Lone Wolf #12: Phoenix Inferno

by Barry, Mike

  “Get out,” Carlin said. He took out his special gun, his traveling gun, a.357 magnum, with dum-dums, expandable bullets. He showed it to Joe, smiling away. “Like it?” he said.

  Joe backed slowly into the wall. His face was still empty. His face looked as if it would never show feeling again. That was fine. He had an edge now. He had the kind of edge that he should have had with this character from the first. Show them. Show them what they are. Show them where they stand, what they mean, what you are to them and they’d never make a move on you. Draw a line. “You know what happens when one of these enters your body?” Carlin said. “They expand. They turn end over end and inflate and can really blow the shit out of you.”

  “Small bore magnum.”

  “Right!” Carlin said. “That’s right.” The gun was steady in his hand and he pointed it at the houseman. It would be so easy now. It would really be so easy. He had only one question to resolve in his mind and that was simply whether or not he wanted to kill the man. He did not want to do anything in a lack of certainty, Carlin thought. He had to be absolutely sure so that he would not look back upon this with regret a little later and with the feeling that he had done the wrong thing. Did he want to kill the man? Yes, he thought, he probably did. He almost certainly did or he wouldn’t have gotten to this point to begin with. “I’m going to kill you,” Carlin said.

  Joe did not seem to react. He slumped briefly against the wall. Then, in one spasm of activity his legs uncoiled and he was moving in the air, hurtling toward Carlin, the explosion of energy released from some source that Carlin could not grasp. It was a mystery where he had gotten the recoil. The man’s face was a huge balloon floating toward him. As Carlin stepped aside easily, Joe’s features contorted in a wholly explicable expression of sadness and agony. He should not have done it, Carlin knew the man was thinking. Putting himself in the air with an armed man stalking him was not a very bright gesture at all. He should not have left himself that wide open.

  “Fool,” Carlin said and turned, pointed the gun and, as Joe landed, tumbling on his feet, unloaded a round. The bullet dropped into Joe’s body as if it were a cannonball. In one motion he literally exploded. Little filaments of flesh were hanging from the walls, painting the ceiling. Joe, standing, his innards hanging out through his mouth, squeaked. He tried to support himself on the floor without feet to support him. Then he collapsed in front of Carlin.

  That was fine. Carlin put another round into the head of the dead man just to see what it looked like. He had often dreamed of firing the.357 magnum—it was a hell of a weapon, something you really had to respect—but he had never quite had the opportunity to do it until now. He lived the kind of life where generally speaking he was protected against the kind of violent confrontations that the.357 was good for. Well, that meant that he had been living wrong all the time. This was a hell of a lot of fun. He should have done it before.

  Through the aperture of the skull, Carlin could see Joe’s brains as if they were a living thing, a vegetable-like growth moving through the foliage of his hair and outward. The brain was under terrific compression by the walls of the skull. Shooting a man in the head enabled the brains to do what they had always wanted to anyway, which was to find more space, come out for air. Laughing, he looked at the thing on the floor and grinned as the brains drove through to find their new space, the feet on the floor kicking reflexively as if in ecstasy at the way in which all of the inner tensions had been resolved. Maybe that was what made people crazy. Maybe that, more than anything else, was responsible for all the tensions of modern society, the fact that people’s brains were always compressed. Why, sheer pressure on the brain, Carlin thought. That alone could make a man tense and unhappy. Look at all the facial expressions that had danced across Joe’s face, look at the way that the bastard had always been trying to find an attitude, never had been quite happy with any.

  Well, the poor bastard was out of his misery now for sure. Whatever the explanation, Carlin had neatly solved all of his problems.

  There was nothing else to do. He holstered the.357, dragged up his valise, and left the room. If there was any purpose to his staying, he would have; he would have done everything he could have to give Joe a decent burial just as he would have done the same for Janice … but what the hell. What did it matter? What difference was there in any of it? Dead was dead; to pay ceremony to them was merely for the convenience of the living. It certainly would make no difference.

  To Mexico City, Carlin thought, and let the other one, let Dick find the mess here and deal with it. Dick was a resourceful type; he would think of something. Maybe he would take all of the blame on himself.

  Carlin headed toward the door giggling, tugging the valise, the valise rapping against his ankles, tripping him a little but not impeding his flight, speeding it in fact.

  Just as he got to the door, however, the phone rang.

  Shit.

  Being a conscientious man now without a houseboy, Carlin went back and answered it.

  X

  Narco had been just swell. Narco had been contrived as the biggest, nicest present that they could give Wulff, a returned Vietnam veteran, decorated in combat no less, as a kind of gesture of their appreciation for what he had done, which was mostly to louse up the figures on all the guys who hung out at the bars saying that Vietnam was a great cause, it was just a fucking shame that they were draft-exempt because they had a more important duty here on the front lines of America, defending it from the scum right on the doorstep, otherwise they’d be out there catching Charlie’s flack. All of them looked pretty lousy next to Wulff, who had passed up the exemption on the grounds that if the war was to be seen then someone from the supposed front lines of the city ought to see it. It had created quite an uneasy feeling in the department, and there were even a few people around at the headquarters level who weren’t shy about saying that Wulff had to be crazy; any man who would buy himself a piece of that when he had an exemption had to be out of his mind. Still, they felt guilty, they wanted to do something nice for him, the PD had a long and not entirely untruthful reputation for taking care of its own. So they put him on narco.

