Lone Wolf #8: Los Angeles Holocaust (7 page)

They should have gotten the hell out of there already.

The horses had gone by; Wulff turned, saw their rumps passing the finish line, some bunched together, a few strung out. From this angle there was no indication who had won but Williams, hunched over the rail, had taken a ticket out of his pocket and was busily shredding it, cursing. “Fucking one,” he said. “Fucking son of a bitch lays off the pace; if he had only chased that cheap speed—”

“Let’s get out of here,” Wulff said.

Williams jerked his head up, his eyes round. The idea of getting out seemed to be a new one to his consciousness. “Yeah,” he said, “yeah, I guess we could do that.”

“He must have thought he blew his cover,” Wulff said. “He’s gone.”

“Gone? Gone? Oh, you mean the guy—”

Something seemed to have happened to Williams’ cerebral faculties. Call it the racetrack itself, he guessed. “Look,” he said, putting a hand on the rail, then gesturing as numbers started to appear on the tote, as the announcer began to babble something about the results not yet being official. “Look at that. The five horse won it.”

“Let’s get out of here,” Wulff said. “I think that we’ve got a few minutes’ grace; I don’t know who the guy is with though, or what he might be carrying—”

“Yeah,” Williams said. He shrugged rapidly several times as if cold, “yeah, we ought to get out of here. Okay. The five horse won it A forty, fifty to one shot.” He squinted, looked at the tote. “Fifty to one on the last flash,” he said, “that means a minimum of a hundred and two dollars. That’s wild.”

“All right,” Wulff said, putting a hand on his partner’s shoulder, guiding him through the crowd which was indeed breaking up into little clumps, most of them babbling curses. “Let’s get the hell out of here.” A continent, four months, three thousand miles for this reunion … and all Williams could talk about was the five horse. “I don’t know how much time we’ve got,” he said. “They’re closing in. It’s bad.”

“I know it’s bad,” Williams said, following Wulff now in a rapid scuttle, pulling alongside of him when they broke into an open area under the grandstand, damp gusts of air propelled by fans hitting them. He was not walking quite normally, Wulff noticed, the knife wound that Williams had taken had hurt him obscurely, badly, changed him. Williams no longer looked twenty-four; he might have been forty. “Don’t tell me how bad it is. I almost got fucking knocked off in Nebraska.”

“Yeah,” Wulff said, “I almost bought it in a few places too.” The announcer was now saying that the result was official, dim groans were coming up like steam around them as they walked rapidly downstairs to ground level toward the parking lot. “Quite a few places.” He looked around him. The tall spotter was nowhere in sight. All right. All right, then, he had been right; there were at least a few minutes lead time. “Let’s get back and unload,” he said, “you got the stuff?”

“In the parking lot. Oh my, yes indeed, I would say that I have the stuff.”

“Good,” Wulff said, “good,” throwing his ticket onto the concrete of the parking lot, the ticket fluttering behind them. It only occurred to him a little later when they were already on the road toward the Idle Hour, forming a little caravan, Williams trailing him tight, the U-haul wobbling in his rear vision, that he had bought a ticket on the five. The five had won the race. He spliced the two facts dimly, obscurely; in this gelatinous mix they moved together. What had Williams said? Fifty to one? One hundred and two dollars minimum?

Well, how about that, he thought, fighting the wheel of the diseased Cadillac. Son of a bitch, they talked about Onan casting his seed upon the ground. What would they say about him?

Probably very damned little. There wasn’t going to be much of a history. And since the guys from the winning side wrote the history books, there probably wouldn’t even be a mention of it.

The hell with it, anyway.

Billings was willing to be patient. The plan to Billings was beautiful; two million dollars worth of shit, if that was what the guy had on him, was certainly worth a hell of a lot more than fifty thousand bounty or whatever crumbs Calabrese would throw at him. Probably not even that; the old man was a cheap bastard. Better go after the shit, he thought, even if possible try to make contact with the guy, arrange a straight split of some sort in return for Billings’s advice and counsel. Wulff would have to know by now that he was a dead man. Everybody in and out of the country, every organization man, every freelancer was out to get him. The guy would surely have to be at the point of listening to reason now. He was a tiger but there were limits.

He had picked up the trail at the trailer court and he had followed the guy into the track, laying back all the time, taking his chances, taking it slow. On a straight kill he might have been able to have taken the guy in the Cadillac out on the highway. Why not? That disguise and cover weren’t fooling anyone and if Wulff thought that they were it was only diminished alertness. The instructions filtered down from the top were very clear, shoot on sight, get him at any cost, but Billings had decided against it. If Calabrese wanted this man dead there would have to be far more guarantee than a bunch of vague promises passed down third-hand through a Los Angeles enforcer. No. He followed the man into the track. Take your time. Wait.

