Hard Targets

by Don Pendleton

  “Depends on how you mean that.”

  “You know how I mean it. No looking over your shoulder the rest of your life.”

  “Just the questions and doubts,” Johnny said.

  “Are they worse than a lethal injection?”

  “Look, Mack—”

  “Get out now, while you can. By the time I’m done shaking things up, they’ll be looking for someone who doesn’t exist.”

  “By the time we’re done shaking things up.”

  One last try. “There’s no need to get deeper in this than you are. Think of Val.”

  “Would she want me to quit?” Johnny queried, giving back just enough attitude.

  “She’d want you to live,” Bolan said.

  “And I will. When this mess is cleaned up.”

  “It won’t be clean,” Bolan replied. “We can’t work miracles.”

  “Okay. A little cleaner, then.”

  “And no more shooting cops.”

  “You know I didn’t—”

  “But we’re both on notice now,” Bolan stated. “They’re in the game, on the wrong team. Some of them, anyway.”

  “Maybe they’ll all confess and mend their ways.”

  Now, that would be a miracle. For sure.

  “We start with pressure,” Bolan told him. “Turning up the heat on Gallo and his Family. They’ll want results, and they’ll start pulling strings. Somewhere, somehow, they’ll start to snap.”

  “Okay.”

  “But when it comes to lethal force, we verify the targets. How’s your intel on the local syndicate?”

  “It could be better,” Johnny granted.

  “Maybe we can fix that.”

  “Hal?” The prospect put a half smile on his brother’s face.

  “I’m not involving Stony Man, per se,” Bolan replied. “But we can mine their data banks. And meanwhile...”

  “What?”

  “We start to squeeze.”

  Chapter 3

  Vincent Gallo lit his first Cohiba Robusto cigar of the day, holding the match an inch below its tip. Robustos contained Dominican tobacco, grown from Cuban seeds, with a Jember binder grown in Indonesia, and a Cameroon wrapper. Whenever he lit one, Gallo felt as if he were smoking the world.

  But this day, it seemed, the world was trying to smoke him.

  “So, let me get this straight,” he said through clouds of fragrant smoke. “Since the night before last, we got one guy dead and three locked up. Plus the O’Malley thing that’s gonna come around and bite us on the ass.”

  “It may not be that bad,” Joe Borgio said.

  Gallo peered at his underboss across a massive desk imported from Brazil, a block of polished teak. “You wanna tell me how it could get any worse?”

  “First thing, it’s one of our guys dead, not four. The others just got dinged a little.”

  “And arrested. Did I mention that?”

  “They’ll all make bond. No sweat.”

  “And now we’re under scrutiny, because they couldn’t do a simple job.”

  “Not all that simple,” Borgio replied. “They went out hunting one prick, and they ran into another. With grenades, no less.”

  “That Billy Scars had better have a goddamn good excuse,” Gallo said, “or he’s gonna wish the prick used one of those grenades for a suppository.”

  “Let him talk to you, at least.”

  “I’ll let him talk. But if I don’t like what I hear...”

  “This all comes back to Nickel City,” Borgio reminded him. “That Dirks guy, and now whoever’s looking for him.”

  “Speaking of whoever, how’s that going?”

  “We were close to him last night.”

  “Not close enough. You might of noticed that he got away. Again.”

  “We’re working on it. Worked out that he used a phony name.”

  “Big help that is. You any closer to his real name? Something we can get a handle on?”

  “Well...”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “There’s something else we should think about.”

  “Just what I need. Another headache.”

  “Someone helped him out last night.”

  “Is that supposed to be a news flash, Joe?”

  “We need to work out who and why.”

  “So, give me some ideas. Not local cops. The state police or Feds?”

  “They wouldn’t come in shooting, blowing shit apart, without some warrants first.”

  “Who, then?”

  “Maybe...another Family?”

  That thought stopped Gallo cold. “You know something I don’t, this is the time to spit it out,” he said.

  “Nothing,” Borgio replied. “But it feels like Family, doesn’t it? Leading with the guns, I mean, instead of all the bureaucratic red-tape bull.”

  “You got a Family in mind?” Gallo asked.

  “None in particular. But if I had to guess, the ones that overlap our interests the most are Cleveland and Detroit.”

  Gallo considered that. He’d spoken to Detroit’s top man, Benny Matteo, just last week and hadn’t picked up any kind of hostile vibe at all, which proved exactly squat, the more he thought about it. As for Cleveland, Vito Turriano had his hands full at the moment with an insurrection in his own ranks, the Fanelli brothers teaming up with the Irish to defy the old man’s rules. Would he be dumb enough to risk a war with Buffalo, on top of that?

  Who knew?

  “You’ll check on that?” he prodded Borgio.

  “You know I will.”

  “And in the meantime, find these other pricks. The both of them.”

  “I’m on the case.”

  “And do us both a favor, will ya?”

  “What’s that, Vinnie?”

  “Make it quick.”

