Panic in Philly

by Don Pendleton

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  FROM BOTTLE AND BEDSPRINGS.

  END OF MESSAGE

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Executioner series

  1 DEATH STALK

  It was easier getting back into Jersey than it was getting out. That mad flight out of Teterboro was only a month ago, though it seemed like a year. Some itinerary—Jersey to Sicily, Sicily to Algiers, Algiers to Jersey. Who’d believe it?

  Someone did, evidently, someone who knew it wasn’t going to be Seattle or Detroit. And now Death was tailgating him across that moonwashed Jersey countryside—Death with a capital D but spelled Taliferi—and it was crowding the rearview mirror of his Mustang with blinding headlights and awaiting only the most efficient place to happen.

  Bolan had identified the big crew wagon the moment it swung in behind him; he knew who they were and how they would try it. The Taliferi knew the death game quite well. It was their profession, their calling, their primary function in life.

  The Talifero brothers, Pat and Mike, were the lord high enforcers of the national combine. They took orders from only la Commissione, and their hit crews constituted a standing army of elite storm troopers such as had not been seen this side of Hitler’s Germany. No “button men,” these—no bumbling hit men or muscle specialists—these guys were Gestapo and, yeah, they knew their business.

  Mack Bolan, thankfully, also knew his.

  His business was to stay alive, to carry the war back to the Bloody Brotherhood, and to walk up their backs every chance he could find.

  Forever the realist, however, Bolan knew that his business, at this moment, was at the verge of bankruptcy.

  He was carrying an agonizing souvenir of his Sicilian encounter his in his ribs and in a painful and stubbornly seeping flesh wound of the lower leg. He was bruised and scratched and hurting like hell from head to toe … and he was weary enough to simply let go and die.

  State troopers were swarming the New Jersey Turnpike and busily sealing every exit along that hundred-mile corridor between Philly and New York. Through some inexplicable extension of the combat sense—or of survival instincts—Bolan had sniffed out that maneuver and made his escape from the toll road at almost the last possible moment.

  And now here he was, cruising a lonely back road across central New Jersey with a Talifero head party at his rear bumper.

  The sanest thing for a guy in this situation would be to simply let go and let it happen. It would be so easy, so quick, so final.

  He’d been a dead man since this damn war began, anyway.

  Yeah.

  Make it official, Bolan. Stop and die for the men.

  He had been cruising at an inconspicuous sixty miles an hour since leaving the turnpike, and when the Talifero meat wagon slid up behind him, he’d watched them nuzzle up and look him over, then drop back again for a pacing into a likely shooting gallery.

  The road was narrow and curvy, picking its way through the jumble of factories, farms, and small towns to the east of Trenton. At this hour of the night, only death was stirring along its winding route.

  Just the same, the death crew would be looking for optimum conditions; these boys hardly ever left anything to chance; they were not gamblers, they were sure-thingers.

  Bolan sighed as he casually checked the clip in the AutoMag. Three rounds of .44-caliber massive death were all that remained for the big silver pistol. The Beretta was totally defanged, empty, useless.

  Sure. Time to stop and die, Bolan.

  He angled a faint smile into the rearview mirror and quietly declared, “The hell you say.”

  His foot came down hard on the accelerator, and the rented Mustang leaped forward in instant response, leaving a puff of exhaust gases to mark the spot where the “death stalk” became a two-sided game.

  The big Cadillac surged forward also, under expert command and grimly hanging into the tail slot. The Mustang, though, had been designed for games of this nature. The early advantage was clearly hers. The sleek sportsters swept over the abrupt ridges and power-screamed through the sharp curves as though all the laws of motion had been written into her design specifications—and slowly but surely a gap began forming between the speeding vehicles.

  Bolan was playing only for numbers, though, not miles—counting the seconds of lead he managed to hold into each turn, calculating the increase with each successive maneuver and pitching his combat mind forward into that moment of confrontation which lay inevitably somewhere on the road ahead.

