Hard Targets

by Don Pendleton

  “It’s Joe and Zoe?”

  “They’re twins. Were twins. I’m not sure when to use the past tense.”

  Meaning Joe Dirks had to be dead, or at the very least presumed so.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Okay. She told me they’d been talking about trouble he was having, just before he did the disappearing act. He’d been building a mall in Cheektowaga, by the airport, for a big, deep-pockets company. It should’ve been a sweet gig, but it started going sour. First, materials went missing. Joe reported it, and then a couple of supposed accountants show up, authorized to double-check his books. In fact, they have their own set with them, and he obviously gets the feeling something was rotten.”

  “Did he brace them?” Bolan asked.

  “Not right away. He’s lived in Buffalo awhile and knows how things work. The Mob gets into things, you know, the same as anywhere. It’s part of life. Joe figures that the best thing he can do is file reports on any thefts, cover himself that way, and keep an eye on quality with the construction. Time goes by, and then a watchman catches two, three guys hanging around the job site after dark, mixing cement. They rough him up and split. Joe calls the cops again. They tell him there’s a lot of crazy people out there, yada-yada.”

  “But he didn’t buy it.”

  “No,” Johnny confirmed. “He’d keep Zoe apprised of all this, as he went along. Next thing, he speaks to someone from the company that hired him. Nickel City Management. That’s one of half a dozen nicknames people have for Buffalo, the Nickel City. Comes down from the bison on the flip side of the old Indian head nickels. Bison, Buffalo, the Nickel City.”

  “Got it.”

  “Anyway, they talk. The guy tries to put Joe’s mind at ease. It doesn’t work. He hires a local firm to snoop around and get some background on the company. Keeps Zoe posted while he’s at it, then she loses contact with him. No one’s seen or heard from him. She calls the cops and gets the usual spiel, adults are free to come and go, no signs of foul play at his home or office, nothing they can do. Meanwhile, with Joe AWOL, another company picks up the mall job. Life goes on.”

  “Except for Joe?” Bolan surmised.

  “Then one day Zoe’s in my office, telling me her story. I tell her I mostly work in SoCal, and I recommend a New York outfit, but she doesn’t trust them after all that’s happened. So...”

  “You let her talk you into it.”

  Johnny shrugged. “She needed help.”

  “Okay.”

  The Bolan weakness. Not just damsels in distress, but any hapless victim.

  “Anyhow, I do some research from the homestead, and I catch a smell from Nickel City Management. It’s incorporated in Connecticut, which anyone can do online these days. An ‘S Corporation’ pays no state taxes, since the profits ‘pass through’ to shareholders and they’re responsible for paying up, wherever they live.”

  “If they live,” Bolan added.

  “Exactly. Who knows? Nickel City smelled bad, so I flew here to do some more digging. Two days on the bricks, and a cop comes to see me, all puffed up and wanting to know why I’m ‘snooping around.’ I tell him I’m researching public records and it’s none of his concern.”

  “Ever the diplomat.”

  “That’s rich, coming from you.”

  “Long story short?”

  “Yeah, yeah. So, I keep digging, and it turns out this same cop’s the one who blew off Joe about the troubles at his job site. Leo Kelly, a detective, sixteen years with Buffalo PD. I hack his file, disciplinary actions, this and that. I keep offering rewards for any leads on Joe. A guy calls me for a meet, but when I show up, a couple of shooters are waiting.”

  “And you took them down.”

  “I did. Turns out one of them was a cop.”

  * * *

  MACK BOLAN’S WAR against the Mafia began with family—his own. He’d been in military service when a loan-shark operation snared his father, and the rest was history. Threats and assaults, his younger sister stepping in to sacrifice her dignity for blood’s sake, brother Johnny finding out and making the mistake of telling Papa Sam. The guilt and shame had cracked him, literally. When the gun smoke cleared at home, Bolan was orphaned, coming home to oversee a triple funeral, with Johnny in the hospital, the lone survivor.

  The Executioner had spoken to police first thing, and found out that the loan sharks were untouchable. At least, within the law. Which didn’t save their asses from the Executioner.

