Lone Wolf #4: Desert Stalker

by Barry, Mike

  Stone died.

  Vinelli put the letter opener into his desk drawer, slammed and locked it away and then turned to the two men still standing by the door in locked position. The smiler had turned solemn, looking down at Stone’s body. A little pearl of saliva formed at the corner of the smiler’s mouth, dropped like a pearl to the carpet.

  “I don’t want no fucking part of it. Get this dead meat out of here,” Vinelli said and walked through them, parting them like sheets, out into the hall.

  Sucker. It was all a sucker game. If he was in luck it would all end now. Unless that fucking lunatic that he had heard about, the one bombing out San Francisco and Boston with land mines, the one that had blown up the townhouse in Manhattan … unless the scent of action drew the madman here.

  III

  Three miles out, maybe two, it is all desert, all emptiness and the ruins of land which will never sprout. But nothing goes into the desert except madmen or teenagers loaded up with spare gasoline and blankets against the night, looking for a little fucking under the stars. Yet the madmen and the teenagers never meet, the madmen being locked inside the skull, the teenagers in the groin. Coming into the town without a downtown, only one vast strip slashed through the desert, gnarled and glowing, its lighted tendrils like those of an enormous plant, Wulff felt the New York fatigue and depression beginning to lift even as the clouds themselves were lifting against the jagged blue of the sky. Valise in hand, enough dynamite and wiring to level Las Vegas—but it would only go underground and burst through the planet the other way—he listened to the driver as background, thinking of Bill Stone who was somewhere in that plant ahead, a rogue cop this one, the worst kind or the best depending upon which side of the street you were working this Thursday, and worked out what he would do. Vinelli, this Vinelli was the one who was probably sheltering Stone: Williams said that the informants were very clear on that fact although exactly what relation Vinelli as manager of the Paradise might play to Stone’s activities in New York, what Vinelli had to do with those above him, that the informants were not so clear on. There were not even any guarantees that Stone would be here; the whole thing might have been a false lead, and, then too, Vinelli becoming aware of the increasing heat back from New York might have gotten rid of Stone. That was a possibility. There were many possibilities including whether he actually wanted to check into that hotel himself; his face would be all over by now and his hotel was no hotel at all if it wasn’t filled with people with access to that picture. But for the moment he could let it all slide, all of it washing over him, filling in little chinks of the present while he left the bleak spaces of the future to sketch themselves in. His first glimpse of Vegas. He had read about it, heard of it, seen the movies, knew the stories … who didn’t? … but seeing the place was something again. “Stay away from craps,” the driver said to him.

  “I intend to.”

  “Craps is deadly. They suck you in by saying the house percentage is lower than roulette or even blackjack which it is, about one and a half percent, but they’re taking that bite on every roll, four rolls a minute. So in twenty-five minutes they’ve eaten up everything. Did you ever look at it that way?”

  “I’ve thought of it.”

  “The races, keno, they take out fifteen, twenty percent but you only get one race every half hour, fifteen minutes if you’re playing a couple of tracks so that way you can stay in action longer. It’s a question of staying in, you understand; if you can keep on going you can go for luck, but craps blasts you right out of there.”

  “You can get hot in craps too.”

  “You can get cold in hell,” the driver said vaguely and then said no more, apparently the conversation having posed some complexity with which he could not deal, either that or his caution about craps was the extent of his dealings with passengers; after that they were all on their own. Wulff leaned back in the seat thinking that gambling had never meant much to him, it seemed to be a characteristic of police in general that after having been on the line playing for real stakes the manipulating of money and risk could only seem counterfeit. Of course the years in Vietnam could be responsible too…. A car came across his line of sight moving parallel to the long line of the highway, moving on the bypass road within a few yards of them, the bypass flowing into an intersection lined a hundred yards down the road. The car was moving fast, much too fast. It came into the intersection, its brakes screaming, turning it halfway around still at about thirty miles an hour. The driver had to brake down frantically, cursing as the other car, a beaten-up Cadillac now reacquired momentum, came off its side of the two-lane highway and headed toward them.

