Lone Wolf # 14: Philadelphia Blowup

by Barry, Mike

  He kept on moving, coaxing the car down the line. He was half-a-block away now, and still the guards had not looked up. The man against the tree seemed to be slumped there, rooted in place, possibly dozing, and there was no movement within the car. They were sleeping there, too, beyond attention, beyond interest, sure that nothing was going to happen on this quiet street in the darkness. Soldiering on the job. Hired help rather than those personally involved. If Martin had used people who were really, directly concerned with him, this would not have happened. But that was the way it worked out. Almost all of these people had to hire help, and almost none of the help really cared. Ultimately they had only the friends which money could buy.

  It was very easy.

  He stopped the car at the corner, cut the engine, and in the same motion took the point forty-five, balanced it, pivoted, opened the door and shot the man who was standing behind the tree. The shot went in quickly, efficiently, and the man fell as if he were not and never had been a living thing, but was merely an ornament, an appendage to the landscape which had now been cut down. The lights of the parked car flicked on and Wulff heard the grinding of the starter, but the people within had already squandered whatever edge they might have had. They should have been prepared before, not after, the shot, because Wulff put a blast of gunfire into the car that stopped it in mid-scream. The driver had put the accelerator to the floor, revving it up for some misguided plunge in the darkness toward Wulff, but that was not going to work. Flooring the car in neutral had only managed to waste five seconds that might have been better used in trying to run Wulff down … But there was no time at all, would not have been, anyway.

  He put the shot right between the driver’s eyes.

  From within the car there was screaming; the bubbling, terrified cry of what was either an infant or a man who had been hurt very badly, and then the door on the driver’s side opened and something fell out. At the same time, the door on the passenger side came open less abruptly, there emerged a hand, and the first shot followed by a matter of seconds. The passenger, unhurt or not as badly hurt, was trying to gun down Wulff. But he could not see. Visibility was almost nil, and he had been dozing in that car and was in a state of diminished alertness, so the shot went nowhere in particular, and missed Wulff by a good margin. He returned the fire, diving to the ground, heard an immediate scream, and fired into the scream and heard nothing whatsoever.

  The car engine idled unevenly for a while in the darkness and little plumes of discolored exhaust drifted up into the streetlight behind. Otherwise there was no sound whatsoever.

  After a little while Wulff went over to the car to check it out. The man on the passenger side had been killed instantly with a clean shot through the heart. A man in his fifties, he lay on his back coldly and peacefully looking up at the stars. The one who had been the driver, however, was not quite as fortunate. Wulff’s shot had split his skull, and his brains were running out in a seminal ooze. But he was not quite dead nor alive, for that matter, and was an animal lying crumpled there in the roadway with only little whimpers contained in the expectoration of breath to contain his humanity; his humanity destroyed and spread through the thousand bone splinters and droplets of blood which lay like a shot pattern around him. Wulff knelt over the man transfixed, staring into the eyes that were no longer alive, looking with fascination at the aspect of something that hovered between life and death, humanity and bestiality, without partaking any more of either. Time was short now. Surely Martin would have heard the shots; surely there would be investigation within a very few moments, and he could not waste seconds in looking at the man. And yet Wulff could not force himself from that aspect.

  He had never quite seen so clearly the line between life and death as it was defined in the thing that lay before him. Suspended between the two, brains imploded but the organs still convulsing in the ritual and march of life, the thing seemed to partake of the best—or then again it might have been the worst—of both conditions. The timelessness and anonymity of death had closed upon the thing and yet it still knew the squalor of existence. Trapped within a corpse that would not fall from it yet would not sustain life either, the thing seemed to waver on some level of horrid intelligence. The eyes blinked as a further little grey stream of brains came from the open cavity in the crushed skull. Light moved in the eyes. It groaned and then it whimpered, birdlike.

  Wulff could look no longer. Even to this, even to suffering and vengeance there had to be an end. Even to the anguish of those who deserved it there had to be some point of termination, he thought, because this was the only thing, perhaps, that defined humanity. Men were willing to bring one another both in and out of this world, administering life to one another in careful and often secretive ways, infusing one another with the artifacts of life that often came in darkness and under the guise of sex or necessity. But they also gave one another death, death through murder or in kind administration, and this was really the only thing which tied humanity together, justified everything Wulff knew of its existence … that it could maintain in a universe which drove every single living thing to death in its time that set of options which would at least make death possible on its own terms. To administer death, then, was to at least exercise a little control over it, and looking at the man, Wulff felt himself overcome for a few horrible moments by some realization of what he would be, what he was already well on the way to becoming, and what he would become more thoroughly if he did not kill this man. He could not allow what had happened to continue, could not sentence him to this middle ground between the living and the dead without giving him the expiration which he deserved. And perhaps that was all; all that humanity itself could be. Expiration. That administration of grace which marked passage between the living and the dead, and at the very end of time might be all that would stand to make the difference.

