Lone Wolf #12: Phoenix Inferno

by Barry, Mike

  V

  One of the two men in the intercepting Bonneville in New Mexico was an experienced assassin. The other was not. One was cool under pressure as the result of having freelanced for almost ten years. The other, just getting into it in his late twenties, almost disintegrated under stress. One of them, in short, knew his job and the other was merely faking it. And they were both working for Carlin because Carlin was faking it too, getting what he could in a tough business at the front end and hoping for the best thereafter. But between experience and inexperience it all began to come apart in the pressure of the chase. The older man, riding shotgun, had put the shots into the rear panes of the Fleetwood that they had miraculously picked up near the state line, thinking he would panic them into scrambling for it so that he could get a nice shot at their rear tires in full flight. But it hadn’t worked out quite that way. The answering fire had come immediately and, worse than that, had hit the windshield of the Bonneville on the driver’s side, splintering it so that the younger man, the driver, could not see. The Bonneville swerved in a sickening way. “You stupid son of a bitch,” the younger man said, “look what you’ve done now.”

  “Shut up,” the older man said. “Just keep on driving and we’ll run them right off the road.”

  “Keep on driving! I can’t see!” the younger man said, fighting the wheel, the car beginning to slide. Another shot came out of the Fleetwood, splintering the glass on the passenger side, and the older man, forty-two years old, in and out of this business in good health and bad since he had come out of Korea, began to feel something he had not known since An San Loc, a little white edge of panic moving in his chest. The younger man was right; he had fucked this up, they should not have made the approach directly but should have swung around and tried it in a less direct manner. But the luck of stumbling across them, the promised fifty thousand dollars on delivery of the body, the rumors that Carlin might in combination with some others go as high as a hundred thousand if he felt particularly generous … all of that had unseated his judgment. He hadn’t even calculated the second man he had seen in the car with Wulff so eager was he to get this damned job done and haul in the goods. Now they were in real trouble. He had really fucked this one up. How could he have been so stupid? he thought vaguely, as if he were thinking of another person. It was not in his track record to fail like this. If anything, what had distinguished his work was its caution and finesse. Its utter control. That was how he kept on getting hired, that was how he had built his reputation. This was really stupid, taking potshots at the Fleetwood. But who would have expected that they would have had the luck to run up against Wulff? When he had taken the assignment he looked on it as expense money, that was all. It was a crap game, but this Carlin would have had to be out of his mind to think that any of the teams actually had a chance of getting this guy. If he hadn’t gotten taken by now he wasn’t going to. Maybe he didn’t exist. And yet there he was. Description, everything dovetailed against the photographs. And the answering fire, that was the key. There was just the slightest chance that they had opened fire on someone who was innocent—and that was one of the risks that had to be taken in this business. It was war, innocent people got trapped in war, that was all—but the skillful way in which the fire had been returned, the way in which the Fleetwood was being maneuvered, and what it had done to their windshield—

  “I’m losing control,” the younger man said, his voice peculiarly calm despite all indications in his history that he would have been the one to have broken. “I can’t see a fucking thing and now I think he’s got the tires.”

  “The tires?”

  “The fucking tires,” the driver said, and there was another impact, the can began to slide slowly, almost gracefully toward the side of the road. The older man knew from experience that they were going out of control; he knew what the feeling of a car was when it was no longer taking the road but succumbing to it. Something hit the windshield again and the driver shrieked. Then the Fleetwood in a trick of vision was coming upon them, moving in reverse at fifty miles an hour. What had really happened was that the car had braked down suddenly, but the illusion was complete, the feeling that the fins of the vehicle were coming upon them made the older man gasp and dive under the dashboard. Meanwhile, the driver, screaming and cursing all the way, was fighting with the Bonneville to brake it down. He wrenched the wheel and the car went into a desperate spin, lost road adhesion, turned around and landed off the road, turning completely around and landing in an improvised ditch. At the end of the last spin there was a dull sound and then a little explosion, like a grapefruit hitting a wall, and then it was very, very quiet.

