Lone Wolf #7: Peruvian Nightmare Read Free

metal curved warmly into his hand as he held it on the man called Walker. He said nothing.
    “You wouldn’t do it,” Walker said. “This is crazy. You just wouldn’t do it.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because you’re a careful man. You run a tight shop: you’re a professional and you’re not going to start pulling triggers without a reason. I’m too useful to you to kill, Calabrese.”
    “You don’t believe a word of that.”
    “Yes I do.”
    “Maybe I’m not so careful. Maybe I’m not so bright as you think I am. I let him go, remember. That wasn’t so smart according to you, even if I know exactly where I stashed him and my men are with him all the time. But you thought that that was stupid. So I can be stupid twice, eh?” He looked at the pistol, turned it so that it caught a fragment of light coming in from the window, bounced that light off Walker’s eyes. “I’m an old man,” Calabrese said. “I think about dying all the time now; there’s very little else to occupy me. Maybe I want to take risks, maybe I’m bored with the careful life. The careful life gets you mostly as dead in a hundred years from now as the risky one. Maybe I’m looking for a little bit of a challenge, something to keep my mind off the fact that age is going to kill me; I want to control my life myself.”
    “That doesn’t mean shit to me,” Walker said but his hand did not come off the doorknob. “I really don’t care what you do or how long you live.”
    “You’re a cheap informant, Peter,” Calabrese said. “Mostly that information of yours stinks. I think that you’re three quarters of a cop at heart anyway, maybe even a double agent.”
    “That’s bullshit. It’s just not so.”
    “But mostly,” Calabrese went on in a slow, patient tone, “I’ve been getting bored with you recently. You’re not doing me any good alive, anyway. Maybe it would be interesting to see you dead.
    Walker shook his head again. “I’m leaving.”
    “You want to leave. You keep on saying that. But you’re not moving, are you, because you know that I’d probably shoot you.”
    “This Wulff has gotten to you. Maybe it’s contagious, whatever he’s got. Whatever the hell it is I don’t want any part of it.”
    “Don’t you?” Calabrese asked softly. “Don’t you want to cut in on it?”
    “No,” Walker said, “no,” and as if fighting himself up and over some level of attention, gasped, inhaled irregularly and then fell against the door, struggling with the doorknob. His motions were irregular, he did not seem quite able to coordinate but finally, in a spasm, he did. He seized the glistening knob and turned it, opening a thin sliver of light into the empty hallway.
    Calabrese smiled in a private way.
    He shot the man in the back of the neck.
    Walker staggered in reverse—two steps, three—in a posture of astonishment, reaching a hand toward the wounded area as if he were dabbing tentatively at a sneeze, as if the wound were in the front rather than the back. He half-turned, showing Calabrese profile, his eyes rolling and then tried to say something, something which no doubt was profound and would have addressed the heart of the issue in a basic way (Calabrese had always wished that he could speak to a dead man) but the sounds only came out like those of a frog. Sounding like a frog seemed to amaze Walker. He reached his other hand toward the area, gripped the back of his neck as if trying to seat his head into place. He twisted. He turned, looked at Calabrese fully, trying to hold his head on his shoulders.
    Calabrese shot him in the forehead.
    Walker squeaked. He leaped, danced two dance steps and then, like a man making himself a careful bed in the woods, knelt, patted the floor twice and then lay in the spot that he had made. Lying on the rug he kicked once as if descending into sleep, then lay quiet. Blood moved cautiously away from him in bright, red rivulets.
    Calabrese, sighing, put the gun away, looked at the