He didn’t know if he was still working for Calabrese or going freelance. It was hard to say; it depended upon conditions. Through forty-three years of life, some of it disreputable, most of it dull, Billings had cultivated one attitude: you went with the tide not against it. If it seemed the only way he could use his knowledge of the man’s whereabouts was to score him out then he would do it and settle for the low money, the hundred dollars and a bottle of Scotch that he would probably wind up with from the old man after the organization’s various levels had finished cutting in. On the other hand, the basic plan was to get out of this at the highest level possible; that meant freelancing if he could get away with it. Get away with the goods. But above all you remained flexible, you changed your outlook to suit the conditions, and you never panicked. Panic was deadly. There was always a way out if you could find it.

Billings used to shoot heroin but with great difficulty he had kicked it. He had decided ten years ago that horse didn’t pay; even at discount rates the habit was too expensive and it was undercutting his ambition. So he had gone into screaming fits in cold isolation for two weeks and walked out of the rooming house with the habit kicked but with the sullen knowledge that he would carry the desire for shit around him as long as he lived. All right. You could live with that, too; better wanting it all the time and living, being able to carry on, than having it and not wanting it and winding up OD’d out or in a sewer somewhere before your thirty-eighth birthday. But his years on horse had given Billings one overpowering insight which would not have been available to him otherwise: he knew all about the stuff. He could understand why a man or woman would get involved, would wind up dedicating the meaning of their whole lives simply to picking up the next shot or the next. It was powerful stuff. It beat all the hell out of ordinary living for the ordinary people and if he had had a choice he might have stayed on it. But no good. No good at all. He would have wound up dead and who would there be to funnel out the shit if all of the shitsellers were on the stuff themselves? That made simple sense: stick to hard liquor and sex, look for kicks anywhere else, but stay off that stuff. He had managed it for over nine years now, nine years, six months, two weeks, four days exactly and there had not been a morning of his life once in all of that time when he had not awakened, alone or with a woman in his bed, aching for one poke of the needle. So live with it.

He picked the big bastard up at the grandstand at Santa. He thought that he had lost him in the parking lot and that was a pretty panicky feeling, stumbling out of luck with the same haste with which he had stumbled in. But when he came frantically into the track convinced that he had lost him he had almost walked up against Wulff underneath the grandstand tote, the big man holding a hand in his pocket, looking nervously up at the tote every thirty seconds or so, which meant that he was waiting for a meet of some sort. Billings had measured the guy; he had looked rough all right but not quite as difficult as rumor had it. When you came right down to it he was just another man, another human being, and Billings knew all of the pressure points. Jugular, groin, nape of the neck, solar plexus, they all went down in the same way to the same trigger and they took bullets in the same way too, blood spreading out like flowers from the ruined flesh no matter who they were. That was the secret: all men were the same in the way that they died and Calabrese knew that secret too, this probably being the center of his power. Billings had looked him over, planning it, plotting it, deciding on the best approach. What he wanted to do, of course, was to find the shit and kill him straight off but since finding the location of the shit probably involved not killing the guy but instead dealing with him in some way, Billings calculated it from that angle. There had to be a level of approach. He would find it.

The guy was alert though. He was goddamned alert; well, maybe that was one of the advantages of having been an ex-cop, he sensed a tail, he sensed cover, and Billings became quite aware, early on, that the man had somehow become alert to the cover. Nothing to do then but to fade away; either that or kill him then and there with the silencer and better than an even chance of sneaking away through the crowds, but Billings had decided to wait on the silencer. He could do that anytime. If you were willing to pay the price, that was what the cliche was, any man could kill any other man anytime. You couldn’t stop killings, you could only punish them and by the punishment set a discouraging example. Maybe. The law had not had too much success with that concept for a couple of thousand years but you couldn’t blame people for poking ahead still trying.

Then the guy got on the window line, shuffled slowly forward, made a bet, went out into the crowd on the lawn. Billings had by that time faded far back, moved out of the guy’s range entirely, and he had almost lost him in the crowd, then he had picked him up, head bobbing, as he had gone toward the finish line. Billings closed in again. Here, possibly, was the place to do it. The audacious answer might be the right one. Shove a gun into the cat’s ribs and abduct him right on the spot, disarm him, get him to the parking lot or wherever the hell the goods were, and then dump him right there. It seemed reasonable and Billings who had never liked the racetrack was beginning to become jittery with the crowds, the heat, the light, the noise. Better get out of here. Maybe it would be better to kill the guy here and get away cleanly than to mess with him, he thought. It tempted him. But he reminded himself that this was only old Santa, pounding its madness into the bloodstream. Better not take this seriously. If he did something like that he would be panicking.

Then the situation had suddenly taken another turn. There was a black guy down at the finish line and this Wulff was talking to him. Suddenly the picture came clear to Billings, this was the meet that Wulff had been waiting for, that was no idle chatter, no black-white relations and understanding going on down there. The guy had a partner of some sort, the black guy must have been the one, and somehow looking at this and the way that the two of them were talking the situation became infinitely more dangerous to Billings; it was not just a question of doubling the antagonists but rather geometrically compounding the odds against him. The black guy was bringing something into the equation that had not been there before, the black guy was obviously some kind of a key to what Wulff was doing here and where he would go from now on because he could see that Wulff was looking for an exit hatch almost as soon as he had started talking to the black guy. He had accomplished what he had come here for. He wanted to get out as quickly as possible. It was the black man, probably more interested in horses than Wulff, who insisted that they stay, that was obvious. Billings felt a profound disgust looking at this but he also felt the beginnings of calm and understanding. They would be coming out soon now. They might stay one race, they might somehow stay even two, but they were going to come out of here shortly and there was only one exit from the grandstand into the parking lot, one into which all of the alleys and corridors of the grandstand staircases fed. He could cover it easily. He could wait. He faded out of there.

