Lone Wolf #12: Phoenix Inferno Read Online Free PDF Page A

insisted to Yount that no one could identify a man passing him on the opposite side of an interstate at a combined speed of a hundred and forty an hour. But Yount said he had been an eagle scout and a point man in the infantry and that was his specialty. Rather than get into trouble with Yount, who was just the kind of prick who would have reported him to Carlin, Owens had gone along. See where that had gotten them, of course. It served Yount right; it would have served Owens right, too, being such a fool and going along if Wulff had not been such a reasonable man. Owens said he was damned grateful and he would lead Wulff right to Carlin’s estate and he would even help Wulff set the grenades, that being the least he could do for the trouble they had caused Wulff and basically being in agreement with Wulff’s crusade anyway. He detested drugs; the exhibitionist had been on coke and pot all the time and doing a little heroin sniffing, and where had it gotten him but out of life and Owen out of a job? Owen felt that it was a damned shame he couldn’t have worked with Wulff from the start.
    Wulff didn’t have as much to say, there being no need for it, but he found that he liked Owens almost as much as Owens liked him; he was the first man since Williams that Wulff felt at all comfortable with. The man was cheerful, he was straightforward, he was, as he had told Wulff, in it only for the money with nothing personal at all, and furthermore, despite his bad luck on the road, he was competent. He probably could have killed Wulff if he wanted to; Owens said that, and Wulff, to himself, agreed. He hadn’t because he had liked Wulff’s style from the very beginning. With that as the start of a relationship it was easy to relax with the gun and let the miles go faster.
    By the time they hit the outskirts of Chicago, Wulff felt at ease enough with Owens to get Carlin’s private number, which he had given out to the assassination team, and put in a call himself. He had found Carlin on the phone to react almost exactly as Wulff would have hoped: with blind, complete panic. That was fine; it was all calculated. Even the possibility that Carlin would meet him with one thousand troops had been calculated, as had been the chance that Carlin would flee. Wulff liked this. He liked it fine. He understood now why Calabrese had not had him killed but sent him off to Peru. Knowing there was someone worthwhile and deadly around kept you young. He needed a rival. There was enough pain; two women dead, thousands burned, he didn’t have to concentrate on that any more. The memories would come as would the
modus operandi.
It was the challenge that would keep him going.
    So they kept on rolling, then, past Kansas City, moving briskly on. Wulff told Owens somewhere around Tulsa that he would be happy to let him go any time now, but Owens said no, he didn’t mind the company and he didn’t even mind the gun; he’d be happy to come along and help Wulff set the traps. At that, Wulff had put the gun away, taking a chance on Owens, which really was no chance at all, and had settled down to the rest of the drive, which was a piece of cake. Owens had a million stories.
    In New Mexico they came across the border and came up against another of Carlin’s troops. Pure coincidence. The team working in two like all the rest, was in a big Pontiac Bonneville that steamed exhaust and looked to be at the very end of the seven-year American car cycle carefully worked out by GM and followed by the others, but whatever it was the car was incredibly maneuverable. Wulff could hear the scream as it wheeled around on the two-lane highway, dwindled in the rear-view mirror, turning. It was suddenly up behind them very quickly, closing ground. It must have been moving at eighty-five or ninety miles an hour. “Floor it all the way,” Wulff said.
    Owens tried, little beads of sweat coming out over his forehead. “Carlin’s not so stupid,” he said.
    “You think