Night Raider (11 page)

The beer-drinker pivoted slightly, screamed, reversed to his original position. “It hurts,” he muttered, “it hurts.”

“Well sure it hurts,” Wulff said, “everything hurts terribly. You won’t be able to move that thing for months without screaming, that is if they find you in time. But the thing is that you’ve just complicated everything now. I’ve blown my cover and I’ve got to get out.”

He closed the valise, shouldered it for weight, put it down and opening the top bureau drawer began to assemble his arsenal. “I got curious,” he said. “I wanted to run down one thread, that was all. Start tracing it from beginning to end to see what I can see. Well, there’s just no end to that thread, is there? Once you’re in, you’re really in. You should have thought about that yourself before you decided to free-lance with your late friend over there. There are no half measures.”

He went to the man, knelt, moved him slightly with more little gurgles and took out the man’s wallet. Identification, credentials, meant nothing, he went for the money. One hundred and eighty-five dollars; three fifties, seven fives. The hit business was definitely improving if goons like this used one eighty-five for walking-around money. He threw the wallet against the wall, folded over the money and put it away. Add it to the reserve. The operation, as far as he went, would be self-financing.

“You’ve fucked up my life,” he said to the beer-drinker.

The beer-drinker said nothing. He appeared to have fainted.

“You drove me out of the underground,” he said, “I was doing fine until you had to screw up my lodgings.”

Little droplets of the blond’s blood, running free, dribbled toward him. Wulff shrugged.

“All right,” he said to the blood, “so I never wanted to be underground after all. I just needed a little time to think.”

He turned, walked to the door, opened the door, went out. As he trudged down the hall the thought occurred to him that the blond and his friend had had absolutely nothing to do with what was happening to him now.

His course had been locked from the very moment that he opened the door of Ric Davis’s Eldorado and slid in. Up until that instant there could have been reversal. He could have backed out at any time. After that one gesture, everything was sealed.

He felt as if he were in an iron pipe somewhere and the pipe was strung toward eternity. Down that pipe he would run, screaming. But before he was done, he guessed, he would take a few with him.

Wulff was not a sadistic man; he did what he had to do only because it was necessary. He took little pleasure from suffering as long as the sufferer was in no position anymore to hurt him. So at the corner of Broadway and 97th he found a public phone, the only one in a bank of them that had not been looted and wrecked, and called the police.

He told them that there was a little trouble on the third floor of the rooming house on West 97th and that they would be advised to check it out. Maybe send an ambulance while they were at it.

He told them that the cops could send regards from the Wolf.

Vincent completed his work early in the afternoon and sat back, thinking about all of it. Finally he shrugged and put in a call to Gerald. There was nothing else to do.

“What have you found out?” Gerald said when Vincent got through the network of secretaries and relief men. “Go on, there’s no tap.”

“Might be one at my end,” Vincent said although he knew there wasn’t. The thing was to try and keep Gerald a little off balance all the time. In the long rum it wouldn’t help much but it was the only edge he was likely to get.

“I’ll take that chance,” Gerald said. “Come on.”

Vincent paused. “It looks bad,” he said finally, “I think it does all tie in together.”

“That’s what I told you.”

“There are a couple more bodies.”

“Oh?” Gerald said.

“One of Marasco’s bodyguards and a goon got shot up over on the West Side this afternoon. The bodyguard is dead, the goon is in pretty bad shape.”

“You’re sure of this?”

“It’s my business to be sure,” Peter Vincent said. “They were found in a furnished room that had been rented a few months ago by an ex-New York cop named Wulff. Wulff left the force a little mysteriously.”

“Wulff,” Gerald said, “somehow the name connects.”

“He used to be a narco.”

“Yeah. Maybe that’s it.”

“It’s Wulff doing it,” Vincent said carefully. “It all comes together on him.”

“I can see that,” Gerald said.

“No sign of him of course. The cops are looking for him now but they’ll never find him.”

“Can we find him?” Gerald asked. That was the man; he was, if nothing else, always to the point.

“Better than the cops I think.”

“Let’s find him,” said Gerald.

“I thought you’d say that. I’m already in motion.”

“I don’t know who this guy is but let’s wipe him out.”

