Lone Wolf #9: Miami Marauder by Mike Barry

existence entirely; they were entirely diminished, even the sound of their voices as he moved away was a frail peep, and then at long last he had turned a corner and shut them entirely away.
    There was rich material there, no doubt about it; if he had been in another line of work he might have wanted to pursue this further because in a certain way this pair represented everything about America which had turned it into a madhouse lined by money and sustained by drugs … but the edge of his consciousness extruded elsewhere, he simply could not get involved, even psychically, with people like this, because there was a total kind of madness indeed. You could not clean up the entire world: all that you could do was to set yourself into one part of it and do the best that you could there.
    At the end of the hall the arrow indicating rooms
1701-1709
pointed straight ahead and he walked down there, putting his hand inside his pocket, feeling the point thirty-eight. He took it out, cupped it into his hand. If Calabrese were waiting in ambush this gun would do him very little good but it nevertheless was comforting to have in his hand; at least he would be able to take a bodyguard or two with him. He did not think however that it would come to that. Calabrese was too shrewd to try anything like that and as he had said to Wulff, it was at this time a standoff. Calabrese wanted him dead very badly but Calabrese wanted the sack as well. He would never have gotten to this point if it had not been for the sack; the old man was too much of a businessman to make this kind of an investment in sheer vendetta.
    The door of 1701 was ajar. Wulff saw the light glinting through it, falling in panels to the rug, the light cascading from the open windows of the room, heard the little viscous murmurs of conversation within and then, no sense of transition, no sense of preparation either, he stepped over the threshhold, walking in quickly, holding the gun like a dense little ball clamped into his hand, and there was Calabrese, sitting, facing him across an enormous space, his hands folded on the polished surfaces of a long sloping desk. The man who he had been talking to, someone who Wulff had never seen before, a bodyguard, probably, was standing against the wall beside the desk. Seeing Wulff he slid out of position, backed his shoulder blades into the wall and walked that way around the corner. Wulff could see the gun in the man’s hand; from this aspect it looked like a cannon, the hole open and gaping. He looked at it calmly. If death was going to come, he thought, it might as well come out of a big gun, it might as well happen now. Oddly he felt no fear at all. Looking at Calabrese he was not even sure that he had emotion of any sort. All of the hatred was gone; it had somehow been scraped free in the long, staggering cross-country drive and now he was scraped down to the raw bone of personality; he felt little more than a bleak kind of acceptance.
    “All right,” he said, “I’m here.”
    “Close the door,” Calabrese said. To the guard he said, “Get out of here.”
    The guard looked at him wonderingly, then opened his hand to display the gun lying over his palm like a stone. “Do you—” he said.
    “I want you out of here,” Calabrese said, “that’s what I want. Right now.”
    “I don’t—”
    “I can handle him,” Calabrese said, “believe me I can handle him. Don’t be so goddamned protective.” He looked at Wulff, then, oddly, winked. “My staff is protective of me,” he said, “overprotective I would say, but then again they’re a very loyal and devoted staff. Aren’t they?”
    “Oh yes,” the guard said, putting the gun into his pocket, rubbing it into place, smoothing folds of clothing over it, “oh yes, we’re very loyal and protective,” and he gave Wulff a look of hatred, walked to the door, went out of the door and closed it. Wulff heard the knob click twice, the second a thinner, higher sound and then