by Barry, Mike
After he had come out of the army, they had felt so guilty about what he had done, setting an example that no one else in the PD had wanted to follow and so on, that they had set him up for the job in narco, giving him what they thought was the softest and most enjoyable slot you could get in the PD short of vice, which, of course, was an inherited job altogether. Narco at that time, in the middle sixties, was a good detail; the hours were easy, the informant system was set up so nicely that you had no work to do at all, just sit on your ass, keep in touch, and every now and then bust a few people on prearranged charges without evidence when the papers stirred things up. The graft was good, the living was soft and the relationship between the informants and the narcos was very cool, very helpful for all concerned.
But what they did not realize was that Wulff, having had a good dose of Saigon, having been given a pretty good idea of exactly what the drug trade meant not in the abstract but in the way that it could do things to people, was not prepared to enjoy the life of ease and the pleasant system that meant that everyone was getting along, everyone was making out and only the junkies—and who gave a fuck about them—were getting ripped off and they wouldn’t know the difference anyway. It was a growing feeling of rage, a feeling that he was feeding the system, not doing anything at all to block it, that had gotten Wulff into the business of busting an informant for possession, not exactly the kind of thing that a narc was supposed to do unless it was prearranged. And after that, everything had led smoothly and inevitably to his ten-city odyssey and several thousand murders. But looking back at the chain, there was no way of saying that there had ever been a point at which it might have been different. Maybe if his girl had not been killed. But then again he had signed her death papers, unknowingly, when he had decided on the bust. And the horror of it was that even if he had known what was coming, even if he had known the risk, looking at the sneering, bobbing face of the informant in the bar laughing at him because Wulff was helpless, he did not know if he would have done anything different. The man had had to go to jail. There had to be an end to it, some fix to the responsibility at some point.
That was all gone, anyway. Williams was all gone, too; Williams was the black rookie cop with whom Wulff had been on patrol the night they had gotten the call on the anonymous OD, a blind squeal coming into the 67th that had been assigned them by coincidence. Williams was the one with whom Wulff had worked from the very beginning to break the organization, the one who had, playing it cautious at the beginning, finally left his pregnant wife and the nice mortgaged house in St. Albans to play it the hard vigilante way. But in the end, in Los Angeles, that had all broken down, too. Williams had seen that the system, as bad as it was, worked better for him than being outside the system, which did not work at all, and he had gone back to his wife and newborn son. Now Williams was under wraps again; he had stayed in contact with sources in Detroit who had made the Canadian run known to him. He had engineered the break from the courtroom to put Wulff back on the road again. But otherwise, essentially, he was out of it; Wulff was as thoroughly alone as he had been on the night he had seen Marie dead and had known that he would have to play it vigilante or not at all.
So he had rolled out of Detroit, once again flames in his wake, coke in his trunk, headed back toward New York, but not sure of exactly which way he was going; willing to play it by instinct as he always had in the past … and he had run smack into two bikers on assignment from Phoenix. Once again the enemy, his old stupid enemy, had given purpose to him, where otherwise there might not have been; once again the enemy had energized Wulff and given him a sense of mission precisely when that sense of mission had been flagging. If they were his creation, then he was theirs, the two of them welded together, hammer and the nail, anvil and the hammer, flame and the anvil … and now there was no disentanglement but only greater heat and the plunge down.
II
Carlin lived on one hundred acres on the irrigated Arizona desert and contemplated his holdings with delight. Carlin lived with a half million dollars and a mistress in a house the color of flame on the desert and thought of all the things that he had gone through to get there. And there was not a moment, each and every morning of his life, when the pleasure did not run through him like water, just to know what he was, where he had come from. Carlin bought and sold heroin on the open market and ran it every way that he could, down to Mexico City, up to Denver, east to New York, west to Berkeley, he didn’t give a damn. It was all commerce. The country was the corpus and heroin was the blood. He might as well have been in stocks and bonds for all that it meant to him. It was a business.
Carlin was very serious about that. He refused to take the issue of heroin on an emotional level; he knew in his heart that he was not a drug peddler or a merchant of death as the press liked to call it during one of its hysterical once-a-year crusades. He was simply a product manager delivering a product in terms of the needs of a given market. Ford and Pepsi-Cola created markets and then served them; Ford and Pepsi-Cola weren’t in any trouble with the feds, at least trouble that they couldn’t buy themselves out of, and here he was, Carlin, not even creating the market like Ford or Pepsi were for their crap, merely servicing it. He wasn’t hooking anybody into heroin; as far as he was concerned it was an evil, debilitating poison, and if he or any of the kids from his estranged marriage or anyone he knew got into it he would make sure there was hell to pay. But then again, if there was this need and all this pain, it would be almost as immoral not to serve it as to take care of it, and he was doing his part. The shit flowed back and forth across the border to points east and west, and through a complex of intermediaries he was good for a quarter million dollars a year without ever having seen a cube of it. He let those he hired for it make sure of the purity. He was making two hundred fifty grand a year and not sweating for it. Phoenix was a good place to live, the more pleasant after having grown up on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn and having spent the first thirty-nine of his forty-five years hacking it out in the miserable cities of North America trying to move his way into a position of some independence without antagonizing anyone. It hadn’t been easy, and there had been along the line a little murder, but he had made it, finally, made it to the desert and a house the color of flame. And he was not going to give it up easily. There was no reason why he should. Basically, Carlin felt he had a moral right to what he regarded as his inheritance.
