Lone Wolf #4: Desert Stalker

by Barry, Mike

  Coming out of it one time he felt clearer than he had since he had been shot and, turning his head toward the window, saw the man. The man was working over in a corner, doing something with wiring. He was wrapping a long silvery set of wires to something that he was cupping in his hand. Alongside him was an open attaché case, the same case that the fucker had carried into the room, the same one that surveillance said had been with him when he came into the casino. He must have lived with that case. Check it back and he had probably left New York with it. Stupid. They had been stupid.

  The man looked toward him and Vinelli quickly turned his head but it was too late. The man had seen him looking, and now the effort of turning rapidly sent pain working through his leg again, some of the worst pain he had felt yet and he screamed with it. He almost lapsed back into coma then, but the pain held him in place, the pain bound him into the room as if with ropes. Then Wulff was over from the corner, looking at him, hands on his hips in an appraising stance. Apparently having decided that Vinelli was in no position to preoccupy him he went back to the corner and resumed work. He did not care then whether Vinelli saw and for Vinelli this was the last assurance he needed. Not that he had thought differently anyway. He was never going to get out of this room alive. He would never see the sky again unless this man drew the curtains and let him look at it.

  “You’re crazy,” he said yet again. His voice sounded surprisingly controlled. The pain was localized now in his leg; the rest of him was weak and empty but capable of functioning. Not a mortal wound at all then, it had probably clotted on him. Given reasonable medical care, he would walk out of the hospital in a week and go back to work. Well. That option was closed.

  “I guess so,” the man said, not turning his head. Having evaluated Vinelli, Wulff seemed to have lost all interest in him. He was fully concentrating on his work. A true professional.

  “You’re going to dynamite this fucking place out, aren’t you?” Vinelli said almost conversationally. Now that he could do nothing to stop it, it was as if it was totally outside of him, happening to other people in a different city and he could look at the thing objectively.

  “I might do that,” Wulff said.

  “You’ve got dynamite and fuses and wires in there, haven’t you? You’re probably working off a couple of monster grenades.”

  “Could be,” Wulff said, “could be.”

  “What’s the point?” Vinelli said. “You blow up the fucking place we’ll all be killed.”

  “Not necessarily. You may be but I’ve got a chance. Anyway,” Wulff said in that conversational tone, his hands not breaking rhythm. “What’s the difference? I’ve got no other chance anyway.”

  “You’re going to kill a lot of people.”

  The man seemed to shrug. “That’s my problem,” he said.

  “There are close to a thousand people in that casino, playing day and night. The nightclub, the lounges. The rooms. The casino’s an open area, there’s nothing to take the shock there. You could kill hundreds.”

  “That would be a damned shame, wouldn’t it?” the man said. He looped some wire in a final knot, put down what appeared to be one of the grenades with an ah! of satisfaction and picked up the other one. “And of course you’ve got the interest of innocent people at heart, don’t you?”

  “They won’t bargain,” Vinelli said hoarsely. “They fucking won’t bargain.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “If you think you can blackmail them into giving you safe passage by threatening to blow it up it won’t work,” Vinelli said. “Never bargain and never submit to blackmail. Use blackmail of course, use it all the time, but never let it turn the other way because that’s a sign of weakness. You can’t show weakness. They’ll turn it down anytime. They’ll never let you out of here.”

  “We’ll see,” Wulff said. “We’ll just see.”

  “You want to get out of here?” Vinelli said hoarsely, “I’ll get you out of here. You don’t have to blow up the fucking place to do it, and you’ll just get killed in the explosion anyway. I can get you out.”

  “Not interested.”

  “You just want to get out, don’t you?” Vinelli said. Negotiation was making him feel a little stronger. He still could not move, but his mind was clear and with the pain localized, shoved away to his left side below the waist he could begin to think with a little of the old cunning again. Unless the guy came over and kicked him in the leg … that was a possibility.

  “I’ll get out,” Wulff said. “Don’t you worry about that.” He finished turning wire again, looked at what was in his hands, shook his head and unwound it to try a different angle. An explosives expert. A fucking explosives expert too. How were you going to deal with someone like this? Didn’t any of them know what they were up against? Well, Vinelli thought, he hadn’t, and that was why he was on the floor.

  “There are closed passageways,” Vinelli said, “right down the hallway, sealed off which lead directly to the outside. You don’t think they’d build a hotel without that kind of safety margin, now do you? I can get you out through one of them. But you’ve got to get me out too. I’ll be your hostage and you can use my car and dump me at a hospital and that’ll be the end of it. No one will even know you’re out if we handle it right. I don’t give a shit what you do after that, it’s not my affair. You can take my car. It’s a Cadillac in pretty good shape, you should be able to push it cross-country in a day, day and a half if you really want to push it.”

