Lone Wolf #7: Peruvian Nightmare Read Online Free PDF Page A

it; other times death itself had been imposed upon him. But one way or the other it was his certain legacy. Having come to avenge death, he could only create an ever-widening pool.
    And in death the two forms were no longer threatening. Lashed to one another they seemed faintly comic. In fact, collapsed as they were into their postures, there was a clownish aspect to these two who had been so menacing before, gutted as they were now like burnt-out cars, the wiring of the bodies itself now unspliced, hanging loose in the flowers of blood. He could see little ropes of exposed muscle tissue.
    He went toward the door holding the gun, cursing. He had created death again, and death was laughing at him. It delighted in the trouble it had brought. What the hell was he going to do with these two now? And what were the others going to do to him?
    It
had
to have been Calabrese’s work. Who else’s could it have been? And yet Wulff found that he could not believe this. The old man simply was not that stupid. He was not. He would not set up something as crude as this, nor would he have taken two inept men who were not a team, one of whom hated him. You did not, above all, put haters on the job. Calabrese knew this. He knew all of the angles of a job like this.
    And the old man had at least taste.
    Wulff opened the door to move into that aseptic hallway, poised sixteen stories above the unimaginable streets, and an immensely calm voice behind him said then, “No, Mr. Wulff. Not just yet. Please wait for a moment.”
    He thought for an instant that one of the corpses had spoken and that it would have been peculiar, although not catastrophic; he just would have taken another shot. But, when he turned, Wulff saw sitting on the bed near the bodies, dangling his little legs as if in an excess of glee, a tiny man with a mustache and an empty face. Slowly, then, the sense of the situation burst upon him.
    The little man held a gun with an opening as large as a mouth.
    “I do like your work,” the little man said. “I’m really quite impressed by your work, but then I expected to be. Please drop the gun, by the way. I can pull the trigger long before you can reach yours. And they’re slow action too; I wanted them to be that way.”
    Wulff said, “This is crazy.”
    “It may well be. But you’re a professional and you can accommodate yourself to craziness just as well as the next professional. Consider the lessons of the last quarter-century or so, Mr. Wulff: the human psyche, let alone a superior one like yours, can tolerate anything. Now why don’t you just drop that gun casually and face me?”
    “Why should I?”
    “Oh come on,” the man on the bed said, his limbs quivering with delight. “I’m not going to shoot you; believe me that’s the furthest thing from mind. It would be disastrous for me to do anything like that; I’d be losing an excellent man and, whatever else my biography may reveal, I’m not self-destructive. Not in the least. Not even a tiny bit.”
    Slowly, then, Wulff let the gun fall from his hand.
    There was nothing else to do. The voice was too self-assured, the little man too much in control of himself. The delight was that of a cobra, a gathering rather than loosening of the situation. It was possible to Wulff that he was yielding only to the assurance in this man and not to the reality of the threat, but he could not risk it. And even so, even if he yielded too easily, what did it matter? Weariness assaulted him.
    It was happening more and more often now, that weariness. Maybe it had started in San Francisco, stemming from when he had been in bed with the girl and she had sapped out of him some vital impetus, uncovered within him the knowledge that he was not so much dead as sleeping and that the stakes on life could be high once again if only he let them. Maybe it was not the girl’s fault and he was only thinking of Boston, seeing the bodies go up in flame—another thirty or forty dead and for what?