Lone Wolf #7: Peruvian Nightmare

by Barry, Mike

  The first response shot came now. It came from one of the two uninjured men, he could not tell which, and he had no time to avoid it, no time even to set himself. The shot hit in front of him, he could see the little puffs of dirt and stone fragmenting outward; and then a second shot placed right behind came even closer to the ground. The man was not a particularly good shot and he was firing under pressure, but his technique was all right; he was leading the shots into Wulff. Wulff got off another shot and this one went high; he knew even as he pulled the trigger on this one that it was going to be a wasted shot. It squeezed the two unhurt men further into the ground but it hit neither. It hit neither.

  Abruptly he felt panic seize him, the panic of knowing that now he had two shots for two men, an almost impossible condition under this circumstance, but then again it was nothing to worry about because he either would or would not place the fire—either would or would not kill them—and in any case, the end would come so fast now as to avoid any brooding on his part. He had gone this far; he could go a little further. Anyway, it did not matter. Nothing mattered. One of the men on the ground panicked, probably, and reared to his knees clutching the tube of the gun, looking frantically in Wulff’s direction, obviously trying to place him but unable for the instant to do so, and this gave Wulff a pitiably easy shot. Nothing to do but aim and fire. He did so casually, not tensing his wrist, squeezing it off as absently as you might on patrol take a shot at a second-story felon. The shot hit the man above the left eye, tearing upward through the plate of his skull, discharging pulp and membranes and then he was back on the ground in a different condition from the way in which he had taken leave of it, his gun in a spasm of agony hurled at some distance from him. Keep that in mind, Wulff thought. He might be able to use that gun later.

  But there was still the fourth to dispose of and the fourth was cunning. While Wulff had been killing the third, the fourth had taken a new tack entirely, had labored his way back inside the Buick. Wulff did not know this until he heard the chuck of the door, the dim metal-against-metal sound of the old car’s door closing and then, from somewhere inside the car came a shot, a poor shot which went high above him but which nevertheless sent him rolling and spinning to the earth again, rolling so frantically that he almost lost his gun, just holding onto it with a fragile grip as he looked desperately for some sort of cover. But there was no cover. His roll had taken him away from that little outcropping of rocks which he had used as a blind, and drawing his legs up against himself he had a feeling of vulnerability, was trussed up in the landscape now like a chicken, a clear, clean shot for the man inside the car. But even as the next shot came, just a little bit high, he felt the good, clean rage overtake him: they had no right to do this to him. He had killed three, three for none, and now the fourth was still firing away and this was not right; Calabrese had no right to send four men out against one, no matter how skillful the one. This was not the way of a man.

  Oddly it was this which enabled him to level the gun to get off his final shot. It was a foolish rage, foolish because Calabrese of all people was not interested in the fairness of a matter but only in the winning of it; in Calabrese’s position Wulff would have been the same (had he worried about the lives and the stakes when he had blown up that freighter in San Francisco?—a hundred men unaware of the danger, had that bothered him for a moment?—no, it had not) but there was nothing like a little rage, even false rage, to catapult a man into a position of efficacy. And so he felt it, allowed it to build within him in a controlled way. The son of a bitch was skulking in the Buick, the son of a bitch did not even have the simple guts to confront him man-to-man on open ground: who did he think he was? Actually, looking at the situation objectively, he was in an impossible situation now.

  Of course he was. The man was in the car, shielded by glass and metal on all sides, the coward, protecting himself, shooting at Wulff who was an exposed target, only one crucial bullet left in Wulff’s pistol. Blame that son of a bitch Stavros too for being so clever, for restricting his fire like this, but then Stavros could not be blamed for everything; doubtless the man had had no suspicion that Wulff would get into a situation like this, would have the safety of his own men to consider. Well, consider their safety, Wulff thought; both of them were dead in the Oldsmobile. Another high shot came out. The man inside the Buick was panicking, no question about that. As much as he had the situation in hand, he was unable to take advantage ot it; three deaths to his left and right must have given him plenty to think about. In fact he might have absolutely no more taste for combat at this point, and then, confirming this line of thought, Wulff heard the engine of the Buick roar, lifter sounds, valves tapping, little golden streaks from the mufflers. The man had broken. All that he wanted to do was to get out.