  “I’m sorry,” Wulff said to the thing that lay drowning underneath him. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and pointed the gun and shot the thing in the skull, killing it instantly, and ran from it weeping and already fumbling for the first grenade that he would throw into Martin’s house so that Martin, too, and in damned quick time, could join that vast legion of the living-given-grace that went under a different name, the dead.

  X

  Williams changed his mind when he came into Philadelphia, and decided to rent a car after all. It was foolish to put himself in an exposed position considering who he was going to meet and the mission he was going on, and if he was going to drop out of the system all the way as appeared likely if he killed Wulff, he might as well grant himself the little amenities that the system could bring. One thing that being in the NYPD could do for you—and he still had all of the identification—was to cut the red tape and make it easy for you to get your hands on things like a rental car. Of course, while you were drowning in all of the amenities they were taking it out of your hide with a bigger and more terrible stick, but that would be something to worry about only after the fact. So when he got out of the terminal, the first thing that he did was to get to a rental counter and take a cheap Falcon on a dropoff deal, arranging to drop it off in Manhattan at no penalty, paying for gas himself, of course. He imagined that after he killed Wulff he would go back to New York and turn himself in. Of course, they would have to slap his wrist or something. They would never let him get out of it clean, but if he was lucky it wouldn’t involve a jail sentence. After all, Wulff was an escaped felon. They would settle for throwing him out of the PD, which they virtually had already done anyway, and the rest he would play by ear. In any event, it was very doubtful if the bills would ever catch up with him.

  He drove to the old hall, listening to the radio. He was twenty minutes early for the meeting and the only car in the district that he could see. No one moved in the central city after sundown any more. There were a few forms sleeping in doorways and a derelict was staggering around the entrance to one of our oldest and most famous landmarks, but on his next sweep around the block the
derelict had vanished and Williams did not imagine that he would be back. It was an ideal place to meet; he could appreciate Wulff’s sense of irony and the rightness of things, although, if you understood Wulff well enough, you would have to realize that there was probably no irony at all. Wulff just did what had to be done; he was not too concerned with looking below the level of things.

  Williams put on the radio, listened to it as he began to circle the hall at a steady pace. The news about the two murdered men found shot to death in the south side sounded to him like something that Wulff might have done. It had exactly the man’s imprint on it, even down to the fact that the two appeared to be junkies and derelicts. Random murder had always been Wulff’s kind of thing; now instead of doing it by the numbers he might have settled for the impersonal but more satisfying device of anonymous face-to-face violence. It would figure. The entire pattern wheeled into place. Williams would not be in the least surprised now if Wulff had needed to murder those two men, if he did not, in fact, now need to murder just as badly and in almost the same way that the junkies themselves had needed the intake of the needle. It was coming to the same thing. The signs had always been there.

  The signs were also there that Wulff was not going to show up after all. On the first circuit Wulff was not there. On the second he was five minutes past due, and on the third of his patient, extended sweeps, Williams found him not there again, and knew with that feeling of cold certainty which came over every cop at some stage of an investigation (and that was exactly what Wulff had become to him now: he was an investigation) that the man was not going to be there. He had gotten diverted and into something else. The murders sounded like his work and might have led him into a different trail. Even if the murders were not his—and there was no reason to assume that random, violent murders like these necessarily had to do with Wulff at all—he had to be reasonable about this. The man could not be everywhere, and there was no accounting for the trail that the man might be taking at this time. And then, too, with that cunning which he had had from the beginning, a cunning which was often connected to events only in the most peripheral fashion, Wulff might have scented what Williams’s intention was and had circumvented it by simply staying away. Wulff was no fool. Throughout his quest there had been one line of consistency: he knew precisely what he was doing and he did it with forethought and with that cold kind of precision which showed that there was an apparatus of intelligence controlling his activities. Staying away from Williams then would fit into that. He had suspected something over the phone or later, and thinking all of this through on his own, had come to that conclusion.

  Third sweep.

  No Wulff.

  Williams went around again. If Wulff were not to show this would make matters vastly more complicated in one fashion, but in another it would be simpler. The complicated part of course would be that he would have to find Wulff, and in a city like Philadelphia that was not going to be easy at all. Nor were there any guarantees that Wulff would even be in the city. He might have already gone on his way, or he might never have come here at all. Or, if he had murdered the two addicts, that act might have induced him into flight.

  That was the complicated part. But there was a simple part to it also, and Williams could see the advantages.

  There was now no doubt at all of the rightness of his intentions, the truth of his instincts. Now there need be no ambivalence at all, no doubt that he might on balance be doing the wrong thing.

  He was doing the right thing. If he found Wulff it was going to be easy now. He would shoot him on sight.

  And if Wulff had indeed committed the south side murders—and there was not much reason to doubt this—he would kill him with the full gratitude of the Philadelphia police force. He would have acted in the cause of immediate justice. He would have killed a dangerous felon.

