Lone Wolf #12: Phoenix Inferno

by Barry, Mike

  Abruptly he was bored. This kind of thing was interesting up to a point and then it was no longer interesting; it was like tormenting a fly on the head of a pin. After a while the absence of variation, the lack of challenge turned your own hatred against yourself. Whatever Carlin had done to him, whatever humiliation the man had wreaked upon Montez, it was not that man lying on the cot now but something that had once been the man. He could never get back at this Carlin who had hurt him so very much. In that sense, truly, there were no reparations in life. Death might be something else, but Montez did not care to bring it into his angle of thought. For advising Carlin that was a different thing. Carlin was much closer to death than Montez was likely to be for a while.

  Montez turned and left the room without saying anything. The guards looked at him respectfully, almost worshipfully. He left the door opened behind him and ascended the stairs. Before he reached the top, the door, as he had expected, closed and he heard the low, pleading burble of Carlin’s breath. He had expected nothing else. In the absence of specific orders to the contrary, the guards had returned to their wonderful work.

  Enough, Montez thought. Enough of it already. They might kill him; he would have to do something, issue some orders, to make sure that they backed off clear of that. But right up until the matter of murder himself he had lost interest. He no longer cared. Let the guards do what they would. It made no difference. Depression overcame him. The man who had once oppressed him was gone for all time. Whatever happened now was merely attacking the ruin that this man had left behind.

  Gloomy, Montez went back to the upper level, the balsa wood of his living room crackling pleasantly underneath him as he looked out toward the mountains and saw the limousine coming in low and fast, four forms in it. Abruptly he felt energy flowing through him again. New meat, a new contest. That was all he needed.

  The infliction of pain could keep you young.

  XX

  Wulff had pretty well kept himself under wraps on the way in. With two men to fight off at the estate and then three when they had taken him to the field, it simply did not seem worth it to make an issue of it. He might have had a small chance with the two, but the odds were not good enough; he had dropped his gun and let them take him. Three was even more difficult, although by that time and with a particularly rough, bouncing flight in, they were all getting distracted and kind of stupid. Still, no matter what excesses of energy and luck he had, even if he were able to take over the plane, what would he do then? He did not know how to fly. It was a survival trip, that was for sure, and if he wanted to survive, it was better to play it their way, at least for a while.

  Besides, he was interested. He was interested in seeing the man who had trapped Carlin. He wanted to see this Montez, whoever he was. And of course he wanted to see Carlin. It might be worth the trip, it might be worth death itself to see Carlin, and in worse condition than Wulff would ever be.

  They came from the airport in another limousine, the pilot doing the driving now, heavy and fast on the damaged roads, none of them saying anything. He had talked to them a good deal about narco on the plane flight, more to keep up his own spirits than for anything else but also because they had seemed genuinely interested, these men who looked vaguely Hispanic but had no accents at all and said that they were working for Montez for the money, not for anything else, that if things worked out for them in a few years they would be able to go into business for themselves. What that business was and exactly how hired thugs branched out in the world wasn’t quite clear to Wulff, but he didn’t pursue the issue. Maybe like ex-narcs they retired to half-pensions, heavy drink, jobs as postal clerks and early heart attacks. He certainly wouldn’t pursue it.

  He sat back in the limousine and let them take him where they would. As always, after a spurt of activity it was almost pleasant to lie back, to have the feeling that fate was at least temporarily taking over and out of his own control. From too much control, from the need to do too much, there often came the reverse, which was complete lassitude, a feeling of succumbing to events, letting events completely take over. He had noted this in the faces of a good many of the men he had killed. They had accepted death almost gratefully, their faces creased into a receptivity so great that it almost might have been sexual. They had had enough of anxiety, of trying to extend the parameters of their control farther and farther, and with every extension that control had become more fluid, more tenuous, verging toward transparency … oh, it was agonizing to have a large operation to run, particularly if you were not sure who the hell you were running it over or against, and at the end death must have seemed almost pleasant, at least for some of them. They had lived with it for so long, they had in their way sought it so desperately and from such inner need that when it came it must have been as a lover.

  Enough. He sat back in the car and watched the mountains unwind. The three men around him smoked cigarettes and said something in Spanish to one another every so often and gave Wulff beneficent, almost kindly, glances. He could see the respect they had for him. He was in their estimation one tough hombre if he had done what he had. Also they had to like him because at the end he had not resisted but had come with them easily. There was nothing in their business better than having a tough job turn suddenly into an easier one, like a long-planned seduction ending with the girl tearing off her clothing, leaping on you and begging to be fucked. They were high up. Wulff felt a little light-headed even in the sealed spaces of the car, the air-conditioning purring away. He could see why the American Olympic athletes had had such trouble here in 1968, had found it impossible to become acclimated even after having trained in the mountains for weeks. It was different air altogether. It took an entirely different kind of man to live here.

  “We’re almost there,” the man next to him said, waving with his cigarette holder. They all looked the same, indistinguishable from one another. Wulff looked through the window and could just barely see an enormous construction straight ahead of them, angled off-center, something that looked like towers rising.