  “Sons of bitches!” the driver said. “Sons of bitches, what is this? They’re after us,” and Wulff hit the floor as the first shot came through the side-paneling shattering glass, exiting the other side with the sound of wind. They had wasted little time at all. They had been much closer on him than he had really expected. And he had felt himself prepared. But it had seemed that the hotel itself would be the first gauntlet he would have to run … but now the road was exploding underneath him, shots lacing the cab, and Wulff could feel it sliding out of control. You could always tell, when the chassis and frame seemed to float away from one another, a sensation of water filling that split space, then the car was going or gone; he had known it in police vehicles and he knew it now. He kept low to the floor fighting inside of himself to get his revolver. No time to go inside the case for the other stuff which would be worthless anyway in a situation like this. The revolver was pretty worthless too when under fire but it was at least something, it was in his hand. The driver must have been hit. He felt a terrific impact, sound and disconnection through the cab and was smashed into the surfaces of the back seat which held him. He came off of it in one piece, knowing that these men were taking no chances on him, they were professionals or then again simply very desperate and had hit the cab broadside, door-to-hood in order to have a stationary target. He heard doors slam, behind that a thin wailing which meant that someone had been hurt. That would not stop them of course. They traveled at least in pairs, probably in threes, and someone in the car smashed up would have nothing to do with the assignment. It would be considered by everyone except the injured man to be a kind of necessary loss. He hunched down, pulled the safety back on the revolver and did the only thing he could do; he came out of the back in one motion, already shooting.

  They might have taken him for dead, at least they had not expected him to come up like this, and the first shot hit the man in the head and dropped him cold. There was another behind him who hit the ground as soon as the shot went off, his gun falling from him, he scrambled for it and Wulff was unable to get another clear shot because the car that had hit them was on fire. Smoke was coming from under the hood, underneath he could see the clear, yellow flames of an ignition fire and the man on the ground could see it too, he picked up his gun, leveled a shot at the cab and then began to run for space. Wulff did not even feel wind from this shot; it must have missed him by yards, the man had other things on his mind. In front of him the driver was lying in an odd quiescence, one hand curled under his ear, his eyes closed, he had been knocked unconscious by the impact, a small delicate stream of blood coming from the top of his head, heep in the bald spot but the wound looked superficial, Wulff thought, in any event, he was in no immediate danger. They might try to kill the driver later just to make sure that there would be no loose ends, no witness, but that was later, now it was focusing on him.

  Within the Cadillac the wailing had picked up in pitch and intensity and had now turned into words. “Get me out of here, a voice was saying, “I’m bleeding, burning to death,” and Wulff felt the situation in that cry wheeling around; it had been three on one, assailants and victims, but now the wheel had turned and there was no recovery. One of them was dead on the ground, the other trapped in the car. All that he had to worry about was the one who had run, but that one, confused by the crash or the smoke or simply by
the fact that Wulff was still alive, had not even gotten off another shot. He was walking in crazed little circles behind the Cadillac listening to the shrieks and at a certain point the shrieks must have gotten into him. Wulff, kneeling inside the car, still leveling down for the one, careful precise shot that would end it saw this man point his gun into the driver’s compartment of the Cadillac. There was a thin high sound, a sound like a bird poised for flight and then another thinner sound behind it, a peep or a cry and then, as Wulff watched, the Cadillac blew up. The fire had hit the gas tank, the car was a ‘59, fifteen years old, almost all of the shielding must have been rusted away. The sound of the explosion was almost incidental, coming as it did between the bird sound and the series of peeps, an anticlimactic whomp! and a sheet of flame came from under the car and embraced it. There was a secondary explosion, this one scattering little fragments of detonation which rattled against the cab and then it was over, the explosive part anyway, the car sitting, very quietly eating itself up from the insdie. Wulff could not see any figure in the driver’s compartment now. He could not even see a driver’s compartment.

  They were far enough downrange from the fire to be safe; car fires never spread anyway. Everything began and ended at the center of the machinery. So he could leave the driver on the seat without having to worry about him now and he did so, opening the door and sliding out carefully, protecting himself against the possibility of a shot by using the cab as a wall, dropping out of the line of sight of the living gunman if he was still there. Then, very cautiously, using a low-crawl and working himself toward the other car patiently, he stalked the other man.

