Lone Wolf #13: The Killing Run (16 page)

Wulff sighed and shrugged and went to the Cadillac and cleared out his gear, lumbered with it in two trips to the cruiser, hurled it into the back, threw the Cadillac keys next to the unconscious trooper, and then went into the cruiser. The keys were in it, the engine still idling, the radio crackling along. Someone was asking the trooper to report. Someone was saying that he had not reported for a hell of a long time: what was going on there?

Wulff knew how to operate the machinery. He took the microphone and checked in, saying that he had flagged a speeder and written the ticket. The dispatcher said that that was all right but please keep responding to calls from now on. All voices sounded the same through the transistors, Wulff knew. Wulff apologized and said something about his inexperience, and the dispatcher laughed and said that there were no complaints that he knew of, and went along the band, checking. That would take care of things for fifteen minutes anyway.

Wulff shut off the blinker and disconnected the siren and drove away at a good clip. Thirty seconds down the road he could see nothing in the rear-view mirror at all, not the yellow bulge of the Cadillac, certainly not the small form of the trooper. It was astonishing how insignificant many things were when you had just a little distance. All your life you enacted scenes within an area of maybe a couple of cubic feet: love, pain, courage, death. Move away from those little circles of space, and they meant nothing. Only the darkness mattered. Darkness and the quest.

He moved toward Philadelphia and the rites of the bicentennial.

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Copyright © 1975 by Mike Barry
All rights reserved.

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: 1-4405-4246-5
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-4246-6

Cover art © 123rf.com/Victor Ortiz Pelayo