Lone Wolf # 14: Philadelphia Blowup

by Barry, Mike

  But in the restlessness—and yes he would admit it—in the stabbing panic after the double murder Wulff had realized that his time was running out. He was working short term now; he would have to do what was necessary without reference to others and particularly without waiting for Williams. What did Williams matter anyway? He was not to be trusted. None of them were to be trusted, and Williams had betrayed him in Los Angeles. If he did it there he would be all the more likely to do it in Philadelphia, which was closer to home, closer to the little lawn in Saint Albans which he treasured. Wulff had Maury’s grenades tucked fore and aft into his coat. Six of them, beauties capable, he was sure, of the greatest destruction. He had two pistols, a point forty-five bore and a point thirty-eight. In the jungles in the night skirmishes he had gone up against a hundred invisible guerrillas with far less and had managed, one way or the other, to come out of it. America had to be looked at in the same way, then. America was a night jungle; the guerrillas were the swine like Martin and they were pinned to their positions. If you were a true soldier you went in and fought them on their own terms. You did not look for outside help, nor did you depend upon those who had already proven that they would betray you.

  Obviously he would have to go into Harrisburg and take care of Martin himself and the hell with Williams. People like Williams would always manage one way or the other. What the hell had they ever done for him? What had Williams ever done for Wulff?

  He stole the first car he laid eyes on, a ninety-eight Oldsmobile, 1966, idling at a light with a heavy black man alone inside wrapped sullenly in his overcoat as he peered at the light and then at Wulff’s exposed gun as if they were equally menacing. “Get the fuck out,” Wulff said at the driver’s side, talking through the open window and showing the point thirty-eight as the driver got out. He opened the door and stepped out quickly, rubbing his hands in the sudden cold and trying not to look at Wulff, who had already forced his way past him.

  “I don’t care,” the driver said, “it’s all right with me. You can take the fucker. I can’t get nowhere with it, and at least I’ll get book value.” Two blocks after he had slammed the car into gear and rolled into the first stretch of open highway Wulff saw what he meant. The transmission chattered and banged like a group of talkative whores, the body had a severe rattle, and the car seemed to have no power at all, losing speed over thirty-five. The wheel seemingly disconnected in his hands. Driving the car was like being in isolation above a small factory which was falling into a deteriorated state, hearing the ominous noises coming from the machinery, and the cries from the operators as they tried to contend with levers that no longer worked. The car contained both machinery and complaint; it was a mobile disaster area—and yet it could run. That was all that mattered. It was still functional, although just barely, and it would get him to Harrisburg.

  Wulff settled himself for the requisite period of misery, and probed the car west. The route was not familiar to him, and there were many slowings to look at signs on the highways; much frantic checking of what he thought might have been the proper exits after he had passed them. At every stop the transmission clanked and the car vomited out clouds of yellow exhaust which blocked his rear vision for thirty seconds at a time. He knew that the mission was perilous. There was never any doubt in his mind but that going to Martin on his own was a risky and dangerous process … But he had never felt before that he was in actual danger in the process of driving a car. The Oldsmobile gave him moments of panic that, in their special way, Wulff had never known before.

  At one point he braked too hard, getting back into lane behind a Corvette that had cut in spasmodically, and, with a terrifying wrench, the brakes had gone all the way to the floor, forcing him to barrel the car left in a straight dive toward the divider to clear the other car and to try and take off some speed. He had managed to save himself, although without much margin, and the Olds had taken a terrific jolt on the left front that had gone all the way through him. Then, regaining control and with the insolent Corvette far ahead of him, he had to contend with the fact that he would have to use those brakes again. Was there any reserve at all? Cautiously playing with them, he had been able to establish that vacuum reserves could be boosted through several applications that brought them up to half-pedal and gave him some fraction of original braking force. But undoubtedly the car would be no good in a panic stop. It would override its brakes in a moment and pitch him and his load of grenades through the windshield leading to a particularly ominous risk … he might not only kill himself, but in the process by impact blow up half the countryside as well.

  He seriously considered rolling the car to the side and trying to get another. The driver had not been kidding, all right; book value for this ninety-eight would be a steal. The insurance company would never know how badly hurt it had been. But stopping the car and trying to get another on a big state highway in the middle of the night was not going to be easy. He would have to flag down cars which would, of course, not stop. He might have to start shooting in order to bring them down, but the drivers would be fleeing in terror and the only way that he would be able to bring a passing car to a halt would be via bullet holes in the tires … and he did not think that the car would be any more use to him at that point than it would be to the driver.

  No, he was pretty well stuck. He would have to do what he could with the Oldsmobile. The next time around—if there ever was a next time—he would learn from this and make sure never to steal a car that was more than two years old. The trouble was that he had been betrayed by his attraction for rotting luxury cars for several years. He had gone crosscountry in rotting Cadillacs. But the Cadillac appeared to be a car of more intrinsic quality than the Olds ninety-eight. Same body frame and components, but maybe the Cadillac assembly line took just a shade more pride in fitting the panels together, or maybe there was some spirit in the Cadillac which could not inhabit the essentially ersatz ninety-eight.

