Lone Wolf #2: Bay Prowler (11 page)

Forty miles north of there eight men sat at a table, some of them with hands clasped, listening to a ninth at the head who was talking. The speaker was almost indistinguishable in appearance from the others, yet he was listened to with the kind of attention which bespoke power. Some of the men at the table, in fact, found it impossible to confront him at eye level but instead like nervous students stared at their fingers or the floor intermittently.

“This thing has been completely fucked up,” the man whose name was Anthony said.
Anthony, never Tony and leave my last name out of this altogether.
“I don’t like it.”

He paused; the men shifted, looked at one another uncomfortably. “Can anyone explain this?” Anthony said.

There was another long, thick pause after which one of the men at the end of the table finally said, “It was just something that kind of got out of hand. We weren’t really warned—”

“What do you mean you weren’t warned?” Anthony said in a deadly voice, “there was a memo put out on this man which all of you in this room received.”

“He came so fast,” the man who had spoken said unhappily, “it just happened so fast—”

“This is intolerable,” Anthony said quietly. “This man should not have lasted here for half an hour. He’s managed to stay around for a lot longer than that. And now he knows far more than he ever ought to.”

“Severo,” a small man nearer the head of the table whispered, “Severo.”

“Severo has been taken care of,” Anthony said. “Nicholas Severo will not trouble us anymore, and in due course arrangements for the succession will be made. In the meantime however, the late Severo turned over enough information to our friend Wulff to put us in real trouble. Now I’m not here to talk, I’m here to listen. We’ve got a shipment moving in here tonight that might be worth more than a million dollars and which we’ve worked on for months.” He paused and looked at them one by one along the table. “Do we call it off?” he said.

No one answered. Men mumbled, licked their lips, shuffled feet. They might have been a group of junior copywriters being questioned by a vice president on the failure of a campaign. If Anthony was there to listen, not to talk, they found it hard to believe.

Anthony rubbed his palms together and just for a moment the rage came through the blank surfaces of his cheeks. “There’s a question on this table,” he said, “and I want it answered. Do we call off this shipment?”

The man who had spoken first said, “No, I don’t think we should.” He seemed to shudder with the audacity of this and turned from Anthony.

“That’s good,” Anthony said, “at last we have an answer. We have a respodent, an answerer. Why shouldn’t we call it off? A million dollar shipment in which five hundred men and half a year have been tied up and which we could lose if we don’t take it tonight. Tell me why we should go ahead.”

The man realized, finally, that Anthony was waiting for him to say something. “Because we’ll have everything covered,” he said unhappily. “We’ll have it ringed with a hundred men if necessary, full arsenal, everything. He may know where it is and what’s happening, but he just won’t be able to get by. There’s no way he can get by. If he shows up there we’ll kill him.”

“Ah,” Anthony said, “that’s fine. You’ll kill him.”

“Well, he can’t stop things from going through,” the man said defensively, spreading his hands. “How the hell is he going to stop us? If he exposes himself he’ll be a sitting duck. I tell you, this thing is going to be ringed.”

“Don’t you think he’ll know that?” Anthony said quietly.

The man jerked in his chair, shook his head. Being the speaker had definitely been the wrong idea, he seemed to realize; it had given Anthony a target. The other seven looked straight ahead, seemed quite glad that the speaker had taken them at least momentarily off the hook. Any one of the hundreds of people who lived and died by these eight men would have been surprised to see them now. Terror seemed to ooze from the close, dense spaces of the room.

“I suppose he’ll figure that out,” the man said.

“So we’ve got a lunatic at large,” Anthony said. “This guy has killed at least ten men, some of them important. He’s starting to hit us the way he did New York.”

The speaker seemed to decide that in for a dollar was the same as in for a dime at this point. “I think he’ll show,” he said.

“You do?”

“Yes I do. I think that he’ll try to take it over. He’s gone too far to stop now. He’s serious about this business of his, that much we know. He won’t be stopped by thinking about the security.”

“A dedicated man,” Anthony said dryly.

“That’s right. We don’t know much about him yet, but I think we know that.”

Anthony shook his own head and stood. He looked down the table, a slow, hot light coming from his eyes, and the men seemed to quiver and shrink further yet. The one who had spoken became interested in his hands, looked at them with seeming fascination.

