Read Online Lone Wolf #9: Miami Marauder by Mike Barry - Free Book Online Page A

for all his life, now hardly so bad in the actuality as it had been in dreams; more purgative than anything, getting my black ass in gear, he thought dreamily. Then the sirens, the emergency room, the long, black space in the hospital, the weeks after that when he had had plenty of time to think over his life and the relationship it bore to the unseen man who had knifed him. It was then that he had come, however reluctantly, to the decision that Wulff was right; any black man who truly thought that he could work with the system was a fool because the system was interested only in protecting itself and ripping off the outsider and that was what a black man would always be … an outsider. Wulff, a cop to the core who had vowed to get rid of the international drug trade, could have been an insider but he had dropped out to murder because he realized that it was impossible to clean up anything when you were part of it … and Williams, tacking the decision onto his own life, saw that Wulff was right, came home from the hospital and spent another few weeks thinking it out and then, when the call from Wulff came from Los Angeles it was as if he had merely been waiting for the trigger. He had left his eight-months pregnant wife, loaded up a U-haul with armaments from Father Justice of the Divinity & Faith Church and had gone out to Los Angeles to blow the system to hell with Wulff.
    But that hadn’t worked out either; Wulff by that time was in so deep that his options were restricted. Everybody had his name and picture; guerilla tactics were almost impossible when you were public enemy number one, open prey for every bounty hunter, amateur and professional, in the business. They had been pinned into a rotten trailer court for a week, the armaments tacked near them, saying that they were waiting to make a move but what they were really waiting for was the enemy to come in after
them
… which the enemy did but not before Williams and Wulff had had enough to do with one another to see that no team concept was going to work.
    The trailer court had been blown up and so was the enemy, but it was a temporary respite; they were starting to roll in like cavalry now. It was obvious that they had to split up, that Williams would have to go back east and put the pieces of his life together, get back into the system again, and Williams had not fought that insight; he had said goodbye to Wulff without sentiment and taken the U-haul back on the roads toward New York … but in the early part of that long drive he had been abducted by two of Calabrese’s men and brought into Chicago. Now he was in Miami and his life, he supposed, was in peril. That peril did not matter to him so much as the outcome of his wife’s pregnancy: she would have given birth by now. He wondered if he had a son. That would have been something worth knowing; as far as the rest of it Williams felt himself simply to be beyond fear. It did not matter; once abducted he had taken to the capture with a virtual sense of relief. It solved his problems for the time being, the dilemma of whether he would go back and face his life or chuck it completely. This was easier. Being a captive took the pressure off, almost completely. For the first time in his life Williams was beginning to see the benefits of slavery. No wonder so many of the slaves, once freed, had stayed on the plantations, begged the masters to keep them. Almost anything was easier than a world in which will or free choice dominated.
    Now, at the rooming house, Williams said to the man who was staying in the room with him, “It’s time to play some more poker.” The guards had taken him for granted. Apparently the word was out: Williams was no trouble. So they worked in shifts one off, one on, in twelve-hour cycles and the one who was on often acted less like a captor than another bored prisoner in the room.
    Williams had no idea what was going on with the girl in the next room other than that Wulff knew her and