Lone Wolf #2: Bay Prowler (10 page)

“I don’t want money.”

“Don’t be foolish; you can’t even pay the taxi.”

“I hate to break this up,” the driver said, “but if it’s all the same to you, I’ve got to make a living too.” Wulff had sentimentalized him; once he began talking he sounded exactly like the middle-aged men.

“Here,” Wulff said. He took out two hundred dollars and put it in her palm. It was all New York money anyway. Compliments of the great Northeast to the culture of Love. Tamara looked at it wonderingly.

“You make me feel cheap,” she said, holding the bills, “that’s all.”

“No need,” said Wulff, “you’re not cheap at all.”

“Oh no?” she said with a bitter smile, “you should only know what you don’t know.”

“You made me feel alive again,” he said. He pushed her into the cab before the driver could make another protest. Then, on an impulse he would not try to understand or guide he leaned down and kissed her. He felt the cool surfaces of her forehead underneath his lips, touched her cheek once tentatively, moved away.

“I’ll be in touch,” he said. She ducked inside the cab. He slammed the door and the cab, steaming out little ropes of exhaust, moved away from there.

He stood there and watched her go. Sentiment had nothing to do with it, although he knew that if he gave into the feeling that was all there, moist liquid rolling inside him, he would never get out of the vat if once he opened the tap. No, this time it was not sentiment. He looked after her with wonder.

She had been with him for no more than a day. In that time she had seen him kill one man, watched him leave the room to kill two more, lived through a nearly-successful attempt on her life to see him kill yet another two. She had made love to him, pumped him dry, taken everything that had happened and at the end it was she who had comforted
him.

She was one remarkable, tough broad and that was all there was to it.

And she had gone through all of this on the down-end of a speed cycle.

Too much. Too much. Wulff watched the taxi out of sight and then very slowly, checking his rear and sides, he trudged down the sidewalk after her. Where she could ride he could, for the moment, only walk. He took off his hat to her. Also his badge—if he still had a badge that is—and about thirty-two years of knowledge.

Remarkable. She was absolutely remarkable. She beat him cold.

He wondered if he would ever see her again.

Severo felt the nervousness hit him again. He had felt pretty good behind the two locked doors making his calls and better yet when he had called in the reinforcements. Now he had the place absolutely locked up tight. This clown Wulff had almost gotten through to him because Severo had not taken the proper precautions, but that was mere sloppiness. It would not happen again. Now he had the situation absolutely under control. There was a cordon of the finest, toughest men anyone could command ringing the place and if anyone even thought of penetrating those defenses he was out of his mind. This Wulff had knocked over a steel townhouse in Manhattan, that was the story on him anyhow, but just let him try it here. Just let him try it. They would take his grenades and his incendiary devices and give them back, all of them, right up his ass.

But the nervousness was there. It was a little roaring fire in his belly which was being stoked, gradually but incessantly by little scraps of information. First was the word that he had somehow broken out, with the girl no less, of the miserable rooming house where he had been holed up. Then impossibly, he had not only gotten away from the Mercedes, which had figured since he had obviously gotten back to the room, but he had knocked the car off the road and had killed two men. And then there was the growing knowledge—and this was the worst of all because it had been building up in the back of his mind from all the other pieces—that he had given Wulff the right data on the shipment tomorrow night. Time and place, chapter and verse.

That had been his mistake. He should have concocted something else for the guy just as he had concocted the whole story of running out on the business. But how was he to think, once he talked his way out of this spot, that Wulff would be able to get away? If the guy was gullible enough to have fallen for that piece of shit song and dance which Severo had made up for him, then he was surely so dumb that they should have been able to have taken him out with one shot in a matter of hours.

Yet there was the guy now out of contact and by all lights he might well show up tomorrow night.

What it came down to, Severo admitted sourly, pacing the grounds restlessly outside, was that he had cracked. Severo had cracked. Under stress, the pressure and tension and knowledge that he was in the toughest spot of his life and that this guy Burt Wulff could actually, genuinely kill him, he had failed to invent details but instead had blurted out the whole story. It gave little credit to him, that was all. Severo, who thought that he was impermeable and knew all the moves, had buckled under the knife.

If something went wrong tomorrow night there was going to be all hell to pay. So far he had handled this right, he thought. It was all his own show and they were letting him call the shots on it since it was in his territory, but if the guy actually got through and fucked the deal up tomorrow, Severo was going to be in far more trouble than a lot of people above might think he was worth. There would be only one way, consequently, to deal with him then.

Severo didn’t even want to think about it.

