Lone Wolf #13: The Killing Run (10 page)

“You see, Maury?” Fred said, as if he had won a bet, “you see what I mean, you see what I’m saying now?” and went to the counter, gathered up all four rifles in a staggering lift and tottered toward the door. The older man took the box of grenades, giving the counter a few swipes, as if to clean the part where the dust from the box had settled, and followed him, and Wulff brought up the rear, holding the pistol on them. He had the suspicion, however, that he would not need it at all.

And he did not. At the Fairlane, Fred and Maury waited politely, almost deferentially, while he put in the keys and popped the trunk, then inserted the rifles and grenades quickly, with the deftness of stevedores, and stood quietly while Wulff wrestled down the lid and then looked quickly over the flat parking lot, at the line of shops like thin lights on a panel behind him. There was a little car movement in the distance, but otherwise there was no one else around at ten in the morning. “I don’t think that this place has much of a future,” Wulff said.

“I’ll agree with you there,” Maury said. “It’s dropping dead.”

“But it’s a nice place,” Fred said. “They got a lot of nice shops, don’t they, Maury? Nice people working here. They just don’t do no good promotion.”

“Nice people? Not nice people, they’re just a bunch of thieves,” Maury said. “They’ve been milking us blind, going for every cent that they could in rent and improvements; otherwise we don’t give a damn. We’re trying to get some kind of an association together,” he said, “but everybody’s afraid, really. That’s the trouble, you know, everybody’s scared. They don’t want to band together to help themselves, so you can’t get anywhere.”

“Well,” Wulff said, “why don’t you get back in the shop, then? I’m afraid I’m going to have to tie you up or something; I don’t want you calling the police before I have a chance to get out of here.”

“Oh, we wouldn’t do no such thing,” Fred said, “believe me, we wouldn’t think of it, would we, Maury?”

“Sure not.”

“We’ll just go back there and sit and chat for maybe twenty minutes, twenty-five minutes, until you have a good head start. Matter of fact,” Fred said a little wildly, “we’ll go in there and talk for an
hour
if you want. I mean, everything’s insured, right, Maury? What do we give a fuck about it anyway. Let the damned companies worry about it, let the mall itself—”

“Except the grenades,” Maury said. “You can’t ignore the grenades. I couldn’t get insurance on those, because no one’s supposed to know that I had them, and possession is probably illegal. But what the hell, there was a good market for those grenades. I could have gotten a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty apiece for them if I had a chance to sell them. Not that I’m mad about this,” he said hastily, looking up at Wulff, spreading his palms. “I mean, it’s all in the line of business, right? Win some, lose some. I shouldn’t complain.”

“Yeah,” Wulff said, “you shouldn’t complain,” and made a gesture with the pistol, and willingly they shuffled back ahead of him into the store and then under the fluorescence turned toward him expectantly, their eyes questioning. “All right,” he said, looking at them, “all right, then. The hell with it. I’m going to go.”

“That’s damned nice of you,” Fred said, “and you’re not making a mistake, let me get that clear to you, because—”

“Don’t call anyone,” Wulff said, and backed out of the store. “Give me half an hour. If you break your word, you know that I’m going to find you somehow. You know you’ll pay for this. If I don’t get you, friends of mine will.”

“Sure,” Maury said, “sure, I understand.”

“Yeah,” Wulff said, and went back into the car and drove away from there straight into the area of Mobile where Nolk lived. Harris had given him some specific instructions, and he had little trouble in finding the house, which, like the houses of almost all the men with whom he had dealt, was expensive and nicely insulated. One thing you could say about these men was that they lived well.

He wasn’t too worried, somehow, about Maury or Fred putting in a call to the police. Perhaps he was looking at matters in too wry or optimistic a way, but there was a feeling of collaboration with the two, almost as if they secretly admired and felt themselves to be on the side of a man who would so willingly take on the system and its assumptions. No man who sold weapons for a living and had a secret cache of grenades could identify with the police. Then too, the insurance
would
cover the theft, and Wulff had the feeling that whatever happened, Maury would make out considerably better from the insurance than he would have by painfully, piece by piece, trying to sell off his inventory.

