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

of the department under the rules and regulations of the career and salary plan. Of course, it had not gone that way at all; seeing Marie dead in that room had sparked him to a hell of a lot of killing; a lot of people had come to regret the death of Marie Calvante, but still, sometimes, he wished that he could go back to the way it was when she had told him that even if he stayed with the department, if he played it as rotten and corrupt as the rest of them, she would still love him, it would make no difference at all. Maybe it would not.
    Maybe it would not at all, but she was indisputably dead, and since then nothing had been quite the same, notably the careers of a couple of hundred top-echelon drug dealers. Still, now and then Wulff would find himself thinking, without any conscious control or understanding, of the way it might have been if none of this had ever happened. He would be living in a house with his wife, Marie, right? He would still be a part of the narco squad, absolutely. He would be keeping his mouth shut and doing what narco required, and not making any waves at all—well, maybe. Maybe, again, not. Perhaps he would have turned himself to working from the inside, subverting narco instead of carrying it forward. It was the kind of angle that anyone who knew his way around the squad could have worked out; it would have meant turning down all graft, turning all supplies of drugs confiscated over to the property clerk, going after the to-line street dealers without letting the informants take the heat. Well, again, maybe not. He wouldn’t have lasted more than a month on narco carrying on that way; busting an informant had gotten him thrown off in a day, but how long could he have gone the other?
    No, there was no point in thinking about it. There was no reason to carry it on through; what had happened had happened to him, all right, and the only comfort that he could find might be in understanding that it would have worked out this way in any case. Maybe Marie had to die anyway. Maybe it was ordained that she would die and fate had thus contrived her death in a way that would have the maximum effect upon Wulff and the maximum effect upon the evil people toward whose destruction he was bent. Maybe. Maybe you could see it that way.
    All that he knew was this—that he had turned toward her in the dense spaces of the car when all of the talking was done, and just before they had gone out of there, he had held her, held her against him, and said, “I don’t want anything to hurt you, that’s all. Whatever happens, I don’t want you to be hurt by any of this,” and she had come against him, against him in the night, the slight, beating moths of her hands against his cheekbones, and had said, “Don’t you understand that you can never hurt me, never, no matter what you do?” And it was that that he would have to live with always, not the way she had kissed him then, or later how she had come against him in that small and final enclosure that they had made of their connection in the close and gripping theater of his bed.

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    Heading the car east, pushing toward Mobile, Wulff had a blazing moment of total insight: they would mass together to get him. Probably at Atlanta, but not beyond Philadelphia, they would be in wait for him, and this time there would be no reprieve, this time they would be there by the hundreds, all of them massed in a final pact of desperation, and he would not have a chance. It was obvious; they could not allow this to continue. News of what had happened to Cohen would have gotten around; they would have picked it up, and from that they would have assimilated the one message that they could not bear—that Wulff was back in action, that he had somehow swung clear of all the traps that Mexico and the international organization had set to trap him, and that now, extremely angry, he was out after them again, his anger, if possible, intensified by the fact that there was an element of