  Nothing to worry about. All these speculations managed to do was to keep him preoccupied, kept his mind buzzing and mumbling about matters other than what he wanted to do to Martin and how really frightened, at base, he was by what he had done. No question about it: stealing a car like this and going after the man directly had been an impulsive gesture. It did not jibe with the calculation that had marked many of his moves up until this point. His quest may have been insane, but it had been approached in a businesslike and professional fashion. If you did not approach something as wild as this from that aspect you could not last in it for more than a day or so. But now there was nothing systematic about it. Not when he was off to Harrisburg to murder a man whom he had never met but still hated; when he had ignored an appointment with a man who might help him but who he did not wait to see. Trying to pick up another car on the highway would have been a compounding of the madness. He would not do it. At a certain point you had to haul back in, had to take things as they came and try to shape yourself to situations.

  So he kept on driving, locked into a bitter tight place, twirling the knob of the radio which was surprisingly functional until he got some music in the background that he found complemented his mood. Something which must have come out of one of the Philadelphia soul stations, it was bitter and bleak music with drums and dull sucking noises underneath it like alien mouths planting themselves in brief, horrid explosions upon flesh which Wulff would never see, of which he could never conceive. He began to sing idly along with the music, mingling obscenities and empty little breaths of sound against the rhythms. Not concentrating too much upon the lyrics, which did not matter—neither theirs nor his—but only trying to establish a certain rhythmic basis against which he could work, all of the time he thought of Martin.

  Martin was the key. According to the sources that he had spoken to in the south, and more importantly according to his own instincts, Martin would definitely be the most significant kill. He was the entire purpose of the Philadelphia breakdown. This was what Wulff thought. He was the head of the seco
nd echelon, and as a result of the meetings which would occur in Philadelphia preceding the bicentennial, he would be promoted to a position of maximum influence. In line with that, eliminating him now might save the nation from two hundreds years of slaughter, two hundred years of dead children, tangled hair in hallways and od’s, twisted bodies and broken mouths pouring fluids in the explosion of pain from the planted needle. He could save an unborn generation from all of this if he could only kill Martin. Dope would always be there, you had to face that. Dope was part of a republic that flowed upon one or another kind of junk throughout all of its history, and it would need that sustaining fire. But he could set back the process, could hurt the trade badly, and make a real difference. That, perhaps, was all that one could hope for: to set up a kill, to set back the course of history. Nothing, ultimately, would really change.

  The radio kept on, shifting to a different, more urgent beat. Pulling in to the rim of the signal, the sounds of an easy-listening station to the east and the coiling of the strings around the sound of drums was, to Wullf, like the feeling of shit coiling around the nation. America was easy-listening. At the heart it was an easy-listening country with smooth tunes and forgettable melodies trickling out of all the empty places of intersection and passage into America in the early 1950’s that accelerated as the nation turned inward. And as the profit began to flow, the coil of drugs had been tightened around it. Soul smacked around easy-listening America, tightening and tightening until finally, from the inside, the country began to explode; first the assassinations and then the riots and then Vietnam, which was the biggest drug war of them all. The issues for the next fifty years were being fought over hard on the farmlands where the power was rooted, and after Vietnam the country had been driven explicitly insane, and the easy listening became an easy, precipitous slide toward universal smack, easy shit for everyone … Only Wulff had stopped that. Wulff had been the only variable in the entire equation which the country had become. He had done well; he might have altered the course of history. But it would all go down the drain unless he killed Martin.

  He had to kill Martin. And he would do it, that was all. He was going to do it because the man needed killing. He represented the total force of evil in the universe as far as Wulff was concerned, and Wulff did not want to hear any of Martin’s excuses or defenses, but only information that would lead to his murder. He began to track signs toward Harrisburg then and felt himself funnelled down from the brief high of the radio and his stream of consciousness. Now that he was close upon it, he was all business again, and with that came a real sense of the risks of his position. He was in a very difficult, exposed way here and he had a lousy car as well, to say nothing of damned little maneuverability. Martin would probably have his house as thoroughly staked out as possible. But then, too, Wulff had one advantage: Martin could not possibly believe, after all of the preparations he had made, that Wulff would be audacious enough to actually strike at him immediately. He would have to be unprepared for this immediate, surprise attack. That would be the key to this, too, just as it was to almost every proper guerrilla action in the history of twentieth century warfare: total surprise.

  He drifted off the turnpike, found his way. He didn’t know shit about Harrisburg except that it was the state capitol and had had some pretty serious floods a couple of years ago which had put about a fifth of the city underwater and had the city declared a national disaster area. That was nothing exceptional, of course. Only the declaration made it unusual. Every city in the country was a national disaster area, declared or not; every city in the country was drowning, if not by water then from shit, poison, corruption and from the garbage left by those who came in every day to take what they could out of it and to flee at night. Near Harrisburg was Hershey, of course, the famous chocolate factory which had been started up by a crazy millionaire who never smoked or drank or advertised. But the crazy millionaire had long since passed on to whatever place there was that gave dead millionaires a fresh start, and now Hershey chocolate bars were advertised everywhere, even in all of the better markets, and had reduced their weight and quality by at least a half while doubling in price. Progress.

