Colorado Kill-Zone

by Don Pendleton

  He located some at a gas station which was closed for the night—a battered Ford pickup with “4-Sale $375” scrawled across its windshield. He kicked the tires all around, then hotwired the ignition and got a decent response from the engine.

  Satisfied that the ancient vehicle was good for at least a few more miles, Bolan made his “midnight purchase” via four hundred-dollar bills in an envelope taped to the door of the station. He stowed the trailbike in the bed of the pickup and once again headed south, returning to the warwagon only to drop off the bike and to pick up some gas for the new wheels.

  The descent to the high plains was uneventful, but at several points along the route to Denver he spotted “military” vehicles with alert occupants who scrutinized everything that moved past them. There were no challenges to the battered pickup truck, however, and this was a hopeful sign of the true situation. A legitimate force could have set up roadblocks. They would not necessarily do so, of course; many tactical considerations could discourage anything more than a soft watch. Still, the absence of roadblocks left the question open—and this was enough for Bolan, for the moment.

  Stapleton Field, in Denver, presented an entirely different perspective, however. The place was crawling with cops. Nothing as obvious as roadblocks and physical searches—but they were there, and in force, in a typical high-priority surveillance network. Strands of the web cast for Mack Bolan? Maybe, yeah. If so, then the situation was thickening—perhaps hopelessly so.

  Bolan donned a hunter’s cap and wire-rimmed clear-lens glasses and went on into the web. If the mob were really working a combination on Bolan then they were finessing it to the fullest potential, ringing in every conceivable force which could be bent to their designs. And if that seemed too far out, then the alternative was almost as bad.

  Traffic was light, and the parking areas around the main terminal practically devoid of movement. Bolan circled through, the battered vehicle drawing momentarily interested stares from the stake-outs. Again, however, no one challenged his presence there. He went on past the passenger terminal and parked in a waiting zone outside the air freight office, nodded to an airport security cop, and went inside.

  The guy followed him in and watched with mild interest as Bolan filled out a shipping order for the attaché case.

  “Make sure it gets on that three o’clock flight, eh.”

  “Five minutes more and you wouldn’t have made it,” the clerk replied.

  “Yeah, I was sweating that.” Bolan gazed deliberately at the security cop as he added, “What’s all the excitement outside? I kept expecting someone to grab me. I wouldn’t have made that flight, for sure. What’s going on?”

  The clerk chuckled and threw a quick glance at the airport cop. “Cops ‘n’ robbers,” he said mildly. “Ask him.”

  Bolan did. “What the hell’s going on?”

  The guy rested a hand on the butt of the .38 and made a long face as he replied. “Looking for a fugitive.” The tone of voice clearly implied that this was a routine matter, of little importance in the day-to-day intrigues in the life of an airport security officer.

  The express clerk chuckled at that, also. “Probably a kid stole a car,” he told Bolan as he accepted the money for the shipment.

  The cop heard that and stepped closer to defend his profession. “Kid, hell,” he said, lowering his voice to a confidential whisper. He was speaking to the clerk, primarily. “We got a tip that Mack Bolan is in the area. He’d better not try using this airport, I’ll tell you.”

  The clerk, a white-haired man of about sixty, sniffed at that and went through a door with Bolan’s shipment.

  Bolan gazed at the cop through his clear lenses and mildly asked him, “Who’s Mack Bolan?”

  “Hell, where you been buried?” the cop growled. “He’s the most-wanted fugitive in the country.”

  Bolan allowed his eyes to reveal how impressed he was with that tidbit. He muttered something appropriate and went back to his truck. The cop followed him outside, hand on gun, and watched him drive away.

  A “tip,” huh?

  So, again, that could mean everything or nothing.

  Bolan carefully withdrew from that thickening edge of the web and went in search of a public telephone. The intelligence package was on its way to “Harold Brown” in Washington. It would be a flight of about three hours. Meanwhile, he needed to contact Leo Turrin and apprise him of the Colorado situation.

