Lone Wolf #12: Phoenix Inferno by Mike Barry Page B

children. And all in the name of bigger and better shit for the West, less kickback and payment to the sinful East, which should stay on the softer stuff anyway. Cocaine and opiate country. Coming back to New York and the narco squad after two years in the Vietnamese countryside was maybe something like coming to work in a very high-grade whorehouse after having spent two years in a field hospital treating advanced and deteriorative cases of paresis. At least that was the way it looked to Wulff.
    It simply would not wash. None of it would; he couldn’t take the easy lies and that the squad had been created to conceal rather than to reveal, could not face the fact that as a narc he was supposed to be dedicated not to the elimination but to the perpetuation of the drug traffic. The real hatred started then, and the grinding rage. But Wulff had a nice girl, he planned to get married; marriage to this girl looked pretty good to him and although getting off the squad and out of the PD was important, being with Marie Calabrese was even more important. At least that was the way it had looked to him then. But in the long run it had only cost her her life. Agonizing, but she would have been better off alive and lost to him then dead and his forever. He still believed that. He still believed in life.
    But it was all academic; the rage spilled over even as the marriage plans went along and Wulff busted a grinning informant who laughed at Wulff with the bricks of smack coming out of his jacket pockets because this was not the night for a bust and under the arrangement Wulff could do nothing. Informants were untouchable anyway, but something broke in Wulff and right in the bar he slapped the man, handcuffed him, busted him for possession and dragged him into the precinct. The informant cried. At least he had that satisfaction; he had broken the man. A hell of a lot of good that had done him.
    So he had busted him, but the precinct lieutenant had busted him right out because he had denied that Wulff had turned in evidence. The informant had gone back on the streets within hours and Wulff had gone off the streets and into patrol car duty because the lieutenant had done something at headquarters, and maybe he had done Wulff a favor at that because Wulff did not think that he could have taken one more night of narco anyway without killing people. So things had worked out for the best, perhaps. Except of course that on the first night of patrol duty they had gotten a blind call to find that the OD they were talking about was his own girl, Marie, dead in an SRO. No, he would not think of that any more. That was canceled.
    Wulff was pretty mad, in any event. Eleven cities and jail had hardly spiked his rage. In fact it was self-feeding; he was madder now than when he had begun. Mad enough certainly to want to kill Carlin. Carlin was the sole remaining big dealer in the Southwest. That made him very much worth killing.
    Wulff looked forward to it.

XI
    The other houseman, Dick, found the bodies. The one in the living room led him inevitably to the bedroom, and the one in the bedroom led him on a slow, careful prowl through the rest of the house to make sure that Carlin himself had not been killed. The houseman did not really think he had been; everything here pointed to only one conclusion, and although Dick was not a thoughtful man he could have said, if pressed, that he had seen it coming. He had waited for it for a long time. There was every indication that someday Carlin was going to do something and if Dick had not been receiving two salaries for his services instead of just one he would not have stayed in the house. As it was, it was just barely worth it. Looking at Joe crumpled on the floor Dick could see how close the calculation had been. Fifty-fifty, that was all. Still, if you got lucky there was no reason to question that luck. He would not have wanted Joe killed, but if it came down to a simple matter of choice … well, Dick