Lone Wolf #11: Detroit Massacre

by Barry, Mike

  But in any event she was gone, and seeing the clean, stark bareness of the room after his first careful sweep through the streets of the city snapped Wulff back into perspective, gave him that utter and fine leap toward control which he had not had for such a long time, since Los Angeles at least, maybe further back than that, in Chicago. There was absolutely nothing holding him now, he thought, no connection; no sentiment about the girl or his own condition could get in between himself and the performance of his role. She could have the coke, and welcome to it. He did not give a damn. It was a shame to see all of that go back into the pipeline; if he had it to do over again he would have dumped it; but what was a little bit of coke as opposed to the reservoir of heroin running in the veins of the nation? Jessica had been right. You had to cultivate a sense of perspective. You could not, yourself, clean up the world.

  Williams, whom he called, said that he had lost control of the situation. Aside from saying that Hamilton’s murderer had not yet been discovered, that all sense of leads had been lost, Williams had nothing to add. He said that he had gotten some noises out of the Detroit PD, noises about how Wulff would be better advised to stay out of town, that the situation was a bad one and building, but Williams said that he pretty well discounted that. It was pretty clear that Hamilton’s killer was a cop, but equally clear that he was a free-lancer, that the pattern was not tied into any long-range network of corruption within the department itself. Sooner or later they would find out the guy’s identity, Williams thought; they were already running down a couple of cops who had taken unexplained leaves of absence and one who had been phoning in sick for a couple of weeks through his wife and who Williams thought might be a real prospect, but there was nothing definite and it tied in in no useful way. “I can’t tell you anything,” Williams said, “and you don’t want to be told anything anyway. Everything’s pretty quiet on this end. They’ve got the guy who killed Smith, and for the moment they’re happy. There’s an all-points bulletin on you, and all that shit, but it’s just pro forma. They’re not following it up at all. They haven’t even got the investigations division on it.”

  “All right,” Wulff said, “so it’s just a matter of running down the traffic.”

  “The traffic’s stopped,” Williams said. “That’s my best information. With Hamilton out of the picture, they don’t want to pick up on it. As a matter of fact, I think that everything’s quiet.”

  “Nothing’s ever quiet,” Wulff said. He was standing in a candy store, looking through the smeared windows of the telephone booth, the dismal aspect of the interior further shrouded by the filth on the panes, and abruptly he felt himself seized by disgust, revulsion—it seemed that he had spent so much of his time standing in enclosures like this talking to Williams, standing in the midst of filth getting information indirectly and in an almost external way, while the real corrupters, safe and insulated in their pretty homes with their pretty wives and prettier mistresses made their arrangements and controlled the world. “Fuck it,” he said to Williams, “I’ve had enough of this. I’m going to blow it out.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m going to blow it out. The whole plant. They’ll never ship stuff through there again. They won’t even think of trying a caper like that anymore. It’ll cut off their entire chain of supply.”

  “That’s wild,” Williams said. He was trying to keep his voice level, noncommittal, but Wulff could detect an undertone of horror. “Are you sure that you want to do something like that?”

  “It’s got to be done,” Wulff said, fascinated with the idea that had just come over him. It was the only way. He could see that now. Everything else was just waiting for them to come to him, waiting for the situation to be resolved from the outside, when that had never really been his way, when his way had been to create resolution. “It’s the only way that it can be done. Anything else is just waiting for them.’’

  “An awful lot of people are going to be hurt.”

  “A clean job,” Wulff said, “incendiaries and one flash. No chain reaction, just a controlled explosion. If I place the fire right, it should stay controlled, and I’ll try to hit an area where no one’s standing.”

  “How are you going to get in there?”

  “Where? The plant?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll find a way,” Wulff said, and paused. “Don’t they have guided tours?”

  “How you going to bring the stuff in that you need without being detected?”

  “A briefcase,” Wulff said. “Even smaller than that, an attaché case. I’ve got a little souvenir I saved from Wall Street, remember?”

  “It’s risky,” Williams said, “it’s very risky. Are you sure you want to do this?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I would have stayed in jail,” Wulff said. “I didn’t give a shit, remember? I was wiped out; I thought that after I got Smith, everything was wrapped up. But you didn’t want it that way. You thought that I belonged back in the world, still doing my wonderful work. All of this was your idea. I would have stayed there.”

  “I didn’t mean to take it this rough,” Williams said; “there are ways and ways.”

  “No,” Wulff said, running his hand over the glass of the booth, which, to his surprise, turned out to be plastic, a thin, crinkling sheet that curved into his palm like cellophane. “No, there’s no easy way. There never was at all; it’s just one way from the start, and that’s the tough route. It’s firearms and death. That’s the only message they understand.”

  “You’ll get killed, Wulff,” Williams said. His voice sounded thin and tentative, not so much the connection as his conviction fading. “You can’t go on this way.”

