by Barry, Mike
After a time she turned and left the room.
Williams stood there for a little while and then went to the downstairs closet where his valise had been for a long time and tugged it down. This time he thought he might need a little more than just overnight gear. Los Angeles, in any case, had been training for this.
When he left, standing by the door for a moment of indecision, he thought that he should perhaps go upstairs and say something to her, but he had the feeling that if he did she would be crying there, and he could not deal with that. He had managed well up to this point; he could continue, but he could not handle her tears. Nor was there any reason for him to.
So he went out the door with the valise and just started walking. The subway was eight blocks away and would take him right to the Port Authority. She could have the car. The place where he was going, he didn’t imagine that he’d be having much use for it at all, now or ever.
XXVI
Maury’s first lead to Wulff came from the reports of the bar shootout in Elktown. It just seemed to be Wulff’s kind of work, that was all, and after reading down in the story to find out the identity and possible occupation of Leon Sperber, the second victim, Maury thought that it all came pretty clear. The bastard was on his way north, just as Maury had suspected, killing his way into some kind of climax, which would probably be—he would make a bet on this—New York, his home town.
But that news was promising. What it meant to Maury was that if Wulff was up in Elktown and under heavy pressure of the sort that would explain the killings, then he probably would have gone to cover somewhere in the area for a little while anyway, until some of the heat came off. He would have never done something like this, Maury figured, unless he was under pressure to start with, and the pressure would have doubled now. Wulff would have gone underground, and the best bet to Maury seemed that it would be in the very vicinity of the murders. That was the way the bastard operated, in a kind of superficial cunning out of a contempt for the law. He would hide so near the scene of the crime that they would never think to check it out; that was the way his mind would work. Maury was ecstatic, or at least happier than he had been since the bastard had come into his sporting-goods store and humiliated him. He threw the big map that he had just gotten on his kitchen table and marked a big circle around a ten-mile radius of Elktown in red, then put a black mark in the center. “There,” he said, “he’s got to be somewhere in there. We’ll get him.”
Fred, his hands on his hips, smiled. Fred was along for the ride now, because Maury had asked him and because Fred said that he felt as humiliated by what Wulff had done as Maury did. No one was going to pull that kind of shit on Fred and get away with it, no matter who he was. Fred said that he would be glad to go along with Maury, full partners on the quest, not even a share in the reward if Maury was able to find something; all that Fred wanted as his payment, aside from all expenses, was to be in a room alone with an unarmed Wulff for ten minutes. With Fred holding a gun, of course. That was sufficient for Fred, and it was fine with Maury; he promised Fred one of the finest pistols from his own private stock, a .23 special little handgun which was rumored to have once been in the possession of Eva Braun. Very hard to kill with a gun like that even at closest range, but it was painful; a wound from that .23 might be worse for the victim than simply dying. “Sure,” Fred said, “we’ll get him good.”
“I think we should just hit the road,” Maury said.
Fred said, “That suits me.” Fred was married but made it clear that it was in no serious way, and after six months of it was more than willing to try free-lancing again. Thank God she was sterile anyway, Fred had said; that was the only thing that had saved him, because this bitch had tried everything to get pregnant, and now that she wasn’t, was talking about adoption. Anything to hook him in, seal him off for life. But Fred did not think that any marriage was a permanent arrangement, particularly when you realized that you had been married under false pretenses. The woman was as frigid as the barrel of an antique rifle. “I’m ready to go anytime that you are.”
“There are no guarantees, of course.”
“Who needs guarantees? We’ll find him. If he’s still alive; if he’s there to be found.”
“He’s still alive.”
“I don’t have to put up with that kind of shit,” Fred said seriously. “He didn’t even take us seriously. We were just something to knock off on his way to somewhere else. He didn’t even look at us as human.”
“I know that,” Maury said.
“I can’t take something like that. He’s going to pay.”
