Lone Wolf #9: Miami Marauder (13 page)

In the copter Calabrese passed out and did not regain consciousness until the helicopter was hovering above the Dade County airport, the pilot indecisive. What the hell was he supposed to do? nothing in his orders so far had ever anticipated anything like this. The guard was no help at all, he was hunched against a bulkhead, gibbering to himself. The pilot just hung there in the air. This would not work, he knew, they had to transfer to another plane, they had to get out of here … he had no idea of exactly what had happened down on that beach but of one thing he was quite sure: it had been very bad. At length, Calabrese’s eyes opened and he stared at the pilot. “What is it?” he said.

“I’m waiting to descend.”

“Where are we?”

“Above the airport.”

“Above the airport,” Calabrese said, “above the airport,” and then something convulsed within him, some flare of intelligence, and he said, “We didn’t get the stuff, did we? He didn’t throw it out on the sands, did he now?”

“No,” the pilot said, “he did not.”

“The girl is gone?”

“The girl is out of the plane,” the pilot said, his hand tapping the controls, “you arranged that, remember? I think that she’s dead. She was shot down there. There was a great deal of shooting going on down there. I think, I think that he got hold of a machine gun or a Browning Automatic.”

“Shit,” Calabrese said.

“There was nothing to do but to get out of there. Our men were being massacred.”

“Shit,” Calabrese said again, “there were thirty-five men down there. How could he? I mean how could he do it?”

“I don’t know.”

“I prepared for everything. I prepared for every single goddamned thing. How could he have gotten out of it?”

“I don’t know,” the pilot said. “We’ve got to get out of here ourselves. We’ve got to land.”

“The girl is dead,” Calabrese said. “She is definitely dead?”

“I think so.”

“Fucking fuckheads,” the guard said in the corner, “miserable fucking sons of bitches. Fuck you too.” He took out his gun, pointed it at Calabrese. “I’ve had enough of this shit,” he said, “I’ve really had enough of it. How much can I take? It’s not right, is it? I mean, a man shouldn’t have to take shit all his life. Sooner or later a man has got to stand on his own.”

The pilot sat rigid, his hands imprisoned between his thighs, looking from the guard to Calabrese. “It’s an old problem,” Calabrese said, “it means nothing.”

“Sure it means nothing, you son of a bitch,” the guard said, “nothing means anything to you. Just death. Death means a lot.”

“You’re in a great deal of trouble,” Calabrese said calmly. The calm was unshakable, the events back at the beach had purged him or at least, he thought, had put him at a level removed from feeling. He simply did not care anymore. Some capacity to be moved had vanished. The guard accordingly was simply another obstacle, more difficult than most. “You could be in worse trouble if you don’t stop this. Put the gun away.”

“Why should I put it away, you bastard? You killed that girl. You sent her out to die.”

“I did not do that,” Calabrese said. His own gun, he found himself thinking with acute clarity, his own gun was in his hip pocket, he knew he had put it there when he had left to board the copter. That solid, unresisting weight against his buttock must be it, for he had not changed its position. It would be a simple matter to get to it, to shoot the guard … but somehow he had to first distract the man. The guard looked distractible, his eyes blank and yet glowing, focused through Calabrese, on the wall behind him, his attention diffused over a wider area … but it was still too risky. He could not do it. He could not do it yet. “I did not kill the girl,” he said, “she did it to herself.”

“You kill everything. You make everything you touch rotten. You didn’t have to kill her.”

“Drop the copter,” Calabrese said to the pilot. “We’re going to land.”

“You’re not landing. You’re not landing anywhere,” the guard said. “You’re going to die here.”

“I don’t think so,” Calabrese said. This guard was named Nicholas and had been with him for four or five years. Before that he had worked in the household staff, getting into that position of trust through honorable work in the collections division. He had never exhibited, in all of this time, a hint of rebellion. So that core of loyalty must remain; it was merely a temporary episode, if he could pierce through and reach that vulnerable, dedicated core which had served him so well he would be in no danger. “No,” he said, “I’m not going to die here. No one is going to die here. Put that gun away.”

“You kill everything, you fucker. You think I don’t know what’s going on? I tell you,” the guard said, “I can’t take it anymore. I can’t take this filth.”