“All right,” he said, “we’ll go through with it. But you’re being held personally responsible. All of you in this room.”

No one said anything. Anthony put his palms flatly on the table, leaned forward.

“Things in the Bay area have been fucked around for a long time,” he said. “We let you get away with a lot of things mostly because we’re interested in cool and quiet, and you had us convinced that if anything out of order came along you could handle it.”

He paused. “But you can’t handle it,” he said. “This is the first crisis and all of you lose. When you came up against it you couldn’t handle it.”

He moved toward the door. “So you’re making it necessary for us to consider a whole new series of arrangements,” he said, “which we probably should have done a long time ago. But first you’ve got one more chance. We’re letting you handle this one. That shipment gose
through
and that man is taken care of tonight—both of those conditions—and we’ll forget about this. Any fucking up,” he said flatly, looking at each, one by one in the eye until the men shook like flowers and folded under, “and you’ll all end up like Severo.”

Anthony opened the door and walked out, not closing it. The eight men sat there for a while not looking at one another, each slumped in some personal meditation.

Then, one by one and quietly, they got up and left until the room was now empty, only the sound and shape of Anthony’s words still hanging, like poisoned vapors, in the air.

Wulff picked up the stuff in mid-afternoon at an obscure little shop downtown. Williams for all his doubts had fantastic leads. From the front it looked like of all things a bookshop, but inside it was pure infantry barracks; and what the old man had in the back was fantastic. He had never seen anything quite like it.

Williams had said that all he could say was it seemed that the San Francisco police used this place to build up their private arsenal. Trade was not restricted to police of course; the fact was that anyone with the price and manners could probably get into a place like this one and do business. Here was one establishment, in short, where the enforcers and the enforced could mingle, cheek by jowl, for exactly the same purposes. The line between the two, of course, was getting thinner all the time.

Wulff knew that this was an increasing phenemonon in the cities; the cops were loading up. They wanted more than the regulation equipment which the cities were issuing them. Walking around the inner cities all day was enough to convince you that a pistol would never be enough. They wanted full riot gear, they wanted a battery of devices, they wanted mace and tear gas and even deadlier stuff, and they wanted to have access to them at all times. These cops’ basements might well look like the back room of this store, in miniature of course.

It was just not enough for them, the regulation gear. How could it be? The cops wanted more, they were arming up. You had to figure that being a cop meant that a lot of people would get your home address sooner or later; most of them would stay away because even in this war there was a code which said that you left a man’s family out of it—but the old codes were breaking down. There was a new breed coming in at the edges which invented their own code or more likely had none at all. They would do absolutely anything to get their share of the power.

So the country, underground, was turning into an arsenal. It might not take the fabled enemy attack at San Francisco to blow this city up, much less the famous earthquake that was supposed to be due at any time at all, next year by the latest. Most likely when the city went up it would be the enforcers, those sworn to protect it from attack who would do the blowing. Imagined attack and then the over-reaction. The basements would empty and the blood would be running fresh and free in the streets.

Wulff hoped very much to be out of town when it happened, but he doubted it. His quest, inevitably, would carry him deep to the heart of the inner cities. That was where the vein terminated, the cities were the carotid of the junk business. It began in little fields in Turkey or Malaga where indolent farmers stroked the ground and stared in emptiness at the sun; it moved then to little ships and planes over great surfaces of water—but always, always like corpuscles tumbling toward the site of an infection, it would have to come into the cities.

The old man gave him everything that he asked for and made suggestions as well. Williams had obviously alerted him; otherwise Wulff wouldn’t have even gotten into the shop, not with that perpetual CLOSED sign banging against the doors. Wulff took grenades, he took tear gas, he took a machine gun and two more pistols. He loaded up like a small platoon.

The owner stood aside and let him take what he wanted. He knew his customers; he did not get between them and their purchases. His eyes were reserved, calm, blank; he did not know what the materiel would be used for and he did not care. Probably he was half a fanatic himself. You had to believe very deeply in this stuff to get into the business. A lot of it was for love.