The block on which Nolk lived was being patrolled by guards. Wulff could see that, could see the two men casually standing near the trees at the turn-in point, and knew right away from the way that they were handling themselves, a certain counterpoint in their movements and sense of connection between the two, that they were definitely on patrol and that the patrol had everything to do with Wulff. You could pick up those signals if you had had any kind of reconnaissance experience in combat; Wulff had had plenty of that in Vietnam, but more important, he had spent the last several months coming close in on men who had urgent reasons not to want to see him.

The first thing to do was to take a pass, handle the situation the way the bullfighter handles a dangerous bull, with cape and grace and evasion. He drove the Fairlane unobtrusively past the two men at right angles to the street which they were covering, hoping that they did not have a specific description of the car, or that if they did, they were not paying close attention. On long patrol, lapses of attention were inevitable, and any commander had to take them into account, for the enemy, for his own troops. Wulff drove the car down half a mile of empty street quietly, just letting it coast, moving by the curb at slow idle, playing with the brake. It was a Saturday morning in what was already a quiet neighborhood. No one was around. A little later on there might be a few children, but in a neighborhood like this, the children were indoors or in their own backyards, and the adults and teen-agers took automobiles everywhere. Two men on an empty street stood out. That was one of the advantages or disadvantages of suburban living: street reconnaissance could hardly be undertaken subtly.

It was a nice neighborhood on the northern outskirts of a relatively cosmopolitan Southern town. The houses, most of them ranch or split-level, got their space by spreading across the property, not arching above it, as was common almost everywhere except in the Northwest, where land had a different valuation. The houses, Wulff estimated, were in the forty-to-fifty-thousand-dollar range, expensive for Mobile, but then again, hardly palatial. They were not estates. It was just a nice area for nice people who worked hard at nice jobs and wanted to give their children nice lives. If there were suicides, cancer, miscarriages, and death here, they would occur offstage in the quiet areas of the inner city, the hospitals and funeral homes, which were left to deal with the refuse of the suburban life when the refuse came home.

But right now it was just a nice, quiet suburb. All of Wulff’s quarry seemed to live in nice places. It was those whom they serviced, those at the bottom of the line, who lived in alleyways or bombed-out SRO flats in the central cities; it was the customers who shot the shit who lived there, but the dealers and distributors, the quiet, semipolished men who had created and serviced the habit, all lived very nicely, thank you. In Boston they lived by the Charles, in San Francisco by the Bay, in New York by the Sound; here by the Gulf of Mexico. And, here too, almost every house had its swimming pool.

Wulff could almost enjoy the pastoral serenity of the same Mobile morning that must have entranced Grant’s troops before they began their final sweep, just sitting and contemplating the way in which these new Americans had come to rest in a way that, on a smaller scale, was little more than a reconstruction of the old. Instead of plantation lawns, instead of slaves humming, instead of a rigid caste system, a nice inner city to stuff the majority of the blacks into, while the few who were able to get out of the inner city could be put into an equally nice but different suburb. America always came back to itself, that was for sure; the country was a wheel, that was all; it was not progress, but mere turning. Oh, Wulff could have thought about it for quite a while, including the complicated and interesting role that junk had come to play on the wheel when it seemed for a few perilous years in the early fifties that the lower classes just might do something really mindless and angry and attempt to pull down the system. That wouldn’t have worked at all, and that was when the shit had really begun to pour into the inner cities. However, he had other business to do, which was to plan out an attack upon Nolk’s house.

Nothing mattered but killing the man, of course. He had had quite enough of negotiations, quite enough of impassioned discussions with the likes of Díaz. After a while, sitting there with the car parked in neutral, left foot on the brake, right foot idling the motor, which had a severe miss anywhere above two thousand rpm, Wulff shrugged and reached behind him, plucked one of the rifles from the back seat, and put it beside him, then reached across the front to the gray box that Maury had yielded so reluctantly. He pried off the lid lovingly, looked at the little black turds of grenades nestled against one another, twelve of them squat and mysterious in the box, and then worked his hand in, took one out, hefted it carefully.

It felt all right. A live grenade had a certain cast and heft to it, which this one possessed; he could feel the fragments within sifting and settling. He looked at the pin, dead center, and the pin looked all right too, well oiled and slick, no rust on it; they were good product, all right. Maury had done himself proud, from whatever source. The only question was whether they would work, and that was something that he could find out only in performance. There could be no test runs in this quiet and sleeping neighborhood. It would lead to difficulties he was not prepared to face.