  Narco was second to vice of course, which was the greatest thing in the world altogether but strictly for relatives of relatives, impossible to crack, on a hereditary basis like the washroom concessions at the top nightclubs. Narco in the mid-sixties was the biggest, boldest thing a PD flatheel could fall into. Narco was supposed to keep the city safe and pure from the ravages of King H by working not on straight busts, which would have netted only small fry and little mainliners, but instead through a network of informants who, the PR work went, would be able to lead the narcs right to major dealers, the guys who were working the shit over with both hands and were at the absolute top, kicking shit at everybody. In truth, of course, all that the informants would lead narco to were small fry like themselves who were happy to show their appreciation for the cops by giving them a few dollars, and about a quarter of that would be then kicked back to the informant for his trouble. This made everyone happy: informant, dealer, and narc who would get it on both ends because he could cheat on the informant’s cut and now and then hold out on him altogether threatening a bust. The informants grumbled about it and there would occasionally be a nasty scene—almost every time you read about a narc being shot on or off duty or found in the trunk of his car, it was usually an enraged informant who didn’t want to be held out on any more. But all in all it worked pretty well, better than most things in the world, anyway. It certainly worked a hell of a lot better than Vietnam. As much as he hated it, and he did from the very first day there, Wulff had to admit that the system was quite workable.

  Every now and then the press would start twitching around, usually as the results of more circulation pressure coming from their intent to raise the advertising rates, and narco was supposed to go out and prove that it was keeping New York free of crime by helping to keep it free of drugs. In the beginning there we
re panicky scenes and shakeups every time the papers would send reporters out to East 4th Street and Avenue ? to pick up some stuff outside the local elementary school, and there would even be shakeups on the squad, but as the sixties went on, by the time Wulff had gotten with it, they had even that down to a system like the rest of it. What they would do would be to make a prearranged bust of a few informants who would have a stash, the stash would mysteriously disappear somewhere between the bust and the courtroom, and charges would be dropped for lack of evidence. Occasionally it was necessary, under severe pressure, to pick up a stash and hold it in the evidence room, but that worked out nicely too because when they finally did a complete search of the evidence room early in 1973 in the early glory days of the impending new drug law prescribing death for the pushers, they found out that some fans of the system had walked off with two million dollars worth of heroin, clean. That was nice. Wulff was able to get even with some of it, but that, of course, was much later.

  No, this was all back in the late sixties and early seventies, at the height of the narco operation when things were running free. And who was Wulff, who the fuck did he think he was to be sickened by it? Wulff was unable to come to terms with it at all. Not much more than enough to just barely save appearances for a while.

  It went back to Vietnam. He had been in Saigon, he had seen what drugs had done to that demolished city. Saigon was the drug carnival and capital of the world; it was a city totally devoted to the peddling of shit and Wulff found it easy to think toward the end of his hitch that this was perhaps what the truth of Vietnam itself might be. We were not fighting for freedom there, we were fighting for shit. Western dealers were hand to hand with the Orientals for control of the rich supply fields of Turkey, and Saigon was the place where it all came together in glittering embassies and ruined corridors and the explosion of the bombs that killed children. And all in the name of bigger and better shit for the West, less kickback and payment to the sinful East, which should stay on the softer stuff anyway. Cocaine and opiate country. Coming back to New York and the narco squad after two years in the Vietnamese countryside was maybe something like coming to work in a very high-grade whorehouse after having spent two years in a field hospital treating advanced and deteriorative cases of paresis. At least that was the way it looked to Wulff.

  It simply would not wash. None of it would; he couldn’t take the easy lies and that the squad had been created to conceal rather than to reveal, could not face the fact that as a narc he was supposed to be dedicated not to the elimination but to the perpetuation of the drug traffic. The real hatred started then, and the grinding rage. But Wulff had a nice girl, he planned to get married; marriage to this girl looked pretty good to him and although getting off the squad and out of the PD was important, being with Marie Calabrese was even more important. At least that was the way it had looked to him then. But in the long run it had only cost her her life. Agonizing, but she would have been better off alive and lost to him then dead and his forever. He still believed that. He still believed in life.

  But it was all academic; the rage spilled over even as the marriage plans went along and Wulff busted a grinning informant who laughed at Wulff with the bricks of smack coming out of his jacket pockets because this was not the night for a bust and under the arrangement Wulff could do nothing. Informants were untouchable anyway, but something broke in Wulff and right in the bar he slapped the man, handcuffed him, busted him for possession and dragged him into the precinct. The informant cried. At least he had that satisfaction; he had broken the man. A hell of a lot of good that had done him.