Wulff paid him twelve hundred dollars in cash. He still had the New York money but the twelve hundred stripped him down pretty well. He knew that he was going to have to go and raise some soon. The one problem he couldn’t face in the life he had now given himself was lack of financing. Stupid that he hadn’t stripped the bodies of the men he had killed. Stupid that he hadn’t frisked Severo down; the little man was the kind who carried twenty or thirty grand on him around the waist, just to convince himself that he was real, that he was alive. But the habit of being a cop stayed with you at least a little while; it was hard to realize that just as the bounty-hunters were closing in on him, so he too must take bounty off his victims.

But then again he had seen plenty of cops strip corpses before the wagon came. For a man on street detail, it could be a pickup of ten percent on his yearly salary. Not steady, nothing to depend on, but like eating on the arm, it was a fringe benefit, every little thing helped.

“Got a car?” the owner said as Wulff stood over the stuff, considering it.

“Yeah,” he said. He had jumped the wires on a beat-up Continental a few blocks away, driven it cautiously over here and parked in front of the store. Stealing cars was a tricky business, but he needed something with the trunk capacity of the Continental to carry the stuff, and maybe the owner would not even miss it.

The owner shrugged, looked at him. “Big job to transport,” he said.

“It beats working for a living.”

“I guess so.” There was an unhealthy pause. Wulff realized that the man was not going to offer him any help transporting. Well, why the hell should he? He sold the stuff; he didn’t offer pickup and delivery service.

“All right,” Wulff said and opened his suitcase. He was able to fit most of the incendiaries in there, but the machine gun, the extra clips would just have to go into the open air, no way about it. “You can keep an eye out when I take this stuff into the street though.”

The owner laughed. He was a younger man than Wulff had at first thought, maybe only in his forties, but the steel-rimmed glasses, the thinning grey hair gave an impression of senescence. Maybe he had gone into the arsenal business because it gave him a feeling of recaptured youth. Who the hell cared? Why worry about it? “Don’t sweat it,” the man said. “You don’t think that anyone’s going to bother one of my customers, do you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Everybody knows about this store. The police aren’t going to touch any man coming out.”

Wulff guessed so. That stood to reason; the policeman would wind up, likely, questioning another cop and you never knew when positions might be reversed. Of course he might also be questioning a criminal, someone buying for the purpose of perpetrating a felony and so on, but you couldn’t make an omelet without breaking eggs and if you wanted access to a store like this, you could tolerate the other customers. This, Wulff was thinking, in the modern jungle of the cities, was as close as you could get to a true neutral zone. Here, everyone declared truce, if only because it was a refueling stop. He was probably as safe here, he decided, as he had been anywhere since he got off the plane, in what seemed to have been another stage of life altogether.

“All right,” he said. He hoisted the suitcase awkwardly, stumbled to the door of the shop and checking the street quickly, staggered to the Continental, pulled open the trunk which he had left unlocked and tossed the suitcase inside, then went back for the rest of the stuff. The owner looked at him impassively, hands on hips.

“Big doings, eh?” he said.

“Not exactly, no.”

“You got enough stuff there to clean out a brigade.”

“I wasn’t thinking somehow of taking out a brigade.”

The man shrugged as Wulff struggled with the machine gun and clips. “It’s none of my business what you do with them,” he said.

“I didn’t figure it was.”

“I just sell the stuff, that’s all.”

“One thing,” Wulff said, pausing at the door, balancing things uncomfortably. “I’m just curious. Has anybody come in here to make a buy and then turned the merchandise on you when you asked them to pay?”

The owner smiled, a big but somehow impassive grin. It was the most animation he had ever seen on the man. “Oh yes,” he said, “that’s happened. Once. Once or twice it has happened.”

“What did you do then?”

The grin broke open into laughter. “That was all taken care of,” the owner said.

He closed the door in Wulff’s face.

Reconnoitering the street again he went to the Continental, put the rest of the stuff in and closed the back, breathing hard. His first idea had not been a very good one, he decided. He was just going to use the Continental to transport the stuff back to his quarters, empty it out, then leave it back on the street, as close as possible to the point where he had stolen it. But he had not taken into account the weight and heft of the stuff he would be carrying. His best bet then would be to leave it in the car for keeps and drive it down to the Bay tonight, which meant that there was going to be one pissed-off owner of a beaten up, mud-grey Lincoln Continental walking round.