Wulff smiled finally and laid the object in his lap. He loved grenades. Every man had a weakness, it was said, and in his new person, his post-Marie Calvante persona, that was, this must be his. From where he was sitting, the grenade was the most efficient, deadly, workable instrument of war available. It was also the most satisfying. There was a lot of pain from a grenade. The fragmentation was apt to cause blindness, the shrapnel could cut a body open.

Still smiling, Wulff turned the car around and drove back to the street on which Nolk lived. At the street entrance he cut sharp left and came past the two men, tires screaming, pistol cocked, moving one-handed. He was twenty yards past them before they could react, and by that time he was beside the house, had stopped the car, and had both hands free.

Wulff yanked the car into neutral, picked up the grenade, stepped out of the car quickly, coming around low to use the hood as cover, and in one easy pitch threw the grenade at the house, aiming high for a rooftop punch. It came down, and at that moment the first shots came, and Wulff used the pistol to return fire and put down one of the men at once, and while the other halted at once, thinking about this, the grenade fired and the house started to blow up, and Wulff, diving beneath the left side of the car, was able to have a perfect view of all of it in almost complete safety.

The second man, however, standing, had no such opportunity, and soon fell from Wulff’s line of sight.

Nevertheless, hating himself but feeling that he had to do it—but not able to explain the reasons for feeling that way either—Williams went the next day to the assistant commissioner’s office without an appointment on his free time, waited through the chain of command until the inspector had allowed him in, then, without any introduction, told him everything he knew about Wulff, which was, of course, not much. But he told about the phone call, the request for ordnance, and the fact that Wulff was near Mobile.

The assistant commissioner had the same question too. “Why are you telling me all this?” he said.

“I’m cooperating with the law. Why are you asking me why I’m obeying the law, commissioner?”

“It isn’t that. Of course the law should be obeyed. But yesterday you said you knew nothing, and now you’re prepared to put all this information on the line.”

“The call just came in since we spoke, commissioner.”

“I understand that too. But still …”

“It’s puzzling? You don’t know why I’d turn him in? You think I think he’s a hero, that I shouldn’t squeal on a hero?”

“He’s not a hero. He’s a maniac. We settled that. Anybody who thinks this man is heroic is crazy. He’s more dangerous than the people he says he’s fighting.”

“I know that.”

“But it’s still hard to believe. It’s hard to believe that he just happened to call.”

“He would call me, commissioner. I’m the only man that he could call. He’s got no one else now.”

“All right,” the man said, “all right. I accept that. He’s in Mobile, then.”

“He says he is. He was heading in that direction, anyway. Of course, he might have been interrupted. ”

“We ought to be reading about that pretty soon if it’s true,” the commissioner said with a little smile. “I’m sure that he’ll make his presence known.”

“Aren’t you going to call in federal strike?”

“I’ll handle this as I see fit,” the commissioner said. “I want to thank you for the information, of course.”

“You’re telling me to get out, right? I told you what I had to tell you; now I should just get on my way.”

“Patrolman, you’re a little out of line. You know I appreciate your cooperation; in fact, your cooperation has been deemed essential, but—”

“My ass is in a sling,” Williams said, standing. “It’s been in a sling for eight months now, but it’s practically hanging out.”

“Now, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I think you know exactly what I’m talking about.”

“I don’t take to this kindly. I said you’re out of line, and I’ll repeat it. Now, I’m ready to thank you for your cooperation and to ask you to keep us posted should any other calls come in, and I think we should control ourselves, patrolman.”

“Wulff was right,” Williams said, “he was right. I thought he was wrong, and then I thought he was right, and then I’ve been thinking he was wrong again, but now I know. Now I know what’s going on. It’s the only way.”

“Don’t counsel felonies, patrolman.”

“I’m not counseling anything,” Williams said, and went to the door. “I’m at the bottom of the ladder. What the hell influence does a cop have? I don’t have to counsel felonies,” he said, “the law does,” and the door opened and he went through it, and all the way down the gray line of offices past the gray people in the hallway performing in their gray fashion in the bright and terrible tasks of the city, he thought: general delivery Mobile, general ordnance Mobile, oh, shit, if he calls again, if he gives me one more chance, I’ll do it … and am I ever, ever going to be out of this?