“He’ll pay,” Maury said. Fred was just bullshitting, he knew, but for him it was serious. Getting this guy would change his life, would change the lives of everyone with whom the guy had been dealing. That could be worth something in hard cash, to say nothing of future prestige. Who the hell wanted to run sporting goods all his life? “He’ll pay, and we’ll pay. But he’ll pay first.”
“That’s right,” Fred said seriously.
Maury folded up the map into quarters and tucked it into the valise that he was using to carry special supplies like the two extra .45’s and identification that marked him as a member of the Minutemen and the National Rifle Association, just in case anywhere along the way he ran into some blustering cop. He figured that that would cool him right down. He patted the valise and put it aside and then looked at Fred as the man hoisted his own suitcase, ready to go to the car. Ready to assist him, ready to participate, that was Fred; he was not very bright, but he was loyal. He was exactly the kind of man that you would want to have along on a mission like this, because he would do everything that he was supposed to, and he would never ask questions. Just getting to Wulff would be enough, just having the satisfaction of working with Maury toward the kill. No war would last twenty-four hours if it were not for people like him. “You know,” Maury said, “I could have forgiven him an awful lot of things. I really could.”
“How’s that?”
“I mean, he’s fighting against drugs, and that’s pretty awful stuff. What they do to kids, what happened to the younger generation with all the radical stuff and the antiwar demonstrations and everything, all because of heroin. So he’s got a point fighting against the hard drugs; I can understand a guy like that.”
“Yeah,” Fred said, “I know what you mean.”
“You can give him points. And killing lots of people, well, you can’t make cider without crushing apples. It wasn’t going to be easy to get anywhere unless you started to kill a lot of people.”
“Fucking A.”
“But he shouldn’t have taken my grenades,” Maury said. “That was private stock. They weren’t any plain old shit; they were stuff that I was planning to hold onto for a long time. I had plans for those grenades. They meant something to me.”
“Right,” Fred said. “They were beautiful. I knew those grenades, Maury. They were the best I ever seen.”
“Killers,” Maury said, “the little buggers were deadly. Give the right guy a hundred of them and he could have blown up the fucking city. And he stole them.”
“No good. No good, Maury, no shit. That’s really rotten. I’m not just saying that. It is, it’s the truth.”
“I’ll get him for that,” Maury said sullenly, “and I’ll get them all back, too.”
“Right.”
“And I’ll use one and shove it up his ass,” Maury said bitterly.
XXVII
Wulff now had the feeling that he was moving into the last act. Finally. He had had it in New York the second time around, that same sensation that everything was coming to climax, that things were winding up and down simultaneously to a point of completion, but never so strong as now when he pushed the Cadillac Coupe de Ville along old U.S. 1, heading north toward Philly. All of the pieces were coming together; the call to Williams had been one of the last. He was pretty sure that Williams would join him, would be outside of Independence Hall in two days. Sometimes you h
ad a feeling whose force outweighed reason; this was one of them. The black man would be there, and he would fight this last round with Wulff, because he too saw the truth now. There was nowhere else to go.
It was good to be behind a Cadillac again. He had ditched the Fairlane in a shopping mall and picked this one up instead. Another housewife who had left the keys dangling in the ignition while she ran into a supermarket, probably to complain about wilted celery. Another housewife who would get hell from her husband for the next month. At that, he had done them a favor; the transmission on this yellow 1971 was slipping badly, the brakes needed relining and were subject to fade, had the characteristic high scratching noise in the drums which threatened serious failure, the engine had a highly defined miss. Book value on this baby might be about seventeen hundred wholesale, and considering that there was five hundred dollars of work in it right now, the happy couple would be coming out ahead. The body wasn’t too hot, either.
