Lone Wolves

by Chesbro, George C. ;

  “You think you can make him give you the names of the people he’s given wolves to?”

  “I’m going to try.”

  “But how?”

  “Sweet reason,” Garth said with a smile as he gently pulled away from his wife’s grasp, turned and kissed her before heading for the door.

  “Garth, you’re the lone wolf around here!” she called after him. “You and your brother are just the same. And when the two of you work together, what you have is a two-headed lone wolf.”

  “He’ll love that description.”

  “You’re not going to take a gun?”

  Garth paused in the doorway, turned back. “I’m not planning on killing anyone—and if I was, I wouldn’t be doing it in our home town. My guess is that the publicity wouldn’t do anything for our privacy, and I don’t think it’s the land of publicity your record company or music publisher would much appreciate.”

  “Garth—?!”

  “I’ll be home before dinner.”

  “Where does this Floyd Kunkel live?”

  “Way too close,” Garth had replied, and in less than ten minutes was pulling onto the rutted dirt access road threading along the side of the abandoned trap rock quarry at the edge of Cairn. He drove as far as he could go on the weed-choked road, then got out and with the camera case slung over his shoulder, clambered up the rock fall at the base of the escarpment where great mechanical behemoths had once sheared huge slices of stone that would eventually be crushed and used for the building of roads in New York City. He managed to climb a few yards up the wall itself to a ledge, where he sat, legs dangling over the edge, and looked down onto Floyd Kunkel’s property. Through the zoom lens he could see that the spacious grounds included a shooting range, as well as a military-style obstacle course where perhaps a half-dozen men in tan uniforms were working out. At the southern end of the property was what appeared to be a kennel, with more than a dozen wooden shelters. Staked outside each shelter was a dark gray animal. Surrounding the entire complex were double chain-link fences, and the inside fence appeared to be electrified.

  Garth shot two rolls of film, concentrating on the animal pens, and then climbed down. He put the camera and rolls of film in the trunk of his car, and then drove around to the front of Floyd Kunkel’s mansion, parked at the top of the circular driveway. There were a number of cars in a parking area off to the side, and one enclosed van with Alaska license plates. He activated the tape recorder strapped to his waist, then went up to the front door of the Victorian mansion and knocked.

  The man who came to the door was no more than five foot three or four. He had a wispy brown moustache that only served to highlight his sallow complexion, and he wore a bushy, absurd-looking toupee that came halfway down over his forehead. His dark eyes were like the button eyes of a doll, without light, the eyes of a man in whom things had died, dreams and ambitions and a sense of self-worth, and then, like a crippled phoenix, had been resurrected as murderous hatred.

  “Floyd Kunkel?”

  “Maybe,” the man replied nervously. “What do you want?”

  “My name’s Garth Frederickson. I’m a neighbor, and I’m here to try to do you a favor.”

  “Go away,” Kunkel said, starting to close the door. “Whatever it is you’re selling, I don’t want any.”

  “It’s about those hybrid wolves you’ve got in your backyard,” Garth said, planting a large, strong hand on the door and pushing it back open. “The favor I’m doing is inviting you to come down to the police station to give up the names of the people you’ve given those hybrid wolves to. That won’t stop the lawsuits that are going to cost you this house and everything else you own, but that kind of cooperation just might keep you out of prison.”

  Floyd Kunkel’s pinched mouth opened and closed, and his button eyes opened wide. “Wh—? I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  “Yes, you do. You’ve been training those animals to attack blacks and Jews, and then giving them away to your punk skinheads like membership cards, or merit badges. One of your boys decided to test his out to see if it would really do what you said it would. It did. It makes you a kind of accessory to murder. In the interest of saving time, why don’t you just give me the names? How many wolves have you given away?”

  The door abruptly swung all the way open, and Garth found himself looking at his own death. He had come to this place filled with contempt for spiritually crippled men he considered weaklings and cowards, but Franz Heitman was neither weak nor a coward. And the ex-Stasi agent had every reason in the world to want to kill him.

  “’Otto,’ I presume?”

  The man with the very pale blue eyes and close-cropped blond hair stepped back, but kept the gun in his hand pointed directly at Garth’s forehead. “Do come in, Frederickson.”

  “Fancy meeting you here, Franz. Interpol’s looking very hard for you, you know, just like the citizens of your former country. There are a lot of people who’d dearly love to get their hands on you.”

  “You don’t say? I guess I’d better stay in the United States for a while longer.

  Kunkel, a bewildered expression on his face, looked at the German. “Otto? Why does this man call you Franz? How does he know you?”

  “Leave us!” Franz Heitman snapped.

  Garth turned to the slight man with the bushy toupee. “You know who you have working for you—or think you have working for you?” he asked just before the white-eyed man brought the barrel of the gun up against the side of his head.

  When he regained consciousness he found himself tied to a straight-backed chair in what appeared to be a small den or office. He was very much surprised to find he was still alive.

  “So what’s up, Frederickson?”

