by Barry, Mike
He owed Carlin a vicious and painful death, of course; Carlin had hurt him more than most of those with whom he had been dealing. Carlin had cost him a man, Owens, who might have been a friend. Carlin had sent a vicious and deadly team of assassins after him. Carlin was functioning from a combination of panic and ambition, which made him more dangerous than almost anyone with whom he had dealt—more dangerous, perhaps, than Calabrese. Cicchini had merely wanted to hold onto his position but Carlin hadn’t found his terminal point yet, he was still pushing, he was ambitious. That meant that he was capable of literally anything. It would be a pleasure to make him die. Wulff had looked forward to it very much. That and almost nothing else had been what had sustained him through the drive from the New Mexico border into Phoenix alone, more kills behind him, Owens gone.
Now there was merely the necessity for revenge, nothing else. Wulff knew that something was wrong, though, even before he approached the estate. He had been finding his way on Owen’s directions, faking his way through back roads and the flat, long pass that would lead then directly to the small access road of Carlin’s home. There had been a police presence on that road, a few more patrol cars than he would have thought necessary in Phoenix at that time of day. Driving farther he came up against a few more patrols, and then at the access road—private, Owens had said, installed at great expense to zoning laws and political maneuverings as well because Carlin wanted his privacy and controlled access and was willing to pay for it—at the access road Wulff found that it had been completely blocked by two old patrol cars, which had straddled the road in such a way that no one could get through. Wulff kept on driving.
You learned that kind of thing on instinct early; a less experienced man than Wulff might have slowed, even stopped, taken a closer look at the cars, tried to find out why the access was blocked. But Wulff kept on sailing at a steady fifty-five, holding the wheel rigidly, looking straight ahead, giving the cops nothing except a little profile, which behind the cloudy glass of the Fleetwood wouldn’t mean a thing. The bullet holes in the rear might attract a little attention, but he doubted it; he had sealed them over with scotch tape at a rest stop, done a pretty good, improvised job, if he said so himself, and it looked like the kind of road damage that almost any big old car might well have picked up somewhere along the way, gravel or stones kicked up from the desert, adventures in off-road traveling, vandalism. No, the cops would not pay too much attention to the Fleetwood. And although Wulff supposed that like everyone else the Phoenix cops had his picture and nominal instructions to shoot him on sight or at least bring him into headquarters for shooting, cops in cities away from where the crimes of the fugitive had been committed just weren’t interested. They had no interest in that kind of stuff, laughed at it, passed the posters around, wiped their asses with them for laughs or said they would, stuff like that. It all came out of the basic attitude of the cop; he was pretty sure that the world was out to get him, all circumstances were dangerous and threatening anyway and you had your own shit to mine, what the hell did you want to mine somebody else’s shit for anyway? The hell with it. Wulff could imagine exactly how these cops in Phoenix felt. They used to laugh a lot at the FBI posters when they had come into the precinct. Fucking J. Edgar, they had said, if they were supposed to get their asses shot up doing his work then they should at least go on his payroll, the cheap, evil old bastard. And those were NYPD, the finest is what they called themselves, the best-educated, best-paid police department in the country. Imagine what they thought of this shit in Phoenix.
He kept on rolling. The patrol was interesting; the shutoff of the access road was even more so. Unless Carlin had the cops literally on his payroll, which was doubtful even in a place like this, it meant that something very bad had happened at the estate, something that demanded a police presence and a shutoff. That could mean that Carlin was dead, of course, but he would hardly be so lucky as to die without Wulff’s own special attentions. More likely something else had happened involving the deaths of other people. Wulff knew that Carlin was panicking. He knew enough of the man from what Owens had told him to gather that he might panic in a very unpleasant way. There was nothing nastier and more dangerous than a weak man backed to the wall, because the weak man would do anything, like a cowardly dog under pressure, to keep from revealing that weakness. Only his self-deceit had enabled him to stay sane; he would do anything to preserve that sanity. So Carlin had probably killed some people, Wulff thought. That was his analysis of the situation, right off the bat.
All right. That meant that he would have to handle things in a different way, but the essential pattern of it would remain the same. Instead of charging Carlin direct he would have to make an end-run. Carlin was not in Phoenix if Wulff’s analysis of the situation was correct; Carlin had committed crimes, he would have left the city. As powerful as he was, Phoenix was still not at the point where a man’s money could buy off the institutions. That would come, of course, that was the shape that America was taking and what it would certainly be in twenty years, but now there were only pockets of that in the country in the same way that cancer in the early stages could be seen as little pockets in the body. In New York it was that way, certainly Washington, Las Vegas, the new and ultimate town of the future made it possible for law to utterly serve power … but Phoenix had a little bit of the frontier, vigilante ethic. It would not be likely that Carlin would be able to stay and to hold the situation with full knowledge of his crimes. Then again he might. You never knew about things like this, but Wulff had learned to proceed like a bridge player, through a series of assumptions; you took the only assumptions that would enable you to make the hand and then you played through. If you won you looked like a genius, of course. If you lost you didn’t look too bad either because you got commended for your daring.
