Lone Wolf #13: The Killing Run (7 page)

The bullet went so wide of Wulff that it was impossible to judge what the man had in mind, exactly where he had placed his target. It was almost impossible to miss by such a wide margin, but there was no time to consider that; housewives were able to kill their husbands at a range of three hundred yards, first shot, sometimes; and even a man like this was capable of getting off a killing shot. Wulff leveled his own  .45 and shot the gun out of the man’s hand so easily, so crisply, that the man could only look in astonishment as the gun detached itself, landed somewhere in a pile of mud downrange. He looked at Wulff, a slow, stupid expression on his face. “Oh, no,” he said.

Wulff held the gun on him, looked at the other, who was lying on his stomach near the car, the fumes of gas ever thicker and fuller, like flowers in the air, and said, “I think we’d better get out of here. That car is going to blow up.”

“Shoot me, I don’t care.”

“I said, I think we’d better get out of here.”

“I don’t give a fuck,” the man said loudly. “You’re going to shoot me, fucking shoot me here. I know that you’re going to do it, so do it now and get it over with. I tried and I failed, and now I have to die.” He raised his hands, the fingers fluttering, hands dangling like leaves from his wrists. “Isn’t that the way you operate? You shoot to kill as soon as you win?”

“I really think we’d better get out of here,” Wulff said pleasantly. “There’s a big car leaking gas over here, and it’s going to blow up sooner or later, no two ways about it. Why should we get incinerated? We can get out of here and discuss this like gentlemen.”

“I’ll never talk,” the man said. “I’ll never reveal a thing. You might as well kill me now. No matter what you do, you’ll get nothing out of me.”

“Oh, shit,” Wulff said, and resisted an impulse to shoot the man on the spot. It would be satisfying and would end the problem, but then again, he knew that he had no business doing it until, at least, he found out who had sent him. If they were on his trail again, if they had the net big and complex enough to pick him up on an Interstate in the early morning, then it meant that they were certainly closing in again and tighter all of the time. “Just get moving.”

“You killed Gerry,” the man said.

“I’m going to kill you too if you don’t move,” Wulff said, and moved the gun in his palm; the man shrugged, let out a deep sigh, and turned, trudged his way from the car toward his own. It was a bare Fairlane, black and pockmarked with what seemed to be scars from old gun battles. The man walked to the driver’s side and stood there patiently, leaning on the half-open door, his head bowed, his attitude patient. Wulff came across to the other side of the car. “Get in,” he said, “get in and drive. I’ll keep you covered.”

“Shoot me now. Shoot me now and drive out yourself, why don’t you?” The man’s voice suddenly wavered. “I mean, what the fuck, if you’re going to die, you might as well
die
, right? Don’t string me along, mister. I’m ready to stand up to it if you do it now. If you do it now, I can die like a man, but if you carry it on—”

“Oh, shut up,” Wulff said, afflicted with a sudden weariness, not only for these men but for their codes, the necessity they had to die
brave
; the scum seemed obsessed by this, but then again, there was another kind of scum which he had dealt with that wanted nothing more than to die
scared
—all of those who had sniveled and wept at the sight of the gun—and they had to be considered too. You had to figure all kinds into the equation; the basic point was that dying was more than most men could put up with sensibly. Living was enough trouble. “Get the hell into the car and let me cover you and start driving. You want that thing to blow up while we’re here?”

He thought momentarily of the cache of drugs that he had back in the Toronado, just the excess of what he had gotten out of Mexico, that which couldn’t be taken out comfortably on his person. It was the only thing worth going back for; the only firearms were on his person, and there was nothing in the suitcase in the trunk worth thinking about, except for the drugs. He wavered for one moment standing at the car, thinking of the few grams that he was going to lose, twenty-five grand in street value anyway, if he could make a proper estimate. But then again, he wasn’t going to take them on the street; the cache had value only as a means of bringing him into contact with others; he would have to let it go, then. He would have to let everything go.

He made a gesture with the gun. The man at the other side shrugged, made a pleading gesture with his hands, and then, as if all force had been drained from him, shook his head and ducked inside. Wulff came down into the passenger seat, held the gun on the man with low-key professionalism, and cocked it.

