Lone Wolf #10: Harlem Showdown Read Online Free Page A

second—”
    “He’s in New York,” Gianelli said. He was a pale, squat man in his sixties who claimed to have known the late Nicholas Calabrese from way back and to have once sworn a blood oath with him: if either was murdered, the other one would avenge that death. Of course, that had been a long time ago; Calabrese had gone one way, Miller another, Gianelli still a third. And Gianelli was in the worst position of all because Miller, who figured he knew everyone, did not know Gianelli. Hired muscle, he supposed, or on the fringes acting as a runner, but at sixty how much muscle, how much running, could a man do? Still, there was Gianelli back from the dead or from Kansas City, which was practically the same thing, swearing he could locate Burton Wulff and avenge the death of his old, great friend, Nicholas Calabrese. What was Miller supposed to do? It isn’t worth it, he thought: Calabrese’s death, what he left behind him, was sloppy enough; there was no reason why he should have to deal with loose ends like Gianelli as well. Still, the man was here: what was he supposed to do with him?
    “How do you know he’s in New York,” he said.
    “He’s got to be in New York,” Gianelli said, “I’ve figured this out, there’s nowhere else he could be. This is what he knows best, this is where his contacts all are, this is where he figures is the absolutely last place that anyone would be looking for him. He wouldn’t be anywhere else. And I know I can find him.”
    “No one’s found him yet,” Miller said. “There are a thousand men looking for him.”
    “That’s all right,” said Gianelli. He cocked and uncocked the .45, giving Miller the uneasy feeling that he was going to discharge it at any moment, then in a spasmodic gesture put it back in his pocket. “Listen,” Gianelli said, “I’m not asking for very much. Am I asking for a hell of a lot? Let me go out on my own, that’s all.”
    “With a couple of men,” Miller said. “Don’t forget that; you’re asking for a couple of men. Otherwise you’re not asking for anything.” Except the impossible, he thought. He looked down the airshaft, seventeen stinking levels down into the polluted hole that New York had become. Sixth Avenue, Broadway, it was all garbage. They had torn the great city apart. “And what’s to say he’s in New York at all?”
    “He’s in New York. I know he’s here. I know how that man thinks; I spent weeks just thinking about him, reading up, familiarizing myself. He’s uptown, probably around Harlem, and I can get him,” Gianelli said. “I want to get him very badly.”
    “We all want to get him very badly.”
    “I’ll do it. I’ll put him out of business.”
    “It’s too late,” Miller said. “It’s too late to worry about that. I’m not in New York to deal with him, I know that. I’m trying to put this thing together again.”
    “That’s right,” Gianelli said standing, going over to the window, standing shoulder-to-shoulder then with Miller, “you’re trying to put the whole thing together because he’s hurt all of you bad, he’s changed the whole setup, you’ve got to get reorganized straight from the top, find new routes, get hold of new supplies. You think I’m a fool? I know all that.”
    “So don’t say it. Say nothing.”
    “You’re afraid to send me out,” Miller said, “because you know that I can get him and I’ll show the rest of you up. I’ll show up your fifty-million-dollar organization for the fools and shits they are. One man, just one man with a gun and a couple behind him is going to deliver him in ribbons to your door. You wouldn’t like that, would you? It would make all of you look like shit. So you’ll send me back to the provinces, won’t you? That’s what I figure.”
    Miller could not take that. There were certain things that you could take, were bound to, others that you could not if you were trying to run or as in this case, desperately hold together, an