He drove through and past Phoenix, the sound of his ordnance clattering in the trunk of the Fleetwood. When he had gone as far from the center of town as he felt to be necessary—and this town like so many of the American cities built after 1900 had no center at all; Phoenix was merely a series of presumptions, apprehensions against the void, when the apprehensions eased down and the void began, that was the edge of town—he did what he had already done many times before, he got himself a furnished room in a private home. This was the best hideout of all. It beat hotels, rooms in apartment complexes, the streets, flophouses … nothing was better than a little one-and-a-half rented out by some solid and usually senior citizen. The cover was absolute; no one gave a damn who the golden ager was renting to or would want to since it merely helped him meet the tax burden without becoming a welfare case. Oh, Wulff loved their furnished rooms, their elegant but filthy nightstands, their ornate bureaus, the sound of the flush-toilet to the rear that never stopped flushing, not once all night. Hell might be a furnished room, but then again heaven might as likely be; it was likely that heaven was rented out in little partitions, one-and-a-halves at thirty-seven dollars and fifty cents a week, no towels supplied, sockets not quite functional but all of it on a trial basis for the Big Room.
Wulff rented his one-and-a-half from an old man with liver spots on his hands and elbows, little freckles all over the dome of his forehead, about five miles from downtown Phoenix. “You’re not going to be bringing anyone in here, will you?” the old man said. “The one thing I can’t tolerate is visitors.”
“Oh no,” Wulff said, “I don’t know anybody here at all.”
“I mean whores or anything like that. You won’t be bringing in people to fuck.”
Wulff shook his head. “I don’t do that kind of thing,” he said. “I don’t deal with whores, anyway.”
“Got nothing against fucking,” the old man said, creasing and uncreasing the fifty dollars week’s rent in advance, which Wulff had had to pay him before they could even get into serious dialogue. “Fucking’s a good thing, a healthy thing, did a lot of it in my time right up until my wife died three years ago but by that time I got to say I didn’t
care for it very much. Tried to oblige her, of course, the poor woman, but it wasn’t anything that I really wanted to do past sixty. But fucking’s okay for young people. You’re a relatively young person, aren’t you?”
“I’m thirty-two.”
“Oh yes,” the old man said, “now that’s a relatively young age, thirty-two.” He blinked against the sun, which lay halfway between their angle of confrontation and ninety degrees overhead, coming into the cluttered yard behind the small house. “Thirty-two is a good age for fucking. I did a lot of fucking at the age of thirty-two. But not with whores. Never with whores.”
“I don’t either,” Wulff said.
“Whores degrade your spirit and they also bring a bad element in. I’ve always been against them. I don’t think there’s any reason for a healthy young man to go with whores. Either he should be married and doing it in a good married way or he has lady friends, has a relationship, it just isn’t a matter of dirty-minded sex if you know what I mean.”
“I’ve got a fair amount of stuff to move in,” Wulff said, thinking of what was jammed up against itself in the trunk of the Fleetwood, thinking of the grenades, the magnums, the small-bore rifle. It was nothing to leave out on the streets, even under metal, even in serene Phoenix. “If you don’t mind—”
“Now with whores it’s just degrading, though,” the old man said, not moving away from the door. “Now there are a lot of people who talk about legalizing sex, particularly down here in the Southwest they say that it’s the coming thing, open whorehouses and charge accounts and music and television and like that. I come from New York originally, you know. Me and the wife. In New York they wouldn’t have such things as open whorehouses.”
“I don’t think they have them here.”
“You’re not going to look for them now, are you Johnny?” the old man said, looking keenly at Wulff. “I mean the thing that brings you down here isn’t that you’re looking for some of that free and easy open sex, now, is it? Because I think you’ll find that a lot of that stuff is pretty exaggerated.”
“Oh no,” Wulff said, “I’m not here for sex. I’m here on business.”
“Good business or bad business?”
“I don’t know. It all depends.”
The old man smoothed the blue and white surfaces of his sport shirt against his body and said, “I hope you don’t think I’m being too inquisitive here, that you think I’m being nosy or anything like that.”
“Oh no. I’m from New York myself.”
“I figured that. You look like a nice, intelligent young fellow of a very fine type you don’t often see around here. I could have almost told you were from New York or I never would have rented you in the first place. I do some pretty careful screening, you know. You’ve got to keep up standards here. I mean without standards, where the hell are you?”
“That’s true.”
“But I could see that you’re pretty decent.” Puzzled, the old man looked at the five bills in his hand as if he was not quite sure what they represented, how they had gotten there. “Well I guess you’ll be staying here for a week,” he said.
“Maybe. Maybe not. It depends on how my business goes. But I paid for the full week in advance.”
“Well if you paid for the full week in advance you ought to use it. I’m not out to make turnover money on you. The trouble is people have no respect for money any more. They think that it’s something they’ll always have enough of, that’s their problem. You stay out the full week.”
“I’ll think about it,” Wulff said. “I promise you, I’ll really think about it.”
“It would be foolish not to.”
“Please,” Wulff said to the old man, “please, I really do have to get settled in.”
The old man looked as if he had caught a glimpse of his long-departed wife in some angle of the sun and a literal expression of fright came across the blunt angles then. “Don’t have to be that way,” he said. “It’s your room. You can do anything you want with it.”
