Lone Wolf #4: Desert Stalker

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 #4:

  Desert Stalker

  Mike Barry

  a division of F+W Media, Inc.

  Those convicted of selling hard drugs to minors … should be sent to prison for life.

  —Nelson A. Rockefeller

  Why waste the room and board on them? I have a better idea.

  —Martin Wulff

  Contents

  Prologue

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  Also Available

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  TO: NETWORK

  FROM: L

  SUBJECT: MARTIN WULFF

  This man, an ex-New York City narcotics officer, is demonstrably insane and extremely dangerous. He must be killed on sight and details of the bounty will be distributed in a further memo.

  This man’s movements in the last three months have been tracked from New York to San Francisco to Boston. Presently his whereabouts are unknown. After killing several valuable men in New York (details also in a further memorandum) he appeared in San Francisco where, after another series of murders, he seized and disappeared with a quarter of a million dollars or more of raw materials whose shipment he intercepted. Efforts in Boston where he next appeared to retrieve the materials were not successful. A top northeast official was murdered and Wulff, with the materials still in hand, disappeared. It is indicated that the materials may have been destroyed. No substantiation of this can be found, however.

  This man, from internal evidence and from statements he has made to various personnel, intends to “destroy the international drug trade.” He has already affected operations seriously and must be considered a menace. His elimination is top priority.

  The basis of subject’s motivations has been inferred from various sources. Subject, while still in NYCPD (although transferred from Narcotics Division for failure to comply with policy) was affianced to one Marie Calvante, who died of heroin overdose which may or may not have been self-inflicted. Subject was in radio car with partner at the time that anonymous tip on Calvante came in and it appears that he was the first to see her dead. Immediately after, records indicate that he resigned from PD and it was then that his “war” began. Thus, the “war” may be considered to have been personally motivated by the death of fiancée although subject’s record while with Narcotics Division indicated an extreme impatience with conventional means of drug-suppression.

  No known personnel were tied to the death of Marie Calvante. This has been researched carefully and it is clear that no member of this or interlocking organizations was in any way responsible for this incident. Nevertheless, all indications are that Wulff believes the interlocking organizations to be responsible and, needless to say, he cannot be approached or dissuaded.

  Subject is six feet four inch veteran of combat (although granted draft exemption by virtue of employment in PD he enlisted in armed services in 1965, apparently out of patriotism) and displays an extremely sophisticated knowledge of explosives, incendiary devices, armaments of all kinds and hand to hand combat. He is directly or indirectly responsible in three months’ period for at least one hundred and fifty deaths and it appears that his “war” is now accelerating. Since he left Boston a few days ago, his whereabouts are unknown.

  A photograph of the subject accompanies this memorandum. He may be shot on sight and all members are advised that considerable benefit will accrue to them should they be the ones to shoot him.

  In the twelve years of the interlocking organization and the important supply pact of 1963, no such danger has appeared. Wulff is only one man but for that precise reason, retains a great freedom of action. He is a cold, remorseless killer and the danger he represents is not to be ignored.

  It is indicated although not proven that he may at present be back in the New York City area.

  Further memoranda, as noted, to follow.

  I

  Wulff, tired but still functioning, the Charles River where he had thrown the valise with a quarter of a million dollars worth of uncut heroin bobbing mindlessly in his brain, came into New York tired but not fulfilled, still with a sense of beginnings. He had taken a car from a shopping center in Cambridge, a new Buick LeSabre which the owner had left keys in, motor running, and had driven down the three hundred miles of turnpike, thinking. In the case behind him on the seat he had the more portable of the armaments he had brought to Boston: a machine gun, hand grenades, a couple of pistols. He was perfectly willing to use them on any police officer who wanted credentials on the car. He didn’t want to. He still thought of police as brothers. But it was just the way it had to be now.

  All out, no quarter. Cicchini, the boss of the northeast who he had killed face to face would have killed him if it had not been for luck and he would have done it more brutally. The war was on in earnest now. The quarter of a million dollars he had dumped into the Charles raised the stake. The men who controlled drugs in and out of this country might tolerate a Wulff who only picked away at various echelons, leaving corpses here and there. In that business it could merely act to straighten out the line of succession, clean away the ranks. Survival of the fittest. But a quarter of a million dollars was another kind of thing. Now he was actually meddling with their business.

  They would kill him, all of them would kill him. No doubt now as to where he was: he was in the game for the rest of his life. Death was the only exit and ripping the car down the thruway at a hundred and ten miles an hour, only parking lights on, he thought that death itself might be a release, not an unwelcome way out of it. But he was a dead man already; he had died on the fourth floor of a walkup building on West 93rd Street and death could not come twice. Only oblivion but never release. And that was a different issue.

