Lone Wolf #8: Los Angeles Holocaust (6 page)

He would take it.

So he got into the Ford and pulled the U-haul out, getting only one suspicious glance on the George Washington Bridge from a toll-taker who thought that he heard something rattling in the back. If he had been going east, where the toll booths were, they might even have stopped him but west the toll booths had long since been abandoned, double-fare, get you on the way back (he might never be back) and the toll-taker, peering down the line at the jouncing truck, obviously calculated and then decided that it was not worth it. Hs was not going to be any goddamned hero on ten thousand eight hundred dollars a year—Williams knew the feeling—and besides the U-haul would probably turn out to be full of pots and pans. Who the hell needed it?

Over the bridge and onto Route 80. Immediately, just three miles, less than that, out of Manhattan the road, the flat, dead spaces, and sensation of the interstate highway overtook him, a road that was everywhere and nowhere, the same ruined landscape that would confront him for three thousand miles already at Teaneck, Little Ferry, Hackensack, Paterson … and deeper then to the breakoff on 46 where 80, not yet completed, fed into the state highway for a while, fighting for space and air with trucks on all sides. Then another patch of 80 and the death of interstate again. He did not know which was worse, to choke and fume on a road with character or to be lost in the emptiness of the interstate … back on 46 again for a little while to figure it out, make a final decision (he never did). And then on 80 for real now, rolling toward the Delaware Water Gap, into Pennsylvania, on Pennsylvania sections, the night falling fast, cars passing him at a hundred and a hundred and ten miles an hour on these unpatrolled segments, the Ford stumbling and missing around seventy-five, the little trailer chattering behind him. On through Pennsylvania all night, poking on into Ohio by the dawn’s early light, his first stopover in a cheap motel in Ohio for a five-hour nap, uneasy dreams of the U-haul exploding tumbling through his mind. Then to the road again, Ohio the same as New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio the same as Illinois and swinging then outside Chicago, the hookup with 90 leading across the flat, dead plains states. Then the real interstate began: mile after mile, hundreds of miles of gray, empty space, sometimes the Ford surrounded as he picked up commuter traffic off the city belts, most of the time almost alone on the highway pushing it as close to seventy-five as he could, the motor cutting out thunderously once at seventy-eight, loss of power steering and the U-haul jackknifing, almost hurling him ass-end first, off the road, but he was able to save it. That was the only exciting thing that happened for twelve hours as he decided to get the best he could out of the five hours’ stopover and see if he could make it all the way into the far western states before the dawn. In and out of transmission belts, the radio flicking on and off, his mind submerged somewhere below attention, Williams kept the pace up, after a while almost locked out of the world, the perimeters of the Ford the perimeters of existence, everything happening only in the car.

Then he came up against the roadblock, locked into that hypnotic state, yanking the wheel, smashing the brakes almost at the last moment, coming to a rearing, terrified attention as he saw men pour from the sides of the road surrounding the wooden sawhorses. There were guns in their hands.

These were not cops.

Williams saw it all in one burst of attention, then, the car idling, he was already diving toward the floorboards. The first shot came high, too high, smashing the safety windshield, putting little plasticine pellets down around his shoulders. And then the second, more intense series followed, the shots skittering off the hood, dumped into the driver’s compartment. If he hadn’t hit the floor they would have had him. But even on the floor Williams was calculating, he was coming to attention, could feel himself beginning to function. Then he got the gun up and at a seated position raised his hand, pumped out two shots, then ducked again as response bullets tore their way again through the windshield, falling around him like ball-bearings.