  Revenge was satisfying, to a point, but Bolan quickly learned that taking out one local nest of vermin didn’t solve the problem. He’d discovered in short order that the Mafia was national—hell, international—and he’d set out to tackle it one city at a time. Along that blood road, he’d made some valued friends, lost most of them in battle, and had taught the syndicate that no one was invincible.

  He’d also met the first love of his life, one Valentina Querente. She’d taken Johnny in, at no small risk, and nearly paid the price when Boston’s capo, Harold “the Skipper” Sicilia, learned Johnny’s ID and snatched them both as hostages. You’d think Sicilia might have learned from all the misery his amici had suffered before him, but no. It took a Boston blitz to drive the lesson home and send the Skipper to a plot at Holyhood Cemetery, sharing space with Kennedys.

  Bolan had learned something, too, from his brother’s second near-death experience. The soldier had broken off with Val Querente, wished her well when she’d married federal agent Jack Gray, and adopted Johnny as her own. Thereafter, he was Johnny Gray, with “Bolan” as his seldom-mentioned middle name. The kid had thrived, gone on to college, joined the U.S. Armed Forces and seen action in Grenada and the Middle East. At some point he’d thought that brother Mack was dead, after a fiery climax to his lonely war in New York City, but he’d later learned the truth from Hal Brognola— Bolan’s link to Justice in his new life, reborn as Colonel John Phoenix. They’d been reunited in battle against San Diego’s reigning Mob boss, Manny Marcelo, and Johnny had learned the hard lesson of loss once again, when his fiancée wound up on a “turkey doctor’s” operating table.

  History. Nobody could escape it, but that didn’t mean you had to let it drag you down.

  “A cop,” Bolan said.

  “Plainclothes,” Johnny replied. “Gregory O’Malley, Buffalo PD.”

  “The other one?”

  “Carmine Romita. He’s a soldier for the Gallo Family—or was.”

  “That’s Vincent Gallo?”

  “Right. Listen, I know your rule about police.”

  Bolan had long ago decided that he’d never drop the hammer on a cop, no matter how corrupt or dangerous a given officer might be. Police were soldiers of the same side, in his eyes, most of them decent, even heroes. There were ways of weeding out bad apples without killing them, and he had done so on occasion.

  His pledge, not Johnny’s. And he wouldn’t judge his brother for an act of self-defense in combat, when the enemy was unidentified. No blame, but if police were pulling triggers for the Mafia in Buffalo, Bolan would have to watch his step.

  * * *

  “OKAY,” LEO KELLY said at last. “Let’s think this through.”

  “So, a grenade?” Detective Sergeant Rudy Mahan asked. “For real?”

  “Not a frag, Sarge,” Kelly answered him. “A stun grenade, I’m pretty sure.”

  The stairwell had a smoky smell, reminding him of fireworks more than anything. Mahan surveyed the bloodstained wall in front of him and said, “Somebody took a solid hit.”

  “One of the perps,” Kelly replied. “The way it looks, concussion slammed his face into the wall.”

  “Three guys get blown up with a stun grenade, and they’re the perps?”

  When Kelly shrugged, his belly jiggled. “They were packing, Sarge. Four handguns betw
een them, plus a 12-gauge.”

  “So, a hit team,” Mahan said.

  “They aren’t admitting anything,” Kelly said, “and I doubt they will. We’ve got them under Sullivan, regardless.”

  New York’s Sullivan Act, passed in 1911, banned purchase, possession or carrying of any pistol or other concealable firearm without a permit issued by police. Each violation of the statute was a felony, bearing a potential one-year minimum sentence.

  “Let me guess,” Mahan said. “They’re connected?”

  “Oh, yeah. Rick Guarini, Bobby Luna, Bill Scarducci.”

  “Billy Scars? Really?”

  “He did the bleeding.”

  “Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy,” Mahan said. “Are they lawyered up yet?”

  “Playing deaf and dumb, so far,” Kelly replied. “The EMTs took them to Buffalo General. Scarducci might stay overnight.”