“Okay,” Vincent said. He paused, considered the mouthpiece for a moment. “There’s only one real problem I see,” he said softly.

“Yes?”

“We know who he is,” said Vincent. “He left a trail clear as blood.”

“Yes he did.”

“But he probably knows who we are,” Vincent said carefully.

Gerald thought about that for a moment. There were clicks and buzzes on the line. Vincent lit another cigarette and let Gerald think. His twenty-fifth of the day. No sinner like a failed saint, he thought and inhaled deeply anyway. With all of his security, he had never exactly considered the possibility of a long life.

“Maybe,” the man said. “Just maybe. That doesn’t change anything though, does it?”

“I guess not.”

“That’s your job, Vincent. You’re the organizer. You have the connections and the instincts, right? Just get to it.”

“I figured as much.”

“Get to it now.”

“All right,” Vincent said softly.

“And keep me the fuck out of it. All I want to hear is that it’s done,” Gerald said and slammed down the phone.

Vincent raised his eyebrows at the crash magnified within the inner ear, winced, took the phone away and delicately put it back on the cradle. He sighed enormously. This should be an easy job and he didn’t think that this Wulff, whoever he was, would pose much of a challenge but—

Why did Gerald treat him like hired help?

He settled his belongings in another near-flophouse in the nineties off Second Avenue, two weeks cash in advance, and then took a walk over to cautiously investigate the premises at six-eighteen East 83rd Street. He was putting himself into an exposed position but it might take them a few more hours to catch up with him—the blond, their best squeal, was now permanently out of commission and the beer-drinker knew nothing—and he felt a sensation of haste, rising pressure. The situation was as bad or even worse than he had figured; it was a three-story, seemingly impregnable building nestled down at the end of the block, the very end, overlooking the river. To the east of the townhouse was a massive iron gate sealing it off from approach on the riverside, to the west of it was an empty lot large enough to hold a building of exactly that size. A gate was on that side too. Wulff figured that Vincent probably owned the lot too and at whatever sacrifice kept it vacant for security purposes.

It didn’t look good. The townhouse itself had a sealed-in, shut down kind of look, the shades pulled, closed gates on all of the windows, the basement entrance which might have been the best idea closed off by a massive iron door. The stoop led straight up, four steps, to the most massive set of doors he had ever seen, decorated in brass with what seemed to be little portholes now closed over. So they could sight from those doors as well, although with only a four-step climb toward the doors sighting would hardly be necessary. Having the entrance low to the ground, flat to the street side was clever. A stupid man might have thought that safety lay in getting as high as possible, building up the frontage, but Vincent knew the secrets of security. Stay low and be able to control all of the terrain.

It looked very bad. Worse than he would have conceived and he had drawn no pretty pictures of this in his mind. He could of course walk up those four steps, use that ornamented knocker and ask his way in. That would be very bright. They probably worked through a succession of locks and entrances like divers coming through decompression chambers and he would be likely to be dead before he ever got to the surface on which the fish, Peter Vincent, floated. He could come in blasting, that was a bright idea; he might be able to take a guard down with him before they cut up his body for dead meat.

It did not look promising.

He thought of dropping it. Five down wasn’t bad: Davis, Jessup, Marasco, Scotti, the blond. The Marasco killing was the only important one in administrative terms but it would keep them shuffling around for a while. He could just back off, be a hit-and-run man, start to burrow in from another angle. Instead of following through the thread, snap it then, find another spool elsewhere. Guerilla tactics.

No. It wouldn’t work.

If you were going to do the job you had to do it
right
, trace through the strand, sever out a whole line of responsibility and succession. Chewing little bites out of the fabric here and there was like killing roaches in hand to hand combat. You could take down one or a thousand but they would always swarm in.

The thing to do was to track the roaches to the point of infestation and then blow up the breeding hole.

