“You believe he’s trying to reconstruct the old organization?”
Bolan shook his head as he replied, “A new one. Maybe larger than the original. Maybe a hell of a lot more dangerous. Whatever, Portillo would be the logical architect. The guy knows the territory.”
“How would he go about it?”
Bolan sighed. “Via the imperfectibility of man,” he replied quietly.
“What?”
“A Mafioso,” he explained, “is a very cynical man. He operates on the oldest vices of mankind. Every man has his price, see—or so the logic goes. A Mafioso religiously believes that. It’s the only thing that makes his world function. Jimmy the Grease could have invented the idea. He’s a genius at buying and selling men’s souls. That’s where any crime syndicate gets its power. And, yeah, Mafiosi are very cynical men. With damn good reason.”
“Are you a cynic?” the lady asked softly.
He grinned and seemed to be thinking about that, then replied, “I’m a spot cynic.”
“What is that?”
“I believe in the imperfectibility of some men.”
“I see,” she said soberly. “Which explains your distrust of our criminal justice system.”
“It explains nothing,” he said tiredly, unwilling to be drawn into another debate on those grounds. “I am not involved in quote unquote justice. I am conducting a war. So let’s not—”
There would be no unwanted debate. As he spoke, the monitor at the surveillance console came alive. Portillo was making a telephone call. The decoder “read” the tone-dial signals and visually displayed the number being called. It was a local area number. April recorded it and cocked a quizzical eye at Bolan as the call went through.
He nodded and muttered, “This could be it.”
It was.
The guy had probably been pulling himself together and tending the minor wounds, trying to decide a course of action—or maybe the delay was natural caution. Whatever, some ten minutes had elapsed since his encounter with Mack Bolan—and the guy was sounding cool and together.
“Yes. Who is it?”
“Hi, this is Jimmy. I have unhappy news.”
“Just a minute.”
There was a brief silence, then another voice came into the connection: “What is it, Jimmy?”
Something was very familiar about that voice.
“Hi. Trouble, I’m afraid. It fizzled.”
“Why?”
“Somebody was sitting and waiting for them. They walked into a lot of unhappiness. The last one. All of them.”
A long silence, then, “All of them?”
“I’m afraid so. All but Junior. And he really pulled a dumb one.”
Muttered curses, then, “What’d he do?”
“Beat it straight back here, that’s what. And brought the heat with him. Can you beat that?”
“What kind of heat?”
“The worst kind. I was just giving him hell about it when this guy walks in on us out of the fog. Right past the damn dog.”
“What guy?” sneered the familiar voice from somewhere in the past.
“You won’t like this,” said Portillo. “Prepare yourself.”
“Don’t say any names right out.”
“I wasn’t going to. No need to. You know what happened to Deej. Well, it’s trying to happen all over again. The guy is back.”
A loud groan preceded the quick response from the far side of that connection. “Are you sure?”
“No way to mistake it. We stood eyeball to eyeball for five minutes or more. He leaned on me pretty hard. Listen. The guy is all they say he is, and more. Listen. I’m a lucky S.O.B. And don’t I know it.”
Portillo was becoming emotional. The other voice was growing colder.
“What’d you have to sell him, Jimmy?”
“You don’t sell that boy, Charlie.” Charlie! Of course! “You just doubletalk all you think you can and you pray a lot. Don’t worry. I gave him nothing. He shot me twice and left.”
“He shot you! What?…”
“Nothing serious, I’m okay. I played dead. Poor Junior didn’t have to play. We’ll have to put him away in a bucket. I don’t know exactly what he told our friend but it sure didn’t buy him any pity, whatever it was.”
