Lone Wolf #13: The Killing Run

by Barry, Mike

  But then the shooting had begun, spilling out of a nearby tenement, and in a few seconds Wulff and his partner, who had been on the other side of the street, found themselves in the midst of a difficult and embarrassing situation. For one thing, the trouble with a shootout was that you were apt to get shot yourself, and for another, they could hardly claim not to have seen it. But when the street began to fill with bodies and blood, when one of the victims dropped a bag near the curb, out of which powder began to spill, Wulff and his partner were faced with a tough decision: they certainly did not want to get involved in this, they had no instructions, but then again, it was not exactly something you could walk away from. What they had done—put this down for more Great Moments in Narco—was to walk away from the scene very carefully, quite deliberately, and put the call in at a near callbox, then they had stood in their lounging garb about a block away looking useless until the squad cars had begun to pour in; and then Wulff’s partner had reported to the sergeant on the scene that they could not reveal their identities because they had been on very important confidential business, but it was they who had arranged the misunderstandings that led to the shootout. They pulled their identification and showed it, impressing the sergeant a great deal—narco had a good reputation still in those days—and then they had strolled away from all of it, taking the subway downtown and checking in just a little more than fifteen minutes early.

  No one had even questioned them about what had happened.

  Oh, those had been the days, all right. It had been a marvelous opportunity; the department had been trying to do Wulff a good turn when he came back from Vietnam, and certainly the job was as represented. The hours were easy, the involvement was nil, the informants were cooperative, and the graft could add a hundred and fifty a week to the paycheck of the dumbest cop. The graft was the only thing Wulff had not touched. It was not as if at that time he had had any moral compunctions against it; he simply did not need the money, and he suspected that there might come a time when he would have to render services for which money had been so freely given in advance. He wanted to keep his options in that regard open; it was not that he hated narco at that time or felt about it the way he got to feel later on, it was just that he sensed that he might hate it, and in that case it would be worthwhile to keep his independence.

  That had been a very wise decision, as things had turned out. Of course, narco was in the process of going downhill severely even before Wulff had separated himself from the squad so dramatically. The millions of dollars of stashed drugs that had mysteriously been found absent from the police property room had at least something to do with the loss of the squad’s prestige, but the basic facts, which could not be ignored—and even the assistant commissioners, after a while, could not ignore them—was that during the great period of the squad in the 1960s the drug trade in New York City had multiplied more than twenty times in quantity, cash, and violence under the ministrations of the elite agents designated to eliminate it.

  XXII

  Once checked into the motel under another name, Sperber felt renewed, changed, confident, and happy in a way that he had not been for many years. It was remarkable what a little change of scene could do for you; just to get the pressure off was wonderful. Philadelphia was a wide, wonderful, beckoning jewel bobbing in his consciousness as he sat in the bar, having cocktail after cocktail and thinking of what it would be like when they all got together in the veritable shadow of Independence Hall in a few months to divide up the country, strongest first. It was going to be a wonderful party, one that would set up the divisions and lines of influence in America for the next two hundred years, and he would be at the center of it. Indeed, as the man whom Wulff had not gotten, as one of the few men who had had the good sense to see handwriting on the wall and flee, he would have a central role at the convention, would play one of the most important parts. Everyone would respect him, and respect as well what he had done for them. He might even come out of the meeting on top. This thought gave him a little delicious shudder of tension, like the contractions of the body just before orgasm, and he giggled. There was just no way in hell that he could fail to come out of this much the better than going in. And it was all, he thought, all because of a little sensible cowardice. That was the new American ideal for the bicentennial. “Mark that down,” he said to the young bartender, who gave him a bored look and wandered away before Sperber could finish the sentence. “Cowardice is where it’s going to be for the next two hundred years. Making adjustments, hanging loose, having the sense to run. This country wasn’t built on heroes, it was built on cowards, and it’s time that we came to terms with it.” Well, fuck the bartender. He upended the glass and sucked the manhattan dry and meditatively bit on the cherry stem, feeling very pleased with himself.

  A woman in her forties wearing a tight black dress came into the bar alone, sat several chairs away from Sperber, and he found in his present state that she looked attractive, certainly a reasonable fuck. Sober she might not look so good; the next morning she would certainly not look good at all, but with Sperber all women looked good at the beginning; it was only after you got their clothes off, probed them, worked them over, to discover only the same old orifices and disengagements, that the disappointments began. Still, at the beginning there was always hope. You never knew: this might be the one to change his life. He gave her a long look, and she gave it back to him in a cool, disinterested way, flicking her eyes between his and the surface of the bar, and after a time he picked up his drink and went over to her, moving slowly, delicately, in what seemed to be an enclosure of perilous space, the way things always looked when he got drunk. She ordered another drink even before he had positioned himself next to her, and the bartender contemptuously made it a double and asked Sperber if it should be taken out of his money. Sperber said all right, even though he had the vague feeling that woman and bartender in this negligible place were working together. Scheming was everywhere. Corruption moved through all the levels of existence. Still, he did not care: the time would come, he would get her back to his room, get her clothes off, and when he had her stretched and vulnerable on the bed, well, then he would see precisely how much scheming she would be capable of.

