Lone Wolf # 14: Philadelphia Blowup Read online

  OTHER TITLES BY MIKE BARRY

  Lone Wolf #1: Night Raider

  Lone Wolf #2: Bay Prowler

  Lone Wolf #3: Boston Avenger

  Lone Wolf #4: Desert Stalker

  Lone Wolf #5: Havana Hit

  Lone Wolf #6: Chicago Slaughter

  Lone Wolf #7: Peruvian Nightmare

  Lone Wolf #8: Los Angeles Holocaust

  Lone Wolf #9: Miami Marauder

  Lone Wolf #10: Harlem Showdown

  Lone Wolf #11: Detroit Massacre

  Lone Wolf #12: Phoenix Inferno

  Lone Wolf #13: The Killing Run

  Lone Wolf #14: Philadelphia Blowup

  The Lone Wolf #14:

  Philadelphia Blowup

  Mike Barry

  a division of F+W Media, Inc.

  This Liddy, he’s some kind of a nut, isn’t he? … but he is strong. He is a strong man.

  —Richard M. Nixon

  Where am I going? I think I’ll go to the moon.

  —John D. Mitchell

  Kill the beasts, the pushers and the poisoners. Kill them all.

  —Burton Wulff

  Contents

  Prologue

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI

  XXVII

  Epilogue

  Also Available

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Well, he hadn’t killed the cop. That was something, anyway, Wulff thought, driving north—and driving fast—through the darkness. That was something in his behalf. Even though he might have to pay for it in some intricate fashion; even though the young state patrolman had only been stunned, and might at this moment have staggered back to his car, radioed in an alert … Still, Wulff had not killed him. He had stayed within the line of scruples which had been his from the very beginning. He was out to kill the pushers and the dealers and the users, not enforcement personnel. However corrupt or incompetent, they were, at least, on one side of the line while the vermin stalked the other. He had spared the cop. Even if they roadblocked him somewhere before the Delaware Memorial Bridge, cut him off and put him into custody without even a phone call, he would have that on his side. He had done nothing to the cop. Of course there was the matter of some five hundred other murders. One way or the o her they would get him. They would get him good.

  But that would be later, and was not something to think about now while he was still inside the Fairlane, sliding perilously on the turnpike with a hint of loss of control at seventy. But the wheel was in his hands; hands tight with the confidence that he would make it. He would make it. He would get through. He was going to Philadelphia with a sack full of shit in the trunk of the Fairlane that would lead him inexorably through the maze of connection and to the end of his quest. There was going to be a big meeting in Philadelphia. There was going to be one hell of a meeting in the first month of the bicentennial year, in the bicentennial city, and he was going to break it up. All of the drug dealers, of those who were left, that is to say, were going to be coming into Philadelphia, clustering in the virtual shadow of Independence Hall to celebrate the beginning of the third century of the country by cutting up the territory and getting a good start on the year two thousand.

  That much he had learned from Diaz in Mexico, who had yielded more specific details about identities, plans, and places of residence. But what they did not know—or maybe the dealers knew it by this time, but Wulff simply did not care—was that he would be there, too. And his explicit purpose was to make the end of the second century the end of their business in America. A far hope, perhaps even a crazed dream … But there were almost a thousand dead men who if once again given speech, could testify to the fact that Wulff had gone further with a crazed dream than any other man in the history of the law enforcement trade. By himself, he had almost destroyed the top echelons of the drug trade in America. Now he would move to the survivors. And then he would quit.

  There had to be an end sometime. Wulff was willing to be reasonable about it. You could clean them down to the ground and there would still be other vermin pouring from the crevices to take their place. You had to face that fact, face as it were the impermanence of all human effort … But, at this moment, he would settle. He would settle for one last terrible conflagration in Philadelphia which would eliminate the cunning survivors and then he would quit. It was enough. At first murder had been a business, then it had numbed him, but now it was becoming a pleasure. And the moment that it became sensual was the time to quit. One final confrontation and enough. He did not want to enjoy murder; murder was only a necessity. Oh, there was a thrill in it now and then. You could not deny the passion and delight in dealing with a Cicchini face-to-face, or dispatching a Carlin in a basement in Mexico City with a single shot. But it led nowhere. Breaking the borders of business did horrid things to the soul. Wulff was getting out.

  He drove the Fairlane north, blanking his mind as he had so many times before, turning out sensation, damping down the information filters so that little more than the knowledge of the road seeped through: the long, dank corridor of purpose through which he eased the stricken old car. In only a little while he would be in Philadelphia. He would meet Williams, they would confer together. Williams with the promised weaponry, and Wulff with the smack. They would decide what they were going to do, would figure out a plan of action. And then they would put it into practice. Just like in Los Angeles, the two of them: a tight team. It was something to look forward to. Everything at last was coming full circle. He pushed the Fairlane north. He hadn’t killed the cop. Whatever else they had against him they did not have that: he had refrained. He had spared the man. Although at the moment of levelling down on him the need to murder had clawed within him, and he had pushed it down with a kind of terror which would have burst to blood if he had only brained the man.

