"I'm not," Bolan pointed out.
"Yeah, I see that." Chianti went on with his packing and casually told Bolan, "You may as well put away that gun unless you came back to finish what you started last night. I'm not armed. And I sent all my boys home. I took your advice, Bolan. I'm retiring."
"That takes a lot of guts, Sam," Bolan commented.
"Yeah. I heard of this guy in Washington. They say he'll put your whole family away somewheres and give you twenty-four hour protection, for the rest of your life if he has to. A fed guy, I mean."
"Sounds like you're getting religion."
"No, I'm just getting smart. Look, Bolan, there's only one way to retire from this outfit, and that's with pallbearers. But I've had it up to my throat and I'm at least going to try." He dropped a suitcase to the cement floor and turned to stare levelly at his visitor. "I'm not even scared of you no more, Bolan. If you gotta shoot me, then go ahead. I just don't give a shit no more."
A flicker of a smile crossed his lips and Bolan holstered the Beretta. "I didn't come for that, Sam."
"What did you come for?"
Bolan shrugged his shoulders. "I guess I just came to talk."
"Well pardon me for saying so but I'm feeling kind of jumpy right now and I need to get going. We planned on cutting out at least an hour ago. Gotta go clear to Connecticut first, then swing back south, and the radio says the roads are a mess."
Bolan told him, "Don't let me delay you, Sam. Go on with what you're doing."
Chianti turned away and again attacked the problem of the baggage. Bolan stepped over and lent a hand. The Mafiosoglanced at him with some surprise and said, "Thanks."
A moment later he added, "You know, what you were saying about religion. Don't get me wrong, I ain't been to Mass more'n twice in my whole life. But Theresa tells me it's not how you start that counts, it's how you end up. Look, Bolan, I ain't the same guy that went out on these streets thirty years ago. I mean, literally. I just ain't the same guy. A guy grows, you know. Listen, I ain't personally wiped nobody since the first time I laid my eyes on Theresa. God's truth. I don't think I could. A guy thinks he's losing his nerve, and I think what he's really doing is growing up. Know what I mean? A punk kid don't think much about stuff like that, but then one day if he's lucky he gets to be a man, and then he starts thinking about things like that… listen, just knowing Theresa made a man outta me. I owe it to her, she made me a man."
Bolan muttered, "I can believe that."
"Yeah… well, of course, I went on with the outfit. I had to go on. But I never did no personal wipes after that. I sat on my ass and sent boys out. Somehow that's different, you know. A name on a contract, that don't mean a hell of a lot. You can kid yourself, you can say my hands are clean because hell there's no way out and I'm just doing my job so I can stay alive. And you build up all these fancy ideas to keep you going, and pretty soon you're thinking you're in a legit business. You take pride in being the best one around, and you don't let yourself think about all the hell you're doing. But listen, Bolan. Pretty soon something will always happen to make you stop and look at yourself."
Bolan said, "Yeah."
"Yeah is right. I been looking at myself since you came to town. Then you came here last night, and just like a dead man I saw it all rolling past my eyes, I mean my whole life, and God I felt like crying inside. And it was too late. That was the hell of it, see. Too late. Then you tell me, go on Sam, go get some coffee and think about it. Jesus I'd already thought about it, my whole damn life in a flash past my eyes — Theresa and the kids, and what a rotten bastard I really been to have people like that caring if I lived or died… I guess you know what I mean."
"I know what you mean," Bolan assured him.
They finished stowing the luggage. Chianti was standing there looking at him with wondering eyes, and finally Bolan asked him, "Where do I find Freddie Gambella, Sam?"
The guy sighed, looked at his hands, and said, "Thirty years we been buddies. I mean, yeah, he's always been the boss, there's been no mistake ever about that… but we been buddies. He's the godfather of my kids. He sat up with me all night in the hospital when the first one was coming. Theresa was having a hard time, so Freddie sat there and held my hand all night long to keep me in my skull."
Bolan told him, "I'm sorry, Sam. But I have to know."
