Lone Wolf #12: Phoenix Inferno

by Barry, Mike

  He got out of the car putting the gearshift into park, racing the engine a little more to steady it, tugged open the passenger side, and slid Owens out to the floor of the desert as if he were a fish coming through layers of water to the surface. The thing that he threw on the desert had no relationship to Owens, did not remind him of Owens, bore no resemblance to Owens at all. To show that he had no feeling, that he had separated the remains from the image of the Owens-that-had-been, Wulff kicked the corpse once hard in the side and then slammed the passenger door closed again, went around and into the driver’s seat, pulled the door closed.

  Time to go now. Time to be on the move. But something unaccountably was missing. Even though he could not quite name it, even though he could not come to grips with what was wrong the feeling that things had not yet been completed overwhelmed him, slammed at him in a sickening way. It had something to do with the corpse, Wulff guessed. It had something to do with granting honor unto the corpse. But the remains were not the person. “It’s all right,” he said then, wheeling the car slowly past the dead man, “it’s all right. You can rest. I’ll get him. I’ll get the man who did this and make him pay. I’ll make him feel the pain.

  “I’ll fix him,” Wulff said to the dead man who was not really dead, “I’ll fix the bastard who did this to you and make him pay for it and make him hurt,” Wulff went on, and then he drove into the desert slowly, engine knocking, rough acceleration, heading toward the fearful, insulated man named Carlin who lived on a hundred acres of the irrigated desert and thinking, thinking hard about what he would be able to do to this man when he saw him.

  It would be worse than Calabrese.

  It would be better than Calabrese.

  IX

  Carlin had not been thinking properly for a while. He was the first to know that; he could tell when his mental processes were all fucked up. A man who had been in his end of this kind of business for so long knew when he was not thinking properly, knew when the mind had gone off-center. All of the time that this was going on there was an older, cooler, more competent Carlin standing outside of him, shaking his head at what had evolved, and making dimissive gestures. “Better watch it,” this more competent Carlin said, “better just watch it, man, you’re going wild now. There’s no reason to go off in that direction, not with the edge that you have on this bastard. Still, if you insist on doing it this way I think that you had better get rid of the body before you go. Also, I think you had better get rid of the staff, all of them, just in case they start to ask questions you can’t answer. I’m sure they can all be trusted, but then again you don’t know about people. They can get pretty strange, pretty peculiar, they can act in ways you never thought they would. Better play it safe, Carlin,” this more competent version of himself had said, “and I’m going to play it safe too, I don’t particularly want to be around these premises. In fact, I think I’d better get out of here,” the adviser said, and disappeared with a whisk.

  He left Carlin with a corpse on his hands, but then again he knew pretty much what he had to do. The advice was well-taken—you could not disregard advice like that. He had been dealing with his auditor off and on for many years, and generally speaking anything that the auditor said was worth attending to since the auditor did not speak frequently, dedicating most of his time to simply listening with a stricken and attentive position. But then again, he was running his life, not the auditor. Carlin had to keep that in mind. What he also had to keep in mind, what was equally important, was that he knew the auditor did not really exist. He was just a projection of Carlin’s own mental state, his inner turmoil, his need to imagine some calm, removed presence that would give him calm, removed advice. If there was one thing Carlin knew and was attuned to all the way, it was his capacity for craziness. At any time he could veer over the edge. No man who had gone as far as he had, who had his enemies, who had to struggle all the time just to keep the sons of bitches off his ass could eliminate the likelihood of his going crazy at any time and blowing the whole thing. The auditor kept him sane, of course. All these tricks and gimmicks kept him going. Still, you had to keep it in proportion. You could not take a crutch and call it a third leg. That was the difference.

