Lone Wolf #12: Phoenix Inferno

by Barry, Mike

  But he could not move. For the moment he found himself in an attitude so dull and withdrawn that it might have been grief.

  The woman was touching his shoulder. Her nails were digging in. “What’s wrong Joe?” she said, “what’s wrong with you? Who did you hear from? What did they say?”

  “Shut up, you stupid cunt,” Carlin said.

  III

  Wulff and the biker got to know each other pretty well on the long trek south. They even got to feel that they had something in common: They both hated junk. The biker drove Wulff’s Fleetwood while Wulff held the gun on the man’s neck, but after a while they got so deeply into conversation that Wulff didn’t worry so much about the gun, and as far as the biker was concerned he had no reason to make any sudden move. They both understood that the biker had been strictly for hire and had nothing personal against Wulff at all and would as soon have worked with as against him. He hated Carlin, too. He talked about Carlin a lot on the way down, but that was only the early and least absorbing part of their conversation.

  The biker was named Owens. The other one, the taller man who had been named Yount, they had just left with the two motorcycles, by the side of the interstate for the cops to find. There was nothing tying Yount to them, and even if there had been they would be hundreds of miles away by the time an all-points went out, if it went out at all. Who cared about people like Yount? Owens asked, and Wulff, after hearing the man’s background, agreed. He was hardly top-priority.

  Owens was thirty-eight years old and had been around. He had been most recently a stuntman doubling for a motorcycle exhibitionist who made his living running off diving boards and canyons; the exhibitionist had been a brilliant promoter but had had something of a yellow streak, and since at a distance where most of the events were conducted one could hardly make out features in a helmet, Owens had done most of the doubling. It had been a pretty good if dangerous job without much security, but the biker had brought an end to it himself finally by taking a jump himself over seventeen parked cars on a ten thousand dollar challenge bet that demanded that he do it without a helmet. Greedy for the ten thousand if scared, the exhibitionist had done it, had turned over on the roof of the fourteenth car, had burst into flame and died. That left Owens pretty unemployed, but some contracts put him in with Carlin and he guessed that Carlin’s assignment sounded like a fairly easy twenty-five hundred down. What the hell? The odds that he would ever meet up with Wulff with a search party of twenty scouring the country were almost nil.

  So he had been sorry when he and Yount had come up against Wulff in the Fleetwood. Actually, Owens explained, it was really Yount’s fault, the conscientious fuck had spotted Wulff on a sweep going in the opposite direction and had insisted that they turn tail and follow. Owens had wanted no part of it and had insisted to Yount that no one could identify a man passing him on the opposite side of an interstate at a combined speed of a hundred and forty an hour. But Yount said he had been an eagle scout and a point man in the infantry and that was his specialty. Rather than get into trouble with Yount, who was just the kind of prick who would have reported him to Carlin, Owens had gone along. See where that had gotten them, of course. It served Yount right; it would have served Owens right, too, being such a fool and going along if Wulff had not been such a reasonable man. Owens said he was damned grateful and he would lead Wulff right to Carlin’s estate and he would even help Wulff set the grenades, that being the least he could do for the trouble they had caused Wulff and basically being in agreement with Wulff’s crusade anyway. He detested drugs; the exhibitionist had been on coke and pot all the time and doing a little heroin sniffing, and where had it gotten him but out of life and Owen out of a job? Owen felt that it was a damned shame he couldn’t have worked with Wulff from the start.

  Wulff didn’t have as much to say, there being no need for it, but he found that he liked Owens almost as much as Owens liked him; he was the first man since Williams that Wulff felt at all comfortable with. The man was cheerful, he was straightforward, he was, as he had told Wulff, in it only for the money with nothing personal at all, and furthermore, despite his bad luck on the road, he was competent. He probably could have killed Wulff if he wanted to; Owens said that, and Wulff, to himself, agreed. He hadn’t because he had liked Wulff’s style from the very beginning. With that as the start of a relationship it was easy to relax with the gun and let the miles go faster.