  “You tell me, Franz. What’s a professional murderer and torturer like you doing hanging around with a bunch of wimpy, wannabe Nazis? They’re all amateurs; you’re the real McCoy. What the hell are you up to?”

  The white-eyed man sitting across from him behind a desk leaned back in his swivel chair, pushed aside the tape recorder he had removed from Garth’s waist, and then folded his hands behind his neck. “I owe you and your smartass little brother, Frederickson. The two of you put five bullets in me.”

  “Yeah, Franz, but you know how hard it is to kill a snake. You’re actually looking quite fit, I’m sorry to say.”

  “Speaking of your smartass little brother, where is he? It’s funny, isn’t it, how I have trouble picturing one of you without the other? Wherever there’s one Frederickson, the other usually can’t be far behind.”

  The reason he was still alive, Garth thought. The German wanted to know who might be covering him, and who else might know about the wolves. He knew that Franz Heitman was unlikely to believe anything he said, so he decided he might as well tell the truth. “He’s in Europe.”

  “You don’t say. Who are you working for? Who hired you to look into this wolf business?”

  “Nobody.”

  “Nobody? Then why are you here?”

  “I found one of the animals you carved up drowning in the river. What had been done to it pissed me off, so I decided to try to find out who was behind it. One thing led to another.”

  The German grunted. “You know, I think you may just be telling the truth. You told that fool Kunkel you were a neighbor. You live here in Cairn?”

  Garth felt his heart begin to beat faster, and he struggled to keep his face impassive. “No. Whom are you really working for?”

  The other man laughed. “The usual suspects, of course.”

  “Abu Nidal’s people? Saddam? Castro?”

  Heitman smiled thinly. “Why go to the trouble of trying to smuggle bands of foreign-speaking terrorists into the United States when you have whole groups of American terrorists here all ready and willing, with just the slightest nudge in the right direction, to do all your work for you? It’s true that your Klansmen and Nazis aren’t too bright, but I’ve found that to work to my various employ
ers’ distinct advantage.”

  “We don’t have the Europeans’ centuries of practice at hating and murdering our own people. You let the wolf loose in that synagogue, didn’t you?”

  “A test of my training methods, with a most satisfactory result. Now it’s time for a Day of the Wolf. The people who have the wolves are simply waiting eagerly for me to give the word. Of course, I must pick a suitable occasion—perhaps Rosh Hashana, or Yom Kippur, when there are lots of Jews wearing prayer shawls on the streets. At the same time, a number of the wolves will be let loose in black neighborhoods. I believe it will make quite a splash, in a manner of speaking.”

  “For what reason, Heitman?”

  “You think Kunkel and his skinheads need a reason? They just want to kill blacks and Jews, and they think that using the wolves is a way for them to get away with it.

  “You sold them the idea, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “What’s your reason? What’s the point? You’re a professional killer, not a goofy ideologue.

  The other man shrugged. “Striking terror into the hearts of your enemies is always its own reason. You know the theory. That’s my job. My employers consider the United States their enemy; terrorism is not only their weapon of choice, but also their only weapon. There will be other operations like the Day of the Wolf. As you know, I’m rather clever at manipulating fools like Kunkel and his skinheads, and putting things like this together. The United States is a very big country, and I plan to keep busy here for some time.”

  “How many wolves are out there, Franz?”

  “Enough,” Heitman said, glancing at his watch and rising. “I’ll leave you to your own devices for now, while we wait to see who may show up looking for you. I really do hope it will be your smartass little brother.”

  Left to his own devices, Garth practiced one other thing his brother had taught him, muzukashi jotai kara deru, which could be roughly translated as “extricating oneself from knotty situations,” and which was a Japanese technique of muscle tensing and relaxation. What Garth had dismissed as a joke, or at most a parlor trick, his brother had used to save their lives inside a Swiss castle, and only then had Garth insisted that his brother teach him. What would have taken his brother ten minutes took him an hour, but at last he was free.

  What he wanted was a telephone, but if there had been one in the office it had been removed. However, rifling through the desk drawers, he found a spiral notebook. Inside the notebook was written the name and address of a hybrid wolf farm in Alaska. There was also a list of men’s names, addresses, and telephone numbers. The addresses were scattered all over the southern half of New York State, with close to a third in New York City. Twenty-five names, including that of a man in Kingston, had dark checks beside them. He ripped the pages with the names out of the notebook, folded them and put them in his wallet, then headed for the door, which opened out into a much larger study at what appeared to be the rear of the mansion.

  He was halfway across the room when Franz Heitman entered. The German cursed and clawed for the gun in his shoulder holster, but by then Garth was running the rest of the way across the room, diving for a window. He put his forearms across his face and dived headfirst through the glass as a gun exploded behind him. He hit the ground on his left shoulder, rolled, and was up and sprinting across the well-manicured lawn toward a wooded area running along the base of the abandoned quarry. As he ran he thought of Mary, wondered what she was thinking and doing. He had said he would be home before dinner, and so by now she would be worried, perhaps already have called the police. He had told her where he was going, but that did not mean the police, without a proper search warrant, would be able to find him. Heitman would certainly have moved his car out of sight, and Kunkel would simply deny he had ever been there. There would be nothing Jeff could do.

