Lone Wolf #4: Desert Stalker

by Barry, Mike

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I forgot the time. I wanted to talk to you.”

  “It’s all right,” she said. Her voice was starting to come through to him now. It was the old voice, unmistakably Tamara and he found, huddled over the phone that he had a slight erection and this pleased him for some reason even if it was painful and nothing to be done with it because it meant that the girl was still there. She was really still there. “How are you Martin?” she said.

  “I’ve been busy,” he said.

  “Yes. I’ve been reading …”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said, “it just doesn’t matter at all.”

  “Really?” she said, “then why do you do it?”

  He thought about that for a little while. She had a way of asking the dumb question that was central and exactly right. “I guess because I have to,” he said. “Are you going to stay at home?”

  “For a while.”

  “That’s good,” he said, “that’s good.” Vinelli stirred and moaned on the floor, let loose a quivering sigh, found another position. The man was coming apart now. Without treatment he might be dead within twelve hours. Meanwhile, he sat clamped over a phone, making conversation with a girl, the enemy forces coming toward him. It just didn’t make much sense, did it? “I’ll see you again,” he said.

  “When?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, looking over toward the window. There was a sudden interruption of light as if someone had worked his way around the building toward the room. The lights from the strip blanked and then came in again. “I just don’t know.”

  “You’re going to get yourself killed, Martin,” she said, “unless you stop this.”

  “That’s highly likely.”

  “But you don’t care, do you? You want to get killed.”

  “I don’t know about that either,” he said, looking toward the window fascinated. The light was broken again. They were clambering either up or down the building then, they were going to try and close off all exits, doors and windows. He hadn’t figured them on being that ingenious but then again they had had plenty of time for discussion. “It’s possible,” he said, “that I want to get killed I mean. Look, I just wanted to talk to you and to tell you that somehow I would see you again. But I’ve got to hang up now.”

  “I miss you,” she said.

  “I miss you too.”

  “I have a pretty good idea now of who you are and what you’re doing and I still miss you. Isn’t that crazy? Good-bye Martin, wherever you are.”

  The phone clicked. “Good-bye,” he said to it anyway, then held the receiver away from him, looked at it incuriously for a little while and put it down. Oddly, for all the pointlessness of the conversation he felt restored. Contact: that was what he had needed, some kind of contact, some assurance that there was someone out there to whom he mattered and who wanted him to come back. Because he wanted to come back badly. Wulff understood this now. The easy despair of the townhouse maneuver in New York, the mood in which he had cut his way through San Francisco, cut his way through Boston—these were gone. He was not the same man. Feeling had been restored to him in little particles and swatches of sensation and he was willing to admit that not all of him had died on West 93rd Street looking at Marie Calvante, a little bit of him, maybe most, certainly the parts that mattered … but there was still something left, the capacity to feel and as long as you were alive you were going to have to feed that capacity or become a monster. He looked at Vinelli and conceded that he even felt for him. He would have done anything to the man to get him out of the way but having done that the need to punish was gone. Vinelli was just a man. That was all he was. He was a man like Wulff was who had been put in a position because of many things and—Wulff finally was ready to see this now—the same thing could have happened to him granted Vinelli’s background and opportunities. It could have been him. It could have been him on the floor.

  Well, no time for that now. He was changing, he was shifting, things were happening to him and he was not the same man. He still had a situation to deal with and there was almost no time left. He heard the noises from the hallway now, the faint sounds of attack; they were gathering out there; the fluttering in the window line of sight was becoming more perceptible all the time. They thought they had him at both ends. It was a good plan, he had to give them credit. They had worked it out carefully, they had not, after the first moments, really panicked; they had gone at their offensive with patience and guile.

  Wulff took out his revolver, put in a full clip and moved carefully to the door. He had only one last advantage to work after which the game was all theirs; he had surprise. They did not know when or how he would come out of this room, they did not know what he had planned for them. But his options ran only in a thin line and through a narrow time-wedge. The revolver felt good in his hand. He hefted it.