  The Buick reared backwards, tracking up dirt, then the old Dynaflow gearing clashed, the car bucked forward and then it was heading toward him, the driver flat out on the gas pedal, trying to run him over. Well, that was a new way of looking at the situation; the man had guts after all. But you could not both drive and shoot at the same time, not with any real accuracy whatsoever, and it was this calculation which caused Wulff to make his last effort; he allowed the car to come upon him, holding his ground tentatively at a high point, bringing his pistol high but not firing. And then as the car kept on rolling, what had occurred to Wulff must have occurred to the driver—the realization that for acceleration there must also be braking action in equal degree and that in coming off the road, roaring toward the abutment where Wulff was standing, he was taking a very real chance of losing the car and going over the cliffs. The driver, in his rage or cunning or some mad combination of the two, had lost sight of this calculation for the instant, so eager was he to ram Wulff over the abutment. But now he came back into contact and the big car slewed wildly left, the brakes screaming as the driver tried to bring it down. Wulff heard the spattering of pistol, the driver trying to struggle off a shot or two as he worked the brakes and the wheel but that was not an intelligent idea, not at all because the shots went completely wild and meanwhile, left to its own devices, the car was skittering, literally inching toward the abutment now. The shots stopped, the car began to make the croaking, screaming noises of an animal as the driver worked desperately to brake it down, concentrating on nothing else and Wulff, feeling like a matador working with an oversized, enraged and particularly clumsy bull, stepped sideways then as the car dived upon him. He moved a couple of feet out of its path and then, leveling his pistol, putting no thought into it and less calculation (because if you began to think about what should be instinctive you merely lost control altogether), he put one shot through the side window where the drivers head ought to be.

  There was a spatter of glass, the old plate glass smashing and tinkling, imploding within, and for a moment Wulff did not know if he had gotten the man or not. Then the car, suddenly straightening on its skidding course, roared with power, something coming like a stone down on the accelerator; then it swayed precipitously, went out of control, headed toward an abutment and began to roll. The driver, only dimly seen from this aspect, a fish under glass in layers of water, was obviously trying desperately to regain control of the car. He was flopping within the aquarium that the interior of the Buick had become, and Wulff could hear his gulping and screaming. And then slowly, majestically, real aspects of grace in it, a grace magnified by the age of the car, the heavy, dull sheen of the metal which some prideful Peruvian had doubtless polished at one time to a second gloss that outshone the first, the glaring portholes, three of them on the side of the car catching the last of the light … as all of this came together the car glided toward the last possible point of stoppage, poised like a diver on the lip of the chasm … and then flipped soundlessly into the valley below. Hand on hip, still gripping the gun, Wulff watched it fall with a kind of wonder. The soundlessness of the movement, the scope of the disaster covered by that soundlessness, was awesome. And then the car hit—glass, fluids, metal
spraying like gunshot from its surfaces as it plunged into the chasm—and as the first fires leaped from the car, Wulff heard the screaming then, fracturing the sound of metal with its long, bloody sound.

  But not for too long. The screaming was cut off in mid-syllable, a lick of fire overtaking the screamer’s lungs, searing them to ash in a single, terrible burst. And unable to bear it anymore Wulff turned, turned from the site where the car had hit to see the villagers staring at him—five, no seven or eight of them in a solemn row, hats in hands, a penitential posture, eyes solemn and reaching. They looked like a cluster of distant relatives arriving at a wake, unaccounted for and embarrassed but eager, eager as such relatives almost always are, to please. To please and ease. To please and ease the situation.

  XII

  The helicopter which was supposed to take him out with the shipment had been sabotaged and had gone down with the pilots in the mountains on their way to pick it up. Therefore he would have to get the stuff out of the mountains on foot. There was no other way. That at least Wulff was able to gather from one of the natives who was able to speak English, but the English was halting and convoluted and he was not able to get much further than that. What he gathered was that Calabrese had called in the heavy reinforcements, that Stavros’s plans had fallen through and that Wulff was very much on his own. That was no surprise. Of course, it didn’t help matters too much either.

  The man who passed the shipment on to him and who spoke English was an old, old man with a beaten face, a face long since smashed into impermeability. These people appeared to live in a small settlement of some kind behind the tourist city of Cuzco, appeared to have blended into the landscape and were living with little more than stone-age implements. But for a product of a culture seemingly without technology of any sort the old man seemed surprisingly sophisticated and all of them, at least those that came by and who spoke to him, seemed to know a good deal. Wulff wondered about the setup—he wouldn’t be surprised if they were all employees of Stavros and if this was not some kind of blind, a thriving little network tucked in behind Cuzco manned by people who appeared to be the most poverty-stricken and hopeless kind of natives—but he guessed that it did not matter. None of it mattered except getting the stuff out of here. The old man made that very clear to him, not that Wulff didn’t know it well himself already.

  He retched twice in the thin air, the second time, after his conversation with the old man a little blood had come out of his nostrils mingling with the sputum, and it had been at that point that the old man told him that it would be best to lie down for a while; there was certainly no getting out of Cuzco before nightfall anyway. So they had made Wulff a pallet in an empty tent thrown up against a pile of slag and he had laid in the tent for a long time, sometimes sleeping, sometimes not, coming from between the flaps a couple of times to check the terrain, seeing only the slow passage of the natives in front of him in what appeared to be a self-sufficient settlement. Two miles to the north, just below, was the tourist mill, the cable cars, the guides and the lost city of the Incas but that was merely gilt; this, goddammit, this right here was the lost city of the Incas and he was in the middle of it. He was a living artifact.

