Lone Wolf #2: Bay Prowler

by Barry, Mike

  “I don’t like the business,” Severo said as Wulff brought the car to a stop, “you hear me? I just don’t like it. I didn’t get started to get into it, it just came along five, six years ago, and how could I pass it up? if I didn’t take it over some other guy would instead and they’d use it as a wedge to push me out. But I’ve been thinking it over for a long time and I don’t want to mess with it anymore. It’s a dirty business. You know, back before the 1960’s they didn’t even want to touch the stuff. Most of them had children, they could see what the stuff would do, they didn’t want to get involved. But they had to get into it finally in self defense.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? I told you why. Because they were starting to get squeezed out. Because the business just got out of hand, it was so big, there was so much money, and so many guys started to push their way in that things were starting to fall apart. Pressure built up, and they were losing so much money, so much money was going to these other sources that they were really beginning to lose hold. So they had to get back into it but there were a lot even then who didn’t want to touch it and they started to get obstructed. So—”

  “So the gang wars started again,” Wulff said.

  “Yeah,” Severo said with a shrug. “I mean it wasn’t quite that simple, but that’s the general idea. I forgot; you were in New York through all that shit, weren’t you?”

  “I got around a little, yeah,” Wulff said, “Just a shade. And now, I should just march in there and take it over, right? And what about you? What are you going to be doing when I’m ditching all of your plans?”

  “I won’t be there,” Severo said. “You don’t think anyone in the higher echelons appears personally, do you?”

  “You have people who do the contact work.”

  “Something like that,” Severo said. He opened the door and pushed his way out of the car. “So I’ll wish you luck now,” he said.

  “Wait a minute.”

  Severo raised his eyebrows and stayed in position, half-in, half-out, hunched over. “What is it?”

  “You think I’m just going to let you go? We finish our talk and I let you out of the car and you go home?”

  “Those were my plans,” the little man said. “You had another idea?”

  “You think you’re just going to walk away from this?”

  “I think we understand one another, Wulff. You have nothing to gain by killing me. Look, I’ve put myself at your mercy as a measure of good faith. I think you can trust me.”

  “Why should I trust you?”

  Severo held his position, looked at Wulff levelly. “Because I’m telling you the truth and because I think we can help each other.”

  “You’re using me to work out a double-cross.”

  “Something like that, yes. It’s much more complicated than that, though. Like the gang wars.”

  “I ought to kill you,” Wulff said.

  “Of course you ought to kill me. I know your track record, Wulff; you’ve been killing everyone. But what do you have to gain? Actually you’re not a killer at all; you’re a businessman. You’re just trying to get a job done like I’ve been doing, and that means getting people out of your way. But I’m not in your way, you see. I’m trying to help you.”

  “Just let you go back into the house and call down every hit man in San Francisco to catch me near that freight tomorrow.”

  “If you think so. You’re quite wrong, though. You know,” Severo said, “I’m getting very uncomfortable standing in this position, Wulff. Now the Fleetwood is mine of course but I can see where you might find it awkward to leave it here and just take a bus on back to wherever you’re staying, so you can have it to get back there. I suggest you leave it somewhere convenient and give me a call and I’ll arrange for a pickup.”

  “You’ve got nerve,” Wulff said, almost admiringly. “You have really got nerve. Severo, I’ve got to give you that.”

  Severo shrugged and moved away from the car, hitched his pants up in the driveway, kicked out a leg, a dancer. “You don’t get into a position like mine without learning a few things,” he said and started to walk toward the house.

  “Stop,” Wulff said.

  The man poised, arched in the air almost as if expecting an impact and for just a moment Wulff could see, even from behind, the mask of this man shift and fall: Severo was terrified. Underneath all of it he had been a man on the edge of terror for two hours. Regardless, he had gone on and done what he had to do.

  Severo turned slowly and looked at Wulff. Whatever happened to his face had already been subject to reassembly work in the instant after he had seen that no bullet would hit him. Now little trace of what he must have looked like was on his face, there was only a hint in the eyes, closure, blood, then vanishing in the whiteness of pupil. Nevertheless, just knowing that he had opened up the man in this way was probably enough for Wulff. He understood himself now. There was no need to kill Severo after all, at least not yet. He only had to see that the man recognized the line where the killing might have been done. Severo saw it. He saw it clear.

  “I had a question,” Wulff said.

  “Oh?”

  “It’s a question about you, not me.”

  “You’re interested in me? Why that’s very touching, Wulff.”

  “What’s going to happen to you, Severo, if I break up this delivery of yours and everybody in the area begins to wonder who might have tipped me onto it? What are you going to do when every middle boss and hit man in the area starts to crawl around these trees?”

  “That’s a problem I’ll face, Wulff. Nice of you to think of me, though.”

  “You really think you can face it? You think it’s something you can deal with, you’d put your head into that kind of oven?”

  “I know my business,” Severo said. “I’ve been in my business for twenty years. How long have you been in yours, three months? Goodbye, Wulff.”

  He walked away. No twitch in his shoulderblades this time, no swerve of his head. The bastard knew he was safe. He had gone through the other side of the confrontation and now even if Wulff hit him it would not be the same. Severo would die in confidence.

