Poison Justice

by Don Pendleton

  Peary had problems of his own to solve, and the first of several solutions was sitting right under his roof. Soon, he would be packing up, moving on to a paradise of his own making and choosing. It might as well already be written in stone.

  Peary was at the kitchen table, thinking about the culture of crime, when the future downfall of the New York Mafia fell into the late-night routine. Peary nearly bit his cigarette in two when the first chords of the same song he heard every night on VH1 videos blasted from the living room. By now he knew the lineup of hits by heart and had heard the songs repeated so many times the past week that he thought he might go ballistic any moment.

  And, of course, every time a favorite was aired Jimmy “The Butcher” Marelli had to crank up the volume until it shook the floor and the walls of the Catskill hunting lodge.

  Peary looked at the slab of human veal perched on the edge of the couch. His superiors claimed Marelli was last of the old school Mafia, honor among thieves and all that nonsense. He was a dinosaur among the new coke-sniffing crowd of backshooters and Mob clowns who killed while driving past sidewalk crowds, indiscriminately blasting any and everybody as long as they got their target. A button man who did his work one on one, face-to-face for the Cabriano Family. The Butcher was famous for whacking malcontents, traitors and songbirds, loyal only to the late Don Michael Cabriano. Only what Jimbo purportedly so loathed way back when he had now become.

  The Mob was notoriously creative when it came to weaving legends about their own and making myth stick as truth for wise guy, public and G-man consumption. In this instance, the Justice Department had flown Marelli up the flagpole as a marquee hitter with a body count of biblical proportions to his credit. Whether or not that was true, Peary figured the hit man was costing the Justice Department a small fortune in wine and Scotch, cigars and cannoli alone. Not to mention all the veal linguini in white clams and twenty other pasta dishes he concocted and ate around the clock.

  How many bodies, Peary wondered, really came attached to this baby-sitting detail on the government’s tab? There were fifty-two kills the FBI and Justice knew about. The Butcher confirmed that during an eighteen-hour Q and A session. All the I’s were dotted, T’s crossed on the Who’s Who of Mafiadom during his three decades of slaughter. There were at least two to twenty other corpses they were guessing had his brand on them, maybe more. Only Marelli enjoyed playing the big shot, stringing them along, feeding them just enough to have the FBI drag a river or dig up some earth in the New Jersey woods. Beyond cold-blooded murder he’d been granted full immunity for extortion, truck hijacking, assault, assault with intent, pimping, pandering and drug trafficking. There was also witness intimidation, tampering and execution. The deal was enough to make Peary wonder if the Justice Department had watched its balls go out the door with the change in administration, but he’d made his own plans well in advance to castrate the whole bull. The time to act, and get the hell out, had just about arrived.

  Shaking his head, Peary watched the hit man, decked out in a flaming Hawaiian shirt and white silk slacks, staring dumbly at the blaring television. He wondered what the world was coming to. He was getting sick of being forced to breathe the same air as the pampered killer.

  Suddenly Peary felt his hand inch toward his shoulder-holstered USP Expert .45. Ten hollowpoints in the clip, and a nasty little resolution to the noise problem flamed to mind.

  “Sir? It’s your move.”

  Peary laid an angry eye on Hobbs. The pink-faced kid was maybe two years out of Quantico, attached to the task force at the last moment when some desk-lifer at the FBI had, for reasons unknown, been able to catch and burn up the ear of the Attorney General. FBI, Justice, U.S. Marshals, everybody wanted in on this gig. It was a chance, he figured, a trophy for someone’s mantel on the climb up the pecking order. Problem was, all the headshed wanted to do was make sure The Butcher was coddled and comfortable, practically warning them all to be careful not to upset or press him too much for information on the Cabriano Family. What next? Bring on the strippers? Everybody chip in for the guy’s lap dance? All the big consideration and fawning the murdering asshole got, what happened to paying for your crimes?

