Lone Wolf #9: Miami Marauder (15 page)

Coming off at Kennedy Williams found that he could not wait. He could not wait even until he had gotten out of the terminal. He went to a telephone in the Eastern terminal and called his sister-in-law. The phone rang only once; she picked it up as if she had been waiting for a long time.

“It’s me,” he said.

“I knew it was you.”

“Is she all right? Is everything okay?”

“You took long enough to call,” she said, “you didn’t really give a damn, did you?”

“I’m home,” Williams said, “I’m home now. Tell me. Is she all right?”

“I take pity on you. Everyone’s all right. You have a son, eight pounds two ounces, born three days ago. They should be coming out tomorrow.”

“A son,” Williams said. He leaned against the glass, it seemed porous. “A son! How about that? What’s his name?”

“No name yet.”

“No name yet? How can that be? Aren’t you supposed to put the names on the certificates within twenty-four hours?”

“Male child,” his sister-in-law said, “they give you a seven-day extension for that. We were waiting, maybe waiting on the chance that you’d be back. That you’d like to help name your son. But we had just about given up hope. You’re a real son of a bitch, do you know that?”

“That’s all over now,” Williams said, “that all happened a long time ago.”

“Did it?”

“I’m home,” he said, “I’m home. I came home to
be
home and I’m staying. What hospital?”

“Lying-in.”

“Lying-
In?
That’s in Manhattan. What is she doing way over in Manhattan; we had it all arranged—”

“There was kind of a speedup,” his sister-in-law said dryly, “we were out for a drive and the baby decided that he wasn’t having none of it. You’re a real bastard, do you know that? Walking out on an eight-months pregnant—”

“I said that’s all over,” Williams said. He held the receiver tightly, feeling the dampness come from his palms and said, “I’m going now. I’m going to see her right now.”

“You’re going to have a very tough time. I don’t envy your position at all.”

“I’ll make it right,” he said, “I’ll make it right. I don’t envy my position either but there are reasons.”

“There are always reasons,” that bitterly philosophical woman, his sister-in-law said, and Williams hung up, threw the receiver on top of the phone and came out of the booth roaring inside, wanting to grip everyone who he could see in the Eastern terminal, babble out to them the news that he had a son, but of course something leaner, colder within him told him that he was acting like a fool if he did that, not that it wasn’t sympathetic, and that he was in no position to call attention to himself. Right. Right on the second anyway, the first he did not know about. What was a fool anyway?

He came out of the building, got onto the cab-line, got a taxi and went off to Lying-In Hospital down the ramps, over the expressway at seventy miles an hour and so complete was his absorption, so total was his delight, that it was hours later, hours after he had left the hospital, hours after the reunion with his wife at a depth of connection that he would not have known could have existed … hours after all of this that he thought of Wulff even in the slightest way and then in the most detached fashion: he hoped that the son of a bitch had made it through. He really did. He wished him the best. He certainly wished him the best.

But it was no longer his battle.

He did not even read about the Chicago liner that had gone down for three days and then only idly, did not connect it to Calabrese. By that time his wife and son were home, he was applying for reinstatement to PD. He had enough on his hands.

30 September 1973: New Jersey

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Copyright © 1974 by Mike Barry
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Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

eISBN 10: 1-4405-4242-2
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-4242-8

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