Lone Wolf #9: Miami Marauder

OTHER TITLES BY MIKE BARRY

Lone Wolf #1:
Night Raider

Lone Wolf #2:
Bay Prowler

Lone Wolf #3:
Boston Avenger

Lone Wolf #4:
Desert Stalker

Lone Wolf #5:
Havana Hit

Lone Wolf #6:
Chicago Slaughter

Lone Wolf #7:
Peruvian Nightmare

Lone Wolf #8:
Los Angeles Holocaust

Lone Wolf #9:
Miami Marauder

Lone Wolf #10:
Harlem Showdown

Lone Wolf #11:
Detroit Massacre

Lone Wolf #12:
Phoenix Inferno

Lone Wolf #13:
The Killing Run

Lone Wolf #14:
Philadelphia Blowup

The girl, Tamara, was alone in her parents’ house when the man in the overcoat came to the door. At first she thought he was selling something but when she stared at him he merely looked back impassively, saying nothing for a little while, clutching something in his pocket. It was seventy-five degrees in Sausalito, humid for a change, the air lying dead and heavy outside the central air conditioning but the man did not seem to mind the overcoat. He wrapped it more tightly around him.

“What is it?” she said after a while. He gave an almost imperceptible nod. “You know what it is,” he said, and then he showed her a gun, bringing out a concealed hand from a pocket. “You’re coming with me.”

“This is ridiculous,” she said. She had been in the bedroom, napping, only a robe on her. She was doing a lot of napping these days. Since she had left Wulff for the second time she had been sleeping too much. This would all change soon, she had promised herself and her parents: she was twenty-five years old, she would make something of her life. Get a job or go back to school or head toward New York again. Maybe next week. “Ridiculous,” she said again.

“I’m not arguing,” the man said. He pulled the overcoat more tightly around him, using his free hand. “This is no time for argument.” He was about five feet six inches maybe somewhere in his mid-forties. Who knew? Tamara was no good at ages. He pointed down the walk toward an idling, battered Camaro, someone sitting in there behind the wheel. “Come on,” he said “It would be easier to do this by myself but there’s some help if I need it. Let’s go.”

“Go where?”

“You’ll find out.”

“You don’t understand,” she said, suddenly understanding. “I left him, left him in Los Angeles. I told him I’d never see him again. He’s not for me.” She paused. “I told him I can’t live that way anymore.”

“That’s touching,” the man said. “Tell me more about it later.” The gun came on her, closing ground, inches away now. “Tell me all about it later. Come on.”

“Are you kidnapping me?”

“No,” the man said, “I thought that we’d just go for a little drive.” His control broke then; he looked back nervously toward the Camaro. A truck with a broken muffler rumbled down the street, gasping. “I mean it,” he said, “I don’t have time for any shit. Let’s go.”

Probably on speed, she thought. The sunken aspect of the eyes, the sudden shifts of mood. She had been on amphetamines herself, she knew the signs. They were not favorable. If people like this were being sent out to get her, it was very bad. Bad for Wulff, she thought, but even worse for her.

“I’m not wearing anything,” she said.

He looked at her intently without sexual interest. “You’re wearing something,” he said. “You’re wearing a robe.”

“I don’t have anything on under it. My parents will be back in just a little while. They’ll miss me. You can’t just take me out—”

The man reached forward with the hand that had grabbed the overcoat and seized her wrist. She could feel arteries trembling in his fingertips. “I said I don’t want any of this shit,” he said, “I don’t have the time. Let’s go.”

She came onto the porch and then down the steps in his grasp. Heavy as the air was, a chill caught her and she found herself shaking as he took her down the walk. She looked up and down the block but this was Sausalito suburb in mid-day. No one was out. No one was looking. It would be an hour until school broke and then most of the children came home in cars.

“What is this?” she said as the door near the sidewalk opened and the man pushed her into the still shrouded form on the front seat. “What the hell is this?”

“You’ll find out,” the man said, slamming the door.

She sat there, looking straight ahead. The man came around the other side, opened the door and pushed the seat forward, the driver leaning forward, and then got into the back poking the gun against her neck. The driver slammed the door. For the first time she looked at him. He looked exactly like the other man. The car began to move.

“You’ll find out,” the man behind her said again.

She sank into the seat.

At the corner, the truck with bad mufflers was staggering through a left. The Camaro settled in behind it, the driver playing with the gas pedal. He seemed to have all the time in the world now.

She guessed he did. Definitely, the pressure seemed off.

