Lone Wolf #4: Desert Stalker

by Barry, Mike

  He thought about killing him but decided not to. Vinelli might prove himself useful later on. Even if he died, the believing outside that he was alive might be worth something as the situation developed.

  Wulff put his revolver away and sat down in the chair behind Vinelli’s desk. He let the emotions of the kill filter through him and he waited for their next move which would surely come. He had killed six men and badly injured another in only a couple of hours and he had just started.

  Their move. Next customer.

  Wulff waited for Las Vegas to come to him.

  IX

  Walker felt the thin edges of his control dissolving. Up until now he thought he had handled the situation adequately, better, perhaps, than anyone could have thought, certainly better than he would have expected of himself. He had gauged the matter correctly, not underestimated the menace which Wulff represented and had put the troops into action, handling all of this without panic and with more control than many would have thought. No one, whatever the outcome of this, could say that he had underestimated the danger or had not come to grips with it quickly and alertly, he was entitled if he said so himself to all the credit in the world … but now Walker felt the control dissolving, the edges beginning to muddy. He was a man in over his head and he knew it. He had never had any trouble at all in admitting his limitations, that was how he had been able to survive so far, because he had never thought more of himself than he really was and he knew now that he was deep in. He did not know what to do.

  Four dead men lying in the hall, Vinelli, badly hurt, locked up with this lunatic who seemed to be in control of the situation. Using Vinelli as hostage, Vinelli’s suite as a center of operations he had the place under siege. Whatever name you wanted to give it that was the fact of the matter; he was in a strong position if not an impregnable one and short of emptying the hotel and literally trying to firebomb the room out, Walker did not know what to do. He could empty out the hotel, of course. But that would bring in police, it would bring in reporters, it would in short bring out a large attendance of exactly those kind of people who would be least likely to let Walker handle the situation in the way it had to be. No, that was impossible. Discard the idea. Forget it completely.

  He had taken up the phone and put a call through to the room, immediately after reports of the murders had come to him. That made sense; he had to make contact with the enemy. Feeling like a corporal who had taken over command of a platoon because the captain, the lieutenants, the first sergeant, all the sergeants had been killed, with just that raging sense of helplessness, he put through the call and asked Wulff what he wanted. He came right out with it. There was just no point in fucking around with the guy, not when they were so deep in.

  “What do I want?” Wulff had said, “I want your hotel, that’s what I want. I want all of Las Vegas but I’ll start with the hotel.”

  “You’re going to get yourself killed,” Walker had said, “you know that, don’t you? That’s the only thing you’re going to get out of this. You can’t get away with it.”

  “I’m doing all right,” Wulff had said, “I’m doing fair. Ask Vinelli. He’d tell you how I’m doing if he could talk which unfortunately he can’t.”

  “All right,” Walker had said, his hand shaking, “tell me what you want. Tell me your terms.”

  “I don’t really know. I don’t know what my terms are yet because I’m not sure what I can get. I have a key to a locker at the airport which I want to use eventually but I won’t be able to get to that for a while. You men are stupid, you know. Stone could have delivered all the time. You just didn’t give him a chance.”

  “I don’t know anything about that. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Sure you don’t, Walker,” the man had said almost cheerfully. He was incredible; the control seemed absolute. Walker had always it seemed moved in and around people who could do all the things that he admired under stress, this one had it to, you had to give it to him. “You’re just the front man. They take your picture and you make the corporate statements. You don’t dirty your hands with business, do you.”

  “You’re going to get killed, Wulff.”

  “This may be,” the man pointed out. “I may well get killed. What should I do, walk out of the room, turn myself in?”

  “What’s that …”

  “Let’s face it, Walker,” the man had said flatly, “let’s face it and be done with it; the only way that I’m going to get out of this thing is if I do it my way, if I can carry it through to the end. If I try to deal with you I’ll get my brains beaten out.”

  “Maybe I’ll negotiate.”

  “You couldn’t negotiate yourself to the men’s room. No one’s going to let you negotiate, they’re going to tell you what to do and from a safe distance. No, Walker, let’s face up to it. I’ve got to go through all the way now. It’s too deep and too late.”

