Lone Wolf #2: Bay Prowler

OTHER TITLES BY MIKE BARRY

Lone Wolf #1:
Night Raider

Lone Wolf #2:
Bay Prowler

Lone Wolf #3:
Boston Avenger

Lone Wolf #4:
Desert Stalker

Lone Wolf #5:
Havana Hit

Lone Wolf #6:
Chicago Slaughter

Lone Wolf #7:
Peruvian Nightmare

Lone Wolf #8:
Los Angeles Holocaust

Lone Wolf #9:
Miami Marauder

Lone Wolf #10:
Harlem Showdown

Lone Wolf #11:
Detroit Massacre

Lone Wolf #12:
Phoenix Inferno

Lone Wolf #13:
The Killing Run

Lone Wolf #14:
Philadelphia Blowup

He went first to a furnished apartment in the Oakland Hills. Every quest must start somewhere. This seemed as good a place as any to begin. Before he was done, if he lived, he would hit them all…

Wulff took the stairs two at a time and smashed open the door in the instinctive entry kick. He dodged to the side, revolver ready. If they were going to hit him they would do it right away but he would not even give them one clear shot.

After a while, hearing nothing, he turned the corner cautiously. There was a girl lying on the floor in the center of the room.

She was about nineteen, he guessed, maybe twenty, one of that new breed of girls who had come out on both coasts in the mid nineteen-sixties and were now, through the force of television, throughout the country. Long, straight blonde hair, high cheekbones, no makeup, simple sweater and pants which did not so much cover as frame the body. She was breathing in shallow, ragged gasps through her mouth; there were small white spots at the corners. Her knees were arched to the ceiling, her eyes open. For a moment he thought she was stuporous but then one of the eyes fluttered and she turned her head slightly. “Help me,” she said, “help me.”

Memories fluttered through Wulff’s mind like birds. He remembered another girl, another floor, another furnished room and for the moment the two combined: what he had seen, where he was now. He felt bile rising within him and thought that he might vomit. With an effort he rammed the bile down, brought himself into focus. He remembered that he was in this room because the attache case of the man he had killed contained documents indicating it was a pickup and delivery center. This room. That was why he was here. It had nothing to do with the girl. He had not expected the girl to be here.

“You’ve got to help me,” she said again. Her breathing was poor. Her hand tried to gain purchase on the floor, fell back. She shook her head.

Wulff knelt over her. Faint discoloration in the pupils, shallow respiration, seeming dehydrogenation of the lips. He took her hand, clamped her wrist and pushed his own hand up to her elbow, peeling the sweater back. No apparent needle marks, which meant little of course; these girls with straight hair could shoot it, they could sniff it, they could induct it in other ways as well.

She seemed to be smiling up at him. “You think I’m a junkie?”

“I don’t think anything.”

“I’m not a junkie,” she said.

“Get up,” he said, checking her pulse. No flutter, steady at sixty-eight, gross signs appeared normal. Distension of the pupils, however—that dryness of the lips. “Get off the floor.”

“It’s speed,” she said with a giggle. Her face was flat; she was still looking up at the lights. “You’ve got to measure it out. I guess I measured it out wrong.”

“Stand,” he said.

“First you get the rush,” she said, “and then you get this nice easy sweeping feeling just like riding a carpet and then you get the crash, but if you know what you’re doing you don’t have to crash at all. You just have to time it out right. But I guessed I timed it wrong and I don’t feel so good.” Her voice broke. Abruptly she looked much younger. “I feel sick,” she said.

“I bet you do,” said Wulff. He had turned his attention from the girl finally, was doing a quick check-out of the rooms. Disorder, clutter, cheap furniture strewn about, unmade beds glimpsed through the half-open door to the next room but no indication of big doings here. If this was a transfer-point they brought the stuff in from outside. All right. Gerald’s book had given him plenty of names, even an address or two, although the addresses could only be of lower-echelon people. All right. That was good enough; you had to start somewhere. He had started at the bottom in New York as well and wound up with an attache case. Also, more than a few people who knew his name.

“Help me,” the girl said again. Her voice was thin, strained. “I want to get up.”

He put a hand under her elbow, tugged, shoved. She came to a seated position, wiping the sweat from her forehead, her face tensed into a cracked smile. She might have been a little older than he had thought at first but no more than twenty-four. He could feel the rhythm of the blood under her wrist. “It hurts,” she said, “it really hurts.”

