Lone Wolf #3: Boston Avenger

by Barry, Mike

  And the car exploded.

  It must have hit a tree dead-on; there was a dull whomp! of impact and then Wulff could feel the searing heat, no longer waves now but vast gusts like a hurricane pouring off the car. The first whomp! set off a series of others, the car went up in stages, blowing fragments downrange like shrapnel and he ducked into the ground, allowing all of this to pass over him, protecting his eyes, clutching his elbows against his face.

  Then, when there was just an instant of silence, he scrambled to his feet and in a blind totter began moving toward the point where he had last seen the valise. He tried to stay low to the ground, anyone watching this from the road must think that he had perished inside the car, but at the same time haste was of the essence. He must have that valise and be gone before the first police or motorists pulled over and came to investigate. The force of the explosion had given him a couple of moments grace, certainly, but nothing like this could go uninvestigated, the convoy must by now have already alerted the state police and soon the cars would begin to sweep in.

  He found the valise. It lay, filth-encrusted, one snap open, at the base of an enormous tree. He yanked on it, feeling the hinges buckle as he wedged it out of the ground. The force of the roll had buried it inches in the earth. It was free. It was in his hand. He felt its surfaces against him.

  Stumbling, clumsy but somehow methodical in his haste, Wulff held onto the valise and headed toward the wooded area and safety. He dived into the trees, his view of the road being instantly shut off. He collapsed sobbing ten yards deep into the forest, the valise rammed into his stomach.

  And then, for a long while, oblivious of anything that might be happening outside, Wulff just lay there.

  XVI

  “It can’t be!” Cicchini screamed into the telephone, but it could be, and he knew with the more rational plane of his mind that it could indeed be, and that shouting would get him nowhere. Shoot the messenger might be a popular policy but if you got anywhere in this business in the long run it was in separating the news from the source, and all the amount of shouting in the world would make no difference. “How did it happen?” he asked more calmly after a moment and his informant told him in quick sentences punctuated by the crackle of background static.

  His informant, a young state patrolman, was taking a big chance in communicating the news through the radio car, he reminded Cicchini of this several times; anyone could intercept these broadcasts and if they got hold of this one he would really be in the soup, but he just thought that Cicchini had best be told as soon as possible. The state patrolman said that he hoped that Cicchini appreciated the way he was sticking out his neck for him, and Cicchini resisted with effort the need to begin screaming and cursing into the telephone. It would do him no good. He must remember that. The essence of success was to concentrate only upon those actions which would lead you somewhere, and telling the state patrolman what he thought would do nothing except to lose him a valuable informant. So Cicchini took it. He listened to everything that the kid had to say and then he hung up on him.

  The Plymouth demolished. Wulff and the valise gone, probably into the woods off the turnpike. Somehow the son of a bitch had gotten away with it, how, exactly, Cicchini would never know. Another police car wrecked. State patrol, Boston patrol, even a couple of federal cars all the hell the way over the area, poking around and absolutely nothing to be done about it. The valise, meaningful evidence, gone. Sands, shaken up in the chase, taken into headquarters and after only thirty minutes, released. No evidence to book him. No one who cared to listen to Sands. Released in his own recognizance.

  Wulff now somewhere at large in the area with the valise. Everything, the whole balance he had made of his life wrecked, fractured. “All right,” he said into the phone when the man was done and there was absolutely no further information to be extracted from him, “all right, I appreciate this,” fuck you, up your ass, and slammed down the phone, turning from his desk, confronting his view of the sea, his view of the grounds from the opposite window, not with the familiar pleasure at having gone so far, but rather as an animal might regard the bars of a cage while somewhere in the background he hears the Keeper coming—he was in a palace but the palace was also a trap. Not like the old days when he could have gone out himself and done something; now he could only wait for situations to come to him. He had arranged matters that way, successive layers of insulation built over the years to remove him from any responsibility, any culpability if things should go wrong, but the isolation cut two ways. In a sense now, he could only wait for Wulff’s to come to him. It was the son of a bitch’s move.

