Lone Wolf #9: Miami Marauder Read Online Free PDF Page B

feeling his hard-won control of the situation beginning to slip, he said, “That’s it, Wulff. I’ve got your girl and I’ve got your friend and they’re both pretty safe now, but if you ever want to see them again you’re going to play this my way. Miami,” he said, “you come down to Miami.”
    “I’d rather kill you in Chicago,” Wulff said.
    “I’d rather kill
you
in Miami,” Calabrese said and disconnected, pulling the master switch on the phone so that not only his but the other two extensions were cut off. Then he slammed the phone into the receiver, pushed it from him forcibly and stood, backing against the window. The impassive man in the room looked at him, then away, showing his palms at the same time in a gesture of compliance: don’t look at me, I had nothing to do with this at all, the gesture said and Calabrese let it go, walked out of the room and down the hall where behind the two open doors everything seemed as it had just a little while ago. The girl was saying something to her guards about the illegality of being kidnapped, Williams was saying, “I’ll raise you back.” It was amazing how in almost any circumstances things settled into a routine, here, no less than at any other time, the people who surrounded him had worked out a system of habits. Perhaps it had something to do with his way of life itself. The mansion had a calming influence.
    He walked into the room where the girl was and said to her, “You can’t keep you mouth shut, can you?”
    She looked up at him defiantly, the tilt of her chin, slash of mouth somehow sensual in this aspect and he found himself again thinking of what it would be like to fuck her. For one poisonous instant it occurred to him that he could; she was helpless, he could throw the guards out of the room and take her by force. What the hell could she do to him? and even at seventy-three, he could overpower a woman. But looking at her, looking beyond the attitude and the clothing, seeming to see into the rotten heart of her he felt that to screw her would be only to take unto himself the corruption of this other man who had already entered her body, by stain and implication the rottenness of Wulff would pass into him, juices from her juices, wounds from her wound and then Wulff would be inside him, his demon, possessing him. The thought chilled him and he moved away from her, backing against the wall, feeling suddenly old and ill, seventy-three years of mortality cooking in his veins like heroin, and did not even listen to her saying something about being out to kill him, he was always out to kill people. Fuck this, Calabrese thought, fuck it, feeling himself winding down to the end of the trail, something within him loosening and breaking away. Then he walked out of the room, past the open door of the other and back to his office for the last time where the man who was his bodyguard was still sitting in that position, feet tilted against the floor, his eyes closed, face toward the ceiling. He was smoking a cigarette, a thick ash protruding, his tie loosened, a thin glaze of sweat coming over his face.
    “Get off your ass,” Calabrese said and the man twitched, jumped, and came off the chair and into a posture of attention, ashes scattering throughout the room. Calabrese looked at him with disgust: a small, repulsive man who knew nothing but dim fantasies of violence, closed his eyes and dreamed for entertainment. Then like a gong the thought came within him: you made him this way. He’s your responsibility. He’s exactly what you wanted him to be.
    Too much. Too fucking much. “We’re going to Miami,” Calabrese said harshly and feeling returned to the man’s face, it opened into something both pompous and fearful, the two emotions chasing one another like dogs across the panes of the face, the features riven into those two parts as he groped uncertainly for an attitude and then the man said, “Miami. That’s all right with me, we go to Miami.