Hard Targets

by Don Pendleton

  Those who made it out would not.

  When they were rolling, smoke and flames receding in the rearview, angry faces swiveling to track the Mercury, Johnny eased back into his seat and asked, “You think they’ll bite?”

  “White shooters, dropping Gallo’s name? At the very least they’ll want to check it out.”

  “It’s race war, then.”

  “A thug war,” Bolan answered. “If it gets that far.”

  His brother looked across at him, half smiling, said, “You’ve got something in mind.”

  “I might at that,” the Executioner replied.

  Chapter 12

  North Forest Acres, Buffalo

  “My name? The rotten pricks are using my name?”

  “All over town, Vin,” Jerry Portoghesi said. “Hitting the Irish and the bla—”

  “I know who they’ve been hitting,” Vinnie Gallo snapped. “But blaming me? What the hell is that—”

  He saw it, then, as plain as day, and it made perfect sense. He hadn’t cracked, despite all that the rotten sons of bitches had thrown at him, both sides of the border, so they’d changed their strategy. Now they were hitting other gangs in Buffalo and blaming Gallo’s Family, making it look as if he’d lost it and was lashing out at anybody he could reach. Hoping the Irish and whoever else they stirred up would strike back at Gallo—which, he thought, the idiots were likely stupid and pissed off enough to try.

  “Goddamn. It’s smart, that’s what it is.”

  “What’s that, Vin?”

  “These guys know their stuff. I give them that,” Gallo said. “What we need to do is head this off before we wind up fighting every two-bit clique in town.”

  “Do you have a plan, Vin?”

  “Jesus, you’re my frigging consigliere. You’re supposed to help me think of plans, eh? But in answer to your question, yeah, I got a plan.”

  “Okay, so—”

  “You get on the phone,” Gallo said. “Talk to Shaughnessy or Devlin. Both is better, if you can. And who’s the top dog for that East Side outfit?”

  “A guy named Cletus Washington,” Portoghesi said. “His homeys call him Rocket.”

  “Homeys?”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “Call him, too. Tell all of them we had nothing to do with any of their people getting hit. Explain the best you can, without divulging any Family secrets, eh?”

  “Okay. What if they don’t believe me?”

  “Be persuasive, Jerry. What in hell do I pay you for?”

  “Right, Vin.”

  “And if you can’t persuade them, then I guess we’ve got to kill them.”

  “All of them?”

  “Al will be here pretty quick, with extra soldiers. These micks and whatever, at least we’ve got a pretty fair idea of where to find them.”

  Nothing like the bastards who’d been kicking Gallo’s ass, so far.

  “I got weapons waiting for the backup team,” Portoghesi said. “And some places they can stay.”

  “Screw that. I didn’t call them over here to sit around and take a nap. I want them on the street, first thing, and Al, too. I don’t want him thinking he’s too big to get his hands dirty.”

  “He won’t like that, coming from me.”

  “He doesn’t have to like it,” Gallo answered. “He just has to do it.”

  “Right, Vin. Sure.”

  “Now, get on those calls, before somebody else starts taking potshots at us, will you?”

  “On my way, Vin.”

  Gallo hated feeling any kind of sneaking admiration for his enemies. Ideally, he preferred to think of them as insects he could flick aside or crush under his Bruno Magli loafers, then forget. Raw contempt had served him well for years, but there had been a time or two—

  Forget that!

  Gallo already had enough grief as it was, without exhuming ugly memories from decades past. He hadn’t gotten where he was without eliminating certain worthy adversaries. Names and reasons didn’t matter now. What counted was his present trouble, which—thanks to the quick wits of his latest enemies—was only getting worse.

  But he could change that, sure. He was a born survivor, and the day he went down—keeping it in mind that everyone went down sometime, somehow—he’d go down fighting. Stupid pricks would have to pry his jaws open, to get them off some dying bastard’s throat.

  Go out in style. Damn right.

  South Buffalo

  “PHONE FOR YOU, Kev,” Rory Keegan said.

