Lone Wolf #10: Harlem Showdown

Lone Wolf #10: Harlem Showdown Read Free Page A

Book: Lone Wolf #10: Harlem Showdown Read Free
Author: Mike Barry
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good twenty and pension at half-pay, and get the hell out, Williams had said. Well, maybe he was right.
    Still, he wasn’t quite ready to give up yet. Close to it but not just yet. Wulff had a few last ideas of his own; you couldn’t start at the beginning, no way, but maybe you could get back to the roots just to see if you had done a thorough job, to do a little extra trimming and weeding around before standing back and admiring the finished construction. That was about what he was after now. There was no way to repeat his odyssey. But he could check back, take a craftsman’s view of his work.
    He went back to Harlem. First cruising the streets casually in a cab, saying nothing to the puzzled, nervous cabbie, just looking over the blocks as he had remembered them: Lenox, St. Nicholas, 125th Street, Lexington, Park. And then when he had decided that the terrain looked pretty much the same, he decided to dig in a little bit deeper.
    Just to see how close he could get to the heart of the flame and still feel his own breath.

II
    Animal said, “Get that white motherfucker.”
    The Dude followed Animal’s point, looked down the street to see the guy coming toward them slowly, looking from right to left, shrugging his way toward them in a curiously graceful series of leaps, really good moves for a white man, and said, “The hell with it. You want him?
You
get him.” He tapped his devil-head ring on the steering wheel.
    “Fuck that shit, man,” Animal said, almost pleading already. “I can’t do it myself, you know that. Anyway, it’s your turn. You get him.”
    They were sitting in the front seat of the Dude’s 1971 Electra 225, custom kit, snow-white tires, rising fist for a hood ornament, trading a pint bottle of Thunderbird, just sipping a little, sliding with the wine, not so much trying to get drunk as just cement the good high that they had gotten from the Animal’s very good stash about three-quarters of an hour ago in the building right across from them, which from the front appeared to be abandoned. The Dude got a laugh out of that, the patrol cars coming through five, six times a day, looking at that boarded-up storefront and checking it off as just another ruined piece of Harlem. Actually the joint was jumping. There was more action behind those fake boards than there was in the Apollo Theater at midnight; in back of those fake boards was a hidden entrance and another entrance over to the side that most of those in the know used. On the ground floor they were selling it outright; there was a nice, clean, dark basement for shooting, and on the upper levels there were even supposed to be women if you had the ambition after a veinful of that good stuff to go up and get yourself laid. The Dude had heard that that was about the best there was, fucking a woman on a horse-high, but it sure as hell wasn’t for him. He could barely get up the energy after a horse high to sit behind the wheel of the Electra, tap the wheel and dream. Animal, on the other hand, became manic, wanted to get started right away on all those plans that he was dreaming up by the minute, giggling away. The stupid fuck. Still, what the hell, live and let live. It took all kinds to get along, took all ways to enjoy a horse-high, too, and if Animal wanted to react this way, the hell with him. He, the Dude, would just tap the wheel and dream, sing to the teddy bears dangling from chains in the custom kit, and get along. The trouble was that Animal was hustling him. He didn’t have that old give-and-get-dead philosophy; he crawled up and down your ass. Insect-like. Someday, the Dude thought, someday soon, like maybe right after the down, he would have to straighten out Animal. Dragging. Dragass.
    “
Get
the motherfucker,” Animal said again and shifted position in the car, holding himself easily, nudging the Dude in the ribs with an elbow, and all of a sudden Dude felt himself build into a real sweat and rage, sitting right there in the car

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