Wulff had been a narc for the NYPD for two years until he had been busted for trying to arrest an informant, and on patrol car duty the first night had caught a stiff who had turned out to be his fianceé, OD’d out in a stinking SRO hotel on West 93rd Street. That had made him pretty bitter, bitter about the drug market and the men who operated it, and he had decided, not unreasonably at the time, to wipe it out singlehandedly. Since then, in stages, he had hit eleven cities and had done more than his share, but on the other hand the market was still staggering along. There was at least someone big enough left in Phoenix to try and get him collared.
Of course, everyone wanted to get him collared. He was probably the most wanted man in the history of the organization; at least ten thousand freelancers had his name and picture in their wallets, every one of them willing to take a shot for the ten grand that what was left of the organization had put on his head. The NYPD wanted him pretty badly, too, because Wulff was making more of a name for them than they particularly wanted in the area of vigilantism. And besides, he had broken out of jail after a four-week stay to start his odyssey again in Detroit out of which he had come just in time to be caught by the bikers working out of Phoenix. That meant that both sides of the law were crunching in on him like a vise, while meanwhile his own situation could hardly be described as improving. A more sensible man would have given up.
But then again a more sensible man would never have gotten into it, and all things considered Wulff had done fairly well. In New York he had blown up a townhouse and a pretty important operative with it; in San Francisco he had blown up a ship containing a million dollars worth of junk and, incidentally, a couple of hundred men. He and the appropriated junk had gone to Boston where things had gotten even hotter for everything except the smack, which he had dropped into the Charles River. After Boston things, even in retrospect, had become a little blurred; Las Vegas was in it and Havana and Chicago and Lima and Los Angeles and Miami and New York again, the last caper the biggest and most terrible of all because it was there that Wulff had found out who had OD’d Marie out. It had been the lieutenant with whom on his last night on the narco squad he had tried to book the informant for possession. The lieutenant had not liked that very much for reasons that went to the heart of the connections in New York, and he had taken rather extreme action, not that it had done him any good in the long run. Wulff had beaten him up and put him in the hospital for weeks, and then some freelancer, working on an organization grudge, and meaning to kill Wulff, had killed the lieutenant by mistake, thus making Wulff’s escape possible. Then it had been Detroit, where he had blown up a good portion of the Cadillac plant through which smack was being run into Toronto. After that one, Wulff had stuffed his ordnance and a fair amount of cocaine appropriated from a dealer who had tried to kill him into the trunk of a Fleetwood and had headed out looking only for a little peace and quiet at this stage … only to run into the two bikers who were not bikers at all but apparently in the employ of someone from Phoenix who wanted to put Wulff out of business about as badly as anyone who had ever run up against him. There was no peace. None at all.
Well, there never had been; Wulff had to face that. There had been no peace since the crazy time when as a young cop he had enlisted in the army, even though under civil service regulations he was exempt, just to have a first-hand look at what Vietnam was like. Was the government telling lies or was it another great fight for freedom? Everyone he worked with thought that Wulff was crazy for enlisting. Wulff, after just a few months in that drug circus in and near Saigon, thought that he was crazy too, but by that time it was too late to do anything but grit it out. He had learned a lot … among other things he had learned heavy and light combat and guerrilla tactics, which had come in handy later in the game.
After he had come out of the army, they had felt so guilty about what he had done, setting an example that no one else in the PD had wanted to follow and so on, that they had set him up for the job in narco, giving him what they thought was the softest and most enjoyable slot you could get in the PD short of vice, which, of course, was an inherited job altogether. Narco at that time, in the middle sixties, was a good detail; the hours were easy, the informant system was set up so nicely that you had no work to do at all, just sit on your ass, keep in touch, and every now and then bust a few people on prearranged charges without evidence when the papers stirred things up. The graft was good, the living was soft and the relationship between the informants and the narcos was very cool, very helpful for all concerned.
But what they did not realize was that Wulff, having had a good dose of Saigon, having been given a pretty good idea of exactly what the drug trade meant not in the abstract but in the way that it could do things to people, was not prepared to enjoy the life of ease and the pleasant system that meant that everyone was getting along, everyone was making out and only the junkies—and who gave a fuck about them—were getting ripped off and they wouldn’t know the difference anyway. It was a growing feeling of rage, a feeling that he was feeding the system, not doing anything at all to block it, that had gotten Wulff into the business of busting an informant for possession, not exactly the kind of thing that a narc was supposed to do unless it was prearranged. And after that, everything had led smoothly and inevitably to his ten-city odyssey and several thousand murders. But looking back at the chain, there was no way of saying that there had ever been a point at which it might have been different. Maybe if his girl had not been killed. But then again he had signed her death papers, unknowingly, when he had decided on the bust. And the horror of it was that even if he had known what was coming, even if he had known the risk, looking at the sneering, bobbing face of the informant in the bar laughing at him because Wulff was helpless, he did not know if he would have done anything different. The man had had to go to jail. There had to be an end to it, some fix to the responsibility at some point.
That was all gone, anyway. Williams was all gone, too; Williams was the black rookie cop with whom Wulff had been on patrol the night they had gotten the call on the anonymous OD, a blind squeal coming into the 67th that had been assigned them by coincidence. Williams was the one with whom Wulff had worked from the very beginning to break the organization, the one who had, playing it cautious at the beginning, finally left his pregnant wife and the nice mortgaged house in St. Albans to play it the hard vigilante way. But in the end, in Los Angeles, that had all broken down, too. Williams had seen that the system, as bad as it was, worked better for him than being outside the system, which did not work at all, and he had gone back to his wife and newborn son. Now Williams was under wraps again; he had stayed in contact with sources in Detroit who had made the Canadian run known to him. He had engineered the break from the courtroom to put Wulff back on the road again. But otherwise, essentially, he was out of it; Wulff was as thoroughly alone as he had been on the night he had seen Marie dead and had known that he would have to play it vigilante or not at all.
So he had rolled out of Detroit, once again flames in his wake, coke in his trunk, headed back toward New York, but not sure of exactly which way he was going; willing to play it by instinct as he always had in the past … and he had run smack into two bikers on assignment from Phoenix. Once again the enemy, his old stupid enemy, had given purpose to him, where otherwise there might not have been; once again the enemy had energized Wulff and given him a sense of mission precisely when that sense of mission had been flagging. If they were his creation, then he was theirs, the two of them welded together, hammer and the nail, anvil and the hammer, flame and the anvil … and now there was no disentanglement but only greater heat and the plunge down.