Lone Wolf #6: Chicago Slaughter Read Free Page A

knee, indelicately he raised it, opening up a few inches of space. It was tough to live with a valise, he decided. It was tough to live with anything that was not a piece of yourself yet had to be treated as if it were. Old lechers with showgirls would know all about that he supposed. “After all, I need further instructions.”
    “No you don’t.”
    “But I do,” Wulff said, “I thought we settled that weeks ago. I’m just the tool. David directs me.”
    “David is a sick man,” his wife said sharply. “He got knifed on the street and a few inches difference, it would have gone the other way. I don’t think he’s going back to active duty for the rest of his life and I’m going to try and talk him off the force.”
    “It won’t work,” Wulff said, “you know that. I’m sure he’ll pull through.”
    “Of course it won’t work,” she said, “but I’ve got to try, don’t I?”
    “I guess you do,” Wulff said. “I guess we’ve all got to try.” And then he said goodbye and before the conversation could start to trace into any other channels he hung up the phone emphatically. He stared through the glass of the booth looking at the activity in the candystore. The circle had broken up into little consultative clumps. Now and then someone threw a stare into the booth although that shouldn’t have been; there were a whole bank of phones here and as far as he knew only one other of them was occupied when he had come in. They shouldn’t be looking inside to see if he was finished. On the other hand—
    On the other hand he had had enough of this candy store. He had had enough of Rego Park Queens. For that matter, with the whole fucking city of New York. It had been a mistake to come back here. Why had he come back? Why—after all it had cost him to get that valise out of Vegas and Havana—had he brought it right back to this trap, this sewer of a city?
    Because he had wanted to present it to Williams and shove it right up his ass, that was why. Show him the valise.
    Enough, Wulff thought, enough, and stood abruptly, his head colliding with an overhead panel. He winced, reaching for the valise, ready to quit the booth, quit Rego Park, quit New York. He could call Williams another time, he just did not like the situation here, he needed space. As he opened the door of the booth a heavy man with a gun whose mouth looked as big as a manhole put a hand on his back and held Wulff in a tight embrace, gripping at him.
    “All right,” he said and his voice in that confrontation was strange: soft, sweet, delicate; he could have been whispering to Wulff of the most intimate and tragic things. “That’s quite enough. Come out of there slowly and leave that fucking valise in there. We’ll take care of that our own way.”
    It was strange to hear the word
fucking
coming hard in the center of all that softness. The inconsistency that made life so appealing, Wulff thought, that made menace the more explicit. He bent over and wedged against the heavy man, came out into the circle, keeping the valise within eyeshot, however.
    Godamnit, he had gotten it out of Havana. He wasn’t going to lose it in Rego Park. They would have to kill him for it … They probably would, at that.

Chapter 2
    Williams lay in bed, hands behind his neck, painfully adjusting himself to take some weight from the bad side while the two cops guarding him murmured in the hallway, smoking illegally. He thought, it’s shit. The whole thing is shit. Wulff was right all the time and I was wrong. The system sucks.
    The system that set me up with a mortgage and a uniform allowance and a legal gun (imagine giving an American black man a legal gun; he had thought that the humor implicit in that was worth the whole crap of the academy, just to know what they were going to hand him). It was teasing me all the time, that lousy cunt of a system was just sucking me in, moving me deeper and deeper, helping me to close my eyes as I worked my way into that