“Come on,” he said roughly, “stand now.” He wanted no involvement with this girl, much less talking her through the downside of a speed-jag. She moved her legs as if aware of their presence for the first time, leaned harder on him, then came to a standing position. He felt the fullness of her weight upon him. A big girl this one. Basically, she was probably quite healthy. Most of them were very healthy right up to their twenty-fifth birthday or so; that was why they were able to carry on so far. Of course, after that point, it was all downhill.

“I have to get out of here,” she said. Her eyes, purposeful while she was on the floor, had become vague again. “Don’t you understand, I have to get going.”

“You don’t live here, then.”

“What are you, crazy?
Nobody
lives here,” the girl said, “at least nobody I’d ever want to get involved with.” On her feet she seemed to have become hostile. She did not feel as bad then as she had on the floor. “Who are you, anyway?”

“That’s a long story.”

“What are you
doing
here? You’re not a cop, are you?”

“No,” Wulff said, “I’m not a cop.”

“Let me out of here,” she said abruptly, wrenching herself free from the hold. Wulff let her go. Enough of this. The girl took a couple of halting steps toward the door and barreled inwards, clutching her stomach.

“I feel sick,” she said, “I really feel sick.” She gasped, got to a wall, leaned against it, still clutched in. “You’ve got to help me,” she said in the tone she had when he entered the room.

This was tremendous. This was everything that Wulff could have hoped for. Come to San Francisco to track the drug network further, go to a contact point which looks promising and find yourself with a sick girl. All that he had was a rental car, a street map, and a very rudimentary knowledge indeed. He didn’t even know where the hospitals were, come to think of it. And if he showed up with a girl in this condition, he was going to be asked a lot of questions.

He looked at her with disgust. Instinct told him to get the hell out of here because the situation could only become more ugly and complicated. But instinct was one thing, compassion another. He could not help himself. He responded to the girl. She was another victim too. All of them were victims. And she reminded him, however vaguely, of another girl with straight hair, dark hair this had been, lying quietly on the panels of flooring on the top floor of a rooming house….

“All right,” Wulff said quietly, “let’s take you to a hospital.”

“
Hospital?
Are you out of your mind?”

“You’ve got to get to a hospital,” Wulff said. “You’re in shock. You probably need detoxification—”

The girl was shaking with little gurgles of laughter that roiled within her. Her breathing became uneven again. “You’ve got to be out of your
mind,
” she said. “Do you think that I could just walk into a hospital—”

“Then you can stay here and die for all I’m concerned,” Wulff said quietly. He looked at her; held the gaze. “I don’t care,” he said, “you’re nothing to me. The way you look to me now, you could hold out all of two days, possibly three before going into a coma. Plenty of time. What’s your hurry?”

She looked back at him and it was as if for the first time understanding pierced those eyes. It was no longer this girl that was looking at him but rather the girl that she might have been two, three years ago before all of this started. Something intricate and trapped wheeled in her eyes. She weaved, reached out a hand. “It’s hopeless,” she said. “I’m too far gone.”

“Maybe.”

“It’s too late, don’t you understand that? Leave me alone. Just leave me alone!”

“I want to help you,” Wulff said. He could not believe what he was saying. Ten minutes into this room, one hour into San Francisco and he was already talking commitment. In his three months underground in New York, no one, nothing had touched him. Was it the air out here? Was there indeed something in the climate which created the life-style? Madness he thought; he could not afford commitment.

“All right,” she said, holding that reaching posture. “I don’t know who you are but I’ll go with you.” Her body quivered, her breasts moved loosely under the sweater. “I don’t know who you are but I believe you want to help.”

He moved forward to take her—and a door opened and a man came into the room.

He had not even heard the approach. Maybe the sound-proofing in this place was pretty good, as it better be for a contact-point, maybe he had just been so caught up with the girl, against his will, that normal caution had deserted him. Either way, a bad practice. He was making mistakes already. You had to keep the terrain under observation at all times and you had to control all of the space you could see. Combat knowledge. Too late now.

The man had a beard, was wearing a sweater with a chain emblem dangling, tight pants, a rather distracted expression. Much older than the girl although he was trying to cultivate an appearance which would let him pass for twenty-five. Nonsense, Wulff thought, appraising him. This bastard was forty, forty-two. But everything about this culture was style, wasn’t it? And from a distance he could pass. Perhaps.

The man looked at Wulff quietly and then reached for something in his pocket. A gun, Wulff realized, just an instant too late to be able to do anything. The man had a pistol, a point forty-five Wulff guessed. He held it on him.

The girl screamed, lightly, and tried to dodge behind Wulff. The man waved her off, she staggered, crossed to another part of the room. He waved the pistol; she held position. He flicked the gun at her as if she were a piece of furniture he had now located in the proper position and turned toward Wulff.