“Drop the copter,” Calabrese said to the pilot again. The pilot nodded once bleakly, put his hands on the controls. “Are we over the airport?”

“We’re over the airport.”

“Then drop it.”

“Don’t drop it,” the guard said. He came off position, held the gun half-crouched on Calabrese. Sweat came off him freely, little drops of it lodging in the collar of his shirt, with the free hand he pulled the shirt away from his neck. “You’re not listening to me,” he said, “you think that this is bluff. You killed that girl. You had no reason to do that. I can’t put up with it anymore.”

“But you have to,” Calabrese said. It was amazing how calm he was under the circumstances; how that calm held. Having seen everything, nothing could touch him. “That’s the way the world is, Nicholas. Now stop making a fool of yourself and forget this. Forget this nonsense.”

“Why did you kill her? Because you raped her?”

Calabrese said nothing. The helicopter began to sink; it fell through the air as if it was water, heavily, jouncing. “We’re about half a mile to go,” the pilot said, “we’re going to go on the far side of the field. It’s going to be fast and hard so hold on.” His voice shook.

“Fast and hard, Nicholas,” Calabrese said, “did you hear that? A fast and hard landing. Better hold on or you’ll get shaken.”

“No,” Nicholas said, “no, I’m not going to go through any more landings with you. I’m not going to have anything fast and hard, I’m not going to see any more death, I’ve reached the end of the line with this now,” and his finger tightened on the gun began to bear forward. Concentration flowed in waves across Nicholas’s face and Calabrese took the gun which he had managed to get out of his pocket during the last lines of exchange, wedging himself against the bulkhead and shot the guard in the throat.

Blood leaped in small jets from the adam’s apple but Nicholas seemed strangely alert, completely conscious. “You son of a bitch,” he said, “I shouldn’t have let you get away with that,” and Calabrese took another shot, this one getting Nicholas in the wrist, spinning the gun out of his hand, the gun crashing to his side, above his head. Nicholas screamed, grasping his wrist, and then spouting blood from the two sites, fell at Calabrese’s feet.

Calabrese shot him in the back of the head.

“All right,” he said to the pilot then, not even looking at the corpse, “proceed on landing. Put this goddamned thing down.”

“All right,” the pilot said, “all right.”

“We’re going to get out of here. We’re going to get back to Chicago.”

“That suits me,” the pilot said. The copter was in a swift descent now. Calabrese lurched, swayed, pitched across the dead body of the guard and lay there, feeling the dead man’s flesh palpating his and as he felt that death, that moistness against him, it occurred to him with an utter sense of finality that someday soon he was going to be that way too. He was going to be dead. The only thing that separated Nicholas from him was time and not very much of it. The dead flesh had a familiarity against his.

“We’re going to get out of here!” Calabrese shrieked and the pilot said
yes
again and the helicopter fell gracefully toward the concrete of the Dade County airport where the private plane that would take him back to Chicago was waiting … but comparing the way he would board it as against how he imagined this triumphal return flight would be, he did not know if he could go through.

The girl dead, the drugs lost, Wulff free and now surely, the line of defenses ruptured, bound to attack him. And how could the victims of the massacre not be tied to him? nothing could shield him from that. He had no lines of defense. Miami was to have been the final arena of victory. Instead, it was he who fled and behind him now the avenger with multiple cause, multiple righteousness.

He had nothing with which to fight now, he thought, but fear itself.

But the avenger did not feel like one now or anything close to it, leaning over the body of the dead girl on the beach. The beach was littered with corpses, sirens were in the air, the few survivors of the massacre had staggered to the boardwalk and were doubtless now moving along the facing streets, clear tracers to the police to lead them to the beach and yet he could not leave until he had seen the girl. She lay on her back, one bright little drop of blood in the center of her forehead, another delicate stain underneath her sweater in the place between her breasts. Head shot, chest shot, clean wounds both of them, the bullets buried so deep as to be invisible. Oh yes, beautiful work had been done upon her. But even in death she would have style. Wulff would have known that from the beginning if he had thought of it. Style in her every gesture, style in substance and act, even dead Tamara was an object molded carefully, turned out priceless. He knelt beside her and had it not been for the bloodstains and what he knew had happened, he might have taken her for sleeping. Even her face seemed poised for respiration, her nostrils about to take in another breath on the instant. But they did not.