Then again, the owner might be pleased as hell. The book value of this thing was probably twice as much as it was worth. The transmission was gone, the front end suspension completely shot, the car had an alarming wobble at any range over thirty miles an hour. All in all, he supposed, a certain inexperience was showing.

If he was going to go into automobile theft among his other activities, he sure as hell could have stolen something in better shape than this bomb, Wulff supposed.

He got into the car and started the engine. The car came to life reluctantly, he drove it out of there and toward the outskirts of town, back to his room. Just getting out of the inner city made him feel better. San Francisco downtown looked the same as Chicago, as New York, as all of the metropolitan areas he had seen. Past the bright scatter of office buildings, the center business district, there was the grim, grey clutter of the streets where only the victims could live. It looked like Munich must have in 1946, a bombed-out war zone in which everything worthwhile had been stripped by the enemy or smashed up by the occupants in sheer frustration. Garbage sifted in those streets; throughout was an air of total hopelessness and acceptance. In these streets, even in daylight, people either walked quickly looking to neither side or sat aimlessly on crates, leaned against building frontage.

Oh yes, the cities were finished. Wulff could not doubt it. In his ten years in New York, minus two for a little reconnoitering in Saigon, he could see the total devastation of that city. It had gone from a city perilously on the edge of defeat to one which was untenable for all but those shielded from it in that decade. The illness was strongest and most visible in New York because it was the largest of the cities, but New York was only a taste of everyone’s future. The same thing was happening throughout the country. Detroit was already finished. There were midwestern cities which had been literally walled off by factories and expressways; no one went into them outside of these protected zones.

And then there was San Francisco, which by all indications would eat itself up long before the earthquake got it. At the rate this inner city was going, the earthquake would have only the rats and staggering, post-human forms to work on if it did not get down to business almost immediately.

Let the earthquake come, Wulff thought, if this is all that we can put up against it. It would be better by far to have the cleansing fire of nature’s devastation than this, if this was the best that men could do. Nature, even at its most mindless, brought a more purifying form of destruction than man could.

He drove back to his lodgings, hearing the armaments rattling in the trunk, the Continental shifting uneasily in the roadway when he tried to compensate for the swerving. Outside of the rooming house a car was parked, two men seated in the front. Wulff saw them immediately, slowed the car, tensed himself to alertness as he headed for a parking space across the street. It was impossible to live in a constant state of crisis and yet—

And yet the men started firing before Wulff had even stopped the car.

The first bullet fired hastily hit the windshield, the second cracked into the driver’s door in an explosion of glass. Wulff forgot about anything except seeking cover. He dived toward the floorboards of the car, hitting his chin a terrific crack on the dashboard, opening up his palms to ward off some of the impact. The car, still rolling, hit a parked car and cracked halfway through it, stopping with a terrific jolt. Wedged tightly in front of the passenger’s seat, Wulff weathered the impact.

The men were still firing. Bullets hit the car like snow. He could feel glass sifting down around him. Then there was the sound of a door slamming, voices shouting to one another. They were taking no chances. They were coming to get him.

He rolled, twisted, got his gun out. These assassins did not care, obviously, who was on the street, they were going to get this job done quickly at any risks. That made them probably working under orders and it also made them desperate. The driver’s door yanked open. From his angle he got no more than an impression of a body standing there, grey cloth, an extended thing that was a hand with a pistol.

Off-balance Wulff fired into the center of the greyness. The thing in the door fell away and he found himself looking at another man right behind it, this man also holding a gun. As he faced Wulff’s pistol his round face broke into an expression of astonishment and he seemed to be trying to dodge away even as he fired.

The bullet missed Wulff. His luck, if luck it was, continued to hold. He had another word for it though, not luck. He fired at the man’s head. The top of the man’s head came off like a dummy’s and grey tears rolled down the surfaces. The man fell away.

Wulff held his position, waved the gun in front of him. He had seen only two in the car but that did not mean that there could not be a third or even a fourth taking up sentry duty. But nothing more happened. Protecting himself, bringing the gun in heavily against him, he grunted to a seated position in the passenger seat, then slid along toward the wheel and looked out.

The corpses, grotesquely, were piled against one another, almost embracing in the gutter. The black Thunderbird in which they had come was still open, engine running. Quick getaway planned, obviously. These were specialists. He got out of the car, still holding himself and checked out the street.