Lone Wolf #8: Los Angeles Holocaust by Mike Barry Read Free Book Online

change his decision to take the desk job that the precinct had offered and go back on duty at least for a few months while the gut-wound healed completely and he decided what he wanted to do with the next forty or fifty years of his life. If his wife had been around Williams would have discussed the thing with her again, but she was not. Things had been deteriorating between them since the knife that had put him in the hospital had struck. Four days ago, after a particularly vicious disagreement, she had packed up an overnight valise and moved over to her sister’s place in Flatbush; just for a few days, she said, until they cooled off and got some perspective. But it had been longer than just a few days now and she still had not called nor had he. Williams supposed that he couldn’t blame her. The knifing he had taken checking out the methadone center in Spanish Harlem had changed his perspective on a lot of things; had imploded all of his neat, previously held ideas about the system which would protect him and hold him in place as he climbed narrowly up the ladder of the white man’s world, sneering at all of them. Now, having been knifed in the gut, having taken what he thought of as the white man’s knife for the privilege of protecting him, Williams was not sure about the system. It was a massive trap, a sinkhole, that was what it was; it existed for the convenience of a very few who lied to the vast percentage of fools and failures out there so that they, too, could find their way inside with perseverance and luck, the principle of the lottery, a chance for all takers … but it just didn’t work out that way.
    No, maybe Wulff had the right idea after all. He had been skeptical about Wulff, more than skeptical. He had taken the man to be crazy with his attitude that the system sucked right down to the bottom, that the system was dedicated to neither good nor evil but simply to its own preservation, and that that preservation would lead it inevitably to more wrong choices than right ones. The idea that a man could go outside of the system deliberately was bad enough, but when it involved a quest as monumental as putting the drug trade out of existence…. Well maybe, Williams had thought when this all began, the right thing was to take up some kind of collection for the guy’s hospitalization.
    But maybe Wulff had a point after all. Certainly he was doing more in a matter of months than the narco squads, the DA’s, the President’s Council, and the border operators, to say nothing of the FBI and the late J. Edgar had been able to do in ten years. Williams could read the headlines; just a look at the front pages of the newspapers some days was an indication of what Wulff was up to and how he was going about it. A freighter fire in San Francisco, two hundred dead. A townhouse blown up on the East Side of New York, an important figure lost in the rubble. Someone shot to death in Wall Street. A fire in Boston. Yes, Wulff was making an impression; he was making the rounds. Williams had been able to help him a little bit, too, give him an insight into a weapons shop here, a lead into a missing bag of shit there. But Williams had now heard nothing from Wulff in several weeks. Only the calls from Calabrese, the boss in Chicago, asking Williams where the hell Wulff had gone, were indications that the man was still in the picture. Williams knew Calabrese pretty well if only third-hand. If Calabrese was looking for Wulff that meant that the man had really reached the big leagues, was starting to dig in at the highest point, because Calabrese came out from under his rock only once every ten years and then usually only to sneer at a grand jury or something.
    But the problem was not Wulff right now; the problem was Williams and what was going to become of his life. The decision to go back on duty had been easily formed, had been inevitable even though he had done it for the wrong reasons at least according to his wife.