Lone Wolf #9: Miami Marauder Read online

  This was not the kind of man you put on narco, which was a fun trip, but PD had thought they were doing Wulff a favor anyway. Narco was a pleasure in those days: hang around a little in the bars, groove on the Harlem scenery, work with the informers who were all on drugs themselves so that you could work a cheap tip, haul in some hapless junkie to build up the arrest record … and if things ever really got hot, which they did periodically with a change of commissioner or a newspaper stink, get an informer himself to take the rap. Bring in five or six of them at once, forty guys bringing in their five or six informers meant two hundred and fifty narcotics arrests which they could announce to the Post the next day … and if the arrests were all dropped for lack of evidence, if the informers were back on the street the day after tomorrow laughing, giggling, shooting up … well, it was all in the game, wasn’t it? That was what it was: a rich, joyous New York game. Everyone had a ball and narco paid fourteen thousand a year at the bottom with a good expense allowance. The department could do no less for its one, authentic Vietnam combat veteran.

  Could it now? The department in its wisdom apportioned to all as they deserved or so the department thought. The trouble was that Wulff wouldn’t play right.

  He had fallen into a soft spot but the damned fool didn’t know when he was well off. He had had to start taking the job seriously, referring back to what he had come to understand in the Nam. So naturally hell was going to break loose, although in Wulff’s case it took three years. Three years during which he went through the motions with increasing rage and disgust … until, finally, it all got to be too much for him. A sneering informant in a bar taunted him just one inch too many past the line, drove Wulff into a blind if transitory rage, and Wulff busted the informant for possession, the shit literally dangling out of his pockets, brought him down to the local precinct in the collar, stood willing to make out all the forms, labor through all the procedures just once to make something stick and had the informant taken from him by a very hostile desk sergeant who told Wulff that this was a precinct matter, not a narco, and he better park his ass in a separate room while they worked this out.

  He paced that room for an hour, working out his case, all the angles of it, getting it cold and then the lieutenant came in. The minute Wulff saw the expression on the man’s face he knew that he had been a fool: he should have carried the heroin down to the headquarters building himself. The lieutenant said that the informant was clean as a whistle, there wasn’t a thing on him, and as far as the shit which Wulff was willing to swear to, there was no case without evidence. All that they were facing right now was a false arrest charge. The lieutenant said that he was pretty damned pissed off and so was Wulff’s commander who had been hauled out of bed to hear about this one.

  He should have expected nothing else, of course. In fact, he really had not: looking back on it not too much later Wulff could see that he had probably stepped into this coldly, deliberately because he could not take narco any longer. There were ways and ways all right, ways of doing anything you got your head into, ways of doing things that you could not consciously resolve to do. Busting an informant was a hell of a good way to get off narco. Informants made the thing run.

  So he found himself the next night in a patrol car, riding shotgun to a twenty-four-year-old black rookie named David Williams, picking up a squeal about an od’d girl in a tenement on West 93rd Street. Shotgun had to take calls like this, the driver had certain prerogatives, and so Wulff, thirty-two years old, ten years senior to the rookie (they had credited his Vietnam time as full service for pension and seniority: wasn’t that nice of them?) had been the one to labor up five flights of stairs to find a dead girl lying in the middle of a furnished room, her eyes bombed out, her body waxen. It looked like heroin overdose for sure.

  The girl was named Marie Calvante and Wulff knew all about her. There was every reason why he should; he had been seeing a lot of this girl for almost a year now. They were supposed to be getting married soon. They had even put down a deposit on the apartment in Forest Hills.

