Lone Wolf #6: Chicago Slaughter

by Barry, Mike

  He didn’t want it anymore. He didn’t care; he seemed to have lived the better part of his life linked to a valise and now no more. He was not a valise. He was not a million dollars worth of smack and after the confrontation with Versallo he wasn’t sure that he was the avenger anymore either. He was sick of killing. The kill on Versallo had been vicious, bitter, almost sick in its intensity; looking at Versallo in that first horrid aftermath, seeing the true impact of death not only upon the man but upon himself, Wulff had realized something: he detested death. He had seen enough of it, precipitated enough, now he wanted to perpetrate no more. Death provoked death and the price was too high. So someone else would have to do it.

  Go to Patrick Wilson then. Go to the federal buildings, see the investigating staff, tell them everything that he could. Surely they would want to listen to him. If the federal war on drugs was at all serious then they could not ignore what he had to say. But even if the war was nothing but a public-relations mockup, even if the war enlisted for its troops people of the caliber he had had to do on the Grand Central Parkway … well, even so. So be it. Let them carry the ball from now on. He was done. He was not going to pay the price anymore. It had brought him from New York to San Francisco, back across the continent to Boston, into Vegas and then to Havana, only to sweep him back to New York and the horrors of Chicago. And the journey was becoming bloodier at every turn, the opposition more vicious, the price exacted increasingly higher. No more. He would tell them his story and let them move on from there. And for the rest of it, someone else would have to continue.

  He pushed the van harder. Bulletins were coming in at only minute intervals now as further details of the fire and explosion at the warehouse came off the police ticker and from reporters sent to the scene. Two found dead in the guardhouse, one killed, fourteen injured in the panic which spread through the warehouse. The names of the dead in the guardhouse being withheld by police until the families were notified. Of course. Let them sweat it out. Discovered dead in his office, William Versallo, president of the company and alleged racketeer. Called in by the grand jury some months ago. Narcotics trade. Major international connections. Refused to answer questions to the grand jury. Married. Three children. Identified in federal investigation as businessman, head of the trucking firm. Personal details beyond the sketchy biography not available. Family in seclusion. Of course. Wulff nodded again. The families were always in seclusion. Ancient ploy.

  Someone cut in front of him on the expressway, a middle-aged Cadillac, children peering through the back window, several adults in the front. The driver had pulled in from a service ramp without checking. Now, as Wulff came down on them, horn squalling, the driver seemed to take cognizance for the first time of what had developed behind. The Cadillac bucked, lurched and then went off the road in a spectacular flourish, bumping and lurching to a point on the shoulder, making a half-spin and finally coming to rest in a burst of steam; Wulff turned to see what had happened in the aftermath but he was already well down the road, the Cadillac invisible. Stupidity. The self-destructive urge was so great in so many people that they would literally stop at nothing in the effort to kill themselves. This had something to do with the drug business also. Wulff shook his head in disgust, clawed at the wheel, righted the van and kept on going. He had not been in Chicago for many years, the expresswayswere new but the direction was old; he thought that he knew the way to the offices.

  Get there. Let Patrick Wilson and his merry men take it from there. Was he being unreasonable? Probably, but Wulff had exhausted any sense of alternative. Here he was on the expressway fleeing yet more destruction; on the expressway were thousands of cars at the same time, any one of which might contain a potential assassin. They were all out to get him; there was no safety anymore.

  He was so engrossed in the effort of driving, battling off like insects the thoughts of how Versallo had looked dead, that he did not even notice the Cadillac until it had speeded up alongside him in the center lane, the driver rolling down the power window on the right side, holding a level pedal which kept him even with Wulff. “You crazy son of a bitch!” he shouted. Between the driver and Wulff was a female passenger, probably his wife who held a hand against her mouth, held herself low in the seat as if to show by the gesture that she had no part in this whatsoever; it had nothing to do with her. Men’s business.

  “You want to get me killed?” the driver said. “You some kind of lunatic?” He was a small man in shirtsleeves, his hands bulging on the wheel as he fought for control of the car, his face compressed and reddening. Children in the rear seat bounced and screamed. “I got your license number, I’m going to report you!” the driver shouted.

  Just go ahead and do that, Wulff thought, let them trace the van back to Versallo’s truckyard and see where it would get them. The driver of the Cadillac could arrest the world as far as Wulff was concerned. But he could not shake the car, the van had poor accelerationand the Cadillac was able to anticipate his movements, stay side by side as if they were welded together. “You son of a bitch,” the driver said, pounding the wheel. “You crazy son of a bitch.”

  Go prove to the man that he had cut in, Wulff thought. Well, you could not prove this to him, there was simply no way that you could get people, most of them, to take the responsibility for their own actions. He made a dismissive gesture with his hand, held the wheel of the van steady, waited for the driver of the Cadillac to get tired and pull on ahead, drop back—it made no difference.

  But the driver, as if he had finally after years of struggle managed to locate the real enemy in Wulff, the one true cause of all his difficulties which had given him a damaged car, a tight-lipped ugly wife, a backseatful of abusive and uncontrollable children … the driver was not so easily satisfied.