  “He lives well, doesn’t he?”

  “Oh yes,” the man said, “he lives very well.”

  “They all live very well.”

  “What is that?”

  “People like him.”

  “I do know what you mean,” the man said, “but that does not mean that people like us cannot live well too. Your narcotic cops, they lived very well, didn’t they?”

  “No,” Wulff said, “you must have lost something in the translation. They didn’t live very well at all. They hated their lives.” He caved in further to the seat and the car kept on moving. The driver hummed something that sounded like American rock tune, faking the verses. It took all kinds, Wulff thought. Actually, these were not bad guys. As hired muscle they were far superior in all ways, cultural and intellectual, to the best that America had to offer. It had to do with the servant problem, he was sure; you couldn’t get decent help in America, the culture was too mobile, too many people thought that they could do better. In the southern hemisphere it was different; the finest people were willing to work, even at humiliating jobs. After all, if you did your job well and made good contacts and perhaps killed your boss, you had a chance to go into the drug-running business yourself in a few years. Ambition was what sustained the world, Wulff thought, ambition as the reverse coin of the fear of death. They interlocked, of course; the coin fell through to only one head. If you succeeded you could beat death, that was what kept one going. But at the end it was all a cheat. He had seen the eyes of his victims.

  The car cut off the drive, went up at an angle, bounced through a difficult access road not unlike that which had crept up to Carlin’s property. All these men lived the same; they walled themselves off and looked for special positions of accommodation to verify their power. Wulff blanked all thoughts out of his mind and simply waited. It was best that way. It was best not to anticipate and to take situations exactly as they developed without undue anticipation, because
anything else would only lead to greater difficulties.

  A tall, elegant man in his middle fifties stood at the end of the drive waiting for them, rubbing his hands. He had an elegant moustache. He looked like a character out of Carmen. He was everything that Wulff could have anticipated.

  So this is the face of the enemy, he thought, and damned if he didn’t feel the impulse to giggle. If this was the enemy, if this was the face of the enemy … then pity the victims without any conception of roles to play.

  The men murmured around him and Wulff waited for the confrontation. Not that it would prove a damned thing. Confrontation proved nothing. Only murder did. But it certainly yielded satisfaction.

  XXI

  They let Dick out of detention by noon of the day after his interrogation. They were quite bitter about it, so bitter that none of the interrogating personnel were even around when he checked out. He had been dumped in a sleazy cell in a basement around midnight. A guard had come by after a long time and with no breakfast to tell him that he could go. Upstairs another guard had handed him his belongings and had demanded that he sign something that upon closer inspection had turned out to be a release from all claims of false imprisonment. Dick did not give a damn. He had been around for quite awhile; he knew how the world, let alone the cops, worked. Besides, they were just as likely as not to toss him back into that cell, still without food, to meditate upon his sins some more. He signed it.

  The guard said nothing to that either, just tossed the release aside as if it meant nothing, as if the release had been Dick’s idea, not his, some idiosyncrasy with which they were humoring him, and Dick had walked out of the headquarters building and into the dazzling light of an October Phoenix afternoon, feeling as if he had spent not twenty-four hours but twenty-four months in detention. Prison did that to you; it destroyed your sense of time. It could hold you for six months and send you out an old man. He walked onto the street and stood there for a while, thinking how old he felt, how helpless, how stunned by the normal routine of the afternoon although he had not been away for a day—how must it be for someone who had been sent up for a year or ten years or twenty?—and then he went uncertainly into the traffic. His car was still up at Carlin’s house, of course, if the cops had not confiscated it, if in fact he ever saw it again … he would have to take a bus home, try to look for it another time. He could go back to headquarters and ask about his car, but somehow he did not think it would do him any good. It would not do to ask the cops where the hell his car was; they were pissed off enough, they were apt to lose that vague sense of legality which held them back from doing the really terrible things they had on their minds all the time.

  It was tough. It was going to be very tough; Dick could see all the complications of his new life sprouting like weeds through the tumbler of his consciousness. He had no job, he had no connections, and he was going to be poison for anybody to hire not only because he had worked for Carlin who was hated, but because once a man had been in detention, once he had been questioned for any reason whatsoever, there was the possibility that he had turned informer. The cops picked up a lot of people exactly that way, sent them back in the world on reduced or dropped charges in return for a nice, informal arrangement that would funnel information through. They were not stupid in Dick’s kind of work, they weren’t likely to want a man who would be quietly feeding the cops fair or foul information. And there really wasn’t much work otherwise for him.

  He walked toward the bus stop, thinking about his complicated and increasingly unhappy existence, vague with the feeling that the best times were behind him. Maybe to get blown out of the business the way Joe or Janice had gone was better. They wouldn’t have to worry about a lonely and useless old age, they wouldn’t have to worry either about what life after Carlin would be like … it was bound to be unpleasant. Dick found that his walk had slowed even further. It wasn’t such a good prospect after all. In interrogation, since he had seen and reported the murders in fact, he had concentrated only upon the objective of somehow coming out of this thing alive, and now he had succeeded, but he had not considered for a moment what he should have from the beginning … that there was nowhere to go.