  Then he went back to the device that he had so patiently spent two hours rigging. It ought to work but then again there were no guarantees. He checked out the wiring, looked at the grenades packed full of death, traced out the wiring toward the plunger-lever he had over in the corner.

  No reason to think any more. He knew what he had to do and it had to be done quickly.

  He took the plunger and pressed it in all the way. Slowly, it began to come back at him. If he had calculated it right, it would take five minutes to return on a full time-release.

  If he had calculated it right.

  He looked at Vinelli lying on the floor. The man had lapsed into coma again. Vinelli was out of this; he was no longer responsible. He had been in it for a while and now he was out of it and he was going to die most horribly. Fragmentation is a terrible way to die; he had seen it in Vietnam more than a few times, the knives of fire and bone tearing into the flesh, the body imploding … he did not want this to happen to Vinelli. Whatever the man was, whatever he had been, he deserved to be immersed in that final sleep now, not to come out of it for the one instant of unbearable pain which would go on and on …

  He delivered mercy to the man in the forehead, one dull shot springing open the bone and leaving a clear, aqueous hole through which colorless liquid sprang. Vinelli’s eyes opened in death and he might have given Wulff a look of gratitude or then again he might have not but he was gone and no factor anymore. He would not suffer.

  Wulff replaced with a full clip. He wanted all the shots the revolver could give him.

  Then he went to the door, crouched by it, his hand loosely on the knob and when he thought that the time had come … he sprang; like blood.

  XIII

  He launched himself into the hallway, the revolver extended and got off the first shot. The first shot was of critical importance, miss it and he had drawn fire on himself. A confusion of forms hit him in the hallway, five or ten men, he could not tell, in a panic-situation anything between four and thirty was the same number and the shot went into the nearest of them, a dead-hit, right in the chest. This man, oblong in the dim hallway, for they had extinguished all the lights except an emergency bulb, let out a peep like a chicken and fell, opening up a space in the middle for Wulff. He ran through this space, screaming. The screams were deliberate; like a football linebacker, he was trying to create as much terror as possible to give his charge greater effect. they dove before him, instincts taking over as he rushed, and then he was through, every one of them behind him, hurtling down the hallway, bouncing off a wall as a knee twisted, getting space between them.

  They were screaming, and the first of the shots came then. It hit slightly above him in the wall, the wall yielding like rubber, then there were a cannonade of further shots, shots coming in from all directions surrounding him like insects but by that time he had turned a corner, come momentarily to a clear spot and bolted toward the bank of elevators. Behind that turn he could hear their rising sound as they plunged after him. Perhaps someone was in the room itself investigating the device he had prepared, but he did not think so. Those who had come from the out
side as well as those who had attacked frontally; they were all in pursuit. That was the major purpose of his flight—to preoccupy them. He was counting on their impatience and desperation. Of course if they got to him he may have won the calculation but lost his life.

  He had a decision to make now—elevator or stairs to the first floor—and even as he stood there balanced, deciding, one of the elevators whisked into place, the down indicator glowing red, the doors opening. Self-service of course. A few unhappy people inside the elevator glared at Wulff. The sounds in the hallway were getting louder. He had at most now a few seconds leeway.

  Elevator then. All right. He showed them his revolver. “Out!” he said and when no one moved, “Out!” screaming it like a curse and they moved, three men, an old woman in a tight evening dress shambling out of the elevator. He pushed them all in front of him just as the pursuit massed, stumbling to a halt, turning the corner. The front men stopped short and the others, coming up behind them, toppled the leaders. For an instant they were knocked off balance.

  Wulff gave the nearest of the men a violent shove and got into the elevator just as the doors closed. The lobby button was glowing and he held his breath hoping that he would make it in one drop, hearing the pounding above him now but something else happened … the lights in the elevator dwindled, then they darkened and the elevator stopped, the floor indicator switching off just as it had hit 3. A sickly emergency bulb blinked onto his rear.

