by Barry, Mike
They might eventually get back into that other Cadillac and chase him but his lead-time was absolute. They would never catch him. And there were no reinforcements.
Singing, Wulff drove on into the airport.
XIX
Five minutes after he had come out of the locker in the men’s room with the valise Stone had left, Wulff was still trembling. It had nothing to do with the wound. The wound was fine. He had stripped his shirt and washed it with a little soap and water and that would keep him going all the way to New York. It was just a small burn, the size of a dime, the bullet winging him, bringing a fair amount of blood that had cleansed the wound and promptly clotted. The body had its own cunning. No, the wound was fine.
Carrying the valise he walked toward a phone booth. No one at the terminal looked suspicious; they had been bombed out back at the Paradise and probably had no troops left to send. The last soldat had gone into the desert with him.
He locked himself into a booth. Nine A.M. All of this had happened after the dawn; it was impossible to realize what had gone on in three hours. Nine o’clock. Six back in New York then. Everybody sleeping except cops, garbagemen, subway motor-men and criminals. All right. Fuck it. Sleep had nothing to do with anything.
He dialed direct, a little shakily, holding the valise between his knees. Williams’s wife answered right away. That was smart, letting your wife do all the picking up. That way they had to go one level to get at you which was critical. Marie would have done that for him. Marie would have picked up the phone and protected him. Marie was dead.
“Let me talk to David,” he said.
“Wulff? That you, Martin?”
“Yeah.”
“You all right?”
“All depends. That all depends.”
“But are you all right?”
She was a good woman. “Yes,” he said, “I’m all right. I’ll do. I’m still here. Let me talk to David. Is he there?”
“He’s sleeping.”
“Wake the son-of-a-bitch up.”
“All right,” she said, “I don’t mind. Break up his sleep for a change.”
There was murmuring and rustling in the background. Bedroom phone then in the nice, tight little clean house of St. Albans, Queens. Wulff looked through the dead spaces of the terminal. Nobody. Nothing. This town might be an all-night proposition, the casinos roared … but between flights nothing at all happened at the airport.
“Wulff,” Williams said, “what happened?”
“Plenty.”
“You all right?”
“We’ve gone through that already. Yeah, I’m all right. I survived anyway.”
“Good,” Williams said. He paused. “Did you find Stone?”
“Nobody will find Stone. Stone’s dead.”
“That’s good,” Williams said unhesitatingly. “That’s mighty good. That saves what you might refer to as a so-called administrative problem.”
“Found his baggage though.”
“Oh,” Williams said. “Oh.” He said nothing for a moment. Wulff waited it out. He would wait it out forever. He didn’t care.
“What kind of baggage?” Williams said.
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know. You’re the one placing the call, aren’t you?”
“So I am,” Wulff said. “So I am. Stone brought out the biggest load of shit I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Williams said, “I could have figured that.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Wulff said and thought again of the decks and decks, lined up like little soldiers in the coffinlike expanse of the valise, neatly strapped in, pure white, pure gold, pure death …
“Bigger than that San Francisco load?”
“Nothing like that. San Francisco was just a match to the cigarette. This is the real thing.”
“All right,” Williams said. His responses were picking up now; he was recovering fast. “So you got it. What are you going to do with it?”
“I’m thinking about that,” Wulff said, “I’ve really been thinking about that.”
“You better get the fuck out of town, man. I don’t know where you’re calling from or who’s watching you but you better get that mother out of town.”
“I intend to. I have a flight out of here in fifteen minutes. I intend to make it.”
“You going to bring it back to New York? Or you going to dump it?”
“I don’t know,” Wulff said. “I’m thinking about that. There are about forty people dead out here and a lot of structural damage. It would be a shame to just dump it, wouldn’t it?”
“That might be so,” Williams said, “that just might be so. So where are you?”
“I’m in the airport.”
“Why are you calling me?”
“Why am I calling you?” Wulff said. He found that his hand was shaking. “Why I’m just reporting to you, don’t you see? I’m the weapon, you’re the-hand, wasn’t that the arrangement?”
“You’re full of shit, man.”
“That’s the way you said it was, Williams. You’re Mr. Inside, I’m Mr. Outside because people like me are expendable.” His hand was beginning to shake somewhat more rapidly. He concentrated on evening out his respiration and locked the hand in between the valise and the wall.
“You don’t understand what I was driving at,” Williams said, “but this is no time to define our relationship, Mr. Wulff. You sound to me like a man who’s jammed in and who ought to get the hell out of wherever he is and get some rest. The valise is your decision.”
“Is it?”
“I don’t give a shit,” Williams said, “turn it back to the supply room. Give it to the commissioner at high noon; he’ll give you a medal. The man who broke the ring and came back with the fucking goods. Maybe you could get an honorable discharge and run for Mayor.”
“I don’t think so,” Wulff said, “I don’t think I’m going to give it to the commissioner. But I’m taking it back to New York.”
“Yes,” Williams said, “I figured that you would. You’re a New Yorker tried and true.”
“What would this stuff do if it were dumped into the market?” Wulff said.
“Make a lot of junkies happy.”
“Sure it would. But what would it do to the market.”
“I don’t know,” Williams said. “I’m getting bored with this conversation, Mr. Outside. If you think it would blow the market up you’re crazy, though. They’re a big organization, just like the government. They got price supports and a subsidy program and a regulator of supply and demand and nothing is going to drop the prices.”
“I thought of that,” Wulff said. He switched the phone to the other hand, checking the terminal. Police had appeared in a clear area and in a bored way were talking with the receptionist. He ducked his head low in the booth. “Okay,” he said, “enough. I’ll be back with it.”
“Don’t bring that shit over to my house.”
“I didn’t think I would,” Wulff said, “I’ll work out a better plan.”
“You’d better do something,” Williams said, “you better figure out something because if you think I’m directing you you’re out of your fucking mind.”
He hung up.
Wulff straightened in the booth, very carefully took the valise, kicked open the door and went outside. The police did not look at him. He walked to and past them and leaned then across the desk to catch the eye of the receptionist. He confirmed the New York flight and its departure time in front of the police and they did nothing at all. All right. It was the only way to play it. The receptionist said that he could board now if he wanted; the plane was ready. He could check his bag if he desired. Wulff said he guessed that he would hold onto it.
He turned and walked back the other way, passing the police again, out the door and into the loading area. The police hooked their hands in their belts, one of them chewing gum and did nothing at all. He walked up the ramp into the empty plane, the motors whining gent
ly and tossed the valise on a rack above and sat with a sigh. He waited it out.
It was only until he was up in the air, two hours later, the businessman behind him mumbling in a thick doze, that Wulff remembered as if in a dream that the police that last time he walked past had not looked at him so impassively at all. They had, in fact, been smiling.
And unless his memory, coming back to him now in little bits and pieces of subliminal incident was wrong, one of them had winked at him.
Had distinctly winked.
Wulff, three hours later, winked back.
And then he folded his hands and went to sleep.
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Copyright © 1973 by Mike Barry
All rights reserved.
Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
eISBN 10: 1-4405-4237-6
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-4237-4
Cover art © istockphoto.com/Jan Paul Schrage