  After that … what?

  A plan of action was forming behind the combat brow. Turrin and Brognola were good friends and comforting allies, sure, but their support of the Bolan effort was necessarily limited to quiet and more or less indirect activities—which meant, in the present situation, very little comfort to the man in the web.

  It would be another three hours before Brognola could even begin to analyze the intelligence.

  For a guy who was accustomed to living on the heartbeat, three hours could represent several lifetimes.

  Bolan could not wait for his friends from the other side of the continent. He had to act now—had to do something to clarify the situation and perhaps weaken that web of containment which thickened at every touch.

  So okay. First, contact Leo. Then, maybe, a strike at the heart of the web. That would be the only vulnerable point. But there lay the dilemma. Where was that heart?

  He would have to probe for it.

  But delicately. Yeah. Very, very delicately.

  6: PERSPECTIVES

  The Colorado dawn was anything but gray. It lit the eastern horizon of the plains with several shades of red and cast the westward mountains in profiles of stark black, with here and there a luminescently glowing snowcap luxuriating in the first oblique rays of the advancing sun. It was an awe-inspiring view, enough to remind a man of his mortality.

  But Mack Bolan did not need the reminder.

  Death was crowding his every heartbeat, and he knew it, as he abandoned the old truck at the edge of the southern suburban community of Cherry Hills and proceeded on foot toward the modest mansion of one Thomas Rizzi, one of the several low-profile mob figures of the area.

  Besides the usual nickel-and-dime operations such as prostitution, gambling and so forth, it was also known that Rizzi was the money man behind a number of “legit” businesses in Denver and surrounding towns. He owned a local finance company, several restaurants and a couple of go-go joints on the west side, held a half-interest in a shopping center, and had lately began blossoming with a land promotion scheme in the Mancos area of Southwestern Colorado. Bolan had checked the guy out thoroughly as one of his first items of business upon arriving in Denver, and had dismissed him from the search for the “supersoft” in Colorado. Now, however, it seemed appropriate to take a closer look at the Rizzi operation. He may not be part of the supersoft, went the reasoning, but if other elements of the mob were in fact operating on Rizzi’s turf, then the rules of the game prescribed the simple courtesy of at least informing the man of that other presence there.

  Bolan intended to have a talk with the guy. Which could be risky enough, in itself. Escalating that risk was the obvious fact that others were expecting him to try it. Bolan had spotted two police cruisers quietly prowling the neighborhood as he made his initial pass through in the pickup truck. Another car, unmarked, was on stakeout in a driveway several houses east of the Rizzi mansion. Bolan read those vibes as cops, also. The “tip” must have gone down hard if the local cops were investing this kind of manpower; the deployment he’d encountered thus far in the city could mean nothing short of a full scale dragnet—most probably an area-wide alert, since several police jurisdictions seemed to be participating. Nevertheless, Bolan meant to have that parley with Tom Rizzi.

  The only thing which Bolan seemed to have working in his favor was an angle of possible overkill from the other side. Too many cooks were stirring the stew. Aside from the standard police set, some third force was present in that neighborhood—the supersoft, maybe?—a presence more fe
lt than seen, something quiet and ominous overhanging that neighborhood like an atmosphere of doom. It was primarily a gut feeling, for Bolan, but he’d learned to trust his gut.

  So now he was afoot, lightly armed, attired in the same mountaineering garb he’d worn down from Peaceful Valley, making a frontal approach on the target. Given all the circumstances, this was the best way. He could spring away in any direction at the lightest provocation—or, operating openly, seize and manipulate the unfolding events into a pattern of his own making.

  It was an upper-crust residential district of fine homes and manicured grounds, here and there a walled estate, plenty of trees and shrubbery. The Rizzi place was not walled nor even fenced but stood in splendid isolation atop a grassy knoll, several hundred feet off the street—a colonial style structure with white columns and portico. A paved drive lined with young evergreens split the grounds at the center then formed an oval at the front of the house, passing beneath the portico and providing plenty of close parking. A three-car garage with overhead housing was set off to the side.

