The black detective knew it was a silly game; his smile said so as he replied, “Maybe you’re right. A lot of the younger men living in Rat Town are ex-GI’s. Most of them infantry veterans of Vietnam. One of the latest equal job opportunities for those people of mine, those coloreds, fighting the nation’s wars.”
“So what?” Spinella asked in a muffled voice.
“So I guess some of them don’t understand why they have to pay half their income to live in a squalor surpassing that of the Vietnamese. So … maybe you’re right, Mr. Spinella.” The cop had produced a handkerchief from an inside pocket, and he was carefully unwrapping it. “I guess the ex-GI angle also explains this lone piece of physical evidence left behind by the killer. You ever see one of these things before? Careful now, don’t touch.”
He was holding the handkerchief directly under the Mafioso’s nose. Spinella took one quick look at the metallic object revealed there. His eyes skittered away and his breath seemed to be clinging to his throat as he huskily asked, “Where’d you get that?”
“We found it on what was left of Tommy the Sandman’s head,” the black man explained.
Lucindo was craning over to get a look at the object, but the detective was already re-wrapping it and returning it to his pocket.
“Just wanted to ask,” the cop was saying, “if the thing could have belonged to one of the victims. Ever see it before?”
Spinella’s eyelids had dropped to about half-mast and he did not seem to be looking at anything in the physical world. “I seen a hundred of those things,” he replied mechanically. “You can buy ’em in any army store, nickle apiece. Now get outta here, Walker. Let me mourn my dead.”
“Sure.” The cop spun about and returned to the doorway. He hesitated there for a moment, then turned around for a parting shot. “I guess you’re right, you can find these things anywhere. We found another one this morning, a few hours ago. Almost on the Capitol steps.”
“Yeah?” The Mafia boss was not even attempting to conceal his interest.
“That’s right. In the same place where we found four more murder victims. Male caucausians. One of them was one of your people, Mr. Spinella, one of those Italians.”
“Who was it?” Spinella asked in a choking voice.
The cop shrugged. “Identification won’t be positive until fingerprint verification comes in. But we believe he was Frank Matti.”
Spinella’s reaction was a mere flickering of the eyes.
Detective Lieutenant Walker smiled again and went out, carefully closing the door behind him.
Lucindo strode halfway to the door in an almost explosive release of pent-up energy, then he whirled about and cried, “Matti and three of his boys! What the hell, Carlo?”
Spinella did not reply. He was staring at his fingers and softly tapping them against his thigh.
The two hardmen exchanged troubled glances and the one who had escorted the detective into the room blurted, “What’d he have in that handkerchief?”
“Hell I didn’t get a look,” Lucindo replied. He took a hesitant step toward his boss. “What was it, Carlo? What’d he show you?”
“One of them decorations,” Spinella muttered. “Those shooting prizes. You know.”
The chief bodyguard’s voice was suddenly as deadened as the boss’s as he said, “You mean marksman’s medal.”
“Yeah, I think that’s what it was,” Spinella growled.
“Oh God,” Ripper quietly exclaimed.
Lucindo was frozen in his tracks, the body arched, a procession of emotions marching across the disturbed face.
Spinella was reaching for the telephone. “A death mark,” he mumbled. “Left right at my front door.”
“Who’re you calling?” Lucindo wanted to know.
“Big Gus, who the hell you think. I’m not facing this alone. Bet your ass, Rocky, not this one.”
“What’s that goddam guy doin’ in this town?” the bodyguard wondered aloud.
“I’ll give you twenty guesses,” Spinella replied sarcastically. He changed his mind about the phone and shoved it back. “You call,” he instructed Lucindo. “Tell ’em what we know, and tell them to tell Gus I’m coming out.” He heaved himself erect and headed for his bedroom. “I’m gonna shave and get dressed. We’ll take the Lincoln. Get it ready.”
Lucindo was already on the telephone and Ripper Aliotto was headed out the other door when Spinella passed into the bedroom.