Too much, too much; these guys had to be crazy. Who would set up a roadblock on an interstate highway and what did they think that it would profit them? Even if they were able to nail him in this trap, didn’t they understand that traffic was going to pile up rapidly behind him, even on a seemingly empty highway, three cars a minute passed a given point … and as if in confirmation far beyond Williams heard the dull pounding of a truck, the hiss of air brakes. The knowledge that traffic was then already beginning to form behind him, that he was not functioning in isolation, gave him the courage to rear all the way up and from this position, peering over the dash, he saw the situation in true perspective for the first time; everything had happened too fast before. There were just two of them, a Chevy van over on the side of the road, the sawhorse slung crudely across the two lanes as a block. Another bullet came, but Williams from this vantage point was already beginning to feel invulnerable. He got his gun up and out and put a clean shot into the near man, a shorter type holding a sawed-off shotgun. The man fell across the hood with a scream, the shotgun firing, the pellets misdirected, and the second man loomed behind him then. Williams saw a man in his forties wearing an odd, double-breasted, gray suit, some archaic aspect coming out of the fields of Interstate 90 to kill him, and in a slow and terrible calm he pointed the pistol at the man and shot him in the throat. The man had not even fired a shot; apparently the death of the man first in line had shocked him. He fell straight to the concrete, spread-eagled, little objects falling from his pockets scattering on the highway; pieces of paper, a few dollar bills, jolted loose by the impact. Breathing heavily, Williams leaned against the door of the Ford, got the handle up from memory, and went out onto the roadway.

Behind him a huge diesel, motor idling unevenly, had come to a stop just a few feet behind the Ford. The truckdriver, a thin man concealed behind enormous sunglasses and cap, was looking out the side. “What the fuck is this?” he said, pointing, taking in all of it; Williams, the roadblock, the two dead men lying on the concrete. “What the fuck is going on here?”

“I don’t know,” Williams said, “I don’t know.” And he meant it. Little knives of Nebraska heat filled with dust and light went through him. He put his pistol away and walked toward the sawhorse. The near corpse was bleeding thickly, dribbling blood into the concrete in a Rorschach pattern. Williams kicked it aside and put his hands on the sawhorse, bit his lips, heaved it upward. Surprisingly light, the contraption came up easily. He staggered to the side of the road, holding sixty pounds, dumped it on the shoulder, came back to the Ford noting abstractedly that there seemed to be bloodstains on the hood. Well, that was to be expected, wasn’t it? He had shot, let’s think about this now, the first man close on the hood, getting him in the throat, or was that the second man, but anyway it had been a bloody shot and of course at that proximity to the Ford he would have.

“I think we better get the cops, friend,” the truckdriver said, still leaning out the window. Another car was lumbering up, a black shape just coming over the horizon. Behind it Williams could see a few more like insects, slithering, stumbling along. There would be five or six cars here in a minute; behind them another five or six more. Traffic was sparse but not all that little; even in Nebraska people still got on the highway, if only to get out of Nebraska, of course. “Really,” the truckdriver said, “we ought to get some cops in here; find out—”

“Right,” Williams said, “right you are.” He got back behind the wheel of the Ford noting that his hands were shaking nicely. When you came right down to it these were his first two kills, weren’t they? The business near the methadone center didn’t count; that went the other way. “Right you are again,” he said, turning, reaching for the doorhandle, slamming it, turning on the ignition. “I’ll just get down to one of these phone booths and call in,” he said and he slammed the door, locked it, floored the accelerator, and got out of there at sixty-eight miles an hour for the first quarter of a mile, a hundred flat for the first half. Yes, these Torinos, even with the emission devices, could accelerate, it seemed.

The hell with it, Williams thought, the hell with it and another thought on top of that: well he was really in for it now. Really in for it, yes sir, he was committed up to his black ass and beyond.

The scene behind him, perceived through the rear-view mirror, diminished, became miniscule, became inconsequential, vanished. He prowled on through Nebraska. He had no idea who the road-blocking guys were looking for. Maybe they had had him tracked all the way from New York.

And just maybe—this was the more frightening thought—just maybe they were looking for someone else entirely and had walked into something that they had never expected.

The hell with it.

The hell with all of this shit now.

He was really in for it.