Waiting, one hand on his gun, leaning against a gate, covering everything carefully, the thought occurred to him for the second time that he was probably in too deep. This might be a job for Calabrese after all; Billings had his advantages and talents but the odds were enormous and if he blew this one it meant that not only Wulff and the partner but Calabrese himself was going to be after him. It meant that even if he was successful he would just misdirect the heat meant for Wulff onto him. Better by far, maybe, to take a shot when he had a chance. They would be coming out of here soon. Okay. They would be coming out of here soon and with the silencer he would have a clear, clean shot and a good chance at escape before anyone even noticed that something was wrong. Who the hell looked at a couple of losers coming out of the track after the first or the second? At that time, the main flow was still the other way; hope money being toted in for the third, the fifth, the eighth, or ninth races. Take his shot and be done with it.

But he was in too deep, Billings thought. He had already made a decision and besides that, besides that he would admit it: the thrill of the hunt was upon him and beyond that the thrill of the ultimate hit. The two million dollars worth of Peruvian goods which this character had with him were authenticated, that much was clear. Calabrese would not call this level of attention into play unless it was true, because Calabrese was cheap. So there was two million dollars for the taking, and damned, Billings thought, if he would relinquish it so quickly. He had scuffled on the margins all his life while worse men had gone further. Now it was his turn. He kept his hand on the pistol and he waited.

After a while, as he had expected, the two men came out of one of the doorways, poked their way through the flowers and greenery of the track, and came onto the path facing him. Billings ducked behind a tree holding his pistol; he was completely concealed then behind a bench but the two men simply kept on walking, kept on talking. For all the difference that Billing’s presence made at this moment he might as well have not been there. Well it was obvious, Wulff had deduced inside the track that he was no longer being covered and now Billings was out of mind altogether. They were deeply involved in conversation; the black man was telling Wulff something. Good, better, best. Billings fell behind to a distance of two hundred yards and then he trailed them.

Coming into the parking lot the men split, the one heading off into the distance, the other, the black man, getting into a Ford sedan with a yellow U-haul behind it. The shit might be in there, Billings thought with vague excitement, it was quite possible, but he kept his eyes on Wulff who was trudging on, seeing him go at last into a beaten-up car of some sort parked all the way down, separated from the other cars by a gap of ten to twenty yards. No, Billings thought, no, the shit isn’t in the U-haul, that’s something else. The shit is in Wulff’s car and he parked it away from the others for that reason but he’s a goddamned fool because it just brings more attention to him. He watched as Wulff struggled with the trunk, opened it, looked inside, then closed it. Checking. The Ford with the U-haul was already backing out of the lot. Billings, hunched over behind a row of cars watched that one move, watched Wulff’s car move, and then as the two met somewhere in the exit path forming a file, he stood and sprinted to his own Volkswagon, not cautious at all now of being seen, simply desperate to reach his car, make the hunt. This was no time to worry about being seen. It would be insane to have gone this far, to have seen this much, only to lose them. He knew. Billings knew now. The shit was in the trunk of Wulff’s junker. And if he knew anything about this situation the U-haul was full of something else, rifles maybe. The black man was bringing in the ordnance. They were a beautiful team all right; oh boy, they were one magnificent team. Kill them both. Billings thought wildly, double your pleasure, grab some guns
and
shit. He picked them up on the highway outside of Santa.

Here, they had slowed, had tried to blend inconspicuously into traffic but that bright yellow U-haul stuck out like a needle from a junkie’s arm; Billings had no trouble at all picking them up then hanging back in traffic, letting the gap widen but never enough so that he lost direct sight, just hanging loose, digging in, and waiting to see what was happening. The trouble was that he was driving an unwieldy Volkswagen, not the car to take in the dense, alternately fast-and slow-moving traffic of the freeways. The four-speed transmission drove him crazy and it was impossible to set the car into a given speed range and track them. It was shifting up and down, cutting across lanes, changing speeds all of the time, and he had the panicky feeling twice that he was going to lose them as he got himself into a jam just as the U-haul broke free of it. It was stupid of him to have rented a car like this for the job. He should have gotten something larger with an automatic transmission but he had thought that a Volkswagen would be relatively inconspicuous. Live and learn. Everything was a process of learning, Billings thought. He was in trouble now, no question about it: he might have been able to take Wulff alone, risky business but despite the man’s reputation at least possible, but the black man, the black man was a new element altogether and a dangerous one. Billings was convinced that the U-haul was filled with ordnance. It was the only explanation that made sense. But what the hell did they plan to do with all of this stuff? Blow up LA? Make a frontal attack? They were in no position to do so … but Wulff was crazy. Everyone knew that; his track record was one of constant attack when he should have been mostly on the defensive.