Pete the Hauler was crashing about in the darkness and swearing and vainly clicking a cigarette lighter which was apparently in need of a refueling. “It’s that Bolan!” he was yelling. “I knew it, I knew the bastard would show up here! Half out of the country—bull shit!”
But Larry Turk thought he knew better. It wasn’t Bolan. It was Joliet Jake the Madman and his hundred boys. Somehow they’d cut the power lines and Turk guessed that the war was really on now. And it was just as well. Things had been getting unbearably stagnant in this family. It was time for some new blood at—or near—the top. And Turk had plenty of blood.
As Lavallo threshed about in the darkness, trying to find his way outside, Larry Turk quietly felt his way along the wall and toward the rear. He knew, if he was bent on killing himself a Capo, just where he’d be getting set to make his play. And Turk was bent on just the opposite chore. He was going to save a Capo and thereby assure himself a place in the royal court. Yes, Turk thought he knew exactly where the play would be made.
The human storm had finally arrived, and the thunder and lightning which descended upon the Mafia hardsite was entirely manmade. Rattling volleys, the big booms of shotguns, and the impressive staccatos of big automatic weapons were woven together in a concert of wholesale death that was all too familiar to Bolan’s experienced ear.
And this concertmaster was wholly aware of each movement and countermovement, the sounds of command and countercommand, the cries of victory and defeat—and, yes, a very hot war was raging across the holy ground of that blessed thing of theirs. The enemy had engaged itself, and Bolan could think of no better troops to fight this war of liberation; he wished a total victory and a total defeat to each side.
Bolan himself was hardly more than a shadow moving across the field of white, an instinctive creature of the night now, homing on the target of targets for the grand-slam clincher of this mob wipe-out. He gained the rear corner of the building—so carefully noted during his earlier pass—and abandoned the snapbrim hat and overcoat in a snowdrift.
The Thompson went across his shoulders and he began the difficult and dangerous hand-over-hand ascent to the roof, using windowsills and cornices and whatever precarious handhold presenting itself.
The weakened shoulder protested and once threatened to quit altogether, but he issued stern inner commands and pressed on—and then the railing of the private sundeck was his and he was up and over and moving swiftly across the wind-drifted snow of that upper porch.
The French doors gave quickly and with only a light snapping sound to the sudden pressure of Bolan’s boot, and he was moving silently across a small room that smelled of liniments and leather and maybe a trace of human sweat lost without labor.
Suddenly the sounds of murmuring voices were rising to meet him, unreal and ghostly against the louder background of the hell let loose outside, and Bolan realized that he was standing at the head of a short circular stairway. Across a metal railing and just below could be seen the silhouettes of several figures standing carefully at a wall and peering obliquely through a window upon the landscape of swirling action outisde.
Bolan swung the Thompson into ready-mode and tossed a small personnel flare toward the center of that room down there. It sizzled into brilliantly flickering patterns of light—and the Executioner knew at once that he had reached the home stand.
The figures at the window—four of them with that prosperous-cheap look of the street hood become boss of all that moved and breathed—whirled about in that awakening which most men find but once in a lifetime. A personal awareness of death-arrived. A weapon flared down there and a chunk of metal tore through the air close enough for Bolan to feel the passage. Already, though, the deadly Thompson was bucking in his grip and he was sweeping that group with a tightly-locked figure-8 burst that flung the entire bunch into the wall and oozing toward the floor.
Another weapon was unloading on him from across the room, and furious chunks of hi-impact stompers were dislodging plaster from the ceiling just above his head. Bolan was working the Thompson in a quick sweep toward that challenge when something hard and heavy crashed into his bad shoulder. The arm fell and the big gun with it, then another blow glanced off the base of his neck and he went tumbling headfirst along the short stairway.
Bolan reached the bottom in a sliding sprawl, fighting to get a hand inside the jumpsuit—but too late. A big guy was slowly descending behind him, pinning Bolan in the spot of a powerful flashlight, and a big nasty Colt .45 was peering at him in a way Bolan knew to be entirely professional.
A breathless voice from across the room, brittle with age and breathless with the excitement of the moment, cried, “Save ’im, Turk, save ’im for me!”