  So, after giving it due consideration, he decided that the auditor had to go to hell this time around. He would have to follow his own instincts and those were to travel light and as quickly as possible. He wouldn’t get rid of the body and he wouldn’t get rid of the staff. In the first place there was hardly any staff to talk about—the auditor as always had exaggerated the situation, overemphasized Carlin’s importance in the world (which was flattering anyway). The only staff were two hard men, probably homosexuals—Carlin had never asked—who were employed in rotating twelve-hour shifts to answer the phone, turn away people at the doors, give him an escort if necessary, and generally beat the shit out of any interloper if all else failed, which it rarely did. Carlin knew that he should know more about them, they had been there for five years, but aside from their names, Dick and Joe (or maybe it was Joe and Dick) and their last names, which he wrote on their checks, he knew very little about them at all. They had come well recommended and they did their job. That was all that mattered to him. If he wanted to get personal he would do it with Janice or with some people he had to deal with in Mexico City; he did not have to get emotionally tied up with the servants like so many other people he could think of. It was shocking how people could be intimidated by their servants. Carlin thought that kind of thing was disgraceful. As far as he was concerned they were merely furniture.

  Thinking of Janice, though, left the issue of the body, and Carlin decided that this was exactly what he was going to do: leave the issue as it was. Maybe this showed that he had gone off the deep end, that the pressure had cracked him and rendered him crazy, but if this was the case it was just something with which he would have to live, he wouldn’t be the first person he had known who had gone crazy nor the last for that matter. Wulff was crazy. No, it made sense to leave the body and travel light, let Joe and Dick take care of the matter. There was a hell of a lot of blood but otherwise it could be said that Janice looked as good in death as she had in life. Which wasn’t very good at all. She was a big, fat-assed broad who had those remarkable tits, which bobbled and swayed in bed and which he couldn’t no matter how hard he tried stuff all the way into his mouth, but that just showed you that passion was no patron of the arts, passion was an old man with a limp and a glass eye. The hell with it. He let her lie.

  He would travel light. He had his schedule all mapped out, Carlin thought, as he threw together one light valise and prepared to leave his mansion in the desert—that was how he thought of it, mansion in the desert, actually it was just an eight-room house with a couple of sleep-in rooms for Dick and Joe, but it was always a distinguishing thing to think of yourself as someone living in a mansion—prepared to take a flight out of Phoenix just as quickly as he could. He would head toward Mexico City; he had a hell of a lot of friends in Mexico City who owed him favors and would be glad to put him up; he would sink underground there and just wait the whole thing out. He had twenty teams of his own after Wulff; the FBI, the NYPD, and practically every agency of the government was after him as well; there were a thousand freelancers, each of them with his picture in their pocket ready to take a shot at him. No, there was no way that the guy could stay in action much longer. His time, even with his phenomenal luck and his energetic craziness could be measured in a matter of weeks. Maybe days. However long it was, Carlin could wait it out longer in perfect safety, and then as soon as word of his enemy’s demise came through—as it certainly would, because Carlin had the best sources of information in the world—well, as soon as word got through that Wulff had been killed, Carlin would be on his way home with the equivalent of a million dollars in his pocket. Make that two million. Shit, make that five. There was absolutely no saying how far he could go once Wulff was out of the way. And he would be—soon. Carlin could close his eyes
and get just a whiff of what it would be like when Wulff was no longer there, and it was crazy; it made his genitals stir. So much for Janice.

  Travel light. Carlin put together a suitcase with underwear and shaving materials, put in one suit, and left the room quickly. Down the stairs and into the living room, out to the veranda for a last look at the blooming desert before he left it for a while. The sound of Joe coming up behind him was almost shocking, so locked had Carlin been into the necessity for a private moment, just communing by himself with his house and his garden. But that was the way it was; there were no such things as private moments, only little abcesses yanked out of time and then lanced by intrusion, and Joe, that physician, was now destroying his own little pocket.

  “You all right?” Joe said. He was a short man with a restless expression on his face, never in repose, always a kind of distraction, and Carlin enjoyed looking at him because it was nice to think that the reason that Joe could not rest was that he was always thinking about Carlin. Always looking out for Carlin’s welfare.

