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

deal with that any more.
    There was another body in the Bonneville. Looking up, sweeping the terrain, Wulff could see that. Counter to the body of Owens in his own car there was a corpse in there; it was lying just below the level of the windshield, just barely visible at this angle unless you knew exactly what you were looking for. Yet, in another way, glowing like a headlamp from that confined space, it would have been impossible to have missed it.
    Wulff walked over to the car and looked at the corpse. It had been a man once but was no longer anything at all; like the body on the desert, it had a face that had been cleaned of all expression. Yet if the body on the desert had shown a clean, bright, almost perceptive aspect in its absence of emotion, then the one in the car seemed to have been brought below the level of individuation. The body on the desert had been a face cleared of expression, whereas this one looked as if it had never had any emotion whatsoever. Wulff looked at the thing, it had been five feet, seven inches in life, an average-sized man now clinging to the seat in parody of the terror that must have grabbed him when the bullets hit. And then for reasons he could not really explain, Wulff raised his pistol and put two fast shots into the face. The body bucked on the seat. Very little blood fell. With no metabolism to punch out the blood, to try and seal over the wounds in the energy of survival, the corpse accepted those pellets as a child might have taken cookies.
    No satisfaction, Wulff thought, and walked away from the Bonneville reloading his gun in an absentminded way. There was no satisfaction in any of this, not that he was looking for satisfaction, not that anything mattered. It was all past tense, Wulff thought, that was the way he had to look at it; not a matter of ongoing action—which was bad enough what with all the pain connected—but action frozen in time, everything history, history even before consummation. No, Wulff thought, the presence of death made everything inconsequential; in that look of termination the faces of the dead man in the car, the dead one on the desert, and Owens there was a finality that meant that anything held by the living was unimportant.
    He put his gun away. It was hot. It was ninety-five degrees and rising on the border and still no traffic, not a single car since all of this had started, barely—Wulff looked at his watch—fifteen minutes ago. Fifteen minutes and three lives, that was all it took. Fifteen minutes and no traffic, two ruined cars, no way out.
    Wulff thought that if you wanted to pursue it in that direction there were edges of panic in this situation. You could not dismiss the seriousness of this, with the heat and with the car out of commission. And with the bodies. If a highway patrol car was the first to pass by, Wulff thought, he did not want to find himself in the position of explaining to the occupant exactly what the hell had gone on. He might make his case, he might not … but it would take a hell of a long time, it would involve bringing him into some wretched substation and by that time the general call information would be in their hands. No. He had to get out of here.
    The Bonneville or the Fleetwood? Each was wrecked, either was as good as the other. Taking a step toward the Bonneville first, he backed off. He could not under any circumstances enter that car. The aroma of death was too strong. Even if it was his only escape from the desert, Wulff thought he could not commit himself to that space, could not touch the dead man on the seat…. Owens, at least, was his own.
    Wulff went back to the Fleetwood. Owens rested in it like a mourner at a long wake catching a snooze, the tilt of his head, cock of his eye—all he needed was a little breath in his lungs to give the total illusion of life. But he was merely dead meat, meat on the rack of the car. He meant nothing whatsoever. Wulff pushed him out of the way, jacked the keys all the