Very quietly he told her, “I think I’ve already given you love, Rachel. The only kind I’m able to give. You don’t want a dying man, you want a living one. I’m going to circle the block, and I want you to get out, and I want you to go home.”
She shook her head adamantly, the lovely head bobbing about on his shoulder. “I’ll take what you have to give,” she told him.
Bolan’s mind had been about eighty per cent on the girl, the other fraction on his driving. Suddenly, though, the balance reversed with the heavy end being directed at the snow-blurred rear-vision mirror mounted on the outside doorpost, and on the pair of headlamps that had followed him out of the garage.
He muttered, “Don’t settle for crumbs, Rachel. Go for the full feast.” He made the turn at the corner and watched the headlamps in the mirror do the same thing.
The girl was telling him, “You may as well save your circling. You’re not going to talk me out of it.”
“I might not have to,” he growled as he swung into the next turn and the faithful followers tagged right along.
He shook the girl loose from his gun arm and commanded, “Get on the floor and stay there.”
“What is it?” she asked calmly.
“Maybe nothing,” he muttered. “And maybe that vision of yours is coming due. Don’t backtalk. Dammit, just get on the floor!”
She dammit got on the floor and she was peering up at him with frightened eyes as he threw the VW into a reckless advance along the slippery street.
“I love you, Mack,” she quietly declared.
He reached for the Beretta and told her, “I love you too, Rachel.”
And, at the moment anyway, he meant it.
He wanted to love somebody, anybody, for at least a little while.
His soul was sick to death of survival.
9: WORLDS
A looming blob of the city’s snow-removal machinery spun around the corner directly in Bolan’s path and hogging the intersection, flashing yellow lights trying to tell him what he already knew, but a moment too late. He cranked the wheel and stomped the gas pedal, putting himself into a crabbing slide through the intersection and clearing the behemoth by inches. It whirred on past him and the VW continued in an uncontrolled skid at quarter-broadside, the rear wheels digging futilely at the icy slope along the curbing, front wheels vainly trying to show the way back to the proper track. And then he was really in trouble. The curbing flanged off into a dipping driveway to an underground garage; the VW slipped into it, spun, and came to rest with one rear wheel edged into the curbing at the far side, positioned front-end-out with absolutely nowhere to go.
And moving cautiously past the snow-remover less than a half-block to the rear, came the persistent headlamps of the tail car.
Bolan commanded Rachel to stay put, and leapt out and ran down the street to meet them, intent on keeping the firelight as far from the VW as possible. The tail car passed beneath the overhead lighting of the intersection, Bolan could see that it was one of the stubby quasi-sportscars of foreign make—hardly typical of mob wheels. At a time like this, though, one did not take chances. He raised the Beretta and rapidfired a line of holes across the top of the windshield in a left to right scan.
The little car immediately went into a spin, the horn sounded briefly, front wheels hit the curbing in a sideways slam and jumped it, and the vehicle came to rest broadside across the sidewalk. Bolan was on the hump of the road, the Beretta at arm’s length, sighting down through the swirling snow at pointblank range. A window on the driver’s side cracked open and a quavery voice yelled, “Hey God hold your fire! We’re friendly!”
“Come out of there backwards!” Bolan commanded. “One at a time! Hands on the roof before I see the rest of you!”
The driver came out of there thusly, scrambling in his hurry to comply with the instructions. After his feet became grounded, he started to turn around but Bolan froze him with an “Huh-uh! Stay! Arm’s length from the car and lean on it, feet apart! And move away from that door!”
He followed instructions to the letter. A moment later another man came scrambling out feet first and went through the same routine.
Bolan moved forward and frisked them, then stepped back and ordered, “All right, turn around and show me those faces.”
They were young faces—early twenties, Bolan guessed—and very, very frightened. The boy who had been driving reacted suddenly to something behind Bolan and yelled, “Rachel, for God’s sake tell this guy who we are!”
The girl was moving up behind Bolan. He gave her a quick snap of the eyes and growled, “I told you to stay put.”
“I couldn’t,” she replied. The voice was coming out jerky and weird—the eyes were big and sort of haunted, and she was giving Bolan that I’ve-never-truly-seen-you-before look.
He softened his tone and asked her, “Do you know these people?”
“I don’t recall the names,” she murmured lethargically. “They’re friends of Evie.”
The Beretta stayed right where it was and Bolan addressed himself to the men.
“Why were you tailing me?”
“We didn’t even know it was you,” replied the driver, a blond youth. “It was Rachel we were tailing.”
“Why?”
“Well … if you’re who I think you are …” The boy glanced at his companion, then at Rachel, the gaze finally returning to rest on the tall man in buckskins with the ready gun. “We, uh, wanted to make contact with you.”
“Why?”
The boy shrugged and again looked at his companion.
The other youth, a dark Italian-type, told Bolan, “We thought we might develop a mutual interest.”
Bolan replied, “You have to talk straighter than that.”
“We wanted to join forces.”
“Against whom?”
The boy fidgeted, and the driver took it up again, and he was getting braver. “You’re smart enough to—”
Bolan snarled, “I’m smart enough to stay alive! I can’t say that for you two!”