The war that this crazy Wulff had launched against the network had worried him, of course—Carlin was a sensible man, he kept tabs—but it hadn’t bothered him too directly. He had taken reasonable precautions, stepped up his bodyguards, tried to buy his independence from certain suppliers and fences by finding new outlets, but mostly it was a matter of just watching the situation from as far away as possible, which was not difficult on the desert, and hoping for the best. He didn’t want to get into anything too aggressive. Therefore, it had been a special bonus for Carlin, something really remarkable to find that the way things were working out Wulff was practically his best friend in the network, was doing more for his business than anyone ever had, more even than his estranged wife, who had inherited fifty thousand dollars that Carlin had used to buy a small shipment back in 1962, which gave him his start. What Wulff was doing was killing off the competition like crazy.
He riddled the Northeast, he went out West and blew up any fragment left of an independent West Coast network that might have made a push. He went back again to Boston and left the New England circuit reeling, then off to Vegas and Chicago where he had first enticed and then taken out violently the old man who had sat on top of everything and who even Carlin had been afraid of, worrying that the old man would notice him some day, notice how well he was doing, and move in. Louis Calabrese. He just could not have stood up against Calabrese, wouldn’t have been ready for him for another fifteen years or later than that. But Wulff had taken care of that old bastard, too, he had shot up a beachful of men in Miami, gone back to New York and cleaned out the ga
sping survivors there. Carlin, reading about it in the newspapers and in little dispatches that he was able to cull through the network, had hardly been able to accept his own luck. He had confronted all of it with disbelief; it seemed impossible that after forty-six years everything was for once breaking completely, totally right for him rather than just wavering on the borderline as it had even during the good years. And the day he had read in the papers that they had gotten Wulff in jail in New York, Carlin had not been able to prevent himself from driving two hundred miles to Turf Paradise and laying five thousand dollars through the machines just in sheer joy at how beautifully everything had turned out. He lost the five thousand dollars but he won the reports that indicated that by the time the psychiatric teams and the jury system got through with Wulff his only source of income was apt to be the twenty-five cents per license plate that he would be knocking down for decades. And with the removal of Wulff it seemed that all Carlin’s problems went away; he did not realize until he read that the man was finally under confinement how worried he had been. The desert was big and the Southwest was not a major territory. It might have been a long time, if ever, before Wulff had gotten to Carlin. But Carlin now was finally willing to admit how real Wulff had been to him. Eventually he would have come. Eventually Carlin would have had to deal with him, and if Louis Calabrese could not, would Carlin have a chance? But that was all gone now.
Everything was all gone. Carlin was a free man in a devastated field; he had every shot now at being the biggest and the best. So the word that Wulff was out again had chilled him, and it was as if the terror that he had carefully kept out of his conscious mind until then had, untrammeled, rolled in without Carlin having any defenses to fight it off. He had used all his energy the first time around, denying fright. But now the realization ripped through and he had no means to beat it off. Reading that Wulff was out left him as close to the line of panic as he had been in twenty years. At that point he had taken desperate measures, done something he never thought he would have found necessary, lost his control altogether. He had hired twenty of the best men he could find, pointed them toward Detroit, where word came through his contacts that Wulff was headed, and asked them to get him. Preferably alive so that he could see him on the desert and know that he had not been lied to, but dead, with photographs, if necessary.
He had not wanted to do this; he had not wanted to open his panic and resources to a killer team; he had not wanted to do something so provocative that if it failed Wulff would be solidly on his trail and Carlin would be on the deathlist. He was terrified of Wulff. But it was precisely this terror that had dictated his move. He could not bear to wait it out now. The man had to die.
Carlin felt a little better knowing that the team was on the job. Every single one of them had been vouched for in one way or the other. In fact, knowing that twenty men were on the trail, that he had interposed all of them between himself and this madman, had the effect of buying him the peace that he thought he had lost forever reading about the escape. Even at fifty thousand dollars out of pocket and a promised fifty on delivery to the winning team, it was cheap. Carlin felt like himself again. He wandered out to the cacti and watched sunsets. He began to think again of what it would be like to run everything from the Southwest. It was not impossible. Huey Long had almost been able to run everything from New Orleans and that was a long time ago in a less technological society. And if the Kingfish had not been such a fool he would have had it all, too. He would have done it. Carlin could do no less than that. Anything was possible.