  “Assume they ride the rap and don’t say anything. We need to figure out who they were after.”

  “Mick’s down with the clerk. You likely passed him, coming in.”

  Kelly was referring to his partner, big Mick Strauss. He was loud and brash, like so many detectives, but the pair of them produced results.

  “This joint has...what? Five floors?” Mahan asked.

  “Five,” Kelly confirmed.

  “Okay. Somebody dropped the flash-bang on them here, which means they had no business on the first or second floors. We need to check out everybody registered on three through five. See who’s most likely to receive a kill-o-gram.”

  “Three floors is sixty rooms,” Kelly pointed out.

  “Can’t be helped,” Mahan replied. “Just ’cause they got blown up on three doesn’t mean it was their final destination. Someone could’ve met them, coming down, or had a lookout standing watch.”

  “Jeez. It’s a gang war, now?”

  “We don’t know what it is,” Mahan said. “That’s the problem.”

  “Right. You’re right, Sarge.”

  “Was there ever any doubt?”

  “Say.” Kelly detained him with a frown. “You think this ties in somehow with what happened to O’Malley?”

  “I wish to Christ I knew. Mob guys, again. At least there’s no dead cop this time.”

  “Thank God, eh?”

  Thank whoever, Mahan thought, and went off scowling, down the stairs.

  He could go by Buffalo General and see the button men, maybe try to lean on Billy Scars a little, but between omertà, the concussions and whatever meds they might have pumping through their systems now, he doubted whether it would be a prudent exercise. The code of silence might not mean as much today as when his father was a cop in Buffalo, but pros like Billy Scars and company knew better than to rat on Vincent Gallo. Unless they had a sweet deal waiting at the other end...

  And Mahan couldn’t offer them a thing. Time off from Sullivan. Suppose they each pulled down a year for carrying. They’d be released in eight, nine months at the outside, and find a package waiting for them, in appreciation. If they’d carried out their contract, then got busted, that might be a different story, but the hit had literally blown up in their faces.

  Funny, but he didn’t feel like laughing. Not with one of his detectives in the morgue, found dead beside another Mob guy, with an automatic weapon, if you could believe it, and they hadn’t shot each other. One gun for the two of them, and there was no good way to dress that up. It looked as if Greg O’Malley had been meeting with a member of the Gallo Family when someone took them out, or else—worst-case scenario—they’d teamed up to get rid of some third party who had turned the tables on them.

  Jesus H. Did it get any worse than that?

  Mahan thought about the scandal in Manhattan, not so long ago. Two veteran detectives had been sent away for life, both of them part-time triggermen for the Lucchese Family. It gave NYPD a black eye that would never heal, and there’d been something like the same deal in Los Angeles, a few years earlier. When Mahan thought about it, he felt sick.

  Sick and determined, to find out exactly what in hell was going on, if it turned out to be the last thing he ever did.

  * * *

  BILLY SCARS WAS numb—which wasn’t bad, considering. The doc had set his nose, third time he’d broken it since he was seventeen, and told him that a couple of his teeth were loose, but ought to be all right if he watched what he ate the next few days. Stay clear of apples, corn on the cob, this and that.

  No problem.

  All that Billy wanted was a drink or three to supplement the pills they’d given him, but he supposed the cops outside his door wouldn’t approve of him imbibing while they tried to figure out what they should charge him with.

  The guns, of course. He couldn’t argue that one. Even if they couldn’t tie him to the shotgun, which he’d try to lay on Rick or Bobby, there was still the Taurus he’d been packing when he got blown up. There’d been no chance for him to pull it, much less drop it, and they likely could have matched it to the holster he was wearing, anyhow. Some kind of CSI shit.

  So they had him cold for Sullivan, maybe two counts if they took time to print the Ithaca and verify that he had handled it. Two guns, two years, if he was finally convicted and he had a tight-assed judge. Big deal.

