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

rather than to shape him looked like he had spent half his life in the process of breaking people and now, at this stage of the game, had just begun to move into the period where he could have other people do this work. Still, he thought again, if you could look at a man and fully judge him there would be no need for painstaking detective detail work, there might be no need for a police force at all. Maybe the man in front of him was a saint who operated this warehouse to give the handicapped a station in life and was kind to animals and small children. Of course. Absolutely. The pressure is getting to me, Wulff thought, it is really getting to me and this much he knew was the truth; fatigue was one part of it and the other was that he had already spent too much time in too many rooms, confronting people like this. There were limits to what one could take and he found himself wondering almost clinically if he might have passed them. But then what?
    “Where’s the smack?” the man said again, more hoarsely. He brought his palms together. “Come on, Mendoza, where’d you stash it? Don’t tell me that you didn’t—”
    “I gave it in at the gate,” Mendoza said. He pointed toward Wulff. “I didn’t want to carry it up here with him; I thought that I had enough to handle here.”
    “Well,” the man said, his palms beginning to rub together in an unconscious gesture of tension, “that was good thinking. Mendoza, why don’t you get out of here? I think I’d like to have a conference with this man.”
    “I wouldn’t advise that,” Mendoza said.
    “Oh?”
    “Let me keep him covered. It’s better that way.”
    “What do you think?” the man at the desk said to Wulff, abruptly. “Should your friend Mendoza stay here and watch you while we talk? Or can we make this a private conference?”
    “That’s up to you,” Wulff said. The man was baiting him. Little saucers of light inverted in his eyes, twinkles of liveliness at the corners of his mouth. He knew that if he could come close to the man he would hear a ragged intake of breath, find irregularities in respiration. It excited him. Fear, pain, hurt excited this one. Of course, he was no exception. Most of them liked to deal with people in this way, otherwise why would they do it?
    “I think it would be sensible,” Mendoza said. “He’s a rough character.”
    “A rough character,” the man at the desk said softly, “a rough tough character, Burt Wulff. Your reputation has preceded you, you are a famous man.” He moved his hands below eye-level, there was the sound of a drawer opening, and then the man came out with a gun which he showed to Wulff with the same absent tenderness that he might if he were demonstrating it for sale in a firearms shop. “What do you think of that?” he said.
    “Nothing,” Wulff said, “I think nothing of the gun at all.”
    “Can we have a calm and reasonable discussion here?”
    “I never said otherwise.”
    “Get out of here, Mendoza,” the man said. There was a sly, cruel overlay in his voice. “We’ll talk privately.”
    “In other words I’ve done my job.”
    “In other words you’ve done your job,” the man agreed comfortably, “and it’s time to go.”
    “All right,” Mendoza said. He left the room abruptly. The man behind the desk made a flourishing gesture to Wulff, half-inclined in a bow and said, “Would you mind checking to see if the door is locked? I’d like this to be a private conversation.” He showed the gun to Wulff again like a demonstrator.
    “All right,” Wulff said, “I’ll do that.” He walked to the door, checked the knob, walked back.
    “No,” the man said, “there’s a bolt there too. Throw it.” His face was alight. A smile almost genial came from him. “You’ll do that, won’t you?”
    “Surely,” Wulff said. He went back to the door, threw the bolt that he found there and went back to the desk. He stood there then while the man made little circles like