by Barry, Mike
That meant that they were very serious, although he should have known that already; anyone who would come along at seventy-five miles an hour to try to blow you off the road had to have more than a mind for risk; there had to be a little desperation there as well. Arrogance, after all, could take you only so far. In the echo of the gunshot there was a much louder, denser sound, that would be his right-front tire going, giving out in a single explosion, and then the car was coming back onto the shoulder then, even less controlled now, skidding and lunging for the weeds beyond and he pumped the brake, killing his lights in the same motion, brought the car back into control, and let it roll right off the shoulder and into the difficult little thickets of grass, as, in the same motion, the car still moving a little, he got his pistol and dived for the floorboard, lay there.
Around him now he could hear shouting, tearing noises, and then the sound of another gunshot, this one coming from the rear-quarter panel behind the driver’s door. They were confused; that was obvious; they had not expected him to come off the road a second time, much less in a slide that would take him immediately out of their angle of vision. That might mark them for nonprofessionals, but then again, it might only be that they had miscalculated in a way that was apt to happen to anyone. There was more running and shouting, two voices now, and then another gunshot, this one imploding the windshield above him, little glistening spangles of glass sifting downward, and then he could hear one of the voices shouting, “There he is, I’ve got him!” and the footsteps came closer.
Now, that was really stupid, Wulff thought, exposing a position like that. It meant that they probably were amateurs, after all; no one who knew his business would want to reveal a position like that. It was very quiet above them on the road; the two cars lay in a shallow recession a foot or two below the level of asphalt, and there was no indication of cars in any direction. It must have been early morning by then. Amateurs though they were, they had at least shown enough professionalism to plan their attack so that it would play out without interference. “Here he is!” the same voice shouted again, and Wulff waited for the gunshot, but there was none; instead, he heard footsteps coming nearer, and then a dull sound as something struck the metal.
The man had run into his door. That was really stupid, Wulff thought; in fact, the whole thing was a fiasco, if you wanted to look at it objectively. The only thing was that the assailants seemed to take themselves damned seriously, a lot more seriously than Wulff did, and the third gunshot that came into the door at very close range was disturbing; it ripped through the backing before depositing the bullet, now a dispirited little pellet only a foot or so from Wulff. “He’s got to be in here!” he heard the voice say. “He can’t have gotten away; I know that he’s in there.” But the voice did not sound very confident.
Someone else was shouting. The other man out in the weeds was screaming, calling the near one a damned fool or something like that, calling him an asshole and telling him to get the hell out of the way before he got himself shot. That sounded to Wulff like reasonable advice, and when the near voice shouted back that he wasn’t going to leave, that he was going to stay right here, stay right here by the car and shoot the son-of-a-bitch out, he felt a strange and reasonable calm descend upon him. If he could simply stay here curled up, the pistol in his hand, the two of them out there would settle the issue themselves. They would kill each other, that was what the hell they would do, and thus go away quietly, so that Wulff could pick up the pieces at his leisure. The only trouble was that the passenger compartment of the Toronado was beginning to fill with the scent of gas; he must have stripped the tank, rolling as he came off the Interstate. The suspension on these cars was really terrible, disgraceful in view of the fact that this and the Eldorado, which was on the same body shell, were being sold as ten-thousand-dollar alternatives to the European Grand Tourismo. A Jensen Intercepter wouldn’t even have gone off the road here; it would have acclerated its way out of it.
But that was of no matter now. What was of concern was that the compartment was reeking and stinking of gas, and if Wulff could smell it, then the two clowns outside could smell it too, and that would lead them—would have to leave them—to one of two assumptions. Either they could wait patiently while Wulff slowly asphyxiated in the compartment, which of course he would not do, so what they could do was simply wait him out, until he came stumbling and gasping into the air; or they could decide to hasten matters along a little, help the course of nature, so to speak: they could strike a match. With loose gas running around and out of all the ends of the Toronado, the only thing that they would have to make sure of was not to be too close to the car when the match struck. Judging from the kind of luck that they had been having so far, this was not too likely; they would probably be in the center of the explosion; but it was hardly going to be of much satisfaction to Wulff that all of them would go up together. It did not seem as if this would do him any good at all.
Already he could hear them squealing with excitement. They were trying to moderate their voices, apparently had decided that Wulff could hear them and it would be worth their while to conceal their intentions from him. Exactly what their intentions were was not hard to figure. They must have smelled the gas by now. They were giggling.
Well, Wulff thought, there was nothing to be done. There was no way around it. He had always known that he would come to a difficult and painful end, but in terms of how far he had gone, how he had struggled, and what he had accomplished, it did not seem right that he should end by being crushed, humiliated, and incinerated in a wrecked fat man’s sports car while two idiot free-lancers probably joined him in the pyre. There would have to be another, less dramatic, but more dignified way to go. He sighed and wedged the pistol tightly into his hand and reached up to the switch that controlled the power door locks, carefully flipped it across. The locks popped up with a stale click. Charge up one to General Motors engineering, anyway.