  “Who the hell is it?” Kevin Shaughnessy demanded.

  “One of Gallo’s greasers, if you can believe it.”

  “Is it, now?” Shaughnessy took his time deciding whether he should laugh or cuss a blue streak, then said, “All right. Give it here.”

  The cordless phone changed hands. “You got a feckin’ lot of nerve, calling this number.”

  “How else am I supposed to talk to you?” the caller asked.

  “Try begging for your worthless life when I’m there, standing over yer fat carcass with a cleaver.”

  “Listen, Kevin—”

  “Friends, are we? Bosom feckin’ buddies?”

  “Huh?”

  “Feel free to call me Mr. Shaughnessy.”

  “Oh, right. So, this is all a big mistake.”

  “You dagos made it!”

  “Hey, now. There’s no call for—”

  “Shooting up the Shamrock, killing half a dozen of my boys. Don’t try to make it sound like you forgot the sugar with my tea.”

  “It wasn’t us!” his caller blurted out.

  “It wasn’t, eh? A couple Eyetie looking feckers just decided that they’d take your goombah’s name in vain?”

  “That’s it, exactly.”

  “Bullshit. Just because yer stupid doesn’t mean I am.”

  “Listen, will you? If you’ve been awake the past two days, you know that we’ve been getting hit ourselves.”

  “And one of you without a lick of sense decided it was me and Brian done it, so you sent a couple of your wops—”

  “I’m warning you.”

  “Oh, yeah? You kill my boys, and now yer warning me? Feck you!”

  He cut the link and turned to Keegan, took a second to compose himself, then asked, “Where’s Brian?”

  “Talking to the families.”

  “All right. I need him back here, quick-like. Tell him there’s no time to lose.”

  “Got it.” Keegan was dialing as he turned away, already speaking as he cleared the room.

  Shaughnessy still couldn’t believe the arrogance. No, scratch that. He could easily believe it, coming from the Gallo crowd, but what he couldn’t do was swallow it. If Gallo or his flunky thought they could roll onto Irish turf, raise hell, then lay the blame on someone else, their brain cells weren’t connected.

  Shaughnessy and Devlin didn’t have the biggest gang in Buffalo, by any means, but they were known for their ferocity. They’d lost six of their men so far, but Gallo had been hit much harder, if the word on the street was accurate. There’d never be a better time to knock the cocky mafioso off his high horse, taking full advantage of the losses he had suffered, striking while the iron was hot.

  Shaughnessy’s Irish eyes weren’t smiling at the moment, but they would be, when he’d personally pumped a few bullets into Vinnie Gallo’s head and watched the blood run out his ears.

  Some bosses lost their touch as they went up the ladder, leaving all the dirty work to others, but that wasn’t—and had never been—the Irish way. Go back to Vincent Coll, Legs Diamond, Dean O’Banion in Chicago, down to Whitey Bulger in South Boston. All of them had kept their hands in, killing when they had to, setting an example for their soldiers. />
  All of them were dead, of course—except for Bulger, on his way to prison after fifteen years or something on the lam—but they had gone down swinging, taking other bastards with them, just like Jimmy Cagney in the movies.

  And that, Shaughnessy thought, with a degree of pleasure that surprised him, was the only way to go.

  East Side, Buffalo

  ROCKET WAS RAGING. Pacing up and down his crib with long strides, not quite jitterbugging, but the angry-nervous walk that friends and family had long since come to know as warning signs of an explosion in the offing. He’d been that way forever—well, as far back as he could remember, anyway, around the time his pops left, way before the man at East High kicked him out for taking down that shop teacher. Pig had it coming, but they had to give the lecture: “Cletus Washington, you’ve gone too far this time!”

  Sometimes he wondered how they’d like him now.

  No time for skating down memory lane today, though.

  A couple of ofays came onto his turf, blew his peeps away, and told the others it was from Vinnie frigging Gallo. What the hell was that about, and how did they expect to get away with it?

