Lone Wolf #7: Peruvian Nightmare by Mike Barry

of it indiscriminately. He certainly was not conserving the joint the way that any American teenager would learn to within five minutes of his initiation. Any American would say it was a waste of grass. But then again, maybe the stuff was more plentiful here. Probably it was.
    He was relieved to see that the driver at least did not take any part of the joint. That was good; driving and pot did not mix. Not that he was any too sure that it was pot; there could have been cocaine, hashish, peyote rolled up in that joint. Although they were usually pipe drugs, there was no accounting for foreign customs.
    The car came to an abrupt halt, spinning against a rock facing to the right of it, the driver yammering. Wulff had to hold on desperately to the back seat to avoid pitching through the windshield. The man with the joint screamed and cursed, threw the remains out the window violently even as the car was braking. Then, the first of them to recover, Wulff saw that the road had been blocked by something that looked, at least at first glance, like a truck; seen secondarily it was a van of some sort from which men with guns were already spilling. They were waving their hands at the car, whose driver was now paled and slumped almost wholly behind the wheel. Abruptly there was a
spang!
something growing in the windshield. The joint-smoker screamed and himself tried to huddle down in the seat, but a second
spang!
caught him in the forehead and he fell into his blood.
    Wulff was already free of the door and rolling, his body being battered by the stones. Oh shit. Shit on it anyway.

X
    Calabrese knew that he had trouble early on, even before he got word of Dillon. Any fool could tell just from the sense of the situation that there was plenty of trouble, but he believed in functioning step by step. That was surely the only way to go in this business, and maybe Dillon would eventually get through to him. And, when Dillon hadn’t reported back hours after he should have, well, maybe there was trouble in the international phone lines or Dillon was having difficulty in finding a phone. It was best to look at matters in that way. You simply could not get far looking too much ahead in this business. Past the end of the immediate problem, that was about it.
    But by ten that evening he had known Dillon had blown it. It was a matter of instinct, that was all; you didn’t need much objective material in this business to see what was going on. Those who needed it were only to be pitied. People who needed the facts laid out in front of them were stacked at the bottom of the river. A suggestion here, a possibility there, a lapsed conduct, the look in a man’s eyes, the way a woman might look at that same man … and you knew everything. He put through an international call to the Crillon and got Stavros. Ordinarily this would have been a three-hour process but Calabrese knew a few people and he knew how to get hold of them even through the blind of pseudonyms that the phone company used. He got the call through in fifteen minutes to Stavros direct.
    “Where is he?” Calabrese said without preamble. If Stavros did not recognize his voice at this point then Stavros was a fool and Calabrese would not have credited himself with such luck.
    “Where is who?” Stavros said. Even through the network of the international phone lines, the ten-second delay, the flattening, mechanical interposition of wires and tapes which meant that he was not hearing Stavros’ voice but only a reassembled recording of it … even through all of this Calabrese could sense the fear.
    “You know who I fucking mean,” Calabrese said. “Your house guest.”
    “I haven’t seen him in a long time. Not all day.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “I’m quite sure.”
    “I’m a little concerned,” Calabrese said. “I sent some friends of mine after him. They should have located him by now.”
    “I wouldn’t know anything about that.”
    “I think you know everything about