  “You sprung me,” Wulff said. “It didn’t have to be this way at all. I could have stayed there and been happy; they could have pensioned me off into solitary or a nice quiet sanitarium and I wouldn’t have uttered a peep. They could have done anything to me they wanted; I would have been a vegetable. You wouldn’t leave well enough alone, though. Everybody’s got to mess with the status quo. So have it your way.”

  “You don’t burn down a building to kill a termite, Wulff. You can’t—”

  “No?” he said. “That’s the only damned way to make sure the termite is dead. And there isn’t one of them, there are millions. You going to turn me in, Williams?”

  “No,” Williams said after a long, thickening pause, “that’s ridiculous. How am I going to turn you in? Who would I turn you in to? That never occurred to me at all.”

  “So let me work,” Wulff said, “let me work and let me fucking well be.” That would have been a good line to hang up on, right there, but something stiffened in his arm, and he only paused there, holding the receiver. He realized that he was waiting for Williams to say something, something that would either release him or send him on his next and terrible journey without doubt, some code which only he could crack, which would release understanding; but as he stood there, he understood that he would never get it from Williams, that release would never be there and that if there would be any final apprehension of his situation it could not come from this outside force, which would eternally be an abstraction anyway, a complete fucking abstraction, but would have to come from within him. That was the only answer there would be.

  “You still there?” Williams said.

  “Yes,” Wulff said, “I’m still here, but I don’t know how much longer that’s going to be,” and then he put down the phone, crashing it into the receiver and he went out into the street, only dimly conscious of the way in which the proprietor was looking at him, only vaguely aware of the aspect of the pavement, the blasted-out storefronts, the exhausted stones which framed this ruined city of Detroit.

  It was easy, that was all, it was easy. Once you got past the indecision, once you had decided exactly what the problem was and the best way in which to attack it, once you had taken the matter of the personal out of
it completely and looked upon it merely as a war, a vicious and unending war which had to be fought mercilessly because you were struggling against the oldest and least merciful foe of all, death, once you had come to that decision, then everything fell into place. Fuck consequence, fuck circumstance, fuck remorse, and fuck the easy answers which one by one, all of them—the jail, Williams, the girl—had forced upon him. The only answers there would ever be would be the hard ones, the old blood-hard messages of death raised against death.

  He went back to his room. He got the grenades, the fire bombs, and the disassembled submachine gun.

  Then he went out to the panel truck, still parked discreetly a few blocks down, and prepared to go to work.

  XVIII

  He hadn’t meant to kill her. Coates wanted to give that message to the world, scream it out through a megaphone or better yet get a slot on the six o’clock news so that he could tell everyone within the greater Detroit area how it had gone this way and how it wasn’t his fault. How could they say he wanted to murder her? Once they heard his side of the story, they would understand; they would forgive him. It hadn’t been in his mind at all.

  Not in the least. All he had wanted was information. He had approached her in the most reasonable way, really being a gentleman about it, despite the fact that her husband had been a bastard, but he had taken the easiest and gentlest line imaginable with her. All he was seeking was a little cooperation and a little information, and it would have been so easy for her to have given him this. He would have tipped his hat and been on his way, just a good patrolman making a stop on his beat to check with the lady of the house. But she had had to get vicious with him, to deny him selfishly the information which was his right to have, only because she wanted to hold onto everything herself, only because with Hamilton dead now she thought that she could run the operation just like some kind of Ma Perkins, when by rights all of it fell to him, Coates; it was his by inheritance, with Hamilton dead. But the selfish cunt wouldn’t understand that; she had had to take the line that it was hers and she had the right to take over where the old man had fallen. That was the kind of shit you had to put up with in today’s society, this women’s liberation business, they not only thought that they were better than men sexually but also in the business area, that they could not only rule men’s lives but supplant them, and that was when Coates had lost his temper.

  Up until then he had been perfectly reasonable, highly in control of himself, but when he saw her treachery, when he saw that she would not under any circumstances give up what she thought to be hers but would hold onto it until the very end, something within him had broken after a very long time of self-control, and he had shot her. He didn’t want to do it, but she had forced him. Any fool could see that; he had had no choice.

  The trouble was that now he really was in hot water. He could tell that. As upset as he was, the cool and cop part of his mind was still functioning, and he could see that there was a case against him and that it would not be pleasant. A judge, certainly a jury, would see his point and would acquit him without delay, but there would be the matter of the arraignment first, and murder one was a nonbailable offense, so he’d be sitting around in the can for a while, and he knew enough about jails to realize that he wanted no part of them. Not that if he could have gotten bail he wouldn’t have gone to the D.A. and made a full confession, because right was right and he would be acquitted soon enough. But jail … no way. He wouldn’t get near it.

