Lone Wolf #10: Harlem Showdown Read Free

he had been looking for, what he had probably been looking for from the moment he had left Chicago.
    West ninety-third Street. A rooming house.
    No one recognized. Who was to recognize? A cop in uniform, as everyone in the business knew, was as close to the invisible man as the postman, the milkman, the parking lot attendant. In their roles, they had no features. He told the small, bitter man at the front desk that he would be in for an indefinite period, paid fifty dollars, two weeks rent in advance; and got a room on the second floor overlooking an airshaft. The second floor was all right.
    He did not think that even he would have been able to take the fifth.
    He spent two or three days lying low, getting his bearings, coming back to the New York sense of things. Everything began here; so it would end. The city was dying, but magnificently: there was more energy in one decayed strip of paper blowing on its streets amidst dog shit than in all of the vast spaces of Los Angeles or San Francisco. He blended into it perfectly. Everyone on the West Side was invisible, most of them invisible even to themselves. No one came looking for him; he had no sense of pressure or menace. He fitted right in.
    The newspapers gave him a little more information. Massacre on the beach at Miami, forty-three dead, mob violence, mob vengeance, assailant’s identity known to the police, intensive manhunt, no information to be released to the press at this time. Nicholas Calabrese dead in an air crash outside O’Hare, connections to the Miami massacre suspected, no definite information. Probable kingpin of the Midwest drug trade, a federal indictment was being sought for tax evasion at the time of his death. Wulff laughed at that, but not very hard. Otherwise, everything seemed fairly normal: a press service story about a possible drug panic in New England; supplies seemed to have almost vanished, to everyone’s consternation. Authorities had no explanation. He laughed at that, too, again not heartily. In New York the drug trade was bubbling right along, new state laws or not, although an inordinate number of police seemed to be getting themselves shot and wounded, even a couple killed, in the process of making drug arrests. However, most of the trafficking had simply slipped across the river; the majority of deals seemed now to be taking place in Fort Lee or Hoboken. New Jersey’s attorney general was going to ask the legislature for similarly harsh laws in his state so that New Jersey would no longer be a refuge for traffic. Wulff shrugged. Enforcement had nothing to do with the problem. Couldn’t they see that? Enforcers were merely employees of the drug traffickers, ripping off their share in civil service salaries, defense legal fees, press publicity, and so on. Nothing would ever change inside the system. The system was dead-set for drugs; they kept it going. If any change was going to come, it would have to come from guerilla technicians, working outside the system, who had absolutely nothing to gain from their efforts but the satisfaction of knowing they were solving a problem. Couldn’t they see that? Yes, he guessed they could. They knew it so damned well that they kept on passing tougher and tougher drug laws, pleading for more judges, more district attorneys, more jail wardens, more social services, more funding for their agencies …
    After four or five days, he got sick of reading the papers and found himself ready to forage on the streets again. Nothing would ever change, that was for sure. Williams, the Williams of the beginning, before he had been knifed outside the methadone clinic, had been telling him the truth after all. The system was not about to change, it was going to go on the way that it always had; all that you could try to do was to hang loose and get your own. Give up any idea that you could make a difference. Go for the split-level or the two-family house in St. Albans, build your walls around yourself, go for the