  The older gunman looked up and looked at the driver. Sprouting blood, he now lay back against the seat, little shards of glass coming out of his forehead like the silver sprinkles on Christmas ornaments, his head the bulb of an ornament running rich red. The older man shuddered from his crouched position but did not move. There was nothing to be done for the driver. He was dead. What was important, the only thing to do to try and save the situation was to stay under cover. Where was the Fleetwood? Where was Wulff? Maybe the Fleetwood had gone off the road, too, but that was not likely. That was not damned likely at all.

  It was quiet here in the desert, quiet and hot. With the car wrecked and the air-conditioning gone, the assassin could already feel the heat beginning to work its way through to him. The windows had been up tight to facilitate the air-conditioner, of course. Now the temperature in the car must have been over ninety. In just a matter of minutes it would be a hundred and twenty, even beyond that … they would have to do nothing in the Fleetwood except to lay siege to him; he would not be able to live in this car for more than an hour. Amazing. It was amazing how quickly the situation could shift in one of these deals, the assassin thought; one moment you were on the prowl and the next you were at bay. Well, that was life, maybe, the constant switching of roles, the reversals that at any time could tumble you top to bottom. But this was not something you could ever learn to handle in a philosophical way, not even if you were forty-two and had been dealing with death all your life.

  He looked cautiously over the ridge of the dashboard, blinked in the dazzling light, saw that the Fleetwood had pulled over at a considerable distance up the road, maybe as much as a quarter of a mile, and was just lying there, no movement at all of the doors. It was impossible to detect movement in the car at this distance, of course, but it did appear to be unnaturally quiet, no hint of shifting light within from which he might have been able to deduce movement. They might be playing possum, of course, but then again they might have been hurt, either in going off the road or by one of his shots. It was possible that he had pierced the rear window and gotten a lucky hit on one or the other, although this was not at all likely. Still, you had to have hope, and this was as likely an explanation as any other. He could not stay in the car. That much was clear; it would be impossible for him to stay in the Pontiac much longer because the heat was already beginning to dehydrate him, he could feel it wringing at him like an animal, and soon enough he would begin to feel the more severe effects, the lightheadedness, the feeling of weakness in the bowels. An hour or two was much too optimistic, the assassin thought, he might last fifteen minutes in this car, not much more. Carefully he cranked down the passenger window half an inch. A little breeze tugged at him, vaulted past his eyes, stabbed under the cheekbones where the deep and intricate nerves under the eyes lived. No help. No help at all, the assassin thought. He would have to get out of the car.

  Seized with an idea, though, he pushed the body of the driver away, tried the key in the ignition. The battery fed a little power, enough to turn the amp light red, but the starting motor, after one click, seized. No good, then. The car would not move. He had to get out.

  The body of the driver was already beginning to stink, a faint rancid whiff of death coming up from the corpse as the assassin had leaned over. He reeled back, reached for the door handle, lifted it, an
d wriggled out of the car, tumbling then to the ground. The heat surrounded him like a fist, squeezed him, little bolts of energy and sickness moved across his body. He crouched on his hands and knees, using the car as cover, crawling very cautiously so that he was not exposed in the direction of the Cadillac.

  It was a mess, that was for sure. All avenues of exit seemed blocked, his mobility was gone, his command of the situation wrecked by the accident. Still, he thought, he had a vew options; he still had his gun and his will and his brain, and that was something. That was not for nothing; you could not take that away from a man until the very end, the integrity of his own purpose, the fixity that had taken him through twenty years and a hundred kills in a life that was for the most a six-month business. He began to think like an assassin again. The fifty grand was still there for the taking. The quarry was still there, too. His partner was gone but that meant that he had to make no excuses and that he had to make no split. His. It was all his.

  Using the Bonneville as cover he started his stalk.