Desperately fighting with the ignition, the man got the Fairlane into gear and drove it raggedly away. They were not even half a mile down the road when the Toronado blew up.

At four in the morning the man in Mobile got a hysterical phone call on the private line that fed into the receiver by his bed. It was the only way that anyone could get to him at that hour; even his wife was sealed off in the separate bedroom down the other corridor. The phone could not be avoided; he had to be there to pick up the only kind of messages that would flow through it. “Hello,” he said in the darkness, looking for his cigarettes.

“Hello,” a voice said. “Is this you? Is this you, Mr. Nolk?”

“Who else would it be?” the man in Mobile said. His patting hand located the crushed pack of Pall Malls, he pulled one out and got the lighter and lit it one-handed, the receiver of the phone perfectly jeweled and symmetrical in the quick flare of light. Pleasing. But the caller was not pleasing. “You know who it is. Now, what do you want?” He paused, waited for the man to say something, then shook his head and inhaled. “Did you get him?” he said.

“He let me go,” the voice said. It sounded shaky. “He could have killed me, he had me right there, and he let me go. I thought I was going to die.”

“You fool,” Nolk said, “are you trying to say that you found him, you had him and he
captured
you?”

“It was a strange situation. I can’t begin to describe to you what it was like; his Toronado blew up.”

“You stupid bastard,” Nolk said. He almost never cursed, had a thing about it, would not permit any foul language to be used in his house or in front of a woman, but there it was now. Better to let it out, he guessed, than to keep it bottled up; that was how you lived to fifty-eight in the best of health, not by bottling things up, by letting them come out. “What do I care about his Toronado? What are you talking about? How could you find him and let him get away?”

“He could have killed me, do you understand?” the voice said. It was now completely out of control, whimpering and gibbering, moving up and down the scale of contact. Nolk could feel little waves of revulsion as he listened to the man, waves that he knew would turn into nausea. “But he didn’t. He let me go. He said that I could deliver a message to you.”

“What message?”

“He said to tell you that he’s coming. He’s coming to kill you.”

Nolk said nothing at all. He held the cigarette flat in his fingertips, letting it dangle against the floor, blanking his mind, concentrating on perfect control, and then he said, “Well, that’s no news at all, is it? That doesn’t mean a thing; we know that he’s coming to kill me. The point is that people like you were hired to make sure that that event would be even more unlikely than it already appears. You seem to have fucked up very badly.”

“We couldn’t have done anything! He had us off the road before we even had a chance. Strauss is dead.”

“I wish you were,” Nolk said. “I’ll take care of that job sooner or later.”

“Now, look. That isn’t right. That isn’t right to say that, Mr. Nolk. We did the best we could, we really did. It wasn’t our fault that we got into this. The guy’s a killer, he’s a combat operator, everybody knows that he’s good. Hey, we had a real good shot at him, that’s more than most people can say, we got him ditched off the road and in real trouble. And he’s got nothing now except one pistol; all of his stuff was in the car when it blew up. So we did the job, you understand? We did everything that we could have.”

“And he left a message that he was going to come and kill me. That’s how you did your job.”

There was an empty space on the wire, and then the voice said thinly, “Listen, it didn’t work out, all right? But we gave it the best shot we could. Anyway, that’s all bullshit. You know that he’s coming, and you’ll meet him with enough goddamned firepower to destroy a regiment. So what the hell is the sweat?”

“The sweat is that you screwed it up,” Nolk said. “You’re an idiot. Both of you are idiots. I’m glad that Strauss is dead, and I wish that he had done the same job on you. If he’s as goddamned efficient as everyone says he is, you’d think that he could have taken care of that one little detail. Where did all this happen?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a hundred, hundred and fifty miles east of Shreveport, you know? Plenty of time, anyway. He’s a good distance from there.”

“What’s he traveling in?”

Once again there was a long singing space on the wire. “Well, he’s got a black Fairlane, pretty beat up, with Jersey license plates. Not too good a car….”

“He got your car, didn’t he?”

