by Mike Barry
“You never see the stuff do you, Vincent?” he said. “You just deal over the phone. It’s all outside of you isn’t it? You never have to look at what you’ve done.”
“I’m dying.”
“Yes you are. You certainly are dying. Everybody you ever touched is dying, Vincent. But you never had to look at the death, did you? It was all something going on uptown. You sealed yourself off in your townhouse and called it the world.”
He yanked the man from the floor, forced him to a standing posture. “Look,” he said, “look at what you’ve done.”
He propelled the man forward, showed the man the street, the splinters, the demolition, the ruins of what had once been his home, of what had once been a fortress. “That’s what you’ve done, Vincent,” Wulff said, “do you understand that?”
“I don’t understand—”
“This is what you’ve turned New York into. Don’t you understand?” Wulff said then with a terrible, sweet, slow patience as he held his revolver. “Don’t you understand, Vincent, that the inside of a junkie’s head looks just like this does now?”
He saw comprehension or thought he saw comprehension growing in the man but Wulff was just not interested. He was not interested.
He pointed the revolver at Vincent and held the trigger. “I’m going to give you more peace than you ever volunteered for anyone, a better end than you’ve wished on a thousand demolished souls,” he said.
And shot the man in the head.
Vincent dropped before him with an exhaling sigh, almost as of relief to finally take leave of life. Looking at the dead man in the growing fury of the sirens Wulff felt a twinge of envy: Vincent at least was out of it. Wherever they went, however they had been taken, the dead, at least, had been granted release.
Which he had not yet been and which he knew now he would never bring upon himself. For death was either for the sick or the weak; it was not for him.
No ease for Burt Wulff.
He picked his way through the broken spaces of Peter Vincent’s house, stumbling through the ash. The beacons were close now, the sirens upon him, all up and down the block people had come to windows and open spaces to look upon his work but he felt that he just might be able to make it out of there undiscovered. The proper way was to the river and then picking his way along that blind back up a cross-street.
He breathed raggedly, unevenly, tears and gases mingling in his lungs but he was breathing.
And he was walking.
The great siege, he knew now, had begun.
EPILOGUE
The man dressed like a stockbroker came quickly into the midday crowds, an attaché case swinging, headed north toward Broad Street. Briskly he stepped from the curb, dodging without thought the heavy traffic, separating himself from the bodies around him, opening himself up for space to move freely. His eyes instinctively measured the traffic, the crowds, the amount of space given him, like any New Yorker’s they saw without seeing. The man opened up to full stride as he crossed the street and began to speed toward his destination. He was already a little late. It was an important meeting, dealing as it would in part with the allocation of Peter Vincent’s domain.
The bullet caught him behind the ear, spun him on the pavement and dropped him in his tracks. The contact had been so precise, the impact so shattering and yet bloodless that it appeared as if he had merely been stricken by a cerebral hemorrage. The man lay there, his case dangling at his side, his sightless eyes looking up toward the great buildings he would never see again. People eddied around him, being careful not to touch. It was certainly best in New York not to get involved with cases like these if you could help it.
A tall man with hollow, pained eyes came from the crowd and knelt quickly beside the fallen man. He appeared to be a friend or a doctor, quickly checking him out for gross signs of damage. The tall man nodded once and took his hand away from the other’s wrist. Then he reached over and took the attaché case and standing, moved off quickly into the crowd. All of this had taken no more than thirty seconds.
The fallen man lay there for fifteen more minutes while the crowds swarmed around. At length a patrol car came, prodding itself haltingly through the traffic and two cops came out. They checked him, shook their heads, put in the call. Then they started to go through his pockets for identification.
There was no identification of any sort. The man with the bullet in his head had no papers, no credentials. A wallet empty except for two one hundred dollar bills and five singles fluttered open on the pavement.
The cops looked at one another and then shrugged. It was possible. A lot of these Wall Street types recently, because of all the security problems on the street, all of the pickpockets, had taken to carrying their identification papers in their attacé cases which they could hold onto, see with them at all times. Someone had probably snatched the attaché case and run with it. It didn’t matter. The cops would find out who he was and if they never did it wasn’t their problem anyway. The problem was the sniper in the district and that made their palms sweat a little as they waited for the wagon and reinforcements to come so that they could at least get some coverage….
But the sniper was already heading uptown holding the attaché case. In due course he would open it up, get a look. He couldn’t wait.
The contents of the case would tell him where he would be heading next….
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Copyright © 1973 by Mike Barry
All rights reserved.
Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
eISBN 10: 1-4405-4234-1
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-4234-3
Cover art © 123rf.com/Stuart Monk