  He lifted a fist, shook it at Wulff. “You ought to drop dead!” he shouted. He had worked himself, successfully, into a tantrum. “Crazy!” he screamed. “Crazy!” and Wulff tried to pull the van out ahead again but the shift would not get into second, the van hung sickeningly in neutral for an instant, rpm’s hammering at the sheet metal and the Cadillac, over anticipating the spurt came out ahead of him, opened up a couple of car lengths and then began to slide over into his lane. The driver had an idea. He would cut Wulff off, put him off the road.

  Wulff went for the brakes, holding the wheel steady, looking for control. If it had not been for the kids in the back seat he would have plowed right into the Cadillac, let the driver fend for himself. He had more weight than the car ahead of him and although there was no hood between him and the point of impact he did not think that the car would risk collision. Rather, by a little leftward manuever he could probably sideswipe the Cadillac off the road. Nothing to it; it was an old police manuever, the kind of thing that he could do in his sleep and had done, in hot pursuit, many times back on the force. In San Francisco, he had put two hoods off the road that way in an old Continental, which had less capacity as a battering ram than this van.

  But he couldn’t. He couldn’t do it. The decision was quickly calculated, instantly made; he wanted to hurt this idiot and hurt him badly because in a way the driver of the Cadillac embodied all of the pointless stupidity of human exchange. But the woman next to him had nothing to do with the driver’s insanity and neither did the children, four or five of them scuttling around in the back, visible through the distorted glass of the rear panel. It took him less than a second really to calculate and reject the alternative of striking back at the driver and then he was braking, braking the van down desperately, fighting with the wheel as the light truck responded to the diminished torque by contracting into itself. Wulff had a feeling of reduced dimensions, the truck impacting and then he was coming close to the Cadillac. Too damned close, the brakes were no good on the van and the compression braking was worse, something was definitely wrong with the van’s moter. Ring job. I’m heading for the ditch and making mechanic’s judgments! Wulff thought bitterly but by then the van was already swerving righ
t, at the point of lost control, heading—still at thirty or forty miles an hour—toward the guardrail.

  He still could have bailed out. That was what he would remember about this the longest. He had the van still marginally under control; by downshifting to first and hoping the clutch would catch he might have regained enough torque to yank the steering wheel left, force response out of the vehicle. He could have come left in the van then, shutting off approaching traffic and bailed out by passing the Cadillac but even as he stared he could see that it would be too close, he would probably sideswipe the old machine, and that would put the Cadillac in the ditch.

  In an instant’s calculation he saw all of this and his foot was reaching for the clutch, reaching for the manuever which could keep him on the road but then, staring intently through the windshield, he saw as in close-up one of the children at the rear deck. It was a boy, five or six years old, looking at him with solemn eyes, transfixed by the proximity of the van, the sight of Wulff bearing down upon them. And what he saw in the eyes was, at least in that dazzle of light, that imploded moment, the thing that he had seen in Marie Calvante’s as she lay on the floor: another hurt, vulnerable, tormented creature and he could not do it.

  He could not do it. He could do it to the idiot driver and his dumb wife in a moment but not to the child. Not to children. In the two seconds that elapsed from the moment all of this began Wulff came to the realization that there were limits to what he could do, either in vengeance or self-defense and after finding one pole with Versallo, he had found another in the child’s eyes. He held the wheel grimly, tensely, half-saluted in a bizarre gesture and almost majestically the van, bearing right, away from the child and toward the Cadillac’s safety hit the soft shoulder, bounced the guard rail, leaped, flamed, and began to roll.

  Chapter 14

  It was not easy to conduct a long series of long-distance phone calls from a hospital bed, fighting all the way through bureaucracy and the chain of command to find the man he wanted twelve hundred miles away, but Williams did it. He was determined to do it. There was, after all, nothing else to occupy his time and he had decided when he began—at eleven o’clock Chicago time, high noon in New York—that he would just not be put off with it and he was going to get through no matter what. They could send the godamned phone bill to the New York police department, by whose courtesy he had this very excellent hospital room and surgical benefits and the rest of it. He kept in mind the lesson he had learned through being in civil service himself, which was that nothing they did or said to you was ever personal. Nothing personal at all; it was not him they were grinding to a pulp through their policies and procedures and assistants and inquiries, it was anybody who got between them and their safe little system. Chalk up another one then for Wulff.

  He got through, finally. There was a new shift at the door; a couple of sullen rookies who seemed to resent the fact that Williams was lying in there all expenses paid and collecting salary in the bargain; they hinted that Williams had probably arranged the knifing himself so that he could get something free out of the NYPD or maybe that was just the inference they were seeking. He figured these new cops didn’t give a shit what he did with the phone as long as he kept it quiet, and the nurses and floor detail had long since stopped trying to do anything with him at all. He was a convalescent case and the hell with him. So he went on with it, doggedly dialing Chicago again and again, going from bureau to bureau, finally, he was able to trap a secretary into giving Patrick Wilson’s home phone number and from there on it was easy.

