Lone Wolf #10: Harlem Showdown Read Online Free

along the seat hand-over-hand to get behind the wheel of the Electra, but his attention had narrowed to the white man himself, still walking, coming toward them, and insight broke upon the Dude: the man was coming to get them. He had tracked them from 125th to the lot where the Electra was tucked, uptown to the shooting gallery, and now that they were happy and high with a few grains for extras still on them, he was going to bust them for possession. He was a narc. He had watched them for days, probably years, waiting, just waiting for the new drug laws to go into effect so that he could hook them in, and now he had them. Real shitfit, the Dude thought, I’m having a real shitfit
… but there was no place to hide.
    No place at all to go: he was naked, exposed upon the street, under observation from a hundred, two hundred people, and then, as if this were happening on some other street, a street with which he had no connection whatsoever, there was a roar,
gunfire
, the Dude thought, son of a bitch, that’s gunfire, and looking in that direction, leaning toward the right, he saw Animal holding out a low-caliber pistol, already into the second shot: where the hell had he gotten the pistol
from
? Well this did not matter, nothing mattered, the Dude urged his legs to run, get out of there, work it all out later, but his legs were gelatinous, nothing was happening there at all, and so he could only stay rooted in posture, then, locked in position. The gun Animal was holding went off for the third time, but the big white motherfucker, untouched by any of the shots, seemingly invulnerable, possibly immortal, suddenly went inside of himself for a gun of his own, and then as the Dude watched, unable to move, unable to locate that heart of desire that would enable him to confront the situation at all, the white motherfucker fired off his own pistol, and the Dude did not have to verify, did not have to look, did not have to swing his attention to the right to know the truth that had burst within his brain, the final inescapable truth of it, that the shot had hit Animal dead on, and that the Animal was croaking, choking, smoking, singing out his life on this damned street, his body suspended against the cushions of the Electra, and there was nothing whatsoever for him to do then but to watch this as the white man lifted his gun yet again and pumped the second, unnecessary shot into the corpse, staining and ribboning with blood the interior of the car.
    They were everywhere. There was nothing you could do to stop them. They would follow you and follow you and then they would kill you off. Overcome by a spasm of weeping, the Dude fell into the sidewalk, then, screaming into the stones while everything went on outside him, and for all the impression that it made on him, he might have been on another world, and all these creatures were aliens.
    Horse-high.
    Teach him to fuck around with it.

III
    “No,” Gianelli said, “don’t tell me I can’t do it. I want to get him.”
    “Too risky,” Miller said. He was trying to be reasonable about this, trying to maintain his sense of balance, but fifteen minutes with Gianelli was half an hour in the ring with the heavyweight champion. He did not know if he could take the constant battering any more. “No, you can’t do it.”
    “I’m going to do it,” Gianelli said. He squeezed his hands into, then against one another. “I want to and I know I can do it. I’m going to.” He showed Miller the .45 again. “With this,” he said, “I can handle anything: the heavy stuff, the light stuff, but this is right. I’m going to do it.”
    Miller shook his head, stood, walked to the window. Hilton Hotel, seventeen stories up. There was a good view of Central Park from certain rooms here, he understood, but he wasn’t in that class. Transient trade; no credentials. “I don’t want you to do it,” he said. “In the first place, no one’s sure of where he is, and in the