Lone Wolf #11: Detroit Massacre

by Barry, Mike

  “Then why do it? You should never do it.”

  The voice laughed. “Right,” it said, “not sorry to bother you at home. Quite necessary, I’m afraid. There’s been a lot of questioning here about how a certain incident was handled.”

  “I had nothing to do with that,” Hamilton said.

  “You had everything to do with it. There’s been a strange death.”

  Hamilton swallowed and willed a fierce calm through his body. “No one I know about,” he said.

  “You’re quite sure about that?”

  “I’m not submitting to questioning,” Hamilton said. His wife was staring at him. Crouched against a wall, she regarded him brightly. He did not know that the woman had so much spirit. He would not have taken her for this level of attention. “Listen,” he said, “This is impossible. We can’t talk here. If there’s anything to say, you’ll have to do it tomorrow at—”

  “There’s quite a bit to talk about,” the voice said, “but I agree that we should do it quickly. You’ve fucked up, Hamilton. You’ve fucked up badly. The last package isn’t here.”

  “All right,” Hamilton said, “all right, it isn’t there.” Then where was it? He tried to keep his mind in one cycle. “That’s not important. We’ll make it up to you.”

  “Where is it?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know where—”

  “I think you do, Hamilton. I think you know where everything is.”

  “You’re wrong,” he said. “It isn’t like you think at all. This is—”

  “You’ve fucked up very badly,” the voice said again with the superb and terrible calm. “It isn’t the kind of thing which can be tolerated at any level, and yet you’ve permitted it to happen. Why did you let it happen, Hamilton?”

  “I didn’t,’’ he said. “I didn’t let anything happen; none of it is my fault at all. I just did the best I could; I tried to handle this at the lowest level …” And then he cut himself off, because he realized that what he was saying made no sense whatsoever. He was babbling. “Forget it,” he said. He would reassume command; he would show them that he was in control. “If you don’t like it, you can deal with someone else. I don’t give a fuck anymore.”

  “I’m afraid that won’t work out,” the voice said. “It would be very convenient if you could cut yourself out of the matter or, on the other hand, if we could pick up someone, but I’m afraid that we’re all in this together. You don’t seem to realize what you’ve done here. Now, where are those goods?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We were afraid of that. We were afraid that you would say you didn’t know.”

  “It’s the truth!” Hamilton bellowed. “Damn it, it’s the truth! I’m not holding back on you. What the fuck would it benefit me to hold back on you?”

  “I don’t know,” the voice said. “I can’t see what it would benefit you to have two men killed, but you apparently saw something in it. I can’t talk for you, Hamilton. No man can talk for any other.”

  “It’s not true,” Hamilton said, babbling again. “It wasn’t two, it was just one. The first death was the fault of that stupid fucking idiot, that Shields. I had to have him cooled because …” And he stopped again. His wife, arched against the wall now, her body compressed, was looking at him in a way that she had not for some twenty-one years. He had not seen that look of intensity and fear since their early times in bed together. “Christ almighty,” he said both to the voice and to her, “I can’t go on this way. I just can’t—”

  “Get the goods, Hamilton,” the voice said. “Find out where the goods are, and get them here. That’s the best advice we can give you. Otherwise …”

  “Otherwise what?”

  “Well, we don’t know. We’ll have to deal with that when we come to it, won’t we? It doesn’t suit anything to make predictions. One way or the other, Hamilton, we’re going to get what we need. We’re going to do it with or without you. It looks very much at this time as if we’re going to have to do it without you, though, if you follow what’s being said here.”

  “You bastard,” Hamilton said. It was not a wise thing to say. It was not the kind of thing that you had any reason to tell these people, and yet it had just slipped out. His wife cringed against the wall, seemed to arc as if a shock had been put through her, and then her face broke open into little pieces. It was not only her face which was crumpling, Hamilton thought. No, it would be easier if one could think that it would end there.

  “That was very stupid,” the voice said. “That was stupid and unnecessary. You will regret that.”

  “Please,” he said, “leave me alone.”

  “A valuable shipment has been lost. That shipment is your responsibility.”

  “Autonomy,” Hamilton said vaguely, reaching for the word. “This is my territory. This is my responsibility. I have autonomy within it.”

  “You have no autonomy at all. You fucked up, Hamilton, and now you’re going to pay. You’re going to find that stuff and get it to us, or you’re going to regret it. You’ll regret it anyway. You will, a good deal.”

  “It’s not my fault—”

  “Everything is your fault, you bastard,” the voice said, and hung up, the phone sending out little echoes and ripples of sounds; and then, in the emptiness of the severed connection, he could hear a discordant whine, louder, like the shrieking of some great forest animal during intercourse, or the approach of a siren. He hung up the phone, the instrument damp in his hand. And then he walked toward the living room, Margaret following him slowly, scuttling, and he retreated into a smaller and smaller opening of space until at last, in a corner, she forced him to turn with a touch and stood before him then, and every line of her face poured knowledge at him.