  VI

  “I don’t think he’s dead in there,” Owens said. “I think that at least one of them is alive.”

  “Probably,” Wulff said. He kept the Bonneville pinned, but even with 20/20 vision and lots of terrain-searching experience in Vietnam, it was not easy to detect movement in a car a quarter of a mile down in blinding, dazzling sun. Cloudy weather might have been better, but it was never cloudy on the desert; it was either a baking heat or rain. Nothing between. “One thing is sure,” Wulff said, “if he gets out we’ll see a door move. And he’s got to get out.”

  “I think so, too,” Owens said. For all they had been through he was quite calm, a good man, Wulff decided; it was a pity that he hired out rather than being inner-directed. An inner-directed man like Owens with the right cause could have blown whole cities, not just ships, out of geography. “He can’t stay in there,” Owens said. He raced the engine of the Cadillac for emphasis; the compressor whined and little puffs of cold air came out of the air-conditioner vents as if for emphasis. Owens took his foot off the accelerator and said, “Of course, his problem is our problem. We can’t sit here forever; we’ll run out of gas.”

  “I don’t think we’ll sit very long,” Wulff said. “I figure we’ll close in and take him out.”

  “That’s how I think, too,” Owens said, “But I’d feel a hell of a lot better if I knew exactly what his condition was.”

  “We’ll find out,” Wulff said. “We’ll find out soon enough. If there isn’t any movement out of that car in the next fifteen minutes, we’ll just close in, and if he does move we’ll come in anyway. Either way—”

  “Either way I don’t see much of a problem.”

  “There are always problems,” Wulff said. “I wouldn’t know what to do without a problem. I haven’t had a single goddamned thing yet in ten cities that wasn’t a challenge, and I don’t think that this is going to be easy, either. Everything’s a struggle. Nothing comes without work.”

  “Yeah,” Owens said, “but this doesn’t look as bad as some of the others, does it?”

  “Everything looks bad. You can die clumsy or brave, you can die fighting against a thousand or because some sixteen-year-old kid playing sniper nails you. But either way you’re just as dead. The quality of the death is exactly the same.”

  “Not necessarily,” Owens said gently, “not necessarily. But then again I’m no priest, minister, or rabbi. I couldn’t get into any argument over that. And I don’t think this is the time to do it, either.”

  “No,” Wulff said. “I guess we’ll table that one.”

  They sat in almost companionable silence for a while then, saying nothing, waiting the situation out, Owens racing the engine every now and then, listening to the valves tap, and waiting for the Bonneville to disgorge some evidence of life or death. It was an easy vigil in a way because it had a good sense of pace and direction. It was not a matter of waiting out some nameless menace in an ambiguous position. They knew exactly who they were and what they were waiting for, and there was a definite end to it. There was a man out there; eventually he would make his presence known and they would kill him. Either that or he would give no indication of his presence and that would be good enough for them, too; they could deal with the dead or injured man by closing in on him. But the situation was essentially in their hands, or so Wulff calculated; that was a pleasure, of course—it was so rare that he had controlled the tempo of a scene—but then again you had to protect yourself against the possibility of being lulled, protect yourself against taking your safety for granted. He leaned back against the seat, letting the edges of steel come against him, and it prodded him into wakefulness.

  “You got to understand the way a guy thinks; the kind of guy who really wants to die,” Owens said.

  “Who’s that?”

  “This guy I worked for. He really wanted to die. Going on living was what frightened him; dealing with death gave him something to do. But after a while when he kept on beating death he got to thinking that he was cheating, that he wasn’t taking death seriously enough or it would have gotten him. There’s no point in fooling around with death if you’re going to cheat it time and again. So he started to get more serious.”

  “Yeah,” Wulff said, “I know the feeling. You begin to feel immortal if you take chance after chance and it doesn’t catch up with you.”