  “You’ll get killed.”

  “You said that already,” the man had said. “You said it and I believe you but you see no one can kill me, that was taken care of a long time ago,” and he had hung up the phone leaving Walker there, choking on it and nothing to do but to go ahead. Because the man had been right.

  Wulff had been right, he had judged the situation correctly, he had come back to Walker the only way that he could. Of course there was no way to negotiate out of this. Wulff couldn’t trust him, Walker couldn’t trust himself. He was no free agent, he was just a man left holding an impossible situation but pretty soon the orders would begin to come down and the orders would be for Armageddon and nothing to do but to go right ahead. Left to his own devices Walker thought that he just might have talked his way out of it at least to some kind of stand-pat. The man could have been guaranteed safe passage out of the hotel, he could have used Walker as hostage and at least he would have saved the Paradise if not the four men that had been killed. He would have turned himself over to Wulff as hostage; he thought that he could trust the man that far. It was not a matter of courage becoming a hostage, only the likelihood that things would even be worse the other way.

  But now he could not do that. They would never stand for it back in New York; they would make sure that any deal he tried to make with this man was blown up, at their safe distance they would press buttons and fling bombs and what it amounted to was that the hotel was finished. Couldn’t they see that? The only way out of this if any way at all was to do business, deal, try to hold onto the operation, but the way of conciliation would strike them only as weakness. There was nothing he could do that they would back up. He was only the front man, the hired hand. Pity unto the peacemakers; for in this as in all other generations they shall be cursed, Walker thought grimly and locked himself up in his office, waiting for the New York call that would surely come within a matter of minutes. They had observers all over the place; by now a telephone council rigged in candy store booths all over the city was probably being constructed.

  Pity unto the peacemakers. Walker thought of his life, of its fruits, of where he had come from and what he had been and in a way it was a shame to give it up because it was not that bad. He had the women, he had money, he even had a certain amount of mobility as long as he made sure to clear his destinations first and keep in constant touch with them. It wasn’t a bad outcome for a man who had crawled out of the fringes of the music business in the fifties, more dead than alive, smashed up and broken, two ruined marriages behind him and almost nowhere to go. He had always had contacts though and he had been able to make an appearance. That was what had saved him. Saved him for this, however? Well, that was another thought. That was another thought altogether. You just never knew where you would end up, did you? It was a wheel and it spun.

  He did something that he had not done for a while; he went to the wall safe at the corner of his room and hit the combination, reached inside and took out a small, pure white deck of heroin. He had never really had the habit, this business about one snort of horse and you wer
e theirs for life was so much bullshit—shit, half of café society was on it every now and then and no one was wandering around the streets looking for a fix—he took it occasionally, that was all, for medical purposes really. The last time that he had touched horse—”horse” was a genteel fifties term for it, well that had been his generation, do him something—had had to be a couple of months ago … but he needed some now. He needed something, that was for sure and it might do him some good. Delicately, Walker extracted the deck, used a nail file to wedge off a tiny white corner and dropped these grains on a sheet of notepaper. He restored the deck to the safe then, locked it in once more and set the grains on the paper until they were centered, then he folded the paper over, brought it very carefully to his nostrils and with economy of effort sniffed it in.

  The poorest way to take horse, of course … it took longer to hit the bloodstream, little grains of it got caught in the cilia of the nose and were lost completely, the entire effect was diluted … but still, back in the fifties, that was the way the genteel folk took it. Serious users mainlined, people who could take or leave it (they thought) would sniff and none of the modern-day intricacies applied. Nowadays they tasted it, dissolved it, drank it, injected it, smoked it, found as many ways of putting heroin into their system as men could figure out a way to stick their cocks into a woman. The fifties were a better time, Walker thought, crumpling the paper and putting it into a wastebasket, you knew where you stood then. If you didn’t use the needle you weren’t an addict and that was all there was to it. You were being social. You were taking a high.