  They had him bottled.

  He should have thought of that. He knew that he should have thought of it; of course they would hit the power and cut him off that way. That he hadn’t thought of it meant that he had been stupid which was something that only the enemy cold afford to be … but afford or not, here he was, trapped between floors in a hotel, the power failing, the attack forces coming on him on both sides, probably up and down … and, Wulff thought, the detonation devices, if they were properly timed would be going off by his best estimate in no more than six or seven minutes. He put his palms flat against the walls of the elevator as if he could somehow yank it up the shaft and toward safety, but the feel of the walls, their lick unyielding passage against his hands only brought him into closer contact with the unbearable reality and he dropped the hold, hung in the shaft, feeling the slight sway of the ropes as the elevator, devoid of power, drifted upon them.

  Locked up. They had pulled the plug on him and now he was a bug in cement, mannequin in casting, corpse in the coffin waiting for the final blow. He could feel his life ticking away then in the cavern of the elevator shaft as the shouts increased and what they said was true: one’s life did indeed pass before one’s eyes in moments of crises. It not only passed, it seemed to flow and in ragged, smashed recall Wulff saw all of it. He saw the dead body of the thing once called Marie Calvante looking up at him, he saw the face of David Williams as he turned from the corpse, barely conscious to confront his partner, he saw the townhouse on the East Side, the face of Albert Marasco as he had tortured the man to death, the freighter in San Francisco bobbing unevenly at pier. He saw the desert, the flat open deserts that he had driven to his path of destruction in Boston and then he saw them again, unreeling before him, those deserts to which he had returned and the rotten little secret heart of them called Las Vegas in which he now rolled like an insignificant pendulum, dangling in an enormous uterine shaft. It had all come to this then, all of the struggle, the bodies, the blood … and Wulff let go a howl of fury because it should not have ended this way. It was not fair, it should have been, he should have died in open spaces face to face with the enemy, not closed in waiting for the final blow, the waves and waves of power coursing through, the explosion …

  The explosion! He felt power coursing through him, power as an enormous bursting of that shell which might have held it, light and sound, heat and darkness ripping through him, and hanging that way in the shaft Wulff became aware of what was going on outside, up there on the fifth level, came out of himself like a penknife being retracted from housing, saw and felt the power of what he had done and then the waves of heat hit him, the whistling of fragmentation. My God, he thought, I could burn to death here and that would be the final reparation for his stupidity, wouldn’t it? incinerated by his own explosion; but even as he thought this the elevator was swinging like a great bird in the darkness, the cable humming and snapping, Wulff scrambling for some handhold on the walls, gasping for breath, trying to hold his lungs against the fire for that one last chance …

  And the elevator fell. It seemed to balloon in the shaft, then dwindle, all dimension going out of it and he felt the cable snap; felt that snapping as a great release of tension within himself and then he was plunging in that box toward the cellar. Weightless now in the fall he bounced into the ceiling, almost striking his skull against the emergency light on the rebound, then falling to his knees and the collapsing of the elevator was a movement away form the heat as well. It was a fall, indeed it was, but it was also a rising, a rising toward life itself as the heat fell away and then the elevator hit at the bottom of the shaft with a dull clang, shaking him and the very walls seemed to splinter and break loose around him.

  Wulff put his hands between the heavy doors, wedging his fingers in tightly and then with all his strength he pulled, separating the doors the way the lips of the vagina are tugged open in a virgin, the doors oozing rather than parting, slipping away in his grasp, the steel moist with his sweat but he was finally able, gasping to get a knee into that deadly splice, the doors circling the knee but not getting past it and after that it was somewhat easier. Rotating his leg in the opening, exerting pressure on the doors with hands and leg both he was finally able to squeeze open a parting just sufficient to admit him and he came out then into the basement.