“Wait a minute,” said Charlie. “Let me see if I understand this. You say Junior was—”
“He was talking, yeah. That’s all I know. Guess I was unconscious for a little while so I don’t know exactly what was said. When I came to, Junior was pleading for his life and saying the guy should keep his end of the deal. Hey, I was hit—twice. I just laid there. Damn quick, Junior was just laying there, too, only not so lucky. So I don’t really know what was said and what wasn’t. I guess it all depends on what Junior knew. I don’t know what he knew, I leave that to you. But listen, that guy went roaring out of here with blood in his eye, so you better—”
“This was when?”
“Just now. Just this minute.”
“Okay. How’s the fog up there?”
“It’s murder.”
“Okay. What can I do for you?”
“I don’t know, Charlie. Right now, nothing, I guess. But I’m very nervous about this whole turn of events. And I’m worried about—well, you better pass the word. It’s big trouble, Charlie.”
“I know it is,” agreed the voice from Mack Bolan’s past. “Okay. Thanks. Do you need a doctor?”
“Naw. I’ll take care of it. You just take care of them.”
“I better tell them. And let them decide …”
“Oh sure,” Portillo quickly agreed. “Tell them. And be careful. You know how this guy operates. He’s hell on wheels.”
“Yeah. Okay. Thanks. Let’s keep in touch. Where will you be?”
“I’m checking into a hotel, Charlie. I’ll call you.”
“Do that.”
A deeply troubled man terminated the connection at the far side. An audible sigh from Jimmy the Grease accompanied the final hang-up.
Bolan already had the engine fired and was directing the cruiser through the mists in the return trip to town. The other vehicle had served its purpose; this was as good a place as any to leave it.
April was staring morosely at the dead monitor.
Bolan said, “Good work. Keep the wires on. Did you get that number?”
“I got it,” she grumped.
“Fine. I’ll want you to translate it into name and address. You can use your credentials if you need to. Just get me the fix.”
“I’ll get your fix,” she assured him, the voice small and distant. “Was he telling the truth?”
“Who?”
“Him. Portillo. Is that the way it happened?”
“What do you think?” Bolan growled.
“I think you’re conducting an imperfectible war,” she replied softly.
Maybe so. Yeah, maybe so—regardless of the modus. At any rate, it was no time for a moral defense of the self—and Bolan was beginning to resent the girl’s constant plucking at his methods. He squelched that, though. A war, imperfectible or not, was building rapidly to a white heat. He needed to get the lady to the telephone office. The rest would take care of the rest.
But Bolan did not really need a name.
He had recognized the reedy voice at the other side of Portillo’s call. An echo from the past, yeah—a very unhappy past.
It was the voice of Charlie Rickert, once known and respected as “the twenty-four-hour cop.”
The rest, yes, would take care of even the past.
CHAPTER 6
CHANNELS
There had been a time when Mack Bolan was the hottest “fugitive” in the country—when police of all the various jurisdictional levels kept close tabs on his known movements, reacting swiftly, cooperatively and massively wherever his presence was noted. Tim Braddock, as the first big city cop to head a “get Bolan” effort, had become something of a celebrity in the national law enforcement community and had spent co
nsiderable time and energy tracking the fugitive around the country, working with other departments as an expert consultant on the Bolan problem.
Through all that, Braddock had secretly hoped that the Bolan “problem” would never go away—that the guy would go on to success after success and finally achieve his stated desire to rid the world of the Mafia cancer. Nobody gave him much of a chance to do that, of course, but obviously Braddock was not the only cop to secretly wish he could.
A lot of the steam had gone out of the “get Bolan” movement as more and more the law enforcement agencies of the nation began to see the fantastic effect of the guy on the underworld power structures. The federal hunt had fizzled out a long time ago, for all practical purposes. It was even difficult, now, to gain access to the federal files on Mack Bolan. Rumors within the police community had grown to the virtual conviction that Harold Brognola himself was covertly supporting the Bolan crusade. A congressional oversight committee had recently leaked a new rumor that the White House was working up an amnesty package in an effort to bring the crimebuster into official government service.
