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

irrigated desert and thinking, thinking hard about what he would be able to do to this man when he saw him.
    It would be worse than Calabrese.
    It would be better than Calabrese.

IX
    Carlin had not been thinking properly for a while. He was the first to know that; he could tell when his mental processes were all fucked up. A man who had been in his end of this kind of business for so long knew when he was not thinking properly, knew when the mind had gone off-center. All of the time that this was going on there was an older, cooler, more competent Carlin standing outside of him, shaking his head at what had evolved, and making dimissive gestures. “Better watch it,” this more competent Carlin said, “better just watch it, man, you’re going wild now. There’s no reason to go off in that direction, not with the edge that you have on this bastard. Still, if you insist on doing it this way I think that you had better get rid of the body before you go. Also, I think you had better get rid of the staff, all of them, just in case they start to ask questions you can’t answer. I’m sure they can all be trusted, but then again you don’t know about people. They can get pretty strange, pretty peculiar, they can act in ways you never thought they would. Better play it safe, Carlin,” this more competent version of himself had said, “and I’m going to play it safe too, I don’t particularly want to be around these premises. In fact, I think I’d better get out of here,” the adviser said, and disappeared with a whisk.
    He left Carlin with a corpse on his hands, but then again he knew pretty much what he had to do. The advice was well-taken—you could not disregard advice like that. He had been dealing with his auditor off and on for many years, and generally speaking anything that the auditor said was worth attending to since the auditor did not speak frequently, dedicating most of his time to simply listening with a stricken and attentive position. But then again, he was running his life, not the auditor. Carlin had to keep that in mind. What he also had to keep in mind, what was equally important, was that he knew the auditor did not really exist. He was just a projection of Carlin’s own mental state, his inner turmoil, his need to imagine some calm, removed presence that would give him calm, removed advice. If there was one thing Carlin knew and was attuned to all the way, it was his capacity for craziness. At any time he could veer over the edge. No man who had gone as far as he had, who had his enemies, who had to struggle all the time just to keep the sons of bitches off his ass could eliminate the likelihood of his going crazy at any time and blowing the whole thing. The auditor kept him sane, of course. All these tricks and gimmicks kept him going. Still, you had to keep it in proportion. You could not take a crutch and call it a third leg. That was the difference.
    So, after giving it due consideration, he decided that the auditor had to go to hell this time around. He would have to follow his own instincts and those were to travel light and as quickly as possible. He wouldn’t get rid of the body and he wouldn’t get rid of the staff. In the first place there was hardly any staff to talk about—the auditor as always had exaggerated the situation, overemphasized Carlin’s importance in the world (which was flattering anyway). The only staff were two hard men, probably homosexuals—Carlin had never asked—who were employed in rotating twelve-hour shifts to answer the phone, turn away people at the doors, give him an escort if necessary, and generally beat the shit out of any interloper if all else failed, which it rarely did. Carlin knew that he should know more about them, they had been there for five years, but aside from their names, Dick and Joe (or maybe it was Joe and Dick) and their last names, which he wrote on their checks, he knew very little about them at all. They had come well recommended