by Barry, Mike
“I’m going to get out of here,” she said, “I’m going to get out while the going is good.” She looked at the corpse and then away from it, walked toward the chair against the wall on which her clothing was propped. “I see the way that this thing is going,” she said, “and I don’t want any part of it. I know that you saved my life and all that, and you can be sure that I’m grateful, but on the other hand, I’m really not up to this any more. My wild times are behind me. Actually, since I got back home after you took me there things have been very quiet and dull and I find that I like it just fine. I wish that I had gotten into the dull life years ago. I may even go back to school in the fall.” She reached for her sweatshirt from the chair, standing on tiptoes to avoid any contact with the corpse, then shrugged the shirt on quickly, casually. “I’m a little old for school, but on the other hand there are worse places to be. This is really wild you know,” she said, taking her pants off the chair, inclining on a toe like a dancer and digging a foot in, then pivoting for the other leg. “Dead men on the floor, people all over the country out to get you, mob bosses who carry your photograph around, triggermen, what not. It’s a wild life, but you’ve got to get out of it, you know. You can’t go on this way.”
“Listen,” Wulff said, turning back from the window, going back toward the bed, “you can’t just walk out of here. It’s ridiculous.”
“Why is it ridiculous?”
“For one thing we don’t know who may be waiting down the hall or covering us on the street. He may have a backup man, there may be other people carrying out surveillance on the building who know who you are. You can’t just walk out into this. You don’t know what you may be walking into.”
“That’s all right,” she said, “I’ll take my chances.”
“No,” he said, “it’s really ridiculous, I can’t permit it. We’ll get out of here together.”
“I don’t think you understand,” she said, turning, facing him, her eyes blank and yet somehow knowledgeable. In this aspect she looked something like the girl that he had pulled out of the San Francisco apartment in a speed jag months ago, although she did not look damned much like her. There were now whole layers of experience seemingly interposed over her attitude and also the softness of that girl that he remembered had gone. “I agreed to meet you, I was glad to hear from you because I felt I owed you something for what you did and also because I had to test something out in myself. I was pretty hung up on you, you know that, don’t you? I guess you could figure that out; the man who was my savior, ex-New York City cop, the lone wolf battling all of the bad men, and so on, and I don’t exactly love the drug pushers myself. I had to see you again, I had to test myself and also, really, I’m grateful for what you did, but you see,” she said, looking once again at the corpse and then putting a small hand, a surprisingly delicate hand for a well-proportioned girl, on the doorknob, “it’s definitely over now. Whatever it was I had to find out, I had to get it out of my system, I did. I can’t go on this way. It’s too dangerous. I’m twenty-five years old. I’d like to make it to twenty-six and I’d rather have a long, boring life than a short, exciting one. Please, don’t come with me. I want to get out of here myself. I just don’t think I want to have any more of your luck riding along with me.”
The girl opened the door, went out into the hallway, closed the door, and left him there standing with a dead man in the middle of the room, her footsteps at first almost imperceptible in the hall and then soundless. As he turned to the window to try to follow her out of the building he realized that the room was looking out on the other side and that there was no way in which he would be able to see her. If someone was lying in wait for her out there she would not have a chance; there would be no way whatsoever that he would be able to protect her.
He stood there poised, listening for the sound of gunfire but there was none, and after a time, Wulff could not calculate exactly when, he knew that she had made it through safely and that he was now alone. Alone with a dead man. He dropped the towel from its position around his waist and slowly, wearily began to dress, feeling as if he had aged years within the last moments, as if some foreshadowing of his own senescence and decline had dropped around his shoulders like a cloak. He hadn’t expected it. He simply hadn’t expected that it would go this way.
The dead man, lusher in his death than ever in life, was leaking fluid through the thin, cheap covering of the floor. Looking at him, Wulff realized that if he did not do something quickly he was likely only to have dead men for company in the near future. They had their merits, dead men did. For one thing they had no ambitions and for another they did not struggle for possessions and show the uncommon perversity that living ones did, but on the other hand it was perhaps better to hold onto life for the time being; it was a known quantity. Also, he had a job to do and he was not finished yet.
It was strange, but apart from these two cited reasons he could not think of one other basis for not pitching it in right now and joining that creature on the floor.
