Lone Wolf #8: Los Angeles Holocaust (2 page)

A few days before, the bearded man who was piloting the hijacked copter took Wulff all the way up to El Paso in a crazy, zagging journey that had Wulff on the floor most of the way, battling the impulse to throw up, not so sick however that he was not holding the pistol steady on the bearded man. The bearded man, dodging heavy cloud cover and the fear that Calabrese’s men might be up in their own craft trying to intercept, was sick almost all of the way but he was a professional; he kept the thing going. In truth, he had no choice.

“Put that fucking gun away, you clown,” he had said to Wulff once over Rio, and once somewhere over Mexico he had said, “I can’t ride this fucking plane with a gun in my head,” but without hope, and on neither occasion did Wulff put the fucking gun away nor did he stop feeling sick. The bearded man pretty well got the idea then that Wulff would not release him from cover, and resignation added skill to his piloting. He was able to level the plane off pretty well.

They came into an abandoned military airstrip in El Paso in the dead of night. The bearded man worked the controls with one hand while he kept the other free to pray, or if not to pray, at least to make some intricate gestures of his own toward the heavens, which were, with the rotation of the copter in rough weather, sometimes one place and often the other. The copter did not hit straight, hovering to a landing the way they were supposed to do in the movies. But instead it bounced, hit again, and then began to slide down a long, thin wedge of runway, a diving, panicky slide at the end of which it collapsed in a bank of woods, nestling against a tree hundreds of yards from the impact point. Wulff, almost knocked out, was the first to recover, coming off the floor in cautious stages, holding onto the pistol, locating the sackful of shit, millions of dollars worth that he had taken out of Peru for a dead man.

The bearded man lay on his back looking at Wulff almost without interest. All fight was gone. His eyes followed the pistol but they did so incuriously. It was all the same to him, the eyes seemed to be saying with a calm that the mouth would not have, whether Wulff killed him or not because he, the bearded man, could not be bothered with something of so little significance. After a ten-hour flight like this maybe anything would have been a relief; any change under the circumstances.

“I’m flat out of gas,” the pilot said in a dull voice. “They used to have some tanks at the far end, the other side on the west, but I doubt if they even have them anymore. They closed this up two years ago when the Pentagon socked it to them. It’s interesting, you know,” the bearded man went on, “the war was going on for a long time and no one minded and then all of a sudden when public opinion turned against it the Pentagon couldn’t raise a dime. I don’t think that you could get a cent in new military appropriations nowadays if you put it up to a vote.”

“I was in Vietnam,” Wulff said absently.

“So was I,” the bearded man said. “Two years flying stuff out of there for the Red Cross. Never in, only out, mostly sick bodies. It was a stinking mess.”

“Yes, it was,” Wulff said, “but it wasn’t anybody’s fault.”

“I don’t give a fuck whose fault it was. You going to let me go?”

“I don’t know,” Wulff said standing, supporting himself against a cabin wall. “I’m thinking about it.”

“Really nice of you to think about it; I appreciate that more than I can say. Leaving me with an empty gas tank and a ruined copter in this hellhole after I got you out of Peru.”

“Yeah,” Wulff said, “yeah, well it’s tough. Ingratitude runs rampant, you know how it is. These are difficult times for all of us.”

“Sure,” the bearded man said, “sure, difficult times, right down the line.” His voice was emotionless. If the ten-hour flight had left Wulff momentarily without conviction it seemed to have drained the bearded man of purpose. Probably he was still disoriented from having been taken at gunpoint out of the airport down there. “You know,” he said, “you’re a really great man. You’re everything that the press said you were. You’re not only a tiger, you show a true and real kindness to your fellow man.”

“I don’t deal with my fellow man,” Wulff said, “I don’t believe in fellow men.” He went over to the hatch, began to struggle with it. The bearded man watched impassively, his fingers curling. After a time Wulff was able to get the hatch open, bringing in a dank draft of air from the Texas night, the first fresh air that he had breathed since the thin fumes of Peru, which counted only in the marginally life-sustaining sense. “I deal with myself,” Wulff said, “that’s the beginning and the end of it.”

He reached behind him, took up the sack, struggled to get it over his shoulder feeling like Santa Claus with two million dollars worth of shit to waft down the chimney. The bag banged into his ankles knocking him off balance, he staggered, reached to support himself overhead. “It cuts both ways,” he pointed out, “you don’t like your position but what about mine? I’ve still got to make it out of Texas.”