  What bothered Billy Scars the most was failing. He had been entrusted with a mission, and he’d blown it. It wasn’t his fault, exactly, but try selling that to Vinnie Gallo. If you had a job to do and didn’t get it done, that was a black mark on your record. If you also wound up getting busted, that was even worse. It didn’t matter if you had been solid with the Family for years. Someone, somewhere, would start to think What if?

  What if the cops came up with something that could send him up forever and a day. Would Billy Scars decide to rat like others had before him, going back to Joe Valachi?

  Sullivan was nothing, but he thought about the guns now, knowing his were clean, but wondering about the pieces Rick and Bobby carried. Had they used those guns before? Would something turn up in the records, if the cops test-fired them and compared the slugs to others from an open case? It could get sticky then, and even though he knew he’d never squeal, it only mattered what his bosses thought. Would they be worried enough to take him out?

  Escaping from the hospital in his condition was a pipe dream. Hell, he didn’t even have the bloody clothes they’d found him in. He’d have to ask for a mouthpiece and keep asking until they brought him one. Say nothing else, beyond the magic syllables: law-yer.

  He’d make bail on the charges, easy, since they hadn’t got around to shooting anyone before the joint exploded. Even if they tried to blame him for the blast somehow, with nothing to support it, that was still a bailable offense. He would get out and touch base with the boss—not running straight to see him, though, in case the cops were watching him. Pick up a burner cell phone and call one of the cut-out numbers. Leave a message.

  An apology.

  Then start to think about the prick who’d caused him all this trouble, nearly killing him.

  They had gone out hunting one guy, ran into another—he was sure of it, no doubt whatever in his mind—and got dumped straight into a crock of shit. Who was the second guy? Why was he knocking on their target’s door when Billy Scars showed up? He hadn’t flashed a badge, just started blasting at them with his damned machine gun. And the piece was silenced, yet.

  Some kind of pro, for sure, but definitely not a cop.

  Fair game, then. Billy Scars was looking forward to a rematch.

  He could hardly wait.

  * * *

  “YOU STILL DON’T know what happened to the brother?” Bolan asked.

  “He’s gone,” Johnny replied. “I’d bet the farm on that. Specifics, no.”

  “I guess that’s not enough to satisfy your c
lient.”

  “Hardly. But I’ve got this other problem now.”

  Cop-killing, right. That wasn’t something that would just blow over on its own. Police didn’t forget when one of theirs was killed on duty. Even if they didn’t know the dead guy—or they knew him and despised him—striking one was an assault on every man and woman with a badge. It was a challenge to the brotherhood and to the public safety, all rolled into one. A blood debt that was bound to be repaid.

  Toss in the issue of corruption and you made things that much worse. If there were other crooked cops in town—and Bolan hadn’t seen a good-size city yet where only one or two were tainted—the surviving criminals with badges would be working overtime to hide their tracks. Meanwhile, the brass, whether corrupt or clean, would be obsessing over means of saving the department’s reputation. Bolan knew the process, had observed it working from Manhattan to Los Angeles, from Dallas to Detroit. Blue walls of silence and denial, with a periodic coat of whitewash.

  Then there was the Mafia. It had deep roots in Buffalo, as Bolan knew from research he’d conducted in the early phase of his one-man crusade. It dated back to 1910, when Angelo Palmeri had arrived from Sicily and set up shop, extorting money from his fellow immigrants, running backroom casinos, smuggling opium. The rest was public record, coming down from Giuseppe DiCarlo to Stefano Magaddino, Freddie “the Wolf” Randaccio, and finally to Vincent Gallo. Once upon a time, the local Family was called “The Arm,” for how it squeezed cash out of Buffalo and other nearby cities.

  But as Bolan had been known to prove, even a strong arm could be broken.

  “You might consider getting out of town,” he said.

  “I might,” Johnny replied.

  “But you won’t.”

  “No way.”

  Of course not. They were too damned much alike, that way. When the kid set out to do a job, he saw it through. And now, when he’d been cornered into cop-killing against his will, he’d want to set that right, as well. The problem was that some things couldn’t be set right. Once they were done, there was no turning back.

  “Think twice about that,” Bolan said. “If police can’t link you to the shooting, you’re all right.”