Lone Wolf #6: Chicago Slaughter Read online

  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.

  Chapter 2

  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, th
e 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.

  Chapter 3

  Wulff came out of the booth slowly, leaving the valise where it was. Had to do it, no choice. He was being held by the big man with the huge gun. Flanking him, left and right, were a couple of others, nondescript types; both of them looked at him impassively, hands in their pockets. They might have guns in there, they might not; the only way to tell was to try them and it was too soon for that. Other than that there were only four or five others in the store now, the clumps of numbers players or whatever they were having disappeared. The owner, his palms flat to the counter was looking in Wulff’s direction with astonishment; the others seated at counter seats were huddling protectively, two gripping themselves. So that was good. That was good then. Coming out of the booth he had thought that he might be taking on an entire group of men, all of the numbers players turning out to be soldati. But it had not been that informed a setup at all. A lend-lease operation. There was only the heavy man and his two assistants handling this, and they had waited out their time until the store had emptied because they had been as afraid of the crowd as Wulff had been.

  Live and learn; learn and live. This was probably another freelance operation, a group of bounty hunters who had stumbled across the information somewhere and were trying to move ahead. Marginal types. It meant that he had a shot at this, although of course not an excellent one. Still, he looked much better than he thought he would when he came out of that booth.

  “Now listen here,” said the owner. He was a small man, his white apron spattered with chocolate stains. “I don’t know what this is but we can’t have any of that here. You take it outside. You take it outside right now or I’m going to call the police. I—”

  “Shut the fuck up you prick,” the heavy man said in that gentle little voice of his and piveted, aimed the gun and deposited a cartridge in the wall. The gun recoiled on him, causing his shoulders to quiver and then a few splinters sifted delicately out of the wall, dropped on the owner’s scalp. He put a hand to the bald spot trembling, brought it away, inspected it. Looking for blood. Wulff knew the feeling.

  “Stay out of it now,” the heavy man said. To Wulff he said, “We’re all going to get out of here now. We’re going to take a nice, quiet amiable little walk down the line here and out the door and into my car and then we’ll see what we see. Don’t forget the valise,” he said to the man on his left, “take it out of there nice and easy.” The other man blinked, as if the idea of touching the valise had never occurred to him; he was the kind of man who worked by the numbers and this had been an outside shot. “Don’t stand their thinking,” the heavy man said in that soft, sweet whisper and momentarily the gun shifted, “just do it.”

  So he might be a bounty hunter, Wulff thought, but he was working with recruited help. That was interesting. That was very interesting, but he didn’t want his attention to narrow down exclusively to the man with the gun because this would be equally dangerous. The three had to be taken on as a team but they were not the tightest and most integrated unit. He stood there quietly, making no moves. He could go for the gun in his inside coat pocket but then again he would not. That would only draw attention to the fact that he had a gun and he trusted the heavy man’s reflexes. “Go on!” the man with the gun said again. “Get it!”

  Delicately, the man on the left peeled off and reached into the booth. He took the valise by the handle and then with some effort tugged it out. It caught on the lip of the stand and Wulff thought for a moment that it might jam there, the same thought occurred to the man, panic flared and then he had the valise fully, held it panting, a few inches off the ground. The other man, the man on the right smiled faintly and licked his lips.

  “All right,” the heavy man said with a directing wave of the gun. “The two of you go ahead with that and keep a lookout; I’ll take this one out myself.” That was even more interesting; he was carrying on the operation now as if he had three men unde
r cover instead of just one, a definite, hounded aspect here and in that moment Wulff saw that he could probably take him. It was not three against one after all; it was mano a mano with witnesses and the heavy man did not truly have the situation under control. He was working on Wulff but doing so without a clear sense of purpose and it had to be fear which was driving him as much as greed. Certainly, not frisking Wulff had been a very poor move, it was elementary procedure … but then he did not trust the other two to carry on the frisk competently and he was afraid to get too close to Wulff himself. So the situation was manageable. It was damned close to even—perhaps even a little better than that because Wulff would know when he was going to move but the heavy man would not.

  “Come on,” the man with the gun said as the other two went out the door, the valise following in grip like a puppy. “Let’s get going.”

  Slowly Wulff moved, following the arc of the gun, went down the line of stools at the counter, heading toward the wedge of light showing through the open door. The owner stood in that frozen position, hands on the counter watching him go; Wulff passed within an inch of the man and then beyond. Out of his class here. Numbers trade was one thing but assault with a deadly weapon was another. The owner probably had established his own code of values which had something to do with the fact that anything he did was legal and morally justified but anything beyond that was not. A good system. Most people worked that way. Wulff kept on moving, not even looking back. He assumed that the gun was still on him but even if it was not, if there was some lapse of attention back there, he wanted to do the owner a favor. He would not give him a murder in his candy store in Rego fucking Park. Cops, detectives, investigations, notice and picture in the Daily News; it would blow his sideline sky-high. Be merciful. Render unto men in equal parts what they deserve.