Read Lone Wolf #12: Phoenix Inferno for Free Online

could not stand it any more. He really could not. He was entitled to better than this. If everything that he had gone through had worked itself toward merely an outcome of this sort then he would have been better off not starting at all. That was too depressing to think about. It canceled all experience. You were better off not doing that. Not canceling your experience. You were better off accepting it for whatever it was, trying to see the benefits in it, and moving on from there. Or did that, trying to make all experience chargeable against an abstract and future knowledge, did that make him as crazy as the captain? The hell with it, he thought.
    “This man is dangerous,” the captain said. “This man is quite dangerous.”
    “To drug dealers he is.”
    “To all of us. He threatens the very process of law enforcement. Society is built upon structures, upon codes, upon a certain common acceptance of behavior. A man who threatens that in the name of justice risks bringing down all of society.”
    “Society is shit,” Williams said. He put his calves back tightly against the legs of the chair, stood, flexed, and pushed back. He looked down at the captain as if from a great distance. “If this is what we ought to preserve, if this is what Wulff is attacking, then he’s doing us all a great favor. I’m sorry, captain. I can’t face this any more. I just can’t deal with it. You’ll have to excuse me. It makes me sick and I can’t take it any more.” He was up, moving to the door of the little office where the captain spent over 50 percent of his working life, would do it until he reached pension in a kind of hatred, which when the pension came in, would remit to nostalgia. The captain, like almost every retired civil servant, would spend the rest of his life vaguely missing what he had despised. That was the trick they played on you, if “trick” was the word for it. Williams had a better word but he didn’t think that saying it would make any difference. “If there’s something you think is wrong, captain,” he said, “you can put in a formal complaint.”
    “You’re a fool,” the captain said. His face had clamped more tightly. “You’re a stupid fool. You think that you’re getting anything out of helping this man, out of covering for him? He laughs at you. He’d kill you if he had to. If he needed to, if it would stand to his advantage, he’d destroy you. He doesn’t give a damn about everyone. I know what you think of him,” the captain said. “I know what a lot of stupid, misguided people think about Wulff, that he’s some kind of romantic, a true vigilante, the Lone Ranger of the drug market. He’s a filthy murderer, probably crazy, that’s what he is and he’s the enemy of order.”
    Williams said, “Captain, I’m sick of people calling me a fool. I’ve been called a fool up and down by too many people for a long time, and I don’t think it’s in the career and salary plan that I have to take it. You haven’t thought this through at all, you understand nothing, in fact, you’re full of shit,” Williams said quietly and went out, closed the door, went down the hall. He was shaking. From deep within, the trembling was working through, moving on many levels. He felt that he might collapse from the extent of his feeling, but then again, everything could be contained;
    there was nothing you couldn’t live with if you kept it bottled up. All the signs were clear. He was too close to Wulff and they were going to get him now, any way they could.
    On the other hand, they did have a point. They were not entirely without justification. He
had
helped Wulff escape.
    It was too much, it was too complicated, the interweaving of culpability and innocence was too much for him. He was better out of it, Williams thought, going back to the dismal office where they had him on desk work, had had him since he had come back from the injury while they decided what if anything to do with him. He was