Lone Wolf #13: The Killing Run

by Barry, Mike

  OTHER TITLES BY MIKE BARRY

  Lone Wolf #1: Night Raider

  Lone Wolf #2: Bay Prowler

  Lone Wolf #3: Boston Avenger

  Lone Wolf #4: Desert Stalker

  Lone Wolf #5: Havana Hit

  Lone Wolf #6: Chicago Slaughter

  Lone Wolf #7: Peruvian Nightmare

  Lone Wolf #8: Los Angeles Holocaust

  Lone Wolf #9: Miami Marauder

  Lone Wolf #10: Harlem Showdown

  Lone Wolf #11: Detroit Massacre

  Lone Wolf #12: Phoenix Inferno

  Lone Wolf #13: The Killing Run

  Lone Wolf #14: Philadelphia Blowup

  The Lone Wolf #13

  The Killing Run

  Mike Barry

  a division of F+W Media, Inc.

  I thought it was right, Congressman. Here you have something terribly dangerous, something that was destroying our young people, the introduction of hard drugs into their lifestyle … we needed the stiffest possible law to get these dealers off the streets and into jail….

  —Nelson A. Rockefeller, at confirmation hearings

  There are no laws; there are only men. Men make the laws; men break them. So it has to be done hard and fast and simple. If you want them off the streets, you kill them off the streets, that’s all.

  —Burton Wulff

  Contents

  Prologue

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI

  XXVII

  Also Available

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  The slender Mexican whose name was Díaz leaned over Wulff near the pool and said, “We shall meet at eight o’clock, then.”

  “Fine,” Wulff said. He closed his eyes against Díaz, against the dazzling sun. “It’s all arranged.”

  “In my room.”

  “If you wish.”

  “It was agreed,” Díaz said. Wulff could smell the faint odors lofting from the man’s mouth, but he could not, at least for the moment, see him, which was a relief. Díaz was five-feet-seven and ninety pounds, but his face was that of a very old man with deep scars laced into it from some knife or knives, which, Wulff supposed, had not been forgotten. “Are you saying that it is no longer agreed?”

  “Whatever you say,” Wulff said.

  “You will have your … cache at that time.”

  “Yes.”

  “My partners and I would be extremely distressed if your cache was not with you,” Díaz said. “This represents a rather substantial investment on our part, you realize.”

  “I realize that,” Wulff said.

  “It is only in pursuit of assurances of your own earnestness that we make this request,” the Mexican said. “If it were not necessary …”

  “That’s enough,” Wulff said, and opened his eyes, stretched on the deck chair, and stood quickly in a single vaulting motion that carried him past Díaz and toward the pool. A few tourists spread out against the sun, breathing slowly through their mouths, looked at him without energy. “We’ve made the arrangements that had to be made,” Wulff said. “There is nothing further to say.”

  “As you please,” Díaz said. He made a gesture toward Wulff—a mysterious gesture which might have been placating but then again could have had an aspect of menace in it, impossible to tell, impossible to figure out the man—and adjusting his coat, left the area of the pool. He was the only one in the vicinity who had any top clothing on at all. Which might have differentiated him, Wulff thought, if anyone had been around to keep a watch on things. On the other hand, no one was looking. The tourists closed their eyes again, opened their mouths wider, passed into sleep. Wulff watched them meditatively, watched Díaz walk through the large swinging doors which led to poolside, and then impulsively jumped into the pool, swam two full laps, a hundred and twenty feet, quickly, came out on the ladder, and toweled himself off. The sun was intense, but that was not the reason that he began to sweat again even before he had completely rubbed himself dry. No, it had something to do with the arrangements that had been made with Díaz. To meet him later in his hotel room. To bring to the meeting a pound of pure junk that he had picked up from a friend. To use that pound as earnest goods to procure from Díaz at least a hundred times that much. To take it from Díaz. To kill Díaz, of course, and any other of his associates whom he might have chosen to bring along. A busy evening’s work, but hardly routine, even in terms of what his life had been.

  He shook his head, thinking of it. It was going to be absolutely necessary to kill the man, of course. The meeting could have no conclusion otherwise, because if he failed to kill Díaz, then surely Díaz would kill him. Still, there came a time when no matter what your capacity for murder, you had to reel back a little bit, feel a shade of repugnance—unless, of course, you were a criminal lunatic. That was one thing which Wulff was not. He was not a lunatic. He was a perfectly reasonable man who had dedicated himself months ago to the elimination of the international drug trade, in the course of which a good deal of damage had been done to people at all levels of this segmented but highly organized industry. But that did not make him crazy. It did not even mean that he looked forward to his confrontation with Díaz tonight. At every step of the way there had been regret not untinged with hopelessness—the job, after all, was so large, the outcome so murky. If you killed the present proprietors, you were only doing their ambitious successors a favor. Still, you had to go ahead. He shook his head again and went to the deck chair, picked up his clothing, and headed toward the doors on the way to his room. At all costs you had to move on. To stay in place was to go back; to go back was to die yourself. Very quickly and painfully.

