He’d had time by then to get a good look at that cold face and had decided to stop talking and start slapping leather, but Bolan’s hardware was already nosing up over the door panel. The Beretta spat out a sizzler that splatted in directly between the eyebrows and the guy went down like he’d been poleaxed.
Bolan had the door open and was swinging down to the ground when the yardman came slugging up through the snow. He was looking at the fallen man, not at Bolan, and he cried, “What’d you do, idiot, run him down?”
The Executioner replied, “Yeah,” and ran another one down with a bullet behind the ear, and the guy fell over atop the first one.
The second yardman was coming around the corner of the house, and his first view of Bolan was looking up along the fully-extended black blaster. He recoiled from the unsettling view, but not fast enough, then a pair of Parabellums found their mark and punched the guy over into drifted white snow that quickly turned red.
Five seconds later, Fury was standing at the door to a little concrete-block house which was joined to the main house by the carport. Bolan kicked the door open and stepped in with the chattergun at full throttle. Two very surprised diners seated at a table in their underwear were the first in the receiving line so they received a .25 calibre explosive wreath about their throats and chests.
Another reared up off a cot and was immediately laid back down with a mouthful of metallic pacifiers.
A large fat one with a protruding belly stumbled to an open bathroom door, stark naked and gawking at Death through puffs of shaving lather. The burst split him from groin to throat, the protruding belly opened and seemed to deflate, the fat one fell back into the toilet bowl and wedged there.
Agony stepped out and glided to the rear door of the mansion. A big man in full dress wearing an apron had moved to the door in curiosity over the rattling sounds from the blockhouse. He fell away in a swift back-pedal as Bolan came through, the guy threw two slices of toast at Doom and pivoted about to make a run for the other door. The Beretta coughed twice and the big man missed the turn into the doorway and crashed over a table, sliding to the tiled floor in a mess of orange juice and scrambled eggs from a breakfast tray.
Remorse went on, through the pantry and the deserted dining room into a darkened hallway. An inside man who had obviously been seated near the door at the far end had abandoned his station to investigate the noise from the kitchen. He approached to within ten feet of Disaster before he recognized the tall figure with the taut face and gleaming teeth, then he just froze and stared, perched across his stride like one of those stop-action shots on NFL Today.
“Bolan?” he asked unbelievingly.
Belief went up to him, pressed the heated silencer of the Beretta against his throat, pulled a snubbed .32 out of a shoulder holster, dropped it to the floor, and an icy voice told the guy, “You guessed it. Now let’s play twenty questions. How many hardmen in the house?”
“F-four,” the guy wheezed.
“Let’s just play one question,” Bolan suggested in that graveyard voice, the Beretta sinking deeper into the shrinking throat.
The hardman expelled whistling air through the constricted larynx and whispered, “Andy—Andy in th’ kitchen. Fixin’ breakfast for Mrs. Gambella. Me. Two upstairs. Hall, each end.”
“Nobody on the third floor?”
“No. Not used. Nobody on third floor.”
Reluctant Mercy growled, “Thanks,” and jerked a knee into the quaking man’s gut, then slammed the butt of the Beretta against the back of his head as he sank toward the floor. Bolan stepped around the unconscious form and proceeded on through into a huge reception hall at the front. Folding doors of heavy paneling were at each side, easily twenty feet tall. A mahogany staircase curved up around the rear and broadened to a landing about forty feet above.
Grim Determination went up, the Beretta holstered and a fresh clip clicking into the chattergun. This would not be so simple if the upstairs men were alert. One to each side could be bad news.
He ascended swiftly, moving on light feet with the burper at half mast, and he hit the second-floor hall at full gallop. A dim figure coming to stiff attention in the distance to his left drew first fire as Bolan crouched and swung into the attack. He laced that end of the hallway with a spiral burst right on target—and kept on going around, twisting to the floor in a corkscrew then laying into the other flank from semi-prone.
