Lone Wolf #12: Phoenix Inferno (10 page)

Driving into it, Wulff thought that Phoenix was bust-out country too.

Most of America was, of course. Most of America had crystallized toward one of two poles: Harlem or Las Vegas. The better sections verged toward Vegas, the worst looked like Harlem, and those in the middle that had any kind of flexibility were trying to become like Vegas with all their might while sweeping up the crumbs and particles that were pure Harlem. One was the model, the other the penalty, and yet, in the dream that was the country Wulff thought they came together so that one could not tell, being dumped into either of them at night when the lights glowed, where they were. The Apollo Theatre or the Sands, both of them would look the same under the cover of night. They were the bust-out capitals all right, the monuments in all of the western world to the way it would all end up when the American string had been pulled. All of America was piling toward those poles, spinning centrifugally, breaking apart … but somehow what kept the country was its ability to sustain the belief, at least among most of those being pulled apart, that there was a real difference between the two. There was not. Wulff had seen both and he was sure of that as he was of nothing else. Still, the myth kept the country going; it kept the junkies going too, driving themselves in their inner flights toward the one or the other.

Phoenix was a would-be Vegas; unlike Harlem it had chosen to shroud reality, whereas Harlem wallowed in it. But Phoenix, although it was a city that had elements of beauty, you could see beautiful things in it anyway if you were aesthetically inclined, was really the kind of place where people who couldn’t make it for Scarsdale or the Oakland Hills or Grosse Pointe would go. Fifty years ago Phoenix had been nothing; now in pastels it had been slung out across the desert: It had its millionaires, its reactionary senators, its bigoted cesspools that moved from the offices of the downtown to determine what part of the desert certain people would live in. It had its hustlers, too, who were working the El Pastorale Estates, two hundred million acres of swamp underground available now at twenty-five dollars down and a hundred and ninety-nine dollars a month for life. They were working the El Pastorales out of the boiler rooms in downtown Phoenix just as the Pocono hustlers were calling up blind leads out of stinking cellars in Paramus, New Jersey. But the air of Phoenix, Wulff thought, was the more desperate because it had started fresh, out of nothing, out of the desert, and in fifty years it had found nothing better to do than to recapitulate America. It had managed to compress two hundred years of corruption into half a century. It had set out from the beginning to be indistinguishable from the rest of America and it had succeeded. And still, with all of that, it was filled with people who could not make it to Grosse Pointe, played nominal host to a group of basketball players who were never good enough to sustain their skills in Madison Square Garden. It was a failed town.

Wulff came into Phoenix the same way he had come out of Detroit: in a busted-out Fleetwood for a busted-out town, a little sadder, a little wiser, a lot of bodies behind him, a lot of moves made. But he was really no different from the man who had left Detroit, just as the man who had left Detroit differed little from the man who had hit it. He had really been the same for a long time now. For months he had been only an angrier and more efficient version of himself. Changes were only in the direction of making him more certain of his mission. He had never been so angry in his life. And he would be angrier tomorrow.

He headed out toward the estate where Carlin lived. His plan, he guessed, was as simple and straightforward as his plans had always been; no duplicity, he would come up against Carlin’s home, he would reconnoiter, check out the terrain, prepare his ordnance, move in, check things out again, and then he would blow it up. Subtlety was wasted on the Carlins just as it was on almost anything in the world, just as subtlety would have been lost in the rotten town of Phoenix itself. America was Las Vegas. He would bomb out the estate and then Carlin would understand what had happened, but only at the moment of death. Never before. He was one of those people who you would have to kill to change. Wulff accepted that simplicity. At least you knew where you stood.

He owed Carlin a vicious and painful death, of course; Carlin had hurt him more than most of those with whom he had been dealing. Carlin had cost him a man, Owens, who might have been a friend. Carlin had sent a vicious and deadly team of assassins after him. Carlin was functioning from a combination of panic and ambition, which made him more dangerous than almost anyone with whom he had dealt—more dangerous, perhaps, than Calabrese. Cicchini had merely wanted to hold onto his position but Carlin hadn’t found his terminal point yet, he was still pushing, he was ambitious. That meant that he was capable of literally anything. It would be a pleasure to make him die. Wulff had looked forward to it very much. That and almost nothing else had been what had sustained him through the drive from the New Mexico border into Phoenix alone, more kills behind him, Owens gone.

