Free Lone Wolf #7: Peruvian Nightmare by Mike Barry

Dillon. “Your Mr. Wulff is an interesting man,” he said. “He is certainly a far better specimen than any of you. I wish that you were on his level.”
    “Calabrese will kill you,” Dillon said suddenly, on instinct. “You can’t get away with this.”
    “You are functioning in your American’s context again. Culpability and retribution. I assure you I am quite uninterested in what your Mr. Calabrese does. Your Mr. Calabrese disgusts me. Although,” Stravros said softly, “he has done me something of a service.”
    Dillon had an insight, or thought he did. “You’re working with Wulff,” he said. “You’ve gotten together with him on some deal and you think that you can get around Calabrese.”
    Stavros raised his eyebrows. “What’s that?” he said.
    “You can’t get around Calabrese,” Dillon said, “no one can get around him. You’re making a very bad mistake if you think that you can. Anything you do to me you do to him. You’ll pay for this.”
    Stavros leaned back with a little sigh. “You are so stupid,” he said. “All of you Americans are so stupid; you think that you are rational men and that the world works in terms of your crazy visions, but you are wrong. You are wrong about everything. Do you think that I care about your Calabrese?”
    “You should,” Dillon said. Looking down the line at Stavros it occurred to him for the first time that he was going to die. He had ducked this knowledge for a long time. Other men died, he had administered death to them often enough to be very familiar with all of its ramifications … but death was not for him. He was in a special, privileged category and he was going to live until the age of eighty and die in a richly appointed, quiet way. Except that he was not. He was forty-seven years old and this little old man was going to kill him right now. “You should care about Calabrese,” he said.
    “Why?” Stavros said, “why should I care about your Calabrese? Why should I care about any aspect of your American system. This is my hotel, this is my country, at least I should say that it is my adopted country, which is almost the same thing at this stage of the game, and all of you mean very little to me.” He directed the gun toward Dillon again. “Your Mr. Wulff is a very sensible man,” he said. “I find that we have an almost mutual accord on many things.”
    “You won’t do it,” Dillon said, “you won’t do it, this is crazy, you can’t do it,” and Stavros shot him in the lower spine. The bullet came out of the gun off-angle, the shot taken almost absent-mindedly, the little man ducking down to the surfaces of the desk as if he were reaching for a cigarette, and Dillon in disbelief had half-pivoted his way out of the chair when the unexpected bullet hit him in the lower back. He tried to rise but found that he could not; the bottom part of him was disconnected. And then as he fell back in the chair, appalled, he felt the pain beginning to rip at him.
    “Stupid,” Stavros said, “all of you are so stupid,” and then he shot Dillon again, this shot coming into the lower neck, near the jugular, just above the Adam’s apple. Dillon had one moment to understand what was happening to him, the impossibility of it suddenly colliding with the actuality, and as he fell back in the chair his limbs, restored and inflamed by death, yanked once, twice, twitched like a beetle’s. Then he fell back flatly, sliding all the way down, feeling nothing, not even the surfaces of the floor as they enveloped him.
This can’t be happening
he thought again, the brain still intact, whimpering out its protests, but then he heard the sound of Stavros’s laughter and he guessed that it was. He guessed that it was.
    Calabrese had laughed during some of the kills, too. Dillon had heard him.

VII
    The shit was in Cuzco. The little man had not been much more specific than that, only telling Wulff that he should take bus transportation up there; someone