“Please. I’m in a hurry.”
“People got no goddamned patience any more, that’s part of the problem. Don’t have the time to sit and talk, don’t have the time to really deal with others. Just rush on through. Ruining the whole goddamned country; there’s no sense of place any more.”
“Sure,” Wulff said. “Sure, that’s it.” He turned from the old man, went down the steps, opened the trunk of the Fleetwood and then just stood there, looking at the old man for a while, holding the counterbalanced lid. The old man showed no disposition to leave the porch. Little leaves drifted across his face, a late October wind caressed his face and brought streaks of red to it. He made an accommodating motion to Wulff. “Just go ahead,” the old man said, “don’t worry about me, I’m just getting some air. I’d help you if I could but I’ve got a bad back. Otherwise I’m very strong, though. I could take anything you wanted in if my back weren’t so weak from all that late fucking.”
“I don’t think you understand,” Wulff said. It seemed that he had said all of this before, but then always, everything was new. “I’ve got some personal materials here.”
“Personal materials?”
“Stuff that’s important to me, anyway.”
“Go on. Unload it. You don’t think I give a damn what you have, do you now, Johnny?”
“You don’t understand,” Wulff said, “I really have a personal feeling about this stuff. I just feel that I—”
“You don’t want some old bastard staring at it, is that right? That’s what you think of me, you think of me as some old bastard, some old son of a bitch who just rambles on and on and can’t be turned off. Hell, I was thirty-two years old once.”
“I’m going to be thirty-three,” Wulff said mildly. In all of his travels he had never felt so at bay. The old man had managed what none of his enemies had; they had never made him feel apologetic and vaguely ill at ease. But then again he couldn’t deal with the old man the way that he had been able to handle the enemies.
“I’ll just go in,” the old man said. “I won’t bother you. Hey, you don’t have someone in that trunk, do you? You don’t think you can sneak someone in, not pay rent, is that it? Well, you don’t have to worry; the basic charge is for the room, not for the person. I don’t care how many people stay with you.”
“No,” Wulff said, “no, it isn’t another person. It’s just some stuff I have.”
“I don’t mean to be nosy. I mean I don’t want to push you or anything like that. I don’t want you to get the idea that I’m making your business my business. It’s just so hard,” the old man said, “so hard to find anybody who will listen to you at all; maybe you have to buy a little conversation when you’re old. You’ll find that out, Johnny. You’ll know it some day.”
“Okay,” Wulff said, “I don’t mind. That’s all right.”
“Easy to be gracious. So easy to be gracious when you’re thirty-two years old. You see how it gets when you start poking around those upper forties, son, you see how gracious you can be then. That’s the test of a man,” the old man said and went back into the house.
Wulff stayed there for a while, letting the hood slide up, the ordnance gleaming at him. The old man could well be observing through a window, his glance fixated on exactly what Wulff was bringing in there. If he did, that would be trouble … unless, of course, the landlord got satisfaction from the idea of heavy weaponry being in his house. That was a possibility—anything was a possibility—but not worth chancing.
But Wulff did not think that the man was looking outside. Call it a matter of instinct, call it a certain leap of perception, he did not think that that was the old man’s style at all. Some skulked and some were all on the surface and some did not react at all … this old man said what he had to say and was done with it.
Would that Wulff would be the same when he got that far.
If he got that far. He saw no reason to calculate that he would last even to half that age.
&nb
sp; But maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing, old age being what it was in America, Wulff thought. Maybe you were far better going young and in the illusion that you had lost yourself in a pleasant, dignified old age. Because to actually enter upon it was horrifying; it was something that drove most Americans insane. No wonder they hadn’t really extended the lifespan in fifty years of advancing medical science; people simply did not want to be old. They would rather be dead.
Thoughtfully, Wulff threw a blanket over the ordnance, just to be on the safe side. Grunting, he carried it through the door. He could, of course, leave it out in the street in the Fleetwood, take his chances. It had been done. He might have been able to get away with it.
But the hell with it. Phoenix was a really tough town. Anything that was founded on drawing water from the desert would have to be.
XIV
At Mexico City Carlin deplaned quietly, shamed. He could barely stand to look at the stewardess. Whatever had happened, whatever had passed through him had been like an illness, some strange malaria-like disease that left you with shaking sweats and three hours later the inability to remember exactly how you had felt. It was better to put it out of his mind completely, put it down to a reaction to what had happened, to the tension of the situation. No good would be served, certainly, by ever thinking of it again. “I’m sorry,” he murmured to her as he passed her moving toward the ramp. “I’m really sorry.”
“No you’re not.”
“Yes I am.”
“None of you are ever sorry,” she said, and he would have answered that one too except that he was moving out of the plane then and she was behind him. He knew that she was looking, staring at him, that the hate he had seen suggested in her glance had probably coalesced into something even more intense and dreadful … but there was no good in looking back. He would not think of it. He wasn’t thinking of Janice, was he? So why the hell should he think of some stewardess with whom he had made a mistake, but then everybody was human and had a right to make mistakes. At least, that was the more encouraging way to look at things.