  “Yeah,” Carlin said, “I’m okay.”

  “Anything wrong?” Joe looked at the valise. “Going somewhere?”

  “For a while,” Carlin said. “Something came up; I’ll be going south.”

  “Oh,” Joe said. There was a long pause. That was the trouble with his relationships with these people; he had never quite gotten clear in his own mind how to handle them. Was he their friend or their employer? If he tried to be the one he was patronizing, if the other, brutish. It all came as a consequence of growing up without servants, of course. But that did not mean that people who didn’t have servants shouldn’t when they were able to afford them get them. You could make the same argument for big houses. Or expensive cars. You had a right to be the best that you could. Upwardly mobile, they called it. Wasn’t that the word? “South,” Joe said.

  “For a while,” Carlin said.

  “I’ll go upstairs and help you pack.”

  “Oh no,” Carlin said quickly, “oh no, that isn’t necessary. You don’t have to go upstairs.” He pointed desperately at the valise. “I’ve got everything I need right here.”

  “Right there?”

  “For a while, anyway.”

  “For a long trip?”

  “I don’t know,” Carlin said. “I don’t know if it will be a long trip or a short one. It all depends. But I can pick up some stuff on the way if necessary.”

  “Oh,” Joe said, “well, all right then.” He moved away from Carlin toward the stairs. “Are you leaving now?”

  “I think so. I think I’ll just drive to the airport and leave the car there.”

  “Then I’ll clean upstairs.”

  “Oh no,” Carlin said, “oh no, that isn’t necessary. I don’t think you have to go upstairs now.”

  “I don’t mind. It will give me something to do.”

  “I’d prefer that you don’t,” Carlin said so sharply that Joe moved away, came instinctively toward him. “I’m sorry,” he said, looking at the expressions in Joe’s face, gaiety and complaint, impatience and resignation chasing themselves in the welter along with many things that he could not quite identify. The man was certainly expressive. If you could say one thing about Joe, it was that; he had the kind of face that did not conceal emotion. Often it showed emotions that he did not have, which was a problem of a different sort. “It’s nothing personal,” Carlin said, “I’d just prefer that you wait to do the cleaning until I’m gone.”

  “Until you’re gone.”

  “You don’t mind, do you?”

  “Oh no,” Joe said, “oh no, Not at all.” He wiped a hand across his forehead, brought it away, looked at it in quizzical fashion. “Whatever you say is all right with me.”

  “I guess I’ll be going, then,” Carlin said awkwardly. He did not know exactly what to say. He had never been in a situation quite like this before. How did a murderer take leave? Not that he was exactly a murderer. He had done the only right and sensible thing under all the circumstances. Still, someone might get the wrong idea about him. He would not like that. Unless he had a chance to explain this it would really look bad. “You can give me a ride to the airport,” he said.

  A look of grief became manic interest on Joe’s face, his cheeks quivered, lips twitched, a little wad of spittle appeared at his lips. “Ah,” he said, “I thought you said that you’d be driving—”

  “I changed my mind. You get a lot of vandalism at those airports.”

  “Oh yes,” Joe said, “oh yes, you certainly do.”

  “Kids breaking into the cars and whatnot. They spot a car that’s been parked there for a few days and they figure that the owner is on a long trip. They gut it.”

  “That’s true. That is true.”

  “The attendants don’t keep an eye on them. The attendants don’t give a shit about any of that.”

  “Yeah,” Joe said, “I can agree with that.” He blinked his eyes, shook his head again. “You’d like me to drive you, then.”

  “Oh yes,” Carlin said, “I thought we discussed that. I thought you could get the keys, you see, and drive me and then bring the car back.”

  “I can take my own car.”

  “Yes,” Carlin said, “yes, that’s true. I never thought of that. It never occurred to me that you could take your own car. But that’s quite right, isn’t it? That would save all kinds of difficulties. If you took your own car.”