  By the time they hit the outskirts of Chicago, Wulff felt at ease enough with Owens to get Carlin’s private number, which he had given out to the assassination team, and put in a call himself. He had found Carlin on the phone to react almost exactly as Wulff would have hoped: with blind, complete panic. That was fine; it was all calculated. Even the possibility that Carlin would meet him with one thousand troops had been calculated, as had been the chance that Carlin would flee. Wulff liked this. He liked it fine. He understood now why Calabrese had not had him killed but sent him off to Peru. Knowing there was someone worthwhile and deadly around kept you young. He needed a rival. There was enough pain; two women dead, thousands burned, he didn’t have to concentrate on that any more. The memories would come as would the modus operandi. It was the challenge that would keep him going.

  So they kept on rolling, then, past Kansas City, moving briskly on. Wulff told Owens somewhere around Tulsa that he would be happy to let him go any time now, but Owens said no, he didn’t mind the company and he didn’t even mind the gun; he’d be happy to come along and help Wulff set the traps. At that, Wulff had put the gun away, taking a chance on Owens, which really was no chance at all, and had settled down to the rest of the drive, which was a piece of cake. Owens had a million stories.

  In New Mexico they came across the border and came up against another of Carlin’s troops. Pure coincidence. The team working in two like all the rest, was in a big Pontiac Bonneville that steamed exhaust and looked to be at the very end of the seven-year American car cycle carefully worked out by GM and followed by the others, but whatever it was the car was incredibly maneuverable. Wulff could hear the scream as it wheeled around on the two-lane highway, dwindled in the rear-view mirror, turning. It was suddenly up behind them very quickly, closing ground. It must have been moving at eighty-five or ninety miles an hour. “Floor it all the way,” Wulff said.

  Owens tried, little beads of sweat coming out over his forehead. “Carlin’s not so stupid,” he said.

  “You think it’s him?”

  “Who else?”

  “No,” Wulff said, “I guess he’s not so stupid at all.” The Fleetwood was rocking at eighty; the suspension, suddenly intimate underneath him, was screaming. “We can’t outrun them,” Wulff said. “The car won’t take it.”

  “Main access road,” Owens said, his hands stiff on the wheel. “He would have them patrolled. He just got lucky, though. I got to believe he’s lucky.”

  “He’s only lucky if they get us,” Wulff said. The transition to the us he noted was automatic; he no longer regarded Owens as an enemy. Owens was in it with him; there had not been any question of that now for several hundred miles. Maybe that would make him a damned fool when Owens used a sudden, unexpected opening to drop him like meat and take him into Carlin, but that was the kind of chance you had to take. Everything was a chance. Everything was an odds game; if you didn’t shoot craps you couldn’t stay in. “They’re gaining,” Wulff said. Turning he took a quick look; the car had closed within a city block or so, barely a tenth of a mile back. “They must have equipment on it.”

  “No fucking good,” Owens said. “There’s never any goddamned traffic on these roads,” he said with sudden urgency. “Goddamn it to hell, why does it always work out that way? When you need traffic you don’t have it. “

  “Would traffic have stopped you?”

  “Probably not,” Owens said, “but we were a special case. We were very determined.”

  “Not determined enough.”

  “How lucky we got,” Owens said seriou
sly and slapped the wheel. “We can’t outrun them,” he said, looking at Wulff quickly, then back at the road. “You know that, don’t you?”

  “I thought it was worth a try.”

  “They’re closing,” Owens said, “they’re closing fast now.”

  At ninety miles an hour the Pontiac was burning rubber, laying down little tracks behind it as it sprung up on them. There was now a distance that could be measured in car-lengths. The first shot hit, leaving a little blister in the glass, a spreading web that looked like a bloodstain.

  “Sons of bitches,” Owens said. His hands were flat and tight against the wheel. Otherwise there was no change in his expression and he seemed to be in control of himself. Not for nothing, Wulff thought, looking at the man, had he been a stunt man for an exhibitionist. Either that or he was one hell of a fabricator of tales. But the other looked more likely. “If they get close enough they’re going to hit,” Owens said flatly. “They’re using rifles.”