  “What is it?” she said. “You’d better tell me now. I won’t be put off, you’ve got to tell me what’s happening. What have you done?”

  And he wanted to shout at her and he wanted to tell her that it was none of her fucking bitch’s business and he wanted to tell her that he had spent his whole life alone, working things always alone so that she would not have to bother with things like this and she had no right at this time to intrude upon him. He wanted to tell her that it was his fucking affair and he would handle it, and he wanted to tell her that no it was nothing to worry about, nothing at all, just let him worry about it as he had worried about everything else. He had gotten them this far, hadn’t he? He had gotten them the house, the money, the cars. But even as all of this and more came bubbling, fulminating to his lips, something else happened, and Hamilton crumpled, six-feet-one, he crumpled in front of her, and then he was falling into her grasp, stunned, his sobs like those of someone else in the room that could not be him, and he was saying, “Oh, Margaret, Margaret, I’m sorry, I’m so terribly sorry, I just can’t stand it anymore….” And then, for the next few minutes there was a long, long tunnel of passage between the place he had been before this had happened and the place where he was going to emerge, and he did not know, he did not know if he could enter into that new, that empty, that appalling future.

  VII

  At the Pennsylvania tip, five hundred miles out of the city, Wulff pulled off Route Eighty and bumped down a side road in another stolen car, this one a 1966 black Fleetwood, to a roadside telephone booth. He liked Cadillacs, he liked old Cadillacs even more, all of that gloss gone to corruption, all of that complexity half-marred toward the grave; he thought that an old Cadillac could be compared to America itself, not that you had to be metaphysical in the least to appreciate the ruined grandeur of those vehicles. A Cadillac at almost every step of its eight-or nine-year journey to the boneyard was a good bargain, a well-maintained car, a car that had been given more pride and attention than any Pontiac or Chrysler. Dialing Williams’ number direct with plenty of change heaped up next to him, the sun glinting across the hood of the huge car pulled up against the booth, he had the feeling of once again being almost in utter control of his life. He
sighed; he was doing what he had always been meant to do. Why had he thought for a moment that he could go back on his pledge? This was his life, his work. After one ring Williams’ wife picked it up and Wulff announced himself, waiting for the explosion of feeling or remonstrance that would come, but she said nothing at all, it was a different woman there, she simply said that Williams was out in the backyard and she would get him, and then he hung there for a while looking at the little twirling patches of light, looking at the dull sheen of the trunk containing all of the armaments, until Williams got on the line and Williams said, “Are you on your way to Motown?”

  “Maybe halfway.”

  “I had every confidence in you.”

  “You always did. I always knew I could count on your confidence.”

  “Everything all right?”

  “Sure,” Wulff said. “I stole an Ambassador downtown, and then uptown I got myself a nice Fleetwood idling in the garage at Ninety-sixth Street. Some attendant will learn not to abandon cars while he takes a leak anymore. It’s not a bad one, either; it’s getting twelve miles to the gallon.”

  “Great,” Williams said. He paused, and then his voice came in a strained, slightly higher tone. “They’re running the stuff out of a Cadillac plant to Toronto in the frames of the cars.”

  “French Connection,” Wulff said.

  “Life imitating art.”

  “Never,” Wulff said, “never.”

  “It was a nice tight operation for a while. Some foreman in the plant, a guy named Shields, was overseeing it. We don’t quite know who the guy he was underneath is, but we have a pretty good idea.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “My connection,” Williams said, “my connection and I.”

  “He isn’t French, is he?”

  “Oh, come on,” Williams said, “come on,” but he giggled a little. “A guy named Hooper got killed in a plant, probably because he saw something that he shouldn’t, and then Shields got cooled too. A bunch of people are pretty scared and mad; it looks like they’re panicking.”

  “Who killed Shields?”

  “Whoever is running the stuff out. The way they figure this is that Shields overreacted, and the murder of this guy opened up so many questions that they had to take out Shields also. But it can’t be sealed off.”

  “They’re running the stuff into Canada,” Wulff said, “but where are they getting it from?”

  “Well,” Williams said, and paused, “well, that’s the really interesting and unique part of this situation. No one is quite sure where the guy above Shields was getting it from, who his source is, how the distribution is worked out on that end. There are some guesses, though. My source has some pretty good suggestions.”

  “Police source?”

  “Yeah,” Williams said, “a lieutenant on the North Side.”

  “You’re getting quite a reputation, eh? You’re becoming a pipeline.”

  “Something like that,” Williams said. “That’s about all I care to be too, a pipeline. You understand?”

  “I understand,” Wulff said. “So the idea is to start where? At the plant?”

  “Play it by ear,” Williams said. “That would be the best way. Things would show up at the plant, though. They’re pretty scared; they can’t keep a lid on it.”

  Wulff watched a mail truck move slowly toward him, cresting a little rise, and said, “You’ve got the whole thing figured out, don’t you?”

  “I do the best I can.”

  “Why don’t you join me?”

  “You don’t want anyone to join you,” Williams said. “You’re the lone wolf.”

