Lone Wolf #9: Miami Marauder by Mike Barry

animal, pleading, teasing for a little speed but Wulff was firmer with the car in holding it down than he had ever been in coaxing speed out of it. He shoved the lever into
D
1 , holding the Chrysler into second speed where the engine labored anywhere above forty miles an hour and, spinning rpm’s, he moved along on US 1.
    He wished that he had a police radio, a short-wave receptor that is, that would pick up reports of the police bands. He would like to hear what the cowboy in the ditched car had to say for himself now. He doubted that it would be very much.
    He was on virtually empty road now with the car shaken. Once, a long time ago, US I had been the only route from Maine to Miami, due south through New York, Philadelphia and Washington, one row of custard stands, drive-in movie theatres, gas stations all the way down but now that was finished, the turnpikes had taken away everything but local traffic and where he passed business now it was faded, burnt-out abandoned hulks which once had been roadside stands. What had happened to all these people? the people who sucked their lives off the highway, that was. Had they retreated into the fields back there in the darkness, little beaten houses just dimly visible from the highway, or had they pursued the population onto the vast surfaces of the turnpikes where they had all become Joes at the filling stations, Emilies hustling tuna salad in the Hot Shoppes? What happened to the people who worked for the country when the country ineradicably changed?
    Well, it was no difference, no point in worrying about it, the country would go on and the people would take different shapes or roles to accommodate themselves to the beast. The country ran lives now, the country which once these people thought they had known and controlled was nothing but a beast now, a slavering beast that absorbed and excreted and there was little place in it for the Joes and Emilies, damned little place as well for the Wulffs too. Men who fought the beast, who threw themselves into its jaws to try and choke and sicken it on its own fetid juices, people like Wulff did not last very long. That was probably his greatest sin, the one that they would impale him for after all of the others were forgotten: he had bucked the system, he had defied it and you simply did not, in modern-day America, take on what fed you. He moved a hand over, poked open the sack and idly let his fingers play with the powder, the little, sticky grains adhering to his fingertips like sugar or salt, clinging to him in little teardrops. Here, properly adulterated, cut down, spooned and injected were a thousand dreams which he was clutching in those fingers, dreams for all of the Joes and Emilies of the land, dreams which would take them back to that easy, gentler time when US 1 had been the world, the boundaries of their world laid out as easily and precisely for them as the drug itself laid down murderous little patterns in the capillaries, pulsating then from those capillaries through the complex and ruined network of the system, squeezing the heart, coursing into the brain, moving out again then into the lungs, the vena cava, the pancreas, the vena cava …
    It occured to Wulff that he was not thinking very rationally. Strain, fatigue, the pursuit, the business of murder itself had changed him, perhaps in some permanent fashion. He was no longer rational, he was through some complex combination of that fatigue and the murder-lust driven into a condition which, without drugs, might have duplicated the mind of the junkie. He was what he despised, he thought lolling above the wheel, inclining his head toward the windshield, maintaining contact with reality in only the most tenuous and exhausting way, he had become what he had dedicated his life to destroying. He was a junkie himself. What he was hooked on did not go into the veins but it was the same thing, all of it was always the same.
    He kept on driving. If he thought about it more he