Braddock had followed all such developments with great interest. He had always admired the guy, even from the very beginning during a time when the hue and cry was hottest for Mack Bolan’s blood—before, even, that climactic moment when Braddock lay dying from Mafia guns and would have bled to death but for the intervention of the “fugitive.”
Yeah. Those had been days hard on the conscience of a good cop. They’d branded the guy with a “mad dog” label and the orders were to “shoot on sight—shoot to kill.”
True, the guy had committed just about every crime in the book. But as the matter began to sift itself into all the neat little police compartments, it became more and more obvious that the only “victims” of Mack Bolan’s war were professional criminals themselves—of the worst kind. Braddock had even been privileged to observe at first hand Mack Bolan’s most outrageous rampage—the one in Boston, when he thought the Mob had snatched and snuffed the ladylove and the kid brother. That had been something else! But even then, with all that mental agony, the guy had not lost his perspective. He had shed no innocent blood during that “kill orgy.”
Big Tim Braddock simply could not read Mack Bolan as a common criminal. Not even as a criminal. The guy was a true hero, in every sense of the word. He deserved a ticker tape parade through every city in the land. He should have schools and boulevards named after him. At the least, at the very least, his name should be stricken from the wanted lists everywhere and carved in granite somewhere as a symbol of rare human courage and commitment.
But the name had not been stricken from the wanted lists. Right here in L.A. there was a whole book of charges against the guy. And, whatever he might feel in his heart, Tim Braddock was still a cop and Mack Bolan was still a fugitive. So it was with no great surge of police spirit that he received the tip that Bolan was back in town. Even less did he like the tipster.
“I don’t want to talk to you, Rickert,” he growled into the telephone.
“That’s your loss, Tim,” said the disgraced ex-cop. “I’m doing you a favor.”
“Do it to someone else,” Braddock said quietly and was about to hang up when the guy said the magic words.
“Bolan’s back in town.”
Braddock paused to light a cigarette and gather his thoughts. Rickert had been a crooked cop, sure, but he was no looneytune. And, of course, the guy held Mack Bolan personally responsible for his downfall. In his own twisted mind, he had plenty of cause for hate.
“Where’d you get that?” Braddock asked him.
“Oh, you know me,” the ex-friend replied breezily. “I still get around. You can take it as gospel. He’s here.”
“For what?”
“What else? You could look into a disturbance at Bill McCullough’s house this morning. Also—you got a pencil handy? I’ll give you an address in Topanga Canyon. It’s out of your jurisdiction, but—”
“I have a pencil,” Braddock said heavily.
Rickert supplied the address, then said: “I haven’t seen the guy personally, but I know a reliable subject who did. And it’s got his tracks all over it. I thought you’d want to know.”
“You ready to produce that witness?” Braddock inquired.
It was purely a rhetorical question. Rickert laughed it away and said, “The guy doesn’t leave many of those, does he? I thought you’d want to get set for the fireworks.”
Braddock sighed into the telephone. “I don’t have to tell you that it’s against the law to give a false report. I hope to hell it’s false, Rickert.”
The renegade laughed lightly at that one, too. “Perish the thought. I wouldn’t even spit on the sidewalk these days, if I thought you were watching. What is it with you, Tim? Don’t you think I suffered enough? The D.A. thought so. After all, I lost my job, my pension, my good name—all on the word of a psychopath.”
“Bolan is not a psychopath,” Braddock said tiredly, “and you lost nothing. You spent it, guy, you spent it all yourself. And if I had my way, yeah, you’d be in the joint right now. The mere mention of your name is enough to stink up the halls around here. And, Rickert—don’t call me again.”
He hung it up and pushed the pad around the desk for a moment, glaring at the telephone.
Damnit. Damnit.
The wrong guy was the fugitive.
He sighed, then, and again picked up the phone.
“Get me a hot line to Washington,” he ordered. “Don’t use the WATS line. I want Harold Brognola, Department of Justice. I don’t want an aide. I want the man himself. Give this the red flag. I’ll sit here until you get him. Get him.”
