The guy back there was screaming bloody murder, and Bolan was several paces removed when some feeble signal freed itself from anesthesia and rose up to rebuke him.
He whirled about and raised the AutoMag, sighting directly into the screaming, flame-wreathed mouth, and he sent unearned mercy into there, and the screaming ended in a bubbling gasp.
He said to the sighing night, “Chelsea, eh?”
He returned to his vehicle, then Mack Bolan—brother of Johnny, lover of Val—took his numbed mind on to the next stop along the hellfire trail.
12: Night of Nights
One effect, certainly, of Bolan’s numbness—or quite possibly the cause of it—was to shut out any mental reconstructions of the hideous last few moments in the lives of those pitiful turkeys he’d left behind in Rockport.
Later, those reconstructions would inevitably come, with grievous pain and with probably an even deeper shock to the mind of this man.
Bolan, after all, was intimately familiar with the ways of his enemies.
They would have done the boy first. They would make the woman lie right there beside him and listen to the agonized shrieks and they’d try to make her watch as they torched off pieces of him—a hand at a time, a foot at a time. And if the shock of that piecemeal slaying had not catapulted the boy into merciful death or unconsciousness, they would have gone right for his throat while he was still screaming.
The things they’d done to her, the hideous mutilations to the body itself, they would have done before they started cutting her up. If they’d been particularly sick, then they’d have done it slowly and carefully, trying to keep her awake and aware throughout the ordeal—they’d want her to know what they had done to her particularly private parts before they went on to the routine stuff.
Yes, Bolan knew his enemies. He knew what some of them were capable of. Indeed, what certain mentalities among them gloried in. Even some of those who were not particularly sick, in any clinical sense, would have taken a delight in doing to Bolan’s loved ones what they would prefer to be doing to the man himself—as though by substitution of victims they could get even with this hated enemy.
Bolan, of course, regarded himself as solely responsible for what had happened. It was his lousy war, and the hatreds which had been inspired by it, which were to blame for the present sorry state of things.
There were a lot of “beloved dead” on Bolan’s backtrack and these weighed heavily on the mind and the conscience of this man. Johnny and Val were merely the final, crushing blow.
Yes, the numbness of mind was serving a purpose … and Bolan perhaps understood this, even though he moved about like a man in some strange trance, even though he knew—at some subliminal level of consciousness—what it was he was being insulated from.
These things could be threshed out later—if there was to be a later. For now, the mood was sufficient unto the moment. It was a mood for destruction, and he knew where to find those who were deserving of his attention. He had, in fact, an intelligence notebook crammed with directions to the front.
Less than an hour after the grisley experience at Rockport, and while the police were still at the scene and questioning a contrite and humble Cambridge lawyer, the man in black turned up at the Chelsea residence of Arturo “Fat Artie” Mariotto, a lieutenant in the Sicilia organization.
It was a fairly modest two-story older home on the north side of Chelsea, undistinguished in a neighborhood of similar homes. Mariotto lived there with his wife of twelve years and two small children. His business activities, which included prostitution, organized extortion and shylocking were carried out from an office in the basement.
Bolan apparently knew all this.
On this night of nights, Mariotto had sent his wife and children to stay with relatives in Arlington, a northwest suburb of Boston, but this fact Bolan could not have known—and perhaps this accounts for the quietness of his initial probe into that hit-site.
He left his vehicle at the curb a half-block from the house and closed on foot, wearing the light overcoat and a snapbrim hat.
The neighborhood was quiet and dark, with light coming only from the Mariotta residence and even this was muted and inconspicuous.
Bolan turned up the walk and went directly to the front door. He rapped lightly, received an immediate response.
The door cracked open and a cautious voice inquired, “Yeah? Who’s that?”
“Santa Claus,” Bolan growled. “C’mon, let me in.”
The doorman flipped on the porch light and was trying to get a look at the caller.
In an impatient tone, Bolan demanded, “C’mon, meathead, don’t put me in no goddam spotlight, f’Christ’s sake!”