  Sperber leaned toward her and began to tell her the story of his life, slanted for popular consumption: he was a businessman getting away from it all for a little while due to the pressures of his occupation, heading, however, toward an important part in his career.

  She said that she had had the same career for many years and doubted if anything important would ever occur to it again, which was not to say, of course, and she licked her lips with a tongue as gray as the inside of Sperber’s eyelids, that she did not enjoy her work.

  Sperber said that he always appreciated someone who enjoyed their work, so few people really doing so in these difficult times, and she finished her drink, a double martini, and said that in that case they would get along very well together, because believe it or not, she loved her work. She asked the bartender for another, and Sperber, suspended somewhere midway between rage and hope, sat there quietly while the bartender without asking him whether it was all right or not made the drink and gave it to her and took some more of Sperber’s money off the bar, and then, as she took a delicate swallow, Sperber suggested that she finish it off quickly so that they could go to his room. He had a bottle in his room.

  “I’m not that easy,” she said.

  “I didn’t say you were.”

  “Perhaps you have the wrong idea about me. I just don’t go off to rooms with strangers.”

  “I didn’t say you did.”

  “I’m not a whore.”

  “I didn’t say you were a whore either,” Sperber said.

  “Maybe we misunderstood each other. Maybe you thought that you were going to get something that you’re not going to.”

  “It didn’t occur to me,” Sperber said. “I wouldn’t misjudge anyone like that, and I could tell right off that you were not
that kind of woman,” and very carefully laid a shaking hand on the bar and licked his lips, and she finished her drink and gestured toward the bartender, was just about, he knew, to order another one, and he was going to tell her something then, was going to lay it on this bitch as he had not done to anyone in years, because no one, least of all a woman, could get away with this kind of thing with him; he simply would not permit himself to be fucked around with this way, but before any of this could happen, someone behind him said, “Hello, Leon,” and he turned, and standing right behind the chair was Wulff. He looked just as Sperber had always imagined he would, to say nothing of the voice. “Been quite a while, but better late than never, eh?” Wulff said, and hit him in the mouth shockingly hard, and the woman screamed, but in a curiously placid way, as Sperber went off the stool and onto his stomach, fumbling then for his gun.

  XXIII

  It figured that he would have a gun, Wulff thought. That was only common sense; a man in flight was a coward, and a coward was even more likely to have a gun than a courageous man. Still, it was stunning in those first moments to see Sperber struggling within himself to pull something out of his jacket; time stopped flowing for Wulff, poised in a wheeling frieze, and then oddly backtracked so that over and over again there was the one refracted moment in which Sperber, stumbling from the blow, fell over himself on the floor, scrambling, reaching, but if the moment was slowed for Wulff, it did him no good anyway, because his own time was stopped as well; and thus there was only an enormous, yawing chunk of time in which Sperber went for the gun and Wulff himself was unable to move.

  But then the scene broke open, began to move again. The woman was screaming in a high, anguished wail; her hand to her mouth, she was backing away from the bar desperately, trying to move out of the scene, but the bartender would not let her. He had vaulted over the bar, had his arms around her, and was shielding himself from Wulff’s presumptive line of fire with her body, while Sperber, still rolling on the floor, was trying to come up with the gun.

  Wulff felt disgust. That was an odd emotion; rage would have been more like it, would have made more sense, but this man was vermin. Almost all of those with whom he had dealt so far, even Carlin, even Díaz, had tried up until the end to behave with fair courage, had been informed by a sense of personal courage, which, whatever else they were, had to be given to their credit; they had been wounded men, dreadful people, but there was some code with which they had conformed, even if that code was obscure or self-serving. They had attempted to meet with honor the very death that they had championed and manipulated, and this was to their credit.

  But this one was something else; this one had had nothing to do at the moment of proposed confrontation other than to run. He would not face the consequences of the life he had selected for himself, and that meant that as much as any of the others, regardless of his importance to the network, regardless of his real contributions or lack of them, this man had to die.

  Wulff charged him on the floor there bellowing, kicked out hard, and caught the man’s free hand, which had held him in position on the floor. The man skittered back, groaning, and Wulff closed on him, leaped, fell, the heavy, sweating weight of the man’s body against his, poisonous and revolting. But there was fullness in that embrace as he clasped him; a fullness which was horrid, because pressing against the man’s body was like pressing against some aspect of his own in a parody of love; he felt that he knew this man’s body in a way that he might have known his own, and this drove him thrashing against him, and something struck him hard on the back of the ear, a stunning blow; the ashtray, for an ashtray it had been, bouncing off the wall opposite. The bartender was throwing things at him from his perch.