  I

  Williams made a quick pass at picking up some weaponry in Harlem, but it came to very little, and he finally decided to go to Philadelphia for the Independence Hall meet with Wulff empty-handed except for his service revolver and a rifle he had tucked away a long time ago for special use. The thing was that none of the sources that he had cultivated wanted to do business with him—of any kind. They all seemed to know that he was dealing with Wulff, even though he denied it, and they did not want to get involved with Wulff on any level at all. Father Justice had long since closed up his rectory and Brotherhood of the Soul Church with the altar in the storefront and the huge ordnance room in the back. But someone who knew Williams said that Father Justice had a friend named Rodney who worked in a pet shop near the George Washington Bridge, and it was from Rodney, among the singing parakeets and shivering dogs defecating in the cramped cold space of their cages, that Williams had gotten the final word. “Your man is crazy,” Rodney had said implacably, holding his cigar tightly while bending to swab some feces from a cage in which sat a cramped and unhappy dachshund. “I’m not going to get involved with that guy at all. I don’t know nothing about no weapons.”

  “It has nothing to do with my friend,” Williams said, and then caught himself and added, “I don’t even know who you mean by my friend, I have no friends. This is just business.”

  “No,” Rodney sa
id, and nodding soothingly at the dachshund, withdrew the rag, using his other hand to scratch the animal’s ears and setting off a small halo of dirt that sparkled in the deep fluorescence overhead, “I can give you no help at all.” He had a curiously ponderous speech which might have come from his position as contact man for some free-lance ordnance specialists. But then again, it might have come simply from working in the pet shop servicing tormented animals for too long.

  “I’m not coming as a cop, Rodney.”

  “That makes it even less promising. If you were coming that way I might listen to reason. We want to help the police all we can,” Rodney said. “We know that a lot of you boys are arming up with heavier stuff than service revolvers. But I wouldn’t believe you even if you said that you just wanted it private issue. I know who you’re working for. That man is crazy.” Rodney said, squeezing the rag in his left hand. “He is bad news.”

  “I have nothing to do with him.”

  “You had something to do with him. You had plenty—”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “No,” Rodney said. He walked away from the cage toward the stockroom at the rear of the store, Williams following. The clerk far in the front was trying to interest two stout old ladies in a singing finch. “Stay away from him,” Rodney said. “That’s my advice to you.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  The man turned toward him with sudden earnestness, and put his hands on Williams’s shoulders. “It was all right at the beginning,” he said. “Someone had to do some shaking, had to get the job started. There had to be a cold, desperate killer. But he’s reached the end of the line now. He’s just out of line. He’s going to do more damage than good, going to bring the whole fucking business down around him and then what? Instead of supply channels there will be ten thousand freelancers; every guy in Harlem will be hustling, looking to score. This way at least it’s restricted. Not everyone can think of moving in and making a mint. He’s gone too far now.”

  There was nothing to say. Sooner or later in this life you had to learn when a situation had broken for you; when it was no longer worth exploration. Williams had finally learned that somewhere along the line, probably in Los Angeles. “All right,” he said.

  “You know where he is?” Rodney said. “Turn him in.”

  “What?”

  “You trying to get stuff to him, and you got a location of some sort. Shit man, everyone knows you were working together. You can do Harlem the biggest favor anyone has done it in years; you can phone in his location and get him picked up. Because if he goes on any further he is going to blast Harlem wide open. He is going to be the end of Harlem. Do you think he’s doing us any favors? The hell he is! He’s just leading to a complete opening of the shit markets.”

  “I don’t follow that.”

  “Of course you do,” Rodney said. “Any fool can follow that line of reasoning and so can you, patrolman. At least the system that we’ve had all these years—as lousy as it’s been—has managed to control supply, limit it for its own profit. So if it was difficult getting hold of shit, if a habit was expensive, it made the thing a little less tempting. But you know what your man wants to do?” As Rodney pivoted in the back room and turned toward him, Williams became aware of a clinging, stinking odor of musk and animal droppings coming at him in slow waves, mixed sickeningly with what might have been odor from the man himself. But then it might have been only some interior corruption coming high and dense through his nostrils, intimations of his own body’s doom mixed with the yelping of hounds from the back. “I’ll tell you what he wants to do,” Rodney said. “He wants to give every man his own Jones, make every man’s monkey his pet,” and the man moved back into the stockroom with Williams pursuing, and then stopping when Rodney reached inside his shirt and took out a small pistol. Williams made it a small French model, a point fifteen caliber or something like that, but none the less deadly for all of it. “No,” Rodney said, “I won’t help you.”

  “You don’t have to pull a gun on me, do you?”

  “Some people don’t listen to words,” Rodney said. “Some people have to be demonstrated.” His face in the small light looked clotted, distract. “Some people have to see.”

  “I’m a police officer.”

  “You’re not coming here as a police officer.”

  “Put the gun away.”

