Lone Wolf #7: Peruvian Nightmare by Mike Barry

they had anything to do with it, though. Wulff picked up that information later on. When he had walked out of the department, dumped his badge on the body, bothered to inform no one but Williams later what he had done, and made his decision to singlehandedly destroy the international drug trade, he got himself moving in circles where people were in a position to deny any involvement with the O.D.’d girl. And they did. All of them did. But by then it was too late for everyone.
    He went out to destroy the international drug trade. It was crazy, maybe, but so was the drug business itself. Madness versus madness. He started to roll out his swathe of death and destruction then, roaming across the continent, moving from New York to San Francisco, back to Boston and then to Las Vegas, on a hijacked liner to Havana, then to Chicago, and at most of these stopover points he found himself sooner or later facing a person of some importance, usually in the process of being killed. And one by one they swore that they knew nothing of Marie Calvante, much less of West 93rd Street. The word had gotten around on the organization circuit that Wulff was out for vengeance, and each of them explained that whatever else they had done none of them had any knowledge whatsoever of the girl. It looked, in short, like a setup of some kind. Either that or it was a coincidence which had sprung Wulff loose finally.
    But he would have done it anyway. That he guessed was the point. He had been aching since Vietnam to take on those bastards; but only a marginal man, a man half-dead and without hope, could try anything so desperate and the murder of the girl, then, had only triggered him off. Anyway, he did not care to believe what they told him about organization non-involvement. Why should he? Why should he believe anything? All of these people were liars anyway. All of them.
    But even if it was the truth, what the hell did it matter? For a little while, particularly in San Francisco early on, he had had the satisfaction of knowing that he was at least getting a job done. It might be a brief life on which he was embarked but it was an effective one—a hell of a lot more effective by any standards than the narco squad. Maybe he had taken out five hundred by now including the heads of the northeast and western sectors. The Bay area, the New England area would not be the same again for a long time, if ever; the organization was wrecked. So he plugged ahead. He kept on killing. He got a helicopter pilot somewhere along the line too; that one had really hurt, but the man in the last analysis had proved to be a traitor. What else was there to do?
    He didn’t like it for the most part; only a lunatic would get pleasure from killing, and despite the word that was being passed around about him Wulff was not at all crazy … but he couldn’t say that he disliked killing, either. That would have been a misrepresentation too. It was just a job. He had little feeling. He had no feeling. He was dead altogether, or so he wanted to believe; the important part of him had died back in New York. Along the way, in San Francisco, there had been a girl and he had had sex with her and it had not been bad but it really didn’t change the equation. Did it? He would not accept that. The equation was cold and hard. It had been laid to rest in a stinking, single room occupancy tenement.
    Until he had hit Chicago.
    He had hit Chicago carrying out of Havana a million dollars worth of smack which he had chased from the police stash room in New York City where it had been taken out by a corrupt cop named Stoneman clear across the continent and onto a hijacked plane. And he had hit Chicago still holding on, a million dollars clear, and there he had run into a man who lived on an estate overlooking Lake Michigan named Calabrese.
    Calabrese had been something else again.
    Calabrese sat or stood on top of the network; he was so far above it in his estate that he did not even acknowledge