Free Lone Wolf #9: Miami Marauder by Mike Barry

they might lull Williams into the feeling that he could indeed try to escape … giving Calabrese the perfect excuse that he needed to kill him.
    No. No, he would not play the old man’s game. It was better to wait now because he knew that Wulff was coming.
    So Williams sat in the room, looking at the dozing guard, and waited for something to happen. Sooner or later you ran your options out and had to do it; you had to wait for something outside of yourself to create a change of circumstances, to change the balance. It had happened to him now; it had happened to the guards and in a sense it had happened to Calabrese himself.
    All of them were simply waiting for Wulff to appear.
    For a man that the outfit had sworn for death, he sure had a hell of a lot of options left.
    You had to admire that.
    Even if the man you were admiring was a dead man.

VIII
    Wulff came into Miami in a stolen car, a 1968 Chrysler New Yorker which he had abducted from the surprised driver right off US 1. There was no time for frills or maneuvers anymore, the business of the
Floridian
had convinced him that if it was going to be done at all it would have to be done quickly and directly. The confrontation with Calabrese could not be accomplished through delicate maneuvering. Coming off the
Floridian
at its first stop, Louisville, there had been a moment of sheer doubt, indecision, with two corpses or near-corpses on this train and what was waiting for him ahead it all seemed hopeless, and he had hung on the platform stupefied for a few moments wondering if he could go ahead. Then the shrieks and sirens of distant cars had piled upon him and he had started to run. Running was simple, instinctive, he knew how to do that. The sirens meant that they had found the bodies on the train; they also meant, if his knowledge of local police was any guide, that the Louisville cops would be just as happy as they could be to do the job that Calabrese’s men had fucked up. Everybody was a bounty hunter. Running with the sack dangling from his shoulder he had burst out at last into an open space, turned a corner, and then found himself at Main Street which was US 1 itself, the big apple before the turnpikes had wiped it out, the only direct route in the old days between Maine and Florida. He had gotten on a bus there, ignoring any glances which he might have been given, wrapped himself into a little sullen space of waiting while in little clumps all of the passengers had gotten off. He had ridden the bus to the end of the line and then gotten out past the suspicious, sweeping glance of the driver, walking south through the outskirts of Louisville, ruined houses lining the road, black people sitting on the sidewalks, mumbling at one another. It was another Harlem scene; despair and the imprint of drugs were universal. They had carried their damages to Louisville, home of the Kentucky Derby and the gateway to the New South as thoroughly as they had in the ruined northeast … and this insight had given him impetus.
    He had kept on walking, a mile, two miles maybe, until the houses had thinned out and then he had turned toward the roadway, looking for a likely car. A Cadillac had passed him, a ruined one all right but driven by a black with three screaming children in the rear of the convertible, the top pulled down, the children standing and hitting one another and he figured that the black had enough trouble already. Then a couple of small domestics had passed him and he figured that these were no good altogether, but then the Chrysler had come by, exactly what he was looking for, driven by a man in his twenties, arm hanging out the window, hand on the roof, banging it in rhythm to radio music. When the car had slid to a stop at the light, probably the last light south in Louisville, Wulff had come from behind a post quickly and had done the necessary almost without conscious thought, functioning on instinct. You learned a few damned things if you were at it this long,