  The man shook his head. “No,” he said, “we’re not going to do it that way. You really don’t understand what I’m after, do you Vinelli?”

  “No,” he said, “no I really do not.”

  “That’s your trouble. You look at me in terms of your own motives, your own reasons. What you think you would do in my position. But it’s not that way at all. I’m going to destroy the business, Vinelli. I’m going to blow the whole fucking thing up. I’m not looking for skirmishes and I’m not trying to make a few million dollars myself and get out. What I’m out to do is to put you and everybody else out of the business.”

  “Then you’re crazy,” Vinelli said again, “if you think you can touch this, that a hundred of you can touch it you’re out of your fucking mind. It’s too big for anyone to break down.”

  “That’s what they tell me. But we’ll see. I did pretty well in San Francisco, starting from scratch.”

  “They don’t know what the fuck they’re doing in San Francisco,” Vinelli said, “that’s a marginal operation.”

  “And Boston?”

  “I don’t know anything about Boston.”

  “How about New York?”

  “You’re dealing with New York. That’s exactly what you’re dealing with right now. The orders are coming out of there by this time, and they’ll eat you up and burn you out.”

  “I did pretty well in New York,” the man said softly. “The show opened in New York.”

  Vinelli stretched slowly, felt the pain beginning in his leg again but it was better this time: gangrene was setting in or at least something anesthesizing and it was becoming progressively sealed off from him. He could live with the pain now. He could even think like the man he knew he was. “Kill me,” he said to Wulff and he meant it. “Kill me then.”

  The man looked up from his work, for the first time really engaged. “Why?” he said. “You’re feeling better now, I can tell. Survival instinct; you think you might hang in through this after all. So why should I kill you?”

  Vinelli said honestly, “Because I don’t want to be around if it just happens that you’re right. Because if you bring this off, whatever the fuck you’re trying to do, I don’t want it to be the man in whose place it happened. It wouldn’t go well for me.”

  “Ah,” the man said, turning back to his work. “Well, if I’ve got no chance as you say there’s really nothing to worry about now is there? You’ll come out of this a hero yet, Vinelli. Just keep on hoping.”

  Vinell
i said nothing more. What he believed now and always was that you talked when you had business to transact, something to work out, some definite purpose in mind and otherwise you didn’t talk at all. Silence made more sense than horseshit conversation. He looked up at the ceiling and closed his eyes expecting to go into coma again, but his frame held. He was still in the room. He would not get any worse for a good long time now and then, eventually, the infection would go out of control, and he would convulse and die. But that might be hours away. Maybe days.

  He listened to the whisking sound of the man setting up his devices and finally when that sound stopped—it might have been five or fifty minutes, you lost all sense of time with your eyes closed. Vinelli had no internal sense of ebb and flow to orient him, he had always been a man who worked in terms of events. He opened his eyes again and looked at him. The man looked back. He seemed calm, utterly relaxed, totally at peace with himself. He sat in an armchair, breathing evenly, looking at the ceiling.

  “Well?” Vinelli said, “what now?”

  “What now?” Martin Wulff said. “What now?” He stood, went over to the sofa, got a pillow and almost tenderly tucked it under Vinelli’s head to make him more comfortable, being careful not to move the man. “What do you think what now? Now we wait.”

  Silently, they waited.

  XI

  Maybe the metaphysical theories about gamblers and gambling are true after all—although the house does not believe this and in fact will send a chartered plane anywhere, anytime, to pick up a load of metaphysical gamblers—because sometime around ten that evening the casino began to empty, not in any purposeful fashion but rather in small clots and clumps of people. The roulette tables emptying first when black hit consecutively ten times, a sequence which mathematically occurs only one in half a million series’ of ten turns or more. But half a million or not was sufficient in this instance to send a couple of progressive plungers out with close to a hundred thousand dollars apiece while the remainder of the players, most of them experts who had simply come back harder and harder on red were wiped out. A certain air of discouragement spread out from the roulette table after all of this, two one hundred thousand dollar winners hardly being sufficient to raise the spirits of fifty others and the empty space must have become noticeable through the floor. There is nothing like an empty space to discourage gamblers. A coffin in the gaming area could not have had a more dramatic effect. Surely if something was wrong with the roulette wheels, chasing all of these people away then something must be wrong with the craps too, with the blackjack, with the chemin de fer … even the slotmachine players caught the sense of gloom and dispersion in the area and almost all of them, except for those who seemed to be permanently locked into the machines by gout, wandered out of the casino looking for bigger crowds and more hope further down the strip. The nightclubs had good crowds, of course, they always did, but the crowds were not exceptional, much of them was composed of people who drifted in from the casino on impulse … and the casino was down to one-quarter capacity or even a little less than that. Even the guests, huddled, fucking or sedated in their rooms, must have caught the odors which drifted upwards from the casino because a surprisingly large number checked out that evening, others wandering down to look for action were dismayed by the sight of the casino which when opened up could have doubled for smoke and size with an enormous graveyard filled with mourning potheads … and decided that they would take their action somewhere else. All in all, by midnight, the Paradise was functioning at something less than one-tenth of its true capacity downstairs, something which had not happened in ten years. Even when the snows hit Nevada which they did occasionally it had not been as disastrous as this. Croupiers, blackjack dealers, craps housemen looked at one another across the empty spaces of the room; cigarette and drink girls conferred in the corridors and then went over to the housemen and dealers for a little bit of negotiated action. Discipline, in short, seemed to be very close to breaking down. There had just never been anything like it. No one connected it to anything which was going on upstairs, of course. Why should they? Nothing in the hotel had anything to do with anything else; that was one of the selling points of Las Vegas. You could establish your own world in perfect isolation and integrity and have absolutely no relationship to the outside; this is what they were selling and if that ever broke down, if the separate fates became meshed they were in deep trouble. It was just a bad night, that was all. They would always look on it, right up to the end, as being one of those bad nights which very occasionally happens. Black can come up ten times sequentially in roulette too.

