Panic in Philly

by Don Pendleton

  But there was no time to mourn the dying. The big limousine leapt forward and sped across the lawn toward the escape gate at the rear, the tricky secret exit which Frank himself had dreamed up for his Emperor’s Key clientele.

  Carmine’s personal wheelman was driving. Drasco himself and his longtime bodyguard were also up front. Stefano and the painfully injured Jules Sticatta were in the back. Frank and Philippa sat tensely on the jumpseats. A backup car of hardmen was right on their rear bumper.

  Frank looked back upon the scene of combat as they cleared the gate and shot up the back road. His beautiful fucking joint was wreathed in flames, burning … burning to the fucking ground.

  “So fast,” Frank groaned. “It happened so fast.”

  “How’d he do it?” Drasco’s bodyguard muttered, scowling into the rear-view mirror. “In broad daylight. How’d the guy do it?”

  Philippa was pressing a bloodsoaked handkerchief against a bullet graze on the back of her hand. She was scared—sure—like the rest of them … but more than that, she was stunned, really out of it. “I hit him,” she was whispering. “… I know I hit him.”

  “I saw the guy,” Frank announced. “Plain as day, big as a mountain, I saw him.”

  “Big deal,” somebody up front growled in a half-audible sneer. “He saw him.”

  “Shut up!” Papa Angeletti roared from the back seat. “All of you just shut up! Maybe we ain’t out of it yet!”

  Frank shivered and glanced over his shoulder for a comforting peek at the loaded crew wagon behind them. Even Don Stefano, the unshakable, the unflappable—even he was scared. When Papa yelled and talked like the streets, yeah … Frank the Kid knew, the old man was shook and flapping.

  The two-car caravan screeched around a corner, edging out a green panel truck which was angling into that same crossroads. The truck gave them plenty of room—then they ignored the warning sirens and also beat a procession of fire trucks into the intersection at Germantown Avenue. When they were leveled out and eating pavement toward home, the wheelman lifted his gaze into the rear-view to watch the last of the emergency vehicles disappear.

  “Bet I know where they’re headed,” he commented quietly.

  “Already?” Frank asked under his breath.

  How could everything be happening so fast? How could those fire trucks already be …?

  He sighed and declared aloud, “I think we got ourselves a mess.”

  “You think, you think,” the Don grumbled. “Listen, and you mark me what I’m saying! I gonna get his head! I gonna get that wise guy’s head and I gonna make me a boccie ball outta it! You mark me!”

  Frank the Kid was marking him.

  But he was still shivering in his hundred-dollar boots … and with no legs, no legs at all, under him.

  Frank Angeletti would have shivered even harder if he’d known about the green panel truck which was laying off their tails by about a cool city block and the ice-eyed man in black who, with cold singleness of purpose, was tracking the hit to the next zone of combat.

  Chapter 7/ Behind the Numbers

  The firemen were battling to contain the furiously blazing fires and trying to prevent a spread to the other buildings on the property.

  Two emergency medical units had pulled into the edge of the fire zone and attendants were hurrying about, checking life signs among the victims.

  Uniformed officers cautiously poked about the grounds, while photographers and other police specialists preserved various items of hard evidence.

  Captain Wayne Thomkins, Chief of Special Details for the Philadelphia Police Department, stood at the edge of the scene with a small group of state and federal officers. The Captain’s face was a study in anger, bafflement—perhaps embarrassment. He asked the FBI representative on the Bolan task force what must have been a purely rhetorical question to all others present. “Well, what’s the verdict? Was it a Bolan hit?”

  Agent Joseph Persicone nodded his head and murmured, “I’d say so. It’s fairly typical. He usually leaves a mess like this.”

  “I see it but I still can’t believe it,” the Captain said. “I don’t see how one man, acting alone, can …”

  “I don’t either, but he does it,” Persicone insisted.

  “The medics have already tabulated fifteen dead. God knows how high the count will go when we start through the rubble.”

