Tunnel of Night (17 page)

I continued to gaze out at the city, at the crazy collections of lights blurred by the rain. As frightening and ominous as Wolf’s gift was, it had also triggered a strange sense of resolve.

I moved closer to the window, touched the pane of glass with my fingertips, and tried to feel the drops of rain.

LATER, AFTER SAYING GOOD NIGHT TO MY DAUGHTER
, I slipped out for the evening.

I was restless, and I had some business to attend to. I also wanted to explore the city, to visit those parts of D.C that would be most hospitable to someone who needs to preserve his anonymity. I knew that Wolf would not hang out in any part of the capital where the paparazzi did, and that eliminated a good portion of the city. He was on a mission; he couldn’t afford to be caught in a casual photo that turned up on the front page of the
Blade
.

A gray sedan—my federal escort, I surmised—was parked on the opposite side of Pennsylvania Avenue, thirty yards north of the Willard’s entrance. I walked over and tapped on the window. It slid down, revealing two thirty-something white men in matching tan suits. The one on the passenger side was Special Agent Rex-ford Landry.

“If John Wolf is dead,” I said, “why are you following me?”

The driver stared at me, then hit a button and the tinted window closed. I felt like putting my fist through it.

My first chore, then, would be to dump the feds, and for that I needed a well-situated, but seedy public bathroom with a window on an alley I’d had twenty years to master my defenestration techniques, and they had never failed me. My favorite “emergency exit”—in Neil’s Beer Garden—had been demolished when Boston built its government center. Poor trade, if you ask me.

A half hour later, I sipped a beer at Jewell Howard’s, a bar that my nephew, Lymann Murr, had recommended if I was ever in D.C. The bouncer, Oscar Bell, a tall, muscular black man, had played drums in one of Lymann’s short-lived reggae bands. We had met only once, when I was in New York visiting Lane, but Oscar remembered me.

When I walked in, he nodded, cracked what passed for a smile, and said, “Lymann’s uncle.”

“You have a good memory.”

“After we met, Lymann told me all about you.” He grinned. “I don’t like bad guys either.”

Oscar got paid to make sure that violence didn’t happen, or if it did, that it didn’t erupt in Jewell’s. Because of his massive size, he was well qualified for the job.

With the advent of Uzi-toting gangs in the city, Oscar’s job had gotten complicated. If he had red headbands in the bar, no blues got in. When the blues caught an early table, the reds had to walk down the block to another bar.

It was Nina Simone night in Jewell’s—nothing but Nina on the cranked-up jukebox, and drafts at half price.

“I have a couple of feds following me,” I said, handing him a twenty and explaining what I had in mind.

“The feds will pay the cover,” Oscar said. “They never drink. They don’t even loosen their neckties. They come in here and they fuck up the mood.”

I sat at the bar, sipped my beer, and watched as Oscar collected a five from each of the agents. Landry remained near the front door. His partner stood at the side exit.

I tapped my fingers to Nina doing “Black Swan.”

Each time that Landry glanced in my direction, he found me staring at him. It was a conditioned response for him to look my way less often. I wasn’t supposed to see him. People do have a bit of the ostrich in them. When he was taking as long as thirty seconds between glances, I slipped off the stool and headed for the bathroom.

I opened the window in the small, dingy room, climbed through, and moved into the darkness next to Jewell’s Dumpster. I heard noise in the bathroom behind me, pulled my nine-millimeter, and stepped back to the window.

Landry was sprawled on the pissy linoleum floor. Oscar stood over him.

“Man slipped,” Oscar said, smiling his cracked smile. “Hit his head on the sink, I guess.”

So much for losing the feds, I chuckled.

I nodded, then walked back through the alley’s darkness.

AS I WANDERED THE CITY STREETS THROUGH A
steady, light rain, I struggled with the uncompromising feeling that I was lost in an urban wasteland. I passed housing projects, liquor stores, burned-out wrecks of cars, buildings that housed whores, Tarot readers, and
the Church of the Laughing God. This dismal land came with its own soundtrack—the soprano wail of sirens, the thrumming bass of a police helicopter, the staccato burst of an automatic weapon somewhere in the city’s maze of dark corridors.