He kicked the door shut and was peeling off the robe when he became aware of a flicker of motion behind him, and before he could react the unmistakable pressure of a pistol’s barrel was roughly applied to the back of his head.
A voice as cold as ice, yet hardly more than a whisper, advised him, “Easy, Carlo, and you might live awhile.”
And that, Carlo wryly reflected, was the best offer he’d had all night.
7: THE UNDERSTANDING
The guy stood a full head taller than Spinella but he was probably no heavier. The two-hundred-odd pounds which were distributed along that stretched-out frame were all hard ones. You knew that by the way the guy stood poised there in an agile balancing of the muscular systems, by the cat-like movements and the spring-tension control which seemed to accompany his command of the enemy environment.
“I want no shitting around,” the Executioner softly told the Mafia underboss, and the cold authority in that voice matched the rest of the man.
Carlo Spinella had no inclination whatever for shitting around.
He fought his tumbling emotions to a paralyzed standstill as he woodenly assured the intruder, “I got no hard feelings for you, Bolan.”
Death was staring at him, Death, with a capital D and all edged with ice as it held command over those penetrating blue eyes. Spinella could not repress a trickling shiver.
He tried again. “We got nothing to argue about, Mack.”
“I’m not your judge,” Mr. Death quietly announced. “I didn’t come to argue.”
The guy shoved him onto the bed and a marksman’s medal hit the soft surface at about the same moment, inches from Spinella’s panicky eyes.
His very breath was hurting as it fought clear of constricted air passages. There was a roaring in his ears and he hurt all over, from head to toe, everywhere—even his hair hurt.
So this was what it was like, then. This was what it felt like to meet the end of everything a guy had planned for and worked for and sweated for throughout a harsh lifetime. This was the end of the trick—and there was pain, yes, real physical pain, in that realization.
In that one frozen moment all the dreams and agonies of a mis-spent lifetime floated free and spiraled into that peaking awareness of death, the memories of violence received and given, the regrets long buried and glossed over by successive layers of tantalizing ambitions, fleeting frames of broads laid and broads missed, of love offered and spurned and sometimes trampled—and agonies of the soul, too, very real agonies which now knew no possibility of atonement. A life in hock had come due, the note was being presented for payment in full and Carlo Spinella knew that he had come up bankrupt.
The guy was angling a black Beretta right into Carlo’s face. It was ominously tipped with a long silencer, making it look twice as long as any gun had a right to be, and—yes, Carlo knew. He knew.
“You won’t make it out of here, guy,” he whispered. “No way, no chance. My boys are all over the joint. Cops running up and down the street outside. This’s dumb, real dumb.”
The big guy replied, “The mob pronounced me dead several lifetimes ago.” He shrugged those muscled shoulders and added, “What does a dead man have to lose?”
Spinella’s mouth was like packed with cotton and he felt that he was strangling on his own words as he said, “Okay, how do I beat it? Look, I’m not ready for this. There’s just no sense to it, it’s dumb to die this way. I don’t even know you, we never even saw each other before. Why should we be doing this? Huh? What’s the sense? Hey, God, Bolan, let’s at
least talk it over.”
Surprisingly, unbelievably, the guy gave that frozen face about a one-millimeter tilt and he told the doomed man, “Okay. But no arguments, Carlo.”
Hope was reborn.
A new mortgage, maybe, was being issued in the spiritual court of last resort. But it was a tenuous reprieve, obviously contingent entirely upon absolute honesty with no cuteness and no reservations.
He could, of course, yell like hell for the housemen. He might get, maybe, half a yell into the air before it was met by the sizzler from that silenced Beretta. And, yeah, the guy would then have a fight on his hands. He’d probably die right beside Carlo.
Small damn comfort.
Spinella reached eagerly for the note on his life.
“I’m done arguing,” he muttered. “Listen, Bolan, you’re right. It’s a rotten outfit. They make a lot of noise about brotherhood and honor and all that crap, but it’s just a lot of crap after all. Hey, they never gave me nothing, not a damn thing. They allowed me to operate, that’s all. What I got, I got myself—and half of that I have to turn back to them. It’s a big con job, Bolan. We just run around conning each other.”