  He would solve all of his problems then. Not only the feeling that he had to kill Wulff, that he was compelled to do so, that he was acting in the interest of society by eliminating the man, but also that he might even restore his career to the NYPD in that one shot. Whatever they thought of him there, the Philadelphia PD could only appreciate his services. Furthermore, if he maintained that he indeed was detailed from a secret squad of the NYPD to track Wulff and capture him—

  Well, it would all fall into place. Even the assistant commissioner would see that. The worst of which they could accuse Williams would be having taken his assignment to the Wulff squad and Wulff himself too seriously. But what could be held against him for that? Wasn’t Wulff dangerous enough, an escaped criminal, the proven murderer of hundreds of people not all of whom had broken the law?

  No. It would all come into place. All he had to do was to kill the man and all manner of his problems would be solved.

  Williams, excited now, hands sweating a little against the shiny wheel of the compact, made a fifth circuit.

  XI

  Wulff had gone into Vietnam with no illusions whatsoever. He did not think that he was defending democracy, did not think it was a matter of getting them in Saigon before they beached in San Francisco. He was unable to equate the survival of the free world with the obliteration of the North Vietnamese, who seemed more ore less indistinguishable in all respects from the South Vietnamese. Both groups seemed mostly interested in getting Americans out of the country, alive or dead. None of that had ever entranced him for a moment; even in his earlier years Wulff could not have been induced to think of himself as a patriot. Rather, he had gone to Vietnam simply to see what was going on.

  Something was going on, that was for sure, and eventually half a million military would have the opportunity to see it and do a little search and destroy themselves, but due to certain vagaries of the civil service law, all members of the NYPD were exempt from military service. Perhaps under the theory that they were already doing their frontline work in that most Saigonized part of America, New York City. Wulff would have found it easy to sit out the war and, indeed, when he had enlisted all of his superiors and most of the men with whom he was serving had thought that he was crazy. What man, given any kind of a choice, would place himself into that hellhole? Surely Wulff did not take seriously all of that patriotic political shit that was necessary to whip the country up into a state of war preparedness and make it unnecessary to drag eighteen-year-olds off to their draft boards to register and be sworn in. Any man who had been around, who had accumulated a few points and a little maturity could not possibly believe that crap. Could he? Unless, of course, he was a member of the regular army cadre which lived off this stuff and of which Wulff was definitely no part. No one could make any sense out of it at all.

  They had been respectful, however. There had to be a divine kind of craziness to a man of twenty-four who would throw over a patrolman’s shield, three years seniority and a fairly easy beat in Bedford-Stuyvesant to go into the slime of Vietnam. Even if Wulff were bucking for an officership or for easy duty, even if he was trying to turn his enlistment to his advantage, or was looking for points to be accumulated later on in the department, there still had to be some kind of respect for a man crazy enough to do this. So when Wulff had come back from Vietnam three years later as a master sergeant skilled in ordnance and guerrilla technique, they had done the nicest thing possible for him, which was to take a man of his experience and put him in the narcotics squad where if he was lucky he would never have to draw a gun again.

  Well, they were trying to be nice. You could be cynical about almost everything concerning the NYPD, but only up to a point. They had carried over the full three years of service toward pension and seniority credits, and they had made it quite clear to him when he came back that duty had been chosen for him in an attempt to show respect for services rendered, even if they had their doubts as to why he had actually rendered them. But Wulff could not be unduly bitter toward the PD for putting him in on narco; they had done it for the best of motives and for what they thought were the highest of reasons. Whatever happened from there
on in, utterly destructive as it was, could hardly be the blame of a group of people who had only been trying to show consideration.

  All things considered, however, he and everyone else would have been a hell of a lot better off if he had been put on foot duty back in Bedford-Stuyvesant or had been detailed to stand guard outside one of the foreign missions, which was also a nice detail if you could get it, although extremely boring. Then again, the way that things worked out everybody might have been better off if he had re-enlisted in the army, which was something that they were very anxious to have him do anyway. There weren’t many ordnance experts of his caliber. They had been willing to give him a direct commission to first lieutenant with indications that captaincy in some easy state post could be his after a time. Or, then again, he could be detailed for special intelligence training at Fort Holabird and head into the Pentagon if he wanted. It was up to him. Wulff, however, had never thought seriously of re-upping. One hitch was definitely enough, and one hitch in Vietnam was like several lifetimes.

  Wulff never spoke about his experience in Vietnam. He tried as well not to think about it. Now and then for a while in sleep he had found himself on patrol again, struggling through the swamps with a bag full of ordnance which could have blown a square mile of jungle to flatiand, sweating and scrambling in the terrible mud to keep control of the explosives on which, in turn, the platoon depended. Vietnam came back to him at these times. Even to this day he could sometimes see the wasted land and the burnt sky in his dreams, and at other times he could see the faces of Saigon, the people of a country which had been so ravaged that it existed only in the reference of a thousand years of war, while the efficient Americans, skidding and sinking all the time, reconciled themselves to years, and finally decades, realizing too late or not at all that their concepts of life and time were entirely different from the terrain which they were trying to occupy.