  Wulff rolled the car into the Deegan expressway, cutting down there to a graceful seventy, but it was only as he rolled onto the Triborough Bridge that he realized where he was going. For hours he had been driving away, the only purpose had been to put Boston and its horrors behind him and New York, as familiar ground, was the first place he had thought of but now, as he saw the flat and dead buildings of Queens before him in the late night, very few cars around him, he realized where he had been going all the time. He was heading for St. Albans. He was going straight for the home of a black cop named David Williams.

  Williams had been in the radio car the night that they had gotten the call on the girl o.d. on 93rd Street, the anonymous tip that had sent Wulff up three flights and into hell. Williams was twenty-three, only a rookie, but there was nothing of the rookie about him: he was as purposeful as a knife and, Wulff suspected, at least as deadly. In New York, at the very beginning, it had been Williams who had come to him offering him assistance in his war. I
n San Francisco, it had been Williams who with a phone call had uncovered the shop from which he got the armaments to blow up the ship. Wulff had the uncomfortable feeling that the black man was laughing at him; that he was using Wulff as a tool without risk. But, then again, the man’s offer had been sincere. And the help had been real.

  He needed to see the man. Wulff had the feeling now of being closed in on all sides—by this time, across the country, the network must be on fire with panic and rage—and yet at the same time he had the vague feeling that he did not know precisely what the next move should be. Throwing the junk into the Charles after killing Cicchini: that had been all right, that had been closing off for all time the first part of his war, but now he felt like a machine at deadly idle, saiting to be pulled into gear.

  He drove into St. Albans.

  St. Albans was quite, respectable: the streets were wide and hushed now in the darkness, the houses were as good as any in the middle-class sections of the city. At this hour, two in the morning, you could not have told, looking at the landscape, that the people here were black and that most of them were living in St. Albans not by choice but simply because there were very few areas in the great, liberal city of New York where a black man with a little money and a handhold on the middle-class could move his family without the risk of getting his home burned. If he could even find a broker to sell him a home. Lower-class blacks were struggling out of Harlem and Bedford Stuyvesant into areas of Brooklyn and Queens which five years ago had been white but they were carrying their poverty and misery with them. St. Albans, though, was a place where you had to get your ticket punched first. It was depressing, Wulff thought, but he was not really concerned with race relations. He had other, much more terrible problems to deal with, than what was being done to the black man. And, of course, if his doomed war could succeed, which never in his lifetime would it, things would have to get better for the black man for he was the one on the bottom, most of it, keeping the machinery going, keeping the Cicchinis in their mansions on the river.

  He ditched the car at 69th Road and Queens Boulevard, double-parking it there, leaving the keys in, motor running as he snatched the heavy valise off the seat and walked briskly away. If the owner was lucky someone would snatch the car right off the street this way, drive it to the nearest junkyard on Pennsylvania Avenue and have it dismantled by professionals, buried deep. Otherwise, if he had left the thing parked and locked, there was at least a small chance that the police would have found it and that would have done the owner no favor. The thing only had seven thousand miles racked up but already the fan belt was squealing, the shock absorbers were failing and the transmission starting to slip; the car would be major trouble before it got to 20,000 miles. Now the owner could collect close to new-car price on it and try his luck again. The owner would never know, Wulff thought wryly, what a favor had been done him unless of course the cops found the car first, noted the Massachusetts license plate and impounded the thing to track it down. But that was doubtful on 69th Road and Queens Boulevard in Forest Hills. It was a lightly-patrolled area, and everything was going on at least five stories up. No street action at all, the high-rise had shifted the structure and occurrence of crime into the air and the police department was still at least ten years from coming to grips with it. You could always trust civil service to be ten years behind the realities, unless it was in relation to drugs in which case it was fifty…. Wulff took a cab the rest of the way to St. Albans.

  He still had a good deal of money. He had lifted five thousand dollars off Cicchini’s corpse after he had disposed of the man and five grand could take you a fair distance when you were a freelancer. Money was not his problem; the problem was a vague feeling that the enemy was closing in on him from all directions, while he was sitting at idle, trying to find his next move. If he could find the moves he would be all right. It was kind of nice to be back in New York in a way; the sullen slump of the driver’s shoulders, his vague cursing when blocked by sanitation trucks on the Boulevard and when Wulff deliberately undertipped him at Williams’s door were somehow comforting. New Yorkers had cultivated the attitude of despair; if they had not seen everything, they acted as if they shortly would, and it kept them from seeing anything more. A healthy way to act except if you were a narcotics cop and couldn’t avoid seeing and feeling. “Fuck you,” the driver said and went away.