"Well wait. Lemme tell you. We've went on vacations together, the four of us, and sometimes Maria insisted we take the kids along because she couldn't have none herself, and she said our kids were her kids. I mean, this is the kind of friends we've been, Bolan. Or I thought so. But listen. I think Freddie's going insane. I mean that. Or else he always has been.
"Listen, Bolan, last night you had a feeling for Theresa, a perfect stranger, but you had a feeling for her. Wouldn't you think the godfather of our kids would have some feeling like that? No, there ain't no feeling like that, Bolan. Freddie would throw me to the wolves, and he'd throw Theresa too, and I bet his own godkids. You wanta know where to find Freddie? Well, I'm going to tell you where, Bolan. And not because I'm afraid of you neither. You know what I been thinking? I been thinking that Freddie has been onto me for a long time. I mean, me not wanting blood on my hands. I think he's trying to keepblood on my hands, Bolan. Don't ask me why, I just think that. I think he don't want to ever let me off the hook, he's gonna keep me bloody right to my grave if he can."
Bolan nodded understandingly and offered Chianti his notebook. "He's got four addresses, Sam. I only want one."
"That's the one I'm going to give you." Chianti took the book and pencil from Bolan and laboriously printed an address in large crude block letters. He sighed heavily and returned it to Bolan, then told him, "Look, there's something else you need to know, I mean I guess I owe it to you to tell you. Freddie found hisself a turkey last night."
A nerve ticked in Bolan's cheek and a chill raced down his spine. Woodenly he muttered, "Who was the turkey, Sam?"
Chianti shook his head. "I really don't know and I didn't ask, because I didn't want to know. But one of the boys called me a couple of hours ago, and he said they had a turkey down at the weenie house, and wouldn't I like to come down? I told him hell no and I hung up. But that's why I was kinda surprised to see you walk up. I figured they'd got to you by now."
"Where is this weenie house?" Bolan asked tightly. Something was shrieking up and down his nervous system and he knew now why that Thang-Duc restlessness had driven him out into the gray dawn to seek something nameless and unimagined.
"If you're thinking of going, it's too late," Chianti was telling him. "This was a couple hours ago, and it was turkey already."
"Where's the weenie house?" Bolan growled ominously.
Chianti sighed and took the notebook back, printed another oversize address, and returned it to the tall man who was suddenly wearing the death mask again. Those eyes had cemetery markers blazing out from the cold depths… Sam shivered inwardly and wondered if he'd said the wrong thing.
"Listen, wait a minute, Bolan. If you go to hit Freddie, use the side entrance on 155th Street. Pull up to the gate and stop with your front wheels on the little metal cleats, then give three quick flashes of your headlights. The gate will open automatically and that driveway will take you right into the carport. And Jesus — lookout. Freddie has a big palace guard."
Bolan jerked his head and said, "Thanks, Sam. Good luck getting to Washington."
Then he was out of there and running for the VW. His blood was ice, his head was a spinning web of anguish and self-recrimination, and he was praying over and over to a nameless God that it would all turn out to be a nightmare, or that he was dead and in hell. There just could not be another turkey on Mack Bolan's soul.
He parked the micro-bus at the big sliding door marked RECEIVING — and stepped to the rear for weapons. The chattergun, an efficient little folding-stock burper handling .25 calibre exploders, went around his neck and he stuffed extra clips into the pockets of the fatigues. Next he stra
pped on the web belt with the grenades still clipped to it, then added an army .45 in a flap-holster.
The door slid back easily and he walked in with the chattergun ready. Two cars were parked inside, one of them a big limousine with jumpseats, but there was nobody around. The working day had not yet begun — apparently the work of the night had not ended, either.
He followed his instincts and went through a long hall-like room with refrigerated beef-quarters dangling from automated meat-hooks, and came into a large room with cutting tables and a variety of machinery. Two guys were dragging a weighted bag across the floor toward a doorway at the far end, guffawing over something very funny.
