Lone Wolf #2: Bay Prowler

by Barry, Mike

  He dropped the car into drive, pulled out from the curb at a whisper. Ferguson, dead or not, was bleeding all over the front seat; the cushions, the mats, even the dashboard had little speckles of his blood. Who would have thought that there was so much blood in a dead man. “I can’t drive this way,” Trotto said mildly. “I just can’t.”

  “What’s wrong?” Wulff said, “there’s no blood on the windshield is there?”

  “You don’t understand. I think I’m going to get sick.”

  Wulff seemed to sigh. That was all right; Trotto had been afraid that he was going to laugh. “That’s all right,” he said, “you’ll get over it. The sick feeling passes sooner than you think and then you’re just riding next to a dead man.”

  “Someone’s going to spot us,” Trotto said. “I tell you, these windows aren’t one-way. Some cop is going to look in and see this corpse here and ask questions.”

  “I see,” Wulff said slowly. “Tell me, do you think that it might be better to just stop here and dump him into traffic then? You’re perfectly free to do that if you really must.”

  “No. No I’ll skip it.”

  “I think that’s a good decision.”

  “What do you want?” Trotto screamed, his control breaking spontaneously, like a rubber band pulled and pulled and finally severing into raw, painful halves, smashed back against his senses, “what the hell do you want from me?”

  “I want to take a drive.”

  “We’re taking a drive. If you want to kill me, kill me, but I can’t take this.”

  “I’m sure you’ll be able to,” the man said quietly. “Everything takes some getting used to, that’s all. I also want to have a talk with you.”

  “So talk! Talk!”

  “I always wanted to see the Golden Gate Bridge,” Wulff said. “Why don’t we head there? I think that I want to go north anyway. That’s the best way, isn’t it?”

  “It depends.”

  “Let’s try it. And on the way we can have a conversation.”

  Trotto felt the nudge of the barrel against his head again. “Go on” the man said, “get to it. You’re still alive aren’t you? You son of a bitch.”

  Wulff and Trotto and a dead man hit the freeway to see what they could see.

  V

  The Golden Gate Bridge, Wulff decided, was much narrower than he would have thought; in the movies all you saw was this great arching span rearing high above the bay connecting the two great port cities, and the illusion was one of vaulting space, the height and hush of the cathedral—but the actuality was something else again. The lanes were impossibly narrow, oncoming traffic through the thin divider seemed about to lurch out of control at any instant and spill the Fleetwood, screaming, into the ocean; and the Fleetwood itself, no small car, seemed to hang dangerously out of its lane although he could see that Trotto, regardless of the pressure he was under, was an expert driver and was doing everything that he could to keep the big car going straight and under control.

  It was just another question of illusion versus reality, he supposed; the postcard illusion of the Golden Gate Bridge versus this narrow, tormenting tangle through which the Fleetwood cut perilously. But he could give only a part of his attention to the landscape because the most important thing was to dig as much information out of Trotto as possible. The man was talking, he was talking inexhaustibly. One thing about these men: they might come on, on their own terrain, like lions all right, but they were simply kittens when they were put to pressure. He would remember that. It was one of the valuable lessons he had picked up since he left the police force where he was still willing to concede that tough guys at least were really tough. No they were not. Not really. “Nicholas Severo,” Wulff said meditatively, remembering to keep the gun rigid and levelled at Trotto from the back, although he was no longer prodding the barrel against his neck. The man might faint. “I know that name.”

  “I’m dead,” Trotto said excitedly, “don’t you understand? For telling you that, I’m a dead man.” Nevertheless he was an excellent driver. The car soared on. The corpse beside the driver lolled indolently, a clown’s smile freezing onto the locked features. A peaceful, pastoral scene circa 1973 in the Bay State.

  “Why?” Wulff said, “why does he want to get rid of me so desperately? What am I to him? What’s the difference; can one man make a Nicholas Severo uncomfortable? I thought that he had an empire.”