“My heart still bleeds,” the bearded man said faintly.

“I’m letting you go, that’s something.”

“You calculate it,” the pilot said, “you think about that.” But Wulff had already vaulted, was into the air, hit the ground harder than he thought he would, was rolling in the mud. Three turns, the sack twisting under him, and then he was on his feet again beginning that slow, staggering walk from the dark runway to an empty, lighted space in the distance, the sack banging his rump … but before he had gone more than a few steps Wulff heard the sound that he must have been expecting.

Surely he knew that it was going to happen; his body, unconsciously, had already arched against it. There was the sound of metal hitting metal, then a bullet went off somewhere to his right missing him by a good distance, five yards or more he estimated. Then there was the sound of a chamber being spun clumsily, an empty click against the grain, and then the second shot came off-angle, hitting behind a little and to the left this time. The bearded man was cunning but just a shade overeager; maybe it had been overconfidence.

Well, fuck him. He had been willing to give the man a chance, small gratitude for being run out of Peru even at gunpoint, but this was ridiculous. Wulff allowed the sack to drop to the ground, turned around and ran toward the copter, that sound of the spinning chamber coming through the air again, and then the third bullet came as expected. This one was a wild shot completely, the bearded man folding in the clutch as bearded men were apt to do unless, of course, they came from Havana. Wulff had his own pistol out by then, putting a shot through the open space up the hatchway.

Inside he heard a scream, then the sound of thrashing. The pilot’s pistol hit the floor of the copter with a clang, and Wulff stretched, then leaped, got a handhold on metal, and one-armed himself into the abcess of the copter. Here in the spokes of dim light coming from a distant part of the field he saw his assailant flopping like a fish on the floor of the cabin. Moaning. “Please,” the fish said, “please, now.”

Always the same. They would kill you fast or slowly; they would kill you like a fly, construct your death out of indifference and then walk away laughing, but at the moment of confrontation when the weapons were stripped from them, when their own death was imminent, they would break open. They had done it that way, all of them. In San Francisco, Boston, New York, Havana, Lima, the tough men had opened up screaming and pleading. But this, Wulff thought, this was not necessarily anything against any of them because their own cruelty and terror (he understood this now) came not from a contempt for life but out of excess respect and for love of that fragile light which was conveyed through their bodies.

“I had to do it,” the bearded man said. “You would have done the same thing, you know it; we’re no different you and I. What could I do?”

Well, maybe yes and maybe no. Maybe he would have done the same thing and maybe he would not, Wulff thought; he might well have done it if positions were reversed, although he liked to think that he had not changed so much during his journey, that in many ways he was still a cop and took the cop’s dictum: only necessary force. There had to be a level at which a man could be spared simply because of the value of life itself, call it the sacredness of life to reach for an odd term. Then Wulff felt a backlash of bitterness because looking at the bearded man he understood that life meant so little to this creature precisely because he had never understood it. The thing on the floor understood nothing and therefore it had no reverence.

If life was death for this creature, then death was merely a transition. The thing was crawling, flopping before him, and Wulff felt nothing; this was merely another body, more meat to be conveyed from one part of the slaughterhouse to the next. Life was a slaughterhouse with a lot of cubicles and only one exit out to that great yard of decomposition. Wulff thought, drugs were perhaps the best conduit for a lot of dead meat, and the thought was a flare of revulsion, a bright spot of rage out of which the pistol kicked twice, his body shaking with recoil.

The man died silently. Nothing came from him but the sound of escaping air, his bowels voiding. He lay quietly, a neat, almost imperceptible entrance hole in his neck, a somewhat slighter exit wound to the side of the head where the blood was already puddling in its murky escape. He had no sensation whatsoever. All of the feeling had left him a long time ago.

Wulff put the gun aside shoving it deep within his pocket and then he leapt from the copter for the second time, carless now of his angle of descent (killers had luck; he was a killer again), hitting the ground hard on the shoulder blades as he went into a roll. He came from that roll slowly, gaining his feet, dusting dirt and death from himself, moving casually and purposefully through the dark to reclaim his prized sack of shit. That was why the bearded man had shot at him. There could have been no other reason. Wulff himself would not have been worth killing.