  “They won’t get close enough.”

  “I don’t see how they can keep in back of us,” Owens said. “They’re gaining like a son of a bitch,” His voice was that of a man striving successfully not to panic, moving instead the other way, toward the absence of effect. It came hard but it would last.

  “Leave it to me,” Wulff said, “we’ll see if we can’t back them off a bit.”

  He took out a.45 he had been holding, not the one he had leveled on Owens at the beginning when it looked as if the man might be difficult to control—a.45 was only a mess at short range, you wanted to use something much lighter and cleaner, like a Beretta automatic—and held it back on the Pontiac. Another splinter had joined the one already there, this one slightly more toward the left, the dimples intersecting. Wulff kept his head below seat level, looking up over it, held the.45 steady. “Keep on driving,” he said to Owens, “just concentrate on the road. This could be kind of messy.”

  “It’s messy already,” Owens said. His hands were smooth and precise on the wheel. “Short of getting dead I don’t see how it can be much worse than it is already.”

  “You’d be surprised,” Wulff said, “you’d be surprised.” But he had to admire Owen’s control. The man was remarkable, there was no question about it; considering everything, he had held up very well and now the shift of roles, the shift that had put him in control of Owens seemed to alter again however subtly. Owens was in control of him now, driving the car, the situation dependent upon nothing so much as Owen’s ability to maneuver the car while Wulff concentrated on the mechanics of bringing down the assailants. It was strange how things worked out. His dependency in a sense was total but in another way it was not at all, since Owens owed him as much. Wulff crouched down over the.45 leveling it into his gut and when something in his mind told him that now was the time to fire, that now the situation had worked itself that way, he listened to that inner voice as he had through all of his struggles going back to Vietnam and he let the big gun go off.

  IV

  Back in New York Williams was going through another kind of hell. Everything with Wulff from the first had served to only suck him in deeper and deeper, but now he was dealing with a captain from headquarters who seemed to feel that Williams was completely responsible for arranging Wulff’s escape from the court building. The captain was five six or so, the sort of man who sneaked through the qualifying physical requirements by no more than half an inch either way, probably by lying. And the bitterness and fright of sneaking into the PD, the feeling all his career that he was somehow hanging in just on a technicality that could be reversed by discovery any moment, had made him ill-tempered and vicious. Williams wanted to stand up and go out of the room, tell the captain to fuck himself but he could not do this. His own career was perilous. He had taken a knife in the gut for Wulff, had dropped his civil service and gone out to Los Angeles to be Wulff’s partner, had come back under the worst circumstances, and he knew that medical disability or not they could let him go at any moment. At their pleasure. While two months ago this was exactly what he had wanted, now it was anything but. He could not afford to lose the job, not now. That was simply the way it had to be; he had made his adjustments toward the side of getting locked in. Also, he had lost track of Wulff. He knew what had happened at that plant in Detroit because he had read it in the papers, but that was not enough. No word had come in. The man might have been caught in the explosion himself. Williams doubted it, but you never knew.

  “I want the truth,” the captain said. “I want you to tell me the truth. It will go much easier if I don’t have to struggle for it.”

  “You don’t understand,” Williams said, “I told you I don’t know anything.”

  “You engineered his escape,” the captain said, “that’s one thing right there. You maneuvered the whole thing.”

  “I maneuvered nothing,” Williams said. There was the possibility that the captain was crazy. That was one thing you had to look out for in the PD all the time; the people you were dealing with might be merely stupid or corrupt, but then again they might spring into galloping insanity, which would furnish the full and final explanation of all their acts. “There was a gunman in the room. He shot Smith. He smuggled a gun into the court and he shot the defendant. There was a little confusion, as one might suspect. In the confusion Wulff escaped. I didn’t have anything to do with it. Or are you suggesting that I set things up with the assailant?”