“I’m saving him, Don Gio,” Larry Turk panted. The .45 was waggling in a silent command that needed no words to back it up. Bolan came groggily to his feet and stood there swaying in the flickering light from the flare, blinded by the powerful spot in his eyes.
“Hands onna head!” the big guy commanded.
Bolan complied, willing his head to be still and his mind to find its place. The war was not over yet, he kept telling himself—he was still alive and functioning.
“Turn around, hands against the wall, feet wide apart!”
Bolan knew the routine. But he also knew that he was not going to give up the Beretta without a murmur. “Go to hell,” he snapped.
The old man cackled with delight. “You didn’t knock all the fight out of him yet, Turk. Who is that, is that …?”
“Yessir, it’s Bolan,” Turk said, the voice edged with gloating triumph. “Big bad Bolan. We don’t want to knock all the fight out of him at once, do we Gio? A minute at a time, an hour at a time, we’ll just drain it out of him slow’n easy.” To Bolan, he yelled, “Turn to th’ wall, dammit, or do I turn you with a foot in the nuts!”
A new sound of warfare, a somehow different quality of sound, was rising up in the air out beyond that window. An amplified voice was carrying across the grounds and, although Bolan could not make out the words, that official tone of authority was clear and unmistakable. He told Turk, “You’d better make your move, turkeymaker. The cops have joined the party.”
The old man stepped to the window, taking care to keep his distance from the prisoner, and declared, “He’s right, Turk.” He stepped back, distastefully eyeing the bloodied dead at his feet, and added, “Look at that, Turk. Look what this rotten bastard did to our friends.”
Turk’s eyes were beginning to waver and flicker rapidly from side to side. With only the merest telltale trace of nervousness to his voice, he said, “Those cops, Gio. How do we—?”
“Maybe we better turn this boy over to them,” Giovanni replied, thinking the words carefully. “For the time being, anyway. It would save a lot of explaining.”
“Yeah I—”
A loud commotion was taking place outside the door on the far side of the room. Someone was pounding on the door and an excited voice was yelling, “Open up, lemme in, I got the finky shit!”
Giovanni sighed and declared, “That’s Pete the Hauler.” His eyes took on a new craftiness and played briefly on Larry Turk. The old man’s .45 swung to bear on Bolan and he told his field general, “Go let him in, Turk. I’m getting an idea.”
Turk said, “Watch it, I ain’t shook him down yet,” and reluctantly turned his prisoner over to the Capo while he crossed quickly to the door. He fumbled with the override mechanism for the electronic lock and swung the door open.
Pete Lavallo stumbled through, dragging with him a dishevelled and bleeding Joliet Jake, overlord of swinging downtown. At that same moment the lighting in the sanctum flickered and came to life with a dull, yellowish glow.
Turk muttered, “Don’t tell me they finally got that generator t’going.”
Lavallo, wild-eyed and panting, gasped. “There’s cops lining up all up and down that road out there. They must be hundreds of ’em.” He slapped his wounded prisoner with the back of
his hand and growled, “Walk, dammit, and stand up like a man. You’re in the presence of your Capo.”
Joliet Jake did not seem to know where he was nor why. The old fellow was groaning with a shattered arm and bent almost double, clutching the arm to his belly and making whimpering little sounds of deepest remorse.
Lavallo said to Larry Turk, “Gimme a hand with this—”
Then he saw Bolan, standing tall and stiff against the far wall, and Pete the Hauler promptly lost all interest in his own prisoner. He half ran across the office, drew up beside Giovanni, and gasped, “It’s him! It’s that rotten shit of a Bolan!”
“It’s him all right,” the Don replied smugly.
Larry Turk was steering the grievously wounded underboss of the Loop to a lounge chair. Lavallo was eyeing the focal point of all his fears and hatreds, and he must have been thinking that his guy, this rotten bastard, was responsible for all the unspeakable indignities which had befallen Pete the Hauler this day. Don Giovanni was looking like the cat which was just about to dine upon a canary.
