Lone Wolf #6: Chicago Slaughter

by Barry, Mike

  “Better,” he said, “that’s better,” not knowing if he was talking about her swallowing it or helping him to come off in her mouth in the first place or whether he was just talking about fucking in general as opposed to doing almost anything else but whatever he was saying she agreed with, nodding her head once, stiffly, then putting on her dress in one motion and got out of the room.

  That was the way he liked it. That was the way they were supposed to be. Take what you had and get it out of you and then get the fuck out of your life. If only everything could be that simple; if only he had learned that about women a long time ago … but enough of this. He would not sacrifice his mood for anything, nothing would take the edge off. He locked the door on the cunt. He waited.

  Waited, purged, he thought of nothing at all. Semen drained, anticipation levelled off, rage tempered, Versallo whirled at idle now like a car locked into neutral or park, thinking almost nothing at all. His major problem would be what to do with this Wulff when Mendoza brought him in. He knew that Mendoza would bring him in. He would have to do something with him. Killing was the answer, of course, but it could not be anything as simple as that because this Wulff had created a great deal of trouble for many people and a simple kill would not be the answer. It would have to be something more complicated than that.

  Maybe, Versallo thought, fill his veins full of his own smack and watch him thrash around on the floor; move up on and out the way that his girlfriend was supposed to have done. Yes, that would be fun. He would not mind working into something like that at all. The only problem would be that as he watched this Wulff scrapple with himself on the floor, what he would feel would not be satisfaction as much as envy. Because of the horse in the veins. Don’t waste it then, Not on something like this.

  The intercom buzzed. His twenty-four-year-old secretary, who seven minutes before had been on her knees in front of him, sucking and milking him dry, her breasts shaking behind the erect nipples (erect with revulsion, he thought, and that was fine with him; they should hate it; they were born as creatures of filth and, stained by their own ugliness, could only find salvation through realizing what they were), told him in a businesslike way that two men were downstairs waiting to see him. One of them was holding a gun on the other, she said. She said this in a totally matter of fact way which Versallo did not find remarkable. The girl had been there for three and a half weeks now, maybe four (he lost track of them early on) and had seen stranger combinations than this coming into the reception area in the dispatching room a level below. If she had any thoughts on what was really going on she kept them to herself which was the proper attitude and meant that she could stay as long as she wished. Versallo said that that was good news; could he get an identification, though?

  There was a pause while the girl consulted with someone in the background. Murmurs, clattering, then the girl was back on the line and said, “Only one of them will talk. The other one won’t say anything. The one that will talk says his name is Mendoza, and you’re waiting, to see him. He says he’s from the other dispatching office, across Michigan, and that you know who he is. Is it all right?”

  “I know who he is,” said Versallo. He felt the giggling beating in his chest again, felt the little bird of laughter in his heart, battering against its cage. Control, control. “Yes, I know who it is. It’s all right. Send them up.”

  “Both of them?”

  “Both of them,” Versallo said and hung up the phone.

  He rubbed his palms together, felt the feet of a stranger clattering on the floor. He looked down. He was dancing. His heels moved in an imperious little strut up and down the polished surfaces of the floor. Like a movie he had once seen of Hitler after he’d invaded some godamn country or other. In his throat he felt a keening which might have been song. Control, he said again. Control.

  It had been long. It had been difficult. There had been moments in the last five years after he had cold-turkeyed it when he wondered if he was going to live or, for that matter, if there was any point in doing so. Why live? Why go on? What man in his fifties who had been on horse off and on for twenty years could face life without it?

  But he had prevailed somehow. And now he knew why.

  Versallo stood by the door and waited for his justification to walk through. And to hell with the little cunt and her almost unnecessary mouth. Shit, the way he was feeling right now, he could have finished—if he had wanted—in his hand.

  Chapter 8

  Wulff had decided to go along with it. That was the only way. Mendoza was no fool; he was a professional and professionals had one trait in common down the line; they were consistent. They might make mistakes but they were moment to moment, small lapses of consciousness; overall they had a fine, consistent line of purpose and you simply could not count upon those lapses extending into a chasm through which you could throw a knife of interference. No, he had to go along with Mendoza; the alternative, which was hurling himself at the man, attempting an all-out attempt for freedom would probably result—this was his best and most calculated decision—in getting both of them killed. He could probably seize the man, choke him, get the car thrown irrevocably off-course but Mendoza would be able to get off the killing shot and even if he did not, if the shot was merely a wounding one, they would both die in the ensuing wreck. It was no percentage. Mendoza knew it too; he knew that Wulff was thinking along those lines and that there was a certain element of risk for him in this too. But with the calculation of the professional he had decided that Wulff knew what he was doing too; he was just not going to attempt anything like this. So, standoff. Pax difficle. Balance of terror. They drove through the Loop and into the parking area of a large, dismal warehouse on the South Side.