  Possible, very possible that Wulff would take his advice and get out of Boston with the valise. But Cicchini doubted this. He had never had any intention of taking the man’s word that he would do this; the idea was to wait until he had gotten it back from Sands and then, under close surveillance, tail him until he was in the first likely spot and get rid of him. Take the valise away. Cicchini was no fool; he was not going to allow a crazy man like Wulff to walk around Boston or anywhere in the fucking Northeast for that matter with a quarter of a million dollars worth of drugs. But now the son of a bitch had wrecked everything. It was impossible that one man could pull off what Wulff had just managed. The guy had to be crazy. Absolutely obsessed and insane. Still, there it was.

  Cicchini paced back and forth savagely. He wanted to take his gun and go hunting, but it was pointless. He wouldn’t even know where to go. The guy had a hundred square miles to play around in if he was going to stay in the territory. Going after him and that valise would be suicidal until he had some sense of direction.

  The phone rang again. Cicchini picked it up on the second ring, surprised at the sudden quivering of his hand. He had not trembled like this for decades. What was happening to him? What had this crazy son of a bitch done to him? The man on the wire said that someone wanted to speak to Cicchini who refused to give his name. Did he want to take it? At least the interceptors were on the job. He had the place manned up to the hilt. No one could get him here. He was convinced of it. No one was going to get Cicchini when he was walled into his palace. But there was no way that the son of a bitch could have gotten away with the valise either.

  “All right,” Cicchini said, “I’ll take it.” It was probably someone from New York wanting to know what the hell was going on. This was his territory and no one was going to challenge his authority, but they would be interested, damned interested in what had gone wrong here. If Cicchini did not have a good explanation, someone in the Middle Atlantic might begin to get ideas. He had been fucked up just like San Francisco.

  “Cicchini,” a voice said. Cicchini knew that voice. He would know it in dreams or death. “Hello, Cicchini.”

  “Where are you, Wulff?” Cicchini said. With an effort of will he managed to mask completely the quiver in his voice. The son of a bitch could not possibly know what he had been going through. “Just tell me where you are.”

  The man seemed to laugh, harsh barking sounds. “Why should I tell you?” he said. “I’ve done my job. I got your fucking valise.”

  All of the control disappeared. It was like a rubber band stretched to the breaking point that had been insolently clipped with a delicate pair of scissors. “Where are you, you son of a bitch?” Cicchini screamed. His hand clawed at the phone. “Just tell me where you are and I’ll settle you out!”

  “Will you?” said Wulff, “I thought that we were partners.”

  “I’ll destroy you, Wulff.”

  “Come on,” the man said, “come on, Cicchini. I’m waiting. I’m waiting for you to come in and destroy me. I want you to do it personally, face to face, but you don’t have the guts. You’ll send messengers.”

  “Tell me where you are. Just tell me.”

  “I’m going to tell you,” Wulff said, “I want you to come in and get me. Are you willing to do that, Cicchini? Are you man enough to come and get me yourself?”

  “Tell me where
you are,” he said again in a low, maniacal voice. “Just tell me where you are, Wulff, I swear to God, I’ll get you barehanded.”

  “I’m waiting,” Wulff said, “I’m waiting for you to do that. Where do you think I am?”

  “Tell me. Tell me.”

  “I’m at Sands’ apartment, you cheap son of a bitch. I’ve got a valise full of heroin and a gun and I’m waiting for you to come and take them away. Or will you do it, Cicchini? You said you didn’t want to mess with an associate professor.”

  Cicchini felt the rage covering him like a tent. It blinded him, choked him. “I’m going to get you, you son of a bitch,” he said.

  “That’s good. I’ll be waiting.”

  “I’m going to kill you.”

  “Please do that,” Wulff said and the sound of his laughter slammed into Cicchini’s gut like an arrow, “please do that, Cicchini, because you haven’t been able to do a fucking thing right yet.”

