Lone Wolf #9: Miami Marauder by Mike Barry Read Free Book Online

tapped that this was not a brief glance, that the man, in fact, had been looking at him for a long time. Now, having caught Wulff’s attention the eyes, suddenly luminous in the shifting light, seemed to glow with knowledge. Then the man was digging into his pocket, his fingers clutching at something in the right outer jacket and Wulff saw the shape of a gun faintly coming together there; then the man had turned fully, hand in pocket, and said to Wulff, “Let’s get out of here.”
    The voice carried over the dim throbbing of the train above the rails, came at him with such casual intimacy that they might have been the only two people in the bar car, in the train itself … and then, sweeping the terrain, Wulff saw that this was so; the white-jacketed waiter who had been there to pick up the drink orders and deliver them, the small old bartender who had been standing behind the counter, flicking at it with a towel … both of them were gone, the car having narrowed to him and the heavy man. Looking at him now Wulff saw that he had misjudged this man severely, allowed fatigue and self-pity to overtake him past the point of alertness because this was no idle late-hour drunk confronting him but a hard, determined man in his late forties who looked like so many of the other men with whom he had struggled over the past months … except that if possible he looked even more competent than most of them.
    The man came out of the pocket slowly with the gun, a Beretta, and said, “All right. Here it is. Now you start walking toward me and you do that slowly.”
    Wulff got up from his seat carefully, feeling the weight of his own gun flapping within his pocket, the gun suspended a crucial six inches from his right hand. He could get it in less than a second … but the heavy man would need far less than that to discharge from that gun the bullet that would kill him. So there was nothing to do but close ground slowly. He had had half of the second drink; more than anything now he regretted that. Sitting in the bar car had been stupid enough but he had been lulled by the rocking of the train, the conversation with Calabrese, the feeling that Chicago at last was behind him. But that was excusable, drinking was not. Every bounty hunter, amateur and professional, in the country had his name and photograph in their hip pocket. What was he doing drinking? He kept on walking slowly and when he had come to within two feet of the man with the gun the man said with a little smile, “That’s enough.” Wulff stopped, the train rocking him slightly. “That’s good,” the man said, “that’s very good.”
    He turned behind him and said, “All right,” and another man of roughly the same proportions but somewhat younger came from some hidden space of the car and stood, looking at Wulff with a little smile. Obviously he had come into the car while the others were clearing out, had been working in tandem with the first man but this did not explain, not quite, the absolute pleasure on this second man’s face, the profound look of joy which seemed to be oozing from its pores. Wulff thought that he had never seen so much pleasure of that sort in his life. “Well,” the second man said, seeming to rub his hands, “well, well, well.” He beamed. “It’s the wolf himself. As I live and breathe it’s the lone wolf.”
    Wulff said nothing, holding his ground. The man holding the gun said, “Let’s get him out of here.”
    “Oh, we’ll get him out of here. I’m counting on that. As a matter of fact you could say that there’s nothing I’m counting on more in the world than getting him out of here, but let me take a look at him if I may. Let me just take a look at him.” The man stared, his face bright yellow in the shrouded illumination of the bar car, his eyes rolling. He might, Wulff thought, be on uppers of some sort. Certainly it was more than good spirits which were giving this cast to his face. “I’m glad to see you, you son