Free Lone Wolf #13: The Killing Run by Mike Barry

you haven’t given me your life,” Wulff said. “I’ve got to have that too, because as long as you live, you see, right up to the minute of your death, you’re still a murderer. You’re still dangerous.”
    “Now, wait a minute,” Cohen said, “now, just wait a minute here …” Wulff pointed the gun at Cohen’s head and pulled the trigger in one convulsive motion. The bullet came forward, tore off the left side of Cohen’s skull, and blew it against the wall; from the open spot that had been created, blood charged in a muddy explosion, a series of spurts like semen moving out unevenly. The corpse rolled over onto the floor, kicked once in an absent way, and lay there in that peculiar and knowledgeable way of all the dead everywhere, seeming simultaneously to embrace all knowledge and to reject it, as if that knowledge, of what it was like on the other side of passage, was no longer worth passing on to the desperate and trivial living.
    Wulff looked at the body with disgust and then put his gun away and went over and kicked it once in the ribs, feeling the dull give, the amorphous crackle of the useless bone. Then he went to the door and down the hallway almost absently, fingering the safe-deposit key and trying to plan his next move.
    Shit. And shit again.

IX
    Marie Calvante had said to him, “I’ll do anything. I’ll do anything that you want to do. If you want to quit the department, you can do it, I don’t care, we’ll get married whenever you want. In the meantime, I’ll live with you. I won’t stop you from doing anything that you feel you have to. But don’t you think that it’s better to stay in? You can’t fix anything from the outside, because once you’re out, you lose control of it, but inside, inside you can work for change. You can work to better things. Don’t you think so?”
    And he had said, “I don’t know. I just don’t know. You can’t change them from the inside, because they turn you into the enemy, don’t you see that, Marie? You’ve got to become one of them just to survive, that’s the way they have it rigged. Once you’re on narco, you don’t last unless you play their game, and if you go off narco to complain, they take care of you in other ways. They’ll put you on a nowhere beat in Brownsville until you’re fifty years old, that’s what the hell they’ll do.” She had been a very pretty girl, oh my, had she been pretty; there had been something heartbreaking as well to her aspect, the nature of her sensuality had been such that it seemed likely to shatter at any time, shatter into something gentle and weeping, or had that only been the way that he had felt when he had looked at her? Well, he would never know now, that was for sure. “I don’t know,” he had said again, “I don’t want to stay, but I don’t want to do anything to hurt us, either. I need this job, we need it for a little while.” And she had said, “Anything that hurts you hurts the two of us,” and that had almost broken him, hearing her put it that way, but it had broken him into something stronger rather than the reverse. A reassembly plant of the soul—that was what she had called him once, thinking of her own background, but it had not been true; it had gone the other way. She had put all the pieces of him together: the Vietnam pieces, the narco pieces, all of the things that shrieked and squeaked in the night.
    Well, that had been a long time ago. That had sure been a hell of a long time ago, a different stage of existence for Wulff, although the time could be really measured only in months since he had taken the steps two at a time in that miserable SRO building to find her dead. OD’d out alone and in the middle of a bare room. That just went to show you where you would get, going around busting informants and taking narco seriously. It would have been a good lesson for him if he had taken it on that level, resolved to shape up and from that time onward follow the dictates