  And hung up on him.

  Cicchini was beyond thought. He grabbed for a gun. The men on duty downstairs had to hold him back bodily and scream at him in their fear before finally he understood what was happening to him and told them. Once he did he was glad.

  He would go in there with an army if he had to.

  XVII

  Sands knew the guy was crazy. The guy was crazy because he had the insane, compulsive purposefulness of the madman and there was no way, absolutely no way that he could crack through it. But then again if the man was insane he was the most thorough lunatic that Sands had ever met, and that only made the situation worse. There was just no way around it. He could not win.

  He did not want to win. All of that context had dropped away from him, coming out of the stationhouse all Sands had wanted to do was to get back home, lock the doors, bolt himself in, collapse. Cancel out, quit. The idea of turning himself over to the police for protection was, he saw now, absolutely purposeless, panic-induced, they could protect him from nothing. He had not realized the terror he had had of confinement until he had been in the car, watched what had happened off the road, been taken into the stationhouse. He could not bear it. He could not bear confinement. Better to stay walled in the apartment and wait for them to kill him, better to change his identity and flee this part of the country—but the police were no solution.

  So he had come back to the cooperative only with dim thoughts of insulation or escape and this man had been waiting for him in the lobby, a tall, grim man with mad eyes and a set to the mouth which had terrified Sands, terrifying him more was his first sight of the valise, that valise which he knew so well clutched in the man’s hand. “Upstairs,” the man had said and pointed a gun in the vacant lobby. Pointed a gun at him! no one had ever pulled a gun on Sands in his life, just a little harmless dealing, harmless wheeling and dealing to keep the students happy; he had never wanted to become involved in this kind of thing and now a man with a gun and a valiseful of junk had met him in the lobby of his apartment building and had told him to get the hell moving quietly or he would blow his brains out.

  No one did this to Phillip Sands! But then again no one had ever dumped a valiseful of junk on him before or had walked out on him saying the things his wife had said this morning. It was all tied up with the junk, that was all, the valise was a curse and he should have barred the men from his place before at the cost of being killed by them but too late, too late for any of this nonsense now. He was in. He was in deep, Phillip Sands was, and no ammount of recrimination was going to change the situation at all.

  When they got upstairs, Sands struggling with the key which did not seem to want to fit the door until with a click it went in and he stumbled into the apartment, the man said, “I want you to go in the bedroom. Just stay out of my way now and you’ll be all right for the time being. You make any problems,” and he showed him the pistol, “I’ll have to kill you.”

  “No problems,” Sands had said. His bowels had become ice and fire alternately and he had had to stragger into the bathroom, leaving the door ajar so that the man could see that he was not planning to do anything in there. He had never been so frightened in his life. This man was implacable. He held the gun with the assurance of one who had been living with guns all his life and had no imagination about them because he knew exactly what they could do. When Sands had finally gotten up, released from the cramps but just barely able to walk, the man had ordered him into the bedroom. “Stay in there,” he had said. “Just stay.”

  “I will. I won’t move. I’ll—”

  “There’s probably going to be some activity around here and possibly a little shooting. If you stay out of the line of fire you may be all right for a while.”

  “I won’t move.”

  “I’ll take care of you later, Sands.”

  “Listen,” he had said resisting the impulse to clasp his hands and fall on his knees, “listen, just leave me alone. Whatever I did, it was a terrible mistake. I’ll leave Boston. I’ll leave this part of the country.”

  “It’s too late for that.”

  “I don’t want to get into any trouble.”

  “You disgust me, Sands,” the man had said, “you disgust me the more you talk, so you’d better shut up. There’s nothing I hate more than a man who won’t take the consequences of what he’s become.”

  “I’ll take the consequences. I’ll do anything; it’s just that—”

  “It’s just that you want to live, but we’re past that simple equation now, Sands,” the man said grimly. “We can’t take into account anymore who wants to live and die. You should have thought of that years ago.”