A heavy man was dancing around down there, trying to become disengaged from an easy chair that was splintering into pieces around him and with him. A revolver roared through the lighter chatter of Bolan’s weapon and a slug thwacked into a post beside his head, but it was the one and only response to his blitz. The guy was coming apart—spouting blood in streams and still trying to get off another shot. Bolan massaged his trigger lightly once again, the guy fell over backwards, crashed through the chair, and the battle was over.
A shrill female voice was yelling something from behind a door just opposite Bolan’s position. He turned the knob, kicked the door open and advanced into an elegant room with Persian carpeting and swank furnishings. It was part of a bedroom suite—a sitting room, Bolan supposed they’d call it. Off to one side was a dressing room and beyond that a gleaming bath. Dead ahead through a fancily carved doorway lay the master’s chamber, and this was where Vengeance had been headed all the while.
The woman yelled something else in an hysterical falsetto as Bolan entered, then she clamped it off in mid-squawk to stare at the intruder with a terror that seemed to keep growing. She was sitting up in the bed with a newspaper—a cup and a silver coffeepot on a tray in front of her. The other bed was rumpled and tossed but empty.
Seething Hatred peered under both beds, into the closets and even out the windows and onto the eaves outside, while the woman was sitting there in a frozen curl and staring at him with open mouth.
He turned to her with a deep growl and asked, “Where’s Freddie?”
The woman was about fifty, and she knew Bolan all right, but she was not made of Theresa’s stuff. She began screaming in breathless yelps—he had to go over and slap her a couple of times to shut her up.
“Where’s your husband?” he again demanded.
“I don’t know!” she yelled back. “Isn’t he here?”
Frustation swept the bed-tray away and it hit the floor with a crash and a splattering of coffee, then he pulled the covers away from her and dragged her out of the bed. She wore a heavy nightgown and a short bedjacket and she was a pretty goodsized gal, thick through the chest like an opera singer with hips to match. She’d been a beauty once, though, and traces of it still lingered there behind the misshapen flesh.
He pulled her terrified face close to his and snarled into it. “All I want is Freddie. Now you tell me damn quick where to find him.”
No, she was no Theresa or Valentina. There was guilt in that face, knowledge of evil and a complicit acceptance of it, and Bolan had seen her kind before also. Somehow he just could not see Maria and Theresa as buddies, and he wondered just how much of that idea had been Sam Chianti’s own.
“H-he left about a h-half hour ago,” she was chattering. “I don’t know where, Holy Mother I don’t know.”
Yeah, Holy Mother, take care of her murderous jackal of a psychotic husband so he could continue to rape the world for Maria’s fancy houses and animal comforts. Bolan had to wonder, could she really know what went into the upkeep of an empire like Gambella’s?
The woman must have read Bolan’s thoughts. “Now listen, mister,” she told him in a voice that was struggling hard for control. “You have it all wrong about Fred. Why don’t you just leave him alone? You’re the one causing all the trouble. Fred is a good man, and he only does what he has to do to protect his business. Any man would do that. Any man will fight to protect his investments.”
Maybe she didn’t know. Maybe she’d insulated herself from the reality in much the same manner as Chianti had described his own adjustments. Growling
Outrage told her, “Okay, lady, you asked for it. I’m going to show you one of this good man’s latest investments.”
He dragged her out of there and down the curving mahogany, and she was protesting and pleading all the way in a choked garbling of words. Bolan just couldn’t feel sorry for her, all the sorrow had been wrung out of him in a confrontation with one of her husband’s turkeys.
She gasped and hyperventilated as Bolan pushed her past the fallen man in the downstairs hall, and she nearly came all the way unglued when she had to step over the bloodied Andy-eggs-juice cocktail on the kitchen floor.
Bolan steered her out the door and she cried, “I can’t go out like this!”
