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

we’ll just close in, and if he does move we’ll come in anyway. Either way—”
    “Either way I don’t see much of a problem.”
    “There are always problems,” Wulff said. “I wouldn’t know what to do without a problem. I haven’t had a single goddamned thing yet in ten cities that wasn’t a challenge, and I don’t think that this is going to be easy, either. Everything’s a struggle. Nothing comes without work.”
    “Yeah,” Owens said, “but this doesn’t look as bad as some of the others, does it?”
    “Everything looks bad. You can die clumsy or brave, you can die fighting against a thousand or because some sixteen-year-old kid playing sniper nails you. But either way you’re just as dead. The quality of the death is exactly the same.”
    “Not necessarily,” Owens said gently, “not necessarily. But then again I’m no priest, minister, or rabbi. I couldn’t get into any argument over that. And I don’t think this is the time to do it, either.”
    “No,” Wulff said. “I guess we’ll table that one.”
    They sat in almost companionable silence for a while then, saying nothing, waiting the situation out, Owens racing the engine every now and then, listening to the valves tap, and waiting for the Bonneville to disgorge some evidence of life or death. It was an easy vigil in a way because it had a good sense of pace and direction. It was not a matter of waiting out some nameless menace in an ambiguous position. They knew exactly who they were and what they were waiting for, and there was a definite end to it. There was a man out there; eventually he would make his presence known and they would kill him. Either that or he would give no indication of his presence and that would be good enough for them, too; they could deal with the dead or injured man by closing in on him. But the situation was essentially in their hands, or so Wulff calculated; that was a pleasure, of course—it was so rare that he had controlled the tempo of a scene—but then again you had to protect yourself against the possibility of being lulled, protect yourself against taking your safety for granted. He leaned back against the seat, letting the edges of steel come against him, and it prodded him into wakefulness.
    “You got to understand the way a guy thinks; the kind of guy who really wants to die,” Owens said.
    “Who’s that?”
    “This guy I worked for. He really wanted to die. Going on living was what frightened him; dealing with death gave him something to do. But after a while when he kept on beating death he got to thinking that he was cheating, that he wasn’t taking death seriously enough or it would have gotten him. There’s no point in fooling around with death if you’re going to cheat it time and again. So he started to get more serious.”
    “Yeah,” Wulff said, “I know the feeling. You begin to feel immortal if you take chance after chance and it doesn’t catch up with you.”
    “No,” Owens said, “it’s not quite that way. I mean I know what you’re saying. If you get into a lot of tough situations and start to glide out of them you wonder if you’re just dreaming. But that doesn’t have to do with a guy who really wants to die. That’s a different situation altogether, when you’re talking about a man who really wants to end his life. He can push farther and farther, but if nothing happens, if he keeps getting away with it, he’s going to get the feeling that he’s not taking things seriously enough, so he gets damned serious.”
    “I never wanted to die,” Wulff said and thought that over for a while. It seemed to be an important insight and one that he was on the edge of getting absolutely, but then it slid away. “No, I don’t quite mean that,” he said. “It was that I calculated that I was dead already. I got killed on West 93rd Street. So that I was a dead man already. They can’t kill a dead man. They can only stop him. You know what I mean?”
    “Oh,” Owens