Lone Wolf #7: Peruvian Nightmare Read Free Page A

corpse for a moment and picked up the intercom. Killing a cop, even this cop, was supposed to be a bad business—even for Calabrese—but he figured that this was not the major problem; he could always get around it. What he could not get around so easily was the loss of control which the murder had betrayed. But then you could not, he supposed, have everything. Better to discharge one’s feelings than to bottle them up; that was the secret to a long, healthy life. “Get a couple of people,” he said into the intercom. “I’ve got a goddamned accident on the rug here and I’d like to have it cleaned up.”
    “Yes,” the voice said and clicked off. The person on the other end had heard this before but not for a while. Probably, Calabrese thought, they’ll be thinking that it’s like old times around here. It isn’t, not quite—but there were certain purgative effects in blood. They could not be discarded. Always, no matter how far you got away from it, you might have to come back to the blood eventually just to retrace your origins. It was what made you strong.
    Calabrese leaned back, broke another cigarette, looked impassively at the man on the floor. Was Walker right, he wondered. It was important in his position to hear all angles and discard none of them; a lot of people in similar positions had gotten into trouble eventually because they had not kept open minds. Calabrese did not consider himself to be in that class; nevertheless Walker might have brought something to his attention that he had not acknowledged. Maybe if he had shot Wulff he could have saved himself some difficulties. He did not think so, he thought he had the man under the tightest wraps possible and he believed that he could get rid of him with a simple phone call anyway … but still, you did not know. You simply did not know.
    Wulff was an unknown element in the tight equation of the operation. Surely Walker had had a point. It had been stupid to leave the man alive. Hadn’t it? Calabrese leaned back in the chair, realized that he was humming unconsciously in a cracked old man’s quaver. Getting old. He cut it out.
    On the other hand, he thought, sooner or later, at some stage of this game, a man
had
to allow a variable into the equation of himself. He had to do it if only to convince himself that he was still alive. It had been too easy for Calabrese for too long; he still had to know if he could meet a challenge if one erupted.
    Bullshit. Walker
was
right.
He had had no business letting the fool walk away from him, under any kind of custody. Instead of leaving Walker for dead on this carpet he should have made it Wulff. All that he had done with this poor bastard of a rogue cop on the floor was to transfer the desire, the change of heart.
Admit it. Admit it, Calabrese.
    He heard sounds in the hallway; two men came through the door without knocking on it. Calabrese looked at them with rage. “What the fuck are you doing here?” he said.
    Looking between the corpse and Calabrese one of them said, “You called—”
    “I called, I didn’t call,” Calabrese said. “Get the fuck out of here. Get the fuck out of here right now.”
    The door closed, the two men were gone. Scared shitless. Yes, he could still scare the shit out of them. He could do it to anyone. He was in command here and it was time to deal with Wulff. He had been a fool to let it go to this point.
    Calabrese picked up the phone and looking at the corpse in a detached way got an outside line, got the operator, and asked to put through a person-to-person call, international, to Lima, Peru.

II
    Half an hour before his interview with the hotel owner, three days after he had been dumped in the hotel, Wulff had walked into his room on the sixteenth floor of the Crillon, fresh from the coffee shop where he had spent an hour looking at tourists and wondering which of them was keeping him under observation that shift. He hated them. He hated the tourists. He hated the Crillon