He ignored her protest, pulled her over to the VW, opened the side doors, and made her crawl inside. Then he dragged her back to where the mutilated girl lay, and gently he unwrapped the shroud of cheesecloth, and as Maria Gambella became confronted with a reality without insulation she came apart then and there. She fought Bolan for the doorway, shrieking and scratching and clawing her way out of there, and she went out in a tumble, squawking as she hit the ground.
Bolan jumped out behind her, pulled her to her feet, then helped her inside the house. He put her in a chair in the dining room and brought her some water. She ignored the offer, staring at the floor with a frozen face and panting raggedly with her exertions.
Quietly, Bolan told her, “That’s the kind of business your husband promotes, Mrs. Gambella. And I want to talk to him about it. Now you tell me where he is.”
“You go straight to hell,” she panted.
“You tell me, or I’m going to carry that pathetic side of meat into this house, and I’m going to put her in your bed, and I’m going to tie you in there with her.”
The woman’s eyes rolled toward her forehead and the blood drained from her face. In a choked voice, she said, “All right, smart guy. I hope you do find him, and that will be the end of you. But I don’t know where he went, and you can believe that or not. He just said he had a date with some girls, and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he did. He’s a man, my husband. A real man!”
Utter Disgust told her, “He sure is, Mrs. Gambella.”
But there was more than disgust in that tortured mind, there was a sudden shivering fear that Maria Gambella had told him quite a bit more about her husband’s plan of the day than she’d realized.
He told her, “You better call the fire department.”
“Why should I call the …?”
“Because I’m going to burn down your lousy palace, Mrs. Gambella.”
Bolan went back through the kitchen, and the woman came scurrying after him.
“What are you talking about?” she yelled.
He went on to the VW and she hopped anxiously about just outside the house, loudly wanting to know what he’d meant by that remark as he reached into the bus and hauled out the bag of incendiaries.
He delayed long enough to kneel beside one of the fallen yardmen and strip off his overcoat. He threw it at Gambella’s Queen and ordered her to put it on, then he picked up his bag and went back inside the house. He scattered the incendiaries in appropriate places, and when he returned to the carport the woman was gone. He climbed into the VW, backed around, and got out of there.
A cluster of curious people were on the sidewalk staring toward the house, attracted probably by the earlier rattling of gunfire. It had been a quick hit, all considered, but he had overplayed his timetable by several minutes and as Bolan knew the cops would be along any time now he wasted no further time in clearing the area.
As he made the turn off of 155th Street, he glanced back over his shoulder and saw flames leaping into the sky and he smiled grimly over small compensations and turned his mind toward the larger ones.
First, though, he had to stop by an East Side highrise to try his hand at reading some Manhattan Indian signs. He shivered, wondering again about the identity of the girls Freddie Gambella had gone off so early in the morning to “date.”
You’d better not, Freddie, he was thinking. He would follow that guy all the way to hell, and if he found him there he would gladly stay to personally supervise the eternal torment of that monster.
Yeah, Freddie Gambella was a monstrosity, just like that burning joint of his back there. So was his old lady, and so was anybody and everybody who made a living from the Gambella “business enterprises.”
“You’d just better not, Freddie,” Bolan murmured aloud. The Executioner was some kind of a monstrosity himself.
14: OPTIONS
It was getting onto mid-morning. The streets were in fair condition and the big city was humming into the day as though the storm had never come. Bolan had been driving aimlessly allowing his mind to settle back into sanity. He had a dead girl on his hands, and he had several large-size problems to be considered on behalf of the living. He knew that he had to concentrate on the living, and just now that meant Paula and Rachel.
Bolan’s only hope was that the two girls had made it out of that apartment and to a safe place before Gambella learned of their existence. It was a frail hope. There was no doubt whatever Evie had told everything Gambella had wanted her to tell, and she had probably told it very early into the night of her torment
It had taken the kid a long time to die, that much had been quite obvious. Bolan never ceased to marvel at how long a healthy body could sustain brutal assaults upon non-vital functions and go on living. Death had unquestionably come to Evie Clifford as a slow advance into massive shock, brought on by continued torment and a gradual loss of blood. The monsters had known their business, and they’d kept her alive and aware for one hell of a long time.
