by Barry, Mike
He heard that Wulff had broken through the first line of defense in the desert and had made the casino no more than thirty seconds after the man had come in. He called up to Walker and told him to sit tight and then he put the second line into action. If they failed which they probably would not (but you had to take everything into account) there was a third line and a fourth. Maybe a fifth. No loose ends, whatever you did, all the way down the line. No loose ends, ever.
This was the kind of man who Wulff took an elevator up four flights to see.
VI
Wulff said, “Knock on the door and tell him the job’s done and you’re alone and you want in.” He prodded the man down the hall. There was no one there.
“It won’t work,” the tall man said. He was not arguing, only a desperate reasonability in his voice. If there had been any spirit it was well broken. “He knows everything that’s going on there downstairs, don’t you understand? He’s no damned fool, he’s hooked right in there and he probably knows everything.”
“We’ll try it that way,” Wulff said.
“We’ll both be killed before we get into the room.”
“So what do you suggest?”
The tall man stopped bringing Wulff up sharp behind him; he took another prod from the gun and stumbled but held himself against a wall. “I’ll tell him that I’ve got you and that you’re disarmed,” he said. “It’s the only way.”
“And what will I walk into?”
“How the fuck do I know what you’ll walk into? I’m trying to stay alive too, friend.”
“Are you now,” Wulff said softly. They began to move again in a soft huddle, the tall man motioning toward the suite that was Vinelli’s. Only a few yards now. “What happened to Stone?” Wulff said.
“What’s that? Who?”
“Don’t give me any shit now; it’s too late. What happened to him?”
The tall man turned. His eyes were burning. “I can’t talk about that,” he said, “that’s something I just can’t talk about at all.”
“Even if I shoot you in the ass?”
The man shook. “I’m afraid of you,” he said flatly, “and I’m afraid of dying. But there are some things I’m even more afraid of.”
“Vinelli.”
The man looked at him, said nothing. Involuntarily, his head jerked.
“All right,” Wulff said, “play it your way. Knock on the door. Or why not try it and just go in?”
“He always keeps it locked.”
“What the hell,” Wulff said, “try it anyway.”
The man reached forward, caressed the knob, his hand bouncing. He turned it. It slid in his palm, leaving little stains of gloss on the metal.
“I told you,” he said.
“All right, knock.”
“He could just open that door and shoot the two of us down. You don’t know. You don’t know Vinelli.”
“I’m going too,” Wulff said, “I’m looking forward to it very much.”
The man knocked. The sound came back on his fist rather than resounding the way that solid doors always do. He knocked again.
“Who is it?” a voice said from the inside.
“Thomas,” the man said. “I’ve got him. I’ve got him with me.”
“Got who with you?”
“Wulff.”
“The New York freak? You’ve got him?”
The tall man looked back at Wulff as if he expected to be shot for this. Wulff held the gun very steady and looked at the door, leveling down, trying to find a sightline. He had made a decision the moment he had heard the voice; he was not going to go in to Vinelli to negotiate, to give him any chance whatsoever to maneuver. He was going to shoot the man instantly and negotiate later.
The tall man must have seen this. He looked at Wulff hastily, looked back at the door. “Yeah,” he said quietly, “I’ve got him.”
“Where’s Witt?”
“Not with me,” Thomas said. “Downstairs.”
“Why?”
“No reason,” the tall man said. “All right, fuck, plenty of reason. The guy knocked him down. But I was able to wrestle him into control.”
“That was fucking stupid,” Vinelli’s voice said. “That was really fucking stupid.”
“I guess so. But I got him.”
“All right,” Vinelli said. “Bring him in.”
“I think it’s better if you open the door,” the tall man said at a jab from Wulff, rubbing his back then in real pain, trying though to keep his voice flat. A fuckup but a professional. You had to respect that. You had to give him that much. “I’ve got him under tight control here but I don’t want to start fucking with the knobs.”
“Oh,” Vinelli said. There was a sound of motion behind the door and then it stopped. “How do I know you’ve got him under control?” he said.
“I do. I do.”
“And what if you don’t?”
The tall man shrugged, almost as if he had been speaking the truth. “What can I say?” he said, “I sure as hell can’t prove it behind a closed door.”
“I’m coming,” Vinelli said after another pause, “but I’m coming with a fucking gun. I’m going to answer that door, open it right up with a fucking gun in my hand and if I see any fucking thing wrong I’ll kill you and then the other guy and Witt too if you’re lying and he’s with you. I’m not fucking around with fucking games. This guy is dangerous.”
“I know he’s dangerous,” Thomas said, “that’s why I wanted you to open the door.”
“All right,” Vinelli said. Wulff gripped his revolver, bringing it in slowly across the tall man’s body, easing it toward the door. At some level of reasoning he knew he was calculating the most possible angle at which Vinelli’s body would confront him at the opening of the door. The thing to do was to play the odds just the way the suckers did downstairs and hope that there was no percentage in this one to eat you up alive.
The tall man in that bleak, compressed instant before Vinelli opened the door, must have seen exactly what Wulff had in mind. The comprehension moved from his eyes down the cheekbones and into his neck. He trembled. Then he must have made calculation of his own.
