Free Lone Wolf #12: Phoenix Inferno by Mike Barry Page A

looked as if he were humping someone, some miniscule female diminished beneath him, shriveled with the impact of his entrance or from the effort of avoiding him, and Wulff was able to grin at that; death was always like that. Death was the opposite side of a dirty joke, that was for sure; in every dirty joke there was really a scream, the scream of the toilet, the hiss of mortality. It was necessary, it had to be that way—if you did not see that comic and terrible scream in death, that rigor mortis of the frozen smile, then it would overcome you completely and you would be unable to deal at all with a life that would casually circle itself around death, make death the inevitable termination of all of it. Death as apart of life was bullshit, death was anti-life, but death also capped all of life and every individual spirit and by refraction made those lives similarly flooded with death. Oh, it was very complicated, Wulff thought. It was very complicated if you wanted to get into that kind of thing and follow it through to its natural conclusion, but the hell with it. He had lived with death so long that he never could speculate on it, not to any depth. This, if nothing else, was what kept him sane. He walked over to the corpse carefully, nudged the cheek with his shoe, and then turned the body over slowly, his gun cocked, expecting at any moment that the body might lunge to its feet, but no, that was not going to happen, that was definitely an impossibility. If he had ever seen a dead man, this one was it.
    He was a big man with a smooth, empty face. Perhaps in life the face had been full of wrinkles and response, but in death as in sleep all had been smoothed out of it. The face was as bleak and empty as the bottom of a clean frying pan. The sun came down on it and sent little pockets of light into the various crevices, but the corpse did not react to the light, nor did it cast off, merely absorbing it in that quiet way the dead have, the eyes open to the intensity of the sun, taking all light, giving back nothing. One of the hands was curled on a pistol, the fingers curved through it, one of them passing through the trigger hole, the others limply but gracefully embracing the pistol, drawing it into the dead palm, which already had a greenish sheen. The man who had held this pistol had obviously understood guns, and he had died trying to shoot. There was tension in the trigger finger; like a dead fish clinging to the line it was arced against the steel, trying to drive it through a point it would never find. The arm, too, had retained a kind of urgency. Like a boxer, the dead man had tried to put the motion down from his shoulder, hitting through rather than into the object. The man had been a skilled and graceful gunman. In a way, Wulff thought, but only in a way, it was a shame that someone so obviously professional had been killed in the act of doing what he did best, because there was little enough proficiency in the world and what little there was left had to be cherished. If the proficiency had been turned in evil directions, that in no way undercut its reality. Most people simply did not know what the hell they were doing at all. In any circumstances, in any way whatsoever, those who did know were important. He kicked the gun out of the hand. It spun against the desert floor, went behind a tire of the devastated Bonneville. He should have held onto it, Wulff thought. It was almost always a mistake to dispose of weaponry, you never knew when you could use it. But then again the Fleetwood was loaded up. There was a ton of ordnance there. He hardly knew how he was going to transport it if he could not get the car to move. He could not leave it there. And he could not carry it. Well, maybe that was life itself; it was too much to carry yet too important to lay down. Not to think about the thing too much. Not getting sidetracked into thoughts about life. That led you inevitably to thoughts of death and Wulff could not