  “I don’t know shit about empires” Trotto said in a high voice. “I’m a freelancer, I hire out to do a little work for the guy, that’s all. How do I know what he’s got in mind? This son of a bitch is bleeding all over me.”

  “Do you deal, Trotto?”

  “What? What’s that?”

  “I asked you if you deal. Do you hustle the stuff? Do you move the junk? Do you make connections? Are you an action man? Whatever the hell you people call it out here, I want to know if you work with the hard stuff.”

  Trotto’s shoulders shook but he held the wheel steady. In the rear-view mirror Wulff saw the man gulp. “No,” he said, “I don’t mess with it.”

  “Not at all?”

  “I told you, I don’t mess with it! I’ve done a lot of things in my life; I’ll do a lot more but I don’t mess with junk. It’s a personal thing, that’s all.”

  “You really think you’ll do a lot more with your life?”

  “Listen,’ Trotto said desperately, swerving the vehicle to capture the right lane, braking to hit the first exit, “listen, I’ve got nothing against you. It’s nothing personal at all. I went out to do a job, that’s all; it was just a job and I had no part in it at all. If I knew that you were this kind of guy I never would have taken it.”

  “I bet,” Wulff said.

  “Where do you want to go?” Trotto said hesitantly. “Look, we can’t go on this way. This guy is bleeding all over the seat. I tell you, there are cops patrolling all the fuck over the place here; they’re going to pick us up and pull us over and then where are we going to be?”

  “My problem,” Wulff said. But Trotto was right. He was going to push his luck if he kept up this particular version of a death ride. The San Francisco police might not have the alertness of New York’s Finest, but that was just parochial pride showing, Wulff supposed, and anyway the cops would have to be flat-out incompetent not, over some thirty miles of freeway, sooner or later, to get a look into this car. The point was that he had nothing in particular against police at all. He felt that he was working with them. Nevertheless, if the car was stopped he would have no choice but to be pitted against them and this opened up a series of choices which he did not want to consider.

  He found himself thinking of Tamara for an instant and then deliberately, like moving furniture, pushed the thought away. He did not know if he would ever see her again and he did not know if this made any difference at all to him.

  “Sausalito,” he said to Trotto. “That’s where I want to go.”

  “Saus—”

  “I think that maybe I’d better see your boss face to face. We can work out our differences like gentlemen. Besides” Wulff said, looking at the barrel of his pistol, “there’s a hell of a lot of junk moving through this vein soon and maybe Mr. Severo would know something about it, eh?”

  Trotto said nothing. His shoulders trembled. He cut to an access road heading north, opened the car up again as they merged with highway traffic. “That’s crazy,” he said, “you can’t go up there. You’ll get yourself killed.”

  “You care about my health, Trotto?”

  “I’m just telling you’ll get yourself killed.

  “My problem,” Wulff said, “but before we head up to Sausalito there’s one other little detail which has to be settled. No don’t get off into the left lane, Trotto. I want you to take the next exit and find me a nice little side road.”

  “In this section. This is Greater Oakland, man, there ain’t nothing—”

  “You’re resourceful, Trotto,” Wulff said sharply, “you’re res
ourceful enough to go around killing people, you can find me a back road near here. Now shut the fuck up and just drive.”

  “What you going to do? You going to dump this stiff? That would be a good idea but—”

  “Shut the fuck up, Trotto,” Wulff said bluntly. “Just move the car.”

  Trotto shut up and moved the car. He found an exit lane, took the car off the freeway and rolled down a long ramp, came to an intersection piled with franchise food stands, traffic lights, large vans and women with baby carriages. “This is a populated area,” he said in a whine, “for God’s sake, anyone can look in this car, can see—”

  “Shove him down,” Wulff said.

  “What’s that?” Trotto asked, the car idling in a line of traffic at the light, his shoulders hunched as he peered through the windshield. “What are you saying to me?”

