"O'Rourke," the man replied.
The bartender sauntered over and took their order.
O'Rourke swung around on his stool. "Just what the hell you got in mind, ol' buddy?" he asked, a hint of menace in his voice.
"I was a friend of John Claw," Bolan said simply.
All that remained of the grin that had come with O'Rourke's laugh now abruptly disappeared. "I didn't know the guy."
"You know what happened to him."
O'Rourke shook his head. "I know nothin'."
Bolan stared silently for a moment at the burly Irishman. "Somebody's got to get some guts, sometime, sooner or later."
"Easy for you to say."
The bartender put a mug of beer in front of Bolan, who picked it up and took a swallow.
"All I want is information," Bolan told him. "Nobody knows me. Nobody saw us talking today."
O'Rourke drained his mug and slammed it on the bar. "John Claw talked too much. That's all he did — talk. That's not allowed. The way it is, you work when you're told, where you're told, pay your dues and keep your mouth shut. That's the way it is."
"Dues pretty high?"
O'Rourke shook his head. "Not bad. The usual thing, union dues. When I say dues, I mean the extra. Like ten percent. Ten percent of what I made today."
"Who gets it?"
"A guy named Brannigan comes around for it. If he doesn't get it — I mean, if somebody gives him an argument — Whitey comes for it."
"When does he come around for it, and where?"
"He'll be at the job tomorrow. We get paid Friday mornings, and I'll tell you, the company puts the cash in the pay envelopes so you can hand over your ten percent to Brannigan. That way, he don't have to change money. Like, this week I'll make maybe seven hundred bucks, take-home. There'll be a fifty and a twenty in there so I can pull 'em out and hand 'em over."
"What's this Brannigan look like?"
"Looks like an old union man. Know what I mean? An old fella who worked his years and then went to work for the union. Teddy Brannigan. Got white hair, red face, smokes cigars. He wears suits, like a businessman. He carries a little notebook, and he writes down what each guy hands over and drops the guys' dough into this kind of satchel, black leather. I bet he delivers every nickel he takes in. I bet he doesn't skim a cent for himself. But he knows every guy on the job and knows how much he has coming."
"Grotti?"
"Grotti worked for Whitey, and Whitey works for Barbosa. Brannigan works for the local. It doesn't make a hell of a lot of difference, to tell you the truth, but that's the way it is. Except that Brannigan's a little gentleman, like you might say, and acts like he hates to take the money. Grotti… My guess is that the Barbosas wouldn't have trusted him to handle money."
"What happens if you don't pay?" Bolan asked.
O'Rourke shrugged and shook his head grimly. "You don't work. Oh, sometimes you can tell 'em you got a special problem and need to keep the dough. They say okay, but they double up the next week. But you don't work."
"What happens if you complain?"
O'Rourke fixed an angry stare on Bolan, as if to suggest he was asking stupid questions. "You get worked over," he said. "But, hey, you don't complain, 'cause it's not as bad as it sounds. We cheat on the time cards. The clock is fixed. I work seven and a half hours, get paid for eight. I'm handing over six percent, really, and the company four."
"But John Claw complained."
"Some guys are nutty on some subjects. He was. He didn't just complain — he was trying to organize resistance. I mean, you know, there's more to it all than just knockin' down on hours and handing over a percentage. Work isn't done right. That sort of thing. We're putting up buildings with weaknesses in them. I don't think I even want to hear about it when one of them… Well, you know."
Bolan nodded. "I know. I've heard about it."
O'Rourke drew a deep breath and let it out in a loud sigh. "I mean, I've got some kind of pride in doin' my job right and seeing a strong building go up. Most guys feel that way — sort of, anyway. It makes me sick to think of…" He shook his head. "I've talked enough to get myself knocked over."
Bolan put a hand on O'Rourke's arm. "I never saw you. You never saw me." He pulled out a ten-dollar bill. "Beer's on me."
O'Rourke shoved the bill back at him. "No way. I figure you might be good for something. And if so, good luck. You'll sure as hell need it."
