Lone Wolf #6: Chicago Slaughter (2 page)

Wulff’s plan had been to show up in St. Albans with a million dollars worth of smack in a valise, shove it at Williams’s impenetrable face and say, “Here it is. Take it back to the property office and tell them to be more careful the next time.” It might have well been worth it, worth everything that had happened to him in Las Vegas or Havana to see the look on the young black man’s face when he did this. “The entire NYPD, the federal prosecuting staff, the godamned FBI, none of you could trace it,” he wanted to say, “but
I
got it and what does that say about your system, Williams? It says that your systems sucks, that’s what it does.” He would have thrown the valise at Williams’s feet and gone the hell out of there, back to San Francisco, maybe, looking for some more distributors he could kill. Then again he might have gone back to the girl in San Francisco and taken an honorable retirement from vigilanteism, having successfully made his point, which was simply that the system had broken down twelve to fifteen years ago through incompetence and infiltration, and that short of the kind of drastic action he was taking the drug problem would
never
come to hand. Hell, his life expectancy could hardly be considered high in his present line of work. By now, he knew, every clown, hit man, pusher, doper, distributor, organizer and adventurer in the country probably had a picture of him in his wallet. There were at least five thousand highly skilled people waiting to get one shot. One shot would be all that they needed.

No, he had to dump the valise and get out of this, at least take a different battle direction. The first frontal assault, sweeping him from New York to San Francisco to Boston to Vegas had had the advantage of surprise and the enemy, unused to vigilante tactics, softened by a decade and a half of making their own way by graft and infiltration had been completely unprepared. But these people were not fools, certainly not like the authorities delegated to destroy them. And they were catching on. They had almost gotten him in Vegas and they had gotten him for sure in Havana, hijacking the Vegas flight out and incarcerating him there. He had made it out of Havana only through sheer luck and because of the confusion he had created there. But the luck was being pushed too hard now.

He had made it out of Havana on a hijacked helicopter which had dumped him in Louisiana, near the border but far enough to get him well inland and all the way back out of New Orleans in a stolen car (he had worked his last rental; he had to function completely outside of society now, dared not even risk a plane flight). He had worked the situation through in mind, worked it out through a thousand miles of blank superhighway, the car momentarily suspending him above the world and it seemed clear to him that he had gone almost as far as he could this way. It was a never-ending guerrilla war, a final commitment. He understood that and he was not abandoning it. But he had to fight another day in another way. They were coming in too close to him now. Two or three hundred of their men were dead by his hand, the northeast sector shaken, the San Francisco area battered, left leaderless. They knew now how dangerous he was and they would stop at nothing to eliminate him.

He would have done the same if the positions were reversed.

So he was going to go into St. Albans. He was going to take this valise and ram it down Williams’ throat and let him, the man who believed in the system and always took the odds, decide what disposition to make and Burt Wulff was going to get out. But he wasn’t after all, it seemed, because system-levers got theirs too, poised on the razor-edge of the world as they were.

Williams had been knifed and beaten. He was in Metropolitan hospital in serious condition. Admitted three days ago he had passed the point of first crisis and was expected to live, to make a full recovery in fact. But the duration of his hospital stay was still unknown. He might be in for months. At full salary, of course.

Duty injury. Williams had been on plainclothes detail in East Harlem, apparently checking out methodone traffic. He had come against an assailant who had either seen through the cover or had been too spaced out to care, or both, or neither—people could get killed in New York City by other people who did not even have a reason. Williams, going for his gun too late, had been knifed and stomped half a block from the clinic. Apparently forty or fifty street people had witnessed all of this and one had even been nice enough to put in an anonymous call for the cops. Williams had been picked off the street in view of all these interested witnesses and taken to Metropolitan where an operation had saved his heart and life. The entry wound was slightly south of the heart, otherwise nothing would have worked. Why Williams did not go for his gun or go fast enough and how he walked into something like this was not quite clear. The assailant, of course, would never be found. Traffic around the methadone clinic continued brisk. Nothing much had been changed except that a twenty-four-year-old cop had gone off duty involuntarily. That was New York for you. Take it with a grain.

Wulff learned all this from Williams’ wife an hour after he hit town. He heard it all on a pay telephone in a candy store in Rego Park four blocks away from where he had ditched the car. The car, a 1971 Delta Royale 88 had been overheating badly through the last hundred miles anyway and had probably burst a seam in the radiator. Wulff never felt guilty about stealing a car anymore. The newer cars were such completely incompetent stuff that the owner was really getting a break on the theft—collecting more on book than the car was worth in transportation value and saving the trouble of breakdowns besides. The godamned things, like the narco squad, just weren’t geared up to deal with the situation.

Wulff learned it all fast. Williams’ wife laid it on him straightforwardly, dispassionately, quickly. She was a cop’s wife. She knew Wulff. She had met him when he had been there before the Vegas jaunt and there had been a moment of sympathy, of possible connection which Wulff had neither missed nor followed up. What was there to follow up? But he had known that in a different time, in a different way, something might have happened between the two of them. Enough. Enough of that. There had been a girl called Marie Calvante and, in a different time, in a different way, something might have happened there too but it had not; instead he had found her dead of a heroin overdose. Forget it. Abstractions. You concentrated on what you could deal with.

