Lone Wolf #13: The Killing Run Read Online Free PDF Page A

pretty bad, all right, and the informant laughing his way past him and out of the precinct. But it was not crucial, because it was hardly as if Wulff had been unaware before of corruption. Of course, precinct was closer to certain aspects of the situation than narco; of course, precinct would protect them. That hadn’t been the pinpoint either, then; he had merely learned again what he had already known—that you did not lose your temper working narco.
    Okay, then, how about being yanked off narco by an angry superior and sent back on beat duty, riding sidesaddle in a car driven by a rookie? Well, that had been the beginning edge of the real killing rage; it was one thing to encounter corruption—life itself was corrupt, after all, and everyone over the age of thirteen knew that—but it was another to find the knife end of that corruption turned against you, to realize that the full force of the institutions for which he worked could be brought to bear upon him for simply having taken those institutions too seriously. Still, he might have gotten by that one too. He had pretty well determined to get out of the department; only Marie urged him to hold on, at least until they got married and got the mortage and moved into the house; after that, with all of that in his pocket he could throw everything back at them and go off for himself. But only for a few months, she urged him, only for a little while, try to hold on.
    So he tried to hold on. Even the demotion might not have broken him. But what finally put him over the edge was picking up a blind homicide report on the radio of the patrol car, and his first night on duty at that, going over to a single-room-occupancy rooming house in the West Nineties, and finding out that the body the squealer was talking about, the young girl who had OD’d out, either accidentally or deliberately induced, had turned out to be his own. Marie. Marie Calvante. His fiancée. She was the one who had been lying on the fifth floor of that wretched tenement in a cold and empty room, and as he looked at her—the dull, fishlike stare of the dead, the glaze of her open eyes as her mortality had passed from her—something within Wulff had broken. It was at that time—and not a moment before—that he had made his pact against the international drug trade. He would destroy them. He would kill every single one. He would kill the men who had killed his woman, and there was nothing that they could do against him, nothing that could be held that would buy him off the quest, except a bullet, because from the moment that he had seen her, he had passed over the line. He had died, all but the functioning part of him. There was nothing more that the murderers could do.
    As it turned out, it had not been the dealers who had killed his girl, after all. One by one, as he chased and killed them from New York to Vegas to Mexico and Miami, they had sworn that they had nothing to do with that murder, that they knew nothing, and it had turned out that they were telling (for perhaps the only time in their lives) the absolute truth. The murderer of Marie Calvante had turned out to be none other than his old friend, the lieutenant in the precinct where he had tried to book the informant for drug possession. The lieutenant had been tied in tight with certain interests who might find the bust embarrassing, and in his enthusiasm to please—he was very well paid—the lieutenant had not only destroyed Wulff’s case and evidence, but had arranged things that he thought would break Wulff’s spirit as well. It had been a very unfortunate decision, of course, and the lieutenant had died for it, but dead or alive, the lieutenant had affected not only Wulff’s life but about three hundred others through his gesture of overzealousness. There were a great number of people dead because Wulff had come to the decision that the drug trade and he could no longer coexist, and none of them had to be in that condition: almost all of