Lone Wolf #4: Desert Stalker

by Barry, Mike

  Someone from San Francisco, naturally it would be San Francisco, asked why they couldn’t just go into Vinelli’s room, bomb out the place and take this Wulff by force. Vinelli was probably dead anyway, they certainly had to figure that and even if he wasn’t, he was dead in their calculations. What did they have to lose? This one was probably the youngest in the room, a sick-looking kid in his late twenties who had probably gotten into the operation two weeks ago and was now heading it up. That was just about the way that Wulff had left things in San Francisco.

  “Because it won’t fucking work,” Lazzara said, skipping the amenities, “you think we’re dealing with some clown here, you schmuck? This Wulff is an explosives man; he hit town with armament. He’s locked up in there with enough shit to blow this place into the desert, and you can bet that he’s got it triggered. If we rush him he’s going to hit the key.”

  “Are you sure of that though?” San Francisco said. His face had become mottled. Lazzara wanted to take out his gun and shoot him, but that was not the way you did things nowadays. The organization had changed in the last ten years. Still, every now and then …

  “No,” Lazzara said carefully, “I’m not sure of that. I’m not a hundred percent sure, nothing’s a hundred percent in this world or out of it except that you’re dead eventually, but the odds aren’t good. The odds are that he’s got it rigged up. Do you want to go into that room? Do you want to break in and face him on the gamble that he hasn’t got a setup? If so,” he said, taking out his gun after all and handing it to San Francisco with a slow, exaggerated gesture, “be my guest.”

  The kid said nothing. He huddled in his chair, squirmed around. Others looked at him and several with an air of disgust got up and began to walk around the room in aimless little circles. Lazzara looked out on them. They were probably as representative a group as you could pull together on short notice, at least every part of the country had a voice here, but they didn’t know what the hell to do either. Nobody did. That was the trouble.

  “I’m open for suggestions,” he said quietly. He looked out on them. No one said anything for quite a while, and then a short man from Chicago stood holding a cigar with curious formality.

  “There’s only one thing I see,” he said, “we clear the hotel and call the cops. Make it a police matter. If it blows up it blows up in their face.”

  “What do we tell the cops?”

  “That we got a fucking madman in the place. We ain’t the first who’ve had that, are we? Maybe he dropped twenty grand in the casino or something. Maybe he’s got a thing against women and his wife deserted him or some hooker couldn’t make him come. What do we care? At least we can get off the hook.”

  “Ah,” Lazzara said, “we can get off the hook. What then? Suppose the cops even decide to rush the room. You know cops these days aren’t that stupid, our friend there is an ex-cop himself, which says something about the PD, doesn’t it? But assume that they decide, okay. They rush the room, and the fucking joint gets blown up. Not on you or me, of course, we’re out in the desert or someplace, trekking it. But there are one hell of a lot of dead cops lying around, aren’t there? They’ll be bouncing off the scaffolding like bowling balls.”

  “Maybe so,” the short man said. He put the cigar into his mouth and puffed to show how calm and controlled he was and how unmenaced by Lazzara. It didn’t work. His hand trembled. “All right!” he said, “so what? So we’re off the hook, aren’t we? We get rid of the son-of-a-bitch and we end the blackmail. Remember, we don’t even know what he’s going for.”

  “Yes we do,” Lazzara said, “we have a pretty good idea what he’s going for, he’s going to try and finish us off but that’s long-range, that’s neither here nor there. Yeah, sure, we get rid of the son of a bitch and a lot of cops besides.” He paused and let them think about that for a while. “What do you think that does for public relations?” he said.

  “Who cares?”

  “Who cares!” Lazzara said, “you tell me who cares? There’s about twenty years invested in this town, twenty years of hard work, planning, cultivation of a lot of friends to say nothing of about five hundred million dollars in capital overhead. Where are we going to stand, how are we going to look if the hotel comes down on half the fucking police force?”

  The man from Chicago tried another weak puff on the cigar, failed completely and began to choke. He clutched at his chest in a fainting way, like a man swooning or having a heart attack. Laughter went through the room, although not of a pleasant, relaxed sort. Well, it was a break, anyway. “Don’t laugh at him!” Lazzara said and slammed the gavel, “at least he’s raising the fucking questions which is more than can be said of the rest of you clowns. These are the questions which have got to be answered, which have got to be considered before we decide to do anything.” He looked at the man from Chicago, nodded approvingly and the man seemed to take heart from this, tried a slightly more energetic puff on his cigar, even wafted a cloud of smoke or two.

  “All right,” Chicago said, “all right, my question is why do we have to be tied to it? Why can’t it be some madman up there who got pissed off at the casino or gambling or his wife or cops or something and decided to blow up the joint? It doesn’t have to come out, does it? Besides, I don’t believe half of this Wulff stuff anyway. I don’t think the guy’s for real.”

  “He’s for real,” San Francisco said and everybody looked at him. “You ask me if he’s real.”

  “All right!” Chicago screamed, “so he’s real but if he’s dead he’s not so real, and then maybe nobody gets the answer! What’s the difference? Answer the question!”