They looked up together, saw Bolan and froze, and he zipped them with a blazing criss-cross from the chattergun that flung them spinning through the open doorway. He followed through with a running charge that sent him hurtling over their sprawling bodies at about the same moment that six other guys in the next room were coming unglued and reacting to the gunfire.
Someone shouted, "Bolanl"— and people were flinging themselves every which way clawing at gunleather. He caught a big ape of a guy with a face like Godzilla in a climbing burst from the guts up, that laid the guy wide and split the ugly face open at the eyes, then everything the ape had inside seemed to be exploding out of him.
Another two were scrambling away from a cutting table and running for a walk-in freezer. Bolan let them go for the moment and swung on to another pair who were diving for the cover of a metal cabinet. He helped them get there with a sustained burst from the chattergun that sent them tumbling and mutilated in a grotesquely flopping sprawl. One of them was still alive enough to be mouthing screams, but Bolan's attention was being demanded by the sixth man, a youngish guy with a long-barreled hogleg throwing fire everywhere except at Bolan.
The burper put out a floor-level string that cut the guy's ankles away from him, then climbed in a figure-eight that kept him from going down right there and flung him in a heap a couple of bodylengths back.
Then Bolan released the chopper and let it dangle by the shoulder cord, circled quickly to the walk-in box and pulled on the heavy door. It cracked open and a hail of slugs in rapidfire from two pistols thwacked harmlessly into the thick wood. Bolan pulled the pin on a grenade, held it for a moment, tossed it in through the crack in the doorway, then stepped quickly aside.
A panicky voice within screeched, "Lookout ifs — "
Then the wall rumbled and the floor moved slightly beneath Bolan's feet. The massive door swung open with a rush and a body was ejected in a flight that deposited it in a smoking heap several yards into the room. Bolan took a look inside and saw that the other guy had been blown in the opposite direction and impaled on a meat hook.
The dying screams down by the metal cabinet were becoming more frantic, but again Bolan's attention was diverted from that agony by a blood-freezing sight on a nearby cutting table. He had passed that table a moment earlier, but with his attention directed into the firefight he'd thought the hunk of meat lying there was a beef quarter or something. But beef quarters did not grow long golden hair, and Bolan knew now that it was not beef. It was turkey, and something was shrinking Bolan's guts and clawing at him from the inside.
He stepped jerkily to the table and gazed down upon What was left of Evie Clifford. The dead eyes stared back at him. They had to. The eyelids had been sliced away. And even through the coagulated blood that was brimming those horrified sockets Bolan could see the agony and the accusation and the mirror of his own guilt and neglect.
They had battered out her front teeth and committed awful atrocities upon the once lovely torso, and what they had done below that point sent Bolan's usually steady mind into a spin through insanity.
His chin dropped to his chest, his eyes closed on the terrible scene, and he groaned, "Oh… Godl"
Then he went down to the screeching man and shoved the hot muzzle of the chattergun into the wide open mouth and he pulled the trigger and let the gun burp until the clip was empty, and somewhere in there the screaming stopped. He dropped a marksman's medal into the gaping well of blood, and reloaded, and went deliberately from body to body and repeated the routine.
Somewhere along that bloody trail his mind began to clear, and when he had completed the senseless and futile acts of revenge upon the dead, he found a bolt of cheesecloth, and he carefully wrapped Evie Clifford's pitiful remains, and tenderly carried her out of hell and gently placed her in the rear of the micro-bus.
His cheeks were twitching and the eyes were brimming with a salty discharge of emotion as he climbed in behind the wheel and sat there a moment willing his mind to find its place. A city bus pulled up at the corner of the building and began disgorging workers in white uniforms. Bolan watched them go into the packing plant, and he found himself wondering idly what they would think about their latest consignment of meat.
Then he swiped away the moisture of his eyes with brutal knuckles, put the VW into gear and headed back into the jungle of his rage.
He knew that a part of him had died with Evie Clifford. There was not much left, at the moment, but icy hatred and a blazing fury.
They should not have done this to Evie.
He was going to tell them so.
He was going to tell it to Freddie Gambella.