Chapter Eleven
Teddy Brannigan wasn't what O'Rourke thought. He wasn't an old union man, retired from some honest trade; he was an old IRA man, veteran of a British prison, veteran of a New York prison, where he'd served time for robbery in the 1960s. It had been in the tough Attica State Correctional Facility that he'd met the members of the Barbosa Family who would arrange for him to become a Barbosa collector.
Brannigan's soft, Irish-accented voice was an asset to him. It was what made men like O'Rourke mistake him for an honest man. But he wasn't an honest man, and he hadn't always left enforcement entirely to men like Grotti and Albanese. What was more, he didn't turn over every nickel he collected. He skimmed, like anybody else. Also, he carried a stubby.38 Colt revolver in a holster on his left hip, covered by the jacket of the blue or gray suit he always wore on his rounds.
It was raining Friday morning. Brannigan wore a long, black raincoat and carried a black folding umbrella. He never went up in a construction job, standing instead on the street, just at the gate. The men on the job collected their Friday-morning pay envelopes and went over to hand him his money.
He liked a job like this, where wages were paid in cash, better than jobs where men were paid with checks. Most of them couldn't hand over the money until they'd cashed their checks, so he had to come back the next day, or on Monday after a Friday pay. By then some of them had spent the money and would plead poverty. It was neat here. They got their pay in cash, handed over their dues and that was that.
Pat O'Rourke wandered over, rain streaming off his hard hat and his yellow slicker. He'd collected seven hundred and twenty, net, what with the union-arranged fudging of his time cards, and he handed over seventy-two. He said nothing. He was one of the sullen ones, who paid but resented it. Teddy Brannigan had never reported O'Rourke's attitude. He never said anything out of line, so he could make sour faces if he wanted to.
* * *
Bolan watched the little drama being played out between Brannigan and the construction workers. Only about one in four of the men went to Brannigan — only the members of the welders' local or one other union on the job. Some of them seemed to make little jokes with Brannigan, or to smile at whatever he said. Most were poker-faced, doing what they had to do but not liking it.
Something else. Teddy Brannigan would walk away with three or four thousand dollars in his satchel. Then, probably, he'd pick up as much at two or three other sites. He walked through the streets with that much money in a little black-leather case, and no one touched him. He was either shadowed by an enforcer or guys smart enough to know who he was were afraid to go near him.
The collector waved casually at whoever was looking, then turned north on Seventh Avenue. At Fifty-sixth Street he turned east. The rain slackened a little, and he lowered his umbrella. He walked at a brisk pace for a man in his late sixties. He crossed Sixth Avenue, then Fifth, and turned north again on Madison Avenue.
Bolan kept well back. These streets were too crowded for him to make a move. He followed him to Sixty-fourth Street, where Brannigan again turned east and crossed Park Avenue.
Here was a neighborhood of brownstones with hardly anyone out on the rainy sidewalks. Bolan moved up.
"Brannigan!"
The collector spun around, wary and angry. What he saw — he thought — was a construction worker. Only this one was letting him see a pistol.
"Don't be a fool, man," he cautioned in a controlled voice.
Bolan motioned for Brannigan to open the worn black satchel. The man shook his head, but he opened it. "You'll
never get away with it," he muttered.
The Executioner looked down into the satchel. "All I see is money," he said. "I want the notebook, too."
For a moment Brannigan hesitated, but he frowned at the muzzle of the Beretta and undoubtedly noticed the silencer, which told him he was facing a man who knew what he was doing and probably wouldn't hesitate to drop him where he stood. He reached inside his raincoat and suit jacket and withdrew the worn notebook in which he kept track of who was supposed to pay what and who owed.
Bolan nodded, and Brannigan dropped the notebook into the satchel.
"I don't see what good that'll do you."
"More good than the money. Now, Mr. Brannigan, you go home, withdraw whatever you've got stashed, which I'm sure is plenty, and retire. Maybe to Florida. Give the word to the Barbosas that they're out of this business. Tell Whitey Albanese if he shows up on a construction site again he's a corpse."
"You're starting a war?" Brannigan asked incredulously.