This was a territory where Wolf could disappear. I teased myself with the notion that I was bait, that Wolf was following me, that I was accomplishing something. I pictured him stepping out of the shadows, saw myself raise my weapon and drop him with a single shot.

It was delusion.

All I was doing was traveling through a long, dark tunnel, its walls decorated with snapshots of the scarred remains of a land more destroyed than Dresden after the bombing. But I was certain my travels were preordained.

This city was the center of power for the entire world. The perfect place to bring to its knees. But how?

At an intersection, I saw a pile of burning debris in the middle of the road. There were mattresses, a broken banister, pieces of furniture—all smoldering. Sparks shot up, but the light rain muted the prospect of any conflagration, instead, blinding smoke billowed out from the makeshift inferno.

Two uniformed officers and five civilians stood there. I joined the group, my eyes watering, nearly blinded.

A third cop arrived. “Tactical’s on their way,” she said. “Who’s out there?”

“Neighborhood guy. He’s wasted. Killed his girlfriend, and now he’s got her three-year-old daughter with him. We’ve got to move these people back.”

Rain matted my hair, running in rivers beneath my shirt collar.

“Tactical wants to know what he’s got for weapons,” the officer said.

There was no response. I felt a slight breeze begin to move the late summer air as I strained to see beyond the group of cops. A small, barefoot child in pink pants and a white shirt stepped out of the smoke. She had her thumb stuck in her mouth, and grasped a rag doll shaped like an owl. The female officer rushed over, knelt, and said, “You okay, honey?”

The little girl yanked out her thumb. “Billy in the smoke,” she said.

At that instant, I heard a savage roar—like a wounded animal—as a small, slender black man wielding a kitchen knife ran from the smoke directly at the cop kneeling with the child. Reflexively, my hand went to my gun.

A woman threw herself over the front end of a parked car. Two men dropped to the wet pavement.

One of the cops had much faster reflexes than I. His nine-millimeter exploded, and the running man smashed to the asphalt, his blood—briefly red in the firelight, then blue, and finally black—flowed into the pools of water.

If there had been any hesitation, the outcome would have been different.

The little girl had her fingers plugged in her ears.

“C’mon,” the officer said, picking up the girl and her doll.

“Billy didn’t make chicken noodle,” she said. “Mama said what Billy made had okra in it. Mama’s ’lergic to okra, so she went to heaven.”

Each member of the small crowd had an opinion on why Billy “snapped.”

“He was dead in his head from that crack,” one said.

“He couldn’t find no work,” another contributed.

“That woman didn’t want Billy ’round there.”

“Why he damn near kill the baby?”

“What was his last name? Billy what?”

The last speaker’s question was the answer. Billy had no recognition. These were neighborhood people, and they didn’t know who he was. He lived among them, but he was a nobody. The man had been powerless. Just another crackhead.

In the end, Billy had settled for “suicide by cop.”

I turned away from the D.C smoke and the slowly growing crowd, and watched as a black Lincoln pulled to the curb.

WHEN WE WERE COLLEGE ROOMMATES, HARRY
Storrs had no intention of entering politics. He had majored in comparative literature, toyed with joining SDS, and, along with hundreds of others, hurled unflattering epithets at then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, until the Cambridge cops turned their dogs loose on the demonstrators. The Dobermans and shepherds had sent us scurrying up the trees along the Charles River. We chanted, “Dogs need trees.”

Now, in the rear seat of his Lincoln, Senator Harry Storrs handed me a bottle of microbrewed ale from his home state. He popped the cap off another for himself.

“What was the commotion back there?” he asked.

“Neighborhood guy killed his girlfriend and was going to kill her daughter. The cops got him first.”

Harry lowered his bottle and stared at me. “You saw that?”