The dark one hastened in with, “Look, should we be standing out here in the street? What if the fuzz should happen along?”
“What do you suggest?” Bolan asked him.
“Let’s find some place better to talk,” the boy replied.
“We think Evie might be in trouble,” the blond one quickly added.
The Beretta came down but remained in view. Bolan told them, “If you guys turn sour, you’d better know … I’d as soon wipe you as look at you.”
Rachel made an odd little sound and marched back to the VW. Bolan watched her disappear into the blowing snow, then he holstered the Beretta and told the two young men, “Okay, let’s go find that place. You’ll have to help me get my vehicle back onto the street. How about yours? Think it’ll run?”
The blond laughed nervously and said, “I think it’ll run okay. But you sure creamed that windshield. I wonder if my insurance pays off on acts of war?”
Bolan dug into his pocket, peeled four Harlem-fifties from a roll, and gave them to the blond boy.
“My insurance pays off on everything,” he told him. “Will that cover it?”
The boy was surprised but he nodded his head and accepted the money. “What happened to your bus?” he asked in a greatly relaxed tone.
“It’s caught on a downslope,” Bolan told him. “We can push it out.”
The dark youth was getting into the car. He ran his fingers along the top molding of the windshield, carefully examined the four ragged holes, and sighed loudly and announced to nobody in particular, “That’s as close as I ever want to come.”
The blond laughed again and said, “I guess he could have just as easily brought them in dead center.”
Bolan said, “That’s right,” spun about and returned to the VW.
The sports car joined him there. Bolan ordered a sullen Rachel Silver into the driver’s seat and gave her terse instructions regarding traction on slippery surfaces,
then the three men got behind and pushed and heaved and grunted the laboring micro-bus onto flat surface. Then the blond grumbled something about the front wheels of his car being “knocked out-of-line and vibrating like hell”—so Bolan took it slow and easy and the two-car caravan crept cautiously along the treacherous streets until they came to an all-night automat.
They parked the vehicles on the next side street and trudged back to the automat, got coffee and pie and took it to a quiet corner where the three men talked of politics and racketeers and dishonest public servants, and of a young girl who talked too freely to possibly the wrong people. Rachel listened brooding and kept her silence. She very rarely looked at Bolan, and when she did it was with a tinge of ill-concealed disgust.
It was her turn, Bolan thought, and she was flinging something back into his face now. It hurt a little, sure, but if what she’d seen out on that street was enough to turn her off, then Bolan had to be thankful for early favors. Rachel did not have Viking guts—she was not a Valentina nor a Theresa, and she demanded her own image of purity from her men. He fervently wished her luck, though doubting she would find much. Under the right conditions that beast would emerge, and a woman like Rachel would find it difficult to remain “in love” with the same guy for very long. A Jesus very rarely came along. And when he did, the Rachels of the world didn’t stand a chance of latching onto him.
So Bolan inwardly felt sorry for the girl, and he saved a little of the pity for himself and for the loss of an impossible dream briefly held, and then he turned his full attention to the gory world of Executioner Mack Bolan.
He took the names and numbers of his two “advisors,” jotted pertinent notes into his little poop book, and he knew that he was entering into a new phase of his war against the Mafia.
After an hour or so he steered Rachel back to the micro-bus and drove her back to the high-rise where the nutty dream had begun and where it was ending.
“Short romance,” he told her as he pulled beneath the awning to let her out.
Her first words since the showdown on the street were, “I’m sorry. I had romanticized what you are.”
“And what am I?” he asked quietly.
“A killer,” she replied.
He jerked his head forward in a curt nod. “That’s me,” he agreed. “And if those had been killers behind us—what then? What should I have been, Rachel?”
She shivered and said, “I’m sorry, I …”
He said, “Goodbye, Rachel. Thanks for my life.” She whispered, “Goodbye, Mack Bolan,” then she was out and gone and Bolan knew that something fine had departed his life.
Correction. Something fine had almost entered his life. Thank God it hadn’t quite made it. The Executioner had enough working against him—he did not need the additional complications of …
He threw the bus into gear and eased away from there.
A glance into the rear-view and it was gone already, lost in the great sticky gobs of winter’s fruit, and back there—behind that swirling screen of white darkness—he saw in his mind’s eye a thing of indescribable beauty crawling naked upon a table to escape the harsh world of men in a shadow world of gods.
“Come out, Rachel,” he murmured aloud. “This is the only world you’ve got.”
10: TIES
Bolan left his vehicle in a private garage near Central Park and walked a block to a nondescript but clean budget hotel where he had registered earlier. He reached past the snoozing night clerk, took his key and walked up to the third floor room, where he sat on the bed for a few minutes mulling over the information given him by his new acquaintances, Greg MacArthur and Steve Perugia.
They were post-grad students at Columbia who had decided that political battles were better waged at City Hall rather than on campus, and they had a rather loose-knit thing going which they called CIG—City Interaction Group. A fair-size troop of older students had been making the rounds of union halls, construction sites, docks and other workman’s areas to “rap with the hardhats,” and to attempt to find some common ground of understanding between the generations.
