Lone Wolf #11: Detroit Massacre
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OTHER TITLES BY MIKE BARRY
Lone Wolf #1: Night Raider
Lone Wolf #2: Bay Prowler
Lone Wolf #3: Boston Avenger
Lone Wolf #4: Desert Stalker
Lone Wolf #5: Havana Hit
Lone Wolf #6: Chicago Slaughter
Lone Wolf #7: Peruvian Nightmare
Lone Wolf #8: Los Angeles Holocaust
Lone Wolf #9: Miami Marauder
Lone Wolf #10: Harlem Showdown
Lone Wolf #11: Detroit Massacre
Lone Wolf #12: Phoenix Inferno
Lone Wolf #13: The Killing Run
Lone Wolf #14: Philadelphia Blowup
The Lone Wolf #11:
Detroit Massacre
Mike Barry
a division of F+W Media, Inc.
You’re my favorite law enforcement officer.
—John Ehrlichman to Richard Kleindienst
I don’t want to be anyone’s favorite law enforcement officer. When you’re dealing with shit, the only enforcement is death. And even in America they haven’t learned to love death as much as their shit … not yet.
—Burton Wulff
Contents
Prologue
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
Also Available
Copyright
PROLOGUE
They didn’t know what to do with Wulff after they apprehended him in the act of trying to kill the lieutenant, so they put him in a luxurious private cell, about as luxurious as the NYPD could offer one of its most favorite customers, and there Wulff stayed for two weeks while they tried to figure out a course of action. They had to arraign him, of course. They had to do something with him. You couldn’t have someone going around trying to kill NYPD personnel in the precincts without taking pretty strong action. Then too, Wulff had killed close to a thousand in his nine-city quest, most but not all of them directly involved with the international drug trade. There were a couple of witnesses or innocent bystanders in there; you had to keep that in mind. Also, there was the bar he had blown up in Harlem and the several top-level, almost respectable men that he had bombed out in their mansions. You couldn’t have that kind of stuff going on. They had to do something.
That said, that agreed to, what the hell were they going to do? What was the best way to handle the case? There was no question but that Wulff had stirred up a good deal of sympathy, not only now in the public, which had received fragmentary but interesting reports in the press about Wulff’s virtually singlehanded attempt to wipe out the drug trade from the sources, but also in the PD itself. There were a hell of a lot of cops who, if they did not have the guts to have put themselves in Wulff’s position, could pretty well feel tolerant. Also, putting him up on formal charges was going to open up a lot more about Wulff’s background in the narco division and the very specific events that had embarked him upon his war than the PD and its lawyers were willing to deal with at the present time.
Still, they had to do something. The lieutenant, a fifteen-year man named Smith, whom Wulff had assaulted, had been beaten up pretty badly and was still in the hospital. That was bad enough, but what was worse was that Smith, from his hospital bed, was talking up a blue streak; layers of guilt were washing out now in confession. Everything that Wulff had accused him of was true, Smith said. He had been involved with the traffic. He had been responsible, when Wulff had brought in the informant to his precinct on a possession bust, for rigging the case at higher levels, letting the informant go, and breaking Wulff down to patrol-car duty. He had only been following orders, Smith said from his bed, his little face sweating. And the order to hit Wulff’s fiancée, to OD her out in retaliation after abducting her to that stinking fifth-floor room in the SRO building in the West Nineties—that had been his decision too. He was sorry, Smith said, perhaps half-delirious, perhaps only trying to come to grips with a terror he had lived with for months. He didn’t mean to do it. He had merely panicked. It seemed at all costs necessary to get the informant back on the streets and Wulff out of his hair forever.
That wasn’t good. That wasn’t good at all, because it had been the death of Wulff’s fiancée, Marie Calabrese, that had sent him on his quest in the first place. It had sent him to nine cities and a thousand victims with light and heavy ordnance; it had resulted in his virtually wrecking the network on both coasts and in destroying the Havana and Peruvian pipelines. All because Smith, covering, perhaps, for higher echelons, had decided that Wulff’s fiancée had to be hit and Wulff silenced. Now, seven months later, Wulff was in jail quarters and Smith was talking it all out; but at what costs? A lot of people were very unhappy with Smith.
