Free Beirut Incident by Nick Carter

balance. He advanced slowly.
    My floundering gyrations may have saved my life, but they had also left me crowded into a corner with the couch along one wail and a heavy oaken table along the other.
    Charlie blocked my only route of escape.
    I pressed against the wall as he took another step forward, only about four feet away now. His thin lips compressed tightly. The final lunge was coming.
    I had no recourse. I snapped Wilhelmina into my hand with an instinctive draw from the shoulder holster and fired.
    The bullet caught Charlie full in the throat and he stood there a moment, brought up short by the shock of the Luger. A look of puzzled surprise spread over his face and he seemed to be looking at me as if I were a stranger. Then his eyes glazed over blankly and the blood spurted from the base of his throat. He fell over backward, the knife still clutched in his hand.
    I stepped gingerly over his body and went into the bathroom to see if I could repair my face. If nothing else, cold water would clear my head.
    It took me a half-hour over the washbasin and another twenty minutes over two steaming cups of black coffee that I made on Charlie's stove before I was ready to go. Then I picked up my Nick Canzoneri papers and headed back to the St. Georges. There were still the "special instructions" from Su Lao Lin before I could take off for the States.
    And she had to be disposed of, too, before I left Beirut. I couldn't very well leave her there, pushing Siciliano hoods through the pipeline to the Mafia in New York. And since I was the last one she had sent to Charlie, his death wouldn't look so good for me.
    I sighed as I rang for the elevator in the ornate St. Georges. I didn't want to kill the Dragon Lady any more than I had wanted to kill Charlie, but I had made one stop between his apartment in the Quarter and the hotel, and that stop would help me carry this part of the job out.
    There was a softness in her eyes when Su Lao Lin opened the door for me, but it quickly turned to alarm as she looked at my damaged features. I had a strip of adhesive tape running across my temple over one eye were Harkins' lamp had cut a painful but actually superficial gouge, and that eye was swollen, probably discolored by now.
    "Nick!" she cried. "What happened."
    "It's okay," I reassured her, taking her in my arms. But she pulled back so that she could look up into my face. I remembered the fat Arab and the very young girl I had seen on my first trip up to Charlie's apartment. "I just got in between some Arab and his whore," I explained. "She hit me with a lamp instead of him."
    She looked concerned. "You must take care of yourself, Nick… for me."
    I shrugged. "I'm leaving for the States in the morning."
    "I know, but I'll see you over there."
    "Oh?" That was a jolt. I hadn't known she was planning to come to America.
    Her smile was close to being demure. She put her head on my chest. "I just decided tonight, while you were gone. I'll be over there in a couple of weeks. Just to visit. I want to see Franzini anyway, and…" There was that mid-sentence pause again.
    "And…" I prompted.
    "…and we can spend some more time together." Her arms tightened around my neck. "Would you like that? Would you like to make love to me in the United States?"
    "I'd like to make love to you anywhere."
    She snuggled closer. "Then what are you waiting for?" Somehow, that emerald green chiffon thing she had been wearing when she answered the door had disappeared. She wriggled her bare body against me.
    I picked her up and headed for the bedroom. We had the better part of the night ahead of us and I wasn't going to spend it in an office.
    I didn't tell her she would never get to the States, and the next morning I constantly had to remind myself of the American G.I.'s Su Lao Lin had destroyed with her drug network before I could bring myself to do what I had to do.
    I kissed her softly on the lips when I left the next morning.
    The plastique bomb I had attached