  “I think so,” Joe said. He looked as if he were about to cry, but then you never could tell with the man’s multiplicity of expressions, he might feel very cheerful. Anyone would feel cheerful being left to the devices of Carlin’s house for a period of time with no one to oversee them. Probably the son of a bitch was robbing him blind, Carlin thought. Him and the other one. And Janice too. No, scratch Janice. She was dead; that was right. He had killed her. But the other two would rip him off right down to the ground one of these days. Still, what the hell could he do or say? It was hell to get servants who were worth anything at all nowadays.

  “Is Janice coming with you?” Joe asked.

  Carlin shuddered, stepped back a pace. “Excuse me?” he said.

  “I asked if Janice is going with you.”

  “What gave you the right to call her Janice?”

  Now Joe looked as if he were about to giggle. That might, come to think of it, be the key to reading that face; if you went for opposites you were not too far off the track. Still, there was a light of humor and anticipation in his eyes that hardly looked as if it were against the grain. “Why nothing,” he said, “nothing at all. I’ve never known quite what to call her. What should I call her?”

  “What do you think?”

  “She’s not Mrs. Carlin.”

  “You’re an asshole. Do you know that? You’re a thorough fucking asshole.”

  Joe looked at the floor. “If you say so,” he said. “I can’t get into that at all.”

  “You’re a fucking asshole,” Carlin said again. He had the feeling that he was reaching for something grander than that but it was not easy, his rhetoric seemed starved. “You don’t know how to handle yourself and you have no idea of respect.”

  Joe said, “Is that all?”

  “I’ve always hated the idea of having the two of you around,” Carlin said. “You and that other one.”

  “He’s off duty now.”

  “I know that. I know he’s off duty. But I felt that you could help me, that you could shield me a bit. But how much shielding have you really given me? All you do is make more problems and take wages for doing nothing at all and steal me blind when I’m gone.”

  “Carlin,” Joe said, and now for the first time his face was smoothed out, there was nothing on it at all. He looked as if he were a machine coming to a sudden and terrible idle. “Carlin, you had better cut it out. Enough is enough.”

  “Maybe for you. Not for me.”

  “Drive yourself to the airport.”

  “You’re fired,” Carlin s
aid.

  “Not until you pay me every cent that I’m owed,” Joe said, “plus a month’s severance, plus the two weeks vacation pay you promised me I’d be getting next payday. You stole that money from me.”

  “There’s no vacation on this job.”

  “You said there was.”

  “There’s no vacation on this job. What the hell do you think I am, a goddamned Rockefeller? You’re not a houseboy, there’s no pension here, no career and salary plan. You’re just a goddamned assistant and you get an assistant’s pay. You don’t like it, you could have quit anytime.”

  “You’re pushing me very hard, Carlin,” Joe said. “I don’t want you to do it any more. I want you to stop it.”

  Carlin knew that he was pushing hard but he did not mind. There was an exhilaration in going too far. It could not be denied; there was that one, clear vaulting leap when you went beyond the normal, the expected, and let everything you had always wanted to say come out. Maybe you could understand the sheer joy of lunacy, Carlin thought, the reason why most of the people in the mental hospitals, most of the people who were picked up in the act of violent murder, were grinning. There was a pleasure in going over the edge. Once you got way beyond the expected you could open up whole new areas of experience, areas that had never been touched before. Hedonism, was that the word? He didn’t know, had never studied philosophy, had not had the advantages he would give to his son if he had had a son. “Fuck it,” he said to Joe, grinning and grinning. He could feel the lines on his face stretching as he gave himself over to it, the frozen, concentrated smile into which he could pour the heart of him. “Fuck you. Get out of my house now.”

  “Not so fast.”

  “Sue for your pay,” Carlin said. “You can see me in court and try to collect it then.”

  Joe’s face was still blank. “You’re crazy,” he said, “I don’t know what’s wrong with you but you’ve gone crazy.”

  “No I haven’t.”

  “Yes you have.”