  Peary watched the FBI rookie shrink into himself under his steely gaze, then checked the board. Back-gammon was the game, and they were playing for a four-hour watch, thirty minutes per win. But the way Hobbs had been rolling double fives and sixes on a whim and bumping him all over the board the past two hours, Peary figured he owed the kid two weeks’ worth of shift duty.

  “With all due respect, you need to relax, sir. Don’t let him get to you.”

  “What’s that?”

  The kid showed a weak smile. “It could be worse. It could be rap.”

  Peary hit the kid in the face with a fat cloud that could have choked half a city block.

  Hobbs flapped a hand at the smoke, making a face like he would puke. He coughed for another moment, then said, “I mean, he’s a thug, sir, and a pain in the ass, but he can cook.”

  “So, he can cook for the troops, Hobbs, that make him a goodfella to you?”

  “Well, what I meant—”

  “Let me tell you something, son. I operate on the general principle I don’t know a damn thing about another human being until they show me some cards. Just because you’re in love with his spaghetti and meatballs doesn’t mean he’s shown a damn thing to anybody. Let me tell you something else, junior. I’m not in this world to be popular or liked. Fact is, the more unpopular, the more disliked I am the better I stand in my eyes.”

  Hobbs cleared his throat, staring at the game. “With all due respect, sir, I think there’s a lot of anger in you.”

  Peary bared his teeth at the kid, wondering if he was serious or being a smart-ass. He looked at the board while running a hand over the white bristles of a scalp furrowed in spots by some punk’s bullets long ago. Double sixes might get him back in the game.

  He was shaking the dice when Marelli shouted an order for somebody to grab him a bottle of red wine from the cellar and some more cannolis while they were at it. Peary looked at Grevey and Markinson, wondering who would make a move as butler or if they had enough pride not to kiss ass. To their credit, he found both marshals with their faces buried in newspapers. They glanced at each other from their stools at the kitchen counter, passing the telepathy for the other to go fetch. Peary heard the thunder of his heart in his ears, then The Butcher cranked the volume high enough to bring down an eagle soaring over Windham High Peak.

  It was more than he could take. The kid had to have seen it coming, but Peary didn’t give a damn if a missile plowed through the roof. He was up and marching, the .45 out, the kid bleating something in his slipstream. The marshals were dropping their papers now, jowls hanging, but Peary was already sweeping past them.

  Marelli was squawking for someone to shake a leg, when Peary drew a bead on the giant screen TV. The peal of .45 wrath drowned out the shouting and cursing around him. Marelli leaped to his feet, dousing his flamingos and island girls with blood-red wine. Peary became even more enraged when he saw the picture still flickering behind the smoke and leaping sparks. One more hollowpoint did the trick.

  For what seemed like an hour suspended in time, Peary savored the shock and bedlam. He found less than ten feet separated himself from The Butcher and considered ending it right there. Marelli was bellowing, but it was clear to Peary he didn’t know whether to shit or go blind. The kid, the marshals and the other agents on sentry duty around the lodge were now swarming into the living room, hurling themselves into a buffer zone between him and the wise guy.

  Peary wrenched himself free of someone’s grasp. They were all shouting at him, arms flapping, hands grabbing whatever they could. Marelli was already launched into a stream of profanity, threats and outrage, interspersed with taking the Lord’s name in vain, among other blasphemous obscenities. He might have turned his back on Church and God, but he itched to shoot the hood for blasphemy alone.
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  Peary heard them asking if he was nuts, what was wrong with him and so on. Turning away and heading for the door to grab some fresh air, he heard Marelli railing how he wanted a new and bigger television, and he wanted that lunatic bastard off his detail or he wasn’t talking to nobody. Peary encountered a marshal with an AR-15 who shuffled out of his path, but stared at him like something that had just stepped off a UFO.

  “What?” Peary shouted, holstering his weapon. “You never see a TV get shot before?”

  Peary rolled outside, breathing in the clean, cool mountain air. Alone, he laughed at the chaos he heard still bringing down the roof. What a few of them in there didn’t know was a lot, he thought.

  Losing a television was soon to become the least of Marelli’s woes.