Bolan shrugged. "Whatever the don wants. Just tell him he's out of this business."
Brannigan shook his head. "Man, you've just committed suicide."
"Okay, Brannigan, I want you to walk. Just keep going the way you were going, and don't turn around. If you make a sudden move of any kind, I'll have to believe you're going for your gun."
The collector kept shaking his head as he walked away.
* * *
Salina Beaudreau had kept watch on the Summit Hotel since Sunday morning. Gina Claw and her boyfriend had returned. Bolan hadn't.
Her instructions had been to hit the woman, but she hadn't done it. Rossi would pay her fifty thousand for that hit, but she could very well lose the million in the process. She'd had one good look at Bolan and hadn't seen him since. She had no idea where to look for him. If he didn't come back to the Summit Hotel to see Gina Claw, where would she look? She had no idea — nor had Rossi.
There was no way that Salina was going to hit Gina Claw and lose her only lead to Bolan. Let Gina Claw thank her lucky stars for that, because there had been plenty of opportunity.
The hitter had changed her plan. Getting close to Mack Bolan could be enormously risky. She had driven out to Wyckoff, New Jersey, where she owned a condominium that housed her arsenal. There she selected a weapon for the Bolan contract — a Savage rifle, a modified version of what had once been called a varmint rifle: barrel machined for a.22-caliber bullet, chamber expanded for a.30-caliber, center-fire cartridge case. The steel-jacket bullet tapered to a point, but the ones made specially for Salina Beaudreau were hollowed out just short of the tip and loaded with a small explosive charge. The heavy load packed in the.30-caliber cartridge drove the small bullet at an exceptionally high velocity, which gave the rifle exceptional accuracy. When it struck a target, the bullet exploded. The explosion was not much more than the bang of a big firecracker — what they called an M-80 — but when it went off inside a human body, the result was deadly.
The gunsmith who had modified this rifle for Salina had shortened the barrel by an inch and a half. He'd cut the barrel from the breech and threaded the two pieces, so the barrel screwed into the breech, or could be unscrewed, allowing the rifle to be packed into an ordinary attaché case. The gunsmith had also replaced the wooden stock with a steel-loop stock, also detachable. Finally he had mounted a high-power scope on the breech.
She had paid ten thousand dollars for the rifle and two thousand for a hundred rounds of custom-loaded ammunition. It had earned her more than two hundred fifty thousand, and she had eighty rounds of ammunition left.
She had put together a variety of cases in which to carry the disassembled rifle — an attaché obviously enough, but also a duffel bag with a hard plastic cylinder inside, a bedroll she could carry affixed to a backpack and an artist's portfolio case.
For her vigil across the street from the Summit Hotel, she had chosen the briefcase. She had chosen, too, a set of conservative business suits, conservative but for the short skirts she always wore. On Lexington Avenue, in the vicinity of the Summit, she prowled every day, sometimes on the street, sometimes in the hotel itself, sitting in the lobby, sitting in the coffee shop, sometimes in neighboring stores and restaurants — but never far from the entrance to the Summit Hotel.
Her hope was to see Bolan enter the building. While he was inside, she would establish herself in one of the several vantage points she had identified across the street or up and down Lexington Avenue. When he came out, she would have a shot at him. Then she would empty the Colt into the air and make her escape while everyone on the street cowered from the heavy explosions from the revolver.
That was the advantage of revolvers — they made a hell of a lot of noise.
Wednesday to Friday. No Bolan.
Then, on Friday morning Gina Claw left the hotel with her boyfriend and another woman — and their luggage. As Salina watched from a seat in a coffee shop across the street, the three loaded themselves and their luggage into a cab.
Salina raced out onto Lexington, ducked across the street in the face of honking traffic and hailed a cab.
"Where to, honey?"
She subdued her impulse to use an obscene word in reply to his use of the word "honey," and heaved a sigh instead. "Like to make twenty bucks extra?" she asked. "Keep up with that cab that just pulled out."
"You kidding?"
"I'm not kidding," she replied, reaching into her purse and pulling out a twenty-dollar bill. She dropped it on the seat beside him. "You gotta give it back if you lose the son of a bitch."