Not all of them were members of the network. The network, what was left of it, had long since cut the lieutenant loose. No, it was the NYPD and the district attorney who did not know exactly how to handle the Smith situation, let alone Wulff’s. Obviously Smith had to be charged with something. He was freely confessing to collaboration with the syndicate and conspiracy to commit murder. But charging Smith with something meant charging Wulff too, bringing it all out in open court, and that was going to be one fine fucking mess. The traffic was in pretty bad shape because of Wulff’s efforts, but the PD didn’t want to take the credit. The credit would have to be taken only by involving the discredited narcotics squad and the several hundred people in the PD who had worked with it at one time or another. That was a hell of a way to look good.
There was no doubt about it; it was a fine fucking mess. And there were no easy answers. So while Smith stayed in the hospital slowly recovering from a ruptured spleen, a fractured jaw, numerous internal injuries, and a broken arm, Wulff stayed in a kind of luxurious solitary while they tried to figure it all out. Occasionally Wulff was visited by his ex-partner, David Williams, the onetime rookie cop who had been driving the patrol car with Wulff the night they had taken the death call on Marie Calabrese. Pure coincidence. Williams was black, and angrier than Wulff in his own way, and they had done a few flights together, most notably in Los Angeles, where Williams had left his pregnant wife in order to do battle with Wulff. But that hadn’t come to a hell of a lot either. Wulff couldn’t work with anyone. Now Williams was home and back with his wife and they had a son, and Williams did not know how much more he wanted of Wulff’s war. Sympathy was sympathy, beating the system was great, but he had come full circle; he had a life, of sorts, to live. Of course, he visited Wulff in his private cell almost every day, offered him comfort, told Wulff that he ought to get a lawyer, stuff like that. But Wulff was hardly having any. Wulff did not want any part of it.
It was oddly comfortable in confinement, Wulff found. The facilities weren’t bad, he had hot and cold running water, his own latrine, and the services of a single guard whose only job, it seemed, was to attend the cell, which was way down the corridors of a precinct in lower Manhattan. Obviously he was being given the kind of service which only top-class mobsters or politicians might get while they were hanging around waiting for their attorneys to make bail, except that in Wulff’s case no one was making bail, nor was anyone likely to; he was being held without charges, and any charges that they made would have to be unbondable. That might have been the problem, the reason that the arraignment was being stalled off.
It did not bother Wulff. Enough was enough; it was plea
sant to blank his mind and simply to rest. New York, San Francisco, Boston, Havana, Las Vegas, Chicago, Lima, Miami, and New York again, that was a hell of an itinerary for four months’ work, even if he hadn’t been fighting every step of the way, even if he hadn’t been taking bodies and organization along with him. Meeting the lieutenant, finding out the responsibility for the girl’s death (he had not, since the moment he had discovered her, been able to think of Marie Calabrese any more as “his girl”; it was always “the girl,” it was the only way to stay sane) could have taken him either of two ways, either into an even bloodier continuation of his vengeance or into a withdrawal that had only a little sanity in it. It had been quite unsettling. He had tried to kill the man; it was a pity that at the last moment they had pulled him away from what would have been bloody meat. Now, somewhere between vengeance and sanity, Wulff held ground in his cell and tried to think nothing at all.
It was better that way.
It was hard for him to pinpoint later exactly when this had ended for him.
I
Hooper came off the line gasping for a ten-minute break, went through the belts, down and around the walkways, fumes billowing around him, went into the latrine, found an empty cubicle, took out the kit, and shot three cc’s of heroin, mainlining. It was the damnedest, riskiest thing he had ever done, and probably, he thought, the stupidest. He had never mainlined in the plant before. But enough was enough; he couldn’t take it anymore. The first rush cleared his head and made him feel all right.
Coming from the booth, dancing a little in a two-step, moving back to his place on the line, Hooper could see the plant in a different way, through a little haze of greens and blues: American. It was not so much the Cadillacs that they were bolting together here, but America itself, the country being put together in little bits and pieces, moving through the stink and the haze of the plant, rolling down the belts and out the doors into the sunlight and the plains and the streams and the mountains and the prairies which were always in the advertisements when the things were painted and ready to make the final trip—and that final trip would take them seven years through the full circuit, just seven or eight years, Hooper thought, giggling a little, and then into the junkyard; well, that was the way it was, that was America. What was there to say? Seven or eight thousand dollars to convert a Cadillac into ten-dollar scrap in seven years; that was a stiff price, but then, it took only seventy years for the country to convert a whole person into scrap, or in most cases a little less than that—forty or fifty for the lucky ones, ten or twenty for those not so lucky. Hooper was twenty-four years old. He had been clean, fresh human meat when he had come into the plant five years ago. Now what was he?