  “That’s typical too,” the agent said, sighing.

  Another plain-clothes officer stepped into the group and whispered something in Thomkins’ ear. The Captain nodded and said, “I sure do. Send him over.”

  The cop hurried away.

  Persicone asked, “What was that?”

  “We had a stake-out here,” Thomkins replied, the red of his face seeming to deepen. “We’re getting the guy in here now to get his story.”

  One of the men in the group snickered and commented, “Some stake-out.”

  “We’re on EPA here,” the Captain growled. He was referring to the “Extreme Precaution Apprehension” routine. “Let’s hear what the man has to say.”

  It was a high-echelon group attending this aftermath of a massive Executioner strike. Persicone was chief of a special federal strike force which had been turned onto the chase for Mack Bolan. Also present were too high-rankers from the state’s criminal division, plus one of the top men of Philadelphia County. Others, many others, were busily setting up control-room operations downtown in an effort to contain Bolan’s Philadelphia plans as much as possible. They had been racing the clock in an attempt to move ponderous machinery into place ahead of the approaching night. Obviously they had lost the race. Bolan was already loose and blitzing. In a city the size of Philadelphia, with all its normal problems, it was not easy to react quickly to a situation such as this one.

  Thomkins’ face seemed to be dwelling upon thoughts similar to this as the group of officials waited in restrained silence and watched the approuch of a young plain-clothes officer.

  The newcomer seemed nervous, somewhat apprehensive, as he introduced himself as “Detective Strauss.” He extended a small leather notebook to Captain Thomkins and told him, “That’s the story, sir. Second by second, blow by blow.”

  The Captain grunted and riffled the pages of the notebook without looking at it. He went right to the point, asking, “Where were you, Strauss?”

  The detective pointed toward the southeast corner of the property. “Right around the corner, on Parklane. I even saw the guy go over the wall, Cap’n. I can’t be sure of this, I mean I’m not dead positive but—well, I believe the guy was around here all afternoon. I think I even talked to him. He came over and got a light from me, small-talked for a minute or two.”

  Thomkins shot a quick glance at the FBI agent. Persicone grimaced and nodded his head in an affirmative reply to the mute question.

  “All right, tell us about that,” the Captain said to Strauss.

  The young officer was losing his nervousness. He fixed the Captain with a steady gaze and told him, “He was driving a phone company truck, or at least I took it for one. And he was outfitted like a lineman. Climbing poles and stringing wire all around here, all afternoon. About, uh, five o’clock he was working the pole just down from me. Came over and asked for a light. Said something about not carrying enough matches for overtime. Asked me how much longer I’d have to hang around the neighborhood. I asked him what he meant—I was just waiting for a friend. He laughed, said okay, I could stick with that story if I wanted to. Asked me if the big joint back there was still a whorehouse. I said how the hell would I know. He laughed again and went back to work. I didn’t start to connect the guy until—”

  “Just a minute,” Thomkins interrupted. “You’re saying the guy tumbled that you were a police officer on stake-out? Is that—?”

  “Yessir, he knew. We get that all the time, you know. Everyone seems to delight in fingering the fuzz.”

  One of the officials commented, “You’re on the Bolan detail, right? You were h
ere specifically to spot any smell of the guy in this neighborhood, around this known mob hangout. I presume you’ve been briefed on Bolan’s tricks, his M.O. You’ve seen the artists’ sketches, I’m sure. And yet you …?”

  Strauss colored, but stuck his chin a bit higher in the reply. “I called in and asked for a phone company verification when I first noticed this lineman. I got a confirmation that work was scheduled for this area but that’s all I could get. Somebody at headquarters was supposed to be checking it out but I never heard any more about it. Meanwhile, the guy was going about his business like he knew what he was doing. I had no reason to suspect that he—”

  “All right, Strauss,” Thomkins put in. “This isn’t a civil service hearing. No one’s accusing you of dereliction. What else do you have to tell us? You said you saw him going over the wall?”