  They had given him the shit in an innocuous-appearing burlap sack. Wulff had looked in it immediately, suspicious of course, wanting to see if Stavros was playing some kind of elaborate trick on him or, worse yet, if the people down here did not know shit from the truth; but the first look, the first careful test with a moistened finger had convinced him: Stavros knew exactly what he was doing. This was beyond a doubt the purest, the most extravagantly clean shit he had ever had contact with. It was unadulterated, in its most natural state, ready to be juiced, cut, bound, knifed; and market value was pretty much of a fiction when you got into an area of this sort but, yes, the street value here would be well into a million, maybe multiples of that. It all depended on how it was cut. That was what predicated market value even more than the original worth of shipment … how much and what kind of adulteration would be going into it. The peasants of Cuzco had done their job. They had turned out a product of inestimable worth. Now it was up to Stavros and his agents where it went from there.

  If indeed this was Stavros’s shipment. You simply did not know; he might be handling this for someone else. In neither case did it matter; the problem was to get the drugs out, get them out of this fucking country and back to the States. Once in the States it was a new situation altogether. The thought had occurred to Wulff that once he was back onto his own turf, if the drugs were still in his possession and he had the luck to work it through that way, it would be a new ball game entirely. What would Stavros do if he charted his own course from there? The best disposition for those drugs would be at the bottom of the El Paso. Or maybe he could play this by instinct, could use them as bait to suck out Calabrese and kill the old son of a bitch. That would be worthwhile, killing Calabrese. If he did nothing else, if he had done nothing else, that would almost justify his odyssey in itself, getting rid of that ruined, terrible, corrupt old man.

  But you had to take it step by step and now he would be all kinds of a fool, a complete fool to calculate what he would do if he got the drugs out of the country. There was no saying that he would get them out of the country. Calabrese’s men had almost killed him twice; now, it seemed, they had sabotaged the helicopter that would have taken him out. You could not, against an enemy like this, make any deductions on your future course whatsoever, except to accept the fact that you would have to go step by step. Obviously, the old man regretted his mistake. He regretted it severely; he wished that he had killed Wulff face-to-face. Well, perhaps he would have that chance once again. Perhaps they would have the opportunity to meet face-to-face. Wulff looked forward to that; no matter how dim the chance, it was at least a possibility and worth pursuing.

  He went from retching to uneasy, clotted dreams in which Marie Calvante rose from the floor of the tenement and greeted him with open, astonished eyes, telling him once again of her love, and on the floor of that tenement he took her, bearing her back to the planks again and giving back to her what she had offered him and more as well; he passed from that dream to a muddled conception of the girl in San Francisco whom he had fucked, who had restored him at least partially to himself and the two images muddled, however dimly. The sexual content of the dreams gutted him and passed him onto another terrain completely in which he moved into asepsis, confronted by a bleak, gray panorama of the faces of all the men who had tried to kill him, from New York to Boston to San Francisco or Havana, and these dreams no less than any of the others left him quivering and spent, too much happening in too little time, a compression of incident which he could not understand, let alone handle. And then somewhere in the middle of one of those dreams, a dream in which he had confronted Albert Maraco in his Long Island home and once again on a burning staircase had killed him, in the middle of this dream he arose from it the way that a penitent after a long time, his grief done, might come from an altar, coming into all the cool, deadly spaces of the tent in which he lay and found that the old man who had talked with him was leaning over him with a mingled expression of compassion and inquiry, his eyes interested yet somehow curiously dead. There was a welter of experience behind those eyes which Wulff could hardly grasp, let alone appreciate. “Are you stronger?” the old man said and then without pausing, “I hope you are stronger, because it is time to go.”

  “Yes,” Wulff said. He came off the pallet slowly, feeling strength reconstitute itself in all of the crevices of his body. “Yes, I’m stronger now. I think—”

  “Night,” the old man said, “night is always better in which to travel. Also, we have reports that your presence here is extremely dangerous.”

  “To whom? To me or to you?”

  “To us,” the old man said, “of course to us. We are not concerned with you, we are concerned with us.” Some complex failure of language seemed to overtake him; he struggled for sound. “You must rea
lize we have our own culture,” he said finally, “our own—”

  “Your own way of life to protect. Your own interests, your own people.”

  “What’s that?” the old man said.

  “Nothing,” Wulff said, “nothing at all.” He looked outside tentatively, then came back, brushed sleep and dust from him in a series of motions, then picked up the sack. It had a faint warmth. The old man looked at it implacably. “How am I supposed to get out of here?” he said.

  “We will arrange an escort at least part of the way.”

  “But how?”

  The old man shrugged. “The roads would be extremely dangerous,” he said. “There is only one way in and one way out if you go by the road. You will have to go through the mountains.”

  “I figured as much,” Wulff said, “but how am I to get through the mountain?”

  “By horseback.”

  Wulff hefted the sack. “I should have known that too,” he said, “but that’s going to be a problem. You see my experience doesn’t cover any time with the mounted police. Somehow I missed that one.”

  “What’s that?” the old man said. He looked genuinely puzzled yet eager if he could to derive some information. “I do not quite understand you.”

  “That’s all right,” Wulff said, “that’s perfectly all right. I don’t understand any of it, either. I don’t even think that I understand myself.”