Lone Wolf #6: Chicago Slaughter

by Barry, Mike

  Wulff held the gun tightly, made his way slowly down the hall. Nothing interfered with him. He reached the staircase. To the first level then.

  He was on the way out. And this time, too, he even thought he knew where he might be going.

  Chapter 12

  Randall was about to fuck the girl when the distress signal came in from the guardhouse. It was an ordinary trip signal of the type which set off a blinker and a buzz in the setting on the opposite wall, and he saw it as he was literally poised over the girl, seeking entrance. Her pants were down around one ankle, sweater pulled up to the neck and she was regarding him with an intense look which seemed to work between fascination and terror, which was fine with him. He liked to scare them a little. He didn’t actually like to hurt them, that kind of thing wasn’t his bag at all, leave it to Versallo, but he did like to give them the feeling that they might be slapped around; he liked to see the fear rising within them. What the hell. It wasn’t like he couldn’t get a good hard-on anyway, it wasn’t that he couldn’t come any way he wanted, he was no pervert for God’s sake … but he liked a little rough stuff or at least the threat of it. It did something for him.

  But the light was going crazy, the buzzer was whining. Something had happened down there, that was for sure. “Oh shit,” he said, locked against the girl in the posture of entrance. She looked at him dumbly, another secretary, another one of the series of cheap little cunts who Versallo liked to bring in on a fast turnover to keep the troops entertained. All of them fucked. If they didn’t fuck they were gone, it was a condition of employment. This one had promised to be one of the best he had fooled around with in months, tense and tight below, the needful suction of her little cunt contrasting with the fear in her eyes in a way that really excited Randall….

  But there was the fucking alarm. Something was going on down there for sure. Coombs was a reasonably competent old guy and he wouldn’t have set it off unless things were really going crazy or unless the dead-man backup had been used and someone, not knowing about that alarm, had triggered it simply by standing in the wrong place in the wrong posture. “Oh shit,” he said again, closing his eyes, hoping that it would all go away, but of course it did not. These things never did.

  Let Versallo deal with it. Except that Versallo would not; the alarm went off in his office and in Versallo’s but by clear right of seniority Versallo was the man who would sit back, make preparations while Randall had to go in there and see exactly what the hell was coming off. It wasn’t fair, of course. Nothing was fair. Still, that was the employer-employee relationship for you.

  All the time he was involuntarily pumping. He was really sealed within her now, he couldn’t get out easily. But without his mind on it he couldn’t come either.

  “What’s wrong?” the girl said. Her voice was curiously level for someone who was actually being fucked. Probably she wasn’t feeling anything at all; if she was so alert to Randall’s reaction it meant that she had been faking participation, faking even the fear maybe. This infuriated him. He felt the rage throughout him and it coalesced, all of it, in his erect penis, making the juncture of the bodies even tighter and more frantic with the need to get out of her, frantic with the need to investigate the emergency. But at the same time, locked into the desperate need to climax, he flailed on top of her, his body contracting like a fist, thrust his teeth against her cheek and then biting, gnawing away at the smooth flesh, battering himself against those surfaces that seemingly he could not enter, Randall climaxed, groaning and emerging in great spurts, each contraction recoiling in a sense of gloom, desperation and waste. He pumped himself dry, the girl lying underneath him, and then slowly he withdrew, his organ already limp, his mind already far away from her, speeding into some alley of circumstance. He had to see what was going on down there.

  “All right,” he said to the girl, getting off her, going for his clothing, “that’s all.”

  She lay there unmoving, making no attempt to pull her clothing into place. “That’s all?” she said. “Just like that?”

  “I’ve got troubles,” Randall said, pointing to the wall where the light was blinking, the buzzer continuing its sonorous mumble. “No time for anything now.”

  “You’ve got a hell of a lot of nerve,” the girl said, still lying there. “You jump on top of me and go in and out, out and in a few times and then tell me to get the hell out. What am I, furniture?”

  “I don’t know what you are.”

  “You know,” she said, “I’m as willing as the next one to cooperate. I don’t really have anything against fucking at all but this is not the way you treat a woman.”

  “Come on,” Randall said. He was already dressed. “Get out of here.” Her semi-nakedness offended him now; somehow seeing a woman nude in the aftermath of fucking always bothered him. It was as if their bodies had only one function and they should be covered except when they were performing it. He went to a file cabinet under the window, fumbled around with the catch and opened the second drawer, took out a thirty-two. The girl looked at him with amazement.

  “Well,” she said, “I’ve seen a lot of ways to end something like this but that’s certainly a new one.” She lifted a hand protectively to her face, sat clumsily. “You don’t have to shoot me,” she said. “I was just leaving.”

  Fucking Versallo and his personnel practices. Bring in women for entertainment but you’d think that he would use at least a little ingenuity in screening them; this one was a fucking lunatic. She had to be crazy, talking that way. Just knowing that she was crazy made Randall feel a little better then. She may have seen his vulnerability but her mind was in such bad shape that she had nothing to hold against him. “Come on,” he said, putting the pistol away, turning toward the door, “I’ve got to get out of here. I want to lock this place up.”