They did not. She was dead.

He looked at her, lying that way on the beach, and he knew that he should go. The thick, prodding sounds of the sirens dense in the air now, only a matter of moments until the police flooded the beach. They would find him, they would incarcerate him and from then the end would come very quickly; there was no way that he would ever see the light again. And Calabrese would be free. He would have gone through all of this, not yet to kill the man who had caused it. It was unspeakable. He knew that he should move.

But he could not. He could not leave her. It was as if, to him in any event, she held life and until the light of that spirit had gone from her he would hold fast. If anything, his months of massacre had given him a reverence for life, its delicacy, its difficult tenancy in the body, how quickly, absently it could be blown free. This had been a life too, perhaps the only one that had touched him and he could not leave her.

The sirens were closer yet.

He leaned over, his discarded gun falling unnoticed to the sands and touched her wrist, felt the bony patina of it as he traced up the surfaces of her forearm, tracing out delicately then the network of her body as he ran his hand under her neck, across her cheek, up the fine nose and against her forehead, brushing a finger into the delicate, already dried spot of blood between her eyes, just risen a couple of inches. As she had used to lie in bed while he did this to her, so she lay on the sands, her mouth twisted into an unspeakable expression of acceptance and knowledge. She had smiled that way in bed when he had been touching her. Touching her.

He felt the pain begin to prod within him, not the pain of fear or of rage, not even the simple fear of death which he had already known many times in his mission, but something far more complex, something that went back to another part of his life and then moved forward until he was looking not only at this girl on the beach but at another face, a face he had seen months ago, the two of them blending together and the fusion was almost unbearable, It was not fair, not fair: he was responsible for this girl’s death in a way that he had not been for the first, going out to avenge the one he had somehow managed to kill her spirit in another form and thinking this Wulff collapsed, sprawled weeping across the girl, feeling all of it rush out of him, the pain that had been bottled up for so long coming out in huge, gasping convulsed sobs, sobs like a giant sea animal might make trapped in this sand.

“It’s not fair,” he said, “it’s not fair,” but her body was cold, cold, his hands ran across that body, cupped and touched her dead breasts and then fell away. “Not fair,” he said, “I didn’t mean it to turn out this way, I didn’t want it, I would have done anything if it hadn’t ended up this way but what could I have done? What the hell could I have done?” She had walked out on him in Los Angeles. God almighty, she had walked out on him in Los Angeles, said that he was crazy, said that this would lead if he continued only to madness and destruction … but did that destruction have to include her? Then she had been caught up in the web and now she was dead. Simple. Simple equation. “It’s not fair!” he shouted again, rubbing his head across her stomach, “I didn’t want it to be this way!” The sirens were almost on top of him now. How much longer did he have? A few minutes? The beach was vacant; he the only man on it, he and the dead men and this one dead girl. It could not be long now.

“You cut that out now, man,” a voice said behind him.

Wulff leaped and, then, losing his balance, staggered backward, lay on his elbows in the sand, completely vulnerable, looking at the face above his. Light was starting to filter out and he could make out the features. “Enough of this, Wulff,” the face said, “you and me, we’ve got to get our asses out of here.”

Williams.

“Where did you come from?” Wulff said and then, the question unnecessary, the answer pointless, motioned toward the girl again. “She’s dead,” he said, “they killed her.
I
killed her. I killed her and now she’s dead.”

“There’s no time for that,” Williams said. He reached out, grasped Wulff’s shoulder, pulled him upward, unresisting. “You got to get your ass out of here. We both do.” He pointed at the beach, the light was coming up more fully now, Wulff could see the signs of the massacre. “They’re going to see that it’s going to be very bad,” Williams said. “You done a job here, you’ve done a real job. But we have to get out of here.”

“She’s dead.”

“I know that. I see very well that she’s dead but that’s not going to change anything. You did the best you could.”

“No I didn’t.”

“I tried to get here sooner but I couldn’t. I might have helped you. But you did all right on your own.”

“Oh I did fine,” Wulff said underneath the sirens, “I did fine, I always do. No one does better. I think I’m going to let them take me.”

“No you’re not.”

