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

shift of roles, the shift that had put him in control of Owens seemed to alter again however subtly. Owens was in control of him now, driving the car, the situation dependent upon nothing so much as Owen’s ability to maneuver the car while Wulff concentrated on the mechanics of bringing down the assailants. It was strange how things worked out. His dependency in a sense was total but in another way it was not at all, since Owens owed him as much. Wulff crouched down over the.45 leveling it into his gut and when something in his mind told him that now was the time to fire, that now the situation had worked itself that way, he listened to that inner voice as he had through all of his struggles going back to Vietnam and he let the big gun go off.

IV
    Back in New York Williams was going through another kind of hell. Everything with Wulff from the first had served to only suck him in deeper and deeper, but now he was dealing with a captain from headquarters who seemed to feel that Williams was completely responsible for arranging Wulff’s escape from the court building. The captain was five six or so, the sort of man who sneaked through the qualifying physical requirements by no more than half an inch either way, probably by lying. And the bitterness and fright of sneaking into the PD, the feeling all his career that he was somehow hanging in just on a technicality that could be reversed by discovery any moment, had made him ill-tempered and vicious. Williams wanted to stand up and go out of the room, tell the captain to fuck himself but he could not do this. His own career was perilous. He had taken a knife in the gut for Wulff, had dropped his civil service and gone out to Los Angeles to be Wulff’s partner, had come back under the worst circumstances, and he knew that medical disability or not they could let him go at any moment. At their pleasure. While two months ago this was exactly what he had wanted, now it was anything but. He could not afford to lose the job, not now. That was simply the way it had to be; he had made his adjustments toward the side of getting locked in. Also, he had lost track of Wulff. He knew what had happened at that plant in Detroit because he had read it in the papers, but that was not enough. No word had come in. The man might have been caught in the explosion himself. Williams doubted it, but you never knew.
    “I want the truth,” the captain said. “I want you to tell me the truth. It will go much easier if I don’t have to struggle for it.”
    “You don’t understand,” Williams said, “I told you I don’t know anything.”
    “You engineered his escape,” the captain said, “that’s one thing right there. You maneuvered the whole thing.”
    “I maneuvered nothing,” Williams said. There was the possibility that the captain was crazy. That was one thing you had to look out for in the PD all the time; the people you were dealing with might be merely stupid or corrupt, but then again they might spring into galloping insanity, which would furnish the full and final explanation of all their acts. “There was a gunman in the room. He shot Smith. He smuggled a gun into the court and he shot the defendant. There was a little confusion, as one might suspect. In the confusion Wulff escaped. I didn’t have anything to do with it. Or are you suggesting that I set things up with the assailant?”
    “Someone did,” the captain said, rubbing his hands together. “Someone set things up.”
    “I didn’t want Wulff out,” Williams said. “Who would want him out anymore? I’m his friend. He was going to get killed sooner or later. His luck was running out.” He might have gotten killed in Detroit, Williams thought. He might have been killed there, in the firebombing of the plant, and no one would know. No one had really expected him to be there, that was the problem. “I’m sorry,” he said and wondered if he should risk standing, offending the captain but ending the interview. He