  “No,” Owens said, “it’s not quite that way. I mean I know what you’re saying. If you get into a lot of tough situations and start to glide out of them you wonder if you’re just dreaming. But that doesn’t have to do with a guy who really wants to die. That’s a different situation altogether, when you’re talking about a man who really wants to end his life. He can push farther and farther, but if nothing happens, if he keeps getting away with it, he’s going to get the feeling that he’s not taking things seriously enough, so he gets damned serious.”

  “I never wanted to die,” Wulff said and thought that over for a while. It seemed to be an important insight and one that he was on the edge of getting absolutely, but then it slid away. “No, I don’t quite mean that,” he said. “It was that I calculated that I was dead already. I got killed on West 93rd Street. So that I was a dead man already. They can’t kill a dead man. They can only stop him. You know what I mean?”

  “Oh,” Owens said, “I guess I know what you mean. But that’s self-protection, saying that you’re dead. You really didn’t believe that, you knew you were alive, but saying you were dead, feeling that way was able to keep you operating. But that’s different from really wanting to die. If you had wanted to die you would have taken care of that.”

  “Maybe,” Wulff said, “maybe. It’s hard to say. It’s hard to calculate anything like that.” He moved on the seat again feeling the exposed steel loops bite into his shoulder blades. “Enough,” he said.

  “No,” Owens said, “it’s never enough. You think that something’s the end, you think that you’ve had enough and that it won’t be the same and that you’re moving toward the end, but every time you get that feeling it starts all over again. There’s no enough. It just goes on and on. Until you die, of course.”

  “I don’t understand,” Wulff said.

  “Me neither,” said Owens. “I don’t understand a fucking thing.” Then he looked up at the rear-view mirror and something caught his glance. He said, “He moved.”

  “What?”

  “He’s out of the car and moving,” Owens said. “I caught a glimpse of him. He’s on the ground now. He came out of the car and took cover. He’s crawling around down there now.”

  “Slowly,” Wulff said, “he must have moved damned slowly.”

  “He hit the ground fast enough.”

  “I mean out of the car.”

  “He probably opened that door inch by inch,” Owens said. “He probably spent fifteen minutes getting out of it, yeah. But he’s out now.” He leaned forward, clutched the shift lever, then dropped it into reverse. “I
’m going to back up on him.”

  “You think so?”

  “I think that’s the best way.”

  “What if he’s got heavy artillery?”

  “Then he can reach us up to fifty yards anyway. Closing in won’t be any more dangerous then staying here. But I don’t think he’s got any heavy. Generally people don’t carry that around and you can be sure that Carlin, that cheap bastard, wasn’t supplying anything.”

  “All right,” Wulff said. Momentarily slack, he had returned to full alertness, the old combat feeling coursing through him. He had not handed over the decision to Owens so much as having abandoned it, but now he let the feeling of control come upon him again. “Back up very slowly,” he said, “and if you see any movement, stop.”

  “All right,” Owens said, one arm draped over the seat back, driving with the rear-view mirror, which was the way that the experienced ones did it. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “I’m not worried about anything.”

  “We’ll get him,” Owens said. “This is just a diversion.”

  “I’m sure it is,” Wulff said. Something hit the rear window again, another part of the glass splintered, and Wulff heard the whine of the rifle. “Son of a bitch,” he said, scrambling below seat level, “he won’t give up.”

  Owens had stopped the car, cranked it into neutral already, and then had hit the floor, squeezing himself in the place between steering wheel and seat, barely fitting in. Another round hit them, the glass splintering more densely now, little fragments momentarily visible in the air as a halo, then falling into the rear seat. Wulff, his pistol gripped in his hand, could not see the assassin yet, the assassin using the Pontiac as cover. The situation was not good. They had no cover but the assassin did. The glass splintered yet again and now Wulff could see open space, holes had been lifted out of the glass, the desert was coming in. “Bastard,” he said, but he continued to concentrate. “He won’t stop, will he?”