Free Lone Wolf #9: Miami Marauder by Mike Barry Page A

probably the drug traffickers had the same feeling: that there was nothing between them and the outcome they wanted but motive. Considerations such as morals just did not enter into it anymore. If they ever had.
    Out into the roadway, level the gun (there was no one in line behind the Chrysler at the light but even if there had been he would have gone ahead with it; who was going to interfere with him?), watch the rising dread pouring into the driver’s face from all the pockets which sowed dread, gesture with the gun, no need to say a word, yank open the door, push him, spinning, from the car and then behind the wheel. The easy transfer accomplished, the car enveloped him like a gigantic mouth, strangely warm, smelling delicately of sweat and exhaust, the huge wheel already curving into his hands with a sense of total familiarity: there were women like that, they could go from one man to the other with such ease and accommodation that you wondered, really wondered, if they were making love to anyone but themselves. The same thing with this Chrysler New Yorker, brougham equipment, floor mats with Cadillac symbols beneath him (so the driver had perhaps had equivocal feelings about his car), the shouts of the driver diminishing behind him as he pulled the car into lane and at speed merged with traffic heading southward, always now, heading south.
    It was easy. Once you broke free of restraints, once you functioned in Calabrese’s world where your desires were modified only by the equipment you had to satisfy them … everything was very easy. Wulff could see the pleasures of criminality. All of that stuff the agencies gave you about how ill-paying a life of crime was and how your average criminal spent five years in jail for every one out and earned a net income of four thousand and fifty dollars a year before taxes … all of that was crap. They did not want to acknowledge the fact that the criminal’s
way
of looking at things was simply superior to the more ordinary view and that the statistics were spoiled by a lot of amateurs and smalltimers getting lumped in with the overall statistics. Actually, the professional criminal took risks which were merely consonant with his job and he tended to make out rather well. Better than he would have any other way.
    Wulff headed the car into Miami. From Louisville to Miami is not a long trip but it was somewhat longer than he thought; it must have been five or six hundred miles anyway and this meant two gas stops, the Chrysler guzzling it away at eight or nine miles to the gallon even on the road. The big cars just couldn’t take it anymore, the country was clamping down on them, but aside from thinking of the gas mileage and the oncoming death of the big car Wulff kept his mind as completely blank as possible, watching the sack bouncing on the seat next to him, sweeping his glance between US 1 and the sack mechanically, rhythmically every thirty seconds or so, drawing this attention into a concentrated, fixed tube. Driving was satisfying and mindless, that was why it had to be the true American pasttime.
    Somewhere around Jacksonville a radio car picked him up; he must have been doing seventy-five or eighty within the township limits and as the car came down on top of him, all the blinkers and headlights going, Wulff had a moment of indecision. Then without thinking about it further he put the accelerator into the floorboards and got the car quickly up to ninety, deciding to outrun the police car if he could. It would only be embarrassing and messy if he were picked up and he would probably have to shoot the cop down rather than get into any of it; he did not want to get into cop-killing if he could help it. It was just too complicated, it would mean more people to evade; ethics hardly entered into it at all.
    They dragged down US 1 at ninety and ninety-five miles an hour, going through intersections and traffic lights as if locked together by a long chain, then, finally, Wulff