"Plus meter."
"Plus meter, plus tip, asshole! Go!"
As they drove to Kennedy Airport, which turned out to be the destination, the cabdriver told her he was studying law at Brooklyn College.
"Don't look back here," she ordered as they approached the airport.
"Hey!"
She put the muzzle of the PPK to the back of his neck. "Fifty bucks plus meter plus tip," she said. "Maybe a hundred. Just drive and cut the conversation."
"Lady…"
"I'm no lady. I'm a killer and I got a contract on somebody. You happened to be available. Just drive and keep your mouth shut, and let's see what happens. The less you know, the less you can tell the cops and the better chance you got to make it out of this situation alive. I want you to pull up beside that cab we've been following."
She rolled down the window. The rifle would be useless here, so she had the Colt Python in her right hand, the Walther PPK in her left, held toward the back of the driver's head.
"Hey, lady, for God's sake!"
"Just take it easy, fella," she soothed. "Do what I tell you, and everything will be okay. For you. Now slow down. I want to come up beside them while they're getting their bags out of the back of the car. When I'm finished, we're going to take off out of here. That's what's going to keep you alive and well and going on to law school." She let him feel the muzzle of the Walther on the back of his neck.
The driver eased the cab up alongside the other vehicle. Gina Claw and her boyfriend stood at the back of the cab as the driver lifted their bags from the trunk. The second woman, the one Salina had never seen before, had her wallet out of her purse and was counting out money.
Salina leveled the big revolver at Gina Claw's back.
The other woman screamed. She was facing Salina and had spotted her and her pistol. She shrieked again, pointing at the cab.
The boyfriend threw himself on top of Gina Claw and wrestled her to the curb.
Furious, hindered, Salina shifted the muzzle of the Colt and fired at the screaming woman. The.357 hollowpoint threw her backward off her feet, her blood and flesh spraying a baggage porter behind her.
The cabdriver floored the accelerator. The tires spun on the pavement, but the vehicle shot forward, rolling and lurching, past the other cab, past a cop who stood stupefied, momentarily paralyzed with shock and horror.
"You idiot!" Salina yelled at her driver. "You, you… Oh, Christ!"
"You said to go when you'd done it," the driver croaked.
"I hadn't finished the job, you stupid son of a bitch!"
"How was I s'posed to know?"
"Well, move! Get us out of here!"
She turned to look back and saw chaos. The cop had now drawn his gun, but that seemed to be all he had accomplished. People were racing about, half of them toward the scene, half of them away from it, in panic. From somewhere a siren had begun to wail, and she could see a flashing emergency light.
"Hey, man, drive ordinary," she said to the cabbie. "Don't attract attention. There's a thousand cabs at the airport, and they don't know which one they're looking for. So stop for that Stop sign."
The driver threaded the cab through the complicated heavy traffic of the big airport, from the Northwest terminal, past the Pan Am terminal and along the front of the International Arrivals Building.
"Where'm I taking you?" the driver asked solemnly.
"Let me off at TWA," she said. "TWA domestic."
"Leavin' town?"
"Wouldn't you?"
She tossed two fifty-dollar bills into the front seat.
* * *
In a women's rest room inside the TWA terminal, Salina closed herself inside a toilet stall, where she pulled off the charcoal-gray suit. Underneath it she was wearing a pair of faded blue-denim shorts — cutoff jeans — and a loose white halter. Tightly folded inside the briefcase with her weapons was a blue nylon duffel bag, twenty-four inches long and about twelve inches in diameter, with a long zipper across the top. The disassembled rifle fit nicely into this bag, as did the Colt and Walther. She wrapped them in the suit. She also had a floppy, oversized faded blue-denim cap, which she pushed down on her head.
As soon as the rest room was empty, Salina left the toilet stall, pulled twenty or thirty paper towels out of the holder and stuffed them in the duffel bag to make it soft and bulgy, leaving no hint of what might be inside. Last she pulled the silenced Walther out of the rolled clothes and let it ride under just one layer of paper towels, ready if she needed it.
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