  “You go,” Rodney said. He held the pistol tightly, his palm drooping over it, concealing it as it might the small breast of a woman. “I mean that now. I’m not here to help you.” A cocker spaniel behind him threw itself at the bars, screaming. Rodney turned, gave the cage a kick, and wheeled back on Williams. “It’s all over,” he said. “Your friend has no support here. Your friend has no support here at all. Harlem is no friend of the Lone Wolf.”

  “Put the gun away.”

  “Go on,” Rodney said, “you just go. Go and you don’t have to worry about the gun. I’m not here to draw on you, only to get you out of my place.”

  There was nothing to do. Williams knew it on every level. There was a time to make a stand and there was another when you had to accept the essential hopelessness of what you were up against, turn, cut your losses, and try to get out with some kind of self worth. It was the same feeling that he had had on 137th Street near the methadone center just before he had gotten knifed. There was nothing to be done. He should have left. But he had not left. Instead, he had continued his way down the block, looking for the sources who were peddling the methadone in the streets, and in the same way, he could not leave the pet shop now. It was stupid; at night there was a dull fire around his heart to remind him of that kind of stupidity, and there would be every night of his life. But he could not get away from it. “A fool,” he said to Rodney, “you’re a goddamned fool.”

  “Get out of here.”

  “This is the only guy in thirty years who has ever tried to help Harlem, who has taken on the job. Who the hell else did anything? The shit has been moving in for decades. Since nineteen sixty it’s been mainlined right in through 125th Street and who changed things? Who tried to bring it to its knees, until this one man came along?”

  “I won’t help him,” Rodney said. “I swab shit out of cages, I walk the dogs, I pop seeds in parakeets’ mouths. Get out of here,” he said, and with a convulsion in his hand showed Williams the revolver in a terrible silent rage. “Get out of here now or I’ll shoot you, you motherfucker. Had enough of people coming in, telling us how to live, telling us what’s right. Had enough of this white fucker deciding he’s going to clean out shit. Ever thought that the people here need shit, maybe? At least they could count on it regular if they scrambled for it. Now where are they? Out motherfucker,” Rodney said. “Get out of here.”

  Williams said, “All right. All right then.” There finally was a time to cut your losses; he saw that now. Even on 137th Street he had learned that only when the wickering knife had cut fast into his ribs, and he had felt with a gliding sensation that his life was beginning to run out. He could not stand up against Rodney. Then too there was the parallel feeling underneath this that the man might be right. He just might be right. Who was Wulff to decide how Harlem should live, what a man’s Jones should be? Who was Williams to decide on his own that Wulff should be armed up again so that he could destroy Philadelphia? Where did the judgments finally cease? When did you decide, at last, that people should simply be allowed to live their lives; that the processes which were the accumulation of those many lives should be allowed to go on at whatever seeming cost because the system, at least, paid?

  “Fuck it,” he said and turned quickly and walked down the corridor of the pet store toward the front. “Fuck it, I don’t give a damn.” And that was almost the truth, was as close to the truth as he was likely to get on this cold morning. The old ladies looked at him with blank eyes, then moved closer to the clerk. The clerk was balancing the parakeet on his finger now, his hand a hook inside the cage, talking
to the bird in a slow, patient voice. “Come on little baby,” the clerk was saying, “sing you mother you, hop,” and the old ladies giggled. Williams walked straight out and into the blank dazzling well of the street and hailed a cab to take him to the Port Authority terminal and straight toward Philadelphia. Weaponless. The hell with it. He would deliver unto Wulff his body and his blood; the steel would have to come from somewhere else. Of course there was his service revolver, but how far would that go at armageddon time?

  II

  Wulff had been a narcotics patrolman for several years in New York City until he had gotten sick of the whole swindle, the false arrests, the manipulation, the winking at the real purveyors, and had tried to bust an informant for flagrant possession. The lieutenant at the booking precinct had not taken too kindly to that and the evidence had mysteriously disappeared. The informant had gone back on the street after a two hour hold and Wulff had been busted back to patrol car duty while they tried to figure out what the hell to do with him. However he had taken a call about an unidentified young woman OD’d out in a single room occupancy tenement on West Ninety-third Street, and as a result of that call Wulff had solved the problem for the NYPD; he had quit and turned into a one-man army against the international drug trade. The unidentified girl had been his fiancée. She had been murdered, deliberately jacked in with heroin and abandoned. The fact that Wulff’s car had received the call appeared to have been pure, disastrous coincidence, but then you never knew.

  You never knew about anything in this business. Wulff was bound to try, however. He had been pretty damned fed up with the drug dealers even before he had found Marie dead; far before he had busted the informant, and, in fact, far before he had been on narco. But Marie’s death sealed it for him. It was one-way now and to the end—whatever the cost. They had killed the feeling part of him on West Ninety-third Street, but the functioning part had been left alone. He had been a combat infantryman in Vietnam for two years in the mid nineteen sixties when it was just starting to get difficult there; he had a pretty good sense of how to fight a war. He went out to fight it.