  Here was familiar territory for Wulff. Chicago had been a strangeness, the elegance of the river, the high buildings along the waterfront looking like nothing in New York, only San Francisco could compare with this. But the South Side was pure Hunts Point; it looked like the Bronx might at the end of a murky, greasy afternoon and Wulff, looking at the way that the doors of the warehouse, streaked with obscene lettering, were closed against the afternoon, felt that he was at home for the first time since he had hit this town. He understood this warehouse, and by implication he understood the man who worked in it. It was a contrived ugliness; they were here because the man who ran things wanted to be here and would have picked a place like this given any alternative. It was the proper kind of cover. And the scene, stretching away from the warehouse on all sides was pure Hunts Point too; there was a feeling here of abandonment so profound that it had moved beyond the few stumbling human forms he saw here into the landscape itself, a landscape streaked and exhausted, wrecked and ruined by assaults compounded over fifty years. Nothing could live here. Nothing could even die here. There was not even the energy to support transition from the one state to the other.

  “All right,” Mendoza said, pulling into a flat, open space at the back of the parking area, removed from a bank of trucks, “that’s it. End of the line. Let’s go.” He tapped the valise and then took it by the handle, waved the gun and showed it to Wulff. “Don’t give me any trouble,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t think of it. I wouldn’t think of giving you any trouble.”

  “Because,” Mendoza said waving the gun, “we’ve gone this far, it would be a shame not to wrap up the job and deliver you nice and safely. Not that I’m not willing to knock you off, you understand. I’ve been given a lot of latitude. But I’m a man of surpassing neatness.”

  “Of course,” Wulff said. Not looking at the man, he got laboriously out of the taxi, felt ground under his feet, stood unsteadily. His cramped position in the cab, the tension of the drive had taken more from him than he might have calculated; for an instant Wulff thought that he might pitch to the ground. Mendoza must have seen it too because he smiled distantly and said, “Nerves will get you even if fright doesn’t, eh, Wulff?”

  And they had exchanged another of their looks t
hen, the third or fourth since all of this had started, a look which said that they both knew exactly what was going on and indeed were so deep into it that either could have played the other’s role. But in spite of that understanding they would act as if this were exactly serious instead of repertory theatre and not make any sudden moves against the grain. Professionalism. Wulff could understand this, he could respect a man who had this competence, this control of a situation. What it came down to at the root, he supposed, was that Mendoza was quite willing to die if he had to and the communicability of this resignation made him more threatening rather than less; there was very little you could do against a man who was willing to die and understood death this well. It was this power in himself which had made Wulff so effective. They walked, Wulff a few paces ahead of Mendoza, into the bottom level of a huge warehouse, a scattering of trucks on this level, sacks, leading bins, one of the trucks muttering away at low idle, men scurrying through the open spaces.

  So these people were in the dispatching business, Wulff thought, keeping a few paces ahead of Mendoza, noting that no one looked at him. Each man seemed quite absorbed in his own task which for the most part seemed to be loading the trucks, although one group of men was working frantically on the idling engine, apparently trying to repair it before the fumes blanked them out. “That’s nice,” Mendoza said behind him, “that’s very nice, just keep on walking that way and everything will be fine. You’re a cooperative gentleman, do you know that? Really quite a cooperative gentleman,” and then prodded him once, guiding him right. Wulff found himself walking into an enormous service elevator, the cage open, the handle unattended. Mendoza poked and prodded him into a corner, closed the gate one-handed and then cranked on the handle, meanwhile holding the gun poised on him in that single, absent gesture. The man knew what he was doing. The man was not to be faulted; he did his job about as well as any Wulff had ever seen. The elevator went up to the second level, hovered there for a moment and then with a crack Mendoza stopped it, opened the cage. Wulff found himself looking into a long, low hallway, oddly stark and well-lighted for a building of this sort. Whoever worked on this level obviously had a good sense of his prerogatives. “Come on,” Mendoza said, standing by the handle. “Start walking.”

  Wulff went past him. For a moment there was an opportunity; the gap between them was only a couple of feet and he might have been able to have extended an arm, closed that gap, knocked Mendoza off his feet. It was at least a possibilty and for a moment Wulff indeed did consider it but then kept on walking. He did not like the odds. It was even money or a little better then that that he might have been able to overpower Mendoza, wrest the gun away, take control of the situation … but fifty percent or a little more was not good enough. Simply stated, he was not that desperate. He had a fair chance of getting out of this alive or at least staying alive for a while, he did not have to do anything drastic. Besides, Mendoza had the valise. The valise was somewhere in the man’s possession; he had left it with the men in the booth controlling access to the parking area but it wasn’t going to stay with them too long at all. He was sure that Mendoza was going to get it back and transfer it up the line. Funny thing about this man; Wulff did not think of him as a messenger but as a quality in his own right.

  Mendoza snorted now as if he had gauged everything in Wulff’s head, had calculated it so well that he knew what Wulff was going to think before it had been thought. Of course. A professional: he had left that possibility of attack open to Wulff—not really to taunt him because he knew that Wulff was too much of a professional himself to try it. Only one professional could do it to another; it was a tribute that Mendoza had given him. A weaker, a less intelligent or experienced man might have sprung at his abductor then. Wulff shook his head with disgust and walked down the hallway.