  So seeing his fiancée lying od’d out five flights up in a filthy, stinking hole of a tenement was calculated to get Wulff pretty mad. It was the kind of thing which could upset a man, even a combat veteran, even an ex-narco. What he went through for the next five minutes he was never quite able to remember, but when he came out of it Williams was standing next to him in the stinking room, pain and wonder on his young face, and Wulff was very calmly ripping his ID card to shreds under the plastic, taking off his badge. “Fuck it,” Wulff said, “that’s it; I quit.” It seemed to be the best speech that he could make at that moment. He left Williams, although not for the last time, walked down the stairs, out the door, past the idling patrol car, a couple of kids playing on the hood, threw what was in his hand in the wastebasket at the corner and took the subway home. He never got around to filing the papers.

  At that point his Odyssey began.

  The conviction formed in Vietnam, flickering away through his years on narco, raised and welded through years of revulsion, had finally come through him like a knife-point: now with the girl named Marie Calvante dead there was nothing to hold him back. He was a dead man anyway. They had killed him; what had been a man named Burton Wulff was mostly left in that room on West 93rd Street. The heart of him was, anyway; only the functioning part was left.

  So he went out to destroy the international drug trade.

  Why not? It was time someone went out to do it and the ambition, as crazy and hopeless as it seemed, at least had nobility. Fail richly. He would take a few of them down with him anyway; the poison, the scum in their five-hundred dollar suits and Eldorados who sat behind the walls and laughed while the cities thrashed and died … he would let them know he was around, anyway. They would pay, they would pay for killing him.

  It took him only three months and eight ports of call to send the message.

  He blew up a townhouse in Manhattan and killed a major operator and his staff, assassinated another. In San Francisco he tracked a shipment and blew up the freighter carrying it: three hundred lost. In Boston he destroyed the fabric of the northeast network, bombing out an estate. Las Vegas, Havana, Chicago were next on the list. He was doing fine. Williams, the rookie, had connections to the informant and black revolutionary network and was turning into a hell of a supplier; a girl named Tamara whom he had met and pulled out of a speed-jag in San Francisco had proven to him that he could still function as a man when he cared to. Then, in Chicago, he finally ran into something first-rate, a major-leaguer named Calabrese who was in his early seventies and lived in a mansion on Lake Michigan. Calabrese almost killed him.

  Calabrese could have killed him, but for some reason found it more interesting to ship Wulff to Peru instead; he said that having Wulff around excited him. It was a decision that Calabrese came to regret but Wulff regretted it too, began in the jungles of Peru and struggling out of them to wonder if you could live for any sustained period of time on the margin as he was, and not begin to actually look for a way out. Calabrese was putting the pressure on.

  But he came out of Peru with a couple million dollars worth of shit from a dead ex-Nazi, an interception of a shipment that Calabrese had worked on, and he went on to Los Angeles where he called Williams for reinforcements. By that time, Williams, a system-believer with a pregnant wife and a neat little plot out in St. Albans, Queens, was about ready to join him. Williams was not so sure about working within the system any more. He had taken a knife in the gut casing out a methadone trade on 137th Street and he had had a good amount of time to lie in a hospital bed and consider exactly where the system wanted to put a black man who was trying to get his. In a grave, he decided. Williams left his wife and ran out a stockade full of munitions to a trailer court in Los Angeles as Wulff prepared his war of vengeance against Calabrese. Meanwhile, Tamara walked in and walked out on him, saying that he was crazy: she couldn’t live this way. Where did he ever get an idea like that?

&n
bsp; But everything fell apart in Los Angeles; first he and Williams went at each other’s throats and then in the middle of that Calabrese’s troops, getting wind of their location, moved in, and they had had to fight desperately, blowing up the court, to get free. It was then, in the wreckage, that Wulff had understood that he and Williams could not possibly go on together; he had started his quest alone, the last act was coming with the kill of Calabrese, he would have to end it alone. “Go home,” he had told Williams, “go home, you still have a chance to stay in the system, I’m out of it. Go back to your wife, get back into the PD, you were right, I was wrong. I’d get back if I could go inside but I’m a dead man,” and Williams had listened, had taken the munitions in the U-haul back east while Wulff waited for the all-clear so that he could move onto Chicago—

  —Except that he hadn’t heard from Williams in two days saying that he had gotten through and then Wulff knew that what he had feared had happened; they had gotten the man. Somehow Calabrese had found him, traced him, nailed him to the ground and put him under wraps. Which meant that Wulff was not only alone with a war of vengeance, he had the responsibility for Williams as well. He had gotten the man into this. He had to get him out. Nothing was Williams’s fault, everything was Wulff’s.