  PETER CABRIANO TOOK a look at the bloody mass of naked flesh hung up by bound hands on the car lift, and believed he could read the future.

  The empire was either his to save, or his to watch go down in flames. That was the problem, he knew, with narcotics trafficking. It built kingdoms, but it also tore them down. For some time now, he’d been scrambling to avoid this day, branching out into other avenues for fast cash. But narcotics had been the Family’s bread and butter since the early eighties, and without the Colombians there would be no promise now of steering the Family into other business ventures, which he knew were the wave of the future.

  There was no time to dwell on rewards not yet earned; he needed quick solutions. One answer was already in the works, but where there was one loose tongue he feared a whole goddamn chorus of squealers was out there ready to bring the walls crashing down.

  Even though his Italian loafers were covered in rubber galoshes, he veered away from the oil splotches, found a dry spot in the bay, stood and considered the dilemma while his two soldiers watched him, awaiting orders. He was forty-six years old, but with a lot of life to live, two young sons to think of bringing into the business and worlds still to conquer. The keys to the kingdom were recently handed to him after his father died behind bars in Sing Sing from testicular cancer and complications of syphilis. The death three years earlier of his younger brother had left him sole heir, and no man who considered himself a man ever let a sister anywhere near the handling of Family business. He wondered how the old man would take charge of the present crisis. Two things he knew for sure. One, the old man would never snitch. Two, he would take the fight to his enemies. Part of the problem was figuring out who his enemies were.

  The fiasco, he realized, all began when Marelli got popped by the FBI. Or maybe it started before that. How in the world he let himself get talked into the purchase and sale of what came from a classified spook base in Nevada, and in whose hands it would end up….

  So what, he decided, he loved money. The focus now needed to be put on what Marelli had on him.

  Cabriano ran his hands over his cashmere coat, gauging the number Brutaglia and Marino had done on Marelli’s lifelong friend. A mashed nose, both eyes swollen shut, blood streaming off his chin where his lips were split open like tomatoes.

  “Bruno. Wake him up.”

  Cabriano took a step back as Marino hefted a large metal bucket and hurled the contents. The effect was instant and jolting. Cabriano listened to Berosa’s startled cry echo through the empty garage, the man shuddering against the sudden ice water shower, eyes straining to open.

  “The beating’s as good as it’s gonna get, Tony. Talk to me about Jimmy. You don’t, I think you know what’s coming.” Cabriano listened as Berosa cursed, called him a punk. He chuckled and gave Brutaglia the nod. “You know, Tony,” he said, as he saw Brutaglia lift the small propane torch from a work bench, then twist the knob, a tongue of blue flame leaping from the shadows, “Jimmy, he figures he can just walk out on me, retire to a beach somewhere, the Feds throwing their arms around him. Maybe he thinks he’s gonna land some big book-movie deal, be a big star, a bunch of Hollywood starlets giving him blow jobs around the clock, telling him how great he is. He thinks he’s gonna rat me out, bring me down, I end up doing life like my father while he’s living the good life.”

  “You’re nothing like your father.”

  “Whatever you say, Tony. Maybe you’re right, but if you are it’s because my old man didn’t have to worry about snakes like you. He surrounded himself with loyal soldiers, stand-up guys who would go the distance, piss on a Fed’s shoe if they even glared their way. What the hell happened to you and Jimmy, huh? Even the young guys, they thought of you two as legends. I don’t get it. How do guys your age end up with a coke habit, anyhow? All your experience and you two get careless, don’t even know when the Feds have every inch of everything you own bugged.”

  “It wasn’t the Feds who came to us. Way he told it, Jimmy went to them.”

  “Then why is Jimmy stabbing me in the fucking back?”

  “Think about it. Your father, he would never have approved of who you’re dealin’ with, what you’re prepared to help them do.”

  “It’s business, Tony, business. My old man didn’t care for dope either, but he didn’t mind using coke money to build himself a hotel-casino, did he?”

  “Different business.”

  “How?”

  “You punk, you don’t get it, you don’t have any honor.”

  “You’re telling me Jimmy got all bent out of shape because of my new business partners?”