  San Diego, California

  ZOE DIRKS WAS southbound on Pacific Highway when her cell phone chirped the first few notes of “Like a Prayer.” She checked the LED screen, saw that it was Johnny Gray calling, and her stomach lurched. She could have sworn her heart stopped for a second, and she started looking for an exit as she answered. She wanted to get out of traffic, just in case the news was bad.

  “Johnny.”

  “Hey, Zoe.”

  “You’re still in Buffalo?”

  “I am. We’ve had some complications.”

  “We?”

  “The case.”

  Her missing brother was a case. Of course, she knew that. It was nothing, just a turn of phrase, but still it drove the point home: Joe was missing, not off on vacation or a sleazy getaway with someone he’d hooked up with in a bar. Missing.

  As in presumed dead.

  “So, what’s happening?” she asked him, forcing out the words.

  “It’s complicated. Basically, I called to see if you’re okay.”

  Dirks kept him waiting, took the next off-ramp and pulled into a strip mall. She parked the Mazda in the first slot she could find and switched off its engine.

  “I’m fine,” she said at last. “Is there some reason that I shouldn’t be?”

  “No, likely nothing.”

  “Likely nothing? Sounds like something.”

  Johnny hesitated, then said, “We shouldn’t talk about it on the phone.”

  “It’s Joe! What’s happened to him, Johnny?”

  “I’m not sure, yet. He was mixed up in some things...no, that’s not right. He learned some things, about a job that he was working, and he asked some questions. Put himself at risk.”

  She heard him sticking to the past tense: learned things, asked some questions, a job he was working. Dirks felt the earth tilt, and her breakf
ast threatening to make a hasty exit.

  “Is he dead, Johnny?”

  “I can’t say that, for sure,” he answered. “But you should prepare yourself.”

  “Oh, God. Oh, God!”

  She’d known at some level, of course. Twins knew things, even if they couldn’t pin it down precisely. No, she hadn’t felt him crossing over at a given moment, like the psychics talked about on television, but she’d had an aching sense that he was gone.

  “Zoe?”

  She took a deep breath, held it for a moment, then released. Said, “Yes. I’m here.”

  “Can you get off work for the next couple of days?”

  “You want me out there? Can I help you somehow?”

  “No!” He spoke too quickly, and too emphatically. Covering, he said, “I just thought you should take a day or two away from home. Relax the best you can and sort things out, while I keep working here.”

  “There’s something you’re not saying.”

  “Zoe, listen. If your brother made some people nervous, if they made a move against him, these are not the kind of people that you want looking for you.”

  “For me? Why would they—”

  “Maybe, if they thought Joe told you something that he shouldn’t have.”

  “I see.” Not really, but the world had done another tilt. She didn’t like it.

  “So, if you could just go somewhere. Don’t tell anybody where you’re going. Two, three days should do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “Be careful. Use cash, if you can. No paper trail.”

  “Johnny—”

  “I have to go right now. I’ll be in touch.”

  And he was gone.

  Use cash? No paper trail? Some kind of cloak-and-dagger crap.

  All right. She would go somewhere, and she wouldn’t wait for anyone who might have harmed her brother to come knocking on her door. She was within a mile of San Diego International.

  Screw running. She was going after them.

  Buffalo, New York

  “SOME GODDAMN PICKLE this is,” Leo Kelly muttered.

  “Damned straight,” his partner huffed.

  They were sitting in their unmarked cruiser, standard-issue Crown Victoria that any halfway savvy skell would recognize on sight and know that they were cops, parked outside a Taco Bell. Better by far than talking at the station, where the walls had ears, and even if you’d known a guy for years, you had to wonder if he might be wired.

  Some goddamn pickle.

  “O’Malley’s fault,” Strauss said. “He never should of gone out with Romita on his own.”

  “He didn’t have much choice,” Kelly pointed out.

  “I mean, he should of taken us with him.”

  “So, it’s our fault now?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Strauss stated.

  “Well, what are you saying?”

  “Just that...ah, who cares. We’re in the middle of it now.”

  And wasn’t that the crying truth, Kelly thought. Stuck in the middle, with The Arm on one side, the department on the other, and a wild man running loose in Buffalo who seemed intent on turning their lives into crap.

  Or maybe more than one guy.

  “Let’s go over what we know again,” Kelly suggested.

  “Jesus.”

  “You got someplace else you need to be?”

  “Not me.” Strauss took another bite of his burrito, red sauce smeared across his lips. Mouth full, he said, “Get on with it.”

  “A guy comes in asking questions,” Kelly recapped. “Wants to know about this Joe Dirks character. What happened to him.”

  “I hear ya.”

  What had happened to him was a couple of bullets in the head, one each from Strauss and Kelly, after which they’d taken him to Vinnie Gallo’s slaughterhouse, and Kelly didn’t want to think about where Dirks had gone from there. Take it for granted that he wouldn’t order any dish with meat in it from one of Gallo’s restaurants in town for two weeks, minimum.

  Make that a month.

  “So, we try to put this nosy guy off, give him the runaround, but he keeps coming. Nothing shows up on the background check.”

  Meaning he used a phony name. Bill Grayson. There were probably a thousand of them spread across the States, but none had records with the New York State Police or FBI, and none were licensed as investigators.

