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

of a bitch,” he said. “I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time.”
    “Let’s get out of here,” the first man said, gesturing with his gun. “Come on.”
    “Oh we will, we definitely will. But there’s no rush, is there? I mean,” the second man said, rubbing his hands together, “there isn’t exactly anywhere we can
go
is there? I wouldn’t want to jump off a moving train, even the
Floridian
special at sixty miles an hour and it’s a pleasure to see the great man close up.” He walked toward Wulff then, coming rapidly and brushed by the man holding the gun and standing toe to toe with Wulff he reached up quickly and slapped Wulff across the face once, hard, the blow redounding through him. Wulff felt the bright slash of pain, then a slower lurch as that pain began to spread in thick rivulets into his gut but he held his ground. The man slapped him again.
    “You like that?” the man said as if he were a salesman, say, demonstrating the capabilities of a high-performance car. “You like that now?” He turned toward the gun-holder. “He bleeds,” he said, “the son of a bitch bleeds.”
    “For Christ’s sake, Al—”
    “Don’t Christ’s sakes me,” the man named Al said. He placed the points of his long, elegant black shoes against Wulff’s, then looked up at him. There was a considerable difference in height, five feet seven to six four, magnified because Al was in a slight crouch. “Just don’t mess with me, Joe,” he said to the gun-holder. “What I do I do when I want to do it, you understand?”
    “This can’t work,” the gun-holder said. “This is all bullshit.”
    “Everything’s bullshit, Joe,” Al said almost conversationally. They might have been having a random debate somewhere in deck chairs, legs stretched across the sea. “Now you know that Joe, you know that as well as I do, everything’s a bullshit deal from way back. You just do the best you can, don’t you sweetheart?” Al said and hit Wulff across the face again, spotting the injured cheek, cracking the blow right down into that open web of pain and Wulff felt nausea, the nausea sifting through him in fine, light waves and this time he did give ground, swaying a little.
    “See?” Al said, “he not only bleeds, he feels pain. He’s going to cry in a minute, aren’t you, you big bastard, you prick, you piece of filth. You know a man named Marasco?” Al said, “I knew a man named Marasco. The first one was for me and the second one was for him.”
    Wulff felt the humming of the train, little intimations of power coming up through the balls of his feet, throbs and pulsations which wove their way into the pain so that it began to spread through him like a blanket … but he was thinking, Marasco, yes, that was where it had practically all started, the guy named Albert Marasco, the kingpin who lived in a mansion in Long Island and who Wulff had killed in the fire. He had tortured the truth out of Marasco, working the truth from his dying pain in the midst of the fire and this man was named Al too, now that was interesting. That was really interesting, Al one and Al two, both of the Als coming together on the
Amtrack Floridian
, this one with a gun, wreaking vengeance. Why there was absolutely no limit, Wulff thought, no limit at all to the kind of trouble that a man could get himself into once he started this kind of campaign … delirium, he thought with the colder center of his mind, the pain had wrecked him, had made him delirious.
    “For Christ’s sake, Al,” the man named Joe was saying again, waving the gun now in little circles, “this can’t go on, we’ve got to get him out of here, someone’s going to come back—”
    “No one’s going to come back,” Al said, “no one is going to come back until I’m good and ready to have them do it, so get off my ass—” and at that moment Wulff hit him. He brought his fist up from floor level, sucker-punched Al in the jaw, lifting the smaller