He jumped as he saw a large Cadillac come up the drive, heading toward him at least ten miles an hour faster than it had any business doing on his property, and then as the car swerved and slowed, he forced himself to relax. The men surrounding the place were absolutely trustworthy. They would let absolutely nothing through unless it had been checked out. Cursing himself for breaking open for the second time that day—but the first time in the study, crying, with all the doors closed could not count because no one could ever see him there—Severo strode toward the Cadillac, a car he had never seen before.

A tall man wearing dark glasses got out of the car on the driver’s side. He was travelling alone. He took one step as if checking the ground and then waited, allowing Severo to come up to him.

Severo scuttled up to the tall man, aware as almost never before of his awkwardness, and stood there. The tall man who was wearing a heavy overcoat despite the comparative warmth. He looked at him, both hands in pockets, with seeming impassiveness.

“Yes?” Severo said, furious with himself again. This was his ground, his house, his terrain. What was he doing running up to this guy like a butler?

He should, by all rights, have been in the house, waiting for the guy to come to
him.
He was not himself. Godammit, he was falling apart and it all traced itself back to this Wulff. He was going to have to kill the son of a bitch himself to get any peace. All right. All right then. If that was the only way, he would do it.

“Severo?” the tall man said.

“Yes.”

“Severo, you’ve done a piss-poor, fucked-up job.”

“It’s my job and I’ll handle it my way,” he said. “Who the hell are you—”

“You’re no fucking good, Severo. You’re smalltime. You’re out here on the Bay because you’re minor league, do you understand that?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, although with a thrill of terror he realized that he knew exactly what the man was talking about. “You let me handle this my way all the way through to the end, and then tell me if you have any complaints.” It did not sound like defiance. It sounded like the whining of a small boy.

“If you go on handling this your way, Severo, we’ll all be six feet underground,” the tall man said. He held himself lightly alert, hands still deep in pockets and Severo realized then exactly what he was doing and what was going to happen to him. But it was unfair. It was profoundly unfair. They had never even given him a chance.

“Get out of here,” he said. “How the hell did you get through anyway? There’s a roadblock—”

“You stupid fuck,” the man said and he sounded almost pitying, “after all you’ve managed to do so far, do you really think we’d let you seal yourself up here with your own men? Who the hell do you think is out there?”

Severo turned to run but he could not. His frame was locked, body frozen. He had never been any good at this kind of thing anyway. He could talk his way out of a tight spot and he could put the screws on others but when it came down to a matter of body, he could not function. That was one of the reasons he had lived to seal himself in; why he did his business over the telephone.

He saw everything. He saw the dark man lift the gun out of his pocket, take careful aim and fire. For one instant Severo’s heart and hands fluttered desperately, but almost instantly he relaxed. He was dead. He knew he was dead.

He began to realize how a woman must feel when she is about to be raped and realizes that there is nothing, absolutely nothing she can do to stop it.
Lay yourself back honey and just enjoy.
Death was coming out of the gun and he realized that he had wanted it, had always wanted it; it was one of the reasons why he had ordered so many others killed. Bringing to them what he had so terribly wanted for himself. The Golden Rule.

The man shot him in the heart and Severo staggered backward two steps and fell, a little flower or insect opening up in his chest, burrowing, burrowing away.

The dark man looked down upon him from a great height with an expression which Severo knew because it had been on his own face so very many times.

His last thought was that he hadn’t really been lying to Wulff; when you came right down to it he hadn’t been lying at all. He had always wanted to get out of the junk business.

Although not quite this way.

Another hour, another room. Wulff wondered if this was what dealing with the junk business came down to: you lived in one miserable cell of a furnished room after another, the insides as interchangeable as the rage which was still beating away in his skull. One thing was sure: the merchants, the suppliers, the quiet men who stood at the top and away from all of this,
they
did not live in furnished rooms. They lived on estates or high floors or in sealed-up townhouses. Sometime, he decided, they should get down to the level of the enforcers or users and see what it was like to look at life from ground-level.

Then again, a lot of them had probably been there and were dedicating their lives to seeing as little of that reality as possible.

He got a little further into the downtown district, took a room there paying a week’s rent in advance and went to cover there. There was nothing to do, really, until tomorrow night. Staying outside could only undercut his position; he was quite convinced now that it was open season on Wulff and that everyone, everyone who had the price of a rifle was on the trail. The two back there had been bounty hunters; the streets would be crawling with them. Which only indicated one thing, of course. A lot of people were getting desperate.