Now there was merely the necessity for revenge, nothing else. Wulff knew that something was wrong, though, even before he approached the estate. He had been finding his way on Owen’s directions, faking his way through back roads and the flat, long pass that would lead then directly to the small access road of Carlin’s home. There had been a police presence on that road, a few more patrol cars than he would have thought necessary in Phoenix at that time of day. Driving farther he came up against a few more patrols, and then at the access road—private, Owens had said, installed at great expense to zoning laws and political maneuverings as well because Carlin wanted his privacy and controlled access and was willing to pay for it—at the access road Wulff found that it had been completely blocked by two old patrol cars, which had straddled the road in such a way that no one could get through. Wulff kept on driving.

You learned that kind of thing on instinct early; a less experienced man than Wulff might have slowed, even stopped, taken a closer look at the cars, tried to find out why the access was blocked. But Wulff kept on sailing at a steady fifty-five, holding the wheel rigidly, looking straight ahead, giving the cops nothing except a little profile, which behind the cloudy glass of the Fleetwood wouldn’t mean a thing. The bullet holes in the rear might attract a little attention, but he doubted it; he had sealed them over with scotch tape at a rest stop, done a pretty good, improvised job, if he said so himself, and it looked like the kind of road damage that almost any big old car might well have picked up somewhere along the way, gravel or stones kicked up from the desert, adventures in off-road traveling, vandalism. No, the cops would not pay too much attention to the Fleetwood. And although Wulff supposed that like everyone else the Phoenix cops had his picture and nominal instructions to shoot him on sight or at least bring him into headquarters for shooting, cops in cities away from where the crimes of the fugitive had been committed just weren’t interested. They had no interest in that kind of stuff, laughed at it, passed the posters around, wiped their asses with them for laughs or said they would, stuff like that. It all came out of the basic attitude of the cop; he was pretty sure that the world was out to get him, all circumstances were dangerous and threatening anyway and you had your own shit to mine, what the hell did you want to mine somebody else’s shit for anyway? The hell with it. Wulff could imagine exactly how these cops in Phoenix felt. They used to laugh a lot at the FBI posters when they had come into the precinct. Fucking J. Edgar, they had said, if they were supposed to get their asses shot up doing his work then they should at least go on his payroll, the cheap, evil old bastard. And those were NYPD, the finest is what they called themselves, the best-educated, best-paid police department in the country. Imagine what they thought of this shit in Phoenix.

He kept on rolling. The patrol was interesting; the shutoff of the access road was even more so. Unless Carlin had the cops literally on his payroll, which was doubtful even in a place like this, it meant that something very bad had happened at the estate, something that demanded a police presence and a shutoff. That could mean that Carlin was dead, of course, but he would hardly be so lucky as to die without Wulff’s own special attentions. More likely something else had happened involving the deaths of other people. Wulff knew that Carlin was panicking. He knew enough of the man from what Owens had told him to gather that he might panic in a very unpleasant way. There was nothing nastier and more dangerous than a weak man backed to the wall, because the weak man would do anything, like a cowardly dog under pressure, to keep from revealing that weakness. Only his self-deceit had enabled him to stay sane; he would do anything to preserve that sanity. So Carlin had probably killed some people, Wulff thought. That was his analysis of the situation, right off the bat.