  So he had busted him, but the precinct lieutenant had busted him right out because he had denied that Wulff had turned in evidence. The informant had gone back on the streets within hours and Wulff had gone off the streets and into patrol car duty because the lieutenant had done something at headquarters, and maybe he had done Wulff a favor at that because Wulff did not think that he could have taken one more night of narco anyway without killing people. So things had worked out for the best, perhaps. Except of course that on the first night of patrol duty they had gotten a blind call to find that the OD they were talking about was his own girl, Marie, dead in an SRO. No, he would not think of that any more. That was canceled.

  Wulff was pretty mad, in any event. Eleven cities and jail had hardly spiked his rage. In fact it was self-feeding; he was madder now than when he had begun. Mad enough certainly to want to kill Carlin. Carlin was the sole remaining big dealer in the Southwest. That made him very much worth killing.

  Wulff looked forward to it.

  XI

  The other houseman, Dick, found the bodies. The one in the living room led him inevitably to the bedroom, and the one in the bedroom led him on a slow, careful prowl through the rest of the house to make sure that Carlin himself had not been killed. The houseman did not really think he had been; everything here pointed to only one conclusion, and although Dick was not a thoughtful man he could have said, if pressed, that he had seen it coming. He had waited for it for a long time. There was every indication that someday Carlin was going to do something and if Dick had not been receiving two salaries for his services instead of just one he would not have stayed in the house. As it was, it was just barely worth it. Looking at Joe crumpled on the floor Dick could see how close the calculation had been. Fifty-fifty, that was all. Still, if you got lucky there was no reason to question that luck. He would not have wanted Joe killed, but if it came down to a simple matter of choice … well, Dick thought, better him than me.

  Having satisfied himself that there were only two bodies and that Carlin had not hanged or shot himself but had definitely gone, Dick made the first of his two necessary calls. It was not the one to the police; the police were going to be very tricky to handle, but Dick thought he saw a way of managing this if his timing was right and if he worked it out sufficiently in his head beforehand. Certainly there was no percentage in not informing the police. If he could face one thing right off, it was that if he was not the one who reported the crimes suspicion would come right down on him, and even though he had, as everyone in his business ought to, a spare identity or two lying around, it was better not to count upon that except if everything else had failed. He would have to report the crimes and take a good deal of heat but that was all right. He had been taking heat in one form or another for most of his life, and the Phoenix cops, compared to some of the scenes that he had gone through, figured to be a piece of cake. There were ways. But the other call was far more important, focusing as it did on the man who was Dick’s second and now only employer and who had been, even at the time there were two, by far the more important. Whatever the Phoenix PD did to him would be nothing compared to what this man would do if he were not contacted and as quickly as possible.

  Dick put the call through collect to Mexico City. He did not want this showing up on the dead man’s phone bill; there would be investigators crawling around. The man in Mexico City was no easier to reach than Carlin had been and had even more levels of approval and Dick waited them all out, giving his name at every juncture, telling anyone who asked him who he was, resigned to take it as long as necessary to get the call through. He had to get the contact; there was no alternative.

  Calling into Mexico City with Joe’s bloated and riven corpse lying in the same room with him was an uncomfortable sensation, of course, but if the roles had been reversed Joe would have done the same. They were both practical men and not at all sentimental about each other, despite the job that welded them together. It was better, Dick thought, a hell of a lot better that it was Joe than him. Too bad but it had nothing to do with him, he did not bear any responsibility here and he could feel this way without guilt. The ugly aspect of the corpse itself did not really bother him; he had been in Vietnam way back at the beginning before he had caught a lucky shell that temporarily ripped up his leg and pensioned him out. Stuff like this didn’t bother him at all. You couldn’t last long in Nam if corpses,
no matter how gruesome, had any effect on you at all. After a long time the man who he wanted to talk to got on the line and said, “What’s wrong?” The man knew damned well that if Dick were calling him it was serious. Dick had called this man only once in seven years, and that time it had involved two million dollars.

  “Plenty is wrong,” Dick said. “He’s killed his mistress and he’s killed Joe and taken off. Both bodies are in the house pretty well ripped up. I checked in this morning and found them.”

  The man gasped once, one small expansion of feeling coming into that open syllable, and then he was completely in control again. “I was afraid of this,” he said. “In many ways I could see it coming.”

  I wish you had told me or Joe, Dick said—but only to himself. He would never make a comment like that out loud, it was just stupid. No matter how much he might have wanted to say it, if there was no payoff, he wouldn’t.

  That was simple discipline. “Yeah,” he said, “yeah, he was in a bad way.”

  “I have long feared that. He is a highly unstable man who at any time at all was likely to commit violence. I have known him for a long time,” the man said in the curious formalism of those for whom English was a second language, however exquisitely they had been schooled, “and I have long suspected this.”

  “Yeah,” Dick said, “yeah, well,” and scratched his forehead. “It happens. Things happen all the time. People get killed on the streets in New York and like that. There’s always violent crime.”

  “You’ve seen no trace of him?”

  “I’ve searched the house pretty thoroughly. Nothing at all.”

  “You do not think that he may have left the house and committed suicide.”

  “No,” Dick said, “I don’t think that this is a suicidal kind of man. If he were he wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of leaving two bodies.”