  Rocket heard a phone blare out a Tupac ring tone, sounded like “Thug Passion,” and he caught a sidelong glimpse of Little Puppet answering. And seconds later: “Rocket, man. For you.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Well, find out!”

  Low-pitched mumbling, then, “He’s one of Gallo’s. The conspiglatory. Somethin’.”

  “Jesus. Gimme that!” He grabbed the phone. “Who the hell is dis?”

  “I told your boy,” the caller said. “I’m Mr. Gallo’s consigliere, calling you at his instruction to explain the recent incident.”

  “Wasn’t no goddamn incident! Couple your shooters come up in here, killin’ friends of mine an’ burnin’ down the house!”

  “I know what happened, but you need to understand we had no part in that.”

  “Man’s bustin’ caps and drops your boss’s name? You got no part in dat? You shittin’ me!”

  “It’s a confusing thing, I know, but—”

  “Hell wi’ dat! You be the only one confused, thinkin’ I’d buy some line an’ let ya off the hook.”

  “Look, we don’t want—”

  “Y’all think I give a rat’s ass what you want? You struck a fire, and your boss is gonna be the one gets burned!”

  He broke the link and tossed the phone to Little Puppet, snapping orders out while it was still in flight. “Call ever’body!” he commanded. “It be time for us to mobilize. Baby Commandos, too. I want ’em all strapped. Pull out ever’thing we got and put it on the street. We gonna show them muthas what it mean to mess wid someone else’s thing.”

  His men were scrambling by the time he finished, rushing off to do as they’d been told. They’d all lost friends in the attack on Clinton Street, and payback was a bitch. Especially for those on the receiving end.

  And it was going to be a superbitch, this time.

  Someone was always getting killed around the East Side, for one reason or another, but they hadn’t had an all-out war in something like two years. Rocket had been expecting something, wondering how it would start, but going up against the Gallos was a trip. It might have worried him at one time, but they’d started it. Now that the fat was in the fire, he didn’t mind the thought of taking it uptown, dropping it right on Gallo’s doorstep. Teach him how the brothers in the ’hood rolled, when you pissed them off.

  Rocket was soaring, goddamn straight.

  And when he landed, he might set the whole damn town on fire.

  North Forest Acres, Buffalo

  “YOU NAILED IT,” Johnny said. “The plates are all Canadian. Ontario.”

  “It figured that he’d call for reinforcements,” Bolan told him.

  “I count nineteen, so far. May not be all of them.”

  “It’s plenty,” Bolan answered, peering downrange through the Barrett’s AN/PVS-10 scope. “Ear plugs.”

  His own were already in place, a pair of SureFire EarPro Sonics Defenders, barely visible at any distance. With so many marks to choose from, Bolan picked at random, settling the reticle on a face distinguished by its sneer below a pair of Gucci sunglasses. He squeezed the Barrett’s trigger, rode the recoil, and the sneering face exploded.

  Shift. Acquire another target. Squeeze.

  A second skull evaporated, while the headless zombie from his first shot did a jerky little two-step, then collapsed into a heap, as if his bones had turned to sawdust. Others in the killing zone were scrambling for their lives, the Barrett’s booming voice now audible, a second after the first hit.

  Shift. Spot the runner. Fire.

  Round three ripped through a barrel chest, the .50-caliber projectile bursting lungs and heart, exiting through a shoulder blade with force enough to nearly disarticulate the dead man’s arm. He went down flopping, blood and mutilated tissue flying everywhere.

  Still eight rounds in the magazine, since once again he’d started with the chamber loaded. For his next shot, Bolan sighted on the hood of a crew wagon with Ontario plates, estimating where a round would find the fuel pump. Impact from the .50 BMG round drilled the hood and left a fist-size dent before it struck a spark inside and sent a fireball wafting toward the power lines above.

  Now soldiers were emerging from the nearby house, some bringing two guns with them, tossing one to new arrivals, who had come unarmed. With seven rounds to spend before reloading, Bolan ranged among them, striking here and there with no discernible pattern in mind.

  He caught a runner in midstride and gave him wings—until the flying corpse slammed head-on into Gallo’s wall of cinder blocks and stained them with his blood.