  “Yessir. I’m pretty sure it was him, I mean the same guy, the lineman. The place where he went over was a bad angle for me, though. I mean, it was just a flash glimpse, but I’m sure he came out of that phone company truck—and then, flash, he’s going over the wall and out of sight. He’d been wearing this jumpsuit, you know, coveralls—like some linemen wear—the tool kit, spikes, all that. But he’s hitting that wall now rigged up for war, I mean heavy combat. But it was a bad angle, and I guess I sat there for a couple of seconds wondering if I’d actually seen what I thought I’d seen. You know how those things go. You’re sitting there for hours, looking for something—then when you see it, you wonder if your eyes are leaping at ghosts. Well … then I called in the contact report and dispatch ordered me to stay with the car. And I did, until the shooting started. I reported that also, then went out to see what I could see. All hell was breaking loose by then. I mean explosions, fire, the whole bit.”

  Thomkins was glaring at something in the detective’s notebook. “You sure these times are right?” he asked in a muffled voice.

  “Yessir. I paid particular attention to that. You can check it out with dispatch. Those are the exact times—”

  “You’re saying two minutes or less,” Thompkins said in that same muffled tone. “You’re saying the guy raised all this hell in just two minutes?”

  “Ninety seconds, sir,” Strauss reported, tight-lipped. “Exactly. He was ninety seconds inside those walls, that’s all.”

  “That’s all,” the Captain echoed.

  “Yessir. I was running along the road just outside the wall, trying to get in close enough to read the license on that panel truck. The guy came back over the wall before I could get halfway there; then all those smaller buildings went to hell. When the smoke cleared, the guy was gone. Some of those inside left at about that time also. I saw two big limousines streaking out the back way.”

  Persicone muttered, “And the Don got away.”

  “Sir?”

  Thomkins was working at another angle of thought. He snapped, “Then how did we …?” He stabbed a finger at an aide and barked, “Time of response!”

  “Five forty-two,” the man replied, without referring to notes. “Fire department also responded at that same time. Citizen’s report, gunshots and fire at the corner of—”

  The Captain’s eyes were all but rolling in their sockets as he cut into the report with a snarl at Persicone: “Four minutes before Strauss called in his contact, before the show even started. So who the hell called, Joe? Don’t tell me … don’t.”

  The FBI man was studying his watch. With a half-smile playing at his mouth, he murmured, “What’d it take us to get out here? … About five minutes?”

  “About that!” Thomkins snapped.

  “Probably called it in from a pole,” Persicone decided, openly grinning now. “I’d say he timed it pretty close—closer than I’d care to try. He calls the cops and the firemen, romps in, knocks the joint over, slides out—and he’s got half of official Philadelphia protecting his withdrawal. Pretty cute, eh?”

  “Hell, I can’t buy that,” the Captain growled.

  “You will,” the FBI man assured him. “Right now, I believe we’d better start worrying about his next punch. It will be coming, and soon. We’d better start figuring where.”

  “No worry there,” Thomkins snarled. “All we have to do is sit back and wait for his next call!”

  The FBI agent shifted his gaze to the young detective, Strauss. He showed him a sympathetic smile and asked him, “Could you give us an accurate reading of that lineman’s face? Could you describe it in pretty fair detail to a police artist?”

  The embarrassed officer dropped his eyes from that knowing gaze and replied, “I guess not, sir. To tell the truth, I never got a really clear look at that face, sir.”

  Persicone nodded understandingly and told Captain Thomkins, “You can see the size of our problem, Wayne. We’re not simply going against another wanted man, or some kind of nut. We’re up against a genius, a real pro, a guy who knows every trick in the combat book, an infiltration specialist, a method actor and—”

  “And a blitz artist,” Thomkins interrupted, sighing. “A brazen bastard, at that. He knew we had the place under surveillance. He drops in on our cop and lets him know he knows. Then he just waltzes over and … Okay. Okay, Joe. I’m buying the guy. Where do I make my down payment?”

