by Barry, Mike
“I didn’t tell him anything,” Hamilton said. “He didn’t get it from me.”
“He sounded pretty damned mad about that murder of Shields, the foreman. As far as I can gather, that’s what blew it into the open in the first place—Shields. You shouldn’t have done that. I can’t recommend stuff like that at all.”
“Leave me alone,” Hamilton said, and tried to get out of the car, made a clumsy, grappling gesture with his right arm. With the butt end of the gun his contact knocked Hamilton’s arm down almost casually, Hamilton screaming with the impact. If the man had done it with other than a light touch, he would have had a broken arm.
“Stupid son-of-a-bitch,” the man said. “I pass the stuff on to you, you pay me money, that’s where it all ends. That’s the way it was supposed to be from the start. You know that I can’t get involved. You promised from the very beginning, that was the deal. That I would make the supply, but my name wouldn’t get into it. What happened?”
“I didn’t tell. I didn’t—”
“I’m a police officer,” the man said. “Do you know that? Did that ever occur to you? I can’t tolerate getting my name in on any level. I thought that that was made very clear. I thought we decided on that at the very beginning.”
Rubbing his arm, licking his lips, Hamilton said, “Of course that was the agreement. That was the agreement all of the time; I never broke it.”
“Yes you did. Yes you did break it, and now you’ve got all of us in very serious trouble, but your trouble is much more serious than mine. Your trouble makes mine look like a warmup. I’m going to kill you.”
Hamilton shook his head. “No you’re not,” he said. “You’re not going to kill me, because they know who you are, and if I’m killed, there’s only one person that they can trace it back to, and that’s going to be you, and I’m a hell of a lot more valuable to them than you are. I’m the one working with them; you’re only funneling it through. They’ll knock you off ten times quicker than they’d knock me off, and the whole thing will blow up.” Was he telling the truth? Hamilton did not even care anymore. He could barely attend to what he was saying. Attending to it would have taken more of an attention level than he had. Survive, that was the main thing. He had to survive. “Let me out of this car,” he said, “and get out of here as quickly as you can, and I’ll forget the whole thing. I’ll forget it ever happened, and you can keep on pushing it, we can deal together just as before … if you let me out now.”
“You must think I’m as crazy as you are,” his contact said, but there was a confused expression in his face; the gun wavered subtly. “You must think I’m crazy as hell to let you walk out of here. Keep on dealing? Deal with this heat on me? You’d be setting me up, that’s all.”
“So don’t deal. You don’t like the money, you don’t like the relationship, forget the whole package. I don’t give a damn. It’s your income you’re slicing up.”
“And that’s not all of it,” his contact said. “It’s not enough that they know who I am and that they can close in anytime. There’s someone else closing in too. Wulff is supposed to be heading toward Detroit. I heard that around in the department.”
“Wulff?” Hamilton said, and then, like a Venetian blind admitting little cracks of light into the attack of his mind, he knew who the man was talking about. “Oh, him,” he said. “The son-of-a-bitch who’s been killing people from coast to coast. He hasn’t been this far north yet, and I don’t think he ever would be. He’s not interested in Canada; it’s cleaning up America that’s supposed to be his bag. Anyway,” Hamilton said, a little more information shooting like a kite across the panels, “he’s supposed to be locked up crazy in Manhattan, something like that.”
“Bullshit,” his contact said “Bullshit to all of it. Bullshit to Wulff, and fuck you too.” He showed Hamilton the weapon. “Between the one and the other, you’ve finished me off good,” he said. “I guess I’ve got to kill you.”
Hamilton had often wondered how he would face death. Now he knew. He could feel his sphincter begin to open, could feel the slow surge of waters in his bladder as they compressed, muddled together, succumbed to gravity. But he held it in. He brought in his stomach, and he held it in. Everybody had to face death. Death was an inevitable. Get it here; get it forty years from now in a coma in the hospital sheets, it was still death. In a hundred years, who would know the difference? “No you won’t,” he said. “I’m going to open the door and get out of this car and go back to mine, and you’re not going to do a thing. You’re angry, but you’re not stupid. If you kill me, you lose either way. Alive I’m your only insurance ticket. You’re not going to do anything.”
He eased his hand up toward the handle of the door, pressed it, opened it. Twenty years with the union, twenty years of knowing how to deal with men were being called on now. If he blew this, then it proved that he had known nothing; but then, that made no difference either, did it? Dead was dead. “I’ll take care of them,” he said. “I’ll keep them off your ass. As long as I’m here to stay between you and them, they’re not going to come after you. I’ll take care of your Wulff, too. All that can be handled, but it’s going to be handled my way or not at all.”
“You think I’ll let you out of the car,” the cop said. “You really think I’m going to let you walk out of here. I’ve got nothing to lose, don’t you understand? You’ve blown everything.”
“Nothing,” Hamilton said, “nothing at all. You liked the money. You liked the suits and evenings out; it wasn’t Grosse Point, but it beat a cop’s salary.” He pushed on the door, feeling weightless. “Now cut it out,” he said. “Don’t be a schmuck—that’s what you tell all your suspects, right?—play it the cool way and protect yourself. Don’t be a goddamned fool. Murder isn’t going to get you anywhere. You cool things, you let me handle this, and we’ll be all right. Otherwise it’s all over.”