  He knew that one crew wagon on his tail also inexorably meant that others were streaking into the chase—from several directions, no doubt. The fact that they had picked up on him so quickly was no matter of chance or accident. These boys were radio-equipped and -dispatched. They were as good as the cops in an exercise like this one; and in this particular case they had an advantage over the cops—they knew the car Bolan was driving.

  Damn right, these guys knew their business. They had to. It was their only excuse for living. And Bolan had been making monkeys of them for much too long. They meant to get him this time, obviously, and that meat patrol that was now about ten seconds off his rear bumper represented but one statement in that determination.

  So, sure … it had to be a game of numbers. He could not simply outrun them. He had to stop them cold, and he had to do it before the others had time to join the chase.

  And so it was when the Mustang screamed into a darkened crossroads with the Taliferi less than fifteen seconds behind. Bolan caught a brief glimpse of a road sign just as he powered into the intersection; one way led to the town of Roosevelt, the other to Perrineville. Neither meant a thing to Bolan. He was seeking terrain, not towns—a place with combat stretch—and his instincts swung him eastward, toward Perrineville.

  And he found his combat stretch several minutes and twenty numbers later, at a point where the road topped a gentle rise to descend abruptly into a double switch back and over a narrow brook.

  He nearly missed the bridge, himself, the Mustang toeing in at the last possible instant to flash across, a hair width removed from the concrete abutment. Then it took him another ten or twelve precious numbers to halt that forward plunge and to bring the Mustang around in a whining return. He killed the lights and swung her broadside across the narrow bridge, then hobbled up the hillside—sternly commanding his injured leg to behave itself.

  The glow of swiftly advancing headlights was peeking over the hill as he took up his position. Then the chase car was into the switchback, burning rubber in the sudden slow-down, rocking with the momentum of the double curve at high speed, and struggling for a path onto the bridge.

  He could see them clearly as they groaned past his position, could feel the alarm and consternation as eight sets of shoulders hunched forward into the do-or-die curve.

  The windows were down. Bolan could hear the cry of warning that erupted from the rear seat as the headlights swept onto that abandoned vehicle at bridge-center.

  His own leg kicked in reflex as another panicky leg straightened on the brake pedal and that big limousine with eight headhunters aboard went into its death slide.

  The Caddy was out of control even as it reached the bridge, hunching down onto locked wheels and crabbing into the narrow passageway.

  The rear end struck the approach abutment a glancing blow, slamming the heavy vehicle into a full fishtail and a broadside plunge along the bridge—twenty-one feet of Detroit steel grindingly attempting to fit itself within a fifteen-foot cement straitjacket.

  The crew wagon was a disaster of disintegrating metal even before it reached the Mustang. It blew on, taking the smaller car with it to the other side. Bolan’s vehicle fell away there and spun off onto the embankment, flipped, and came to rest on its top in the brook. The other car took an en
d-over-end tumble off the roadway and rolled on for another thirty feet or so before shuddering to a final halt on its side.

  Bolan began his approach in a complete and deathly silence. A moment later came the weak cries and ghastly mouthings that assured him that he was not getting off all that easy—a mop-up operation was clearly in order.

  One of the hardmen had been ejected from the vehicle during that wild plunge across the bridge. The remains were obviously beyond mop-up and even beyond identification; it looked as though he’d been caught in that meat grinder between rending metal and abrasive cement.

  Bolan stepped around the soggy pile of hamburger and went on across the bridge, moving slowly to favor the protesting leg and warily approaching the pile of junk which had seconds earlier been a proud testament to man’s engineering excellence.

  He encountered another grisly bag of pulverized flesh on the roadway at the point where the crew wagon had taken off on its cross-country roll. From that point he had only to follow the trail of broken bodies, counting three more between the road and the shattered vehicle.

  That would leave three still to be accounted for; and from the sounds of the night, they would soon be beyond mop-up also.