He put his hands into his pockets and slowly walked west on Eighty-Third Street. No one was on the block, no one seemed to notice. Quite possibly in fact probably, he had been sighted through the windows but they could not identify him by face, not just yet anyway, and for the Peter Vincents of this world it made little sense to start sniping down strangers, no matter how suspicious, on the street. This could lead to inquiries. Eminent domain, as Wulff understood it, did not from the property owner’s point of view extend beyond the sidewalks into the streets. In the country that the Peter Vincents would build for us it would of course extend beyond the water’s edge but they were about five or ten years yet from having that kind of country. It was getting closer but there was still a little margin left in which you could operate.

Wulff found himself possessed by an idea. He walked back to the new rooming house quickly. As the East Side was considered, generally speaking, to be one generation advanced in lustre, temper and sophistication from the West Side, so this rooming house was an improvement over the one on West 97th. He had a small bathroom in his room here. The drug traffic seemed to be contained within the rooms of the individual residents rather than spilling into the halls and the lobby. The lobby itself had a desk clerk, an ancient, incoherent man who sat on a chair behind a high place and nodded off into a stupor but he was, to be sure, a desk clerk. And this rooming house even had a public telephone in the lobby which worked. All in all, things seemed to be looking up.

He dialed into the precinct and asked to talk to Williams. Williams, it seemed was not in; he had called in sick a few hours before and would not be in for his four to midnight shift. Wulff noted with a jolt of surprise that it had been only sixteen hours since he had last seen the man; that was two murders, another lifetime ago. He took a card out of his wallet on which a long time ago he had jotted down some numbers and called Williams’s home in Queens. His wife answered.

“He’s sleeping,” she said.

“Get him up.”

“Who is this calling?”

“This is Wulff,” he said after debating it for only an instant.

“Oh,” she said. “
Oh.
Okay. I’m sure he won’t mind getting up for you.”

“Don’t bet on it,” he said.

The phone went down in his ear. A little later Williams, hazed with sleep, said, “Wulff, how are you doing? What’s going on?”

“A lot and a little. I think I want to take you up on part of your offer.”

“That’s great,” Williams said, “I’m sincere, that’s great, but I’ve had no sleep except what I’m getting now for days and I don’t feel like no two man army—”

“No army,” Wulff said, “this is me alone. I just need some information from you.”

“Go on.”

“Information only you can get for me I should say. Through the department. I need some plans; a survey of a particular building.”

“Oh man,” Williams said, “oh man, that’s murder. Documents bureau.”

“I know where it is. I need the stuff right away.”

“How soon? What’s right away.”

“Right now. Fifteen minutes ago. But I’ll settle for midnight.”

“That’s rough,” Williams said. “I was going to sleep this shift off. Maybe I could get up and hustle a little. But
documents
bureau? City survey?”

“You said you wanted to help.”

“What’s the address?”

“Six-eighteen East Eighty-Third Street. I want to know anything about it you can get. Piping, supply, electricity ducts, foundation, tunnelling, the whole works. And I need it fast.”

“Rough,” Williams said again. “I’ll see what I can do though.”

“When you’ve got it, I’ve got myself a new address too.”

“Oh? What’s that?”

Wulff gave it to him. “One more thing,” he said, “maybe you could get me some riot equipment.”

“Come again?”

“Grenades, launchers, machine guns. You know. The good old stuff.”

“You’re kidding,” Williams said. “Practically.”

“You can’t get that stuff. They won’t even admit they
have
that stuff.”

“I know that. It was just a thought.”

“Man,” Williams said admiringly, “I will give you this; you have ambition.” He laughed dryly, all the sleep gone from his voice, and hung up.

Ambition. If there was one thing he had it was ambition. Wulff went up to his room, second floor this time, and opened the door half-expecting to be hit by a volley of shots or men, all of them bearing name tags saying
Peter Vincent
but saw nothing. Roaches of course, cracked fluorescence, small threads in the walls through which, once, fingers must have groped. But if it was not an attack all of these could be interpreted as friends.

Wulff locked the door, worked in his own chain-bolt quickly and skillfully, pulled down the shades after securing the windows and hurled himself to the bed like a low inside pitch. He slept a sleep devoid of dreams. If his timing and expectations were right it might be his last sleep for a long time; he had better take advantage of it.

Still, as dreams grabbed him, he felt nagged by guilt. The enemy never slept. The enemy worked in shifts and was always active. Sleeping was just turning over time to them.

But he was only one man.