Bolan’s soul shuddered with the memory of it and he asked himself for the thousandth time why it had to happen to a sweet and harmless kid like Evie. Then he shook Evie Clifford out of his mind and returned again to the problems of the living.
In her place, he began establishing a rationale for Gambella. The guy either had the girls or he didn’t. Either he got to them, or he could not get to them, or he decided against snatching them. How would a smart Capo handle the information he’d rung out of Evie?
Bolan damned himself for not having the foresight to establish a contact schedule with Paula during that final conversation. Bolan did not have the personnel resources to check out every hotel in Manhattan, not even the most obvious ones. Gambella did have. If he missed the girls at their apartment, he could damn soon cover every hotel in the city.
But did Gambella really want the girls? Did he actually need them? Bolan knew what he would do in Gambella’s place. He would not touch those girls, not right away. First he’d put them under close surveillance, he’d bug their apartment, their salon and their telephones, he’d stake-out their home and their place of work, he’d get a feel into everyone who knew them and the places they went—then he’d just sit back and wait for Bolan to show.
And if the pigeon did not come along in a reasonable time, then he would go ahead and snatch the girls, and he’d find a way to let Bolan know that he had them, and he’d challenge the guy to come and get them before he made turkeys out of them.
Yes, that would be the strategy. The enemy knew Bolan as well as Bolan knew them. He had to figure that. They knew that he would not run away and leave his friends at the mercy of the turkeymakers.
Okay, so how about a rationale for the quarry? How would a smart Executioner counter such a strategy? That problem was complicated, of course, by the knowledge that this was no mere game of chess. The lives of two good women could be dangling in the balance and …
Bolan snapped off that line of thought and tried to align himself away from the emotional aspects. This was a battlefield problem in strategy and tactics, moves and countermoves—nothing else. He had to keep it that way, unless he wished to defeat himself.
Okay, so here’s what a smart pigeon would do. First, he would assume that Gambella could have snatched the girls—and then he would remove to every extent po
ssible whatever options the other side might have. He would.… Yes, by God, he would.
Bolan smiled grimly at the idea that was forming in his mind. Yes. It would be the most logical countermove.
He drove directly to Receiving Hospital and left the shrouded figure of Evie Clifford on an ambulance dock, in full view where he knew she would quickly be discovered, and he left a note folded into a mutilated little hand. The note identified her and explained what had happened to her—by whom, where, and why. It also contained a solemn promise that justice was going to be done—by whom, and against whom.
He pulled away to a discreet holding position to watch the scene through binoculars until the body was discovered. He saw the orderly or whatever recoil from the grisly find, and he watched the uniformed cop who came charging out of the emergency entrance, and he saw the cop pulling the note out of the dead fingers.
He made a mental note of the time, then he went away, his hands and his mind done with the beloved dead. He cruised slowly toward the apartment building, and when he arrived there he mentally tipped his hat to New York’s Finest as he noted the police cruisers clustered about the garage entrance. He smiled as he went on by. If the Mafia had been hanging around, they weren’t now. One of Gambella’s options was gone. Maybe even all of them, if the cops should also luck onto Paula and Rachel to tuck them away into protective custody.
Again he noted the time, then stopped at a phone booth ten minutes away and called the Lindley apartment. A guarded male voice answered the second ring, and Bolan distinctly heard the extension phone also click into the line.
Bolan identified himself and asked to speak to the head cop. A whispered consultation followed, then another voice replied, “This is the head cop. What the hell are you up to, Bolan?”
“Are the girls there?” he asked.
“Why don’t you come and see for yourself?”
“No way,” Bolan replied coolly. “That’s why I sent you. I figure Freddie has the joint sealed.”
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