Wulff walked away, Santa Claus with his sack, blanking his mind. So many yards to the far side of the field, so many more yards, perhaps, perhaps not, to a highway on which he could flag down a car or hijack one if necessary. So many miles to the car until the next stop and he had an idea where he was going to go from there.

Not Chicago. Not to Calabrese.

He was not ready. He needed to rest, to recoup, to plan his next and final campaign against Calabrese but he could not bait that tiger now.

He found himself thinking of Tamara.

Well, it had been a long time, quite a time since he had seen the girl, almost as long since he had last spoken to her from Las Vegas. There had been a time when she had reached him, another when he thought that he was beyond reaching and that what had happened in San Francisco was just a brief collision of the bodies … but now she had touched him again. He realized that he wanted to see her.

So be it. He was entitled at this stage of the game to the integrity of his impulses. He would see her then. See her, and finally Calabrese.

Wulff walked through the darkness of the abandoned airfield, moving toward the far side. He had killed four hundred and fifty men, most of them fairly prominent at one level or the other of the international drug trade. Four hundred and fifty in four months. He had swept from New York to San Francisco, Boston to Havana, Vegas to Peru and most of these centers would never be the same again, not in relation to the drug traffic, maybe not in relation to anything. He was thirty-two years old. He had a girl behind him and a girl ahead of him. He had a dead man in a cockpit and a couple of other corpses almost as fresh to the far south. He had a lot of bodies ahead of him, still moving, breathing, fucking, drinking, that had his name on them too.

“Get him,” Calabrese said over the phone. “Get him. I don’t care about the cost, I don’t care about the risk, I don’t care what kind of troops you have to bring around. Get the bastard.”

“You should have gotten him a long time ago,” the voice on the other end said calmly, “I could have told you, I—”

“Shut the fuck up!” Calabrese screamed. He felt the blood working its dangerous way through the channels of a network, pressing to burst free, moderated himself with a few even gasps of breath. He was not worth dying for. No son of a bitch was worth a stroke. “I know that,” he said more quietly, “I know all about that now. Don’t get into that again.”

“All right,” the voice said. He was a professional subcontractor, working out of the coast area, not really part of the organization at all, which was the only reason that he could get away with talking to Calabrese like this. If he had been almost anyone else Calabrese would have touched him with death right then. “You see the trouble you make for yourself, Calabrese? You see the fucking time and expense? It’s your own goddamned fault. You had him and you should have killed him.”

“That’s in the past,” Calabrese said, “the situation has changed.”

“You bet the situation has changed,” the voice said almost meditatively. “This is a hell of a job you’ve given me, Calabrese, I want you to know that This man is no clown. He’s no fool.”

“I know that,” Calabrese said, “don’t you think I fucking know what we’re dealing with? But at least he surfaces easily. You won’t have any trouble fingering him.”

“I know that,” the voice said, “in fact he’s already surfaced. He’s in LA, do you know that?”

Calabrese paused deliberately, reacting against screaming into the phone. Two more breaths and his control had returned. “Sure,” he said, “I suspected that.”

“We’ve got pretty good information where he is and what he’s doing. Word gets around about him pretty fast.”

“So why didn’t you go after him?” Calabrese said. “Don’t you know there’s a bounty on him already?”

“I was waiting,” the voice said, “waiting for you to call. I’m no bounty hunter, I’m a professional. Besides, I figured that we could do better in direct negotiations than working any bounty and I was right, wasn’t I? I’m usually right. I’ll be in touch,” the voice said and hung up.

Calabrese held the empty receiver in front of him for a while and then very slowly, very neatly he placed it down. He stood, walked from the desk, turned and looked out at the spaces of Lake Michigan for a while, and then he turned back, very slowly reseated himself, ripped open a fresh pack of cigarettes and began to scatter them, one, two, three, broken butts and edges over the room.

I should have killed him when I had the chance, he thought. I had him and I let him get away. So it’s my own fault but what does that mean? What does any of it mean? Fault or no fault, you have to go ahead.

I’m losing my grip, Calabrese thought, and I’m getting old, and it’s all starting to move away from me, but one thing is sure; one thing is absolutely sure; I’m going to get that son of a bitch before he gets me and I’m going to stand over his corpse and I’m going to spit and laugh. And then I’m going to kick his eyes out of his head.

Sure, he thought, and broke another cigarette, that will be very constructive.