  Well, at least that was something: the man did not have a gun. If the bartender had had one, it would have been fired by now and all over for sure. But ashtrays he could deal with, Wulff thought, that and a poor aim, and he came up high over Sperber, rearing in continued parody of sexual embrace, and then drove his fist deep into the man’s throat, and the man screamed in a voice which sounded fractured, and his one hand at his side, like the wizened limb of a very old man, came up once feebly and then fell back. Wulff brought down the heel of his left hand and broke Sperber’s wrist with a single driving blow. The gun came out of it like a pellet of expectoration. His hand was close to it, and then it was over. He had it. He had the gun. He drew up his knees and came off the man, and the bartender threw another ashtray, which he ducked just in time, coming down to a knee as the heavy glass passed over him and then hit the wall with a dull smash and fell beside the other. “No,” the bartender said, raising his hands as he saw Wulff coming into position with the gun. “No, don’t do it.”

  But he had to do it, of course. He had to put the man down; there was no choice, even though the bartender had shown fair courage and had done only what he thought he must to protect himself. He had just gotten himself jammed into the middle, that was all, he had just suffered from a form of bad luck, gotten caught in struggles that went on around him and with which he had little to do. Well, it was too bad, but that was the way in which all of life itself could be conceived to function, huge centers of power and influence which became poles; in between those poles, small helpless objects like the bartender. Of course, he wasn’t so damned small and helpless; you had to keep that in mind at all times. He could have killed him with either of those two ashtrays if they had struck him in the temple or throat just right, and it was not from lack of trying that the bartender had failed. Remember that. Keep that most firmly in mind. Do not suffer from compassion.

  Wulff shot the bartender in the heart. The man squealed and fell across the counter, then, dying in stages, fell, one arm at a time, then torso and head underneath, flopping like a big fish on the bottom of a boat. After a moment there was silence.

  On the floor Sperber moaned something thickly and tried to move, felt his broken wrist, and screamed.

  The woman said, “Don’t kill me.” Her hands were up as if in some parody of a television serial she might have watched in which this was the approved procedure for dealing with attackers. “See, I’m not making a bad move of any sort. I’m just standing here. I don’t have anything to do with this.”

  “Yes she does,” the man on the floor said thinly, “she’s a whore.”

  “I’m not a whore.”

  “She’s a dirty, stinking, festering hole. Shoot her. Do something good in your miserable life, at least kill her.”

  “You won’t kill me,” she said. “I’ll walk right out of here and go away. I’m not involved. I’m not involved at all; I don’t have anything to do with this.”

  “Shoot the whore.”

  “Just stay there,” Wulff said to the woman. “Put your hands on the bar and don’t move.” She must have been almost fifty, but still holding onto some mask of sensuality, the way that Sperber must, in better times, have held onto the illusion of danger. You had to give her credit, he guessed. “Don’t move and don’t say anything.”

  “I won’t,” she said. “Oh my God, I won’t.” Something broke in her cheekbones, which must have been only the layers of mascara, and then she was crying. But her hands as she brought them down on the bar were very steady, and when she brought her head up slowly, it was caught in the light like stone.

  Wulff walked away from her, turned his gun on Sperber. “Get up,” he said.

  “Don’t kill me. I didn’t do anything to you. You know that’s the truth; in my whole life I never did anything to you. You’ve got a persecution complex, Wulff.”

  “Up.”

  Sperber put his unbroken wrist on the floor, put slight pressure on it, moved his body waveringly upward. “She’s a whore,” he said. He rubbed the back of his hand across his eyes. “Why don’t you kill the ones who really need killing?”

  “That’s what I’m going to do.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “I looked for you.”

  “No, that isn’t it. I t
ook every precaution. I took every precaution that I could have. I left no trail, I didn’t tell anyone where I was going. I’m in here under a false name. I know that I wasn’t followed.”

  “I looked for you,” Wulff said. “You aren’t a hard man to find, Leon.”

  “Don’t call me Leon.”

  Someone came into the bar from one of the side doors, a short man with glasses. He looked at what seemed to be happening in the dim light and obviously thought he knew what he was, because he screamed and then ran out. “All right,” Sperber said, “I think we’ve got about thirty seconds.”

  “Please don’t shoot,” the woman said. “I just came in here for a drink. I don’t know what’s going on, and I don’t want to know. It has nothing to do with me.”

  “How did you find me?” Sperber said. “That’s all I want to know. No one could have found me. I’m no goddamned fool. I know how to run.”

  “I bet you do, Leon.”

  “Please don’t call me Leon.”

  “That’s all you’re worth,” Wulff said. “Where do you keep the stuff? Tell me now. We don’t have much time.”

  “What stuff?”

  “The stash, Leon.”

  “I don’t have any stash.”

  “No time, Leon,” he said, and waved the gun.

  “You think I’m dealing? I’m not dealing. I don’t mess with it at all.”

  “Yes you do.”

  “Maybe a little soft stuff, that’s all. Maybe a little pot, but that’s not even a drug anymore. You can’t call that dealing. Maybe some cocaine now and then, but how the hell can you say that that counts? Cocaine isn’t a drug either.”