  So, carrying nothing but a big sackful of heroin and a few hundred dollars, Wulff had grabbed a hitch on the outskirts of Los Angeles and was now heading toward Chicago. With plans, of course, to ascertain that Williams was alive before he took the last and biggest risk.

  It was a hell of a situation but Wulff had one comfort. It was coming toward a conclusion now. He could feel it. Win or lose; all the chips were riding on Calabrese.

  If he could kill this one, he thought, he could break the trade. And if he could not, then the answer was that he had never been big enough to do it, no man could do it, it could not be beaten, it was insanity to think that one man no matter how skilled, angry, lucky could make a dent—

  —But, oh Jesus, had he tried.

  3

  About an hour later, somewhere on Route 80, a small sedan, a Chevelle probably, passed them on the left moving fast and erratically, then swung into the lane in front of them so abruptly that the driver, screaming, pumping the air brakes was just barely able to back off and clear the rear bumper as the car, accelerating wildly then, went flat out ahead of them, moving at a hundred miles an hour Wulff estimated. Shaking, reaching out to grip the sack, his thought had been Calabrese, Calabrese had somehow tracked him but the surge of panic from the near-impact had wiped his mind clear, leaving him oddly empty in the aftermath and purged of that kind of fear. He knew that it could not have been Calabrese. No, it was only some lunatic, using Nevada for a playground.

  “You all right?” the driver said, struggling with the gears, getting the van up to fifty again. Wulff looked down at his palm which was bloody; he had not realized it but he had hit the dash hard, bracing himself and he must have been cut. He wiped the blood away leaving a little residue, just a scratch. “Son of a bitch,” the driver said.

  “I’m all right,” Wulff said, looking down the windshield, down the long flat line of highway now empty again.

  “That’s what you put up with,” the driver said. He seemed oddly abstracted now, not really in the cab at all. “The last fucking frontier, that’s what this is.”

  “The frontier is dead.”

  “Not here it isn’t,” the driver said, “this is what it all comes down to.” He had relaxed into the rhythm of the gears again, shifting the stick rhythmically, faint music purring out of the stereo as they got back to an even sixty. “Open season, shit, anything goes here.” He looked sidelong at Wulff. “You’re no ordinary hitch,” he said.

  “No, I guess I’m not.”

  “You didn’t hitch because you’re out of money. You had another reason.”

  “Something like that,” Wulff said. He settled back into the shiny, porous surface of the seat. The driver was all right, he had nothing against him at all, but he did not want to talk. So far the ride had been fine; aimless and quiet, they had not even talked about the waitress. Now, two hundred miles out of there, if the driver could keep up the pace, he could see Chicago by dawn and he wanted to sleep his way there. “It doesn’t matter though,” he said, “the important thing is to get there.”

  “Get to Chicago?”

  “Something like that,” Wulff said.

  “You got business in Chicago?”

  “You could call it that. You could call it that,” Wulff said, wondering how he was going to handle this, how he could stay out of contact with the driver without insulting what was after all a free ride. “More or less, I suppose.”

  “Has it got to do with that sack?”

  “What’s that?” Wulff said. The driver was looking at him now with an oafish smile. “What sack?”

  “That thing,” the driver said. “You haven’t let it out of your sight thirty seconds since you got in the cab. Except at the diner. It all has to do with that sack, doesn’t it?” and Wulff was turning toward him, trying to frame something which would both get the driver off his back and put the sack out of the question, wondering if he was heading into a confrontation of some sort when the driver saw something down the road. “Holy shit,” he said, pointing, and Wulff followed the line of sight along the windshield. Something about half a mile ahead of them, maybe fifty yards off the straight, flat road was burning in a field. The flames were arcing upwards ten to twenty feet; even through the air conditioning, Wulff could smell it. The driver was already working on the brakes again.