Still, there was one thing which he had to do and he decided to get it over with. Telephone facilities were not a specialty of this house so he made his long-distance phone call from an odorous little booth in a candy shop downstairs. The owner looked at him nervously through the open glass of the booth, a scuttling, nervous little man, probably a refugee—wasn’t everyone in California?—from Brooklyn. From the traffic in the store and the way the owner kept on peering at him, Wulff decided that there was probably a small, not flourishing, numbers business being run out of this hole. All right. So what? What would a candy store be without a numbers operation? Nine-tenths of them would not be able to stay in operation for a week.

He called person-to-person collect. His party couldn’t afford it either but it was less of a hassle than to wrestle with coins. Williams’s wife got on and the operator got him through to Williams. Easier this way. He didn’t have to talk to the woman. She was a nice woman, he supposed, but she could hardly have enjoyed her husband’s involvement with Wulff.

David Williams had been the other patrolman in the car the night they took the call on Marie Calvante. He had come up the stairs after Wulff had not come out and for a minute had stood with Wulff, looking at the body, saying nothing. He must have known what had happened although Wulff had never discussed it with him.

He had thought that the black rookie patrolman was immature, naive, not really able to understand and deal with the reality which Wulff had recognized, but he guessed he had been wrong about that one at least. Williams had come to him in New York to offer his help with Wulff’s war; the man had on his own figured out why Wulff had left the force and what he planned to do next.
I’ve got to stay inside the system,
Williams had said,
but that doesn’t make it real and it doesn’t mean that you’re not doing it a better way. I can help you though. Let me help you.

Williams had been sincere and he had meant business. Wulff had turned down the offer then, mostly because what he was doing was single-track, would have to keep on that way if he were to have any success at all, but Williams had nevertheless helped him at a crucial time by using the police department resources to dig up a detailed city survey on Peter Vincent’s townhouse. He had used the plans to go in through the gas lines and destroy that townhouse, had pulled Peter Vincent out of the wreckage and before he killed him gotten the information which had taken him to San Francisco. So Williams had helped. He had really helped. Maybe the man had a point: if you were going to go at it vigilante style it was always a good idea to have someone inside the system.

Williams got on the phone and in his high-pitched voice said hello. Wulff was running in luck for the first time since he had hit the Bay; the man could well have been on duty. Hours were irregular; there was no way as Wulff remembered well, to calculate even a week ahead which shift you’d be on. It led to a nice, ordered, regular, relaxed home-life is what it did, he thought bitterly, which was one of the reasons, until he had met a girl named Marie Calvante, he had thought that he would not marry until he retired.

“It’s me,” Wulff said.

“I figured it was you. I didn’t think anyone else would be calling long-distance person to person. Man, where are you? What have you been up to? You took New York by storm and then you left.”

“Oh? What happened?”

“You blew up that townhouse, didn’t you?” Williams seemed to giggle. “Man, I could get into some trouble if I was associated with
that
one. There are rumors that you have singlehandedly cut the traffic in half here.”

“That’s good.”

“You’re shaking up a lot of people, but you are playing some dangerous game.”

“I never expected anything else.”

“Where are you now?” Williams asked.

He had to trust the man. There had to be at least one person around who you could trust; also he needed help. He risked a cautious glance through the glass of the booth, observed that traffic in the candy store had suddenly become very brisk. Three juveniles had come in and were conversing sullenly with the proprietor, hands in pockets. It occurred to him that wedged in the booth as he was he was an inviting, open target: he would have to watch this. “I’m in San Francisco,” he said.

“Beautiful San Francisco. So then what?”

“I need some help,” Wulff said, “some information.”

“I’d love to oblige but I can’t fly out to San Francisco just tonight. If I had known—”

“It’s all right,” Wulff said. “I told you in New York, this is a singlehanded operation at least for a while. I don’t want to involve you or see you get hurt. Not now, anyway. Maybe later—”

“Cut that,” Williams said. “Tell me what you want.”

“I want to buy some explosives,” Wulff said, “and I didn’t think that the thing to do was to go into the Yellow Pages. I want you to find out particulars for me.”

Williams on the continental line laughed. “You are
seized
by that idea,” he said. “Don’t tell me you are planning to do in San Francisco what you did here?”

“Something like that,” Wulff said cautiously. The juveniles had now ringed the proprietor whose glasses glittered faintly in the reflecting light. They seemed to be pushing him while at the same time talking in low intense voices. Good Lord, had he walked into the middle of a robbery or worse? Any second they were going to notice him in this booth and then what?

“I just don’t know,” Williams was saying. “You want a legitimate source of supply?”

“Yeah, if possible. But I’ll take it any way I can,” Wulff said. “That’s up to you.”