The big guy just said, “Yeah.”
The speech obviously had more meaning to Spinella than to his audience. Mainly, he supposed, because he had actually faced the truth for the first time. It was almost blinding, that kind of truth. It was deathbed truth.
“I mean it,” he whispered, with all the awe of a man who had suddenly known a mystical experience.
Bolan said, “Okay, show me. Go to the door. Open it one inch, no more. Call your house captain in here. Then get clear.”
God! Call Rocky in to his death?
That was it, of course. It was the guy’s only way out. Call them in one by one, knock them off one by one, then it would be Carlo’s turn.
Bolan must have read the thoughts that were tumbling through that tortured mind. He told the Mafioso, “It’s your only card, Carlo. Play it or cash out.”
Spinella played it.
He got off the bed and staggered to the door, paused a moment to stare about the room in confusion as he straightened his dressing gown, then he cracked the door open and called, “Hey, Rock. Getcher ass in here a minute.”
He heard Rocky’s responding growl and he retreated immediately, leaving the door slightly ajar, dropping tensely onto the edge of the bed and staring at the floor.
He did not want to see Rocky get it.
They had been friends, they were a long ways down the road together, but there was not even a feeling of guilt or treachery … simply regret. At a time like this, a guy did not split the hairs of life … he simply clung to them.
Lucindo barged in with his usual display of energy, banging the door behind him like the bull in the china closet he’d always been. Spinella loved that big gorilla, really loved him like the brother he’d never had. He could not look at him.
“Okay they’re expecting us,” the bodyguard announced. “Ripper’s getting the car—”
He knew.
The breath just suddenly deserted his speech and he stared at Spinella’s grudgingly upraised gaze—and, yeah, poor Rocky knew.
He cried, “Carlo, what the hell …” and exploded into the final defensive move of his life, throwing himself sideways and clawing for the revolver in the shoulder-holster as he tried to spin into a confrontation with the big guy in the shadows.
An eerily throttled gasp spat out from those shadows and then another so close that the two sounded as one. Rocco Lucindo kept on moving sideways though sort of punched over from the top and going down head-first into a sliding dive, his big meaty paw convulsed around the holster and all his claims to life bubbling out of a shattered skull.
Regret fled and gratitude took its place as Spinella frozenly contemplated the curiosity of sudden death.
Where did a guy go in that fleeting instant, in that abrupt transition from life to death?
Where was Rocco Lucindo now?
Carlo did not have the answer to that. He only knew that he was still here, and it was a moment to celebrate, not mourn.
“How many more?” the big guy wanted toknow.
“They’re all out front with the cops,” Spinella quickly replied. “Except Ripper Dan Aliotto, he’s out back with the car.”
“Is Ripper Dan a cool wheelman?”
“Yeah, he’s the best there is.”
“So get dressed,” the big cat instructed in that icy voice.
So where was Rocco Lucindo now? It was a dumb question. Rocco was dead, that was all. The question to be considered now was where the hell was Carlo Spinella going.
But it was not, he knew, a time for idle questions of any nature, nor was it a time for arguing, dealing, or wheedling.
It was a time for truth, then for going on living.
And a minute or so after the untimely demise of his old friend Rocco, the titular boss of the nation’s capitol was in a lockstep with the Man from Death, moving through the house out the rear, down the steps toward the garage, unquestioningly and gratefully going on living.
Yeah. It was a time for understanding exactly where a guy stood … and exactly how he could go on standing for as long as possible.
This Goddam Bolan wasn’t shitting around.
8: MANHUNT
Ripper Dan was a “cool” wheelman, all right. He eased the big sedan through the assemblage of official vehicles, intermittently sounding his horn and exchanging wisecracks with the uniformed patrolmen until they were clear of the congested area, then sent a worried smile into the rear-view mirror and asked the men behind him, “Okay, now what?”