  On the upper level, in the business and residential suite which had been Sam Walker’s, they could not have cared less, of course. They did not know what was going on down there and it did not matter to any of them. All night they had been drifting in alone and in pairs, the tight sullen men from New York, a couple from the midwest, one from Cicchini’s old turf in Boston which was already up for grabs, a couple of experts in from San Diego who had been on the freighter the night that Wulff blew it up and were in a position to give some firsthand advice, if not any real solution. Now, near midnight, the room was filled with twenty-five to thirty men, stretched out easily on the couches, a couple perched over the desk, more filtering in all the time from the side-rooms where they had been pretty heavily into the whiskey.

  Lazzara, the man who had killed Walker, decided early on to let them get into the whiskey. This was a tough crowd, they were going to be rough to handle anyway you looked at it, cutting them off from liquor would make them even uglier. The best thing to do was to let them at the liquor early, as soon as they came in as a matter of fact, and hope that the liquor would blunt them down a little, take some kind of edge off them. Lazzara had been occupied with other things; he was certainly not going to entertain the men of the council as they came in. He was on the phone to New York, he had the problem of disposing of Walker’s body (by a side-exit right into an unmarked limousine in a box and straight out into the desert, this was one of Walker’s goddamned exits that the press was not going to cover), and mostly he had the problem of framing exactly what he was going to say, what tack he could take that they would both believe and follow. This was a tough crowd, all right, it might well be the toughest crowd that had ever been put together in one room at the same time, and he was going to need all the preparation that he could get.

  The thing was that they had really bought it this time. This time they were in almost over their heads, and yet the one way to blow the council up at the start was to take that tack, let them know exactly what had happened. They had been in an increasingly exposed position for years and years, Lazzara had warned them of this back in the East seeing it long before they did—that the trouble with going legitimate and putting the money on top of the ground was that any fool could walk in and try to take it—but no one was going to listen. Las Vegas looked like the sweetest racket which any of them had ever found. It looked good, no question about it; there was no limit to the take and all of it could be declared as long as taxes were paid. But how long did they think that it would last? How long until someone or a lot of people went for the visible goodies that the organization had protected for so long by keeping them subterranean? Well, there was just no way to answer a question like that, and Lazzara was not going to try. He was not a thinker, he was a man who performed. That was why he had been rushed out of New York, private plane, to what was obviously a building crisis-center, that was why the situation had been put into his hands, win or lose, full responsibility and no approval necessary for his decisions, whatever they were. He might hang, indeed he might hang … but he would hang very high.

  He let them drift in and drink then and finally at around midnight when he decided that there was nothing to gain by letting the preparations drag on further, he called them to order. A gavel and everything, the works, a formal meeting. These types would be impressed by formality if nothing else. Downstairs he knew that the guy was hanging i
n there, hanging tight just like Lazzara was but he was pretty sure that there were a few hours’ margin. The man was waiting for them to come to him. That was obvious. He had all the time in the world, he was holed up in there with Vinelli, he had heat and running water and maybe a bottle of Vinelli’s booze and there was no way that he was going to be starved out but then again he had enough there that he was not in any hurry which gave them some operating margin. It worked both ways. Everything worked both ways, in the long run, if you took that kind of view.

  Lazzara told them what was going on. He laid it on the line for them, right up through the crooked New York lieutenant who had come to Vinelli for hiding but turned out to have been bluffing which was the reason, probably, that Vinelli had killed him. Killing Stone was dumb of course, the lieutenant might have been worth something to them as negotiating material—but then Vinelli had gotten his too. He asked for suggestions.