And then Pete the Hauler “lost his mind” and forgot where he was and why. He gave an enraged bellow of frustrations released, and “the magnificient fuckup” threw himself upon the object of his pinpointed hatreds, chopping at Bolan with the little revolver and apparently intent on smashing his head in.
And it was all Bolan had needed. He smoothly went inside the attack, turned Lavallo effortlessly around and held him there as a shield. Meanwhile the Belle of the Ball was whisking clear of her sideleather.
Don Gio was throwing lead pointblank into the stiffening and suddenly wracked human shield, and trying to scamper to one side for a better firing angle. Bolan accorded the old man one split second of his attention and a single blast from the Beretta, then he was flinging himself clear of his dying burden and swinging to meet the attack that counted.
Larry Turk was running toward him and blazing away with the .45, and Bolan was aware that at least two of those zinging chunks had carried away parts of his own flesh in their passage.
Bolan caressed the Belle’s trigger four times, twice in mid-fling and twice from rolling-prone, and Larry Turk’s charge faltered and died. He stood there for a moment giving Bolan the dazed, I-don’t-believe-it stare then the Belle spoke once more and an I-believe-it third eye opened at the bridge of Larry Turk’s nose and he pitched over backwards, dead in the air.
Bolan rolled across the floor for an inspection of Don Giovanni. The old warrior had a Parabellum in his Nassau-softened belly, and Bolan could see the life draining away from those weary old eyes. The Capo coughed and a trickle of blood flowed across the corner of his mouth. He groaned, “Put me in my chair. Let me die with dignity.”
Bolan told him, “You’ll die as you lived, Gio, in blood and crap up to your neck.” Then he got to his feet and went to the lounge where Joliet Jake was shuddering with pain, oblivious to the death scene about him.
Bolan bent over him, and something flickered in those pained eyes, and Vecci gasped, “It’s you, th’ telephone guy!”
Bolan said, “Yeh, I’ve been a lot of guys tonight, Jake. Busy busy busy.”
“Well what a hell of a night this turns out to be,” the subcapo groaned.
Bolan told him, “Count your blessings, Jake,” and he stepped away, disengaged and ready to shake that joint.
But then another man ran into the office, the tails of his topcoat flying out behind him, and he halted abruptly at sight of the big guy in the white jumpsuit. The man said, “Oh God.”
Bolan thought, yeah, oh God. It was a face familiar to millions of Americans around the country, an almost intimate face to anyone who’d ever watched a televised news program or any other national hi-jinks from Chicago. That face had appeared on the covers of Time and in countless other magazines and newspapers. Pretty big stuff, this guy.
Bolan felt a bit queasy at his stomach as he glowered at the man and told him, “You got here late, Jim. Or do we call you City Jim in this hallowed place?”
The guy was staring at the black blaster in Bolan’s clenched fist. In a voice of total resignation he declared, “Okay, let’s get it over with.”
“Not a chance,” Bolan told him. “You’ll have to meet your fate in its own time and place, bub.”
And then Bolan went away from there, back across the sumptuous office built of terror and savage greed, up the winding iron stairway, and back along the route of entry.
He dropped lightly into the snow at the rear of the building and made for the river, mentally counting and assessing his own wounds, and listening appreciatively to the waning sounds of combat out front. The cops were taking over, and Bolan wished them well, both here and in the inevitable clouted courtrooms just beyond.
He reached his war-wagon and borrowed enough time from flight to tape compresses over the three flesh wounds he’d picked up from Larry the Late Turkeymaker, and then he drove confidently onto the ice and headed upriver.
As the scene for a wipe-out, the big windy city beside the lake had been a real charmer. Bolan quietly and humbly thanked Chicago … and he thanked the universe for all kind favors received.
Sure, it mattered who won. And the universe cared.
EPILOGUE
The signboard outside the modest North Side home had been hastily altered to read: LEOPOLD STEIN, LEGAL ADVISOR.
Bolan smiled and punched the doorbell. It was four o’clock in the morning, sure, but the joint was ablaze with lights, and the cute kid who answered the ring was looking as though she could remain awake for another twenty-four hours. Her eyes were glistening as she led him into the living quarters, and she announced, “Daddy, it’s the man.”