  But then too, he wouldn’t have made his confession to the D.A. just yet. Not until he got rid of the smack and collected his five million dollars. They were worth at least that, those precious bricks, maybe six or ten million, but he wasn’t going to be greedy, not with that kind of money at stake. No, he would take the five million and consider it fair enough. Once he had that stashed away, he’d gladly go to the DA and make his plea and get a lawyer (Lord knew he could afford the best then) and serve out his two or three days in jail until a jury empaneled itself and he got through a quick trial. He was a cop, he had a respect for the law taught him by his time in the department; if a citizen with five million dollars didn’t have respect for the law, what the hell was the point of the whole fucking country? No way. Meanwhile, though, he had to get rid of the smack and get his money. That was the uppermost problem. Also, just in case there were questions about discovering her body in the living room, which he doubted would happen, because who gave a shit about her, but just in case questions developed, well, then it would be best not to be in a position to be discovered. Not until he had made his deal and gotten the five million dollars safely away; then they could do anything they fucking wanted with him as far as they were concerned, as far as he was concerned too. She was the widow of a drug dealer, for Christ’s sake, who wanted to take over the business for herself! What right-thinking American jury would stand for anything like that?

  Coates spent the first night after the murder, then, in an odorous cubicle in a cheap downtown hotel choking on the fumes which five years later still seemed to come from the burned-out sections to the north, spent that night formulating his final plans. As the dawn came riding along like a taxi driver briskly cutting through traffic, the plan occurred to him in its great simplicity and brilliance; the best way to find out exactly where the stuff was being dumped was to smuggle himself into one of the Fleetwoods and then ride it all the way to its destination. That would do it! That would solve the problem completely! If he got himself into one of the cars coming out of that particular assembly point, he would be conveyed straight to the same place where the heroin had been, and what a surprise for the recipients, to open the door expecting to find their usual neat package sealed into place behind the crushed-velour upholstery and to find instead a very angry, incorruptible Detroit policeman come prepared to wreak vengeance upon them and end their cruel game forever … unless of course they were willing to try to deal with him on his own terms. That would be the least that they would be expected to do; after all, these people were not fools. They would share Coates’s desire to make an honorable end to the fiasco.

  Pacing back and forth, banging little flakes of plaster from the walls, standing in the sift of plaster as he inhaled its odors deeply, feeling the little grains drive power into his lungs, Coates thought of the mechanics of the thing. It would be difficult to get into one of the cars inconspicuously; a man was somewhat bigger than a shipment of heroin, of course. But then again, the Fleetwoods were enormous; they could literally swallow one up, and he could hardly be seen through the tinted glass of the gigantic passenger compartment if he huddled within himself like an elderly passenger gripping a cane, slunk down into the crushed velour and stared fixedly ahead, his features merging with the dim interior of the car. He could certainly get away with it, he thought with excitement.

  Get away with it, and what a surprise for them in Toronto! He found himself giggling, rubbing his hands convulsively as he thought about it. That would really be something, when they opened the doors, looking for their routine shipment, and found him instead, the heroin draped in a sack across his lap. They would probably freak out on the spot, think of him as some kind of avenger, the ultimate narco transported three hundred miles over the border to make his score. Their resistance, what little there might be of it, would utterly be destroyed when they saw what they had confronted; truly they would never be the same again. Five million dollars? He might get ten!

  It was a wonderful idea; it was the ultimate solution. Coates almost thought of calling his wife to tell her about it, just so that she could see after all her suspicions and the vicious things she had said that she had not married a fool after all. She had married a man with an eight-year plan, a man with a stroke of genius in the bargain, and a man of such courage and persistence that even a major setback like the treachery of everybody with whom he was dealing could not slow him down from consummation. That was what she had married! And what a pleasure it would have been to outline his plan to her over the pho
ne, even tell her that she’d be in for thirty or forty grand so that she would just shut the fuck up and stay out of his life forever, but then he remembered that the room had no phone, which was all for the better, because, he remembered, on top of that, shushing himself with an elaborate gesture for the benefit of any spies who might be observing him through one-way mirrors, he couldn’t give away the plan or his location. She would just call people in on him, and he couldn’t have that.

  Yes, there were spies all over. There were spies in the hotel, and spies who had watched near the lot when he had shot Hamilton (but he had been clever; he had gotten away quickly), and spies no doubt who at this very moment were busily observing him and taking frantic notes for their distant superiors; but no matter what kind of notes they took, they could never defeat him, because what they did not realize was that you had forever the integrity of your own consciousness; they could never take that away from you, and no matter what they did, they would never squeeze awareness of his plans out of him. He would not even talk about them, just in case there were lip readers around. He would merely think.

  All right, then; he would think. The tricky part, the only tricky part he could see to what was otherwise a very solid and admirable plan, would be getting himself into the plant and getting inconspicuously enough into one of the Fleetwoods when it had reached its final assembly point. That was something to think about. There were a lot of people around the cars then, and probably they had to survive a final inspection at that point; it was a risky thing to think that he would be able simply to walk into the car, let alone carrying a sackful of heroin, plant himself in the rear seat, pull the door closed, and set off. It would not be too likely that they would all just at the moment of his entrance shift their attention elsewhere.