  Wulff let him go.

  He let him go, nothing else to do. Obscurely he understood that, by the code he had created for himself and was now living by, if he was going to kill Severo he would have done it immediately. Or at the latest, as soon as he had pumped the man clear of information. You did not keep the butterfly on the pin, you did not draw out the moment either for your own enjoyment or for their suffering. That put you on their level. They loved death. They played with it like normal men might play with a woman.

  Wulff did not. He merely used it as another technique. And by letting the moment go by he had lost the opportunity to bring it.

  Severo, positions reversed, would have shot him. He was sure of it. But the positions were not reversed. Lonely, locked in, he was always going to be himself.

  He watched the man walk confidently into his house, close the door and flick out the lights.

  Very meditatively, Wulff started the Fleetwood and drove the hell out of there.

  VIII

  Severo did not stop shaking inside until he had closed and locked all the doors clear up to the study on the third floor which had chain bolts and which no one, he hoped, would ever know about. It was his fortress; at the last moment if they ever came to get him he would meet them there. In that fortress now, bolts on, bars across the window, he sat in a chair in a great gasping explosion of breath and allowed the tension at last to ease out. He put his hands in front of his face and in the private way he allowed himself only in this room and only then once or twice a year, rationing it out, he cried.

  He cried convulsively for two or three minutes and then all of the little crawling sounds and fears were gone and he was himself again. He leaned back in the chair, lit a cigarette and smiled.

  He had won, though. He had walked into the valley of death all right, he had met the m
onster, he had worked him over like a woman or a violin and he had won. He had him exactly where he wanted him now.

  They could have done the same thing to him in New York and cancelled him right out if any of them had the guts or the craft. But no, it had all come to him, Nicholas Severo, and he had done it. They called everything outside of the northeastern circle the minor leagues, did they? They would have to begin to re-evaluate their thinking.

  He picked up the phone and dialed a number, got a voice which he recognized. He told the voice to call another voice to the phone, and when the second voice came on he explained quickly what had happened and what he had done and exactly where Wulff would be tomorrow night.

  “I want you to hit him with everything you’ve got,” Severo said clearly.

  The voice said that he would take care of it.

  IX

  Heading south again, out of Sausalito, Wulff was cut off by another car and almost ditched. It all happened so fast that there was no time to evaluate, no time to even consider what was happening to him. He was going on a long stretch of pretty good highway, working the right lane pretty close to the top limit of the Fleetwood, peering through the rear view every ten seconds to make sure that his rear was staying as clear as the front. Maybe eighty-five miles an hour, which for all its tricky suspension and soft riding insulation, was all that the big car could safely handle. Sure they were road cars, the reputation was deserved. They were road cars on long, flat, empty straightaways without ruts, when held below ninety miles an hour. Any two-year-old patrol Plymouth could have left this thing for dead in a parking lot.

  The Mercedes in the far lane came upon him so quickly that he did not even see the damned thing until it was alongside. It must have been going a hundred and forty, a hundred and forty-five miles an hour. That was the only explanation. Otherwise, on his ten-second sweeps of the rear he certainly would have seen it. The man beside the driver riding low, hunched over, looked at Wulff for a bleak instant as the car, decelerating, hung alongside the Fleetwood. Then he said something to the driver.

  The Mercedes spun ahead and screamed across Wulff’s left front fender. The idea of course was to make him brake so abruptly that the Fleetwood would rear out of control, then a quick fishtail of the Mercedes, a quick cut left, storming back then into the passing lane would finish up the job. It was an old maneuver; Wulff had done it himself on patrol quite a few times although never to kill. There you did it to bring some drunk to his senses and to a crawl but the fishtailing motion was the real killer. That you never did. You stayed in front of them and braked them down quickly, but turning your right rear into a battering ram: that was the killer.

  All of this he was able to judge and calculate in a frozen fraction of a second. He knew exactly what they were trying to do; the question was whether he had the reflexes and the experience to overcome before he passed over the point of losing control. At eighty-five miles an hour in a Fleetwood that point came up very fast. He hit the brakes to the floor with all his strength, making the car scream and hurling himself against the wheel but in the next instant he released the brakes totally so that the car sprung back. He fell against the seat, holding the wheel desperately, having picked up six or seven feet of clear space behind the Mercedes. All of this had taken perhaps a half a second.

  The car was trying to fishtail now, the driver reaching the accelerator to the floor to pick up the necessary power. The Mercedes itself had braked down to about fifty or sixty miles an hour to get into lane and boiling down like this in just a matter of seconds must have shaken the driver too, enough so that his only impulse was to get to the floor and get the car out of the sudden pocket as quickly as possible. But even as the Mercedes was looking for speed and passage to the left, Wulff was deep on the gas himself. He pulled the Fleetwood into the left lane and pedal to the floor ran up alongside the Mercedes.