  His greatest fear, the anxiety that had gnawed at his heart throughout the long night, was now realized as he approached the house and saw Mary’s station wagon parked at the back of the mansion, where it had been placed in plain view to tell him that Franz Heitman had his wife. He threw his gun off to one side and entered the house through the back door into the kitchen, where he found Floyd Kunkel’s corpse on the floor, a single bullet hole in his forehead.

  “I’m here, Heitman.”

  “Right this way, Frederickson,” Heitman’s voice called. “Straight ahead.”

  Garth walked down a corridor with walls decorated with garish Nazi posters, into the spacious living room of the mansion. Mary was sitting very straight in a chair that had been placed in the middle of the room a few feet away from where the German sat on a couch, legs crossed, an automatic pistol resting in his lap. The wolf, lying on its stomach at Mary’s feet, raised its head and began to wag its tail as Garth walked in.

  “I knew those idiots wouldn’t get you, Frederickson,” the German continued, glancing at his watch. “In fact, you’re here just about the time I thought you would be.”

  Garth looked at his wife. “Are you all right?” Mary nodded. “You?”

  “Yes.”

  “By the way,” Heitman said with a thin smile, “the police did come around looking for you. Kunkel told them he didn’t know what they were talking about. What were they to do? When your smartass little brother didn’t show up like I expected him to, I decided that you must have been telling the truth when you said he was in Europe. I remembered you also telling Kunkel that you were a neighbor, so I went into town and made some inquiries-told people I was a long-lost friend of yours who’d misplaced your address and phone number. Everybody knows you; people were very helpful in giving me directions to your home. Incidentally, you and your lovely wife have done some nice work with that wolf. It’s downright docile. I think I’m going to keep it for myself.”

  “He came to the house,” Mary said in a small voice. “He said you needed my help right away, and that I should follow him and bring the wolf. I didn’t know what else to do but what he asked.”

  Garth nodded, looked back into the cold, blue-white eyes of the ex-Stasi agent. “I saw the mess you left out in the kitchen. You must be getting ready to move on.”

  “Indeed. You’ve managed to make things uncomfortable for me here. But first I want to make some phone calls, and you have the numbers of the people I want to call. I’m thinking that today would make as good a Day of the Wolf as any. You have the list of names and phone numbers?”

  “If you were certain I had the list with me, I wouldn’t be alive right now.

  “The thought did cross my mind that you might stash the list away someplace after you saw your wife’s car, just to annoy me. Did you? You won’t annoy me for long. I’d hate to put a bullet in your wife’s kneecap to prompt an honest answer, so why don’t you just tell me where to find the list?”

  “If I do, will you let Mary go?”

  “Give me a break, Frederickson. You want me to insult you by lying to you? Interpol and various other police forces I can handle, but I don’t need your smartass little brother dedicating the rest of his life to hunting me down. I can’t leave any witnesses. I will promise that neither of you will suffer.”

  “Under the circumstances, that seems fair enough,” Garth said. He removed his wallet from his pocket, took out the folded pages, flipped them in the direction of the German. As the man reached out to catch them, Garth took the prayer shawl out of his jacket pocket and tossed it at the man’s head. “You might as well take this, too.”

  In the instant before the billowing prayer shawl settled down over his head, the German’s pale eyes went wide with shock and horror. He grabbed for the gun in his lap with one hand, while with the other he frantically clawed at the fringed black and white cloth, but by then the wolf, which had sprung to its feet at first sight of the tallis, was at him. Heitman screamed as he and the wolf toppled over backwards. Garth quickly walked around the overturned sofa, gripped the wolf’s collar, and pulled him away from the German’s head. The man had manag
ed to protect his throat and was still alive, but his face was gone. Franz Heitman writhed on the floor, screaming, legs thrashing, his hands spasmodically reaching for, but never quite touching, his shredded flesh. Garth pulled the animal back around the sofa, brought it over to Mary, who gripped its collar while wrapping her free arm around its neck.

  “Our wolf is going to need a lot of love and counter-training if he’s going to unlearn the nasty habits he’s been taught, which is essential if he’s going to be allowed to live,” Garth said to Mary as he walked across the room and picked up a phone to call the police and an ambulance. “Considering the fact that he’s played a large part in saving a lot of people’s lives, including our own, maybe we should keep him. I could look into getting a special permit, and we could build an appropriate enclosure. Would you like that?”

  Mary, her eyes brimming with tears, simply nodded.

  HAUNTS

  “They’re here!” Madame Bellarossa shrieked as the flames of the seven candles on the table guttered, and then Mary screamed, her voice joining the other woman’s in a duet of horror, her features twisted with the same terror Garth had seen on Elsie Manning’s face when he had found her huddled on the ground at his back door at three o’clock in the morning one week before, too weak to pound any more, scratching at the screen like a stricken cat.