“And where am I supposed to get this information?”

“A New York cop can get hold of anything,” Wulff said, which in a way was the truth. He thought quickly of his days on the narcotics squad. Yes indeed, there was nothing you couldn’t get hold of if you were willing.

“Well, I’ll see what I can see,” Williams said sounding doubtful. “Where am I supposed to reach you on this?”

“You’re not,” Wulff said. “I’ll phone you back.” The scene outside had taken a completely ominous turn. The proprietor had sunk completely out of eye-level and two of the youths were leaning over him. The third was watching the front and back in a quick reconaissance and as he did his eyes fell across the booth and Wulff.

“I’ll call you back in two hours,” Wulff said rapidly and hung up. He put a finger on the handle, poised against the door then, looking at the kid.

The kid had already turned and was quickly telling the others what he had seen. Wulff hesitated for only an instant before pulling the handle into the booth. There was a bad moment, bringing the door against him as he was, when he was wedged
into
the booth and exit would have been impossible but he got past that point and came out quickly, reaching for his gun.

The kids appeared to have no weapons. It was an intimidation kind of thing. They were going in barehanded, which meant on the one hand that they were clever because carrying made it armed robbery right away, but they were stupid in that they were not prepared for emergencies. Wulff had the gun out and levelled on the nearest one even before they could complete the turn. The circle broke open and he could see the proprietor lying on the floor, a small, fine spider of blood coming from his bald scalp.

“Let’s get out of here!” one of them said and the three of them went for the door. The gun, as always, had made the balance; if they had not seen the gun they probably would have jumped him. In his condition they would have had a good chance too. He held the gun as they ran for the door, debating for a long, agonized instant and then he let them go. They thudded into the street. He wanted to shoot them, in fact he wanted to kill, but it was just not worth it. It would get him involved at a level that now, with much greater stuff on the line, he could not afford to take.

He knelt over the old man on the floor quickly, checked him out. The man had little apparent damage, no skull fracture, and even as Wulff prodded him gently he regained consciousness. He looked up at Wulff with dread leaking from the pores of the old seamed face.

“Don’t,” he said, “please don’t—”

“It’s all right. You’re all right.”

“Take anything. Take everything. Just don’t hit me again.”

Too complicated. He could stay knelt there and explain to the old man that he was his rescuer, not an assailant, but what was the point? The old man would survive this one; in two days or two months the three kids or another group would come in hunting again, but nothing to be done about that. Once you were knocked over you were meat on the rack. Wulff stood. The old man saw the gun dangling from his hand and began to whimper. He rolled on the floor, hands crossed in front of his face.

“Please,” he said, “don’t shoot. I’m seventy-three years old; I’m going to die soon anyway. It’s not as if I’ll live a long life—”

Wonderful. Wulff turned and ran from the store. In San Francisco as in New York, junk had changed everything: this old man felt that he was going into the combat zone every morning when he unlocked his candystore. Nothing was being held in place any more. Everything was falling apart. He bolted into the street. A small crowd had already gathered; as they saw him then, the gun still unconsciously in his hand, the urgency in his gestures, they scattered, screaming. He raced through them. In the distance he heard a siren.

The old man, apparently not injured seriously at all, had gotten to his feet and was at the door. “Stop him!” He shouted, “stop him,
stop him!
” Thirty seconds ago he had begged for mercy, gotten it, now he wanted Wulff arrested. That was gratitude for you.

Nothing to do. He turned and ran. Disgust filled him with every intake of breath. It was not enough to have every clown, bounty hunter and hit man in the area crawling after him. That was not satisfying enough. He needed, it seemed, more attention yet. Now he would have the cops too. Because he had happened to make a phone call from the right place.

Never say that he would lead a lonely existence.
Shit,
Wulff thought. He ran. He turned a corner, putting the gun away in full stride. The siren was closer but approaching from the other direction.

Scream of tires and that patrol car had braked. In the distance he heard another siren, different direction. Then another. People on the street looked at him with curiosity. He forced himself to return to a normal pace, turned another corner, moved out of there.

More sirens. Every cop in town was going to get in on this one. The Severos, it seemed, could carry on their lives without harassment, but when you got down to the really important stuff like a candystore being knocked off, the cops were out in force. They would take all credit for averting the robbery.

Police work was always very good at mopping-up after the deed had been done. The police might not prevent crime but they sure as hell could catalogue it. Wulff, at normal stride, walked the five blocks back to his new rooming house cursing. There was no question about it; events were running at a flood. He wondered if he was still, in the last analysis, being a cop: attracting and creating crimes rather than eliminating them.