  The man was crazy. He said all of this in a neutral tone, flat affect, absolutely not raising his voice at all and it was the most chilling thing that Sands had ever heard. This man was not afraid of death. This man was death; this flashed across his consciousness. This abductor, this person with the gun could not be moved by ordinary calculations because he simply had gone beyond all of them. He did not care whether he lived or died. Looking into those eyes, seeing the cool, grey panels of the man’s consciousness sliding closed behind him Sands knew that he was dealing with something unlike anything he had ever seen in his life. The man flicked the gun indicating that he should go into the bedroom and Sands scuttled away like a dog or a child admonished by a parent. He would do anything that this man asked him to do. He was quite sure now that any protest at all and the man would kill him.

  In the bedroom he collapsed to the bed itself, finding himself unable to stand or pace, feeling the sheets bunch beneath him. The urge to simply sink into sleep was overwhelming. Maybe he would awaken and find that all of this had gone away. But with that cooler, more detached part of his mind which had never failed him and which would not fail him now, he knew that he was not going to be able to sleep. He had been raised to screaming alertness.

  The valise. It all went back to the valise. If he could only get his hands on the valise he might be able to save himself yet. The man had said that there would be shooting, very likely, going on within this apartment. That meant that there were people, surely, who wanted that valise, were coming here to try and take it away from the man with the grey eyes. But if only somehow Sands could get hold of that valise himself, turn it over to them, then he would have established his credibility, would have proven beyond doubt that he represented no danger to these people and they would release him. It would be his captor with whom they would have to deal but maybe, just maybe, his captor would not be around.

  Sands went to the bureau, opened the third drawer. The gun was where he had left it the last time he had looked at it a month ago. Once a month he just wanted to open the drawer and check to assure himself that the gun was still there. Otherwise, until now he had wanted nothing to do with it. He had a horror of guns, everything that they represented; having it around had been only insurance. But in the sideline he had fallen into it made sense to have a gun in the house even if you were not quite sure that you knew how to use it.

 
Sands took out the pistol. It felt warm, palpable to his touch although it had been lying untouched under the stack of underwear for months. Had Karen ever found it while stacking his clothes? He had ordered her time and again to stay out of his bureau and she said that she would, but there was no accounting for the woman. Maybe she had seen it, touched it recently. It could be another reason why she had left him so abruptly. That was worth thinking about. How could he have explained to her that he never wanted to use the gun?

  No way. She was gone, she was gone anyway, forget it. He held the gun against his side and very cautiously walked toward the door, opened it a soundless crack, looked through. The man was standing in the living room, occupying ground in a position of alertness, the gun held easily in his right hand, his eyes sweeping the terrain with such rapidity that Sands could only freeze into position hoping that he would not see the slight crack of the door. He did not. Finishing his sweep, his eyes cut back to the opposite corner of the room and then, very quickly, he walked to the window and looked outside, down three flights. Checking out streetside, Sands held the gun in his right hand, the gun shaking slightly. He would have to open the door slightly; the crack was too narrow to risk a shot. It could rebound off the wood and hit him. That would be his luck.

  He would have to push that door open quickly, as silently as possible, aim and fire. With luck he had one shot, one clear shot before the man whirled and cut him down. If he missed that shot, he was unquestionably dead because he was obviously dealing with a man from whom no second chances were obtained. But he did not even know if he had that one shot, the door might creak (did it creak? he had never noticed) and his finger might slip on the trigger, any one of a number of things might happen, all of which would be disastrous because the man would turn on him before he would even have a chance to guard himself.

  The man was still standing by the window, now. Something outside had caught his attention because he was pinned to the glass there, fluttering like an insect in his attention. He had not looked back toward the bedroom for a full minute. The man shrugged his shoulders, flexed them and then, quickly raised the pistol, checking it out. Then he dropped his hand back to where it had been and quickly, delicately, walked through the living room and positioned himself by the door, wedging himself against the wall, his shoulders flat to position.