The door closed and the porch light went off.
Bolan heard the rattling of a chain-lock being released, then the door opened wide and the guy behind it greeted the Executioner with: “Can’t be too careful, y’know. Not tonight, of all nights.”
Bolan agreed with him as he pushed on inside.
The guy told him, “They’re downstairs.”
“He send Harriet and the kids away?” the caller inquired.
“Yeh, you know it,” the doorman replied, still trying to get a good look at Bolan’s face.
He did not.
Perhaps the last thing in all the world this soldier saw was the chilling black snout of the Beretta Belle’s silencer, perhaps the darting little flame that sighed out from it. The nine-millimeter slug thwacked in directly between his eyes, and the guy very quietly died on his feet.
Bolan helped the body down to a silent fall, then he quickly scouted the main level of the house.
He came upon another hardman sitting at the kitchen table, staring sadly at an empty beer bottle.
Again the Belle whispered of death. The rear man slumped quietly across the table.
Bolan went upstairs then, and quickly satisfied himself that no one was there.
He returned to the main level, found the door and stairway to the basement level, then he went down to join the party.
It was not much of a party.
The basement room had a floor area of about 200 square feet. The lights were too bright and the air too polluted. Four guys were sitting around a card table, none of whom bothered to look up when Bolan entered the room.
Fat Artie was seated in a swivel chair a few feet further along, gazing with heavy-lidded eyes at a small television screen.
Bolan announced his presence there with a marksman’s medal, which he tossed into the pot at the card table, and the Belle sighingly executed the foursome while they gawked at the new table stakes.
Mariotto swung the chair around and lunged to his feet in an amazingly fast scramble, considering his weight problem. He was trying to bring an oily Army .45 to bear on his most urgent problem when the whispering Beretta cut his hand away from it.
The fat man fell over against the wall and stayed there, panting and holding the shattered hand to his chest. Twice his eyes met that icy gaze of Bolan the Enraged, and twice the gaze faltered and fled to less upsetting views.
From Mariotta’s viewpoint, the big guy was just standing there, those legs spread, the shoulders leaning forward slightly, the black blaster poised there like a cobra ready for the strike, and he was saying nothing—absolutely nothing.
Presently Fat Artie gasped, “Well whattaya want?”
The guy said nothing.
Mariotta nervously tried again. “I got nothing personal with you, Bolan.”
Personal or not, his blood was leaking all over the floor. He licked his lips and said, “I guess I’ll just stand here and bleed to death, eh?”
Funny, it didn’t really hurt much. Just numb, sort of. Artie had always heard that. Big wounds never hurt that much. Get a hangnail, now, and you’d go outta your skull. But something like this, and …
The guy wasn’t talking. Course not. He hadn’t come to talk, that’s why. He’d come to listen to Artie Mariotto talk.
�
�Hey, uh, I don’t blame you a damn bit. I’d be pissed off myself. I mean, I’m a family man. I know what you’re being put through.
Still nothing, no reaction whatever. Just standing there, staring.
“Uh, I told Skip he shouldn’t screw around with a man’s family that way. But what the hell. Skip’s the boss, I’m not. Look, Bolan. Do I look like a guy would do a rotten thing like that, snatch some guy’s family? A fat man like me? Hey, I wouldn’t … I mean, I just ain’t built for that kind of stuff.”
Nothing.
“God, I guess I’m just going to stand here and bleed to death, huh? Look, he’s not going to hurt them. He promised me that. I still told him to deal me out, I didn’t want any part of a thing like that. Hell, Bolan, I got all the damn territory I need, I don’t want anymore. I told Skip that. He’s got these crazy ideas of taking over the whole town. Hell, he’s crazy. But, Bolan … he ain’t that crazy. He’s not going to really hurt your family.”
Quietly, surprisingly, Bolan asked, “Where is Sicilia now?”
“God I don’t know, I swear. I been trying to get him myself for two hours. On the phone, I mean.”
The guy was just staring again.