“Well, all right, yes. But I got out of it with my ass, anyway. Listen,” the voice said, “You think it’s so goddamned easy, you’re so tough lying in bed there giving orders and telling me that I’m an asshole and Strauss who is dead is an idiot, you really think that that’s so goddamned easy,
you
take this guy on. He’s a fucking killer, can’t you understand that? He’s a murderer.”

“You’re a fool,” Nolk said to the voice. “Both of you are fools. One of you is dead because of it, and the other one deserves to be.”

“You don’t understand.”

“You’d better not let me see you,” Nolk said. “You have any sense at all, you will make yourself difficult for me to find because if I do, I’m going to take care of the job that Wulff should have done. You bastard.”

The voice made astonished, revolted gibbering sounds. But Nolk was already without interest; first his attention and then the receiver itself had been withdrawn, placed on its pedestal. Closing off the voice was like tying off one abscess, only to open a tunnel into a deeper wound; he found, lying on the bed, that he was shuddering. Little movements of revulsion worked their way up and down the panels of his body, and Nolk found that he was cold, fifty-eight years old and heaving in the spaces of his bed like a child, an infant who had tossed off the covers in the middle of the night and had now somehow lost control of himself. He pushed the covers back suddenly, and in a convulsive motion stood, his feet on the floor establishing a connection that felt curiously insubstantial, disconnected. Wavering, he felt for his slippers, put them on, and then went for the door of the bedroom. I am getting old, he thought. It was the first time that he had thought this in a very long time. I am getting very old, I become cold in the middle of the night, I look for comfort, something in the network of night to hold against me. He went out the door and through the corridor. He opened the first door on his right, peered in, saw the sleeping form of his wife against the pillow. Looking at her in sleep was shocking; he had not seen her this way for a very long time—it must have been eight or nine years since the new house and the separate bedrooms—but seeing her that way reminded him of how it had been in much different times. Oh, he guessed that he had to go back almost thirty years to get that image properly fixed, but there it was: the way she had looked huddled in the bed of their hotel room on the first morning when he had come back from the bathroom to see her there in the spattering of sun, stricken by the light and yet framed by it as slowly, slowly she had turned then, held her arms to him, and he had moved toward and then upon her.

She moved now too, sensitive to him as she had always been in some part which he could not touch, which he must not have known about, and the two images must have meshed then: recollection, in which in a profound abyss of connection he moved upon her again and again, and the present, in which slowly he came toward her, driven by emotions that he had not had in many years. As the fires in recollection battered and tore at one another, rising and falling in the light, so in the present, in the harsh, guttering bulb of the nightlight, did he come upon her, and now, as then, she turned and held him; he felt her gathering him in, a sudden hardness in her touch as she brought him against her, and he felt her move toward him, damp. He can’t reach me, he thought as he worked within her grasp, he can’t touch me, he can’t get near, I will have a hundred men around this house and all of them trained and all of them ready to kill. To kill for me. I cannot be touched. But she could touch him, he felt himself beginning to grow within her, struggling to pull himself free from his clothing, not able to do so, settling into her with sighs and groans, and oh my God she was slack, she was loose down there; he had never realized until now, driven by need, how far gone she was; he had maintained in his mind some image of sufficiency which must have again and again circumvented realization so that time and again in these years of the separate bedrooms, when he had plunged into her he had been fucking not the woman she had become but the woman she had been; but now he saw, he was in the bed with
her
, not some recovered image, not some dream, but Jennifer herself, and heaving and bucking against her, her cries filling the air, he knew that they were cries not of the young girl he had married, the girl in the hotel room in the sun, but rather he was fucking the groaning and submissive fifty-three-year-old woman grunting beneath him, whose breasts slid like water to her sides, as insubstantial as the blood that ran within him, and his orgasm was diminished, feeble, coming out of him in little weak sprays.