  On Bolan’s first pass of the morning, the place had been lit up from ground to roof. Four cars occupied the parking oval and another was parked in front of the garage. The police stakeout was across the street and three drives up, in excellent visual command of the situation. The officially marked cruisers prowled quietly on the perimeters, close enough for a quick response yet distant enough to not discourage a penetration of the area.

  That other factor, the disturbing one, centered about a couple of casual anomalies which only finely tuned instincts would detect. One of those was a home-delivery milk truck which seemed to be spending far too much time in the area. Milkmen had to be hustlers if they meant to make a living. They had large routes to cover, and they had to “drop and git” if they were to drop it all in the prescribed time. This guy had been fifteen minutes in one residential block of single-unit dwellings. So, chalk up one for the gut.

  Minutes before the milkman made the scene, a guy had spent too much time delivering newspapers from a panel truck.

  And, now, one block north, a telephone company truck was dawdling at a pole while the “repairman” walked inane circles around its base. Ma Bell efficiency … at dawn?

  Gut stuff, sure—but that was the stuff of life and death for a guy like Mack Bolan. Those people could, of course, be cops themselves. But it all seemed a bit much for a routine stake-out. If the cops were really dragging the area and trying to cover all possibilities, they’d never get the job done with a spread so thick.

  Bolan strode straight along the street at dead center, looking neither left nor right, past the parked milk truck and on another hundred yards or so to the police stake-out vehicle. He halted abruptly at that point, went to the curb and sat on it, his back to the vehicle, and tiredly massaged the calves of his legs.

  “You guys have the easy detail,” he said in a conversational tone, without looking around.

  “Don’t bet on it,” replied a bored voice from the vehicle. “What’s up?”

  “Daybreak, that’s what,” Bolan said, matching the other’s bored tone. “The guy isn’t going to show.”

  “Don’t bet on that, either. Do I know you?”

  “I hope not,” Bolan replied casually. “It’s not exactly my job to be known by guys like you. You been watching that milkman?”

  A brief pause, then the quiet reply: “Yeah, off and on.”

  “Been here quite a while.”

  “Well, you know what they say about milkmen.”

  “Not this one. Spends most of his time in the truck. Better check him out.”

  “He’s not, uh, one of your beards?”

  “He’s not one of mine,” Bolan assured the cop. “Also there’s a telephone lineman just around the corner up there.”

  “So?”

  “So did you ever get a phone fixed in the middle of the night?”

  The voice behind him sighed. A moment later, Bolan heard the subdued squawking of a radio conversation. He stood up and brushed off the seat of his pants.

  “Okay, we’re checking them out,” the stakeout voice advised him.

  Bolan nodded curtly and walked on. So far, so good. And it was no discredit to those cops that they’d played Bolan’s game. They were programmed for it, victims of the grim quiet games they play among themselves along the twisted jungle paths which had become the law enforcement game.

  It was, sure, hard to tell the players without a program. Luckily for Bolan, that truth applied equally to both sides. And it was not all luck. It was, indeed, 1 percent luck and 99 percent pluck. The hell of it was, you had to spend all the pluck before falling back upon that luck percentage—and then, sometimes, the luck simply was not there.

  None of this was present in Mack Bolan’s consciousness at that moment, however. He was a player, not a gambler—and the game was life itself. He did not look to luck but to excellence, and he cultivated that with a dedication to be found only in a life-and-deather.

  During the next few moments, this life-and-deather would need every erg of human excellence within his reach.

  And, sure, he knew it.