Well, he was a little high, that’s what he was, Hooper thought, a little high and freaked out, drifting now on the heroin, the first rush taking him simultaneously above and below the conditions, the way that it was apt to do, just a little weary, Hooper thought, but willing as always to resume his place, willing to do what could be done. That was America for you. Weaving slightly, he found his way back on the line, the others to the right and left of him still locked into their own rhythms, not even noticing his passage. The heat, the stink, the noise, were awful; drugs took the mask off. He stared into and partook of the hell in which he lived, and then his mind shut down again, carrying him away from there.
The foreman, Shields, had taken his place on the line while Hooper was out. Hooper hated him, nothing personal, it was all part of the system, but as Shields looked him over quickly, his little eyes blinking against the fumes, Hooper thought that the hatred could become a killing thing; there were means and moods in which he could murder this man. “Where you been?” Shields said. “You said you were just taking a leak, what the hell kept you?” His eyes flashed, each of the creases in his face held a message, then he moved away. Hooper came back into place, and Shields said, “You probably went in there to get high, that’s what the fuck you did, I know you,” and added something sub vocally, something, Hooper knew, about niggers, but Shields was clever, he would never say anything like that out loud. Not like the old days. “Fuck you, you son-of-a-bitch,” Hooper said, but subvocally as well, and as Shields moved away, Hooper moved in, putting his hands on the bolts of the door, positioning himself toward the frame that crept down the line at a foot a second, the car still as open as a crater.
His job was to bolt on the doors of the coupe and Sedan de Villes, just lay them in place on the left front for the sedans; the entire left for the coupe, level them in so that the next man down the line could use the welder to make the first set of connections, a worse job than his because of the fumes that came off the welds. His own job was no piece of cake, because those mothers weighed forty, forty-five pounds apiece on the coupes, and wrestling them into place could give a man, even a twenty-four-year-old who wasn’t quite set up for the boneyard yet, a ruined back. “Fuck you, Shields,” Hooper said again, this time screaming it over the sound of the torches down the line, and the fucker did not hear a word of course, not a syllable of it, the fat son-of-a-bitch moving up and down the line now, screaming and cursing out some other poor bastards. For the couple of minutes that Shields had filled in for him, Hooper thought, those poor buggers, all of them, were going to pay.
But it was easier not to think of Shields, easier not to think of anything at all now, floating on the horse, moving the shit in his bloodstream to the rhythm of his work as he staggered the doors into place, groaning a little but sweating easily, feeling the smack lay a level in between him and the job, which, interposed, gave him a feeling of invulnerability. How could you not use the stuff? How could any man, Hooper would have liked to ask, not needed horse through the line? Well, the answer was that a hell of a lot did; this was not quite the kind of subject you went into in your free time, but he would bet that at least half of them were at least running pot and speed steady to keep going, and half of those had to be into smack a little. He was in it more than a little—he was blowing maybe two jolts a day, but that was nothing, nothing compared to what he would be taking if he didn’t have some discipline. Discipline, Hooper thought, gripping the unchromed handle of a door, moving it into position, aiming it and then holding it in place as a big, bleak Coupe de Ville rolled down toward him. You had to have discipline or the mind would go entirely, and then so would the fucking reflexes. But if you held everything in place, if you timed it out, then you could make it through. He could kill Shields. He could burn down the plant—that was what he could do; he could personally choke every son-of-a-bitch who bought a Cadillac and throw the fat bastards into a pit; that was what he would like to do, hang out incognito at the dealerships and grab the customers as they strolled through the doors, their wives in their neat little suits, steel of their faces glinting as they signed the papers for the car. Eight thousand dollars. Bastards. Still, it was a job.
He put the rage away, poised with the door now. You simply could not maintain this level of anger. If you did, the mind would go. The mind should not go. That was what the horse was for, to keep the mind in shape. Horse was the whore of the mind, bringing it into place, setting a rhythm. There was something jammed inside the frame of the Cadillac.
