Lone Wolf #13: The Killing Run Read Online Free PDF

them could have been alive if the lieutenant had not gone out of his way to please imagined superiors. Wulff at this moment could have been a married man living in a split-level with a pregnant wife and a bright future somewhere in a department of police science. It all went to show you. Instead, he was somewhere north of Mexico in a room with a dead man and a dying one, drugs all over the place, zeroing in on target.
    It just went to show you, all right.

V
    He got a lot of information out of Díaz. Once the man started to talk, he was inexhaustible; that was the way so many of them were, once they got into pain, became vulnerable. It was as if the urge to talk, to express themselves, to let everything be known, so long bottled within them because of the necessity for absolute cunning and control, once released, proved stronger than any impulse for retention. Wulff had found this again and again: the toughest and most brutal of bosses became almost chatty when he was facing death, when he was feeling pain; what it meant was that at the root most human beings were the same, had the same needs and responses; and although they could be shut off by conscious will, these needs would sooner or later, given the chance to balance, reassert themselves. The most controlled and dangerous became the most vulnerable and communicative under stress, as if they were seeking, indeed welcomed, the opportunity to give up small parts of themselves, just as the most cowardly in normal circumstances would, under stress, surprisingly often turn out to be among the most courageous. It all came down to a matter of balancing action, Wulff supposed.
    In any event, Díaz had plenty to say, and he gasped it out in little bursts until interrupted by pain or the need for another drink of water, which Wulff would bring him from the bathroom. The short man in the corner, having died some time before, was unavailable for duties of this sort, but Wulff did not mind: it made him feel useful. According to Díaz, a good quantity of drugs and potential successors to the old organizers were planning to descend upon Philadelphia, the bicentennial city, sometime late in the year or early in 1976, for the purpose of a general realignment and restructuring of the network. There was some irony in that they had chosen the bicentennial city at the anniversary of America to set up this kind of meeting, but if Díaz was aware of it, it did not come through in his little whimpers and gasps; it was simply a matter of setting an important meeting at a logical place at a logical time. And then too, there was going to be a lot flowing through Philadelphia in 1976, not only many tourists, but important federal personnel, all of whom might be expected to have an interest in the new arrangements.
    It was for these purposes that Díaz had set up the meeting with Wulff, allegedly to buy some drugs, in truth to kill him and take his own cache. There was nothing personal to this, Díaz wanted Wulff to know; he had no quarrel with Wulff at all. It was just a matter of building up his own influence and position within the emerging line of the network-to-be. As crude as it might sound, the new positioning that would come out of Philadelphia would be at least partially the outcome of the size of each cache. The man who brought the largest amount of drugs into the city (although he would not be stupid enough to take them to any meetings, of course; he would cache them somewhere else for secret manipulations and viewings) had a good chance of coming out near the top of the organization, and Díaz was as anxious to be in that position as anyone. Not because he was naturally ambitious, Díaz pointed out weakly, but because lack of any ambition in his business would almost certainly result in elimination. There could be no halfway measures; if a man was sincerely committed to rising in the profession, he had to be willing to do anything to implement that rise. Otherwise he would find his career