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

concentrate on the task at hand, stay to it, don’t get distracted, put it away. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and the next shot came in, the assassin placing his fire carefully, gaining in confidence now as well he might, and this bullet passed so closely over Wulff that if he had not fallen, had not gotten below the line of the seat, he would have been gone. No time to think of that, though, no time for calculation of any sort, what he had to do was to somehow protect himself.
    The assassin was obviously running out of fire. If he had not been he would not have settled for one shot or two; he would have followed up the dead hit on Owens with only one shot but would have made that one right, then would have pumped in the remainder and finished off Wulff for sure. But he had not done that and that could only mean one thing—he had only one weapon, he had run out, he was reloading. All of this swept through Wulff in a matter of thickened seconds while the Fleetwood was still barreling in reverse at its maddened ten to fifteen miles an hour, Owens’s dead foot linked to the accelerator, Owens already quiet above him. And Wulff did the only thing he could have in that instant to avoid either death by impact or by fire, nothing to lose really, double dose of death carried in the situation. He reared up from the alcove, pushing away Owens’s body with an effort of strength, came up on his knees and, centering his weapon, put one shot downrange toward what he saw as an explosion of light, then braced himself against the seat as he saw that they were going to pile into the Bonneville. There was nothing to be done. There was no way around it; no way to deny the crash. In a perfect panorama of stopped time, Wulff saw it all and what would happen then, and there was nothing to do but to hang onto the seat, close his eyes as had the dead man, and hope that when the Fleetwood crunched into the Pontiac dead-on, the assassin, if he were not dead already, would be caught in the impact.

VII
    Carlin had decided that he had to make a break for it. Call it crazy, what the hell. He had to get out of Phoenix until Wulff was gotten, had to lay low until he was sure that the madman was no longer on his trail. Maybe it was crazy, maybe it was cowardice, maybe what it really was was showing a lot of sense. He had entirely too much at stake now. Everything was breaking for him, if only he could save his ass. He might have the whole country in his palm, but what the hell good would that do him if Wulff got to him first? It wasn’t worth thinking about any longer. Carlin wasn’t going to consider it. He would go south of the border, lay out for a while. In Mexico City he knew at least three men at the highest levels, each with impregnable villas, each with a hundred gunmen. He could take his choice of any of them, hide out in perpetuity. When the time came to get out of there he could pay off any one of the men or all three in ways that would make it worth their while. No. When you considered the situation overall, when you considered all the stakes and the possibilities, he would be a fool to stay, not to go. Going made sense.
    He had twenty men in teams on the trail, but what the hell were twenty? What were thousands as against this Wulff? He had taken out singlehandedly at least that many in that freighter in San Francisco; then there had been that business in Boston where they were still counting the bodies. And Las Vegas—he had blown up an entire operation in Vegas. No, twenty men, no matter how skilled, no matter who they were, could not be considered ample protection. It made sense. It made sense to get the hell out. Besides, and at the heart of it, Carlin was terrified. He was man enough to make that admission. Wulff scared the shit out of him. Anyone who wasn’t scared by that man had no business being in the world. Wulff wasn’t even a man, he was a beast. An animal could do anything. How could you buy off a murderous jungle beast