The ad in the personals that he had been looking for for a week was there that morning—ALL HECTOR LOPEZES: HECTOR LOPEZ CLUB FIRST ANNUAL MEETING SANTA ANITA RACE-TRACK, THIS AFTERNOON—was in and Wulff was there; in the grandstand at Santa, twenty minutes before the first race, pacing between the five and ten dollar win and show windows, checking the time as it came on the tote every minute. They were supposed to meet down at the finish line, that had been prearranged, just before the first race. All right then. Williams had made it; somehow the son of a bitch had gotten through and not a day too soon because Wulff did not know how much longer he could have held on. The Idle Hour trailer park was bad enough; it had turned out to be even worse than he had expected but the hell with the trailer park; he could have done that kind of duty standing on his head. What he could not take was the clear feeling now that they were closing in on him; that even this cover had run out its chances and that it was only a matter of time, very little time indeed, until Calabrese’s forces or the freelancers had him nailed to ground. There were too many strange people poking around the place. There was too much traffic moving in and out After five days he had pretty well mapped out the residents of the Idle Hour and there were people coming into the place now who had no trailers there. How much longer did he have? He had a huge bag of shit and light armaments, no way really of procuring more. How long could he have taken it? The net was tightening. But Williams had made it, somehow the son of a bitch had made it and put in the agreed-upon personal and maybe now he was at the end of this. Or at the beginning of something else. Wulff did not know. He simply did not know. It was the feeling of helplessness which he could not take, the rage, the slow feeling of entrapment. Somewhere, he knew, Calabrese was laughing at him.

Santa Anita. It was the richest racetrack in America, that was what he had read. The purse distributions were the highest, the per capita daily attendance and handle were on top now that the New York circuit had collapsed under the same government that had given New York the drug law, and Santa Anita stood or squatted alone, huddled in the mists around the valley, a vast pocket in which thirty-five thousand men, women, and children, most of them wearing dark glasses, came every weekday to throw their money against the tote, screaming. It meant very little to Wulff, horse-racing. Never had, never could now, but pacing here looking at the track, waiting for Williams, the son of a bitch, to show or not show, he could understand a little of what was going on here, what drove people to the track. Craziness. They were beating at the cage of possibility, the cages of the windows here, like insects. Heightened to rage, these people discolored the voice of the track announcer heard through all the megaphones. For all the information it was giving on weight changes, change of jockeys, scratches it could be giving out funeral information.

Well, it was very much like heroin. Then again, it was nothing like heroin but maybe it had the same outcome. People were looking for the same things from both: a passage out of the world and into some space where possibilities and accomplishments could be spliced, no difficult passage, easy conjoinment. Wulff did not want to think about that too much, standing under the tote hung from the ceiling of the grandstand, horseplayers scurrying around him, the heat and noise of the track rising to clamor now with ten minutes to post. The horses first taking the track, he was thinking, instead of the sack of heroin, rolled up, stuffed into the trunk of the Cadillac in the parking lot a quarter of a mile from here. That was probably stupid, bringing it out into plain daylight if even under cover; a clear target where anyone could get a shot at it, but on the other hand what the hell could he do? He sure as hell could not go lumbering around the grandstand of Santa carrying a sack like Santa Claus nor could he leave it in the trailer at the Idle Hour. That would have been classically stupid because Wulff was pretty sure that back at the Idle Hour trailers were ransacked in the owner’s absence, possessions were gone through pretty quickly by the staff there. It was a police state was the Idle Hour, tight surveillance, all lights out at ten o’clock, stiff deposits paid when entering, a penalty fee paid as removal charge if one wanted to get out before the end of the month, and a list of rules and regulations which as far as Wulff could deduce made anything impermissible, gave the owner all the options and the residents simply one … to pay and pay subject to the whims of the owner. It was a nice, tight little slum there all right; a slum with the further virtues of a jail. That was an American characteristic anyway; there was something about people in this country that made them enjoy putting themselves in jail, made them delight in the restrictions they imposed upon themselves. Americans, it seemed, only derived their sense of identity from being imprisoned. The Idle Hour, a perfect little South American nation carved out of the ruined landscape of California, was as perfect a working example of oppression as Wulff had ever seen. There was a whole generation of people now who were living this way, living in the Idle Hours of the country, and although they grumbled and complained a bit the Idle Hours were flourishing. The trailer park business was certainly a growth industry. What it came down to, Wulff thought, was that people liked it. If they had not had the abuse they would have taken to thinking of all that space, all that possibility, and the human mind, or at least the human American mind, was not equipped to take it. A man was looking at him.