  He did not have half the power or suspension of the other car; it was only surprise that had gotten him this far, surprise on the part of the other driver and his own quick reaction in not slamming the brakes but stabbing them, meaning that the Fleetwood was still under power and in control at a time when by the Mercedes’ calculations it should already have been looking for an exit hatch from the road—the fishtail would only finish the job. But that would mean nothing unless he was able to capitalize on the surprise. He tried to literally drive the accelerator through the floorboards. The Fleetwood, screaming, did the best it could. He got it in one whining explosion above its control limit, one hundred and five miles an hour.

  Now he was slightly past the Mercedes, he had an impression of astonishment in the other car, the passenger his mouth open distended, almost screaming, the driver risking a quick sidelong glance of absolute shock. What the hell was the Fleetwood doing there? the driver wanted to know. Wulff had almost the same question but he was not going to push his luck. So far the car was handling. If it did not continue to handle he would be no worse off than he would have been otherwise.

  This had taken no more than five seconds. Now he perilously worked the Cadillac forward, trying to gain a car-length on the Mercedes. He could not outrun that other car on a straightaway, couldn’t come close. He was capitalizing, he hoped, only on the driver’s shock. If the driver realized in the next second or two that the Mercedes was in no worse position than it had been when this began, that he could accomplish his deadly work as easily from the right lane as the left, and Wulff would be finished. He would not have a second chance at this.

  But the driver was not thinking. For too long he had probably depended upon the wonderful resources of this car and the panic of his victims; left to his own devices he could not handle the situation. Wulff, at a hundred and ten miles an hour got his car-length. Got a little more. He could see the puffs of dust and fumes rising from under the Mercedes even as he inhaled once, tightened his lips and took the wheel hard right, got in front of the Mercedes and before he had even established himself in that lane cut it left.

  He felt a shudder roll from the left rear of the Fleetwood all the way through his buttocks to his knees and then he was moving away in the left lane again, the Mercedes dropping far, far behind, in two seconds already down ten car lengths and then he saw the car wobble, begin to leave the road and start a long, long roll through the frail guardrail and out into the flatlands beyond. He braked the Cadillac down and turned, watched the car take six or seven revolutions and then, almost lazily explode. Then he was back behind the wheel: driving, driving, and the Mercedes, bit by bit, was out of sight and his life. And the driver and passenger out of theirs.

  There was nothing to think. It might have been Severo, treacherous, putting these people on him. It might have been any freelancer in the area looking for a boost in the hierarchy. Or it might have been someone from New York, flown out to do his specialty.

  Then again, it might be some fool who liked to go out on the parkways and kill people.

  He was pretty sure he would never know. It did not matter. Wulff put it out of his mind within five minutes and just kept on rolling back toward San Francisco.

  You could almost call it part of the hazards of trying to do his business.

  X

  Tamara was not in the apartment when he returned, but she had left him a note. AVENGER—she had written—I FEEL BETTER AND AM GOING OUT FOR A WALK. STAYED UNDERGROUND FOR TWO HOURS AS PROMISED AND CHECKED CAREFULLY BEFORE GOING OUTSIDE BUT ALL LOOKS CLEAR. WILL BE BACK LATER TONIGHT. HAVE NOWHERE ELSE TO GO YOU SEE. HOPE YOU WILL BE HERE. IF NOT TOUGH LUCK. The note was held between two coffee cups, half-filled, in the kitchen. He shook his head, almost smiled, and ditched it.

  It did not matter; he might even want to see her but now all he wanted to do was sleep. There was too much in the past, too much coming up, somewhere in between the two of these Wulff had to sleep.

  He had taken care of the Fleetwood half a mile from here. Putting it any nearer would have been stupid; if Severo was indeed bound on treachery, and Wulff thought he
might be, then the Fleetwood would be a dead lead to him. Trotto and Ferguson had tracked him once through a car; better people, the first string, would be coming now. So the Fleetwood lay a long way from here, the keys dangling from the ignition, the license plates stripped and thrown into a sewer. If he was lucky, and Wulff thought that his luck might hold on this one, a couple of kids would hit the car and take it far down the freeways before he had even walked back to the apartment. So much for the Fleetwood then. It had been a good car, it had saved his life, despite its poor suspension and essential unresponsiveness, when he had needed it, but he was damned if he was going to get sentimental about it at this time. If the kids who came along to steal it had any sense they would strip the thing blind before they ditched it themselves.

  The Galaxie was more easily taken care of; he drove it five blocks away, pulled the plates from that one as well and just left it. A stolen-car alarm would go out from the rental agency of course but he doubted if he would have to worry much about that. He had rented it on a false credit card, no supporting documents had been asked for. It was amazing in this credit society exactly what you could get away with if you could present a card, any kind of a card, with the right expiration date. And getting hold of the card through false information had been as easy as hell, too. All that you had to do, it seemed, was to send in the request in the mail and ask for it. They didn’t care; like the junk merchants the credit-card companies were willing to move the stuff any way they could.

  So he went to sleep. Wulff went to sleep. He secured all the doors, although not with the chainlock which would have kept Tamara out; he took off his clothes, stripped the bed and laid on it. Ghostly, her perfume and body odor stalked from the sheets to envelop him, but he discarded this. He would not be moved by the girl. If she came back, she came back. She was object, not subject….