  “Excuse me,” he said to a shambling man on the hot sidewalk whom he had bumped into, but he was not really thinking of the old man or of his apology. What he was thinking of was Montez. Montez owed him something, Dick thought, he had protected Montez. Indeed, if it had not been for him Montez might have lost everything, everything out of his hands what with Carlin somewhere in flight to an ending that might have resulted in Montez’s murder. Carlin had been really crazy; he was capable of doing almost anything. If it had not been for him, Montez would have lost everything, Dick thought. But thanks to him the man was not only in control of his situation but had a chance for real power … power such as he could never have touched had Carlin remained sane and in control.

  That was it, Dick thought, as the shambling man stood with his hands on hips and looked at him. “That’s it!” he said aloud, thinking that he would go to Montez, that he would call the man right now and demand to be helped. Montez owed him that, there should be no question of the man helping him. But if for any reason Montez decided to balk—

  —Well, Dick thought, in that unhappy circumstance, he certainly knew enough about the man to put him in at least as much trouble as Dick had been. Or maybe more.

  Why even work? he thought, his excitement building as the shambling man, waving his arms, began to curse him. “Why even work?” he screamed, talking to himself really excitedly, the words bursting out, he could not contain himself. “If I know what I know and Montez knows that, then it isn’t even necessary to put me on the payroll! He could just pay me a retainer. I deserve it,” Dick said, “I deserve it for what I’ve done for him.”

  “You’re crazy,” the shambling man said to a small crowd that had gathered to listen to Dick and which was nodding in agreement, “you’re crazy, do you know that?”

  “I’m not crazy,” Dick said to the voice that seemed entirely outside of him, or then again it might have been a deep version of himself with whom he had to have a brief but logical discussion. “It all falls into place, you see. The whole thing. It worked out for the best; I thought I was in serious trouble here but it really couldn’t be better. I’m right in the catbird seat, in the fucking catbird seat, you know that?”

  “Out of your fucking bird,” the man said, “I’m going to call a cop.”

  “No cops,” Dick said, the word touching him off at some level of reflexive twitch, “no cops.” Cops could ruin everything, he had already had quite enough of cops, that was the truth, he could carry off his plan and make it work beautifully, no problems at all, nothing to worry him if he could just work it through uninterrupted and without people calling him crazy … but he couldn’t have cops. That was for sure. The cops were for Montez.

  He started to move toward the bus, which came panting into the stop, his hand waving, his body concentrated in a gesture that was somewhere between triumph and anticipation, thinking of the call that he was going to make to Montez from his furnished room, the call that would change two lives forever and set him, perhaps, on the glory road from which he would not depart … and a.38 slug fired from very high above, three or four stories high in a big, brown building hulking across the street opposite caught him in the center of the skull and tore his brain away.

  He saw nothing, heard, felt nothing either, went to the stones in one tumble not knowing they were there, kicked once and lay on his back, his eyes like panes of glass. The shambling man who had hit the ground at the explosion, leaning on his elbows now, looked at the corpse and said, “I’ll be damned. I’ll be goddamned.” He looked up at the sky. “I told you he was crazy,” he said to no one at all. The crowd, what there was of it lying on the ground said nothing. “Told you,” the shambling man said again.

  But of course, Dick hadn’t been.

  He had merely had bad luck. A very natural
and inevitable kind of bad luck, however.

  Montez, in his new role as a cautious and expanding businessman, had covered all the possibilities.

  XXII

  “You interest me,” Montez said and offered Wulff a cigarette. “I’ve followed reports of you, only fragmentary ones, of course, but recently I’ve been hearing a good deal. I’ve been extremely anxious to meet you.”

  “You could have sent an invitation,” Wulff said. He leaned back in his chair. Unlike the Americans who were his counterparts, Montez seemed to have exquisite manners. He had offered Wulff a drink, a cigarette, and a chair, only the last taken, had leaned back in his own exaggerated ease, had even put his feet up on the desk and turned his attention toward Wulff as if Wulff occupied such a complete position of attention in his consciousness that Wulff’s time would be his for as long as necessary. Of course the two guards, both of them armed with the pistols centered on his neck did not make Montez’s mood any less forced, Wulff thought.

  “You wouldn’t have responded to an invitation,” Montez said. “That really does not appear to be your style. Rather it seems you prefer to drop in unannounced.”

  “Only occasionally.” Wulff said.

  “You are such an interesting man,” Montez said and frowned slightly. “Why does a man of your intelligence want to clean up the so-called international drug trade? And even if you could, what’s in it for you? People must be happy, you know. They will try to buy their happiness in the manner and style that they can afford and to which they are accustomed. If they can’t have drugs they will only have something more terrible. Besides, who are you to decide that one man’s happiness is illegal? Is this under your American tradition? Your happiness comes from killing people. Why cannot another man’s happiness come from injecting heroin?”