The newest deputy chief at LAPD knew full well that he was “sitting here” on a time bomb.
But … he had to know. Dammit—he had to know for sure.
The building was one of those new Sunset Boulevard highrise developments, which serve both business and residential needs. Judging by its ground floor office space, SecuriCom was a large and thriving company. It provided security services not only to this building but to a number of industrial and business clients in the area, as well. The record would reveal that many of those—perhaps all—were owned or controlled by William McCullough’s California Investors Limited. Which made for a nice twist to the villainy now afoot within that empire.
Bolan’s Mafia threads and tinted glasses apparently passed the cold scrutiny of the television camera. The door buzzed and opened to his touch. A guy in a snazzy uniform sat at a small turret-console just inside the huge outer office of SecuriCom. He was surrounded by banks of CCTV monitors and other electronic devices. Two more uniformed men sat at desks toward the rear; another was working at a computer.
The guy in the turret shoved an open book toward the visitor. Bolan signed the register “D’Anglia” and shoved it back. The guard half smiled as he asked, “Who’d you want, sir?”
“Rickert should be expecting me,” Bolan said as he gave the place another quick look.
The guy wrote something in the book, then told the visitor, “I guess you know your way.”
He did, yeah. He’d just spotted the door with the gilt lettering: CHIEF INVESTIGATOR. And, beneath that, in smaller print: Charles J. Rickert.
It seemed, on the surface of things, a rather painless exile for a kinky cop.
Bolan’s visual memory of the guy was clouded and tinged with emotion. His one personal encounter with then Lieutenant Rickert had come at an anticlimactic moment, at a time when Bolan was both physically and emotionally exhausted—and Rickert himself had seemed half demented. It was beneath the cliffs of Balboa on a dark and tragic night. Rickert was about to gun down a fellow officer—none other than Carl Lyons, later a federal undercover cop whose friendly path would cross Bolan’s at many points along the wipeout trail. It seemed unlikely that Rickert had ever actually laid eyes on Bolan—and even if he had, his memory would be of a face that no longer existed. Shortly after
that encounter, Doc Brantzen had worked his plastic wonders at Palm Desert to fashion the battle mask behind which the warrior had lived ever since. Police sketches of the new face had never really captured it and few living Mafiosi could summon forth a reliable image other than vague references to “them damned eyes” or “cold, man, cold.”
So Bolan felt no great identity risk inside the enemy’s lines. He was also a master at role camouflage—the ability to take on almost any identity of his choosing.
At the moment, he chose to be a Mafia torpedo. And Charlie Rickert, ex-twenty-four-hour cop, seemed to be buying him right from the top.
A television monitor stood beside Rickert’s desk and there was a small console through which apparently he could select any of many closed circuits for display. At the moment, the monitor was displaying the reception area just outside. The guy had obviously seen him coming in.
Rickert did not look up from his desk and there was no exchange of greetings. Bolan went to the window, lit a cigarette, and stood there smoking with his back to the desk.
“There’s big trouble,” he said quietly.
“Don’t I know it,” Rickert muttered. “I hope you didn’t come here to tell me that.”
The voice fit, yeah. A man’s physical parts can change quickly—especially so at Rickert’s age. He was in his late forties, maybe early fifties. The hair was mostly white, now, with little tufts of black here and there, worn short and bristly. Bolan had not remembered that particular feature. And the guy was heavier than he’d seemed that first time around. But it was the same guy.
Bolan turned from the window with a tight smile and said, “Some people worry.”
“As well they should,” Rickert replied, looking at him directly for the first time.
“How about you?”
“Sure. I worry, too. It’s my job to worry.”
Bolan turned back to the window and fiddled with the blinds for a moment, then he moved across the room and took a seat atop the desk.
Rickert growled, “Get your ass off my desk!”
“Put it off,” Bolan-D’Anglia invited.
Terrible Tuesday Page 4