Free Lone Wolf #6: Chicago Slaughter by Mike Barry Page A

Mendoza said behind him, “that’s very nice, just keep on walking that way and everything will be fine. You’re a cooperative gentleman, do you know that? Really quite a cooperative gentleman,” and then prodded him once, guiding him right. Wulff found himself walking into an enormous service elevator, the cage open, the handle unattended. Mendoza poked and prodded him into a corner, closed the gate one-handed and then cranked on the handle, meanwhile holding the gun poised on him in that single, absent gesture. The man knew what he was doing. The man was not to be faulted; he did his job about as well as any Wulff had ever seen. The elevator went up to the second level, hovered there for a moment and then with a crack Mendoza stopped it, opened the cage. Wulff found himself looking into a long, low hallway, oddly stark and well-lighted for a building of this sort. Whoever worked on this level obviously had a good sense of his prerogatives. “Come on,” Mendoza said, standing by the handle. “Start walking.”
    Wulff went past him. For a moment there was an opportunity; the gap between them was only a couple of feet and he might have been able to have extended an arm, closed that gap, knocked Mendoza off his feet. It was at least a possibilty and for a moment Wulff indeed did consider it but then kept on walking. He did not like the odds. It was even money or a little better then that that he might have been able to overpower Mendoza, wrest the gun away, take control of the situation … but fifty percent or a little more was not good enough. Simply stated, he was not that desperate. He had a fair chance of getting out of this alive or at least staying alive for a while, he did not have to do anything drastic. Besides, Mendoza had the valise. The valise was somewhere in the man’s possession; he had left it with the men in the booth controlling access to the parking area but it wasn’t going to stay with them too long at all. He was sure that Mendoza was going to get it back and transfer it up the line. Funny thing about this man; Wulff did not think of him as a messenger but as a quality in his own right.
    Mendoza snorted now as if he had gauged everything in Wulff’s head, had calculated it so well that he knew what Wulff was going to think before it had been thought. Of course. A professional: he had left that possibility of attack open to Wulff—not really to taunt him because he knew that Wulff was too much of a professional himself to try it. Only one professional could do it to another; it was a tribute that Mendoza had given him. A weaker, a less intelligent or experienced man might have sprung at his abductor then. Wulff shook his head with disgust and walked down the hallway.
    At the end, a door opened before him as if this had been prepared, as if his coming had been observed. He walked through into an office. He saw the man who had held the door for him and then he saw Mendoza come through and close that door as the man went back to his desk, sat, sighed, put his hands behind his head and looked at Wulff with cold, measuring eyes. Then the man sighed again, the coldness in his eyes turned into a soothed pleasure and he leaned further back, put his feet up on the desk, smiled and said, “Mendoza, that was good work. It really was.”
    “Thank you,” Mendoza said. “It was my pleasure.”
    “I knew you would do it all the time. I never doubted that you would bring the son of a bitch in. Someone else, yes, I wouldn’t have been sure. But not with you. I’ve just had the feeling coming over me for hours that you had scored.”
    “I scored,” Mendoza said. “That’s for sure.”
    “Where’s the smack?” the man said. His eyes gleamed. Wulff, looking at him, thought that he had never seen such corruption before, not of this variety, but then again there was no judging from appearances. The man in front of him, heavy, in his early fifties, dressed in a blue business suit that seemed to cover