The gun shook slightly in the cop’s hand. “You think I’m going to let you walk out of this. You think that you can just get away with this.”
“Murder accomplishes nothing,” Hamilton said. “Murder accomplishes nothing at all.” And he put his foot on the gravel, his ankle turning slightly as he put it to pressure and then moved his whole body on it, weaving slightly.
Behind him the cop said, “Murder proves nothing? Maybe you should have thought of that before you killed Shields.”
Then Hamilton heard a sound which was really the gun going off in his head and killing him, but in that moment before his consciousness shifted, expanded, dwindled, and pulverized, in that instant the explosion might have been his realization of the truth of what the cop had said. My God, he was right, he had a point there, he really did, impulsive murder was being snatched back by impulsive murder … live, die by the sword, and now the whole world, not only Detroit, was turning to shit.
X
So Wulff had a panel truck and a load of coke and a very scared girl on his hands. The coke he did not find out about until the Michigan border, when it occurred to him to make a slow, careful hand search of the crevices of the truck precisely for something like that, but the girl he had found immediately.
She had come screaming out of the truck right after he had killed Edgerton, and her panic was so immense that Wulff thought he might have to kill her too, kill her because through her screaming he could not even talk to her, make her understand, but finally, because he could not see killing a woman (unless he absolutely had to, in which case sex discriminations would vanish), he had thrown the gun away, literally tossed it into the woods and faced her empty-handed. Her screams had modulated, her eyes had taken on a very calculating expression, and for just a moment the two of them had shared an appraisal of Edgerton lying in his blood by the side of the road; then the girl had said, “What are you going to do now?”
“I don’t know,” Wulff had said. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“I think you’d better haul ass out of here,” the girl said. “That’s what I’d do if I were you.
”
“And what about you?”
She ran a hand through her hair in that female gesture. “Me too,” she said. “I can’t drive these things, though. I can’t do a damned thing. He couldn’t do a damned thing either, could he?”
“He could do one thing all right.”
“He was crazy,” the girl said. “I think he was on drugs or something, that’s what I think.”
“That could be,” Wulff said, “that could be,” and he looked at the girl, looked at the corpse on the road, looked at the Fleetwood, and then made his decision: it would be best to leave his own car, make a transfer and get out of there in the truck rather than doing it the other way, because the truck would make more evidence than the car would. With his own stuff out of it, the car would be indistinguishable from any others, and besides that, the transmission, the crankshaft had absolutely had it; the thing had been making noises for two hundred miles. The girl was a problem, but looking at her, Wulff could see that she was not much of one; she was probably a pickup, a little blond on the run, bouncing from here to there, and this character had nailed her, but it might have been anyone else, a Harvard Ph.D. or a hit man. The road was just too open; it was a lottery on the road.
He told her that he was loading up the truck and getting out of there; she could stay or go, whatever she wanted. He even offered her the keys to the Fleetwood, told her that she was as welcome to it as anyone else around, but she backed away from that completely, saying that she barely knew how to drive, let alone drive tanks, and that there was no point in staying out here alone on the road; she would only wind up with someone worse than Edgerton picking her up. That had been the guy’s name, Edgerton. She said that her name was Jessica and she was eighteen years old (Wulff didn’t believe it; she was closer to twenty-four, but he could sympathize with the kind of girl who would want to put herself down in teen-age status to justify her condition, like an old bank teller saying that he was still in his forties so that he would look like less of a failure) and that she was going nowhere in particular except outward. She said that Edgerton had been heading toward New York, and Wulff said that this was no good, he was Detroit-bound, and Jessica said Detroit was fine with her, anything was fine with her as long as she kept on rolling, it didn’t matter too much to her where they went. She had no expression on her face at all as he crammed in the ordnance. He had a feeling that he was going to need it. He had a good idea at that point exactly where it was going to be used.
Then it was a matter of cleaning anything personal out of the Fleetwood, which meant really nothing at all, and getting the truck secured, which was pretty simple also; and then the girl, offered her choice, said that she would sit next to him as they went highballing off on Eighty. The corpse was already in rigor, but Wulff didn’t think about it too much.
Neither did the girl, apparently; at least, to the degree that Wulff could deduce mental states from outward actions, she didn’t seem to be particularly disturbed at all. Edgerton’s killing had been a relief to her, it appeared; it had solved a tricky problem of exactly how the hell she was going to shake him when they got to New York—he had taken it into his head that they would have a continuing relationship; at least according to him, she was the first decent fuck that he had had in years, and it had given her a sense of purpose. She spoke about the fucking in a tone so flat, so matter-of-fact, that Wulff perversely found himself excited about it; Tamara outside of bed had spoken about sex in exactly the same way, as if she were a waitress, say, talking about kitchen detail, and then in bed the woman had been absolutely wild, probably because she had, in her own head, taken all the myth out of sex, and coming to it expecting nothing, could get a great deal.