  He felt the rush overtake him, feebler by far than mainlining he knew but still like nothing else he had ever had. Luquor couldn’t touch it for force, the soft drugs, whatever the potheads were saying, lacked any of the concentration and focus, the sheer disconnection which smack—now that was a better term, there was a sixties term all the way, smack, if he kept it up he would get to shit and that was pre-seventies but fuck that—could give you. He felt the stuff hitting his system in little odd granules and spurts of energy; it burbled through the nerve endings and Walker at least momentarily began to feel not like the hounded figurehead owner of a hotel-casino that was going to burn but like a man of substance who did not have to take shit because he had achieved a position in the world where no one, nothing except death could touch him … and if you could take death with horse in your system, well then you could beat that too. Heroin was a line of defense against mortality; it didn’t hurt so much, had no hold on you if you simply didn’t care and right now Walker did not care. He knew that sniffing at this time was probably, objectively speaking, not the wisest move he could have made but he did not care. He simply did not care. Nothing mattered. He picked up the phone again, put it on the house intercom line and dove into Vinelli’s room. The big New York clown picked it right up as Walker knew he would. He must have been thinking too, sitting in a room next to a dying man with four corpses in the hallway beginning to realize what he was taking on but he did not have horse to beat it with. No, he was an ex-New York City narco this one; they traded in it all right but they sure as hell didn’t use it. Strait-laced. “You’re a dead man, you know,” he said to Wulff.

  “So are you. So are you all.”

  “We can rush that room and take you out. We can tear-gas you out.”

  “Try it,” the voice said, “come on, I’m waiting.”

  “You’ll never get out of here alive.”

  “I’m not alive now.”

  “You don’t give a damn, do you?” Walker said, heroin or not feeling rage. “You just don’t give a good godamn.”

  “No I do not. I absolutely do not.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “There are people who’ve said that.”

  “We’re going to get in there and take you out of the place, Wulff.”

  “I’m waiting,” the man said, “believe me, I’m waiting for just that.”

  “I mean it,” Walker said. “I really mean it.”

  “You’ll be the man who killed Vinelli,” the clown said, “that’s how you’ll be marked up on the keno charts. Do you really want to be remembered that way?”

  “Fuck you,” Walker said. The conversation was all wrong. He was in control now. Why didn’t the fucker realize that? “I’ll kill you,” he said.

  “I’m waiting,” the man said with cold precision. Almost offhandedly. “I’m waiting for anything you have to do, Walker.”

  “You can’t get away with this.”

  “I think you’re starting to repeat yourself,” the man said and hung up, leaving Walker holding a dead phone, feeling the little crystals stirring within him to a newer, more menacing beat. He put the phone down slowly, beginning to feel the high turning rancid within him, beginning to feel the whole edge of that high turn ninety degrees and cut against him. He was a fool, that was all he was. He was a fool and now he had done the most dangerous thing of all, he had exposed himself to the enemy. He had made his plans visible. There was no way that you could do that kind of thing and get away with it. If Walker had learned one thing in years here it was to keep his mouth shut, and now all of it was blown.

  He felt a self-loathing more profound than any he had known before. Part of it was the panic, another part was the high, cutting back on him the other way. He hung up the phone, sat stupidly in the chair, feeling his body go slack under him. That was the trouble with horse; you couldn’t count on it. The closest you could come to it in alcohol was gin. One moment you would be feeling pretty good, very much in control of a situation, prosperous and content and in the next things would shift and you would see them in an entirely different way so that all you knew was a staggering futility. He knew it now. He was conscious of his respiration, the fluttering of his eyelids, all of the hundred, small unconscious acts which the body committed every moment merely to sustain the processes of life. He hated himself. He had been close to that knowledge for a long time and now it was clear. He was a hateful, loathsome man.

  Someone was trying the doorknob of his locked office. Walker looked at it incuriously. The knob turned, squirmed around, returned to rest. He had, of course, taken the precaution of locking himself in. That made sense. The knob turned again and there was a light tapping. He said nothing. Eventually whoever it was would become bored and go away, leave him to himself again. Then he would have to figure out what to do. He did not know what to do.

