Free Lone Wolf #10: Harlem Showdown by Mike Barry Page A

about the rich and ancient traditions of his background that had brought him to just this moment, Gianelli put the needle into his arm, pressed the plunger all the way through, and took the rush.
    It was like thunder in the head, blood in the gut, a feeling of warmth below, alertness above that had not been duplicated in anything else that he had found in his sixty-three years. Women were all right, but with women the pleasure was too quick, a few brief spasms at the end of the manic jerking and you were spent, exhausted, lying across them gasping out the heartbeats. But horse carried you on and on; liquor was all right, but the induction was too slow and sometimes in the getting there one would lose all sense of what had sent him that way. Other earthly pleasures not excluding sleep were not even worth considering. But horse, ah! horse went on forever. He felt it beating like a bird within him now, felt it rising, his heart itself enlarging like a butterfly with gigantic wings to embrace the horse as it hit his system. Then, just barely getting the needle out, just barely maintaining enough sense of the situation to get the damned needle
out
and put it somewhere on a high shelf where it would be safe for the next time, for the next sacred rush, Gianelli staggered to the bed, sat on it heavily listening to the springs whoosh and then lay straight out, feet up, arms extended, looking upward, looking at the ceiling, watching the pretty pictures that began to float across the slate of his mind.
    Beautiful, it was beautiful. He writhed with joy watching those pictures: there were women being chalked upon that slate, flaring hips and gigantic breasts; there were forest images that he had not seen except under the horse for thirty years. Oh, there were a multiplicity of things, and Gianelli enjoyed every one of them, writhing, thrashing, screaming on the bed as the images blasted through. Behind all this the vague thought that he should not be doing this, that he was wasting valuable time doping when he should be hard on the trail of the Wulff was so frail, so transparent as to be negligible; he did not have to think of it at all. Later. There would be time for all of this later. Wouldn’t there be? The man was at his mercy, Gianelli had the upper hand, everything was a mere matter of time and he could take the man any time he felt like it. In the meantime he was entitled to his own relaxation. Wasn’t he? Of course he was. No less than anyone, his old, dear friend, Calabrese would have approved.
    Calabrese would have understood why his loyal and devoted friend Gianelli would be entitled to pause during his vendetta for a little bit of the horse that he so loved and would not begrudge him this great and simple pleasure. Had not Calabrese himself, after all, shown his own sympathy and understanding for heroin by being critical to its distribution?
    Of course he had.
    Gianelli lay on the bed dreaming, and all sense of time or urgency perished from him as it always, always did when inside the great gong of self began to ring.

VII
    Lincoln was just about to score, huddling intensely over the gleaming frame of the bar, dealing hard and fast, the deck in his hand twinkling like a magician’s pack of cards in the lights, edging in, closer and closer to the score all the time, the buyer just sitting there, astounded, paralyzed by Lincoln’s self-sufficiency and spiel, the vision of pure, white wonder and release that Lincoln showed in his hand … when everything blew up.
    One moment Lincoln was working away, going into particulars, holding the deck like a wand, while the buyer, a thin cat who Lincoln had never seen in the lounge before just watched everything, fascinated, his eyes rolling like pebbles. The next moment there was a dull, pounding rush, a
whoomp!
as if the stars in the sky had suddenly punched out holes of heaven, and he was rolling, rolling, all around him the bar, maybe fifty people along its length, another couple of