  A man and a woman came out of the swinging doors as Wulff walked through. The woman was tall and beautiful, a quick brunette with perceptive eyes and full breasts, but it was the man, after an instant, who caught his attention, a short, older man only up to the brunette’s shoulders, leaning against her, looking upward as he said something in a low, intense voice. They kept on walking. After a moment the man looked back at him and the brunette too, but when they saw that he was standing there staring at them, their gazes dropped, and they turned, went away quickly.

  Wulff stood there for another moment and then went back through the lobby and up to his room, feeling thoughtful and pressured.

  I

  Wulff had taken several pounds of pure heroin out of the house of the man whom he had killed, and then had come some seventy miles north to this resort hotel in the mountains far from Mexico City. The junk was in a bag that he had then filled to the top with fifty thousand dollars in crumpled hundreds, which had also been part of his victim’s cache, and on top of that Wulff had put two .45 pistols which had been on his victim’s body. If there was one thing that could be said about the late Carlin, it was that he had not only lived well, he had arranged his life so that the good things were always on hand. For immediate exit or otherwise.

  Carlin ran drugs out of an estate in Mexico City, and Wulff had killed him. He had also killed Carlin’s henchmen and mistress, and before making his getaway in one of Carlin’s spare limousines, he had dynamited the house and watched it burn. So disposing of Carlin had been in many ways Wulff’s most satisfactory strike to date; h
e had killed high figures in the network in every pocket of the United States and in several foreign countries, he had run his oldest and strongest enemy, Calabrese, to ground in Miami Beach, but he had never until then faced down a man as he had faced down Carlin, turned the situation around on an enemy, and killed him not only in terror but humiliation. But he had done it and killed the others and had gotten out of it cleanly with only Carlin’s goodies to keep him company, and then Wulff had decided, not unreasonably, that he needed a rest, deserved a real rest for the first time—being in jail in New York City not counting at all—and he had driven to this elegant resort hotel, ditched the car a few miles away, checked in with his one loaded valise, and gotten himself a suite. His appearance at the time he had checked in had not, perhaps, been outstanding, but this was the kind of hotel in which anyone’s appearance and background were satisfactory if the front end was taken care of. Thanks to Carlin’s cache, Wulff had the front end well taken care of.

  So he had checked into a suite thinking of R&R to which he was richly entitled. If anyone was. He had covered eleven cities in a little more than three months since he had decided in his night of fury to bring an end to the international drug trade. First and foremost it had been New York, then San Francisco, back east to Boston, and then out to Las Vegas; into Havana and back north again toward Chicago, hitting and killing, driving and seeking the blow, the force, the combination of kills which would once and for all end hard drugs in America; and it had been difficult, oh, it had been very difficult indeed, with first the organization and then virtually the entire law-enforcement network of the country coming down upon him. But Wulff had done it. From the cold, frightened men he had killed in their estates in the East, to the beach on which he had left a girl he might have loved and the body of Calabrese, he had gotten the job done. Only at the end of it, coming back to New York for the second time, had he found his resolve ebbing, and then only for a little while. They had put him in jail in New York. But he had gotten out, too; an assassination attempt had gone wrong, Wulff had sprung the courtroom, and then, with renewed fire, he had bent his will toward the mission. He could see the enemy beginning to fall back now. So it had been Detroit and then Phoenix, and finally his strange capture and flight to Mexico City, where he had come face to face with Carlin, who might have inherited it all, had talked him down, and had won. Carlin was dead.

  All of them were dead. His ambition was not; the fact that a lot of the top men had been eliminated did not, Wulff well knew, have anything to do with the ending of the drug traffic itself; all that it was going to do was open up vacancies. As long as the supply held up—and if there was one thing his years on the NYPD narc squad had taught him, it was that the supply would always hold up, that there was too much money in it for it to ever be shut off—there would be men to run it. But for the moment he had run out of possibilities. Calabrese dead on that beach in Miami, Carlin shot once in the head in the mansion the color of flame. He would have to start from the beginning.

  It was that realization, that he would have to pick up new leads, new contacts, as much as any need for R&R itself, which had sent him to the resort hotel. The resort hotel was seventy miles due north of Mexico City, near its own airport; it was fifteen stories high to the wind and the sun; it catered to a kind of clientele who could have no possible interest in coming to a place like this unless it was either to get very far away or to do business with one another. Either way, it looked promising. He could use a few days of rest too. In any event it had looked like a reasonable place to go to start picking up the trail of the network again, and there was no doubt in his mind that there would be no end to his quest until he was dead. He could not give up now. He had gone this far, he had hurt the organization that much, he had brought the system toppling to collapse; here, at the precise moment that he was closing in, he could not give up. Even though there were probably ten thousand people of one sort or another gunning for him. Very few of them knew his face, however. Certainly no one at the hotel.

  And things had gone well. Things had worked out almost as if there had been some set of controlling factors, as if, as he had always suspected anyway, his mission was being overseen by some divine forces which understood its strength and importance. He had not even had to go fishing for further contacts; indeed, it had been Díaz who had come to him, Díaz, the slender Mexican who less than a day after Wulff had checked into the hotel had approached him in the bar, offering to sell Wulff a hundred pounds of heroin.

