door and embraced him. He did not think of that. He went straight home in his own car, cursing all the way, rolling down the window now and then to spit the bile out of the car onto the glistening surfaces of the Long Island Expressway, and eventually he got home and went to bed for three hours. He was awakened by a telephone call telling him to report to the 24th precinct for radio car duty at his regular shift time and that had been the end of his career on the narco squad. Damned near the end of his career in the police department proper. He had lasted, all told, another thirty-six hours.

  Well, that was all water under the bridge now, water under the bridge and all like that but it came back to him. Things like this could not be put away under consciousness forever; eventually they were going to come back and seize you. The Narco squad came back to him vividly, and following that the thoughts of what had happened in the last thirty-six hours of his service came too, and Wulff had to tangle with all of them even though the proper thing to think about was Louis Cicchini and the pact he had made with Cicchini and what he had to do now. That was the important thing. The past was gone, it was locked away; there was nothing that you could do about it except move on. Or cry. Or cry and then move on but this kind of thing could not stay with you.

  But it had to come back. Sooner or later he knew it would come sweeping over him, and so it had. The point was that Cicchini was right. The man was right. The man knew what he was talking about. Wulff was crazy; he was out of his mind. Anyone with his mission would have to be. He was fighting a flood with a sieve; they would run through and around him without even knowing, most of them, that he was there. He could storm city after city, knock out San Francisco and give a body-blow to New York, hurt some minor operator here in Boston—but the real power, the kind of power represented by the Louis Cicchinis, who were distinctly not clowns and made the whole thing operate, well….