Mariotta tried to squeeze off the bleeding, and he tried Bolan again. “He’s got this crazy idea, Bolan, that’s all. He wanted you to come roaring to town. God, I swear. He thought you’d take out after this here Al 88 we got now. Know who I mean? Listen, I told him that was a crazy idea. Look, I just run a few girls and I got a few quiet little deals turning here’n there. I don’t go for this rough stuff. I’m a family man. I sure wouldn’t go for a snatch just to taunt a guy with.”
Softly, the big guy said one word. “Pawns.”
“Huh? Naw, I do a bit of uh, you know, personal loans. But I don’t do no pawn business.”
“How old are your kids?” the tall man asked in a strangely soft voice.
“Eight and ten,” Mariotta replied hopefully. “Uh, no eight and nine—Patty don’t have her birthday ’til next—”
Bolan said, “For them, then,” and he spun about and went out of there.
Fat Artie was perhaps the only Chelsea area Mafioso to face Mack Bolan on that night of nights and live to tell about it.
In the succeeding two hours, Bolan blitzed a path across that north Boston suburb which left, by the most reliable count, 52 dead men strewn in his wake.
He destroyed a pool hall and a cafe, burned two nightclubs to the ground, rousted the girls and torched five houses of prostitution, and knocked over a syndicate “bank” in the city’s eastern section.
At a few minutes before dawn, Chelsea’s choicest residential neighborhood was rocked by a series of shattering explosions which reduced to rubble and ashes a reputed quarter-million-dollar home owned by one Harold Sicilia.
And, by the dawn’s early light, a harassed and weary-eyed group of law-enforcement officials met at the scene of Bolan’s latest strike to hear an irate police inspector declare, “This guy has gone bananas. He’s ripping through this town like an enraged rogue elephant, and you’ve goddammit got to stop him! I don’t care how you go about it or what you have to do, but I want you to stop this crazy bastard!”
The tenor of the inspector’s demand was perhaps influenced by the unsettling fact that several of the sites which had been subjected to Bolan strikes had been under police stake-out at the time.
“I’m putting the whole city on overtime,” he fumed. “Nobody goes off duty, nobody gets sick, nothing else gets done until we stop this fruitcake son of a bitch!”
One of the listeners was Leo Turrin. He was wearing dark glasses and his coat collar was turned up to nearly meet the brim of his hat.
The fact that he was present, in this gathering of top police officials, indicated or rather emphasized the seriousness with which the law-enforcement community viewed the situation.
He turned to a companion, a dark-featured man on crutches, and woefully commented, “He’s not crazy. That’s the worst part. He thinks those poor turkeys they dropped at Rockport were Johnny and Val. The way to stop Bolan is to somehow get the word to him.”
The other man replied, “We’re broadcasting it on everything at our disposal. It would be much better if we could actually produce those two, alive and well.”
The speaker was Harold Brognola, an official of the U.S. Justice Department who had arrived on the Boston scene a few hours earlier. He added, “I doubt that anything else would deter him now. Trantham could be right, maybe he is over the edge. Bolan is not the cold death machine that everybody tries to make him. The guy has a heart, after all, and every man has his limit. Maybe he has gone temporarily insane. All the blood tests and bone samples and other physical evidence in the world may not be enough to convince him that those bodies could not have belonged to Johnny and Miss Querente. We’ve simply got to produce the people, Leo.”
“Yeah,” Turrin said sadly. “But what if we only turn up a couple more turkeys instead?”
“I wish,” Brognola replied testily, “to hell you had not said that, Leo.”
“I just wish to hell Mack would contact me,” Turrin muttered. “I’ve got ears out everywhere, I just wish he’d drop a word.”
“Yeah.”
“Listen, if Figarone was leveling with you, Hal, then Sicilia is the crazy one. He pulled the dumbest stunt I ever heard of. If Mack had any restraints before, it was mainly the fear that he’d overrun Johnny and Val, so he was moving very carefully. Now that he thinks they’re dead, hell … there’s nothing to restrain him. He won’t stop until he’s dead or there’s nothing left around here worth hitting.”
