Lone Wolf #6: Chicago Slaughter Read Free

heart, otherwise nothing would have worked. Why Williams did not go for his gun or go fast enough and how he walked into something like this was not quite clear. The assailant, of course, would never be found. Traffic around the methadone clinic continued brisk. Nothing much had been changed except that a twenty-four-year-old cop had gone off duty involuntarily. That was New York for you. Take it with a grain.
    Wulff learned all this from Williams’ wife an hour after he hit town. He heard it all on a pay telephone in a candy store in Rego Park four blocks away from where he had ditched the car. The car, a 1971 Delta Royale 88 had been overheating badly through the last hundred miles anyway and had probably burst a seam in the radiator. Wulff never felt guilty about stealing a car anymore. The newer cars were such completely incompetent stuff that the owner was really getting a break on the theft—collecting more on book than the car was worth in transportation value and saving the trouble of breakdowns besides. The godamned things, like the narco squad, just weren’t geared up to deal with the situation.
    Wulff learned it all fast. Williams’ wife laid it on him straightforwardly, dispassionately, quickly. She was a cop’s wife. She knew Wulff. She had met him when he had been there before the Vegas jaunt and there had been a moment of sympathy, of possible connection which Wulff had neither missed nor followed up. What was there to follow up? But he had known that in a different time, in a different way, something might have happened between the two of them. Enough. Enough of that. There had been a girl called Marie Calvante and, in a different time, in a different way, something might have happened there too but it had not; instead he had found her dead of a heroin overdose. Forget it. Abstractions. You concentrated on what you could deal with.
    “I’m sure he’d like to see you,” she said over the phone. “He’s conscious and the pain isn’t too bad. Visiting hours are anytime; I’m going to go there myself in just an hour or so. You can—”
    “No,” Wulff said. “He wouldn’t want to see me.”
    “Of course he would. You don’t understand—”
    “I understand that he’s probably got two police watching that room all the time,” Wulff said. “That’s standard procedure and I don’t think they’d change it even for a man shot in plainclothes.”
    “Oh,” she said, “oh.” She paused. “The police patrol. I forgot—”
    “Forgetting isn’t something a cop’s wife should do,” he said. He was calling from a candystore, stacks of newspapers heaped in front of the booth and now as he looked beyond them he saw a hint of activity, men moving around rapidly, someone at the center of a small group talking animatedly, digging into his pockets to pass something to a few in the circle. Numbers payoff? It couldn’t be a bookie’s runner, the legalized horse parlors had put those kind out of business. It didn’t matter, he supposed, but living on the run made you preternaturally alert. “I was going to bring him a present,” he said, “but I don’t think that I had better deliver it. Do you?”
    “You found the—”
    “Yes,” he said, cutting her off. “I did indeed. Don’t ask me anymore.”
    “We read about Las Vegas in the newspapers,” she said. “He didn’t think you’d make it but I did. I thought you would all the time. He thought that you’d go through it alive but no one would ever find—”
    “Please,” he said, cutting her off again. “Enough. Don’t mention it. What hospital is he in?”
    She told him quickly, adding the room number. “It’s a private,” she said, “and because he’s on critical they allow him visitors around the clock but he’s not really critical anymore. They just do that so I can get in when I want. Do you think you’ll call him?”
    “I think I’ll do just that,” Wulff said. The valise was an unpleasant weight against his left