Odd that even in all this heat, this swirl of crowd, Wulff could pick up one clear focus of attention, but police training, whether you wanted to remember it or not, was always there. Leaning against a shutdown fifty dollar window about ten yards away, a tall man wearing a hat, a Racing Form folded and shoved into his armpit, was looking at Wulff with a steady and rising interest, a glare of attention so pure and clear that Wulff knew that he had been recognized. Slowly he adjusted his position under the tote, then turned and went into the line behind the five dollar window. The man’s eyes followed him. Seeing Wulff’s sudden reaction to him, the man very slowly took the newspaper from under his arm and feigned reading it, his eyes peering out above the paper with intense interest. There was a slight bulge on the left side of the jacket near the heart. The man was armed.

Well, Wulff thought, that was wonderful. That was just wonderful, but then what had he expected? A disguise was only as good as the degree of interest you had aroused and he had aroused a good deal. The tall man seemed to know exactly who he was. Standing there, the line shuffling forward slowly to the window like a group of penitents waiting for assembly-line communion. Wulff instinctively patted his own inner pocket where the point thirty-eight caliber rested. It was no defense. Assuming that the man was after what he supposed he was, you could not take out a pistol in the grandstand at Santa and start shooting. That kind of thing just wasn’t done. Also, there was no assurance that the man was working alone.

There were three people ahead of him now in the line. Wulff looked up at the tote; three minutes now until post time. If he and Williams had worked it out properly Williams would almost be down at the finish line now, would almost be ready for the meet, but he resisted the impulses to lunge from the line and walk down there. One had to remain cool; one had to force a sense of control of the situation even if that control did not truly exist, because if you lost the handle, if everything came apart inside, then it would come apart on the outside with the same alacrity. The owners of the Idle Hour knew all about that kind of control. A small man shambled away from the window looking at the tickets he had bought with a bemused air as if not sure that he even remembered having done this, and Wulff told the seller, “Number five,” and put a ten down on the counter. Five was as good a number as any, he supposed; he was at the five dollar window, wasn’t he? The man over by the closed fifty window had now put away his newspaper and was slowly ambling toward Wulff. The ticket came out of the machine, lay in front of him. With a kind of exhausted tilt to his head the clerk slowly counted out five singles, held them, finally put them down next to the ticket when it became apparent that Wulff was not going to leave. Behind him, with the flash down to two minutes to post (but the tote always worked a minute ahead to build the action of the last-minute bettors to early frenzy) the crowd was mumbling and cursing. Wulff took the ticket, took the singles, stuffed it all into his right pocket and began to move slowly toward the great doors that opened out to the concrete lawn, the lawn running up to the rail and beyond that to the earth of the track. It was cool and pleasant today but it had rained the day before; that meant that the track was a holding, hard surface bad for come-from-behind horses, good for early speed, or so Wulff had heard around the grandstand. He did not give a damn. Horseracing meant nothing to him; he was dealing with a much deeper, darker history of chances. The man was still behind him as he worked his way through the crowd toward the finish line.

No doubt about it now; he had been spotted. There was always that small possibility up until the moment that they pursued you that it was all in your mind, that he had been functioning at the edges of attention for so long that innocent people, innocent gestures, became transmuted to menace. But this was unmistakable; as Wulff increased his pace dodging through the crowd, the man behind him, afraid that he might lose the trail, also extended his own stride. For the first time Wulff could see, looking back in little glances that the man had abandoned his posture of inattention and was pushing, really pushing frantically, trying to keep him in sight. Wulff put a hand inside his jacket pocket, checked the point thirty-eight. To use it in the infield would be crazy, of course; he simply could not do it. But would the tall man have similar consideration?

