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

personal revenge.
    And they would not be able to stand for it. This last news, coming at a point when they had reason to believe that Wulff was out of action or dead at last, would be sufficient to drive them together for the first time in a pact to preserve their mutual interests. These vermin tore at one another, they simply refused to cooperate, and it was this, really, that was the only reason Wulff had managed to get as far against them as he had: they had as much stake in the bad luck of one another as enforcement did, and so Wulff had been able to go at them without at least a unified counterattack. The memos they were passing one another through intelligence, the verbal agreements they had made to try to kill him, the supposed thousands of messengers or button men who were alert at all times to find and kill him for bounty—that had been so much bullshit. Calabrese loved what Wulff had been doing just as long as it did not affect him; it was just that much less potential rivalry. Carlin could not have hoped to rise to the top levels without Wulff working for him, and so on. No, their fracture had been his strength, but now, Wulff thought, it could not possibly continue that way, because at last they would see through the fact of Cohen’s murder that the situation was desperate if they did not mass together; but if they did so, it was no-lose. Surely they would see that. Surely they would know that he was working alone, that he had long since exhausted all possibilities of assistance, that he was now officially an escapee from the New York City prison system, among everything else, and that he had blown the last chance that he might have had of assistance from law-enforcement personnel. They would never protect an outright felon; they had to protect their own asses too. No, if they gave it a little careful and patient thought, no more than a couple of minutes apiece, a few phone conferences, a little bit of give and take in their informal councils, they would see that alone he was quite dangerous, that he might be able to do to them what he had done to Cohen; but if they worked together now, he was helpless. He had absolutely no chance against them once they got together, and after everything that they had been through, they certainly would. Probably from the fact that he had hit Cohen they had a good idea of where he had come from and what his information would be and where he would be going next. They had to know that by now, all right. And they would be waiting.
    So why, he thought, hustling Cohen’s Toronado through the fast, dense Southern night, why was he going on? Why was he pushing toward Mobile when death was almost certainly waiting for him, death by the hundreds? Well, there were many interesting reasons for that; he would have to consider them sometime. In the meantime, he was going to go on, add speed if possible, hasten the moment of his rendezvous with Mobile so that it would all come to a point quickly. He guessed that he needed confrontation; what he might be in pursuit of now was not so much victory as an ending, fast and conclusive, to his mission. He would rather, toward that ending, take them on by the hundreds than one by one. It was almost empty on the flat span of the Interstate tonight; he had not passed a car, nor a car him, for several miles. Locked into the utter isolation of the Toronado, Wulff felt himself succumbing to the illusion, which he had had before, that he was the only person in the world, that the world contained no motivations, no possibilities other than his own, that indeed these men whom he had been fighting and killing from coast to coast could in themselves be constructions out of his own imagination, projections from his own necessity, and that were he to pull the Toronado over to the side of the road, cut the engine, clamber out of the car, and say to the night, “This is enough now, I have reached the end, no more, no more of it,” everything would dissolve, all