Read Online Lone Wolf #12: Phoenix Inferno by Mike Barry - Free Book Online Page A

me.”
    “All I wanted,” he said thickly and slowly, “all I wanted was for you to come with me. Was that so much to ask?”
    “All right.”
    “Don’t tell me all right,” he said, the gun steady, the rest of him shaking, but the gun held rigid in his hand just like a cock, “don’t tell me all right, you bitch, you just can’t get away with it, you can’t make it disappear! Things don’t disappear just because you say that they weren’t meant. I can’t take it any more,” he said. Surprising how steady the gun was. It occurred to him with clinical detachment that it was very possible that he could shoot her. He did not know which way it would go yet, you had to watch this kind of thing, but that was definitely a possibility.
    “Joe,” she said, lifting her arms, but very cautiously, holding them, palms turned outward against the wall, “Joe, I don’t think you know what you’re doing.”
    “Yes I do.”
    “I’ll go with you. I’ll go with you if that makes any difference. Put that gun down.”
    “You should have said that before. You’ll say anything now with the gun turned on you.”
    “I’m trying to help you. I’m trying—”
    “I didn’t want much,” Carlin said as if talking to someone else, not Janice now but some distant auditor who he could imagine as a wise, benevolent old man shaped from gases, drifting in and out of the spaces of the bedroom, turning a curious and attentive ear to his utterances, nodding wisely and sympathetically every now and then to indicate that basically, despite his silence, he was on Carlin’s side. “I just wanted to be left alone. I worked hard, I had a nice thing to look forward to, a good thing going, I didn’t want much. Mostly I just wanted them to leave me alone. I wanted all of the sons of bitches to let me alone, but do you understand something, they wouldn’t.” He wiped some sweat out of his eyes with the gun hand. Janice twitched against the wall, and then as he leveled the gun back to position, she returned to her solemn, frozen position. “They just wouldn’t let me alone and now after all of it I’ve got to do something, you see. I’ve just got to do something. It’s Wulff, you see, that son of a bitch, I could have held the whole thing in my palm, the two of us could have worked it out together, we could have had a deal, Wulff and me,” Carlin said, and the circumspect form nodded, waved an index finger in quizzical agreement showing that he wanted more information. “Well of course,” Carlin said, “I mean that stood to reason, he was working for me just as I was working for him, and so the two of us could have worked together. You dig what I mean? He was knocking off the bastards right and left, he was clearing the ground making things easier, and I could have made things easier for him, too, because once I was on top no one could have touched him. No one at all, not with me running the interference. And I could have done anything he wanted, within reason of course, even given him a piece of it, but he just didn’t understand.” The auditor made a
come again?
expression. “He wouldn’t understand anything like that,” Carlin said. “I think that the trouble with the son of a bitch is that he’s truly crazy. He doesn’t want to get along, he just wants to blow things up. But that doesn’t make me crazy, does it? Not when I’m trying to get along as best I can. I mean, somebody has to run the operation, no? Supply and demand, that’s very important, that’s a brutal law of economics, that if there’s a demand then somewhere there’s got to be a supply. So why not me?” Carlin said, “why the hell not me? I’m just giving people what they want, and there are a hell of a lot who would have done it worse than me.”
    All right
, the auditor nodded, satisfied, and began to dissolve into the background of the room, apparently having found Carlin’s argument unanswerable.
I see what you’re saying
, and Carlin