That was, in a way, the worst of it—the fact that he was able to climax. If he had been impotent with her, seeing this new aspect, if he had turned in revulsion, unable to function, it would have at least made some statement on himself and how far he had come from the imposed fantasies which had enabled him to fuck her all these recent years; but he could not; reflex was stronger than recognition, habit leaped higher than disgust, and at the end, moving within her, Nolk felt not only emission but a kind of lust, actual lust, which made him reach farther into her, his prick a claw, the flow of his semen little nails to catch her more deeply, and it was his revulsion which must have peaked the orgasm, made it even more intense so that in reacting against it he found himself moved more strongly by her, so that he came in a long, thrashing, bleating series of movements that banged her against the bed and made her groan with pain, all of her soft against him, a feeling of waste. Fucking offal, he thought, I am fucking offal; and that part was all right, but not the perverse and rising excitement that, even in the aftermath of orgasm, tricked him over into his second and more violent coming, and he lay on top of her as those spasms passed from him, looking at himself in a kind of interior astonishment: he would not have imagined that he had this kind of thing within him. He would not have really thought that he was this kind of person.

Slowly Nolk separated himself from his wife, slowly he pivoted to an elbow, rolled, brought up his legs to guard against strain of the lower back, and looked then at the ceiling, dimpled and full above him. His wife lay there, his juices and hers running from her, an overturned urn, now leaking parts of the evening’s wreckage. He knew that he should talk to her, but he simply could not think of anything to say. What he really wanted to do, of course, was to get back to his own bedroom and lock the door and lie on his bed planning the retaliatory campaign. He would have to have a hundred men around the house. That was correct. He would not take on Wulff with less than a hundred, and a hundred and fifty would be better if you could raise that number in this area on short notice, but he doubted it. Settle for a hundred, then. He would have to begin calling around at once; he would have to be on the phone for hours, starting immediately, because there was not that much time in which to make arrangements, and there was no saying how near Wulff had already come to Mobile. He would have to do that. But somehow he could not force himself off the bed, not before he tried to talk to her, although he had no idea what to say. He simply did not have the slightest idea of what to say.

Neither did she, apparently. She lay there running her palm over the sheets in slow, skilled, expert motions of arousal, as if the sheet were he and she was trying to move him once again. He stopped the hand, put his palm over it. She looked at him. “It’s no good, is it?” she said.

“It was all right.”

“You don’t have to say anything. You don’t have to lie. I know when it’s no good, for God’s sake.”

“All right, Jennifer,” he said. “All right.”

“Go on, tell me it was no good. I can take it.”

“I don’t want to tell you anything.”

“Yes you do. You’re dying to tell me. I can see how badly you want to. Well, go ahead and do it. Do it now and get it over with.”

It was hopeless. It was all of that; he was married to a fifty-three-year-old woman who (how could he have forgotten this?) was not only aging but querulous, not only unsatisfactory but raised to a pitch of awareness about her weakness which was to make it doubly unbearable. “All right,” he said, and sat up in the bed. “All right.”

“You come into my room in the middle of the night, you have sex without saying a word, and now you just want to walk out? No,” she said, “no, it won’t work out at all. You could at least say something. You could tell me how it stunk.”

“Oh, my God.”

“Don’t just sit there. Say something. Let it all out of you. I can take it. I can take almost anything now.”

“Oh God, Jennifer,” Nolk said, and stood, swaying uncomfortably on the uneven surfaces of the floor. “Will you leave me alone?”

“That’s ridiculous. That’s the most damned ridiculous thing I ever heard. You start all of this off and tell me to leave
you
alone.”

“I shouldn’t have gotten into it,” he said.

“Don’t start with your foul mouth. You can tell me anything you want, but you don’t have to get into dirt. I don’t have to listen to that.”

“I don’t mean what you think I mean,” Nolk said. “It wasn’t that at all.” And he was almost ready to get into it then:
I
never meant to get into distribution
, is what he would have said.
That wasn’t what I wanted, but it was too easy an opportunity to pass up, I couldn’t let something like that go, no one would have. I would have been a fool to pass it up, and when things started to shake down here, when it looked like I had a shot at the top, I was really commited, but now I see I shouldn’t have done it, and it’s too late. Oh my, is it too late
. To her he only said, “Good night, Jennifer,”’ and went toward the door of the bedroom.