Lone Wolf #9: Miami Marauder by Mike Barry Page B

machine guns and men to operate them, even if room seven-oh-one was a cell of fire whose flaming walls could drop around to embrace and consume him … even if all of that were true he still wanted to go up there, to see the enemy whole. “All right,” he said, “I’m coming.”
    “I’m glad. That’s a wise move, Wulff.”
    “It’s a goddamned dumb move, Calabrese.”
    “All right,” the man said almost pleasantly, “it’s a goddamned dumb one, but you haven’t been smart yet and you’re not going to start now, are you?” Hanging up the phone he guessed he wasn’t.
    Wulff walked rapidly through the lobby, streaming fountains in the background, soft music pulsing through him, little gusts of air purring from the central air conditioning hitting him as he walked underneath the vents. This was probably the closest that it was possible to come in the Fontainbleau to a sense of climate. Here indeed was where a certain kind of Americana had peaked: sheer insulation from the environment, the shutting off of any sense of strong, uncontrollable forces which were mysterious and deadly. To be an American was to seek relief from these forces, to move further and further up the socioeconomic scale was to move further away from the irreconcilable and the monstrous to some state in which death itself was merely an unfortunate aspect of the weather and could be held outside by rigorous technology.
    Cadillacs operated on the same principle, Wulff thought, which might have to do with his affection for them but there was, he liked to think, some humor and at least a trace of irony in this obsession because the Cadillacs he loved were not the new but the seven or eight-year-old jobs where the bloom was off and where the environment came peeking in all the time: a bad muffler here, ruined tailpipe there, leak in the exhaust vent, the air conditioning, the leather seats themselves coming askew, all of the marvelous insulation falling apart so that you knew all the time what America consisted of. It consisted of holding onto a rotting, dismembered apparatus which could not perpetually deny what it had been conceived to abolish. The rich could have Cadillacs and the Fontainbleau, at least eight years worth of Cadillacs and Fontainbleau to wall them off, the middle class could at least get a piece of them through two-week flight-included package tours and three- or four-year-old de Ville series coupes and sedans. The poor, however, had to settle either for the Fleetwood Eldorado series in very bad repair, seven- or eight-year-old cars which were literally spilling through the joints … and heroin. Heroin was the Fontainbleau of the poor man … except, Wulff thought, that the rich had all the bargains as usual. Heroin was far more expensive.
    He rose up six flights in an empty self-service elevator whose speakers sung to him, the one hundred and twenty-one strings sweeping their hearts out for him, flowers and bowers, breezes and sneezes they were playing, a chorus of heavenly voices was singing about in front of them, the chorus and strings intertwining richly, ripely, lushly … Wulff could have thrown up if he had the energy, but of course he was merely a simple cop at heart, he could not appreciate the intricacies of beautiful music which the one hundred and twenty-one strings, as he remembered, definitely had a fine reputation for playing.
    The doors came open on the seventh floor and he walked out into vacancy, vacancy glinting from the chandeliers, vacancy on the rugs, a couple of people in evening dress making their way along the hall, holding on to the walls almost tenderly, both of them in their mid-sixties. The man was whispering words of encouragement to his wife, or at least the man thought that he was whispering although there was some difficulty with his auditory sense. What he was doing was hoarsely mumbling in a rasping, carrying tenor. “Just a few more steps dear,” the man was saying, “a few more steps and