  The Executioner gut-shot a mafioso who had caught an M4 carbine on the fly and stood exposed, scanning the block for targets, trying to return fire. He then hit one of the soldiers running from the house, and spun him like a weather vane, before his feet got tangled up, knees gave and he dropped twitching to the pavement.

  Next Bolan nailed two for one when they lined up just right, by accident, his full-metal-jacket round shattering one skull, then ripping through another soldier’s throat to leave him coughing crimson through an ugly blowhole. Another gunner was sent tumbling through a crazy backward somersault across the hood of another crew wagon, bouncing once before he rolled out of sight.

  Three-quarters of a gunman’s face was sheared off, spraying the tattered fragments over two or three shooters standing around him, so that one keeled over, vomiting.

  A final shot from the Barrett caught a Gallo soldier in the boss’s doorway, picked him up and blew him back inside the house to soil the carpet.

  “Good enough for now,” the Executioner said, and lifted off the scope. “We’ll let them clean up while the neighbors tie up 911.”

  Back to the car, at an easy jog, and they were out of there with no one to oppose them. Residents of ritzy neighborhoods might be skeet shooters, kill a pheasant or a grouse from time to time or keep a shiny pocket pistol in the nightstand for emergencies. The ones who’d rush outdoors to face a stranger carrying a .50 caliber Barrett were few and very far between.

  Like, none at all.

  “I’m guessing the padrino’s pissed,” Johnny said.

  Bolan smiled, then replied, “He ain’t seen nothing yet.”

  * * *

  “THIS HAS ABSOLUTELY gotten out of hand.”

  “I hear ya, Sarge,” Eugene Franks replied.

  It wasn’t quite the worst Mahan had seen, since coming on the job. There’d been car wrecks, of course, and people set on fire. A crazy woman who had cut a baby from its mother’s stomach after half a dozen doctors said she couldn’t have her own. But shootingwise, he thought the bloody scene outsi
de Vincent Gallo’s house came closest to the prize.

  Against the numbers and the blood, of course, he had to weigh the fact that all the dead were first-rate scumbags, likely murderers themselves, who had deserved exactly what they got. Officially, however, the identity of any given murder victim carried no weight when it came to diligently turning over every rock, to find the perp responsible.

  Except, in this case, Mahan thought he had a pretty fair idea who’d done the deed.

  A guy with graveyard eyes who’d sat across a table from him at The Square Meal, not so long ago.

  “How many?” Mahan asked.

  “Nine dead,” Franks answered, “plus a couple who got singed around the edges when the car went up.”

  “Then he, whoever, just stopped shooting?”

  “Bagged his limit, maybe.”

  “I’d be very much surprised if that were true.”

  “Okay, then. Say the big gun’s making too much noise. He spooked and split before the first squad showed.”

  “Lucky for them.”

  But in his head, Mahan could almost hear the stranger telling him, “I don’t shoot cops. It’s just a rule I have.”

  “You think the Irish did this?” Franks inquired. “Or maybe Clinton Street?”

  “It’s possible,” Mahan said, knowing better. He’d be stunned to find that either outfit had a shooter of this quality, and both were likely still in shock from the attacks they’d suffered in the past two hours. Mahan thought they would be hitting back, but it would take a little longer, and they likely wouldn’t be this organized. Drive-bys, maybe. Or a car bomb.

  “You seen the boss yet?” Mahan asked.

  “Not home,” Franks told him. “And before you ask me, yes, we checked the case. Proximate cause, looking for victims, weapons, yada-yada.”

  “Where’d he go?”

  “His mouthpiece claims nobody knows.”

  “Uh-huh. And if you buy that—”

  “Brooklyn Bridge,” Franks said, beating him to it.

  “Job one,” Mahan said, “is finding Vinnie Gallo. If we don’t, somebody else is bound to. Shaughnessy or Devlin, Clinton Street, whoever did this. Till we clear it up, the Gallo Family is tops on the endangered species list.”