  Wulff stood for a moment, looking at Williams’s neat little two-family house on the deserted street. Two-family, that was the way to do it: live on one level and use the rent from the other to pay off the mortgage so that the only thing out of pocket was the down-payment which in the long run you could absorb too. Williams had all the angles covered, he wasn’t doing badly for a black man: wife, quiet little house, income-producing house. But, Wulff wondered, exactly what the percentage could be in safety if you knew that you were the one in ten who had staggered out of the wreckage of your race and that there were men like Cicchini who all the time wanted nothing other than to put you back there … decided that this was none of his business and exactly the kind of thinking which would make Williams angry and went back to the door. He rang the bell, hefting his case, feeling tentative, noting by his watch that it was now one-thirty. This was a hell of a time to come in on a man, even one who had offered to help you. But it was Williams himself who opened the door, dressed in street clothes and alert, smoking a cigarette and in all ways looking as collected as he had been the last time Wulff saw him in the Manhattan rooming house. “I expected you,” he said quietly. “Come in.”

  Wulff went in. He had never been in this house before, but it came back to him like bits and pieces of a recollected dream: the short hallway, the spare furniture in the living room, installment plan all of it, the curtained windows, the color television set in the corner playing a movie now. “I figured you’d be along,” Williams said, “and I’m not surprised to see you at all.” He motioned for Wulff to sit on the couch. “I just got off shift about half an hour ago and I can’t sleep,” he said and then looked at Wulff alertly as if all the time for social conversation had now passed. “I heard about San Francisco,” he said.

  “Did you?” Wulff said putting the case on the couch beside him and leaning back. “That was nothing. San Francisco was nothing. It was Boston that was the killer.”

  Williams shook his head and chuckled. He looked much older, could have been forty or fifty: it was something to realize that a black cop was probably fifty inside before he took the exams. “I haven’t heard about Boston yet,” he said, “but the word will filter down. But San Francisco was nice.” He paused, exhaled. “San Francisco was very nice. New York wasn’t bad either. That townhouse …”

  “I’m not here to discuss what’s been done.” Wulf said, “that’s over with.”

  “It’s not over with. It’s just beginning. You took a fucking ship out in San Francisco, you know that?”

  “I know it.”

  “A whole fucking freighter. Man, reports are getting around, people are in a panic out there. And in here too,” Williams said. “You are upsetting the natural order of things. What did you do in Boston?”

  “I got to a man,” Wulff said, “and I got rid of a shipment.”

  “The same shipment you picked up in San Francisco?”

  “You know about that?”

  “You learn,” Williams said, “you come around resolved to listen and, oh my, you learn a good deal. But that’s not what you wanted, is it?” He looked at the case lying next to Wulff. “You travel light, don’t you?”

  “That’s equipment.”

  “That’s what I mean,” Williams said. He sighed, stretched on the couch, stood. “There’s a pretty big one for you,” he said, “if you’re interested in going in on it.”

  “I call my own shots.”

  “I know you call your own shots,” Williams said. He smiled vaguely, walked into the archway separating kitchen from living room. “You want some coffee?” he said. “My wife’s asleep or
I’d give you better than that, but there’s some cake …”

  “I’ll have some coffee,” Wulff said. “What’s the big one?”

  “Ah,” Williams said. He went into the kitchen, let Wulff look at the prints on the walls for a moment while he seemed to be struggling with some plates, then came back, balancing a cup of coffee precariously balanced on a palm. “Never make no waiter,” he said, passing it to Wulff, “I had to get into the sub-professional classes because the fact is that I simply could never make it in the servant class, isn’t that right, Wulff?”

  “I don’t know,” he said and took the coffee. Williams had his points, the man was valuable … and the man had been at his side the night they killed him, that was not the kind of bond you could break … but even so, Williams got on his nerves. Probably he always would. There was hatred one inch below the surface of any black man and all in all, Wulff guessed, they were entitled to it, they would be crazy if they did not hate … but it was tough to take, working your way through a network of feelings that could blow up on you. “Tell me what you have to and let me go,” he said.

  “But you don’t know where to go, Wulff,” Williams said. He stared at him blandly. “You are a fighting fool, you are a mass of energy, you are going to take on the pushers and the dealers and the organizers and the suppliers and the channel men single-handed but you are a weapon without direction. I got to point and aim you man. All right,” Williams said, waving his hand in a dismissive way, sitting across from Wulff on a straight chair he dragged from the side of the room. “Let’s not even get into that.” He looked at Wulff for a while, his eyes flickering to intensity and then suddenly, convulsively, deadening. “You know about all that shit in the evidence division,” he said.

  “Indeed I do.”

  “Two million dollars street value of heroin missing in the last three years when they finally get around to investigating the place. That was real nice,” Williams said, “that was a credit to the department.”