What happened next happened very quickly. Looking back on it Wulff could see it clearly, could plug the sequence of events to tell exactly what went on but at the time it lacked any sense of continuity and he was working only on the ancient cop’s instinct. What happened was that the tall man, pedaling backwards, tried to throw his weight into Wulff, catch and pin him by surprise against the opposite wall just as Vinelli opened the door, hoping that Vinelli would see what was happening instantly and using that moment of surprise, shoot over him to kill Wulff. It was a simple plan, certainly one which came out of vast respect for Vinelli and looking back at it Wulff could only admire the man. Right to the end, even defeated, he had been thinking like a professional.
But it did not happen that way. What happened is that the tall man caught Wulff all right, threw an elbow into his solar plexus and sent him back against the wall gasping, losing that one crucial instant and handhold on the gun which could have been the story as Vinelli opened the door … but Vinelli, either misjudging the situation or overreacting or perhaps (this was the most frightening of all) doing something which he had planned to do anyway, shot directly at the tall man and hit him in the chest, killing him.
He must have been killed instantly. He fell away from Wulff the way a sheet falls from a naked girl doing a final strip and gasping against the wall, holding his solar plexus with one hand, trying to get a decent grip on the gun with the other, he was open to Vinelli. The man raised his arm for the killing shot.
Wulff fell. He plummeted straight down, no longer trying to protect his stomach and hit the floor like a carpet, scrambling behind the corpse of the tall man named Thomas. Plaster sifted into his hair behind a quiet pop. Vinelli had been using a silencer. He fired off the silenced gun to kill Wulff, but the bullet only hit where he had been.
Vinelli
had an instant of confusion. He was a big man with experience and no fool in situations like this but he was also fifty-two years old and the reflexes were simply not where Wulff’s were. He took a fifth of a second to try and see exactly where the hell Wulff had gone. By the time he found him on the floor, Wulff had rolled part way on his back, arched himself, pointed the gun and gotten the shot off.
No silencer. The gun screamed in the confines of the hallway. It threw up dust, the recoil slamming him straight back into the corpse.
He hit Vinelli in the left kneecap.
It was where he had wanted to put the shot in the first place. He could not have done better if he had wanted. Vinelli, pivoting, raising his leg to aim the next shot had presented that target directly to Wulff, and Wulff hit him dead center. Blood leaped from the knee like a bird.
Vinelli screamed.
The scream was harshly feminine, unlike any which Wulff had ever before heard. At the same time that the bird of blood carried him upwards, the scream must have carried him down, the leg arching up straight into the air, inclined toward the ceiling, little bone fragments spilling. Vinelli fell straight into the carpeting still screaming. His body, two hundred and forty pounds of it, unprotected, not guarding against the fall hit hard, like a mass of gelatinous material, and he screamed a second time.
Wulff, half on his own knees now, finished off the job by shooting Vinelli in the foot of the same leg.
The scream came again, ripping out in little waves, rivulets of effeminate sound that combined with the pain in Wulff’s plexus to carry him to a place where only noise existed. He could not have been there for more than ten seconds, probably less and when he came out of it he found himself embracing a corpse while a live man squealed before him, his face brightening … but he would never be the same again. He knew that. He had simply never seen pain like that in a human being before.
Dogs yes, plenty of dogs and there had been a stray cat he had once seen on patrol which some madman had literally opened up so that its guts were falling out of it like a series of pendulums and the cat’s agony had brought it to humanity. It had looked at Wulff with gratitude as Wulff had pulled his revolver and instinctively shot it. But the cat was something else, so were the dogs, Vinelli, whatever else, he was a man, a man now with a destroyed knee and a ruined foot, clubbing and howling himself to death in a hallway and Wulff knew that whatever he did now he had to get the man inside, had to get the two of them inside along with that corpse because the screams were surely going to draw reinforcements, had probably counselled reinforcements already and what would happen when men poured down this hall went beyond description. At least inside the room he would have a post; he would have a line of defense.
Wulff staggered upright and looked at the man before him in the hallway. Vinelli was the man all right: he was the one to whom Stone had fled, the one who had sent four men to kill him, the man who might have been the most dangerous of all that he had faced, but in the posture of agony they were all the same, weren’t they? the faces drawn to the same translucence of anguish, the mouths uttering the same words of hurt and shame. Remember that Wulff told himself, looking at the thing in the hallway, clutching itself almost senselessly on its left side, at the end all of us are the same. Pain is the great leveler.
He left the dead man, Thomas, in the hallway. The dead were the dead all right, there was nothing to be done with them. He might not even attract attention out here, at least from guests. He would look just like any other loser, busted out, lying facedown in the hallway. They would lie in the hallways after a disastrous night at the casino, sometimes in their own vomit, and the considerate staff would not help them into their rooms, often because to awaken in the knowledge that they had been seen would be the most unbearable of all. He kicked the man aside, feeling the odd resiliency of the corpse and put his hands on the shoulders of the semiconscious Vinelli. He poised himself behind the man.
He dragged him into the room.