Still, a Cadillac was a Cadillac. If Wulff had indulged any personal obsession during his Odyssey, it was this car. He had driven cross-country in a 1964 Coupe de Ville, he had wrecked numerous 1962’s and 1963’s at various times; he had driven a magnificent Fleetwood at one point in his pursuit of Calabrese. His actual tastes were for a Cadillac either much older or newer than this medium-grade vintage; he preferred all of that elegance varnished or instead turned, like America itself, to pure rotting corruption; a 1971 was neither here nor there, like a nervous college girl, who had had a little sex-on-the-run here and there and neither understood nor totally misunderstood the nature of the act, had to be retuned from the ground up. Still, he would take it.
And the highway patrol, he saw, giving another due-thirty-second sweep of his rear-view mirror, the state cops looked about ready to take him. There was a black cruiser coming up low and hard behind him, the signal light already turning, and as Wulff looked down to check his speedometer, the siren began to go. He was going sixty-three miles an hour in the right lane, a little bit over the speed limit, to be sure, but nothing drastic on the dry, empty highway; it was more likely that the cruiser had picked up the stolen-car report and was tracking him.
That was bad. It was very bad, and the easy, aimless drift of his thoughts stopped; he felt himself slowly coming into focus, and at the same time he drove the accelerator down to the floorboards, moving the car in a series of lurches at over eighty-five miles an hour.
The planetary gearset in the turbohydromatic whirred and screamed, chattered loose as the transmission wavered frantically between second and third, then it seized on a downshift—to first—which was really not there at all, and in a catastrophic explosion of gears, the flywheel went. The transmission gave out; Wulff could feel the unmistakable clank of a GM transmission that had given up the ghost, and then the car decelerated with a violence surprising in something so padded and insulated, the doomed transmission grabbing the gears, clasping them. The transmission screamed like that of a clutch car whose clutch had not been depressed in shift, and then he was burning oil at twenty miles an hour, the cruiser hot on his tail, going into the emergency lane.
The siren was on high now. The trooper must have been very excited in there; it was not often that a stolen car was grabbed on the fly like this. It was not so much honor in the department but the thrill of the capture itself that was energizing the man; Wulff remembered the feeling. He drove one-handed, arcing the wheel, putting the car through its paces as it staggered to a halt on the pebbles, and he already had his pistol cocked when the Cadillac stopped in a spray of sediment. The cruiser came in hard behind him, banging his bumper, shoving him forward a little, and then they both chattered to a stop, and for a moment, inside the Cadillac, the power windows sealed tight, the motor idling perfectly at fifteen hundred rpm neutral, Wulff felt himself insulated behind glass, locked off from the world. Would that it would continue that way. He kept both feet on the floor, hand on his pistol, pistol inside his pocket, and waited, looking into his rear-view mirror. After a time the door of the cruiser opened, and the state trooper came out slowly. He was about twenty-four years old, wearing a wide hat and dark glasses, an uneven set to his mouth that might have been determination briefly taking over from uncertainty.
He had his gun out, Wulff saw. The trooper walked forward and passed out of the line of sight of the rear-view mirror and was then beside Wulff on the driver’s side, looking at him. The open muzzle of the gun flared like a snout in the window, separated only by glass. The trooper gestured with his hand, indicated that Wulff should roll down the window.
Very carefully Wulff reached his right hand across his lap and hit the power gear. The window unfurled slowly. His left hand was still tight on the .38. The window came into the door, the gearing whisking quietly, and then the cool, strange air of Route 1 was blowing on both of them. The gun could not have been more than an inch now from Wulff’s cheek.
“License and registration,” the trooper said.
Wulff said, “I’m going to have to reach for them. They’re in my inner coat pocket.”
“All right. Reach for them.”
“Couldn’t you put the gun away?”
“License and registration,” the cop said. His voice was high but flat on the syllables. Young he might be, but he knew what he was doing. He would not have lasted a month on narco, of course.
“All right,” Wulff said, “they’re coming out right now.”
He brought out his gun and in one sweeping motion aimed and fired and knocked the pistol out of the trooper’s hand. The trooper’s .45 special arced upward and fell about forty yards downrange on the grass. “Put both hands up,” Wulff said very pleasantly.