  “Let’s go ask Don Stefano about that,” Persicone suggested. He smiled, a droll flick of lips and eyes, and added, “If there’s still time.”

  Chapter 8/ Out of Hand

  Bolan was pushing his luck with the warwagon and he knew it. The time had come to dump it and switch to something less noticeable. However, he had followed the Don’s vehicles from the Emperor’s to a sedate neighborhood on the near north side of town and satisfied himself that the old man was indeed going home—and he had one final job to perform with this disguised war machine.

  There had never been any thought of mounting a frontal assault upon the Angeletti residence. There was no combat stretch in that neighborhood. Houses were too close together, too near the street where too much traffic flowed; the odds were simply too great that innocent civilians would get caught in the action.

  That house did figure in certain other aspects of the war, though—and the time would never be better to take this initiative.

  Bolan felt that he had to chance it.

  He had engineered a tap on Angeletti’s telephone two days earlier and left the splice taped off at a distribution box located a block and a half away from the house. Using his lineman’s phone, he could connect into that circuit whenever the time seemed appropriate to do so.

  That time had now arrived.

  He made one pass through the neighborhood in the wake of Angeletti’s limousines, verified their destination, then circled about in a quick recon of the area.

  And, yeah.

  The cops had this place under surveillance, also.

  He spotted two likely, appropriately inconspicuous cars angled off for unobstructed views of the front of the Angeletti home, another on a side street where the rear of the property could be watched via a narrow alleyway.

  They were not watching for Angeletti.

  They were waiting for Mack Bolan.

  It was a police tactic which was giving Bolan more trouble than all the others. Not that he blamed the cops. It was their job. They weren’t trying to protect the enemy, necessarily—although in the curious legal-moral structure of this country the lawless had as much right to protection under the law as anyone else. But that wasn’t it. The cops were probably just as happy as anyone to see these Mafia fatcats—whom they could rarely touch, themselves—falling all over their asses trying to evade the Executioner’s implacable style of justice. But supposedly it was a nation of law. And the law had to prevail. Mack Bolan had to be put out of circulation.

  And the law was gunning for Mack Bolan in Philadelphia.

  Sure, he accepted that. It was part of the game. Bolan had never asked for a hunting license; he’d even refused one, early in the game.

  But the cops were not the ene
my. They were, in Bolan’s mind at least, soldiers of the same side. He could not fight them. He could only hope to avoid them. And they were making that task more and more difficult all the time.

  He warily circled the neighborhood, counting his chances and calculating probabilities. Then he threw the whole thing into the hands of the universe and sent the warwagon along the side street to the north of the Angeletti address.

  It was a short block and a narrow street—no houses fronting, no streetlamps. Night had fallen. The moon was up, but high trees on the properties bordering to each side were casting deep shadows and enveloping the narrow lane in heavy darkness.

  He could not have asked for better conditions.

  With the exception of the AutoMag and the Beretta, he left his armaments in the warwagon and went up the pole to eavesdrop on a Capo.

  The line was in use when he plugged in.

  Someone in the household was talking to a doctor, one who presumably knew how to keep his mouth shut about certain injuries which could prove embarrassing to a low-profile family like the Angeletti Mafiosi.

  A few seconds after the conclusion of that conversation, old man Angeletti himself made a call to an attorney. This had to do with certain protective measures which the Don had apparently worked out some time earlier, something to do with a dummy lease which had been let on the Emperor’s property, and “you know what to say when the cops come nosing around.”

  The lawyer assured the Capo that he could not possibly be tied, not officially anyway, to the trouble out at the Emperor’s.

  The third call was made immediately thereafter—a direct-dial long distance connection into a New York City exchange—and Bolan knew that this one was the paydirt he’d been awaiting.

  A cautious voice responded to the third ring with a quiet, “H’lo, yeah, who’s that?”

  Don Stefano’s voice announced, “This is me in Philly.”