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

out, getting only one suspicious glance on the George Washington Bridge from a toll-taker who thought that he heard something rattling in the back. If he had been going east, where the toll booths were, they might even have stopped him but west the toll booths had long since been abandoned, double-fare, get you on the way back (he might never be back) and the toll-taker, peering down the line at the jouncing truck, obviously calculated and then decided that it was not worth it. Hs was not going to be any goddamned hero on ten thousand eight hundred dollars a year—Williams knew the feeling—and besides the U-haul would probably turn out to be full of pots and pans. Who the hell needed it?
    Over the bridge and onto Route 80. Immediately, just three miles, less than that, out of Manhattan the road, the flat, dead spaces, and sensation of the interstate highway overtook him, a road that was everywhere and nowhere, the same ruined landscape that would confront him for three thousand miles already at Teaneck, Little Ferry, Hackensack, Paterson … and deeper then to the breakoff on 46 where 80, not yet completed, fed into the state highway for a while, fighting for space and air with trucks on all sides. Then another patch of 80 and the death of interstate again. He did not know which was worse, to choke and fume on a road with character or to be lost in the emptiness of the interstate … back on 46 again for a little while to figure it out, make a final decision (he never did). And then on 80 for real now, rolling toward the Delaware Water Gap, into Pennsylvania, on Pennsylvania sections, the night falling fast, cars passing him at a hundred and a hundred and ten miles an hour on these unpatrolled segments, the Ford stumbling and missing around seventy-five, the little trailer chattering behind him. On through Pennsylvania all night, poking on into Ohio by the dawn’s early light, his first stopover in a cheap motel in Ohio for a five-hour nap, uneasy dreams of the U-haul exploding tumbling through his mind. Then to the road again, Ohio the same as New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio the same as Illinois and swinging then outside Chicago, the hookup with 90 leading across the flat, dead plains states. Then the real interstate began: mile after mile, hundreds of miles of gray, empty space, sometimes the Ford surrounded as he picked up commuter traffic off the city belts, most of the time almost alone on the highway pushing it as close to seventy-five as he could, the motor cutting out thunderously once at seventy-eight, loss of power steering and the U-haul jackknifing, almost hurling him ass-end first, off the road, but he was able to save it. That was the only exciting thing that happened for twelve hours as he decided to get the best he could out of the five hours’ stopover and see if he could make it all the way into the far western states before the dawn. In and out of transmission belts, the radio flicking on and off, his mind submerged somewhere below attention, Williams kept the pace up, after a while almost locked out of the world, the perimeters of the Ford the perimeters of existence, everything happening only in the car.
    Then he came up against the roadblock, locked into that hypnotic state, yanking the wheel, smashing the brakes almost at the last moment, coming to a rearing, terrified attention as he saw men pour from the sides of the road surrounding the wooden sawhorses. There were guns in their hands.
    These were not cops.
    Williams saw it all in one burst of attention, then, the car idling, he was already diving toward the floorboards. The first shot came high, too high, smashing the safety windshield, putting little plasticine pellets down around his shoulders. And then the second, more intense series followed, the shots skittering off the hood, dumped into the driver’s compartment. If he hadn’t hit the floor they would have had him. But even on the floor Williams was calculating, he was coming to