  At the end, a door opened before him as if this had been prepared, as if his coming had been observed. He walked through into an office. He saw the man who had held the door for him and then he saw Mendoza come through and close that door as the man went back to his desk, sat, sighed, put his hands behind his head and looked at Wulff with cold, measuring eyes. Then the man sighed again, the coldness in his eyes turned into a soothed pleasure and he leaned further back, put his feet up on the desk, smiled and said, “Mendoza, that was good work. It really was.”

  “Thank you,” Mendoza said. “It was my pleasure.”

  “I knew you would do it all the time. I never doubted that you would bring the son of a bitch in. Someone else, yes, I wouldn’t have been sure. But not with you. I’ve just had the feeling coming over me for hours that you had scored.”

  “I scored,” Mendoza said. “That’s for sure.”

  “Where’s the smack?” the man said. His eyes gleamed. Wulff, looking at him, thought that he had never seen such corruption before, not of this variety, but then again there was no judging from appearances. The man in front of him, heavy, in his early fifties, dressed in a blue business suit that seemed to cover rather than to shape him looked like he had spent half his life in the process of breaking people and now, at this stage of the game, had just begun to move into the period where he could have other people do this work. Still, he thought again, if you could look at a man and fully judge him there would be no need for painstaking detective detail work, there might be no need for a police force at all. Maybe the man in front of him was a saint who operated this warehouse to give the handicapped a station in life and was kind to animals and small children. Of course. Absolutely. The pressure is getting to me, Wulff thought, it is really getting to me and this much he knew was the truth; fatigue was one part of it and the other was that he had already spent too much time in too many rooms, confronting people like this. There were limits to what one could take and he found himself wondering almost clinically if he might have passed them. But then what?

  “Where’s the smack?” the man said again, more hoarsely. He brought his palms together. “Come on, Mendoza, where’d you stash it? Don’t tell me that you didn’t—”

  “I gave it in at the gate,” Mendoza said. He pointed toward Wulff. “I didn’t want to carry it up here with him; I thought that I had enough to handle here.”

  “Well,” the man said, his palms beginning to rub together in an unconscious gesture of tension, “that was good thinking. Mendoza, why don’t you get out of here? I think I’d like to have a conference with this man.”

  “I wouldn’t advise that,” Mendoza said.

  “Oh?”

  “Let me keep him covered. It’s better that way.”

  “What do you think?” the man at the desk said to Wulff, abruptly. “Should your friend Mendoza stay here and watch you while we talk? Or can we make this a private conference?”

  “That’s up to you,” Wulff said. The man was baiting him. Little saucers of light inverted in his eyes, twinkles of liveliness at the corners of his mouth. He knew that if he could come close to the man he would hear a ragged intake of breath, find irregularities in respiration. It excited him. Fear, pain, hurt excited this one. Of course, he was no exception. Most of them liked to deal with people in this way, otherwise why would they do it?

  “I think it would be sensible,” Mendoza said. “He’s a rough character.”

  “A rough character,” the man at the desk said softly, “a rough tough character, Burt Wulff. Your reputation has preceded you, you are a famous man.” He moved his hands below eye-level, there was the sound of a drawer opening, and then the man came out with a gun which he showed to Wulff with the same absent tenderness that he might if he were demonstrating it for sale in a firearms shop. “What do you think of that?” he said.

  “Nothing,” Wulff said, “I think nothing of the gun at all.”

  “Can we have a calm and reasonable discussion here?”

  “I never said otherwise.”

  “Get out of here, Mendoza,” the man said. There was a sly, cruel overlay in his voice. “We’ll talk privately.”

  “In other wor
ds I’ve done my job.”

  “In other words you’ve done your job,” the man agreed comfortably, “and it’s time to go.”

  “All right,” Mendoza said. He left the room abruptly. The man behind the desk made a flourishing gesture to Wulff, half-inclined in a bow and said, “Would you mind checking to see if the door is locked? I’d like this to be a private conversation.” He showed the gun to Wulff again like a demonstrator.

  “All right,” Wulff said, “I’ll do that.” He walked to the door, checked the knob, walked back.

  “No,” the man said, “there’s a bolt there too. Throw it.” His face was alight. A smile almost genial came from him. “You’ll do that, won’t you?”

  “Surely,” Wulff said. He went back to the door, threw the bolt that he found there and went back to the desk. He stood there then while the man made little circles like smoke rings in the air with the point of the gun.

  “Good,” he said, “good. Now let’s discuss things, Wulff. Tell me all about your career.”

  He leaned back as if to get more comfortable, the gun held lovingly in his hand. “And when you’ve filled me in on all the background,” he said, “then we can discuss your future.”

  Chapter 9

  The man with federal credentials leaned over the bed and said to Williams, “You’ve got to cooperate. You’re not helping us at all.”

  “I don’t know a thing,” Williams said. “I tell you I don’t know a damned thing.” He wanted to throw the covers in the man’s face, get out of the bed and stalk away, but of course, he could not do that. Non-ambulatory condition. The surveillance man, standing against the wall in uniform, crossed his legs, sighed, but made no move to come over. “Listen,” Williams said to the cop, “give me a break. I’m a sick man. Tell this clown to get out of here and come back and ask me questions when I’m well.”