“It’s too much, can’t you see? I can’t take it anymore. She got killed.”

“That wasn’t you, it was the old bastard. The old bastard did that.” Williams looked at the sack lying crumpled a few yards down. “You won,” he said. “I see you still got what he wants.”

“I have nothing.”

“If you have what he wants then he got out of this with nothing. The last step is to kill him.”

“He killed Tamara.”

“Tamara was dead already, don’t you understand that?” Williams said ferociously. He yanked Wulff toward him holding a tight grip, fingers biting into his wrists, then literally shook him. “She was gone, you met her in a speed factory. If it hadn’t been for you she would have blinked out right there; as it is you pulled her out of it. How much longer do you think she had anyway?”

“I don’t know. Longer than this.”

“She was
dead
,” Williams said, “once you’re hooked into that shit you never get free of it, it’s in the system and she was going right back there. How much longer do you think she had, a few months? You goddamned fool,” Williams said, “you’re not going to blow up everything you’ve done so far for this, are you, you’re not going to let it go by because of this bitch—” and Wulff broke inside, he clawed at Williams’ face, he hit him, and Williams took the slap straightway, standing there, hands dangling flatly at his sides, his eyes resigned. Wulf, after the inpact, turned around, staggered away from Tamara, down the sands toward the sack.

“Okay,” Williams said, “okay, now you have done it and that suits me but it’s time to go. It’s time to go, it’s time to get out of here, Wulff, now let’s go,” and he came beside him, helped him raise the sack, helped him carry it along the length of the beach. “You know that,” Williams said, “maybe it could have been different but it’s too late now to worry about difference and we’ve got to kill that son of a bitch.”

“It’s too late,” Wulff said, “it’s too late to kill him.”

“It’s never too late,” Williams said, “it’s never too late for killing a monster and the man is a monster. Think of the satisfaction, Wulff. Think of the pleasure. Think of what it’s going to mean to rid the earth of this vermin.” They were almost off the beach now, staggering toward the slats of higher ground. “That’s all, Wulff,” Williams said, “you’ve got to do it.”

“He went back to Chicago. I know that he’s gone back to Chicago.”

“Probably,” Williams said, “he’d probably do that.”

“Then I’ve got to go back there and burn him out. I’ve got to go back to Chicago and blow up the lakefront to get him but I’ll do it.”

“That’s good, Wulff. That’s real good.”

“I’ll get him,” Wulff said, “I’ll get him and then I’m turning myself in.”

“You better move your ass,” Williams said flatly, “unless you want to be turned in right
now
,” and he pushed Wulff along, impelling him with a blow in the small of the back, the blow not at all unkind but rough,
rough
, harder than the slap which Wulff had given but not nearly as mean and Wulff thought, no, he’s not a bad guy after all, he’s trying to pull me out of this and he’s right, he’s got to be right because if I give up now, her death will indeed have been in vain and nothing will have been accomplished. You’ve got to go on. Whatever you do, you’ve simply got to go on. There were sirens all around them now.

“We’ve got to get a car,” he said.

“You don’t worry about that,” Williams said, “you just leave that to me, I’m getting goddamned experienced in this business, not in your class Wulff, but I could fill in in the dark,” and leaving him at streetside, he ran toward a parked Mustang, illegally sprawled on the curb, probably left by a drunk who had given up the ghost but then again it might simply be out of gas.

Williams kicked the window on the driver’s side in skillfully, the safety glass spattering, and sprung open the door, vanished inside it. Standing there, Wulff watched, the sirens coming closer and closer all the time and a dull roar came out of the dual exhausts of the muffler. Then Williams had wrenched the wheel all the way around, spun up on the sidewalk, made a huge U-turn and came screaming to a halt beside Wulff, the left rear door falling open. Wulff crept into the smelly, furred cave and the door closed, Williams rammed the accelerator all the way down and they were moving along the beachfront drive at thirty-five miles an hour. Another screaming U-turn at the next corner and they were moving away from the sirens at fifty. Wulff settled back into the seat, breathing unevenly, feeling the sweat come down and around into all the empty spaces of his body.

“Nothing to it,” Williams said, “nothing to it at all. Police academy technique for motorists locked out of their cars. Remember?”

Wulff remembered.