  Of course, it had not been quite that simple; nothing ever was, and Díaz was not, by a long shot, that stupid. You did not approach strange Americans and offer to traffic in drugs without having at least minimum assurances that you were not walking into a bust, or worse yet, someone who would simply take it from you with a gun. No, there had to be some investigation, some negotiation, but then again, Díaz prided himself on his ability to intuitively size up prospective contacts, and a strange American traveling alone and with little luggage in a place like this was automatically promising. It became even more promising when Díaz, after having initiated a conversation in the bar, asked Wulff what he was looking for and Wulff had told him he was looking for some shit to take north with him. He had his own cache, Wulff had said, a cache from his traditional sources of supply, but it had worked out, this time, to less than he had hoped for, and rather than leave Mexico empty-handed he was keeping his eye open for the possibility of picking up something additional. Díaz had said that that was very interesting, because it just so happened that he might have exactly what Wulff was looking for. Of course, you could not be sure of matters like this; he might have the wrong idea of what Wulff was seeking. What did Wulff want, anyway? Falling into conversation in the dim and elegant recesses of the bar had been easy, easier still on the drinks that Díaz kept on ordering round after round, and Wulff felt himself succumbing, after an hour’s conversation with the man, to the enormous apprehension of good luck. Just when his quest had seemed to be dead-ended—by success, but that was as ruinous as failure if it put him out of business—Díaz was here to inaugurate exciting new chances. Díaz was obviously no minor figure, not if he had the amount of junk on hand which he seemed to be promising. It was then, in the bar, that Díaz had brought up the even more complicated issue of the bicentennial.

  According to Díaz, Philadelphia in 1976 was going to be some kind of focal point for the biggest influx of drugs into the United States in the last fifty years, at least since the great drug wars in Chicago in the mid-twenties, before the organization had found Prohibition to be a far safer and livelier investment. Because of certain shifts and realignments in the power structure, Díaz said grimly, because of rumors that some maniac was going around deliberately killing off important heads of various sectors, there had been and was continuing an intense power struggle at the second echelon of the organization, and much of it had to do with the distribution of the massive influx that would be coming into Philadelphia. According to Díaz, the shipments in would come from various and disparate sources, but they were going to go out in a body; some central figure was going to take control of all the pipelines and turn them to his advantage. It might even be Díaz himself, although that of course was nearly a year in the future; you could not be sure. You could not these days be sure of anything even a month in the future, Madre de Dios, Díaz said, and ordered another round of drinks.

  Why the man had found it necessary to talk so freely, and exactly what he made of Wulff was hard to figure. It did not matter anyway, not in the long run. What mattered was that Díaz had indicated willingness to put some heroin into Wulff’s hands, quite a bit of heroin if Wulff were interested. He assumed that Wulff would be, that there was no other reason why an American would be in this hotel by himself at this time of the year, let alone willing to fall into conversation with a poor Mexican like himself.

  They had arranged the meeting for eight that evening. Díaz had offered to sell Wulff as much as he wanted, within reason, of c
ourse. The only demand Díaz had, and which he hoped Wulff would understand, was that Wulff bring his own cache to the meeting. Just to prove, of course, that he was earnest about this, not someone who was merely trying to lead Díaz into a trap. You could not be too careful about these things, Díaz had warned; most Americans who came to this hotel north of Mexico City were in the same business that he was, but you could not get away from the possibility that there were enforcement personnel also, although this was unlikely. Still, fair was fair.

  That was all right with Wulff. He found himself on the rim of an idea anyway. Ideas had never been his long suit—from the beginning it had not been an idea that had led him on, but a certainty, the certainty that if he did not take his mission seriously, no one would—but here was something. Díaz’s cache was part of it, and another part was the running of drugs into Philadelphia, the bicentennial city. It was interesting that America would celebrate its official two hundredth birthday with the largest single influx of junk in history into the old capital city, but when you thought about it, it made perfect sense, was completely rational.

  Someone else would be there, Wulff decided.

  So he put a few samples together from Carlin’s stock and prepared to meet Díaz in his room. He put a .45 into his pocket as well, although he was quite sure that if Díaz were as intelligent as he guessed the man to be, that was going to be the first thing that they would look for. Still, you did the best you could, you took reasonable preparations, and from then on in you just played it by instinct.

  Wulff got ready for the meeting. It was very much on top of his mind. He didn’t need the reminder by the swimming pool at all.

  II

  Felipe Díaz was playing it by ear too. The first thing that he was improvising was of course his name, which was not Díaz at all, but something else—something more Hispanic, a name that might well be found unpronounceable by the stupid but dangerous American with whom he was dealing. But his improvisation went far beyond his name or even the little shifts of identity with which he teased the American, drew him in; what it came down to was a profound conviction—he could not really give the source for this, he was just sure of it—that the American was someone very important, that he was not who he said he was, that he was either a powerful law-enforcement officer of some kind or a really major dealer. Either way, of course, it amounted to the same thing. What mattered was that bringing him in was going to be a coup for Díaz.