“I’m sure he’d like to see you,” she said over the phone. “He’s conscious and the pain isn’t too bad. Visiting hours are anytime; I’m going to go there myself in just an hour or so. You can—”

“No,” Wulff said. “He wouldn’t want to see me.”

“Of course he would. You don’t understand—”

“I understand that he’s probably got two police watching that room all the time,” Wulff said. “That’s standard procedure and I don’t think they’d change it even for a man shot in plainclothes.”

“Oh,” she said, “oh.” She paused. “The police patrol. I forgot—”

“Forgetting isn’t something a cop’s wife should do,” he said. He was calling from a candystore, stacks of newspapers heaped in front of the booth and now as he looked beyond them he saw a hint of activity, men moving around rapidly, someone at the center of a small group talking animatedly, digging into his pockets to pass something to a few in the circle. Numbers payoff? It couldn’t be a bookie’s runner, the legalized horse parlors had put those kind out of business. It didn’t matter, he supposed, but living on the run made you preternaturally alert. “I was going to bring him a present,” he said, “but I don’t think that I had better deliver it. Do you?”

“You found the—”

“Yes,” he said, cutting her off. “I did indeed. Don’t ask me anymore.”

“We read about Las Vegas in the newspapers,” she said. “He didn’t think you’d make it but I did. I thought you would all the time. He thought that you’d go through it alive but no one would ever find—”

“Please,” he said, cutting her off again. “Enough. Don’t mention it. What hospital is he in?”

She told him quickly, adding the room number. “It’s a private,” she said, “and because he’s on critical they allow him visitors around the clock but he’s not really critical anymore. They just do that so I can get in when I want. Do you think you’ll call him?”

“I think I’ll do just that,” Wulff said. The valise was an unpleasant weight against his left knee, indelicately he raised it, opening up a few inches of space. It was tough to live with a valise, he decided. It was tough to live with anything that was not a piece of yourself yet had to be treated as if it were. Old lechers with showgirls would know all about that he supposed. “After all, I need further instructions.”

“No you don’t.”

“But I do,” Wulff said, “I thought we settled that weeks ago. I’m just the tool. David directs me.”

“David is a sick man,” his wife said sharply. “He got knifed on the street and a few inches difference, it would have gone the other way. I don’t think he’s going back to active duty for the rest of his life and I’m going to try and talk him off the force.”

“It won’t work,” Wulff said, “you know that. I’m sure he’ll pull through.”

“Of course it won’t work,” she said, “but I’ve got to try, don’t I?”

“I guess you do,” Wulff said. “I guess we’ve all got to try.” And then he said goodbye and before the conversation could start to trace into any other channels he hung up the phone emphatically. He stared through the glass of the booth looking at the activity in the candystore. The circle had broken up into little consultative clumps. Now and then someone threw a stare into the booth although that shouldn’t have been; there were a whole bank of phones here and as far as he knew only one other of them was occupied when he had come in. They shouldn’t be looking inside to see if he was finished. On the other hand—

On the other hand he had had enough of this candy store. He had had enough of Rego Park Queens. For that matter, with the whole fucking city of New York. It had been a mistake to come back here. Why had he come back? Why—after all it had cost him to get that valise out of Vegas and Havana—had he brought it right back to this trap, this sewer of a city?

Because he had wanted to present it to Williams and shove it right up his ass, that was why. Show him the valise.

Enough, Wulff thought, enough, and stood abruptly, his head colliding with an overhead panel. He winced, reaching for the valise, ready to quit the booth, quit Rego Park, quit New York. He could call Williams another time, he just did not like the situation here, he needed space. As he opened the door of the booth a heavy man with a gun whose mouth looked as big as a manhole put a hand on his back and held Wulff in a tight embrace, gripping at him.

“All right,” he said and his voice in that confrontation was strange: soft, sweet, delicate; he could have been whispering to Wulff of the most intimate and tragic things. “That’s quite enough. Come out of there slowly and leave that fucking valise in there. We’ll take care of that our own way.”

It was strange to hear the word
fucking
coming hard in the center of all that softness. The inconsistency that made life so appealing, Wulff thought, that made menace the more explicit. He bent over and wedged against the heavy man, came out into the circle, keeping the valise within eyeshot, however.

Godamnit, he had gotten it out of Havana. He wasn’t going to lose it in Rego Park. They would have to kill him for it … They probably would, at that.

Williams lay in bed, hands behind his neck, painfully adjusting himself to take some weight from the bad side while the two cops guarding him murmured in the hallway, smoking illegally. He thought, it’s shit. The whole thing is shit. Wulff was right all the time and I was wrong. The system sucks.