The left leg dragged and bumped on the carpeting; Vinelli bellowed once, that piteous effeminate wail and then lapsed into unconsciousness. His head lolled off to the side. He was dead weight, dead meat. In the room, Wulff dragged him clear of the door, left him lying there, came to the door and kicked it shut, chain-bolted it. Alone in the room now with a wounded man, one dead in the hallway. He saw the little trickles of blood pooling from underneath the pants leg, billowing onto the slick, yellow carpeting of the room. Vinelli must have been proud of that. The yellow carpeting must have been his taste, all right: he was exactly the kind of man who would take pride in a touch like that.
The phone was ringing.
He allowed that fact to penetrate his consciousness, standing there, looking at the man, then he went over to the phone itself, alive with its piercing sound and considered. Then he picked up the phone, inhaling, allowing not even the sound of his breath to hum over the wire and listened.
“Sam?” a man’s voice said finally, “Sam, are you all right?”
Wulff said nothing. He held the phone. Eventually, if they had something to say, they would come right out with it anyway. You could count on that. An open line for a man under stress was a request to speak.
“Sam?” the voice said tentatively, uncertainly, “there’s some trouble down in the casino. Sam, there’s something going on down there. Are you all right?”
“I’m all right,” Wulff said in a monotone. “Everything’s under control.” He kept his voice expressionless, level. There was always the chance that you could get away with it. It was worth a try anyway. “I don’t want to be disturbed,” he said, “I want to handle this my own way. Everything’s under control.”
“You sure? Are you sure now?”
“Yah,” Wulff said and slammed the phone down. He tracked the silvery coil of wire into the wall, yanked on it hard. Expansion material, the coils bulged in his hand but did not come free. Impatient, he took out his revolver, put the nose of it against the wire and blew it free. Then he picked up the disconnected phone, carried it to the window, pushed open a latch with difficulty and hurled the phone out the window, quickly closing the pane against the sound of impact.
That would take care of that for a while.
He had a few moments leeway he supposed. He walked over to Vinelli, checked the unconscious man who was now beginning to breathe in deep, whimpering gasps and kicked him once in the ribs, feeling bone shatter. That would bring him back to consciousness, sure enough. Then he went back behind the desk, took a straight chair against the wall there and carried it to the door, wedged it underneath in a good tight hold. Going back to the desk he ripped the remainder of the phone line out of the wall, took it over to the door and, grunting, plugged it into the lock. It just fit. It might not do much but then again it could possibly be something of a help if they tried to shoot their way in.
Then he went back to the body on the floor and kicked it again, then once more until the eyes fluttered and Vinelli, his eyes rolling, looked up at him.
“Let’s talk,” Wulff said, almost affably.
He was going to get some answers.
VII
He squeezed what he could out of the brief conversation and still it was not enough. He did not like it. Walker did not like it. Whoever had picked up that phone was not Vinelli and yet that knowledge was not enough; Vinelli manuevered around a lot down there and generallly speaking his moves were not to be questioned. If he didn’t want to be bothered Walker should have left it at that, but sitting on the topmost floor of the Paradise, Walker turned in his chair, looked out past the strip to the clear dark spaces of the desert in the distance and decided that this one time he could not let it go. Whatever the risks he had to follow through.
There was the problem in the casino for one thing; the little man who, reports said, had been beaten up and had been taken out of there by ambulance. There were the two other men in the casino who apparently had been with the hurt one and who had left, headed, it was said, to Vinelli
’s office. And there was a whole feeling coming over Walker that something happened which was off the books, not to be controlled, outside entirely of the normal routine.
Thinking about it and what he would have to do next, Walker felt himself beginning to shake. If his luck had held he would have been in Europe today on a public-relations tour disguised as a vacation, an actress next to him, reports clustering to ask the latest decision of the man who had come to be known as the miracle magnate of the strip. If they knew! if they only knew! later on he would have gone back to the hotel with the starlet, he to his room, she to hers, and there lying under the ceiling in the dark he probably would have jerked off to her remembered image behind his eyelids, the only way it got off, the only way that he had been able to get it off for ten years. And all the time there would have been the phone calls to answer from the states, the memos and lists of things to be done to be followed up while the starlet who was part of the package deal grinned mindlessly for the press and stayed out of the way otherwise. But the godamned thing had been canceled, they had wanted him here for some reason which they did not explain and that had been that. They never explained anything of course, and Harry Walker was sure as hell not going to ask. That he had understood very early in the game; that he had one function to perform and if he did it for them he would live very well and within limits contentedly but if he started to fuck around with them there were sure as hell a couple of hundred others who would do the job without fucking around … and it wasn’t that bad a life, he would get along with it.
So all right, go to Europe—he went; go to Los Angeles and tour a studio or two—he went; hit New York and do the celebrity circuit—and that was fine too; stop, go, wait, reverse—anything they wanted was fine, and if there had been a change of plans on Europe he would accept it without question. But now, suddenly, Walker had the feeling that what had been dumped on him was the biggest mess that had hit the Paradise, maybe had hit the entire strip and it was his responsibility. No one else was going to handle it.