  “Someone did,” the captain said, rubbing his hands together. “Someone set things up.”

  “I didn’t want Wulff out,” Williams said. “Who would want him out anymore? I’m his friend. He was going to get killed sooner or later. His luck was running out.” He might have gotten killed in Detroit, Williams thought. He might have been killed there, in the firebombing of the plant, and no one would know. No one had really expected him to be there, that was the problem. “I’m sorry,” he said and wondered if he should risk standing, offending the captain but ending the interview. He could not stand it any more. He really could not. He was entitled to better than this. If everything that he had gone through had worked itself toward merely an outcome of this sort then he would have been better off not starting at all. That was too depressing to think about. It canceled all experience. You were better off not doing that. Not canceling your experience. You were better off accepting it for whatever it was, trying to see the benefits in it, and moving on from there. Or did that, trying to make all experience chargeable against an abstract and future knowledge, did that make him as crazy as the captain? The hell with it, he thought.

  “This man is dangerous,” the captain said. “This man is quite dangerous.”

  “To drug dealers he is.”

  “To all of us. He threatens the very process of law enforcement. Society is built upon structures, upon codes, upon a certain common acceptance of behavior. A man who threatens that in the name of justice risks bringing down all of society.”

  “Society is shit,” Williams said. He put his calves back tightly against the legs of the chair, stood, flexed, and pushed back. He looked down at the captain as if from a great distance. “If this is what we ought to preserve, if this is what Wulff is attacking, then he’s doing us all a great favor. I’m sorry, captain. I can’t face this any more. I just can’t deal with it. You’ll have to excuse me. It makes me sick and I can’t take it any more.” He was up, moving to the door of the little office where the captain spent over 50 percent of his working life, would do it until he reached pension in a kind of hatred, which when the pension came in, would remit to nostalgia. The captain, like almost every retired civil servant, would spend the rest of his life vaguely missing what he had despised. That was the trick they played on you, if “trick” was the word for it. Williams had a better word but he didn’t think that saying it would make any difference. “If there’s something you think is wrong, captain,” he said, “you can put in a formal complaint.”

  “You’re a fool,” the captain said. His face had cl
amped more tightly. “You’re a stupid fool. You think that you’re getting anything out of helping this man, out of covering for him? He laughs at you. He’d kill you if he had to. If he needed to, if it would stand to his advantage, he’d destroy you. He doesn’t give a damn about everyone. I know what you think of him,” the captain said. “I know what a lot of stupid, misguided people think about Wulff, that he’s some kind of romantic, a true vigilante, the Lone Ranger of the drug market. He’s a filthy murderer, probably crazy, that’s what he is and he’s the enemy of order.”

  Williams said, “Captain, I’m sick of people calling me a fool. I’ve been called a fool up and down by too many people for a long time, and I don’t think it’s in the career and salary plan that I have to take it. You haven’t thought this through at all, you understand nothing, in fact, you’re full of shit,” Williams said quietly and went out, closed the door, went down the hall. He was shaking. From deep within, the trembling was working through, moving on many levels. He felt that he might collapse from the extent of his feeling, but then again, everything could be contained;

  there was nothing you couldn’t live with if you kept it bottled up. All the signs were clear. He was too close to Wulff and they were going to get him now, any way they could.

  On the other hand, they did have a point. They were not entirely without justification. He had helped Wulff escape.

  It was too much, it was too complicated, the interweaving of culpability and innocence was too much for him. He was better out of it, Williams thought, going back to the dismal office where they had him on desk work, had had him since he had come back from the injury while they decided what if anything to do with him. He was better off staying away from all of them: Wulff, the PD, his wife, his own inner voices. Shut it off, shut off everything and just live your life from day to day. It was the only way to do it. But if he knew anything, he knew they wouldn’t let him do that. There was no way out, no way out of it at all. You could not get off this planet alive. You could not even stay on it alive. All your life in a trap, and nibbling at the edges of it that giant animal, death.