  “All right,” Lazzara said, hitting the gavel once, gently, and they all quivered, “I’ll answer the question. The question is why it has to come out who he is or what they’ve walked into after the job is done and maybe in all the excitement nobody ever finds out. Or then again, here is a point you didn’t bring up, Chicago, even if they do find out they can’t be sure that we knew who he was. As far as we’re concerned he was just a menace to public health. But that won’t work, and I’ll tell you why too. It’s all going to come out. It’s come out already.” He paused, waited on this. “The cops know exactly who he is and what we’re going through,” he said. “Vinelli made some calls, you see.”

  The room broke up. Chairs moved, shouts, curses, the pacers who had been wildly working the walls through the meeting stopped cold while others bolted out of the chairs to come toward Lazzara. He had to use the gavel several times, but finally he got a kind of stricken quiet. “It won’t work you see,” he said, “the world’s all over on this one. Vinelli made no secret of what was going on and even before the guy came he warned local authorities. Everybody’s got his picture. They know exactly who he is and do you know something? I don’t think they want any part of him.”

  They took their time, thinking about that. Lazzara let them think; it had to be understood by them all the way. “So you see,” he said, “we’re in a bad position here.”

  “All right,” someone said from the rear obscured by bodies. One of the pacers; Lazzara could not quite make him out. “So leave him sit there. Leave him with Vinelli and his explosives. What the fuck can he do? Eventually he’ll get tired and go away.”

  “Will he?”

  “He’s got to.”

  “No he doesn’t,” Lazzara said, “I mean he may want to go away, but this man is not stupid. A lot of people got into trouble or are dead now because they thought that he was stupid. He isn’t at all. He’s smarter than most of us. He’s not going to give up and go away because he knows that we won’t let him. Eventually if he goes out he’s going to get grabbed. He knows that he’s on our turf and if he can’t negotiate his way out he’s going to get killed. So he’ll stay put.”

  “So let him negotiate his way out!”

  “No way,” Lazzara said, and then with enormous patience he put the gavel aside, leaned both hands on the table and catching the man full-faced—a heavy,
confused-looking man, probably another of Cicchini’s abandoned troops—”and you know why? because he hasn’t even given his demands. We don’t know what his demands are, and that’s probably because he doesn’t have any demands at all. He’s just holed down there with Vinelli, you see, he’s already killed at least seven men that we know about, and when he’s good and ready he’ll go on to the next stage.”

  “Which is what? Is he a one-man suicide squad?”

  “I doubt it,” Lazzara said. “I don’t think that he wants to get himself killed if he can help it. He doesn’t mind the idea of getting killed as far as we can figure out his methods but he’s not looking for it either. No, he’s just looking for a spot and that spot is probably going to get this hotel blown up. Maybe when we’re in it. Maybe right now for all we know. It would be a good time, wouldn’t it?”

  They didn’t like that. Throughout the room, men looked at one another frantically, some of them moving instinctively toward the door. At the back someone began to curse Lazzara, the words were hard to make out but the meaning was clear: what kind of a crazy sonofabitch would call a setup like this, run such a risk? Did he want to get them all killed? “No,” Lazzara said, “I don’t want to get us all killed. I want to save our ass. I think we’ve got a little margin, not much, but a little bit, because he’s still waiting on his moves and because, essentially, he’d prefer us to come to him. He won’t want to come to us unless his hand is forced or some time-limit he’s set up in his own mind expires.”

  Now was the hard part. Nothing to do but go ahead. He picked up the gavel, hefted it, waited against the explosion. “Okay,” he said, “we’ve reviewed the situation, and I think that it is clear to all of us where we stand. We’ve got a man down there with enough equipment to blow us up at will. He’s probably got it rigged. We can’t call in the cops because they won’t come and if they do we can’t take the risk of what would happen if it wipes them out. We can’t wait him out because he’s got some kind of time-limit in his mind after which he’ll move first and we’re just signing our own suicide note if we let him do it. We can’t negotiate with him because as far as we know there’s nothing to negotiate.”

  Lazzara took a deep breath. “So we know what we’ve got to do,” he said.

  “What?” someone said, “what do we do?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Lazzara said, “if the cops won’t do it, and we can’t wait him out, and he won’t negotiate, then we’ve got to do the job ourselves if we want to save this fucking hotel. Maybe if we want to save Vegas.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, “this is no discussion meeting. This is a company maneuver. You’re all recruited for the operation, crack troops of the organization so to speak and you gentlemen, and me of course in a command position, we are going to go in and get that son-of-a-bitch out of here.”

  And then he let them explode.

  XII

  Wulff knew the time of waiting was coming to an end. It was more than a feeling; it was a deep certainty, they had waited just about as long as they would if they were going to make a concerted, well-planned attack and within the next half an hour they would strike. The first danger point was almost immediately after he had secured the room; a hasty, impulsive follow-up and of course the three hoods had come up just that way; the second danger point was a larger group which might have come after him on the heels of those three, but that was where they had deviated from panic for the first time. They had backed off, giving him all the opportunity in the world to set up the equipment. But then again the backing off had been ominous because it showed that they were trying to pick their spots, that they were trying to figure this situation out in a disciplined manner and that meant in the long-run more trouble than him. A couple of hours, he figured then. After a couple of hours they would have had their meetings, the intercontinental lines would have been filled with their discussions, a party would probably have been put together and then they would come after him. Whether they would clear the hotel or not was an open question. It could go either way. It would be humane to clear the hotel, but then they weren’t so interested in being humane. They were interested in protecting an investment which he menaced and hotel-clearing was very poor practice, generally speaking. People might get the idea that the hotel was unsafe. They might even take to leaving and never coming back again.