In any event, Wulff, who had thought of nothing but killing since he had come out of the courtroom, and about almost nothing other than killing for a time before that, found that he was not thinking about killing so much now; at least, it was not uppermost in his mind. Detroit would be there, but in the meantime it would take care of itself, and turning to her, he asked her if she wanted to go to a motel. She took this quite gravely, without expression, like an exquisitely trained little girl being complimented on her posture, and then said there was no need to go to a motel, they could pull off the side of the road right here and have sex if he wanted to. Edgerton had fitted out the back of the truck not only with passenger plates so that it could go anywhere but also with a double bed, which enabled the people who were riding in the truck to go anywhere too. Jessica said that this was Edgerton’s joke, not hers.
Wulff didn’t know how funny this was—he had picked up a certain loathing toward Edgerton; it was difficult to become emotionally involved in a healthy way with people who had tried to kill you—but he considered the offer, and then, after a while, some forty or fifty miles farther west on Eighty, he decided to take the girl up on it. It was not only a matter of energy being discharged—and since he had found Marie dead he had too often thought of sex in exactly that way—but in seeing whether he had any capacity left to feel. He had felt for the girl Tamara, of course, the girl he had found freaked out in San Francisco and whom he had carried out of there, only to bring her to her death on a beach in Miami, but it had been a very qualified kind of feeling … and there was also the possibility that her death had taken away the last vestige of feeling from him. In blunt language, Wulff wondered whether or not he might be impotent. He had to find out; there was an almost clinical interest in settling that case. An impotent man could not function with the kind of efficiency that a potent man could; killing was not as easy for an impotent man, no matter what the hell the myths were about it. So he pulled the truck off to the emergency lane, hoped that no state trooper would come along for a little while to check on precisely what was the emergency that had put them off the road, and went into the neatly furnished back, where he found that Jessica had already taken all of her clothes off and was lying on the stark but not uncomfortable bed, running her hands all over her body and moaning. Whether this was from real perverse passion or merely an attempt to make him feel more comfortable in the situation, Wulff did not know.
In any event, he took off his own clothes, joined her, and with an efficient ruthlessness found that he could function as well as he ever had. On an emotional level he was dead, of course; that was nothing new, but by shutting off emotions and fucking only with a small part of his mind, a single, bitter gleaming ray of intelligence lighting up the corridors of desire, he could do it any way she wanted, fast or slow, top or bottom, and her responses, automatic at first, dry and convoluted, the motions of a woman fucking as she is supposed to rather than from any real need, began to break open into a smoother and deadlier rhythm, and he put his hands up to her small breasts, squeezed them like coils, and his first orgasm was merely a draining, an unloading of blockage. Having finished quickly, he stayed within her and moved then into a slower, more intense rhythm; looking down upon her from a great height, poised between her knees, moving slowly and considerately, he began to feel the essence of the act, desire and the need for connection moving through him, and she put her arms up toward him, could not reach, fumbled away. He seized her small hands, grasped them tightly, and she began to cry then, squeeze with her thighs, demand … and it went on for a long while this time, much more slowly than he had done it for a long time, her little cries and shrieks like garlands of flowers all around them, and at the end there was one clear image of grief before he screamed and fell against her, winding tightly into her on the bed.
They stayed that way for a long time, and then they came apart. She ran her fingers through her hair and told him that it had been much better than she had expected; he was certainly better than Edgerton, that was for sure. In fact, he was better than anyone she had had in a long time. She would just like him to know that she had at least three orgasms, one of them intense, which, although it might seem slight, was at least fifty percent better than she had ever done before, and he had every reason to feel pride and a sens
e of accomplishment.
The cold-bloodedness of this might have infuriated Wulff at another time, or then again it merely might have amused him (most likely it would have amused him; it fit in with her attitude toward the world, which seemed as if she were administering it an unending true-or-false quiz), but his mind had already moved far away from sex toward the more pressing conditions of the truck, the road, his mission, the situation. Sex was all right; he had proved that he was still functional, and that was good; it was nice to know every now and then that your car could still go a hundred and ten miles an hour on the speedometer, even though in normal driving you might have to draw on that kind of power once in a hundred thousand miles, if that. Still, power in reserve was something. The more immediate problem, though, was Detroit and what to do with the girl. Within five minutes he was back behind the wheel, and Jessica, feeling affection, was riding up front with him, her head bobbing on his shoulder while he watched the panel of Eighty now fading underneath the dusk. “I don’t even know your name,” she said.
“Burton Wulff.”
“Oh. Burton Wulff. Where are you going, Burton Wulff?”
“I’m going to Detroit,” he said.
“What’s in Detroit?”
“The same thing that you’ll find everywhere else. Junk.”
“There’s also money and sex in Detroit. There are a lot of things in Detroit that you’ll find anywhere else. And then you’ll find things that aren’t, like cars.”
“Just junk,” Wulff said, “that’s all that interests me.”
“What interests you about junk?” she said, patting his knee, winding her fingers around his flesh. “Are you a junkie?”
“Just the opposite.”
“I used to be, but I got off that stuff. I never used the hard stuff, not at all. It’s no good for you; it screws you all up inside. Anyway, what do you mean you’re the opposite of a junkie?”