  “What you’re planning…your father would have shot you himself.”

  Cabriano was growing weary of the insults. No matter what, he knew tough when he saw it. He could burn the nads off Berosa, but the man wasn’t going to break. Besides, the old soldier knew he was dead already.

  He saw Marino moving toward Berosa, waved him off. “I don’t suppose you’re gonna tell me where the disk is?”

  Berosa laughed. “Why don’t you ask Jimmy?”

  “That’s a good idea, Tony. See, what you don’t know is before the sun comes up Jimmy’s taking whatever his big dreams to hell with him. I’ve got people on the inside, Tony,” he said, and saw the stare come back, cold but believing. “Yeah, there’s still a few Feds walking around willing to take my money. I know exactly where Jimmy is. Seeing as how he wants to live out his golden years so bad, I’m thinking if I get my hands on him, put a little fire to his balls he’ll take me by the hand and walk me straight to the disk. What you did, Tony, you just told me you two are the only ones in my house I had to worry about.”

  “You’re a disgrace to your father’s memory.”

  Cabriano snapped his fingers at Marino to give him his .45. The old soldier was still cursing him when he took the big stainless-steel piece. Then Cabriano silenced the loose tongue with the first of three rounds through the face.

  2

  All the years the man in black had been in the killing business and the evil of the savage opposition never failed to amaze, sicken and anger.

  Where it was all headed, whatever the fate of humankind, he couldn’t say, nor he thought, was it his place to venture a guess. He was a soldier, from beginning to whatever his own end of the line. As such, he believed common sense, basic decency and having eyes to see and ears to hear, could read into the telltale signs, sift through all the deceit and schemes of the age, and figure out where and how bad it could all get. No matter what the spin or political correctness of the time, no matter how much money was tossed around to turn eyes blind, two and two still equaled four in his game. Yes, there were subtle forms of evil spawning across the land, luring the impressionable or the weak and naive who floundered on the fence toward the abyss. But it was the leviathans of terrorism, international crime, mass murder and other forms of sabotage against the national security of the United States and the free world that was part and parcel of his War Everlasting.

  Being only flesh and blood, there were days, however, he woke up and wondered how it had all come to this, where those in charge of running societies, those with power and money and the chance to make a real difference would have the wo
rld at large believe right was wrong, wrong was right, up was down and so forth. But they said the Devil was a liar, and his greatest lie was making man believe he didn’t exist.

  In the realm he walked it was clear a powerful force of darkness never slept. To him the laws of good and evil were as immutable and ironclad as Mother Nature. Up the stakes from murder of innocents by automatic weapons to weapons of mass destruction, morph a drug dealer or local hood into a dictator savaging his country in genocide, starvation and torture, and only the face of evil and the numbers of victims and depth of atrocity changed. Again, it wasn’t his duty or destiny to be a preacher, politician, or Sunday-morning talking head. But there was clear and convincing evidence enough, from Baghdad to Bogotá to Beijing, that certain and many inhuman factors were hard at work on the planet to push the fate of humankind toward a point of no return.

  For the man named Mack Bolan, also known as the Executioner, only a few good men and women rising up to tackle the extremes in action of the Seven Deadly Sins could somehow, someway, save the future, steer it all back on course before it was too late. Without question he counted himself among their ranks.

  Big Tony’s Used Foreign Imports was Bolan’s launch pad for the new campaign. It was planted in a decent section of Brooklyn, a sprawling lot carved out between 6th and 7th Avenue, Prospect Park a short walk southeast. But the Cabriano Family hadn’t seized their fortune on turning overpriced European wheels. For a moment, as the Executioner crouched behind the garbage bin at the end of the alley, the sound-suppressed Beretta 93-R out and waiting targets inside the garage, he felt a sense of déjà vu. A hundred lifetimes ago and too many ghosts of the good, bad and innocent to count, the soldier had taken on the Mafia. Back then, he’d been a one-man army, waging war against an invisible empire, at first striking down la Cosa Nostra out of a blood debt owed to his family.