Free Lone Wolf #8: Los Angeles Holocaust by Mike Barry

sources of cash out there. He already had the U-haul and the Ford, of course, and it was simple enough to back them straight up to the church. It turned out that that long hallway in the back room instead of the fourth wall led to a boarded-up wooden door around the corner near a vacant lot. No one was on the street at this hour at all and the U-haul was able to come in flush to the wall so the armaments were not exposed to sight for even an instant. Still, it was hard, heavy work, Justice helping, the two of them sweating freely in the dark, Harlem air and when they had finished Williams wanted nothing so much as to sink into one of those pew-benches in the Brother Divinity and just sweat for a while.
    But Justice had become very nervous. “You must go, my son,” he said, adopting or readopting his ministerial manner the moment that they had come out of the street. “He who travels with the Lord travels as if with the wind; his feet are speedy and his heart is light but he that will tarry, yea, he that will tarry even in the name of the Lord will do so with a great burden because in His service there may be no delay.” That seemed to clinch the issue fairly well, at least from Brother Justice’s point of view.
    He had given the reverend eight thousand three hundred and four dollars and had gotten into the Ford and gotten the hell out of there as quickly as a man could when he was leaving a place of the Lord. Driving south on St. Nicholas he had done so with the vague feeling that he might never see Harlem again, that he never would see Harlem again, but that was merely an illusion. The only way that he would fail to see Harlem again would be if the two of them got killed out there. (He could not think of Wulff dying and Williams lucking through alone.) Otherwise he would be in Harlem for the rest of his life. Any black man in America lived in Harlem no matter how far he journeyed, and that was the truth of it.
    So he had the U-haul loaded and the next thing was to call his wife; at least tell her where the ten thousand was and that it was hers and he had to get out of town but he found that he simply could not do it. He could not face it; more than likely he would find if he called that she was giving, had given, birth and that double-connection, son (he knew it would be a boy) and wife, would have been too great. As far as he had gone, he would simply never make it all the way out of here if he learned that he had a son. So instead he simply wrote her a letter, a flat, businesslike delivering-the-message letter which he mailed to her in care of her sister, saying nothing about the way he felt or what it meant to leave her, saying that he would be back and this time, somehow, they would make it work. It was a lie, he knew it was, but at this time it was the best that he could give her, the only thing that he could give her.
    And then, the letter mailed, the blinds drawn, the house locked up, the few items he thought he might need rolled into a suitcase and hurled into the back of the car, the armaments themselves under double-bolts which he spent half a day working on, Williams got out of there as quickly as he could. Staying there, staying in the little house in St. Albans with a U-haul full of ordnance in the neat, white garage would have been criminally stupid for anyone … but it was not only that. If he stayed in this house, even with the phone pulled out of the wall, which he did, the memories were going to get him, the feelings composed of rage, loss, abandonment, disaster … and he might never move. He had to move. If he did not do it now he never would. He would stay in St. Albans with a healing knife wound in his gut and he would die slowly, thirty or forty years maybe, sinking into his own revulsion. What Wulff offered him was at least quicker and cleaner. It was a chance to confront the enemy whole, to seize and see the face of the nightmare.
    He would take it.
    So he got into the Ford and pulled the U-haul