  Still no traffic on this road. But then there never was, that was what the driver had said; he would take him in on an almost unused bypass that almost no one knew about, that was eight miles around but would end up getting him in faster than any of the main roads. He had gone along with that; he didn’t want to be in a situation where they were contending with other cars, any of which might have been on the Cadillac’s mission, but the gunmen had simply fallen into a kind of unfortunate luck. They had planned almost certainly to hit him in heavy traffic where for all the seeming obstacles there would have been almost no risk other than the getaway itself and instead they had been led into the desert where, city lifers all, they had not been prepared to cope. Wulff low-crawled the hundred yards toward the other car, his revolver at the ready, not worried now about his exposed position, unconcerned that at any moment the man might rise to his feet and level off the shot that would kill him. He was pretty sure that this man would never stand again.

  He found this gunman behind the Cadillac, huddled over in a posture of death. There was a thin hole underneath his temple, almost bloodless, where a piece of steel must have been thrown in the explosion. He had been a heavy man with a face which some people probably thought of as affable; full folds of skin, gaping lips, but now, with his eyes opened in death he did not look affable but simply surprised and somehow reduced. He was crouched over, his forehead leaning against one of the ruined doors. Wulff wedged the gun out of his hand, checked the clip, and then threw it into the desert. The fire had eaten away the metal.

  He moved away from there finally and checked out the first gunman, the one he had dropped as the man foolishly bolted from the car. This one had a small wound in the neck through which he already seemed to have bled everything that was in him, the blood still coursing through five minutes after death in a steady, unending stream, the reflex action of the viscera just grinding the blood out and when he had had enough of that he walked back to the wrecked cab where the driver was now sitting, rubbing his hand over his head, talking in a confused manner. Concussion. There was no sign of recognition in the man’s eyes as Wulff pushed him over from the driver’s side and got behind the wheel. The man lay rigid against the seat, his body tensed, babbling.

  The only humane thing was to take him to a hospital and get some kind of treatment, in a way Wulff was at fault for this and in another way by taking the route he had the driver had saved his life … but as he considered that possibility, Wulff decided that he did not like it at all. That was no way to come into Vegas, a town he did not know, coming in a taxicab with an injured man, having to find a hospital in a strange place and then put up with all of the questions which there would have to be, questions which even if he did not answer would serve to pin him in space and time, reduce his mobility, draw an attention that he could not bear.

  There was no way around it. There was just no other way to handle the situation. He did not like it at all; it put him in a way on a level with the enemy, but then again he was at war now and the only troops he had were those in the case behind him. He reached for the case, took it, gathered it in like a football, meditatively, then he sighed, put the case between he and the driver on the seat, got out of the cab, went to the other side and pulled the babbling driver out of the car. The man came into his hands like paste, unresisting, unremitting, easy to get hold of, hard to dump. He pulled him well off the road to a position where he would be visible, propped him against a boulder where if he did not move much he would have support against falling and left him there. “Crap on all of the sons of bitches,” the driver said. “The nine’s an eleven and don’t believe otherwise.”

  He didn’t believe otherwise. He was beginning to accept everything that he heard, closing the books on none of it; this was one of the keys to any workable campaign. He got back into the cab, pushed his case over, slammed the door and started the engine. A ‘72 Impala, already 85,000 miles on the thing, smashed up before the impact, worse smashed after it but still drivable. It would have to do. You made do with what you had and let the rest of it go to hell.

  He hoped someone would pick up the driver. Wulff took the wrecked taxicab into Vegas and the Paradise.

  IV

  He left it a few blocks down from it on the strip after having circled once to establish location. The strip would eat anything up alive; an hour from now the cab would not be there or it would have been changed into another slot machine and slammed into a lobby somewhere. Nothing could survive outdoors on the strip, the heat was terrific, dry, pounding, moving upward from his shoes on concrete and lunging then into his body, unlike the New York humidity which always moved down from the head. Wulff carried the attaché case lightly, loosely, walking toward the hotel, hoping that he looked like everyone else on the strip although no one there looked exactly like anyone else. He was not noticed. It was not the kind of place where people considered other people.