That was strange; he had never seen anything in these frames before. They moved on the belts like pieces of hell and sparks floating through the emptiness; now and then you might see a cigarette butt or a flake of someone’s spit, but otherwise nothing; the frames were mere scaffolding, you would see nothing inside them until far, far later, when they had gone way down the line, when they had gone into the Fleetwood plant, where the interiors would be laid in as if with a knife. But nevertheless there was something in there; Hooper could see it, and as he strained his eyes, trying to locate the small parcel which he could see wedged between the spikes of the seat frame and the brackets of the hardtop, he succumbed once again to the feeling that it was an illusion. It would have to be; it was impossible that he was seeing what he did, a neat parcel riding high;
it looked like something that might have been wrapped skillfully to go through the post office.
Well, there was no time to think of that. No time to think of it at all. Hooper struggled with the doorframe, the metal sliding perilously inside his palms, the car bearing down upon him at its steady, terrible rate, and everything went out of his mind—the line, the men surrounding him, even the impact of the rush upon his mind. The world had dwindled to frame and door, the fusion of the two, jamming the one into the other, just like jabbing your cock into a smooth cunt—that was exactly how it had to be, the feeling when he could get the hinges to meet on the first try, just like how it felt to slide it all the way in on that first tight conjoinment, hear her scream and then wind her legs around you…. No, he could not go on this way. He could not think, even about sex. Concentrate on the energy needed to lift the door, to seal it in, his body screaming, everything pulsing as he positioned it in his palms, oblivious of the heat; and then, as the car came in to him, he pressed the door into place, recoiling from the heat, which was now perceived only as a kind of pain.
He was damned if the package had not come open in little strips up and down its length, the heat searing away bits of the wrapping; and he was damned, Hooper would be damned, if inside it he could not see the glint of something that looked like white powder.
Impossible. It was impossible, Hooper thought, staring at it, the car trundling away now toward the welds, the heat wringing sheets of damp from his skull, running down his face, and not only the heat, not all of it. It was impossible, but he was looking at skag; that was what it was. He was looking at pure skag, wrapped into that package, rolling merrily down the line and toward the welds, and even though his jolt had slowed down his processes so that he seemed to be functioning through layers of insulation, even though it seemed that it took thirty seconds or more for him to react, his astonishment was not moving in stop-action but twitching through him; and involuntarily then, Hooper did something which he probably never would have done if he had been straight, did something which was probably the drugs talking to him. But that was not his fault; shit, a man had to do something, had to keep going any way that he could. That was all, and it wasn’t his fault, damn it, it wasn’t his fault if they had made of his life something which had to be supported only through skag. He hadn’t asked for it to be this way, not at all. But the production line—that was all that he was offered, and even then he had had to go on his fucking knees to get the job, be part of a disadvantaged group and all that shit. “Look at that!” Hooper shrieked. “Look at that,” as the paper, blackening in the fires, began to spread like the space left by a dismembered limb. “That’s shit! That’s pure fucking shit in that package. What the fuck is going on here?” And his scream wheeled all of them around; everyone was looking at him, the welder stupidly, with sparks coming out of the end of his instrument, the bastards to the right and left of him all staring. “Don’t you see that?” Hooper screamed. “It’s shit, damn it, it’s shit!” And then: it was impossible, he could not keep on shouting, what was he shouting for? Hooper thought stupidly. If that was shit in that car, someone had put it there; it was no accident, and that someone would not be very happy, would not be happy at all with Hooper calling attention on the line to what could only have been a terrible mistake. And then Shields was bearing down on him. His sense of time had become compressed and all fucked up, just the way it did with a jolt after the first rush; he just was not thinking too well, events moving out of synchronization somehow. “You fool!” Shields said. “You fool, you’re holding up the line!” And Hooper did not quite understand what he meant. What was Shields fucking around with now, what was this business with the line, didn’t he understand what was going on here? And he turned almost dreamily to confront Shields with this, confront the man with the impossibility of his position. As he did this, something broke within him; something strange and damp in a pocket of his stomach mashed open, and he was running blood, he was running blood and fire. It was not horse, but pain that was running free within him, and as he fell, Hooper thought: This is silly, this is wrong, this cannot be. I am going to whale the shit out of the stupid son-of-a-bitch who laid on this bad stuff, but as he hit the floor, the sounds of the machinery now enveloping him, it occurred to him that whatever had happened had nothing to do with the skag—it was the skag, if anything, that was holding him off from any true understanding of what had happened to his body.