“Virginia,” came the crisp reply from the big bastard who sat beside the boss.
“Yeh, take route 29,” Spinella muttered. He quickly added, “Play it straight, Ripper. This’s no time for fun’n games.”
The wheelman nodded his head in understanding. There had been no need for that note of caution. Ripper Dan had recognized Mack Bolan at first shiver, let nobody wonder twice about that.
Where the guy had come from, and how he had managed to get the drop on Carlo and Rocky inside their own joint—these were not questions of anything more than idle curiosity. The only fact of immediate interest was that the guy was sitting back there with a big blaster snuggled into Carlo’s armpit. It wouldn’t take much to set the thing off—a twitch, a hard sigh, even—and Ripper Dan had a large respect for that big cold bastard back there. He’d as soon kill both of them as to wait and wonder why they twitched or sighed.
He kept both hands high on the steering wheel, both of them always in clear view. Carlo was directly behind him. Bolan was off to the side a little, with an unrestricted angle of vision into the wheel area.
This placement also gave Ripper Dan a good view of Bolan, via the mirror. The guy was really something else. He didn’t really look too much like those posters, that artist’s sketch. A little, yeah … but a lot of guys could look like that sketch. Only one guy could look this way, though. It didn’t really have too much to do with the shape of the face or the way it was put together. It was something under that face, something inside those eyes, that a guy identified as Mack Bolan.
Yeah. The guy was something else.
Ripper Dan suppressed an apprehensive shiver. He was scared, sure. He could admit that to himself. His hands were clammy and there was a ball of mush or something right at the top of his stomach. Sure he was scared. This guy had death written all over him. How many goddam people had he killed already? Hundreds, easily. Maybe thousands. And it showed.
But there was something different about the guy.
Dan Aliotto, after fifteen years with the mob, had known a lot of professional killers. He even ate supper once with some of the old Murder Incorporated bunch. They’d been hard bastards, too. But not like Bolan. There was something different about this guy.
Ripper Dan wished that he could put a finger on that difference. He could not. And it bothered him. W
hy should it bother him?
Unconsciously he shrugged his shoulders and sent another quick glance into the mirror. His eyes met those cold blue ones from the back seat, the gazes locked for an instant, and something passed between them.
What? What was that message?
Ripper Dan did not know. But he thought he understood a bit more, now, about that difference.
Respect.
Yeah, that was it. You just instantly respected this goddam guy. Not the uneasy fear kind of respect which Aliotto had usually felt for the professional killers. You respected those guys, sure, but in a different way. All the time you were respecting them, you were also putting them down in your own mind. When you were around guys like that, you just automatically felt better than them. Weaker, maybe, but still better. Bolan did not affect a guy that way. Bolan made you feel lesser than him. Yeah, that was the difference. He made you remember your own sins, not his.
How about that?
Ripper Dan tried another glance in the mirror, and his gaze snapped back with a confirmation of his new truth. Shit, you could almost like that bastard … gun and all.
He cleared his throat and told the guy, “You said Virginia. It’s a big state.”
“Don’t fuck around,” Carlo fussed. “You know where he wants to go!”
Another silent message crackled across the polished surface of that rear-view mirror. Ripper Dan understood that one also. Sure, he knew where the guy wanted to go.
“Wrong place,” he volunteered, ignoring his boss entirely. “Gus’s got about twenty boys guarding that joint. It’s like a fortress, electronic eyes and everything. You don’t want to go there.”
The ice-edged voice replied, “I’m not. Carlo’s going.”
Whatever the hell that meant.
Ripper Dan felt rebuffed in his attempt at casual friendliness. So maybe he had mis-read the guy, after all. Besides that, he could feel the seething eyes of Carlo Spinella boring into the back of his head. It was a rather discomforting feeling.
The wheelman turned his full attention to the chores of navigating the streets of early-morning Washington. Moments later they were crossing over into Virginia and speeding into the countryside.
Washington I.O.U. Page 6