  He was also making progress toward the place in his mind where he felt he had located Martin’s home. All of his pursuits had been mapped out in some area of the mind which more often than not were in accordance with the reality that was then presented. It was not so much as if he were pursuing these bastards through the real Boston or San Francisco, but rather as if they were occupying terrain which he had created and which absorbed them. The same thing with Martin. The same thing with all of them. He was omnipotent, he was driven by righteousness, he was utterly in control of himself, and this righteousness would inevitably lead him toward a righteous outcome. He had to believe that. He had to accept the fact that his cause was correct and that it would lead to victory.

  So he drove through the streets of Harrisburg, working on instinct, working on little more than his knowledge of urban geography to take him to where Martin would live. He would be far from the inner city and probably to the east, but he would not be so far that he could not conveniently reach the runners who would have to work that inner city. He would have to be near the turnpikes, too, because he would be dealing with people who would be coming in from New York, Philadelphia and Chicago, and they would want to come right in, conduct their business, and get out again. So the house would be in a fairly nice residential area about three miles east of downtown, and Wulff, now that he was here, drove with splendid patience, resting easy on the wheel, all the time in the world.

  No need for the radio now. The car made its own music from chirping fan belts and little pulleys tearing at one another in the bowels of the engine. It actually seemed to be running a little better, now that it had been on the highway for a while. Maybe if the owner had treated it with respect, had blown out the carburetor now and then, he would not have had so much reason to complain. These big bombers desperately needed to be taken out on the road and run at speed. Of course, that really did nothing to solve the brake problem. The brakes were really bad. Once he came into the residential area, he settled for driving on the transmission, dropping it into low at the stop signs, slowing up a block before traffic lights, using the brake only at the early stages and then in a series of light taps rather than jolts to coax a little vacuum out of it. The brakes were not encouraging. One thing that Wulff distinctly did not need right then was to hurtle through a stop sign and be stopped by a cop or a car.

  He knew exactly when he had reached the street where Martin lived. It had the patrolled look that he had seen on so many streets that he had approached in the past. There was a car, its headlights doused, sitting in the middle of the street to his right, idling slowly. Forms appeared to be inside it, but it was impossible to really tell. Behind a tree, half concealed, stood a man with a hand in his pocket. Wulff let the Olds drop right by the block, moving with maximum caution and playing for inconspicuosness, then rolled down three blocks and angled right into a sidestreet out of their line of sight. He cut his own lights, brought the car to a stop and shut the engine. Very carefully, he removed the grenades from his coat and stacked them in a little pile beside him. Then he took out the two pistols and checked them carefully, both barrels and stocks, making sure that all was in order. As he did all of this he hummed to himself the same way that he had done on the highway with the radio, to a merry, tuneless little snatch of song repeated over and over again with vowels rather than words in perfect rhythmic constancy to the sounds that the pistols made when snapped into order, and to the gentle rolling of the grenades on the seat as he carefully counted and restacked them.

  They were curiously warm to the touch, and felt almost gelatinous. If he closed his eyes, he felt that he would see them glowing in the tight spaces of the seat. But there was no time to look upon the grenades with a sensual air. That would get him nowhere, and besides, it would be a hell of a sad comment on him if he were to admit that
the grenades had more of an effect upon him that way than anything had in a long time … since the girl, Tamara, had been killed in front of him on that beach in Miami. He had not thought of sex since, and knew that sex no longer existed for him in any form. Strange then that the grenades attracted them in this way. He shook his head, spat on the floorboards, started the car again. Tamara had died on that beach so that Wulff would have a second chance, so that the dealers and poisoners and scum of the world would not be able to destroy him and go on in their evil work. If he were to quit, even at this stage, it would be as if her sacrifice had been meaningless, as if he had never been there at all. You had to stay on top of the situation. The vermin were everywhere. They were absolutely everywhere. Look at Martin. You turned away for one moment and there was another rooting to the fore, ready to take over. The basic issue was poison.

  With delicacy and precision, Wulff turned the ninety-eight around in the street in a broken U-turn without clashing the transmission at all and without having to pump the brake, and keeping the carat the lowest possible rpm’s without stalling out, manipulated the transmission lever between neutral and reverse with the greatest of delicacy. Facing the right way, he idled up to the corner, cut left, and with infinite patience hung to the curb, creeping up on the third block down at no more than two or three miles an hour. It was two in the morning. They could not be at a high state of alertness. It was three hours until the faintest touch of dawn in this late fall, and if he did not accomplish what he had to within those three hours, he did not know his business at all. He would be truly worthless to have any worry at all about the time element now, he thought. He had his lights off, the radio playing softly. It would take fifteen minutes to creep down on that block at this pace, and at the rate he was going the Olds would be almost on top of them before they knew what had happened. Human metabolism was at its lowest at this hour; alertness might come from the brain but it could never come from the blood in the deep night. The ape that man had been slept in trees and trembled in the darkness.