The trooper’s face had a look of utter astonishment. If Wulff had been a woman and had bared breasts to him he could have had no more stunned an aspect. He simply stood there, dropping both hands then to brace himself on the doorsill. His eyes were brooding, however, and intensely fixed. He seemed to be reproving himself.
“Come on,” Wulff said gently. “Please get your hands up.”
The trooper slowly drew his palms into the air after inspecting them to see whether or not they were still there. There were little circles of damp underneath his arms: the excitement of the chase, of course. Right now neither of them was sweating.
A truck went highballing the other way across the divider, one muffler out, eighty miles an hour in top gear. The noise for a full thirty seconds was overbearing. Wulff let it go. An old Ford sighed by on their side of the road, children’s heads dangling from every window, looking at them incuriously.
“Come on,” Wulff said. “It’s not that bad.”
“You’re in trouble,” the trooper said weakly. “You’re in real trouble.”
“Not if you act right.”
“A stolen car, and now this. Resisting arrest, using a firearm. You’re in real trouble, friend.”
“Come on,” Wulff said. “Stop being such a cop. There’s no reason for anybody to be hurt now. You lost, and you lost honestly. Now we just have to work a way out of this.”
“Give me your gun,” the trooper said. “Turn your gun over to me and place yourself under arrest.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“If you do that now, you won’t be in half as much trouble as you’re going to be.”
“I’m trying to work this out,” Wulff said. “Why don’t you walk back to your cruiser and get inside now? I’ll go with you, and we can put the radio out of commission together. Then you can go across the divider and drive the opposite way, and I’ll be getting along.”
“I won’t do it,” the trooper said. He bit his lip. “Give me your gun.”
“I’m trying to work this out sensibly,” Wulff said. “I don’t see any need for anyone to be hurt here. It’s just a matter of letting you go in a way that will give me a fair chance to get out of this.”
The trooper took a deep gasping breath, then another. His eyes blinked. He wore a wedding band. “I’m going
to take that pistol away from you,” he said. “Unless you hand it to me, I’m going to grab for it.”
“Then you’re going to get shot.”
“You wouldn’t shoot me. You wouldn’t shoot a state trooper in the process of making an arrest. You’ll go to the chair for sure then. They got the death penalty in this state.”
“They won’t get me. I’ll be in another state.”
“Give me the pistol,” the trooper said.
“Don’t be a fool. I don’t shoot cops. I don’t think I’ve ever deliberately hurt law enforcement; there might have been a few caught in some of the mass scenes, but that was their fault. Face to face I’d never hurt a cop.”
“Now,” the trooper said, and dropping his hands surprisingly deftly, went for the gun. He had it in clasp before Wulff wrenched it away, and then with a twisting motion the trooper had forced it all the way around so that Wulff would have to drop it or have a broken wrist. It was clever, courageous work. This was a cop, all right. There was a time when Wulff would have admired him very much. Now he was only a dangerous fool.
The pistol fell to the ground. The trooper clumsily bent over, scrambling in the dirt for retrieval, and that was a mistake. Wulff threw the switch for the power door locks, flicked them up, put his hand on the lever, pulled, and came out of the coupe hard and fast, throwing his weight against the door. It hit the trooper hard across the shoulders, sent him staggering away, and Wulff was on his feet, using the door as cover before the trooper had regained his balance. Wulff pushed the door hard, and it hit the trooper on the rebound, knocking him all the way over and coming off the hinge partway, to lie at a crazy angle on the ground. Wulff pushed it out of the way, went to where the trooper lay, and kicked the man hard once in the ribs. The trooper screamed. Wulff turned and got his pistol, which was six feet away, and checked it, then pointed it at the man, who was feebly trying to get up. Another truck went by fast on the opposite side of the divider. No one else seemed to be on the highway at all.