  “I said shove him down to the floor if he offends you,” Wulff said. “You see, it’s your problem, not mine.”

  “You want me to touch him?”

  “Why not? Never seen a dead man before, Trotto.”

  “Not up this close. Never like this. I—”

  “Shove him down,” Wulff said and touched Trotto ever so gently in the back with the pistol. The man jumped. He extended an arm, gave Ferguson’s body a weak shove, then pushed harder when the corpse failed to move.

  Ferguson fell to the floor in a little leap and shower of blood.

  “Better,” said Wulff as Trotto, shuddering, got the Fleetwood moving behind the traffic again. At the intersection he cut right, right again, they headed into a long two-lane blacktop, opposing cars hurtling toward them perilously. Wulff shifted his attention for just a moment, looked around, focused on the terrain. It looked exactly like Queens or Patchogue, Long Island. The clutter of the highway, the arrangement of the stands, the flicker of the used car lots, even the way the landscape had been carved out to fit this junk looked like any suburb he had ever seen.

  The thing was that they had made all of the country the same. Differences, if there ever had been any at all had been abolished. Just as the network and their dealers had moved into the central cities throughout the land, cleaving them all into a single pattern of waste and devastation, so the developers, the used-car men, the franchisers had come into the near countryside and made it their own. On the one hand, junk was being poured into the central cities; on the other, a different kind of junk was being dropped like bird pellets into the countryside. Maybe Wulff thought wryly it wasn’t a coincidence or a matter of two forces after all. Maybe the eager developers and the junk network were the same people operating out of two briefcases; from the one they pulled arrangements for shipments, from the other they grabbed another vacant lot zoned for private use, bribed a few councilmen to change that zoning and threw up another “Wonder Waffles.” In both cases they were out to level the country, to make it exactly the same all over, to erase all differences from the land because if the land was all the same then one policy, one government, one program would work as well as any other and there would be no will left to fight them. Maybe you could see everything that had happened in these last twenty years as the outcome of the fact that the country, down the line, had lost all sense of its differences. You didn’t want to push that theory, any theory entirely too far but it was certainly a possibility.

  Trotto, retreating into himself had taken the car a long way down the blacktop. Now the country was beginning to open and Wulff could see the savaged remains of what it might have looked like nearer the intersection a few years ago. Wasted grass, ruined trees, low-hanging mist, a few discouraged houses and industrial buildings thinning out even further as they moved on. They were getting away from the built-up district after all. In a few years, maybe less than that, the developers would have gotten out this far but it still was not quite worth their while. Aside from burning out the landscape and scattering a haze of pollution through it like a child dumping sand on a beach, they just didn’t have too much interest. Yet. Wulff took a couple of deep breaths and sat patiently in the back of the car. Trotto was his chauffeur and was carrying him off to an appointment. Look at it that way. Wulff knew exactly what he had to do now; it was just a matter of timing.

  “What are you doing?” Trotto said nervously, as if catching this throat, “what are you going to do?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “Listen,” Trotto said quickly, “I told you, I have nothing against you. I just work for a guy, that’s all. I don’t mean you any harm at all.”

  “Of course not.”

  “I don’t!”

  “I know it,” Wulff said quietly. “You don’t mean me any harm at all; you would have killed me back there but it would have been nothing personal at all. All right,” he said, noting that the scenery had now opened up almost completely, devastated grass, brown, withered foliage, “stop this car.”

  “I mean it!” Trotto said, his voice bleating, “for God’s sake, don’t do this to me!”

  “Don’t do what to you?”

  “Don’t kill me,” Trotto said. “I’m twenty-six years old; I don’t want to die.” He did not slow the car.

  “Nobody wants to die,” Wulff said. “In the whole history of the world there have been only three or four people who really wanted to die, they’re the great exception, but nevertheless, everybody does die, don’t they? It’s just one of those things you’ve got to put up with Trotto, like turning in a car every two years and taking the depreciation. I told you to stop this thing.”