The fools had not heard him. They were still whispering outside, probably making coin matches to decide who threw the match while the other ran. They were deep in consultation at the moment that Wulff rolled out of the car, feeling the dank and poisonous mud of the interstate valley embrace him, tear free of him with a sucking noise as he wrenched his way to his feet, and then, pistol extended, began to fire. The trigger came comfortably against his finger; as shaky as his new footing seemed to be on the mud, he felt calm and absolutely in control. The recoil of the pistol, in fact, seemed to put him ever more firmly on his feet, taking him into stanchion.
He heard a scream on the first shot, and there was a brief flare, light arcing against the sky as if a match had been dropped, and then from behind the screamer there was a deeper, groaning gasp and the sound of answering fire. He had put down the near man, the man who had surveyed the car instantly, which figured; of the two, he was the more clownish and incompetent, the one about whom they would say that he had been ambushed in a situation where no other man could possibly have been taken by surprise. It would make a hell of an epitaph, Wulff thought, and heard the giggling sound of the man drowning into the mud, trying dreamily now, Wulff could imagine, to separate the clods of earth from his mouth, trying to imagine what had happened to him, and then the roar of fire came from somewhat in back of the downed man, the first shot splattering what was left of the Toronado’s windshield, the second coming into the mud only a few feet in front of him, and the second man, the man firing, was screaming now, unconscious or uncaring of his new and exposed position. “You dirty bastard,” he was screaming, “you rotten son-of-a-bitch, you can’t do this to me,” and Wulff could appreciate the sense of what he was saying. From the man’s point of view, Wulff was fucking him up pure and simple; he was not being an easy target in a blind alley, was not submitting in the terrified and graceful way that routine targets did, but had come out unpleasantly capable of fighting himself, and that made things difficult: complex assignments were not for men like these, they were used to handling on
ly the simple ones; whoever manipulated them was careful not to put them beyond their depth. “Stupid bastard,” the man said again, and fired awkwardly. In the uneven flash Wulff could see him as if brought to exhibition in some grotesque museum of twentiety-century minor American crime; there he was, a short, slightly deformed man, both hands on the pistol, hunched over it, his face tight with concentration, seeming to be in the act of fighting the pistol down, the gun rising in his hands. “Son-of-a-bitch,” the man said, and fired again.
The bullet went so wide of Wulff that it was impossible to judge what the man had in mind, exactly where he had placed his target. It was almost impossible to miss by such a wide margin, but there was no time to consider that; housewives were able to kill their husbands at a range of three hundred yards, first shot, sometimes; and even a man like this was capable of getting off a killing shot. Wulff leveled his own .45 and shot the gun out of the man’s hand so easily, so crisply, that the man could only look in astonishment as the gun detached itself, landed somewhere in a pile of mud downrange. He looked at Wulff, a slow, stupid expression on his face. “Oh, no,” he said.
Wulff held the gun on him, looked at the other, who was lying on his stomach near the car, the fumes of gas ever thicker and fuller, like flowers in the air, and said, “I think we’d better get out of here. That car is going to blow up.”
“Shoot me, I don’t care.”
“I said, I think we’d better get out of here.”
“I don’t give a fuck,” the man said loudly. “You’re going to shoot me, fucking shoot me here. I know that you’re going to do it, so do it now and get it over with. I tried and I failed, and now I have to die.” He raised his hands, the fingers fluttering, hands dangling like leaves from his wrists. “Isn’t that the way you operate? You shoot to kill as soon as you win?”
“I really think we’d better get out of here,” Wulff said pleasantly. “There’s a big car leaking gas over here, and it’s going to blow up sooner or later, no two ways about it. Why should we get incinerated? We can get out of here and discuss this like gentlemen.”
“I’ll never talk,” the man said. “I’ll never reveal a thing. You might as well kill me now. No matter what you do, you’ll get nothing out of me.”
“Oh, shit,” Wulff said, and resisted an impulse to shoot the man on the spot. It would be satisfying and would end the problem, but then again, he knew that he had no business doing it until, at least, he found out who had sent him. If they were on his trail again, if they had the net big and complex enough to pick him up on an Interstate in the early morning, then it meant that they were certainly closing in again and tighter all of the time. “Just get moving.”
“You killed Gerry,” the man said.
“I’m going to kill you too if you don’t move,” Wulff said, and moved the gun in his palm; the man shrugged, let out a deep sigh, and turned, trudged his way from the car toward his own. It was a bare Fairlane, black and pockmarked with what seemed to be scars from old gun battles. The man walked to the driver’s side and stood there patiently, leaning on the half-open door, his head bowed, his attitude patient. Wulff came across to the other side of the car. “Get in,” he said, “get in and drive. I’ll keep you covered.”