  The vehicle was lying in the shadows of high bushes, but with enough illumination from the bright moonlight for Bolan to see the two men who were folded into that steel trap.

  And, yeah, they were in bad shape.

  Both were conscious, though, and carrying on a groaning conversation.

  “Can’t feel my legs. Think my back’s broke.”

  “How ’bout Carlo? Where’s Carlo?”

  “Fuck Carlo. Where’s that fuckin’ guy? Where’s he?”

  “Dunno. Who cares now? We’re gonna die here, Bill.”

  “Maybe you are.”

  “We both are.”

  Bolan joined the conversation then, his voice low-pitched and coated with ice.

  “Yeah, you both are,” he announced solemnly.

  A hand moved into the wreckage to pluck a revolver from numbed fingers. Another hand came in and clamped itself over a bloodied mouth and nose.

  “How many in there?” asked the ice man.

  The one who had been addressed as Bill replied, “That you, Bolan?”

  “It’s me.”

  “I knew we’d meet someday.”

  “Congratulations, you were right.”

  Bill groaned and gargled deep in his throat as he asked, “What’re you doing?”

  “Mopping up.”

  “Leave us be.”

  “Can’t.”

  The guy moaned and tried unsuccessfully to move his head for a better look at the big cold bastard outside. “What’re you doing to Campy?”

  “Helping him die.”

  “Bastard!”

  “Don’t feel left out,” the cold voice suggested, and the hand moved to the other face.

  “Wait! Goddamn it, wait a minute!”

  “Too long already.”

  The guy was mumbling angrily into Bolan’s fingers. “Look, don’t! Lemme die my own way!”

  Bolan slid the hand aside. “Okay,” he said quietly. “If you want to die talking.”

  “About what?”

  “How many crews are after me?”

  The guy snickered, choked, coughed painfully, then told the big man outside, “Enough. You’re dead already, bud.”

  “So give me something to worry about.”

  “You’ll never get out of this fuckin’ state alive.”

  “How many crews, Matthew?”

  The guy coughed again, and sticky warmth flowed onto Bolan’s fingers. He turned the head to keep the guy from choking on his own blood, and again asked, “How many?”

  “Fuck ya. Die wondering.”

  Bolan replied, “Okay,” and went away from there.

  The piercing odor of gasoline vapors was strong in his senses as he stepped around the rear of the wreckage; and then a movement in the bushes a few yards away sent him in a sprawling dive toward the shadows.

  He had a flashing perception of a large bulk of a man with a pistol outstretched and spitting flame at him; in that same instant the entire area was brilliantly illuminated by flames as the gasoline vapors ignited with a whooshing explosion.

  He felt the bullet from that fateful firing sing past him. By the time he had completed his roll and was coming up to return the fire, his target was a staggering fireball, the brightest thing of the night, spinning in confusion and seeking an escape from the inescapable.

  The guy must have been lying in gasoline, soaked in it.

  Bolan’s appropriated revolver instinctively jerked into the firing lineup and pumped three quick mercy rounds into that tortured hell on earth … and he walked quickly away without looking back.

  Afoot now, bleeding anew from the old wounds, and with a thousand Jersey guns awaiting him somewhere out there, Bolan nevertheless sent out a quiet “thanks” to the universe at large.

  For the moment, at least, he was leaving death behind him.

  2 THE FARM

  He dreamed interminably of the infinite river and eternal warfare, and he awoke somewhere within that eternity with bright sunlight upon his face.

  He was lying in straw, and he was naked. The sunlight was coming through an overhead window, a sort of skylight set into a high ceiling. He was warm, woozy, completely without pain.

  A large man in blue jeans and a striped shirt sat on a bench beside him, watching him with attentive eyes.

  Someone else was at his other side. He was too comfortable to make the effort of turning his head to see who was there.

  From somewhere off in that direction came a gasp and an excited female voice. “Bruno! He’s awake!”