“What is this?” he said. “Who the hell are you?”

Flat voice, penetrating eyes. Yes, Wulff decided, the pistol was not for effect. This man could kill him. He held his ground.

“He’s trying to help me, John,” the girl said. “He came up here to help. I’m sick. I tell you—”

“Shut up,” the man said absently. The gun was held tight on Wulff’s stomach. “I want to know who the hell you are and what you’re doing here and I want to know it now.”

No way to get to his own gun. Any man who could handle a pistol this offhandedly, this expertly, could certainly drop him in place before he could even get his hand on the point thirty-eight. He looked at the man called John and without working it through at a conscious level came to an instant decision: yes, this man could kill. He had killed before and he could do it again as easily as this girl could float off into another amphetamine haze. Killing meant nothing to him.

It might be San Francisco but Wulff felt right at home. In a way it was almost comforting. The landscape might change but he would be going up against the same types time and again. He had beaten them in New York. He guessed—if he got by this one—he could in San Francisco. Medallions or sport coats they were all the same.

“I said I wanted to know who the hell you are,” the man said.

“Please—”the girl said.

“Shut up, Tamara. Just stand against the wall and be nice. This is between me and my new friend here. You’d better talk, my friend. This is breaking and entering for openers.”

“I’m a freelance writer,” Wulff said. Say anything, just keep talking and keep the man distracted. “I go here and there trying to report on events in various parts of the country. This month I’m doing music. I understand there’s a big festival here and I was directed to come here—” Tamara, he thought, while he was going through this. That was an interesting name. He would go twelve to five that she had been born Betty or Helen, though. Something like that. Those were the ones, once they hit this culture, who needed more than the average to feel exotic.

“Don’t give me that shit,” the man said. For someone wearing a medallion showing the emblem of peace, he had a rather rough approach. “I want to know who the hell you are.”

“Is this your apartment?”

“Please John,” the girl said weakly before the man could answer, “please leave him alone. He was going to take me to the hospital. I tell you I’m sick—”

“You freaked out bitch,” the man said softly. “I think you’ve fucked up just one time too many. You shut up or I’ll knock you down too.”

“Who is he?” Wulff said, turning to the girl, “who is this man.”

“He’s—”

“Shut up, Tamara,” the man said, but saying it wheeled his attention over to the girl and it was at that point, that brief flickering instant when the man’s eyes were one way and the gun the other that Wulff moved.

He moved quickly, diving to the floor even as he was reaching for his own gun, scrambling for balance on the floor. The girl screamed but that was all right, almost a plus factor since while it wheeled John’s attention back to Wulff it also shook up his sense of timing; the gun was already firing but the girl had driven him off balance and he was firing to the place where Wulff had
been
rather than toward the new position on the floor. Even so, it was much closer than Wulff had wanted it to be. The man had good instincts; he was a shooter. Even off balance, the girl’s screams rippling higher and higher in the room, he drove the first bullet only inches above Wulff’s right ear, put the second into the floor where his kneecap had just been, and all the time Wulff was fumbling, fumbling for his gun which had gotten jammed inside his clothing.

Stupidity. It was the kind of thing which happened to people who were long dead, but he had somehow gotten the butt of the damned thing going head over heels from the barrel and it had caught on the cloth. For one sickening instant Wulff thought that he was not going to get the gun out at all. He was going to die pumped full of holes on this floor not two hours after he had hit San Francisco, and what the hell would be made of
that.
Should have stayed in New York, Wulff, at least you knew the territory.

But the girl’s screaming helped a lot. Speed made you overreact, brought events on top of you and then
froze
them so that they seemed to be happening over and again at a terrific slow motion. The girl must have felt herself to be inside death, watching what was developing in front of her; the crash-end of the amphetamines had not blunted but sharpened her perceptions so that rolling over her in waves came pain and fear and she reacted against them, squealing and screaming hysterically. But at last, even as the third bullet came just a few inches off his middle, Wulff was able to get the damned gun out and rolling and he pointed it where he thought John would go when he tried to jump, and fired. Once, then twice, the recoil, small from the point thirty-eight, enough in his position to knock him into the wall. The sound of John’s body falling was covered by the sound of his own impact as he collapsed into the wall, and then slowly he turned, came to one knee, looked in front of him. John was lying on the floor, his pistol two or three feet away, flung then as he had taken the shot. His face already seemed frozen into the rictus of death. John had been living death for so long that when it came at last it swaddled him under it as if he had been dead a hundred years.