  “Sure,” she said, “sure.” She tugged up her pants, brought the sweater down in one motion, somehow the two met in the vicinity of her navel and she tucked one against the other, looked under the couch for her shoes. “This is a crazy place,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever worked in a place like this. Are you all the same way?” She found her shoes, put them on standing, crossing a leg over and then went to the door, tried it, found it locked.

  “All right,” she said standing there, not looking at Randall. “I give up. What’s the magic word?”

  Suddenly he was filled with rage, everything coming to that one pinpoint. This little cunt with her sharp mouth, the fucking alarm going off just when he was beginning to enjoy himself, fucking Versallo himself with his security system and surveillance and his demands that Randall, as his chief of security, function as nothing more than a hired gun, ready to jump into action whenever the alert was sounded. Who the fuck did Versallo think he was? What kind of place was this anyway? How had he gotten himself into something like this?

  And all the time the fear beating underneath because he had a feeling that the business in the guardhouse was really bad. You developed instincts after a long time if nothing else, and his instincts told them that this was real trouble, not Coombs getting nervous or someone trying to run the gate. No. It was much worse than that. He went past the girl, yanking at the bolt, tearing away at the knob until the door reluctantly opened, put a hand in the small of her back and pushed her out into the hall.

  “Go,” he said, not caring if anyone was there to see this, “get the hell out of here.” Her weight was slight against his thrust, she felt frail, weak and, as she stumbled into the hallway, tripping, losing her balance to fall with a little squeal, he realized that he had lost his temper, had pushed too hard. The hell with it. He pushed by her, pulling his jacket around him. She wasn’t going to be here come tomorrow anyway. He might have to take shit from Versallo and jump when the man sneezed, but he had a few little prerogatives of his own, godamnit and one of them was that he could decide who he was going to fuck. She was getting out.

  He ran down the hall in the direction away from Versallo’s o
ffice. His instructions on this were very clear. He was to respond to an alarm by going directly to the point of origin, not pausing to check with Versallo.

  The hall was filled with activity. It had not been caused by the alarm which was linked into only two offices, Versallo’s and Randall’s. Nevertheless it was jammed; secretaries had come out of the offices fluttering like birds, supervisors, clerical personnel, all of them, thirty or forty people were in this hallway now, milling around, talking. Randall could catch only a few phrases as he went out there but the clamor stopped, they looked at him, then away, then slowly the clumps began to break up as people went toward the stairwells.

  What the hell is going on? Where the hell is Versallo? he wanted to bellow at them, scream, demand response but of course this could not be done. Versallo had always insisted that distance be cultivated. Fucking the secretaries was all right, a necessary condition of the job, as he put it; but otherwise he was to have nothing to do with the people who worked on the floor (he did not even know what the hell most of them did; they were tied in with the clerical aspect of the trucking firm which was Versallo’s cover, and Randall was not there for the cover-operation of course).

  Now it was beginning to tell. They all looked at him as if Randall was merely another aspect of disturbance. What the hell was going on? he did not know; he charged the stairs, two at a time, using his arms like wings to beat employees aside and came onto the first floor, the huge, musty area where the trucks and loaders congregated to find that it too was empty. He went through the dead air of that enclosure, through an open door and then at last Randall was able to see what had happened.

  Down range, both dull and bright against the tent of sky, the guardhouse was burning.

  It was flaming, sheets of flame reaching up like fingers toward the sky, and the first floor was empty of men because they were already down there, ringing the guardhouse, trying with factory equipment to get the blaze under control. And even as he watched this, the hooter at the top of the gate began to scream—emergency-cut-in from incineration no doubt, summoning the fire department. For Chicago’s finest or second finest it would be a routine enough job; for the forces at work, however, it appeared to Randall to be too much. Splinters, pellets, really, of force were being hurled from the heart of the flame, filling the air like shrapnel and the fire was lunging across the gates as well. Randall did not care. He was stricken suddenly by an idea.

  It was that idea, not fear of the flames which wheeled him around, sent him storming back into the huge, flat building. The fire meant nothing except that somehow the guardhouse had been overcome, Versallo’s point of control had been destroyed but it was merely property and as far as the old man who tenanted that guardhouse during the day,. fuck him, Randall was not paid to worry about the lives of lower-echelon employees. His condition as chief of securityhad been clearly mapped out for him by Versallo a long time ago: you take care of me, you protect me, you don’t give a fuck about what’s going on in this building; its got nothing to do with you at all. Of course. Randall suddenly understood what had happened. As he ran through the huge, reeking enclosure once again, he did so with dread. Someone had gotten through to Versallo.

  They had been laying for him for a long time; now they had broken the ring of protection, had gotten to him. There were a lot of people who wanted Versallo. Randall was no fool, he knew exactly what his boss was into. What did Versallo think he was, some kind of idiot? All of it was a cover, the factory, the secretaries, the dispatchers, the clerks—merely a means of providing a cover for the real business in which Versallo was engaged, and Randall knew this perfectly well. Why wouldn’t he? He was charged with the man’s safety. Versallo was into drugs. He was at the virtual top of the midwestern drug trade.

