Lone Wolf #6: Chicago Slaughter 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 #6:

  Chicago Slaughter

  Mike Barry

  a division of F+W Media, Inc.

  Fix the pusher … by dialing the drug hotline at any time, night or day, in complete confidence, by giving any information you may have on the pusher: name, habits, whereabouts … you can, in safety, help the government to help you. Let’s fix the pusher … let’s put him in jail.

  —Newspaper display ad

  So some clown is going to call up the hotline, give the name of the guy who he thinks is running around with his girl or who he owes a hundred bucks to; some clown is going to call the hotline and get the feds on his neighbor because he doesn’t like his looks. How long is that going to last? Either the feds are going to put everyone into jail or they’re going to give up. A little bit of both, knowing their track record.

  There’s only one way to fix the pusher and make it stick. It’s an old message and where it lands, comes out blood.

  —Burt Wulff

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Also Available

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  Methadone stinks, David Williams thought.

  Methadone stinks; it was supposed to be the promised land for drug control but it’s just turned out to be another kind of hustle. Methadone was supposed to block the need for heroin in the system, remove the obsessive grinding search for a fix that was the core of the addict’s existence, but actually it did nothing of the sort. It did not take the user off drugs and turn him into a non-addict but only pushed him in another direction. Methadone produced a high of its own, not the free-floating condition of heroin but a lower, steadier buzz and he had heard professionals say that in its own way methadone did not have to take a back seat to the big H at all; that you could do very nicely with methadone, it would get you off in a different way for about the same period of time. And with methadone you had a license, illegality being the big H’s only drawback.

  You traded in one form of addiction for another; the same principles were in effect, Williams thought. Also the same people and methods. If you could peddle heroin then you could sell methadone; if you could build up a profit-and-barter system on smack than methadone which was more freely available, distributed by the government itself, was even easier to push into the flow. Who was kidding who? Methadone was getting pushed into the street just as H was; the margin wasn’t as high but the work was steadier and less dangerous. And, he thought, the methadone high was nothing to look down on. It wasn’t an H high but on the other hand it was considerably better than no high at all.

  It was the same corruption and stupidity that had always been, Williams thought as he brought the car to a stop a block away from the methadone center in East Harlem, yanked up the emergency brake and then, leaving the doors unlocked—shit, it was New York City PD property, this unmarked 1971 Plymouth; the junkies could only do them a favor by taking it—got out of the car and worked his way east. Plainclothes duty; check out the traffic around the methadone center. Maybe try to locate a known dealer or two by face and bring them in. Meth, heroin, it was all the same. It was a hustle; the same actors, the same format with a new deck of cards switched in. A stacked deck, of course. Williams supposed that he didn’t mind.

  Hell, why should he mind? He was going to draw his fourteen grand per plus pension, plus health benefits, plus this and that for the full twenty, no matter what he did. If they wanted to send him up to Harlem to check out methadone that was okay; if they wanted him to sit on his ass in property and shuffle papers around he would do that too. Putting in the time, making the time: he had eighteen years and two months to go and if it wasn’t bad time it was good time … the Army philosophy.

  He moved quickly on 137th toward Lenox, checking without seeing, absorbing without thinking. Street technique. You picked it if nothing else up fast. Everythinglooked as it always had; junkies littering the stoops, a couple of kids playing hookey scooting through alleys kicking garbage cans, sanitation workers in the middle of the block holding beer cans and bitching while the truck stood idling, doors open. They were working out their twenty, too. Everybody was on the twenty.

  Shit, Williams thought, it doesn’t matter to me. If they want me to check out meth I’ll check it out, if they want me to deal for a little smack just show me the way; I’m just working here. I didn’t make this situation, I hold no responsibility for it and it’s going to be the same after I leave. Except worse. Short of dealing myself or ripping off graft I’ll do anything necessary to take me through the twenty. I don’t really believe that, he thought.

  Talk of hustling, he was hustling himself. It all hurt too much, that was the point; it hurt too much for an honest, feeling man to take, doubly so if he were a black man, and if you didn’t build up that armor you were wiped out. It was something that either came with your first month out on the street or sent you right off the force. Williams allowed himself to look at the intersection of 137th and Lenox for just one moment with eyes that were not shrouded by attitude and the impact of the scene. The litter, the waste, the small, nervous pool of activity radiating from a filthy storefront made him sick. He had to draw down the shroud of detachment quickly, otherwise he might have stumbled on the pavement, collided with something. It was that bad. All right then, it was that bad.

  You had to seal off. Unless you were Wulff. Unless you were that crazy bastard Wulff, and Williams thought abstractedly of the man for an instant—his ex-partner, ex-cop, ex-narc, ex-combat veteran, ex-career man, ex-everything in the whole godamned world who was going to clean up the international drug-trade singlehandedly because he thought they had done something nasty to him once. Wulff was crazy, he believed in this holy war shit, he really thought that you could make a difference. And Williams could have laughed, but then he thought of what Wulff had been able to accomplish in just a couple of months of single-handed action and he was not so sure. He was not so sure at all. Moving out on his own he certainly had done more damage than a hundred agencies had in twenty years. “Watch where the fuck you going man,” someone said.