VI
Williams heard about the Evans-Finch double murder the night before he went back on duty. Almost every cop in the city knew about it within two hours, but Williams was still at home so he had to pick it up from the late edition of the Post. To the paper’s credit they gave it a great deal of play, centering a close-up of Evan’s covered body lying on Lenox Avenue with a lot of theorizing out of headquarters as to whether this had been a planned slaying or an impulse killing, but Williams wasn’t having any of it. It was obvious as hell what had happened here. Evans and Finch had probably been in the middle of taking a narcotics bust when the guy on the other end of the score, keeping September 1st in mind, had decided it was better to take a chance on capital for killing a cop than taking sure life for dealing, standing, and letting the two cops put the cuffs on. A week ago the murderer or pack of murderers might have stood still for the arrest, just possibly. Five years for dealing, with the possibility of parole after twenty-two months, would have looked a little more promising than sure death if they got nailed for cop-killing. But with the new program, all bets were off. It was going to be open season in the arena of the shooting galleries from now on; God help any cop who tried a dealing arrest without a gun in his hand and a strong backup across the street. Even that might not hold them. Credit the governor for the new narcotics law; he was going to drive all the dealers out of the streets all right. He was going to disperse them all over the country doing their wonderful work, all except the few who would be starting up a new death row, that is. But the governor didn’t believe in pill-taking of any sort, and goddamnit, if he wasn’t going to take even an aspirin for a headache no one in the State of New York, if he could help it, would be able to do the same. At the rate the governor was going, Williams figured, aspirin-taking without a prescription would itself be a felony within the next four years.
He thought about it quite a bit that night. He wondered if it would change his decision to take the desk job that the precinct had offered and go back on duty at least for a few months while the gut-wound healed completely and he decided what he wanted to do with the next forty or fifty years of his life. If his wife had been around Williams would have discussed the thing with her again, but she was not. Things had been deteriorating between them since the knife that had put him in the hospital had struck. Four days ago, after a particularly vicious disagreement, she had packed up an overnight valise and moved over to her sister’s place in Flatbush; just for a few days, she said, until they cooled off and got some perspective. But it had been longer than just a few days now and she still had not called nor had he. Williams supposed that he couldn’t blame her. The knifing he had taken checking out the methadone center in Spanish Harlem had changed his perspective on a lot of things; had imploded all of his neat, previously held ideas about the system which would protect him and hold him in place as he climbed narrowly up the ladder of the white man’s world, sneering at all of them. Now, having been knifed in the gut, hav
ing taken what he thought of as the white man’s knife for the privilege of protecting him, Williams was not sure about the system. It was a massive trap, a sinkhole, that was what it was; it existed for the convenience of a very few who lied to the vast percentage of fools and failures out there so that they, too, could find their way inside with perseverance and luck, the principle of the lottery, a chance for all takers … but it just didn’t work out that way.
No, maybe Wulff had the right idea after all. He had been skeptical about Wulff, more than skeptical. He had taken the man to be crazy with his attitude that the system sucked right down to the bottom, that the system was dedicated to neither good nor evil but simply to its own preservation, and that that preservation would lead it inevitably to more wrong choices than right ones. The idea that a man could go outside of the system deliberately was bad enough, but when it involved a quest as monumental as putting the drug trade out of existence…. Well maybe, Williams had thought when this all began, the right thing was to take up some kind of collection for the guy’s hospitalization.
But maybe Wulff had a point after all. Certainly he was doing more in a matter of months than the narco squads, the DA’s, the President’s Council, and the border operators, to say nothing of the FBI and the late J. Edgar had been able to do in ten years. Williams could read the headlines; just a look at the front pages of the newspapers some days was an indication of what Wulff was up to and how he was going about it. A freighter fire in San Francisco, two hundred dead. A townhouse blown up on the East Side of New York, an important figure lost in the rubble. Someone shot to death in Wall Street. A fire in Boston. Yes, Wulff was making an impression; he was making the rounds. Williams had been able to help him a little bit, too, give him an insight into a weapons shop here, a lead into a missing bag of shit there. But Williams had now heard nothing from Wulff in several weeks. Only the calls from Calabrese, the boss in Chicago, asking Williams where the hell Wulff had gone, were indications that the man was still in the picture. Williams knew Calabrese pretty well if only third-hand. If Calabrese was looking for Wulff that meant that the man had really reached the big leagues, was starting to dig in at the highest point, because Calabrese came out from under his rock only once every ten years and then usually only to sneer at a grand jury or something.
But the problem was not Wulff right now; the problem was Williams and what was going to become of his life. The decision to go back on duty had been easily formed, had been inevitable even though he had done it for the wrong reasons at least according to his wife. “I’ll hang in for a couple of months and really get well,” he said, “and maybe I’ll get hold of some files and data and information and when I’m back to myself I’ll do what Wulff did, I’ll quit them and I’ll really blow them up.” She hadn’t liked that, not the part about going back, but the part about blowing it up. She was eight months pregnant now which made him doubly a bastard for letting her walk out, he supposed, She was all for the house in St. Albans and the system. That was what he had offered her when they were married and that was what she was in it for. At that level her loyalty was unquestioned. But when the very prerogatives shifted, when it turned out that he was interested in something he had never talked to her about, all bets were off. He supposed there was at least a chance that they would never get back together again.