  “You’ve got too much faith. You think too much of me. How do you know I can do anything here? How do you know that I even want to?”

  Williams said, “You’re out, aren’t you?”

  And that was the truth. He was out. The truck was moving very slowly now, the driver peering through the glass, looking at the Fleetwood with interest, the brakes groaning as it went even more slowly. Wulff realized that this was not the proper place to continue a discussion of motives, not with half an ordnance factory in the back of the car. “All right,” he said, “I’ll do what I can. It sounds promising, anyway. They’re half in trouble as it is.”

  “You want the address of the plant?”

  “I’ll fake it,” Wulff said, and hung up the phone. The truck had now stopped, was on the other side of the road, little puffs coming from its exhaust, and in the window the form of the driver had vanished. Wulff started to move from the enclosure of the area, and then suddenly he did not; some preconscious instinct held him in place while he looked the situation over carefully. There was something about the truck which did not reckon; it was mottled in a peculiar way, did not seem to bear the colors of the U.S. Mail service so much as a hastily painted version of them, and then too, the engine was idling in slow and then more rapid bursts of speed, moving from sluggishness to high rpm’s in a strange uneven way, much as if someone … well, much as if someone behind the wheel in a strange and cramped position was gunning the engine in preparation for a fast getaway.

  Wulff stayed exactly where he was and calculated the situation.

  VIII

  There he was with a ton of cocaine and a sleeping girl in the back of the panel truck, just trying to make a quick run through to New York, pick up the bread, dump the girl, and get out of the country, there he was, minding his own business and pleased with the camouflage, and then, Edgerton thought bitterly, then he had to run into this Burton Wulff character right on the side of highway Eighty in Pennsylvania. It was crazy.

  Crazy! You spent all your life looking for the big score and settling for the small ones, dreaming a lot and performing a little, and then out of nowhere they dropped the lottery ticket on top of you, they gave you the two-hundred-dollar longshot by special-delivery mail. But meanwhile you were sitting there in the crapper with your pants down, wrapped around your ankles, barely able to move and almost beyond hope. What was he supposed to do now?

  There was a ten-thousand-dollar bounty on this bastard’s head. Everybody knew that; the word had been passed through all the circles of the network, what was left of it, that is—there wasn’t a hell of a lot, although little coke runners like him would hardly expect to be hassled. Ten grand was ten grand, though. All that he had to do was to gun this guy down and use his Polaroid to take a couple of pictures, and there it was. They would lay the ten on him for the privilege, and maybe a little extra. They were that desperate to get him. He knew exactly whom to pass that photo to and how to make the arrangements for the pickup.

  Ten grand! He even had the weapon, a good point-thirty-two Magnum small-bore, which he would never be without on this kind of a run, not that, thank God, he’d ever have to use it. But he would if he had to. Once a trooper had chased him and given him a speeding ticket, and even though Edgerton’s papers had been in order and he had taken the ticket quietly, what the trooper didn’t know was that all the time Edgerton was braking the truck, pulling it over to the side of the road, he had had the gun in his hand in his coat pocket and he would have killed the trooper if it had turned out to be anything more serious than a ticket.

  He was ready to do it, all right. The guy had been on the phone talking away, the Fleetwood just at off-angles to the enclosure. Then, he had not been talking, but he hadn’t come out, either, which meant that he might have picked up Edgerton’s pitch but that he couldn’t come out, because all of his weaponry—and there was probably a shitload—was in that Cadillac. So what the hell good was all his weaponry going to do him now? It was a deal. Eventually Wulff would have to come out of that enclosure; it was that simple. Edgerton could hold him under siege in the painted-over panel truck, and when Wulff came out, Edgerton would fix him. Alternatively, he could try to close in on foot or in the truck, but that would have been a trifle riskier and would have given him more exposure than he wanted. Still, it was something not to be entirely ignored. He would have done it if
the situation had made it look likely.

  One way or the other, or the third; it would have been a groove. It would have been fun toying with that initial advantage, with the outcome never in doubt. Edgerton could see where it would have been almost stimulating, almost a contest, the kind of thing he most enjoyed. He loved sports, and what was the greatest thing of all was to convert things into a sports context; that was why he thought of himself running the coke as a marathon runner moving under pressure. But he couldn’t play it at all. He just couldn’t do it.

  He had this sleeping bitch in the back, Jessica, eighteen or nineteen years old, long blond hair, knapsack, the whole paraphernalia. She had been alone in a diner in southern Illinois, and it had been the easiest thing in the world to slide into the booth just under the gazes of the truckmen who had been staring at her, and begin to talk to her casually, intimately; unlike the truckers, he had the uniform of her kind, the sideburns, the dungaree jacket, the little beard. She had begun to come on to him right away, and it had been easy, easy; she had been, as he had suspected, dropped there on a hitch; she was looking for another hitch. East. She said she had a child back East, and a husband too, had been on the road alone all summer trying to find herself, but now it was time to go home. Her husband had been very tolerant, but if she didn’t show up soon, he would cut out for good, and what would happen then? He made a pretty good living; she needed the money.