  He wasn’t able to get Wilson at home but by pushing his wife very hard—she sounded like a real piece of ass but dumb, like all prosecuting personnel or those associated with them, seemed to be, basically just dumb—he dug out the phone number of a place where Wilson might be reached if he wasn’t in his office or court during working hours. She called it a conference center but to Williams it sounded like a bar. Only two more calls and he was able to get hold of Wilson himself midway between a court appearance, he said, and an urgent interview with a state witness. He sounded impatient and angry but otherwise unremarkable. Williams didn’t know; somehow he had expected more. Superman should have a resonant voice filled with confidence and passion, whereas Patrick Wilson, head of an important federal prosecution sounded like—well he sounded something like an informant. Williams pressed on though. Don’t let little details like this mess with your mind. For all he knew the guy had a lot of brains, although he certainly sounded like a schmuck.

  “Well, I don’t know,” Wilson said when Willams had put the case to him hurriedly, bringing his voice to a concentrated point of whispering, “I just don’t know. I can’t make any definite commitments, that’s for sure. It sounds to me like the matter is out of my hands.”

  “It doesn’t have to be.”

  “Other agencies are obviously looking for your man,” Wilson said. There was a sound of hammering in the background, voices singing off-key, detached obscenities, like dismembered limbs floating in water, seemed to be there as well. “They would probably supercede my authority—”

  “Don’t you know who Wulff is?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t go into that kind of material with you over the telephone, even if you are who you represent—”

  “You mean to say that you don’t know who the man is?” Williams said. “How can you be into an investigation like this and not know who I’m talking about?”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t know who he was,” Wilson said, “I did say that there’s information here which I certainly couldn’t release unofficially over the telephone to someone whose identity is unsubstantiated.”

  “I have reason to believe that this man is coming to you, and that a whole lot of stuff is going to fall into your lap and there should be some guarantees—”

  “I can’t make any guarantees or representations at all,” Williams said. “All of this would have to be handled on an individualized basis. Certainly if this man is as potentially valuable as you say he is we might be able to make certain allowances, we might be able to at least explore the question of a limited immunity—”

  “Limited immunity,” Williams said. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I don’t even know who you are, friend. I’m not going to get into bargaining with you on the long-distance telephone.”

  “You interested in getting something done out there or is this just more federal agency bullshit like the informants? You people seem to be pretty good at blowing up houses and beating up innocent people but are you really out to touch the trade? Sounds to me very doubtful.”

  “I resent your attitude,” Wilson said. “And I don’t like your representations. If there’s anything to discuss it can be handled in a more direct context.”

  “You know what I think, Wilson?” Williams said.

  “Frankly, Mr. Willman or whatever you said your name is—”

  “Williams. I’m a New York police officer.”

  “Williams. Frankly, Williams, I don’t give much of a damn what you think.”

  “I figured that out. I really did now. But I’m going to tell you anyway. I think that if Wulff actually comes to you people he’s got at least half a chance of being turned right over to the organization.”

  “You do, do you?”

  “Yes sir,” Williams said softly. “I really have come to that tentative conclusion,” and he held the phone then, waiting for the prosecutor to hang up. He sat there, his breath in his throat, waiting for the signatory click which would tell him that Wilson had definitely hung up on him. But strangely it did not come. It was as if Wilson was as stunned as Williams by what had just been said. After a little while Williams got tired of this and hung up the phone himself. He did so gently, not to injure the delicate ear of the delicate federal prosecutor and he lay back on the sheets then with a sigh, feeling soiled by the contact, but vaguely cleansed as well.

  At least, he thought, at the very least, this would put Wilson
on notice not to try funny stuff as he might have otherwise done.

  What he wished, what he really wished was that there was some way in which he could reach Wulff and call him off. Keep him from going to Patrick Wilson. Keep him after all, from any involvement with the system.

  He had been wrong. He had been dead wrong.

  Wilson and the people against whom he was allegedly fighting were interchangeable.

  The system was the enemy.

  He wished that he could tell Wulff that now.

  Chapter 15

  Wulff came out of the wrecked van feeling like little bits and pieces, testing various parts of himself, deciding that he had survived the accident in good repair. A man picked up a certain resiliency sooner or later. Superficial bruises, a pain in the left thigh, nothing that he could not work out. The van had overturned, he had made it out through the side door. Not a moment too soon. Lying on its roof, the surfaces had already started to impact and crumple. The Cadillac way down the road, of course. Doubtful if the driver had even looked back. Why should he? It was out of his hands.

  A police car pulled to the side of the road. Cruising, they had seen what had happened, were coming to investigate. Wulff thought for a moment of trying to make some escape through the bushes that were over to his right, leading into another warehouse district but decided not to. He couldn’t move that quickly. Also the Chicago police would never let him get away. In addition, he decided, it was just as well to be picked up by the cops now as later, wasn’t it? He was headed right into the arms of authority anyway.

  The police got out of the car, walked down the little depression toward the van. Big, clumsy men dangling clubs and guns, pointing at the van. Wulff stood there, his arms apart, his hands open. It was doubtful if the police would shoot him simply because he had been in a one-car accident but on the other hand the Chicago police had something of a reputation. They did indeed.