  The doors slammed behind him leaving him in darkness, in the clinging, clamorous mysteries of the basement of a great hotel. But even as he tried to get his bearings down there he saw a slice of light coming from some abscess and as he headed toward that light it wavered before him; Wulff brushed against clinging ropes which felt like vines, felt metal on his forehead, felt all of the engines of the basement closing upon him … and then, like thunder, he heard the explosions beginning above him again. They were shorter and fiercer this time like the deep jolts of fucking after orgasm and he thought, Jesus, maybe it’s out of control now and even as he thought this one last, great impact took him by the scruff of the neck, the waves soaring upward and he shook as if in an embrace. One of the cellar walls tore out and he was looking at concrete. He fell through this, gasping.

  XIV

  Lazzara from a position well back was trying to direct traffic but the sons-of-bitches would not listen. They would not follow through, they had no poise under fire and now everything was beginning to fall apart under them. They should not have panicked, they should have been prepared for exactly what the bastard was doing but most of them, he realized now, had not been in the field for years, if ever. They had gotten fat and happy sitting behind their desks, issuing orders, and controlling from a distance, put back to the ground level they were almost worthless. Still, what was to be done? They were the only troops he could have massed at such short notice; turn the recruiting over to them and it might have been days before they worked through their perogatives and local councils to the point where they would take some action.

  But this was bad. This was really bad. The son-of-a-bitch came out of the room shooting, drawing their fire and scattering them, then got down the hall and around a turn so quickly that there was no time for a shot. Laying back of this Lazzara saw it all developing before him; saw the way that the flying wedge of the attack had been blunted. He ordered himself to get off his own shot, prong the bastard as he ran down the hall but his reflexes were shot, he had gotten fat and happy too and he could not make brain and arm connect fast enough to dump him. Standing in the hallway then, the men tumbling around him, Lazzara had his first real premonition that this was going to be bad. He had mucked the wh
ole thing up. They had underestimated this man yet again, that and his position and now he was going to escape.

  “The power!” he screamed into the mass of men, “for Christ’s sake, cut the power now!” hoping that the men by the huge generators in the basement had had the sense to have thrown the switches. No coordination. No coordination from first to last but even as he let go a wail of fury, his troops turning to look at him, the lights in the hallway flickered, the emergency bulbs coming on. So at least that had been done. If nothing else they could hope to bottle him up … but power off for him meant power off for them as well. The men were shooting and cursing at one another in the darkness. He could hear bullets spanging. They were coming apart in the darkness.

  “He’s in the elevator!” someone shouted, “we’ve got him in the elevator!” and Lazzara understood then that they had, after all, stumbled into the right position. The man had run into the elevator without thinking and now they had him closed in the shaft. “Come on!” the same voice said, “now we can move in and get him!” Some kid this one, probably one of the youngest, most ambitious people at the council, not that he could associate voices with faces or he gave a shit if the kid was going to try to make points by being the one to kill Wulff. Let it go that way. Ambition was as useful a method as any to get people to do the jobs they should have done anyway.

  The flow now was away from him and he let them pelt down the corridors, the men who had come in through the window running out the door. He went into Vinelli’s suite and saw what probably none of them had even bothered to look at—Vinelli’s corpse lying on the rug, blood surrounding him, blood, dried and crusted on the clothing and in the center of the forehead a neat, tight bullethole. Vinelli looked old in death, a hundred years or more lying on the floor that way, a shell of a representation of a man and looking at him Lazzara could see that suffering and death had transfigured Vinelli, that this was not the man he had known. The sunken, yellowed eyes showed knowledge, the fingers were clasped across the face allowing those eyes to shine through, the bullethole an almost incidental ornamentation in the forehead. He must have suffered but at the end, Lazzara thought, he must have known something beyond suffering, that was fairly clear and he was struck by a sense of mystery. Men could deliver death coldly, they could manipulate and apply it like a compress but they would never, never understand it, nor could they bring its reversal. It was final all right. Maybe men killed precisely out of a knowledge of that finality; death was something that they could not face so that they administered it from the feeling that if they could give they could also taketh away … but death could never be taken. Vinelli had learned that at the end.