The system that set me up with a mortgage and a uniform allowance and a legal gun (imagine giving an American black man a legal gun; he had thought that the humor implicit in that was worth the whole crap of the academy, just to know what they were going to hand him). It was teasing me all the time, that lousy cunt of a system was just sucking me in, moving me deeper and deeper, helping me to close my eyes as I worked my way into that cunt, and all the time you know what was waiting for me at the end of that tunnel? A shiv in the ribs, that was it. And almost an expenses-paid funeral with an honor guard. The mayor might have been there.

That was what the system had offered him.

Williams found himself thinking more and more about it these days. Lying in the bed, after the first few hours when he knew (even before the doctors) that he was surely going to live, had given him plenty of time to think. Now the system was no longer an abstraction, that neat figment he had batted around with Wulff in their sessions. No: he could see the system now and it was a cunt all right or if not that a beast, a concrete organism that sat over the swamp somewhere and set up the conditions: my swamp, my game, my rules, your ball. Your loss. He had believed in that beast, sweated and romped with it, chased it all the way into the sewer. And had come within six inches of being ripped off by it as casually as any fifteen-year-old Harlem junkie.

Except that the junkie wouldn’t even know that he had been ripped off; he would think of himself as a hustler who had lost. Whereas Williams—thanks to the coaching of the system: access to its facilities, its educational institutions, its media, the piddling little toys it offered with one palm—could at least identify what had happened to him. That was all. They had elevated him to that level of insight where he knew what was happening.

Wulff’s right, he thought then.

He’s right, he’s always been right, the son of a bitch. It doesn’t work. How can you change something from inside when the whole purpose of the thing bottling you up is to
keep
you there? Like the FBI. Federal Blackmail and Intelligence division,
that
was your FBI for you, a complicated information-retrieval and extortion business whose
only purpose
was to keep itself in existence. The FBI was no aberration, no example of breakdown whatsoever.
It was the system in miniature.
All of it shit and lies and here I lay, he thought, here I lay with a hole slashed across my ribs reaching like a hand toward my heart to prove it. I thought that all the time you could play it on the rules and make it work for you and
I
was the fool. Save a place in the palace, Huey, I’m coming to lay the bombs. The pain is just beginning because who’s going to lay bombs anywhere? I’m trapped, he thought. To get rid of the pain in the chest and what was coming was only to move it upwards where it could take rest, lay its confetti of anguish up to the brain. Pain in the brain, he thought, they’ve given me a pain in the brain and Wulff, you crazy, vigilante son of a bitch, you were right after all.

One of the cops, bored, came in from the hall and asked him how he was feeling. He knew damned well how Williams was feeling, this fat white sergeant who had been cruising in and out of the room for a week, his belly moving delicately in rhythm with his stride. This half-dead son of a bitch who was on stuff like surveillance detail and monitoring because something had happened to his own body or mind which made him incompetent for active duty, but the department was too cheap to give up and hand him full disability, take him out of his twenty-year misery. Don’t be that tough on him, Williams thought, it’s just another part of the system. But it was hard to look at the man let alone answer him in a civil way. “How do you think I am?” he said. “How does it look to you?”

The sergeant shrugged and said, “Just trying to make conversation, just trying to show a little interest, you don’t have to take out your troubles on
me
friend, I’m pulling duty here whether you like it or not,” and went back into the hall without saying anything else. So they have me labelled as a bad nigger, Williams thought. What it comes down to is that he looks and sees just another angry, hostile black lying in this bed.
Who the fuck do they think they are?
he was probably saying to his partner out there in the hall now, his partner also white and crippled up, a thinner man with the dull eyes and abstracted walk of a man probably carrying around a piece of steel in his head.
Beats me
, the steel plate would say,
all of these bastards are exactly the same, he probably thinks that we did it to him.
And on that note they would resume their sullen sodden stumbling in the hall. They had very little to do, it was just an obligatory sort of detail so that if someone came off the street to shoot him they might have a slightly more difficult time than otherwise, not that these two clowns would pose any kind of problem to a determined assassin.

But then, Williams thought, who the hell would bother to kill him? Even assuming that someone on the street had decided that he didn’t like Williams’ detail and wanted to make sure that Williams didn’t go around checking out methadone trade again, they didn’t have to kill him. He was finished. He had reached the end. His next detail if he got one would probably be to join the steel plate and the belly out in the hallways to guard another fool. And if the purpose of the assassin was to make him suffer further …

Well who needed to shoot him for
that?
He was in hell, Williams thought. It had all blown up on him now. He understood everything, he accepted nothing; everything that he had believed had been gutted out. He would never be the same again. Wasn’t that as good a definition of death as any?

He heard steps in the hallway that sounded like his wife’s and lay back, closed his eyes, breathed regularly, imitated sleep. He would make her think she woke him up. Yes. He would make her think that he had been lying here resting, relaxing, all of the pain purged and that none of this was happening to him. Because he did not know, he did not know, if he started to talk to her about all of this … if he could pull her through it. He knew that he could no longer navigate himself.

He simply did not believe a word of the shit anymore.