“Shoot me now. Shoot me now and drive out yourself, why don’t you?” The man’s voice suddenly wavered. “I mean, what the fuck, if you’re going to die, you might as well die, right? Don’t string me along, mister. I’m ready to stand up to it if you do it now. If you do it now, I can die like a man, but if you carry it on—”
“Oh, shut up,” Wulff said, afflicted with a sudden weariness, not only for these men but for their codes, the necessity they had to die brave; the scum seemed obsessed by this, but then again, there was another kind of scum which he had dealt with that wanted nothing more than to die scared—all of those who had sniveled and wept at the sight of the gun—and they had to be considered too. You had to figure all kinds into the equation; the basic point was that dying was more than most men could put up with sensibly. Living was enough trouble. “Get the hell into the car and let me cover you and start driving. You want that thing to blow up while we’re here?”
He thought momentarily of the cache of drugs that he had back in the Toronado, just the excess of what he had gotten out of Mexico, that which couldn’t be taken out comfortably on his person. It was the only thing worth going back for; the only firearms were on his person, and there was nothing in the suitcase in the trunk worth thinking about, except for the drugs. He wavered for one moment standing at the car, thinking of the few grams that he was going to lose, twenty-five grand in street value anyway, if he could make a proper estimate. But then again, he wasn’t going to take them on the street; the cache had value only as a means of bringing him into contact with others; he would have to let it go, then. He would have to let everything go.
He made a gesture with the gun. The man at the other side shrugged, made a pleading gesture with his hands, and then, as if all force had been drained from him, shook his head and ducked inside. Wulff came down into the passenger seat, held the gun on the man with low-key professionalism, and cocked it.
Desperately fighting with the ignition, the man got the Fairlane into gear and drove it raggedly away. They were not even half a mile down the road when the Toronado blew up.
XI
At four in the morning the man in Mobile got a hysterical phone call on the private line that fed into the receiver by his bed. It was the only way that anyone could get to him at that hour; even his wife was sealed off in the separate bedroom down the other corridor. The phone could not be avoided; he had to be there to pick up the only kind of messages that would flow through it. “Hello,” he said in the darkness, looking for his cigarettes.
“Hello,” a voice said. “Is this you? Is this you, Mr. Nolk?”
“Who else would it be?” the man in Mobile said. His patting hand located the crushed pack of Pall Malls, he pulled one out and got the lighter and lit it one-handed, the receiver of the phone perfectly jeweled and symmetrical in the quick flare of light. Pleasing. But the caller was not pleasing. “You know who it is. Now, what do you want?” He paused, waited for the man to say something, then shook his head and inhaled. “Did you get him?” he said.
“He let me go,” the voice said. It sounded shaky. “He could have killed me, he had me right there, and he let me go. I thought I was going to die.”
“You fool,” Nolk said, “are you trying to say that you found him, you had him and he captured you?”
“It was a strange situation. I can’t begin to describe to you what it was like; his Toronado blew up.”
“You stupid bastard,” Nolk said. He almost never cursed, had a thing about it, would not permit any foul language to be used in his house or in front of a woman, but there it was now. Better to let it out, he guessed, than to keep it bottled up; that was how you lived to fifty-eight in the best of health, not by bottling things up, by letting them come out. “What do I care about his Toronado? What are you talking about? How could you find him and let him get away?”
“He could have killed me, do you understand?” the voice said. It was now completely out of control, whimpering and gibbering, moving up and down the scale of contact. Nolk could feel little waves of revulsion as he listened to the man, waves that he knew would turn into nausea. “But he didn’t. He let me go. He said that I could deliver a message to you.”
“What message?”
“He said to tell you that he’s coming. He’s coming to kill you.”
Nolk said nothing at all. He held the cigarette flat in his fingertips, letting it dangle against the floor, blanking his mind, concentrating on perfect control, and then he said, “Well, that’s no news at all, is it? That doesn’t mean a thing; we know that he’s coming to kill me. The point is that people like you were hired to make sure that that event would be even more unlikely than it already appears. You seem to have fucked up very badly.”
�
��We couldn’t have done anything! He had us off the road before we even had a chance. Strauss is dead.”
“I wish you were,” Nolk said. “I’ll take care of that job sooner or later.”
“Now, look. That isn’t right. That isn’t right to say that, Mr. Nolk. We did the best we could, we really did. It wasn’t our fault that we got into this. The guy’s a killer, he’s a combat operator, everybody knows that he’s good. Hey, we had a real good shot at him, that’s more than most people can say, we got him ditched off the road and in real trouble. And he’s got nothing now except one pistol; all of his stuff was in the car when it blew up. So we did the job, you understand? We did everything that we could have.”
“And he left a message that he was going to come and kill me. That’s how you did your job.”
There was an empty space on the wire, and then the voice said thinly, “Listen, it didn’t work out, all right? But we gave it the best shot we could. Anyway, that’s all bullshit. You know that he’s coming, and you’ll meet him with enough goddamned firepower to destroy a regiment. So what the hell is the sweat?”
“The sweat is that you screwed it up,” Nolk said. “You’re an idiot. Both of you are idiots. I’m glad that Strauss is dead, and I wish that he had done the same job on you. If he’s as goddamned efficient as everyone says he is, you’d think that he could have taken care of that one little detail. Where did all this happen?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a hundred, hundred and fifty miles east of Shreveport, you know? Plenty of time, anyway. He’s a good distance from there.”
