Lone Wolf #6: Chicago Slaughter Read Free Page B

cunt, and all the time you know what was waiting for me at the end of that tunnel? A shiv in the ribs, that was it. And almost an expenses-paid funeral with an honor guard. The mayor might have been there.
    That was what the system had offered him.
    Williams found himself thinking more and more about it these days. Lying in the bed, after the first few hours when he knew (even before the doctors) that he was surely going to live, had given him plenty of time to think. Now the system was no longer an abstraction, that neat figment he had batted around with Wulff in their sessions. No: he could see the system now and it was a cunt all right or if not that a beast, a concrete organism that sat over the swamp somewhere and set up the conditions: my swamp, my game, my rules, your ball. Your loss. He had believed in that beast, sweated and romped with it, chased it all the way into the sewer. And had come within six inches of being ripped off by it as casually as any fifteen-year-old Harlem junkie.
    Except that the junkie wouldn’t even know that he had been ripped off; he would think of himself as a hustler who had lost. Whereas Williams—thanks to the coaching of the system: access to its facilities, its educational institutions, its media, the piddling little toys it offered with one palm—could at least identify what had happened to him. That was all. They had elevated him to that level of insight where he knew what was happening.
    Wulff’s right, he thought then.
    He’s right, he’s always been right, the son of a bitch. It doesn’t work. How can you change something from inside when the whole purpose of the thing bottling you up is to
keep
you there? Like the FBI. Federal Blackmail and Intelligence division,
that
was your FBI for you, a complicated information-retrieval and extortion business whose
only purpose
was to keep itself in existence. The FBI was no aberration, no example of breakdown whatsoever.
It was the system in miniature.
All of it shit and lies and here I lay, he thought, here I lay with a hole slashed across my ribs reaching like a hand toward my heart to prove it. I thought that all the time you could play it on the rules and make it work for you and
I
was the fool. Save a place in the palace, Huey, I’m coming to lay the bombs. The pain is just beginning because who’s going to lay bombs anywhere? I’m trapped, he thought. To get rid of the pain in the chest and what was coming was only to move it upwards where it could take rest, lay its confetti of anguish up to the brain. Pain in the brain, he thought, they’ve given me a pain in the brain and Wulff, you crazy, vigilante son of a bitch, you were right after all.
    One of the cops, bored, came in from the hall and asked him how he was feeling. He knew damned well how Williams was feeling, this fat white sergeant who had been cruising in and out of the room for a week, his belly moving delicately in rhythm with his stride. This half-dead son of a bitch who was on stuff like surveillance detail and monitoring because something had happened to his own body or mind which made him incompetent for active duty, but the department was too cheap to give up and hand him full disability, take him out of his twenty-year misery. Don’t be that tough on him, Williams thought, it’s just another part of the system. But it was hard to look at the man let alone answer him in a civil way. “How do you think I am?” he said. “How does it look to you?”
    The sergeant shrugged and said, “Just trying to make conversation, just trying to show a little interest, you don’t have to take out your troubles on
me
friend, I’m pulling duty here whether you like it or not,” and went back into the hall without saying anything else. So they have me labelled as a bad nigger, Williams thought. What it comes down to is that he looks and sees just another angry, hostile black lying in this bed.
Who the fuck do they think they are?
he was probably saying to his partner