  It had been a long and nervous night and chief bodyguard Jack “Sailor” Santini was glad to see it ending. He turned off the outside lighting and stepped onto the front porch for a quick breath of fresh air and a quiet appraisal of the situation out there. The nippy air felt good and the world looked beautiful, too beautiful for the mess the human race was making of it. The ex-fisherman from San Francisco had become something of a nature lover since his arrival in the big sky country a few years back—an appreciation with its seeds, probably, imbedded behind the prison walls where Sailor Jack had left twelve years of his life. He and Tommy Rizzi had been boyhood pals, growing up together in the North Beach district of San Francisco. Rizzi went east at eighteen and made a connection with the New York mob; Santini went down to the sea on his uncle’s fishing boats, married the passionate Sylvia, and began an annual harvest of new mouths to be fed—far too many to be handled comfortably from the uncertain proceeds of a fisherman’s life.

  Santini began taking “side jobs” with the power brokers of underworld San Francisco—mostly muscle work and an occasional “body contract.” The powerfully built fisherman quickly established a reputation as a reliable “arm and leg man” and, later, as a “mortician” or “garbage man.” His mainline profession contributed nicely to that latter sideline; it was estimated, by the prosecuting attorney who finally nailed him, that Santini had disposed of more than twenty corpses of murder victims during his five years with the fishing boats. It had also been suspected that the sailor himself was directly involved in several of those murders. He’d finally gone down on a conspiracy rap which accounted for his first five years in San Quentin and during which time Sylvia divorced him and took off somewhere with the kids. Santini had never seen any of them again. He did, though, see San Quentin a couple more times over the years.

  It was Tom Rizzi who pulled him out of that circle of defeat, bringing him to Denver and at least an air of respectability. Rizzi had struck it big, fronting in the mountain state for an eastern combination of interests and gradually building his own little base of power.

  Rizzi had never been a button man. He’d never broken arms or buried bodies and he’d never been convicted of anything beyond a couple of simple misdemeanors. He was a charm guy, a brain specialist—a “natural,” as they used to call that type in San Francisco.

  Sailor Jack hated Tom Rizzi’s guts.

  Which was not too surprising. The Sailor hated everybody. A white-collar con at Q had once quoted some philosopher as having said that mankind was God’s greatest mistake—and that summed up Sailor Jack Santini’s philosophy in a nutshell.

  He did not like anybody, himself least of all.

  But, yeah, that world out there was beautiful. It overshadowed the mistake that was mankind, played it down, put the garbage in its place.

  So philsophize
d the arm and leg man from San Francisco on that chilly morning in Denver’s south side as he faced the new day. He walked to the edge of the porch and lit a cigarette, then called out, “Jim! Eddie!”

  A skinny kid appeared from the shadows of the portico, bundled in an overcoat and moving stiffly. “Yeah, Jack.”

  “Where’s Eddie?”

  The second one appeared at the south corner and called up, “Right here. What is it?”

  “Another day,” Santini growled. “You boys tuck it in and go on home. Thanks for standing by.”

  “Next time, make it a summer night,” said the kid at the portico.

  “Mr. Rizzi appreciates the help, you know that. You’ll see it on your next paycheck. Go on, get outta here, go get laid or something.”

  The bodyguard watched as the muscle contractors gathered their crews into the vehicles at the curb and quietly departed. It was a hell of an expense for nothing, Santini was thinking. It would be much cheaper to keep a full crew standing, on standard salary arrangements. But Mr. Rizzi the Natural would not go for that. Nothing that obvious. It would hurt the civic-minded image of a legitimate businessman to have a bunch of gunsels standing around in the full light of day. Someone might even get the idea that the natural Mr. Rizzi associated with criminal types, God forbid.

  Sailor Jack puffed on his cigarette and watched the vehicles to the street, ruminating darkly on the hypocrisy and natural perversity of the world of men, then he took a last appreciative look at the dawn rays reflecting from the mountain peaks and turned back toward the door.

  The gun crews hit the street and turned west. A commotion in the opposite direction froze the Sailor and turned him back around. A hoarse voice had yelled some urgent command; now a guy dressed in a white outfit was sprinting along the street, up there, with a sheriff’s deputy hot on his tail. A car roared out of a driveway several hundred feet eastward and gunfire erupted farther east.

  Santini muttered, “Oh shit!” and quickly let himself into the house.