Free Lone Wolf #6: Chicago Slaughter by Mike Barry

the parking area of a large, dismal warehouse on the South Side.
    Here was familiar territory for Wulff. Chicago had been a strangeness, the elegance of the river, the high buildings along the waterfront looking like nothing in New York, only San Francisco could compare with this. But the South Side was pure Hunts Point; it looked like the Bronx might at the end of a murky, greasy afternoon and Wulff, looking at the way that the doors of the warehouse, streaked with obscene lettering, were closed against the afternoon, felt that he was at home for the first time since he had hit this town. He understood this warehouse, and by implication he understood the man who worked in it. It was a contrived ugliness; they were here because the man who ran things wanted to be here and would have picked a place like this given any alternative. It was the proper kind of cover. And the scene, stretching away from the warehouse on all sides was pure Hunts Point too; there was a feeling here of abandonment so profound that it had moved beyond the few stumbling human forms he saw here into the landscape itself, a landscape streaked and exhausted, wrecked and ruined by assaults compounded over fifty years. Nothing could live here. Nothing could even die here. There was not even the energy to support transition from the one state to the other.
    “All right,” Mendoza said, pulling into a flat, open space at the back of the parking area, removed from a bank of trucks, “that’s it. End of the line. Let’s go.” He tapped the valise and then took it by the handle, waved the gun and showed it to Wulff. “Don’t give me any trouble,” he said.
    “I wouldn’t think of it. I wouldn’t think of giving you any trouble.”
    “Because,” Mendoza said waving the gun, “we’ve gone this far, it would be a shame not to wrap up the job and deliver you nice and safely. Not that I’m not willing to knock you off, you understand. I’ve been given a lot of latitude. But I’m a man of surpassing neatness.”
    “Of course,” Wulff said. Not looking at the man, he got laboriously out of the taxi, felt ground under his feet, stood unsteadily. His cramped position in the cab, the tension of the drive had taken more from him than he might have calculated; for an instant Wulff thought that he might pitch to the ground. Mendoza must have seen it too because he smiled distantly and said, “Nerves will get you even if fright doesn’t, eh, Wulff?”
    And they had exchanged another of their looks then, the third or fourth since all of this had started, a look which said that they both knew exactly what was going on and indeed were so deep into it that either could have played the other’s role. But in spite of that understanding they would act as if this were exactly serious instead of repertory theatre and not make any sudden moves against the grain. Professionalism. Wulff could understand this, he could respect a man who had this competence, this control of a situation. What it came down to at the root, he supposed, was that Mendoza was quite willing to die if he had to and the communicability of this resignation made him more threatening rather than less; there was very little you could do against a man who was willing to die and understood death this well. It was this power in himself which had made Wulff so effective. They walked, Wulff a few paces ahead of Mendoza, into the bottom level of a huge warehouse, a scattering of trucks on this level, sacks, leading bins, one of the trucks muttering away at low idle, men scurrying through the open spaces.
    So these people were in the dispatching business, Wulff thought, keeping a few paces ahead of Mendoza, noting that no one looked at him. Each man seemed quite absorbed in his own task which for the most part seemed to be loading the trucks, although one group of men was working frantically on the idling engine, apparently trying to repair it before the fumes blanked them out. “That’s nice,”