And then the business with Evans. Still, what the hell could you do? The governor was fucking things up right and left. The governor should at least have thought about the choices that he was giving the dealers and the cops when rammed down to confrontation, but the governor, of course, did not give a shit; that kind of thinking was too abstract for him. The governor was a first-class shit at least on this count, Williams thought, but then again he knew nothing about the ins and outs and intricacies of politics. Maybe the governor thought that he was ramming through a popular program and New York City was shit capital of the world as everyone knew. Anyway it hardly mattered to him except in the abstract sense. He was going to go back on desk duty.
Williams lay in bed unable to sleep for a long time, thinking about what had happened to him and what was going to happen next. His gut still ached in certain positions, little slivers of pain like cold radiating through him, and he had to adjust himself repeatedly, trying not to think of what that pain meant, some refraction of his death, the pain of his own death, refracted some fifty years down the pike. He was able to touch his death in the darkness, feel it as a companion in his bed. Instead of a wife, now he had death lying in his bed and this knowledge brought him upright in the darkness, the realization cutting through him as that knife on Lenox Avenue had … and when the phone rang he seized it gasping, groaning, shouting into that phone as if it was only further confirmation of that message.
“Yes!” he said. “Who is it? What is it?” The thought occurred to him in that breathing space that it might be his wife, contrite, willing to come home, or maybe his sister-in-law to tell him that he had a son, but the pause stretched out and he knew it was neither. “All right,” he said in a more restrained way then, “who is it? What the hell is it?”
“You know who this is,” a voice said, “don’t you?”
He guessed he did. Williams guessed he did. “Yes,” he said, “I know who it is. Where the hell have you been?”
“That’s a long story,” Wulff said. “Where the hell have you been?”
“I’ve been in a hospital and then I’ve been home. There are a lot of people querying your whereabouts, Wulff.”
“I know that. I know that damned well. You okay? You’ve recovered?”
“Parts of me,” Williams said, “parts of me have recovered. I’m supposed to go back to work tomorrow.”
“How’s that wife of yours?”
“That’s another story,” Williams said. It was funny how after a lapse like this he could fall back into the same, odd rhythms of the relationship he had established with Wulff. Nothing changed. Nothing changed at all; at least on the outside. That seemed to be a truism. “That’s another story altogether.”
“I’m in trouble,” Wulff said.
“That’s okay. I’m in trouble too.”
“You want to help me out?”
“I don’t know,” Williams said. “I don’t know about my sources of information anymore. I don’t know about anything.”
“I mean more directly,” Wulff said, “more directly than information.”
“Where the hell are you?”
“I’m in Los Angeles. Half the country is looking for me now.”
“You wanted to take on the system. That’s what happens when you take on the system. A lot of people begin to get interested in you.”
“It’s too much for me,” Wulff said, “it’s a little too much even for me. I need some help here. I don’t think that I can hold them off single-handed.”
“I got a knife in my gut,” Williams said. “I almost died up there on 137th Street. I’m lucky to get out of it alive.”
“All right,” Wulff said, “it was just an idea. The hell with it.”
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t go. I don’t see what I can do for you, though. I’m supposed to go back on duty tomorrow. Desk job.”
“Desk jobs are all right,” Wulff said. His voice was thin and high through the continental transmission, not quite as Williams remembered it. Some freak of receptors, of course, unless it was something else … unless he was talking to a man different from the one he had last spoken to. “You’re a system man, Williams, remember? You ought to be happy.”
“I don’t hold no truck with the fucking system,” Williams said, “I’m in a different position now.”
“Then come out,” Wulff said, “come out and help me. I can’t handle this alone. I can’t do it anymore.”
“I’m still on light duty. They don’t want to put me behind a desk because they feel sorry for me. I’m not able to get into heavy stuff.”
“You’ll come out then. You’ll help me.”
“I don�
�t know,” Williams said. “I’m about to have a child. She’s into the ninth month.”
“Then it’s still the system. The ninth month and a desk job. That’s all you’re telling me.”
“No,” Williams said. He shouted again. “I got nothing to do with the fucking system. I almost died on 137th Street, man, don’t you know that? And she’s not living with me any more. She walked out.”
There was a long pause; Williams could hear Wulff breathing on the other end but for an extended time there was nothing but that breath. “I’m sorry,” Wulff said, “really, I’m sorry about that. I hope I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Not much,” Williams said. “Not much.”
“I have no right to ask you anything then. Listen, you get back with that woman. You—”
“It’s too late,” Williams said sharply, and realized in saying it that it was the truth. Of course, it was; it must have been from the beginning. He knew that there was some reason that he had not tried to call her and now he knew what it was. They were simply past that point. “Too late for any of that crap. You’re in a lot of trouble, right?”
“I’m in more trouble than I’ve been in my life. I don’t think I can handle this myself. I thought that if you wanted to come along for the ride I could use you but if you’re not able to handle—”
“I’ll handle it,” Williams said. He clamped the phone in his hand, feeling that hand moisten to the contact. “If I can be of any help I’ll handle it. Where are you? Just tell me where the hell you are.”
