Lone Wolf #9: Miami Marauder Read Online Free Page A

throwing his weight into the door, getting out. Wulff got out on his own side, feeling the hard tar of the road underneath him as he leapt from six feet and then both he and the driver were running toward the car. “It’s going to explode!” the driver said, “it’s going to blow up!” and yet he kept on running. Wulff ran with him. At this moment there seemed nothing else to do; he shared the unquestioning purpose of the driver. The thing that was in there had cut them off, had shaken them up, had almost killed them but that thing was human.
    Closing ground on the car Wulff felt himself running weightless, a curious disconnection seeming to lift him from the ground, then both he and the driver were in the fumes themselves, little sputtering arcs of flame all around them as they closed in on the driver’s side. Something was huddled behind the wheel, open-mouthed, staring through the windshield with an expression of horror and Wulff touched it first, wrenched the body free, the body tumbling and falling to the field against him, then the driver had the ankles and together they carried the thing in a groaning, gasping run back toward the truck. The fire was sputtering down now, coming into the core of the car and then, just as they labored back to the truck, holding the thing in their arms, the Chevelle blew up, in a curiously graceful series of motions parts of it, fenders and hubcaps, suddenly came free, dancing in the fire. Then there was the dull
whoomp
! as the gas tank seared in, crumpled upon itself. The impact put them to the ground hard and there was a second
whoomp
! then it was over. There was a faint crackling downrange. There was still no sign of traffic on the road.
    “I think he’s cooked,” the driver said.
    Wulff looked down at the thing they had stretched on the ground between them. The thing had been in its forties and was short and fat; a gold chain dangled across its vest. It was not respiring. There was no blood, no sign whatsoever of external damage. “Yeah,” Wulff said, “yeah, he’s dead.”
    “He’s a stiff,” the driver said, and then added almost wonderingly, plaintively, a man who would sprint fifty yards and risk his life to save a man who might have killed him, “what the hell did it to him? I don’t see nothing.”
    “You wouldn’t,” Wulff said, “you wouldn’t at all,” and almost went on to tell the driver what he was looking at. Wulff knew what they were looking at; he had seen it once before, in a different way, on a girl in a tenement on West 93rd Street. The sign of the overdose, the white face, the stricken eyes. The blind fish. The sign of death. “Let’s go,” he said shakily, standing, feeling the sweating beginning within him but controlling it with an act of will. “He’s dead. There’s nothing to do. What the hell do we want? cops, a report, spend a morning doing this?”
    “No,” the driver said, standing with him, “no, we don’t want that at all.” The road was still vacant; there was little traffic on Route 80 in the dawn. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
    They went into the cab, the engine still idling. “What did it to him?” the driver said, “what the hell did it to him?”
    “He was driving on heroin, Wulff said, “he overdosed out,” and the driver let out a long whistle, then said nothing, clanking the truck into gear again and slowly they moved out, passing the filaments of the dead car across from them.
    “I never seen anything like it,” the driver said after a while, “I never seen an overdose.”
    “You’re lucky,” Wulff said and pressed back into the cushions. The truck rolled, it rolled toward Chicago, it moved on the rope of his vengeance and he thought yes, Calabrese would have to be killed, all of them would have to be killed for this because the price was simply too high and all the sheltered, stinking, smiling men behind their thick walls … they would have to pay.
    The empty eyes. The blind