  Okay. That other someone was a woman, obviously. The big dude in blue jeans must be Bruno. So what?

  Bruno looked okay. Balding, a bit overweight, pleasant face, worried eyes.

  Bolan tried to ask, “Bruno who?” but his tongue clung to the roof of his mouth, and somehow he couldn’t get it loose.

  Then the woman leaned over him; and she wasn’t a woman, at all. A girl, a mere slip of a girl, dressed also in blue jeans and a shirt made from the same material as Bruno’s.

  Bruno’s daughter?

  The eyes were huge pools of dark compassion, framed in smooth flesh of almost dusky hue, but alive and glistening. Long, shiny hair fell in smooth cascades across the shoulders—jet-black, silken.

  A kid, and here lay Bolan mother naked.

  He made the effort and got a hand in motion, sending it to a flopping and heavy rest somewhere about the thighs. A towel was draped across him down there—or something with a terrycloth feeling.

  Okay. Okay, kid, nothing to worry about, don’t look so scared.

  She was asking him, in a concerned but musical voice, “How do you feel?”

  He tried the tongue again and gave it up, settling for a crooked smile that somehow felt all contorted and clownish.

  What the hell was wrong with him?

  As though reading his thoughts, the girl told him, “Bruno found you in the brook. We’ve stopped your bleeding, and. we’ve given you something to ease the pain. Can you tell me how you feel?”

  Reality crashed in on him, then. Somehow he got an elbow under him and tried to push himself upright. The girl pressed him back down, gently but firmly, and she told him. “You must lie still.”

  The tongue came unstuck, but his voice sounded like quacking as he mumbled, “No, you don’t know. Danger, dangerous for you here.”

  She was trying to calm him, and the guy came over to place a heavy hand on his head.

  He was trying to tell them that their lives were not worth a piece of the straw he was lying upon—not as long as he lay there—but he felt that he was speaking into a well, a deep well which began enlarging and closing in around him; and it was the last lucid moment he had that day.

  When next he found an edge of reality he could hang on to, he was lying between
soft sheets, and he felt as though he’d been dropped from a highflying aircraft without a parachute.

  The girl was seated at a window just across the room, bright sunlight streaming in on her, writing something on a large tablet which she held on her knees.

  She was beautiful.

  He watched her for a long moment; then her eyes raised to his with a start, and he was again impressed with the dimensions of those deep pools.

  The well, maybe, into which he had become absorbed the last time around?

  Bolan did not know, offhand, what else to say, so he asked her, “How long have I been here?”

  “This is the second day,” she replied in a voice with very little air pushing it.

  “Where is it?”

  “What?”

  “Where am I?”

  “This is … my bedroom. Our farm, my brother and I. Chicken ranch. Near Manalapan.”

  “What is Manalapan?”

  “A town. On Route Thirty-three, mid-state.”

  “Now close to Perrineville?”

  “Not far. Less than ten miles. We’re just about halfway between Philadelphia and New York City.”

  Bolan groaned at that and raised himself to a sitting position. “Then you must have a special angel,” he told the girl. “That’s not nearly far enough.” He swung one foot to the floor and felt himself toppling off-balance toward the headboard of the bed.

  He wasn’t even aware that she’d left her chair, but the girl was there instantly, arms about his shoulders, guiding him down to the proper spot on the pillows.

  “Don’t try that again,” she commanded almost angrily. “You’re not that tough, Mr. Bolan.”

  His eyes must have asked the question. She perched there beside him and answered it in a no-nonsense tone. “Yes, we know all about you. There’s been nothing else on radio and television for the past two days. Bruno took the bullet out of your side, and we did what we could for your other hurts. The rest is up to you, though. You must lie still, or you’ll bust loose and start bleeding again. How about some food? Think you could handle some?”

  He muttered, “I’ll eat a cow if it’ll get me out of here.”

  “That’s thanks for you,” she said in a solemn little voice.