He did not know. Down at the finish line where the rail of the infield joined that of the paddock there was a crush of bodies, hundreds of people leaning against the rail staring out at the horses, who were now dots on the backstretch wheeling to turn into the starting gate for the six-furlong sprint. Wulff could not see Williams. For a moment he thought that it had all gone to pieces—there was also the chance that Williams, similarly spotted, might have been intercepted—but then he saw him, the tall black man at the furthest point of the conjoinment wedged tightly into the spot where the rails met, looking back at the crowd with bright, staring eyes. They must have recognized one another at the same instant; then Wulff was using his elbows to prod his way through the crowd, really shoving now. Williams extended a hand, and then his reserve returning at that instant, elaborately turned and looked back toward the track. The tall man was somewhere behind Wulff now but he could not for the moment see him. Momentary respite, that was all. He was closing in.

He poked through bodies, then came against Williams. The man was looking out at the track, still with that elaborate unconcern, but the fingers of his left hand were jumping and there was a tremor in his cheek. “Yeah,” he said quietly as Wulff came against him, “yeah,” a short emission of breath making the word a sigh…. He smiled in an intensely private way and then wedged himself yet deeper into the rail, looking out at the backstretch. “Who do you like, man?” he said. “I think the one horse has got this; he’s got the early speed for the conditions but seven to five is no bargain, not for cheap shit like this. I’ve been making a study of the conditions,” Williams said quietly.

“I’m being followed.”

“Oh,” Williams said. He held himself steadly against the rail. “Oh, shit.”

“Somebody in the grandstand spotted me.”

“That stands to reason,” Williams said very quietly. The track announcer said something about post-time. “Just one of them?”

“So far. Maybe he’s a spotter, maybe he’s got partners. Don’t know.”

“You’re in deep, man. You’re in very deep.”

“I told you that over the phone. You get some stuff?”

“Yes,” Williams said quietly, looking in his cop’s way carefully through the crowd without his eyes lighting on any specific individual; it was clever, the rookie was a good man. Always had been. “I got a lot of stuff. I don’t see anyone looking at you.”

“Can’t tell,” Wulff said quietly, head down, hands in pockets. Through the megaphones Wulff could hear a thump, and then the black dots, far in the distance were moving freely, scurrying down the backstretch. The noise level around the two of them began to build; they were able to talk under it, moving close together. A fat woman to Wulff’s right was jumping up and down, cascading sweat. Wulff flicked the drops of him. The five horse seemed to have taken the early lead.

“Let’s get out of here,” Wulff said.

“No point,” said Williams. “Couldn’t move in this, anyway.” The noise level was terrific, waves of sound beating at them like surf. “Wait till the race is over, then they scatter.”

“Let’s go now.”

“You don’t know shit about racetracks, do you?” Williams said with a little smile. “When the race is on nobody moves. Somebody spotting us, he’ll pick us up right away. After the race there’s plenty of movement, we can get lost.” The five horse was still holding the lead coming into the stretch. Williams leaned over, grasped the rail, inclined his head down the track surface. He seemed to be saying something but with the noise Wulff could not hear.
Come on, one
, he lip-read. The son of a bitch had a bet down.

Well, that was his business. In the fifteen seconds during which the last furlong and a half was run Wulff suspended his attention, turned on the crowd, saw in that crest of faces all of them pointed toward the track: begging, pleading, shouting. He saw that the man who had pursued him down to the rail had vanished. There was no doubt of that whatsoever; he had positioned the man in his mind, known exactly where he had been standing, understood his intention … but in those moments since he had made the meet with Williams the man had somehow ducked out, gone away from there. It would not have been difficult. As Williams had said, who during the running of a race watched anything but the race?