  The car swerved, brakes locking. Trotto seemed on the verge of trying something desperate; Wulff had to poke him once with the gun in the back as a reminder to keep his mind centered. Trotto finally braked down in a series of little swerves and buckings, the car spilling off the road and onto a rutted shoulder, little clouds of dust being kicked up by the wheels. Trotto held the wheel tightly as the car braked down and seemed to be peering through the windshield. He twitched.

  “Shut off the motor,” Wulff said.

  Trotto cut the engine and turned to face him. “You’re really going to do it, aren’t you?” he said.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do. Get that corpse out of the car.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I said, get Ferguson out of this car. He’s staining the upholstery and I don’t feel like riding around with a dead man anymore.”

  Trotto looked behind him nervously. “There are cars all the time—”

  “There are no cars now. That’s your problem, Trotto,” Wulff said. “I’m just going to sit in here and look at this gun for a while. You do the housekeeping.”

  Slowly, reluctantly, Trotto opened the door and moved out. Wulff watched him carefully. “You won’t get away with it” Trotto said.

  “I expect not.”

  “And if I had the gun on you, Wulff—”

  “But you don’t,” Wulff said. “You don’t have a gun on me. I have the gun on you and that’s the only relationship you understand so you just go ahead and do what you have to do Trotto.”

  Trotto walked around to the other side. Wulff leaned forward, unlocked the door for him. Trotto leaned in, took the corpse by the shoulders and tugged. The corpse did not move. Trotto shuddered and pulled harder.

  Ferguson came free from the car like a clump of seaweed being pulled out of water.

  Wulff sat and watched it. Working on the passenger side as he was, Trotto was shut off from the road. No one would be able to see what he was doing, working close into the car, not that it mattered anyway. On the road, no one stopped. This was the one basic rule of the new American road: stop for nothing. That was what the country had turned into; people in little air-conditioned cubicles rolling quickly, ignoring the scenery. There was no scenery. If your own car malfunctioned you were just out of luck. Maybe a cop would stop and maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe a truck would come along and then again most likely it would not. The best thing to do when your car malfunctioned was to start hiking and if you were a crippl
e or a pregnant woman in deep labor that was just your tough luck. New rules of the road: everyone is a stranger. Except at the franchise food stand, of course. There, these people were your friends just like the dealers who always knew you at the beginning.

  Trotto holding the corpse in a ballroom embrace, wandered some yards from the car, dropped Ferguson heavily on the ground. The body made just a little clump on the earth; it would look from the road like a shallow rise. Colorless, merged into the earth. All of the blood had come off it in the car.

  Trotto stood there for a moment and then came back to the Fleetwood slowly, reluctantly. He seemed to be limping. He walked around to the driver’s side, opened the door, started to slide in.

  “No,” Wulff said. “No, Trotto.”

  The man stopped in mid-gesture. Wedged, half-in, half-out of the car. He looked at Wulff.

  “You’re not going anywhere,” Wulff said. Softly he opened the driver’s side of the back seat, got out in one quick motion, walked up behind Trotto. Now he was covering him, belly to buttocks. “Back out of the car,” he said, clearing a little ground. “Back out very slowly and don’t try anything.”

  “No,” Trotto said, “you can’t do this to me.”

  “Try me.”

  “There are cars! There are people—” Confirming this, a Rambler American bounced down the hill behind, came up to and by the Fleetwood fast, children peering out the windows. It was out of sight even before Wulff could smell the exhaust.

  “No one cares, Trotto,” he said. “Everybody just wants to get to where they’re going. They don’t look at this as being real at all. It’s just something you drive through.”

  Stiffly, Trotto moved around the hood. His hands were trembling. “In broad daylight—” he said. “On a public road.”

  “That’s life. You would have knocked me down in a street. Isn’t this better? You can die in the grass.”

  “Don’t kill me,” Trotto said. “For God’s sake don’t kill me, Wulff.”