  But all of that was behind him now; the real action was beginning. Wulff had the old combat feel. There had been nothing out of Vinelli for a long time, the man had lapsed now into a heavy doze, not quite a coma but not a real sleep either, lying on the floor. If he awoke he was bound to be feverish and disconnected. Wulff felt sorry about that in a way because Vinelli, in certain fashion, had been the best of those that he had run up against, and he hated to lose his company. The man was a realist and had interesting things to say and probably if he could have probed Vinelli he would have learned a good deal more. Pity that he had shot the man so deeply and painfully; if he had it to do over again he would have settled for a foot or hip. But that was neither here nor there of course, Vinelli was out of the picture and out of all reasonable accounting. He could not save the man nor did he even want to. All that he could hope to do when the real pressure began was that they wouldn’t come down on the room too hard for the sake of Vinelli, that they would take a chance on his being alive and take that into calculation. Probably they wouldn’t, however. No one was valuable enough for the wolves of the organization to show mercy.

  So he sat there, huddled over his explosives and he waited but after a time the waiting got monotonous even for him and he decided that he wanted to make a phone call. He considered calling Williams just to let him know what he was up to and what an interesting situation Vegas had mushroomed into but he decided against that. The phones were tapped, they were probably linked into him now with pliers and it would be very very bad to give them a lead on Williams. Williams was too valuable to him, too dangerous to them, and if they got a tracer on it Williams would be over his head. That would not be fair to the man, although, Wulff thought wryly, it would pay him back in kind for what Williams had done to him. Who was the tool? Who the agent? He had thought about that for the last day or so without coming to any real conclusion. It could have gone either way of course. Call it a question of mutual use maybe and leave it go at that. But it was interesting.

  No, he would not call Williams; he could not do it to the rookie. But he found that he wanted to call someone else so strongly that he would take the risk: take it for her and for him together. He wanted to speak to Tamara, the hippie girl who he had met in San Francisco, the girl he had met in amphetamine jag and had murdered to save, had coaxed through, had slept with for one night and had then sent back to her parents with a prayer that this time she would stay and that someday he might see her again. Although he doubted it. The girl had given him the first spate of feeling he had had since Marie Calvante had died. She had been the first thing to convince him that feeling was not necessarily over and that had been exciting but terribly dangerous too because feeling raised you to a new level of possibility … but he did not want to go into that now, he only knew that simply and terribly he wanted to talk to her. They had the phones lined in: that was all right. It was doubtful that there would be anything to happen to her because of the call. If he survived this they certainly would be afraid to go at her because of the possibility of retaliation and if he did not survive … what would she matter? She would be an old friend of a dead menace.

  He knew her parents’ address by heart although he had heard it only once to tell the cab driver into whose car he had committed her and he gave that address to the information operator in Sausalito; she gave him a number and that sounded right too so without thinking about it further he put the call through. There were, come to think of it, no clicks or buzzes on the line. There was a chance then that they weren’t tapping after all. Come to think of it, it would make sense that Vinelli’s phone would be rigged to be impermeable to tap. Yes, when he th
ought about it that was the most likely possibility of all and the guilt fell away from him as he heard the phone ring. He knew now, was willing to admit, how badly he wanted to talk to her.

  A woman got on and he asked for Tamara, then remembered, catching himself, that her name was not Tamara, that was only what she had traveled under in the subsociety she had bounced through and asked for Louise. The woman asked who was calling and Wulff said that it was an old friend and please hurry and the woman said she didn’t know if she could take that, she would really need some better identification. Wulff said to her without thinking about it that she was no godamned switchboard operator and he was no job-applicant and if she didn’t get her daughter on the phone right now both he daughter and she might regret it. The woman gasped and threw the phone down. For a time he thought that she had simply hung up on him—and he would have let it go, he really would have because now as he thought about it for the first time he did not know how sane this impulse was—but she had not hung up, only wandered away and then a girl’s voice came on. Wulff looked at his watch and realized that it was three o’clock in Sausalito. Yes, that would make anyone a little testy he thought and forgave her mother a little.

  “Who is this?” the girl said.

  “Tamara?”

  “This is not Tamara,” she said, but with a little intake of breath. “My name is Louise. I am not …”

  “This is Martin Wulff, Tamara.”

  There was another intake of breath, much louder this time and then the girl’s voice changed. “Martin?” she said. “This is you, Martin?”

  “It’s me,” he said. “It’s me all right. I see you got home all right.”

  “Yes,” she said, “I did. I’ve been home for a month. Has it been a month? It’s hard to believe … my God, it’s three in the morning. I’ve been sleeping. I was …”