Bolan could not think of kinder words nor a nicer tribute, and he could not imagine a warmer welcome than the six-feet of foxy womanhood who flung herself into his arms.
She cheeked him out, limb by limb and almost organ by organ, oohing and worrying over the miniscule losses of flesh here and there, and Bolan had to allow them to fuss over the wounds with antiseptics and bandages—and finally he was seated at a big dining table with Jimi on his lap and a heftily-laced cup of coffee in his hand, and he told his host, “I see you changed your shingle outside.”
Stein grinned and replied, “The groundhog came out early and failed to see his shadow. To hell with that slime, Mack. I’ll never hide from them again.”
“Be careful, Leo,” Bolan advised him. “The clout machine is probably as strong as ever.”
“You forget,” the lawyer reminded his guest. “We got the whole report on television, nearly an hour before you toddled in here. I never heard of such a slaughter. Out of the whole hierarchy of the Chicago syndicate, there’s nothing but a few lieutenants and one lousy subcapo still alive. A guy named Meninghetti is in the clink, also a Drago.”
“How about Benny Rocco?” Bolan asked. “And Spanno.”
Stein shook his head. “They’ve seen their last appeals court.”
“Okay, I’ll scratch them from my book,” Bolan murmured. “Uh, I meant what I said about being careful. There’s still a lot of dirt in this town, Leo.”
“Oh hell, I know that. Tell you what. I’ll promise to be as careful as you. Okay?”
Bolan smiled soberly, trusting that the universe would be as concerned for men like Leo Stein as for wildass warriors like Mack Bolan. He realized, however, that the universe cares only for those who care for themselves—and for it—and the brief interlude of stolen camaraderie with friends he could trust was about used up.
He got to his feet and made ready for his re-entry into the jungle of survival. He shook hands with his new friends, the Steins, and he pulled Jimi into the office foyer for a private farewell.
“You watch it,” he growled, and poured an accumulation of loneliness and pent emotions into that goodbye kiss.
She clung to him and breathlessly asked him, “Where will you go? What will you do now?”
He whispered, “Down!”—and she stiffene
d momentarily in his embrace, then she shivered and clung to him all the more.
“That’s where I live, Foxy,” he reminded her. “It’s home, and the only place I can live.”
“Well, you watch that beloved flesh, you hear?” she said huskily.
He disengaged from the embrace and went to the door, turned around for a final look, and then he was through the doorway and moving briskly into no-man’s-land.
A man moves steadily, he knew, from the womb to the grave. It mattered little where he entered the world or where he left it. What counted was that route between the two. And Mack Bolan’s only route lay in the jungle. It was the place where he lived. One day it would be the place for him to die. This was both his character and his fate. The Executioner accepted both … as a heritage. He would move forever along the wipeout trail, until the final decision was rendered.
Somewhere, somehow, the whole savage and bloody thing mattered. It was not a senseless game, from which a guy could just disengage any time the going became a little rough.
It was life, and Mack Bolan meant to live his to the bloody, bitter end. This was, simply, the kind of guy he was.
Turn the page to continue reading from the Executioner series
1: FIFTY SECONDS
The task was simple, and yet tinglingly complex. All he had to do was to halt two powerful vehicles, overcome the natural resistance of at least ten heavily-armed Mafia gunners, liberate an awesome shipment of illicit gambling profits, and withdraw along a narrow route of retreat before the base camp reserves could get into the act.
And he had to do it in fifty seconds.
The tall man in the midnight combat suit was Mack Bolan, also known as Mack the Bastard, the Black Blitz, the Executioner, and more often—in one particular segment of American society—“that fuckin’ Bolan!”
He was kneeling in a tumble of rocks on a mountainside between Las Vegas and Lake Mead. Directly ahead of him, but many miles away, the nighttime glow of the fabulous gambling city lent a faint illumination to the western horizon. Overhead a bright desert moon presided over the stillness and draped its soft radiance in patterns of light and shadows across the rugged uplifts of rocky terrain. Bolan was himself a part of that pattern, a black-clad three-dimensional shadow—or perhaps, more correctly, a foreshadowing—of death and destruction and uncompromising warfare.
Chicago Wipeout Page 14