All right. That meant that he would have to handle things in a different way, but the essential pattern of it would remain the same. Instead of charging Carlin direct he would have to make an end-run. Carlin was not in Phoenix if Wulff’s analysis of the situation was correct; Carlin had committed crimes, he would have left the city. As powerful as he was, Phoenix was still not at the point where a man’s money could buy off the institutions. That would come, of course, that was the shape that America was taking and what it would certainly be in twenty years, but now there were only pockets of that in the country in the same way that cancer in the early stages could be seen as little pockets in the body. In New York it was that way, certainly Washington, Las Vegas, the new and ultimate town of the future made it possible for law to utterly serve power … but Phoenix had a little bit of the frontier, vigilante ethic. It would not be likely that Carlin would be able to stay and to hold the situation with full knowledge of his crimes. Then again he might. You never knew about things like this, but Wulff had learned to proceed like a bridge player, through a series of assumptions; you took the only assumptions that would enable you to make the hand and then you played through. If you won you looked like a genius, of course. If you lost you didn’t look too bad either because you got commended for your daring.

He drove through and past Phoenix, the sound of his ordnance clattering in the trunk of the Fleetwood. When he had gone as far from the center of town as he felt to be necessary—and this town like so many of the American cities built after 1900 had no center at all; Phoenix was merely a series of presumptions, apprehensions against the void, when the apprehensions eased down and the void began, that was the edge of town—he did what he had already done many times before, he got himself a furnished room in a private home. This was the best hideout of all. It beat hotels, rooms in apartment complexes, the streets, flophouses … nothing was better than a little one-and-a-half rented out by some solid and usually senior citizen. The cover was absolute; no one gave a damn who the golden ager was renting to or would want to since it merely helped him meet the tax burden without becoming a welfare case. Oh, Wulff loved their furnished rooms, their elegant but filthy nightstands, their ornate bureaus, the sound of the flush-toilet to the rear that never stopped flushing, not once all night. Hell might be a furnished room, but then again heaven might as likely be; it was likely that heaven was rented out in little partitions, one-and-a-halves at thirty-seven dollars and fifty cents a week, no towels supplied, sockets not quite functional but all of it on a trial basis for the Big Room.

Wulff rented his one-and-a-half from an old man with liver spots on his hands and elbows, little freckles all over the dome of his forehead, about five miles from downtown Phoenix. “You’re not going to be bringing anyone in here, will you?” the old man said. “The one thing I can’t tolerate is visitors.”

“Oh no,” Wulff said, “I don’t know anybody here at all.”

“I mean whores or anything like that. You won’t be bringing in people to fuck.”

Wulff shook his head. “I don’t do that kind of thing,” he said. “I don’t deal with whores, anyway.”

“Got nothing against fucking,” the old man said, creasing and uncreasing the fifty dollars week’s rent in advance, which Wulff had had to pay him before they could even get into serious dialogue. “Fucking’s a good thing, a healthy thing, did a lot of it in my time right up until my wife died three years ago but by that time I got to say I didn’t care for it very much. Tried to oblige her, of course, the poor woman, but it wasn’t anything that I really wanted to do past sixty. But fucking’s okay for young people. You’re a relatively young person, aren’t you?”

“I’m thirty-two.”

“Oh yes,” the old man said, “now that’s a relatively young age, thirty-two.” He blinked against the sun, which lay halfway between their angle of confrontation and ninety degrees overhead, coming into the cluttered yard behind the small house. “Thirty-two is a good age for fucking. I did a lot of fucking at the age of thirty-two. But not with whores. Never with whores.”

“I don’t either,” Wulff said.

“Whores degrade your spirit and they also bring a bad element in. I’ve always been against them. I don’t think there’s any reason for a healthy young man to go with whores. Either he should be married and doing it in a good married way or he has lady friends, has a relationship, it just isn’t a matter of dirty-minded sex if you know what I mean.”

“I’ve got a fair amount of stuff to move in,” Wulff said, thinking of what was jammed up against itself in the trunk of the Fleetwood, thinking of the grenades, the magnums, the small-bore rifle. It was nothing to leave out on the streets, even under metal, even in serene Phoenix. “If you don’t mind—”

“Now with whores it’s just degrading, though,” the old man said, not moving away from the door. “Now there are a lot of people who talk about legalizing sex, particularly down here in the Southwest they say that it’s the coming thing, open whorehouses and charge accounts and music and television and like that. I come from New York originally, you know. Me and the wife. In New York they wouldn’t have such things as open whorehouses.”