“I saw a skilled police officer kill a ‘Billy’ with no last name before Billy had a chance to hurt a child or another cop who was crouched next to the child.”

“Jesus Christ.”

I had seen the expression on Billy’s face as he emerged from the smoke. Rage. “Every person he could reach was going to die. No work, a crack habit, domestic problems. He had to dig himself out. This was his chance to taste power, to tell the world to go fuck itself. I think he believed that if he created an intolerable horror, people would stop dead in their tracks and notice him. It was his justice, his way of bringing down the shithouse.”

Harry shook his head. “Neighborhoods like these are bad for your health,” he said, raising his bottle and drinking.

“Do something about it.”

“That’s up to Marion Barry. My constituents are concerned about farm subsidies. They don’t give a shit whether there’s any toilet paper in the District Building. How’s Savvy?”

“She’s fine, as far as I know. I had a card about six months ago. Vera?”

He laughed. “I think I see her about as often as you see Savvy. Ever think we might’ve planned it that way? You’re the shrink, Lucas.”

“What’s going on with the Willoughby investigation?”

He shook his head. “You never did play enough. The FBI will be back on your doorstep. The Bureau’s had a rough couple of years. The Olympics thing didn’t help. The problems with the lab. Now this. Publicity goes down the tubes. Morale suffers. Then, of course, funding becomes a problem. They don’t have anything in this Wolf matter. Is that his name?”

I nodded.

“Nothing. They’re running a routine investigation on the agent’s death. Intensive, but routine, and no wolves. You think he’d be in a neighborhood like this?”

“I do. He’d blend in here.”

Storrs drank again from his ale, and I watched as his head went back—the mane of white hair, the familiar profile.

“What do you think of this ale?” he asked.

“It’s almost an India pale,” I said.

“Not bad, though, huh?”

I smiled at my old college friend. “For something they ship to the legions in a foreign land, it’s excellent.”

He laughed, then looked at his bottle. “You prick. You’re right.”

“Too bitter,” I said. “What else do they make?”

“I don’t know. I’d rather drink bourbon anyway. I read about that business last year, Lucas. I thought you were finished with this crime stuff.”

“Wolf killed a friend of mine. He almost got me. But that isn’t all of it.”

“You can’t leave it alone, can you?”

“Could you walk away from politics?”

He laughed. “They’ll carry me away.”

I sighed. “I’m starting to feel the same way. Maybe I can’t quit.”

THE SENATOR’S DRIVER DROPPED ME AT THE
Willard.

I sat in my darkened room, smoking a cigarette, running my fingers over the brass phoenix. I had picked up the cigarettes at Jewell’s. I was pissed off. It was that simple. Even after six years, smoking was an easy habit to fall back into, and it was comforting.

I tossed the brass figure of the phoenix onto the foot of the bed. Wolf was inside my head. We were going to play mind games.

As I watched the smoke circle toward the ceiling, I drifted back to that Christmas Day in the seventies, when Ray Bolton arrested Jeremy Stoneham for the murder of Cora Riordan. Late that night I sat in my study and scribbled a note to Ray.

This killer is pure predator, a brilliant one, unlike anyone we have encountered. He is Stoneham’s “wolfman.” He spoke to Jeremy, whispered in his ear. The voice that young man heard is real
.

I grabbed the brass phoenix from the bed.

When you want to deliver a message, nobody can stop you, lad, can they? You don’t guess at anything. You reason everything through, then skate around the edges, soften us up, and have one hell of a good time for yourself
.

I stubbed out my cigarette, walked to the window, and gazed into the distance.

“Whisper in my ears, lad,” I muttered. “Talk to me. Tell me how you got Dexter Willoughby, an FBI agent, to walk into your arms.”

AFTER LEAVING MY GIFT FOR DR. FRANK, I WENT
prowling. I had work to do.

I found a gray van with white magnetic signs stuck to both doors: Valley Carpet. It was parked at the end of an alley off lower Pennsylvania Avenue.