Outside Reno the trucker Wulff had grabbed a hitch with in Los Angeles wanted a rest stop. “It isn’t the stomach,” he said, almost apologetically, “it’s the kidneys.” He patted himself on the waist. Maybe he thought the kidneys were located there.

“Suits me,” Wulff said. He had been sitting upright in the cab since Los Angeles. After six hours of this he felt as if the shit had been kicked out of him. Then again, that was the way these drivers lived. “I could use some coffee.” He made a checking glance as he had fifty times before, every seven minutes, at the sack of heroin neatly rolled up and jammed between the seat and the door. There it was. It hadn’t fallen out, two million dollars worth of dreams.

“Good,” the driver said, “very good.” He worked on the gears, preparatory to pulling off at the next exit. It was a complicated procedure and after a minute of this, the truck jolting and groaning along, Wulff was sweating almost as much as the driver, only half in sympathy. The thing moved all over the road.

They slid into the exit ramp, just barely. “Sons of bitches,” the driver said, “these things are getting more complicated all the time.”

“That’s right.”

“But we’re still the same. The same men running different gears. The men never change.”

“Sometimes they do,” Wulff said, “but only for the worse.”

The driver was short and fat and wore a high-peaked hat. At the pickup he had started talking to Wulff about all of the women he had stashed away on the road fucking for him, then he had gotten into a longwinded discussion about the teamsters who were marked as rotten but had certainly done right by him. Communist fucking press. Then it had been a little stereo Tijuana Brass out of the rig he had had especially installed and then more talk about fucking. But now gear shifting was the issue. The driver talked inexhaustibly. Little plumes of dust hanging above the land reeled back against the windshield. Desert. Wulff had been in this area before; a couple of months ago. That had been different. A different stage of his life. “Machinery is a bitch,” he said.

“Ain’t it all?” the driver said. He downshifted further wrenching it into third, then brought the truck down a small side road at thirty miles an hour. There was a sign, DINER AND EATS, blinking off to the right, half of the
A
in EATS
missing. “I’ll just leave it here,” the driver said, rolling past the diner into a large, bare field just past it, set off by a gate. “I’m not going to wrench this son of a bitch into the lot for
nothing
.”

He cut the engine then and looked at Wulff carefully as he hit the air brakes and then the emergency, taking the keys out. “You got money?” he said.

“I’m all right. This isn’t a hitch anyway, I’m paying for the ride. Should have told you that.”

“Oh,” the driver said vaguely, but without resentment, “I see,” and went through the door. Wulff got from his side more slowly, feeling a little network of pain stretching through his back. Too much; he had taken too much. Still you had to on. “Don’t pay for the ride,” the driver was saying, “that’s against regulations.”

“Isn’t everything?” Wulff said.

“I don’t know,” the driver said, Wulff following him through the dark toward the diner. They went then into a vast, vacant room, a couple of truckers sitting hunched over coffee to the side, a waitress with amber-framed glasses reading a newspaper. The driver nodded to the waitress as he took a stool at the far end. Wulff followed him, then on instinct backed off at the last moment and went to the other side of the counter. It was not his ride. He thought about the sack of shit in the truck; the driver had not locked up the cab, it was there for the taking. That was very dangerous but what the hell was he going to do? Go back and bring his Santa Claus bag into the diner? No, that would not work and worse yet would be asking the driver to lock up. That would be a cold tip, not that anyone around here seemed to be interested in the heroin business. That was an urban trade.

The driver and the waitress were now locked into a close, intimate conversation. Good for him, Wulff thought. Good for him: he was no bullshitter anyway, he did have something going for him even though it seemed to be about forty and of generally poor quality. Still, who the hell was Wulff to make judgements of this sort? Each to his own. Wulff kept on walking toward the pay phone down the line, fumbling in his pocket. Plenty of change, anyway. It was an open phone, no enclosure, but then the lighting was dull and no one at the counter seemed to care about anyone else. He shrugged, thinking the hell with it, just plow on, and put a dime in, dialed
?
, placed a collect call to Chicago to a man named Calabrese.

“Who is calling, please?”

“Tell them it’s the wolf.”

“What’s that? You’ll need a name, more specific identification, sir. We can’t put through collect—”

“Just put it through,” he said harshly, and sent the operator away babbling. He ran his hand through the left front pocket with the change, turned, looked back at the diner as he listened to the empty sound of the transcontinental wire. “In the future, sir,” the operator said, “you can place this kind of call directly, prefixing it with
O
. The local operator will help you.”