  Williams looked up. The man in front of him was a little younger, make him in his twenties, a cigarette coming out of one corner of his mouth, down to the butt end. The man must have been in an alleyway; he certainly had not been there just a few seconds before. Williams had that much faith in his reconnaissance even though all of it was subconscious. “Who you think you are, anyway?” the man said.

  Williams stopped
and looked at him. If the man was setting him up for an attack of some kind he was far gone because Williams had to outweigh him by thirty pounds or so—to say nothing of the gun that he carried inconspicuously. He looked at the man’s eyes which were rolling slightly, then levelled out as they stared at Williams. Probably a junkie. You couldn’t be sure, though. Half of New York had that rolling, spaced out look. If you went by the stare, there would be two million people in Nelson’s fancy lockup.

  “Excuse me,” he said and extended an arm to brush by the man. Damn NYPD procedure anyway. Men in plainclothes were required to maintain a certain standard of dress and decency at all times unless they were on an infiltration squad. He would have attracted a hell of a lot less notice if they had let him go out on the street in the clothing that the rest of them wore, but no. No, the NYPD procedures panel was having none of it. Plainclothes but he had to wear a white shirt and suit jacket. Lucky they had not thought of a tie or that would have been included, too. He reached the arm out in a blocking gesture to bring the man to his side, uncovering the pavement so he could walk through. Elementary crowd technique. But the man did not come up into his arm and instead ducked under it. Now he was to Williams’ side.

  “Just hold it up there, dude,” he said, “I want to talk with you a bit.”

  Williams stopped. The situation was getting trickier. On the corner a clump of them—dealers and customers, narcs and informers, for all he knew—were looking at him fixedly. Motion itself seemed to have stopped on the street. An incident, then, anything to break the monotony. Some outsider getting himself ripped off. He was probably the only man on the street who was not immediately identifiable. Thank the NYPD for that too … sending out an observer cold without infiltrating the neighborhood, making him dress in white shirt and jacket. Bright, that was very bright. “What the fuck you doing around here?” the man said. He reached into his pocket and took out a small knife, pointed it at Williams. “You a tourist at the freak show or a fucking narco?”

  Crazy. It was getting crazy. Williams had the vague feeling of unreality of the dreamer. This could not possibly be happening to him; it was the kind of routine mugging that might occur to the outsider he was pretending to be but not to him. Not to David Williams. Particularly not to David Williams who understood the situation as no one else did and who played carefully and with the system. No one was going to take him off. Impossible. He reached inside for his gun.

  “Look here,” he said, “I’m an—” And would have gone on to point out that he was a New York police officer who was going to take this man in for assault, lay it out to him simple and clear, see the widening fear in the assailant’s eyes as he realized who he had had the profound ill luck to take off. He had it all plotted out in mind, in fact, knew what his moves would be leading up to using the gun to get clear to a callbox and summoning a patrol car … but the assailant short-circuited him. Williams felt something like a pinprick in the area of his ribs, a small, neat incision of pain, then the pain began to spread, opening up like a flower and he felt the petals of hurt beginning to work through him.

  “Son of a bitch,” the assailant said, “son of a bitch narco.” So he did know after all but this was doing Williams no good. The man in fact had moved into fury. “You dirty bastard,” he said, “doing this to your own people,” and Williams was still trying to get his gun out—should be simple, one motion and out, but it had hooked inside on a coil of thread in his jacket, either that or something had happened to him to make him weak. He felt a strange disinclination to struggle further for the gun; leave it stay where it was, it was hopeless anyway. Never get it out. He felt the pain moving upward now, toward his neck. Funny: funny thing about that, water seeks its level going downward but pain moves up. “Son of a bitch,” the man with the knife said, “dirty, fucking cocksucker,” angry, he was really angry and Williams reached out a hand to tell him to cut it out, it was ridiculous, this was no way to solve the problem and in any event he was an armed police officer who in just a few seconds was going to take out his gun and kill the man. Just a few seconds. In just a few seconds he would go for the gun; now he was still meditating the best way to do it. The sidewalk hit him on the left side of the jaw and dreamily he punched back at the concrete. Unwarranted attack. Assaulted by a sidewalk. This was quite funny; he felt himself beginning to giggle. “Son of a bitch,” someone said to him again as if from a far distance but he did not care this time to find out who was saying it. They were all the same, all of them far away at 137th Street and Lenox whereas he, David Williams, was comfortably settled in St. Albans, Queens, in his mortgaged house where the system was taking care of him. He had a sensation not of falling but of rising. Funny. Strange how it worked out that way. Well, maybe death was upward-mobile too.

  Chapter 1

  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.