At first, apparently, there had been a moderate success. Then the kids had set up “rap halls” in various neighborhoods, with a program geared to “political education.” This was not an ivory tower thing but a cold hard look at actual evidence of corruption, downright thievery, and flagrant abuses of political power. They were naming names and documenting facts, not merely shouting numbers and broad suspicions, and someone had obviously decided that they were becoming dangerous. They had been picketed, then threatened and muscled, and recently two of their halls had been bombed.
CIG did not regard this interference as a valid reaction by “hardhats,” although this is how the counterattack was made to appear. They had good reason to believe, in fact, that certain elements of the organized crime structure of the city were responsible for their harassment. There were lurking suspicions that they had been infiltrated by the enemy. MacArthur and Perugia were “just sort of tossing around” the idea that perhaps The Executioner might wish to “take some action”—especially since it appeared that his “benefactress,” Evie Clifford, “might be in very grave danger.”
The nature or direct source of Evie’s potential danger was never quite specified. Apparently MacArthur and Perugia had only a vague fear that she had talked in front of the wrong people—“infiltrators”—or else they were trying to con Bolan into their fight. Either way, of course, Bolan had to assume the worst until he could definitely ascertain that the fears were groundless.
Also, the danger would not be confined to Evie. The other two girls were equally susceptible to a Mafia snatch. If the mob ever got the merest inkling that a path to the Executioner led through those girls, then their lives would not be worth …
Bolan firmly rejected the idea. The time was nearly three o’clock, his legs were getting wobbly, and the shoulder was aching like hell. It had been a long and tiring day, and Bolan was not much given to idle worrying. He could, of course, go back and camp in the girls’ living room with a burp-gun under his arm—but his whole intent had been to carve himself out of their lives with all haste. If Evie had not already compromised their security, then Bolan would certainly be doing so by continuing to hang around them. No, he could not.…
On an impulse he went into the hall to a pay phone at the head of the stairs and called the apartment. Paula responded to about the twelfth ring, in a voice thick with sleep.
“Did Evie get home?” Bolan asked her.
“I don’t know,” she replied fuzzily. “I took a pill, and I … I guess I’m groggy. Just a sec. I’ll go see.”
She was gone for about a minute, and her voice was much steadier when she told Bolan, “No, she isn’t back. And I think Rachel is flipping out or something.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean she’s at the wailing wall, and I haven’t seen that girl cry in the three years I’ve known her. What did you do to her?”
Bolan muttered, “Dammit.”
“Well, what did you do?”
“Nothing, Paula. I didn’t do a thing to Rachel.”
“Okay. I guess that’s why she’s wailing. Well, what do you think? About Evie, I mean. Should I call the police?”
“Is it unusual for her to stay out all night?” he asked.
“Not at all,” came the prompt reply, with emphasis on each word.
“Okay, then I’d say don’t sweat it. But listen …”
“I’m listening.”
“I think it might be a good idea for you and Rachel to pack off to a hotel for a couple of days. And get Evie under your wing as soon as you can.”
A slight pause followed, then, “You think we’re in danger?”
“You’ve been in danger from the first moment you saw me. Yes, I think you should get out of there.”
“All right. I’ll accept your judgment.”
“Call it an instinct,” Bolan told her.
“All right, a
nd I accept that even faster. Now if I can just get Rachel to understand.”
“Tell her that I said dammit just do it.”
Paula laughed softly and said, “Maybe you should come and tell her yourself.”
“Can’t do that,” he muttered. “I’m about out on my feet, Paula. I’ve got to put it down.”
“Do so carefully,” she said, and hung up.
Bolan stared at the telephone for a moment, dark thoughts of security and super-security edging through his mind, then he found another dime and placed a collect call to Pittsfield, the old home town where this war had been born. He identified himself as Sargent La Mancha, and the operator made him repeat it twice.
A sleepy voice from far away confirmed the connection on the second ring with a, “Yeah, hello.”
The operator announced, “I have a collect call for anyone from a Mr. Sargent La Mancha in New York City. Will you accept the charges?”
“Call from who?” Leo Turrin asked groggily.
“The party says his name is Sargent La Mancha.”
Turrin replied, “No, I won’t accept any collect calls on this phone. Tell him to—wait a minute, I’ll get that other number.”
Bolan grinned and waited while the undercover cop and Mafia under-boss dug for the number of a pay station a couple of blocks from his home. Then the familiar voice returned to the line and recited the number, and added, “And tell him to use his own damn credit card, operator.”
Turrin hung up and the operator asked Bolan, “Did you get that, sir?”
Bolan said, “I sure did. Thanks, operator.” It was their own little arrangement. Bolan’s voice never had to enter the hookup into Turrin’s house number, but the contact was set up.
“Do you wish that I re-place to the other number now?”
“No, I’ll wait a few minutes, thanks,” Bolan replied.
He returned to his room and stripped to the waist, removed the bandage, and looked at his wound. It was pulsing and it had a sort of an angry look to it. Bolan muttered, “Oh hell,” and applied medication and a new bandage, then slipped the shoulder rig onto bare skin, pulled on a shirt, and went back to the telephone.
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