  “And so Gallo has the bright idea to take him out,” Strauss interjected. “Using cops, of course.”

  Why not? Kelly thought, since they’d sold their badges and their trigger fingers to the Family? Having a cop take out the opposition hedged the mafioso’s bets, like an insurance policy. Unless the deal went south, of course, and left you with a dead cop and a dead torpedo, plus everybody from the mayor’s office to the media demanding explanations.

  Giving Gallo credit, he had tried to clean it up. He’d traced “Bill Grayson,” sent a team out to the guy’s hotel to ice him, maybe swoop him up and make him disappear—but in the process, they had made things worse. Three of them had been hauled away in meat wagons, all charged with weapons violations now, and they had diddly-squat to show for it.

  Except more heat.

  Now all the boob tube talking heads were yammering away about a “Mob war,” stirring up the public, putting heat on the commissioner to “keep Buffalo safe.” It was the kind of talk you heard around election time, and didn’t mean a thing in terms of real-world problems and solutions.

  Sound bites. Screw them.

  “We’ll be up next time, ya know,” Strauss said, meaning when Gallo called for help.

  “Makes sense,” Kelly replied. “Nobody wants this to drag on any longer than it has to.”

  Which was too damned long already.

  “When we find this guy...”

  “He’s bought and paid for,” Kelly said. “The prick’s a cop killer. We take him out, we’re heroes overnight.”

  Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building,

  Washington, D.C.

  HAL BROGNOLA’S PRIVATE number was exactly that: private. Fewer than thirty living people knew it and were authorized to call.

  This day, the world outside his office was a relatively calm place. Not that you would know it from the newspapers or CNN, of course. Various wars dragged on, people were killing and defiling one another at their normal pace, but he was in a momentary lull between those special crises that required immediate attention from his small crew of unrivaled troubleshooters.

  And he’d known it was too good to last.

  The big Fed picked up on the second ring. “Brognola.”

  “Striker,” said the deep, familiar voice.

  “Hey, pal. Good job there, in B.C. You’ve definitely earned some R & R.”

  “I wish,” the Executioner replied.

  Brognola felt his hackles rise, a warning sign. “What’s up?” he asked.

  “It’s Johnny. There’s a situation that’s come up in Buffalo.”

  “New York?”

  “The same.”

  “I’m listening.”

  The Executioner spelled it out in simple terms. Brognola listened, tore a sheet of paper from a notepad, laid it out beside his blotter, on the hard desktop, before he started jotting names. No point in leaving an impression for the cleaning crew, regardless of their clearance.

  One guy missing, two guys dead. One of the stiffs a dirty cop.

  They were like roaches, in Brognola’s view. Not only vermin, but the kind that multiplied in waves. A force with dirty cops would never have just one or two. The payoff system couldn’t work that way. It took corruption from the bottom to the top, protecting one another and the scumbags they were paid to put in jail. No striking revelation
there, since some police had been accepting bribes and other favors throughout history. Track down the first police department ever organized, and you would find it had its share of criminals in uniform.

  “I’ll get the team on this,” Brognola said, when Bolan finished laying out the facts. “We have a file on Gallo, obviously, and I’ll ask if anybody’s looking into BPD. I know there was a cop in West Niagara, convicted on a drug deal in 2010, but he went down alone.”

  “Blue wall?”

  “I didn’t pay that much attention, but you know how these things work. What’s Johnny’s visibility on this?”

  “They’ve got no ID on him yet, but they’ll be looking. And he doesn’t want to clear the field.”

  “Chip off the old block, eh?” Brognola commented.

  “I hope not. He’s been doing all right in the real world.”

  “This is the real world,” the big Fed reminded him. “The down and dirty side of it, at least.”

  “It needs another cleaning,” Bolan said.

  “Well, if there’s anything that I can do to help, even if it’s just running interference...”

  “Thanks. I’ll take whatever information you can pass along, but you should keep your distance this time.”

  “Okay, if you think so.”

  “Thanks again,” Bolan said. “Later.”

  “Later, guy.”

  Brognola cut the link, frowning. He raised his pen and jotted two more names. Not targets; people he could trust for information, maybe for assistance.

  “Keep my distance, huh?” he muttered to the empty air. “Like hell.”

  Buffalo, New York

  BILLY SCARS CHECKED his reflection in the rearview mirror of his jet-black Caddy XTS while he was idling at a traffic light. He had a purple nose, taped over, and two black eyes. His top lip was a little fatter than it ought to be; his head throbbed when the Vicodin wore off. Good thing he had a source to keep it coming while his mug healed and he got beautiful again, while he was tracking down the pricks who’d handed him a steaming load of crap and then lammed out.

  Bastards.

  Billy Scars thought he’d smoothed things over pretty well with the padrino. Sure, he’d dropped the ball, but Mr. G. was understanding, to a point. He realized that the crew was sent to bag one guy, given directions to his doorstep, not expecting some kind of commando to be there ahead of them. A guy—three guys—could do only so much when they were under fire from a machine gun, then some prick dropped a grenade on top of them. They were lucky to be breathing.