“That’s just wonderful,” Wulff said without irony, “I’ll want to keep that in mind.”

He heard clicks, then buzzes on the wire and underneath that, like the sound of the sea, voices. Down the counter the driver stood suddenly and walked down the row of stools, heading toward the room marked MEN. The waitress watched him, then took off her glasses abruptly, laid them neatly on the counter and followed. They walked toward the end of the counter that way, then split, the driver heading into the room, the waitress into the kitchen. Ten to one there’s no partition back there, Wulff thought.

He supposed he envied the driver—not that the waitress was attractive, that wasn’t what he envied, just the certainty of the proposition—but he just did not have the time to think about that kind of stuff now. It was either behind or ahead of him; right now the engagement of bodies, grappling in the dark, did not interest him.

The operator was fighting with someone on the line now who did not, it seemed, want to turn the call over. This person wanted more information on who was calling and he was doubtful about accepting it. “Put him on,” Wulff said, cutting through this, “he’ll want to talk to me.”

“I can’t just put him on. I have to know—”

“I said, put him
on
,” Wulff said, raising his voice a little and there was a click on the wire, then the operator said, “Sir, you are not permitted to talk to your party until the call is accepted.” She put him into a dead space. He held the phone, palm sweating lightly, looking at the chipped walls of the diner, his back toward the counter. The two men were still hunched over. Did they live here?

“Yeah,” a voice said. “Yeah, this is Calabrese.”

“Hello,” Wulff said. “I’m here.”

There was a slight pause and then Calabrese said, “Where are you now? You coming? You in Chicago?”

“I’m on the way,” Wulff said. “But I want Williams. I’ve had six hours to figure this out now and I make it that you’ve kept him alive because he’s your insurance. You’ve got him, of course.”

“Schmuck, I don’t have anyone.”

“Yes you do, but you aren’t going to dig into him until you’ve got me in hand. So let me put it this way: I’m going to put this call in again in three, four hours and I want to talk to him. I want to hear his voice, know that he’s all right. Until then it’s a standoff. You don’t touch him and I’ll keep on coming.”

“You think you’re smart,” Calabrese said. His voice was wearier, older than Wulff had ever heard it. He seemed to have perceptibly aged since the time of their last conversation, barely a day ago. “You’re smart as shit.”

“Those are my terms,” he said, “you get him to a phone and the next time I call in I want to hear his voice and he better be sounding healthy. Otherwise I might cancel my trip; kill you from behind. Your style.”

“You have no style.”

“I’m just trying to muddle this through as best as I can. I make it you’ve got him and he’s still alive. Next time you’ll prove it to me.”

“You could be dead in three hours,” Calabrese said. “An accident could happen on the road.”

“You don’t know where I am and you’re not finding out.”

“Maybe,” Calabrese said, “but I know something
you’re
not finding out either.”

“Yeah?”

“I’ll tell you next time around,” Calabrese said mysteriously, “that next call you promise, all right?” and he was the one to terminate, hanging up on Wulff instead of the reverse as he had planned it, leaving Wulff to walk from the pay phone shaking his head. The old bastard still had moves; you had to respect that.

He went back to the counter. The waitress and the driver were still gone, he sat at a good distance from the two hunched-over men, shook his head, looked at the silverware in front of him. He guessed that he could go and get some coffee but it was too much of an effort. After a while, the waitress and driver came out from different directions, men’s room and kitchen. The waitress’s eyes looked confused, the driver hitched at his pants. Well, Wulff thought, well indeed and almost instantly came a flare of revulsion: it just was none of his fucking business what the truck driver did, what any of them did. He had one narrow corner to worry about; he was out of the world. None of this was for him any more. Barrel right on through now and end it.
End it
. Coming to the last scenes. He and Calabrese were coming to that moment when alone on center stage they would finish it.

The driver nodded and wiped a hand across his cheek. A slight sheen of sweat there. “Ready to go?” he said.

“Guess so.”

“You haven’t had anything to eat. You want anything?”

“Maybe some coffee.”

“All right,” the driver said. He seemed vaguely belligerent. “I guess I’ll have some fucking coffee too.” He looked down at the waitress who was slumped against the wall, her eyes turned inward. Whatever they had made back there it wasn’t love. Wulff wondered if all of the truck driver’s assignations went like this. Maybe. The waitress took a menu off the shelf and came toward them, biting her lips.

“Too much,” the driver said, as they looked at her, “too fucking much, you know what I mean?”

“I know what you mean,” Wulff said.