  There was the sound of a key in the lock and with a whisper, like a girl’s lips opening for a kiss, the lock parted. The door slid open and a man came through. Walker found himself looking at a man who he had never seen before and at the same time he thought that he knew this man as well as he would ever know anyone. He had seen this face in a hundred dreams, conjured it up on a thousand nights, every outline and detail of this face, and now it was before him. His guest walked toward him quickly, lightly, balancing himself gracefully on the balls of his feet, an ex-athlete perhaps, unostentatiously dressed, somewhere in his forties with a cold, compressed face but these were merely the trappings, the outer part of the man who Walker had seen and dreamed. He clamped his hands on the top of the desk feeling them go cold and then colder against the wood. The man looked at him for a long time, his eyes seeming to take in the little scattered grains of heroin which Walker had not even noticed leaving traces on the desk, the decor of the office, the set of Walker’s eyeballs as they floated in a face that seemed to have turned to water. He put his hands on hips and looked at Walker coldly. Walker felt his heart scrambling away at the walls of his body like a scared little animal in a cage.

  “You silly son of a bitch,” the man said. “You really fucked it up this time.”

  Walker was speechless. He found his hand involuntarily brushing at the grains on his desk, trying to sweep them into the carpet. The man looked at this and a smile worked its way slowly, across his face. It was a terrible thing to see, that smile and Walker was suddenly unable to move his hand anymore. The man had trap
ped it. Now he leaned on the wrist slowly, hitting a pressure point with his thumb and Walker felt the paralysis begin to work its way, stalking, up his arm. He almost screamed then but looking at the man’s face he saw that that would do no good. This man liked screaming.

  “You’re picture looks all right in the papers,” the man said, “and you do all right fucking starlets but you want to know something Walker? You really want to know something? You’re just a lot of shit.”

  Walker gasped. His arm was dead on him now. Yet he could not struggle against this man. He knew, whatever else, that struggle would be worse.

  “Just a lot of shit,” the man said quietly, almost as if he were amusing.

  He released the grip and Walker’s arm fell like stone across his lap, hitting him in the groin, hurting him. The arm felt nothing.

  “And a godamned junkie,” the man said, the smile now fully on his face. “Don’t you know that you’re supposed to keep business separate?”

  He reached into the pocket of an oversize tan jacket and took out the largest revolver that Walker had ever seen. Walker could do nothing but look at it. It was too late to run and nowhere to run to. Somehow, he supposed that he had played out this scene in dreams a hundred times. It always ended this way. It would have to. There was no other way, and fuck all the good times, that it could have ever ended.

  “You fuck up everything,” the man said and shot Walker in the teeth.

  Dying across the desk, Walker’s last thought was that he probably agreed with him. Halfway. Not fuck. Not present tense. Fucked. Past.

  He was done.

  X

  Vinelli slipped in and out of coma like a man being washed by waves on the beach. The comas were not too bad, like being packed in mud and ooze with the smell of blood, but the dreams were twisted and not too terrible. But coming out of coma was always bad; again and again he relived the moment when the man had shot him. Stupid. He had been stupid. He had underestimated the son of a bitch. Nothing like this had ever happened to him in his life; you just did not get where he had gotten by underestimating people and yet he had gone off the track on this one. Badly. The bastard had been much more dangerous than Vinelli had thought and now it was too late to retrieve the moment and handle it the right way. How could he have been so stupid? Had Kansas City, the lessons he had learned both in the field and observing what was happening to the others, hadn’t that taught him everything he needed to know? Hadn’t they taught him respect? But it was too late for any of that now. Fat and happy and stupid. That was what Vegas did to the best of them. He was just another fucking loser. Then he would slip into coma again for thirty-second periods that felt like hours and come out of it remembering nothing, piecing it together all again. Everytime it was the same. Stupid. He had underestimated the man. You simply did not underestimate people and make it all the way through to the end. He had been stupid. Fat and happy. Vegas did that to you. Stupid.