  No. Here it was machinery. It was the perfect place, perhaps the only place where the wolves at the height of the drug trade could have dug in and built their castles. The money had to go somewhere, somewhere where the stench would be lifted or if not that buried. And it had been buried here in a hundred hotels that rose or spread, in fifty casinos filled with light and noise so overwhelming that it would be possible to forget, if only for the time spent in them, exactly what had built them and where the money would go after it passed through. Somewhere around 116th Street and Lenox Avenue right now people were staggering and shuffling, gathering in the shooting galleries like flies, conferring over the needles, somewhere right now people were dying, the last frozen moment of an overdose when the impure heroin hit the central nervous system—somewhere all of this was going on, but it would take a saint or at least a philosopher, Wulff thought, to make the equation between the two, to point out that Las Vegas and the shooting galleries were exactly the same thing, in different decor but the same thing nevertheless. People were all over the streets but they moved in them like roaches in an open space, only to scuttle from one abscess to the other, no one looked at the sky here or even at anyone else. The action was all indoors. Las Vegas was the ultimate indoor city. Holding the case, walking toward the Paradise, Wulff did not feel at all conspicuous. He could have undressed on these streets or taken out his revolver to begin shooting; in both cases people would have dropped away from him and dived into t
heir pursuits. Las Vegas was either the last city of escape or the very first; he couldn’t make out which.

  Hotels on the Strip were built two ways, up or out, those that were up ascending twenty or thirty stories of sheen and concrete, the ones that were out using their materials to lunge over an acre, shallow domes topping them off. The Paradise was definitely an up construction; he could see it a few blocks away, rising over the surrounding buildings, gleaming against the lights from the casinos and as he came nearer the place seemed to overwhelm him. It was an enormous construction which Vinelli managed; this was probably one of the three or four biggest hotels on the main strip and momentarily Wulff felt a sense of insignificance: it was just too big, there was too much, it seemed impossible that one man could have any effect upon a network which had managed to throw up something like this … and then he thought grimly that the people who ran the network had thought enough of him to send out three semi-professionals in a Cadillac to greet and kill him; he was not as insignificant then as all that. Nothing was too big for them, nothing was too small: they protected everything frantically, and he was beginning to get into the center…. He walked into the hotel.

  No one walked into these places; you were conveyed, usually by a limousine direct from the airport, and he felt a momentary conspicuousness. Then, entering the lobby, he was absorbed by the noise, the crowds, and the effect was shocking. It was as if this lobby was a glove which had snatched at him, seized him in a hand covered with satin and in that clamp dumped Wulff into another plane of existence. There were the machines lined up against the walls, there was the flicker and the roar of the casino, out of sight but ripping through to him through that satin covering and there was the lobby itself, an open space filled with oddly ornate furniture which was only an abscess carved into that noise, not set off from it at all. At the machines people were yanking frantically at handles, most of them muttering and cursing. A few, older women seemed to have moved beyond energy, though, into some state of transfiguration in which every clawing at the handle was merely a prayer, every spin of the wheels an offertory and these were the most frightening—the old ladies that was, because they were not people but merely appendages of the machines. Like junkies in the last stages were simply an extension of the drugs which clamored at them, so these women were not to be set apart from the machines: they looked as if they had been fastened on them with wire and as demonstrators of the movement of the machines had found their last purposes. Coins rolled within the bowels of these machines; he heard the damp, silvery twang of money being vomited into canisters and Wulff’s own insides roiled from the sound of it. He had seen enough of this, he had dealt with the junkies, seen the map of drugs spread through the cities and that form of corruption he could understand and had now become literally deadened but this matter of gambling opened up a new level of feeling entirely. These people were crazy. They were genuinely crazy, all of them, and yet if you settled for thinking that you would be entirely off the track … because the craziness was normal, built and patterned deep into the country that had sent them there, and once you began to look at things that way, there was literally no end to the line of speculation that this would bring.