  “The Chevelle,” the driver said, “I bet it’s that fucking Chevy,” and the van came to a halt in stages, first the front part of it coming to rest, then like an accordion the middle and the rear banging up, and they were on the shoulder of the road, maybe fifty yards downrange from the burning automobile, the driver already wrenching, reaching for the door. There was no one else on the road at all in the early dawn; no reflection of headlights in either direction. “Fucking Chevelle,” the driver said, throwing his weight into the door, getting out. Wulff got out on his own side, feeling the hard tar of the road underneath him as he leapt from six feet and then both he and the driver were running toward the car. “It’s going to explode!” the driver said, “it’s going to blow up!” and yet he kept on running. Wulff ran with him. At this moment there seemed nothing else to do; he shared the unquestioning purpose of the driver. The thing that was in there had cut them off, had shaken them up, had almost killed them but that thing was human.

  Closing ground on the car Wulff felt himself running weightless, a curious disconnection seeming to lift him from the ground, then both he and the driver were in the fumes themselves, little sputtering arcs of flame all around them as they closed in on the driver’s side. Something was huddled behind the wheel, open-mouthed, staring through the windshield with an expression of horror and Wulff touched it first, wrenched the body free, the body tumbling and falling to the field against him, then the driver had the ankles and together they carried the thing in a groaning, gasping run back toward the truck. The fire was sputtering down now, coming into the core of the car and then, just as they labored back to the truck, holding the thing in their arms, the Chevelle blew up, in a curiously graceful series of motions parts of it, fenders and hubcaps, suddenly came free, dancing in the fire. Then there was the dull whoomp! as the gas tank seared in, crumpled upon itself. The impact put them to the ground hard and there was a second whoomp! then it was over. There was a faint crackling downrange. There was still no sign of traffic on the road.

  “I think he’s cooked,” the driver said.

  Wulff looked down at the thing they had stretched on the ground between them. The thing had been in its forties and was short and fat; a gold chain dangled across its vest. It was not respiring. There was no blood, no sign whatsoever of external damage. “Yeah,” Wulff said, “yeah, he’s dead.”

  “He’s a stiff,” the driver said, and then
added almost wonderingly, plaintively, a man who would sprint fifty yards and risk his life to save a man who might have killed him, “what the hell did it to him? I don’t see nothing.”

  “You wouldn’t,” Wulff said, “you wouldn’t at all,” and almost went on to tell the driver what he was looking at. Wulff knew what they were looking at; he had seen it once before, in a different way, on a girl in a tenement on West 93rd Street. The sign of the overdose, the white face, the stricken eyes. The blind fish. The sign of death. “Let’s go,” he said shakily, standing, feeling the sweating beginning within him but controlling it with an act of will. “He’s dead. There’s nothing to do. What the hell do we want? cops, a report, spend a morning doing this?”

  “No,” the driver said, standing with him, “no, we don’t want that at all.” The road was still vacant; there was little traffic on Route 80 in the dawn. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

  They went into the cab, the engine still idling. “What did it to him?” the driver said, “what the hell did it to him?”

  “He was driving on heroin, Wulff said, “he overdosed out,” and the driver let out a long whistle, then said nothing, clanking the truck into gear again and slowly they moved out, passing the filaments of the dead car across from them.

  “I never seen anything like it,” the driver said after a while, “I never seen an overdose.”

  “You’re lucky,” Wulff said and pressed back into the cushions. The truck rolled, it rolled toward Chicago, it moved on the rope of his vengeance and he thought yes, Calabrese would have to be killed, all of them would have to be killed for this because the price was simply too high and all the sheltered, stinking, smiling men behind their thick walls … they would have to pay.