  Randall felt the animal of fear bursting within his throat. It was going to be bad. Oh my God, it was going to be very bad.

  He sprinted the stairs, groaning. He knew that they had somehow gotten to Versallo. It all tied together. His groin ached as he ran, little flares of pain like bursting buds along the heel of his thigh, opening sores. Too old for fucking, he thought. Forty years old; he couldn’t screw around like this anymore and still expect to do the job he was counted on to do. They had probably broken through while he was fucking. Right when he had been in the saddle they had destroyed security and moved upon Versallo. It was going to be hell. There was going to be hell now.

  Back on the second floor. He ran past all the open doors, through the whirring and chattering sounds of electrical equipment which had been abandoned in mid-operation, and toward the end of the hallway. The end of the world would probably be this way. The machinery would continue to hum, only the bodies would be missing. The world was created for machinery now; the bodies incidental. That was where they lived. Even Versallo probably carried on his work by computer.

  He came up against the closed door of his employer. For just an instant old instinct prevailed; he felt a hesitancy at jamming himself through and possibly finding Versallo whole, untouched, swearing at him over the desktop. “What are you doing you crazy son of a bitch?” and so on: “you fucking Anglo-Saxon prick….” He could hear it all, the obscenity spurting like semen from the man’s open mouth and then the explanations, the apologies, the babblings from Randall. He would have to tell Versallo that he had been fucking a girl and had not heard. Because Versallo knew everything, you could not lie to him; he would have to confess his shame and the resulting scene would be terrible. There was no saying what Versallo might do then but some colder, harder, more ancient part of the brain pushed away a few levers in there and told Randall, that underneath it all he was full of shit. He was not going to find Versallo in there in any condition to berate him. He knew that, didn’t he? Of course he knew it.

  He tried the door. Locked. He could have expected that, he dug into his pockets for the spare set of keys, didn’t find them, felt an instant of panic when he thought that he might have had them stolen when he was screwing the girl—she was an agent or infiltrator of some sort and that was the only reason she had gone down for him, who else would go down for Randall but someone knowing who he was and needing his confidence?

  But then he found the keys—see? he told himself, stop looking for the worst explanations for everything—and slammed one into the door, fumbled, sweated, and pushed his way in and there he felt himself seized by the smell, the smell took him by the scruff of the neck and shook him like a puppy. He had never, never under any circumstances, smelled anything like this. It sent him reeling back. He folded up against a wall, shaking his head like a fighter who had been hit hard but still came back. He came off the wall, his only thought being that he had to open a window.

  A window, had to open one, get some ventilation in here, get out the smell. A smell of such corruption and decay that it overtook his senses and momentarily his very perception was altered, altered to the degree that he did not even know what he had stumbled against. Something was against his foot. Very delicately he took his foot away so that the thing underneath should not trip him again, still thinking about getting to a window so that he could ventilate this place. But this time he looked down, anxious to see, or at least interested in seeing what had tripped him, and it was in that posture, holding his foot clownishly, hopping around, looking away from the window which he was going to open in just an instant …

  … That he saw Versallo and the condition to which he had come.

  Randall was not a coward and he had seen death many times in his life, but he had never seen anything like this. I’ve never seen a man so killed, was his first foolish thought and then the horror hit. He did not need to open a window after all. A window would do no good. He went instead to the bathroom and the sickness contracted into one electric wave of pain and shock which went through him and for just the next few moments … until the cops came on the heels of the firetruck to see exactly what the hell was going on in these offices … for just those next few moments Randall gave in to a sensatio
n of grief and terror unlike any he had ever before known. Versallo, the un-killable was dead, and only he, Randall was left. And somehow it was all his fault because he had been fucking instead of vigilant.

  He knew that it was not his fault. He knew that vigilance had nothing to do with what had happened to Versallo and that the fucking was the least of all his sins. Nevertheless he felt that way. He battered against himself. He had a difficult time.

  But when the cops came in he became quite composed all over again—cops were always able to bring him back to earth—and he answered everything that they asked quite levelly, explaining as truthfully as he could, leaving out only the matter of the fucking and what he really thought Versallo did for a living. And inside him a crazed little heart of purpose kept pounding, pounding, pounding away: he was going to get the man who had done this to Versallo and he was going to do the same thing to him.

  Chapter 13

  Wulff found himself in a light van driving toward downtown and the federal office building complex. He did not even know about the fire at the guardhouse which had spread into the warehouse itself until he put on the radio to listen to any kind of background noise which would take him out of himself for a moment, firm up his purposes. He listened to the bulletins with amazement, struggling with the traffic flow on the parkways, struggling with the floor-shift and trying to understand what he had heard. There must have been a struggle in the guardhouse, that was quite clear, and that struggle had something to do with the valise. The valise, of course. Versallo had sent it away from him before they talked and it must have been conveyed there by someone who had tried to take it away. Or from someone else who had wanted it. It all came down to the valise, though, that was clear. He wouldn’t be surprised if Mendoza, the man who had escorted him in, had not decided that he wanted that valise, had been blocked, and had precipitated this. Not that it mattered. The valise was gone. He had resigned himself to that before he had killed Versallo.