Carlin was fucking his mistress when the call came in. He had rolled on top of her and was banging away, as deep into her as he had been for months. Her name was Janice and she was, he had to face it, little more than a stupid, slightly overweight broad in her thirties who was in no way worthy of him, had no idea of who he was or what he was doing—which was probably a benefit, come to think of it—but who had the most fantastic set of tits he had ever dealt with in his life, forty-eight inches, tits that he could drown himself in, with nipples like headlights; just a fair fuck but those incredible tits and the pliability of them, which let him do anything that he wanted to do, bounce them, toss them, throw them over her shoulders or his, squeeze them around his prick and fuck them like a crazily shaped, huge, tight cunt. All right, she was stupid, but in her own way she was exceptional and he could roll over and die in her for lust, and that was the best deal he had been able to come up with yet, what with his wife, that bitch, having mostly ruined him for women for years after their marriage. She had hated to fuck and had resented every part of it so much that sometimes Carlin would still shudder in fucking right now remembering the expression on her face when he had come. Well, that was all behind him now. Onward to better things. He had been living with Janice for two years and although nothing outside of it meant anything at all, the sex had been absolutely sensational. It was a toss-up which absorbed him more as a recreation, Turf Paradise or her tits. Maybe Turf Paradise, he had to admit. You couldn’t fuck her tits nine times a day. But then again, every time he got on top of Janice he was a winner.
“All right,” she was groaning as he settled against her, “listen now, take it easy.” He was groaning and biting her breasts, leaving little streaks and ridges up and down the width of them and although her hand was drawing him in, her fingers pressed to the back of his neck there was a sudden pressure in the fingers, which meant that he was hurting her and she was hurting him back. “Please,” she said, “enough, enough, Joe.” And Carlin, almost screaming with the intensity of it, took his head back just a little, tried to focus his desire down to something he could control. Just as he ejaculated, coming within her violently without pumping, screaming and biting her breast then in fury as she dug her fingernails in and screamed back, whether in disappointment or pain he did not know … and just at the moment when his ejaculation was finished, swimming somewhere in the darkest part of her, the phone next to the nightstand rang.
He rolled from her, reaching for it. In a way it was almost a relief, the call coming in; he had been taking to coming within her too fast almost all the time now, an old problem that he thought he had licked but that had come back probably with all the tension of Wulff and then the leap of his plans. She didn’t like it, of course, no woman liked it, but on the other hand, fuck her; he had the right. If she excited him that much, who was she to complain if he came off quick? There were a lot of women dying for it, who would have been happy to get it almost any way they could from a man like him. Shit, just read the advice to the lovelorn columns and all the women who complained that they couldn’t even get their husbands to undress much less pay attention to them. But even though he was right, somehow Carlin did not want to go into this at the time. He had a few times before because Janice had really bitched about it, but somehow he didn’t know quite what to say. It could get ugly. She somehow did not understand that it was his right, and anyway she with the forty-eight-inch tits and the IQ of forty-eight had no business complaining about anything. The phone was almost a relief. Often he refused to pick it up at night when there was no one around to filter it through, but tonight he made an exception, almost grabbing it, seizing it the way five minutes before he had seized her breasts. “Yes,” he said, “hello?”
“Is this Joe Carlin?” a voice said. Carlin couldn’t place it. It was flat, dull, and yet somehow underneath the monotone there was force in it. This man had a sense of self-possession. “I said is this Joe Carlin?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. I wanted to check.”
There was a pause that went on for a while until Carlin realized that the man was not going to say anything more, and for the first time he felt a dull twinge of apprehension. “What do you want?” he said, “who is this?”
“This is a friend of yours, Carlin.”
“Who’s that?”
“Someone you wanted to see.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
�
��Someone you wanted to see so badly that you sent some other friends of yours to get me and bring me there.”
Carlin shook his head and said, “Listen—”
“You know exactly who this is,” the voice said.
“You son of a bitch,” Carlin said. The woman looked at him with interest, her hand flat on his thigh. She began to rub with sudden energy. “Cut that shit out,” Carlin said sharply to her. His voice shook. She took her hand away and looked at him with something that might have been hatred.
“Okay,” the voice said, “I’ll cut that shit out. I’m coming to cut it out of your heart and head, Carlin. If I were you I’d get moving now.”
“I’m not afraid of you,” Carlin said.
“You’re about twenty men afraid of me, Carlin. You’re afraid of everything. But we’ll see. You’ll have a chance to prove yourself. I just want you to know I’m coming,” the man said. “It’s been a little while and a lot of cities since I found someone who was really worth killing. Who I really wanted to kill in a personal way, not just business. So I’m glad to get caught up with you; you’ve given me some new interest in life. I’m coming, Carlin, I’m coming,” the voice said and hung up.
Carlin put the phone down and turned slowly on the bed, looking up at the ceiling with dead, flat eyes. I should do something, he thought, I really should do something. There is a lot to be done and I can do any of it and my position really is not so bad, not so bad at all. But then again, he might be twenty miles from here now, twenty miles or two thousand, no way to say, but I shouldn’t take the chance.