Chapter Thirteen
Monstrosities
Bolan eased the VW along the avenue in a slow recon of the big place on the corner. It was one of those turn of the century monstrosities where the architect had obviously been unable to decide if he felt Victorian, or Gothic, or just frivolous. The result was a three-story jumble of bay windows and cathedral-stained glass, square columns and turreted corners, wood and stone, and a roofline featuring everything from gables to minarets, with an occasional gargoyle thrown in just to make sure there was something for everyone. It was an anachronism from a flamboyant age, and Bolan could understand how a guy who had muscled his way up from a two-room coldwater flat in East Harlem would be impressed with such a joint. Even in old age it reeked of wasteful opulence and flagrant power — yeah, that joint was Freddie Gambella from the stained-glass cathedral windows to the gargoyles leering down from the gabled eaves. The whole production was set off from the street by a rock wall with ancient iron spikes. The pedestrian gate alone had more steel in it than his VW.
Bolan passed on around the corner onto 155th and went through the routine suggested by Sam the Bomber. Sure as hell the massive gates swung open and Mack Bolan swung in with his daisied micro-bus. He'd seen two guys walking the snowdrifts of the yard in bulky overcoats, and he rolled down his window to wave at the nearest one as he tooled along the drive. Another guy ran up as he pulled into the carport, gave Bolan a hard look, and said, "What the hell're you do — "
He'd had time by then to get a good look at that cold face and had decided to stop talking and start slapping leather, but Bolan's hardware was already nosing up over the door panel. The Beretta spat out a sizzler that splatted in directly between the eyebrows and the guy went down like he'd been poleaxed.
Bolan had the door open and was swinging down to the ground when the yardman came slugging up through the snow. He was looking at the fallen man, not at Bolan, and he cried, "What'd you do, idiot, run him down?"
The Executioner replied, "Yeah," and ran another one down with a bullet behind the ear, and the guy fell over atop the first one.
The second yardman was coming around the corner of the house, and his first view of Bolan was looking up along the fully-extended black blaster. He recoiled from the unsettling view, but not fast enough, then a pair of Parabellums found their mark and punched the guy over into drifted white snow that quickly turned red.
Five seconds later, Fury was standing at the door to a little concrete-block house which was joined to the main house by the carport. Bolan kicked the door open and stepped in with the chattergun at full throttle. Two very surprised diners seated at a table in their underwear were the first in the receivi
ng line so they received a .25 calibre explosive wreath about their throats and chests.
Another reared up off a cot and was immediately laid back down with a mouthful of metallic pacifiers.
A large fat one with a protruding belly stumbled to an open bathroom door, stark naked and gawking at Death through puffs of shaving lather. The burst split him from groin to throat, the protruding belly opened and seemed to deflate, the fat one fell back into the toilet bowl and wedged there.
Agony stepped out and glided to the rear door of the mansion. A big man in full dress wearing an apron had moved to the door in curiosity over the rattling sounds from the blockhouse. He fell away in a swift back-pedal as Bolan came through, the guy threw two slices of toast at Doom and pivoted about to make a run for the other door. The Beretta coughed twice and the big man missed the turn into the doorway and crashed over a table, sliding to the tiled floor in a mess of orange juice and scrambled eggs from a breakfast tray.
Remorse went on, through the pantry and the deserted dining room into a darkened hallway. An inside man who had obviously been seated near the door at the far end had abandoned his station to investigate the noise from the kitchen. He approached to within ten feet of Disaster before he recognized the tall figure with the taut face and gleaming teeth, then he just froze and stared, perched across his stride like one of those stop-action shots on NFL Today.
"Bolan?" he asked unbelievingly.
Belief went up to him, pressed the heated silencer of the Beretta against his throat, pulled a snubbed .32 out of a shoulder holster, dropped it to the floor, and an icy voice told the guy, "You guessed it. Now let's play twenty questions. How many hardmen in the house?"
"F-four," the guy wheezed.
"Let's just play onequestion," Bolan suggested in that graveyard voice, the Beretta sinking deeper into the shrinking throat.
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