“That’s exactly what I’m afraid of,” Brognola replied, sighing.
The little undercover cop lit a cigar and puffed it to a high glow, then he glared at the charred embers of the Sicilia mansion and declared, “Screw Trantham! I’m not shedding any tears over what he’s doing to the mob here. That’s not crazy, that’s just Bolan in rampage. Hell, he hasn’t hurt anybody else yet, and I’m betting he won’t, even if he goes completely off his rocker.”
“That’s the whole problem, Leo,” Brognola murmured. “It’s something we can never be sure about.”
“Yeah, well, what I’m interested in is getting word to the poor guy. Sure he’s half outta his mind. Who wouldn’t be? I’d just like for him to know that what he saw up there at Rockport was not Johnny and Val.”
Indeed, Mack Bolan would have been a far happier and saner man if someone could have reached him with the truth about Rockport.
The night of nights had ended, yes, but a furious new day was just beginning … and a rampaging young warrior was still beating the hellfire trail in search of Harold Sicilia.
Even the truth would not have significantly altered the course of events at Boston, however. Regardless of who the hapless victims should turn out to be, some two innocents had served as stand-ins for a grisly game of horror, and Mack Bolan had seen the results. No, the game plan would not have been significantly altered by the truth.
And, yes, Bolan was in rampage.
Wherever he paused, death fell; wherever he lingered, hell descended.
And the most thoroughly shaken and rightfully frightened man in Greater Boston was at that moment counting the costs of his ambitions and wondering what he should do now with his “hot merchandise.”
He still had the hot pair, yes, alive and negotiable.
The paramount consideration now was simply this: How could he best use them to ensure his own continued good health?
The answer to that perplexing question was not within the intellectual reach of Harold the Skipper Sicilia … and his street-jungle instincts had gone bankrupt.
A showdown was brewing, and Sicilia must have known that he had run out of options.
But, as Bolan had guessed, this was a guy who would fight to the last gasp, to the final drop of blood.
For Johnny Bolan and Valentina Querente, the night of nights had not yet met its dawn.
>
13: Day Two
It was eight o’clock on the morning of Day Two in Boston. The major commuter highways into the city were under peak load in the early-morning traffic hassle. On the Northeast Expressway, a major route which carries the brunt of the daily population shift in the northern areas, a speeding vehicle with four grim-faced men aboard was making excellent progress in the lighter traffic of the outbound lanes. The vehicle was a month-old Continental, and the man behind the wheel was driving like a professional.
At a point just inside the suburban city of Revere, a community bordering Chelsea to the north, another vehicle moved smoothly alongside the Continental and casually paced it through two interchanges.
Witnesses later reported to investigating police that the second vehicle seemed to be “maneuvering” the Continental, over a course extending for several miles, and that the men inside that doomed vehicle appeared to be highly agitated throughout that period.
The driver of a parcel-service van admittedly “chased” the strangely behaving vehicles, “trying to keep them in sight,” and this witness reported that gunshots were exchanged between the speeding cars throughout that wild last mile.
Another witness, however, insisted that all of the shooting was coming from the Continental—that the lone man inside the “pursuit car” did not open fire until the very end.
Most of the following traffic had fallen back to give the dueling vehicles plenty of room; those ahead quickly made room and remained clear. Many regarded the bizarre incident as a police chase, but none within sight or sound of the contest could have been unaware that something unusual was taking place.
At a point where off-highway congestion became minimal, in more or less open country, the chase car suddenly veered over to “bump” the other vehicle from the side, and this is the point where most witnesses agree that the first firing erupted from the pursuing car.
“You could tell the difference,” a Navy CPO reported. “The earlier shots were all coming from ordinary guns, like maybe thirty-eights. But when the other guy opened up, hell it was like the booming of a shotgun. I was maybe a quarter-mile behind them at that time, but hell, I knew when that dude starting laying into them. And it was obvious why he waited so long. You see, he was trying to maneuver them into the clear. He didn’t want to hit them back there in all the congestion.”
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