Bolan sprung the AutoMag and aimed it at the Doberman's head. "Call him off," he warned the woman.
It had all occurred so quickly that the woman's hand was still poised in the air where she had released the dog. Those emerald eyes did not so much as flicker as she issued the soft command. "Thunder, break."
The monster-dog seemed grateful to be relieved of his responsibilities. He crawled toward the woman, whining and still fighting for breath,
Bolan sheathed the AutoMag and knelt beside the dog to rub his throat and massage the quivering ribcage.
Something was coming alive in Marsha Thornton's dead eyes as she watched the tall man with the impassive face stroke the suffering animal. She murmured, "I wouldn't believe that if I hadn't seen it. I was assured that Thunder would protect me from a grizzly bear."
Bolan said, "He would."
His jacket was ripped and he was bleeding slightly from a fang-graze on his hand.
The woman rolled onto her knees and stood up. "Come on up to the house," she suggested. "I'll put something on that cut."
The Doberman was licking the fingers which had defeated him, and Bolan was thinking what a shame it was to misuse a dog this way. Man's oldest friend in the animal world, converted to a living robot, programmed to kill upon command.
The dog and Mack Bolan had a great deal in common — Bolan realized that. He'd pondered the question after a run-in with a couple of German Shepherds during the New York battle. And he'd decided then that there was a difference — subtle but important — between himself and the killer dog.
The dogs killed because they were conditioned to accept a command to do so. In a dog's world it was a sort of a morality to be obedient to his master's desires. Actually, Bolan knew, guard-dogs killed because they had to kill. There was no mental or moral alternative.
Bolan did not have to kill.
He killed because he could— and because, like the dogs, there was no mental or moral alternative.
So, yeah, he had a lot in common with the Doberman — but with a difference. A very important difference.
He pushed the thing from his mind and followed Marsha Thornton to her beach house, the Doberman huffing along at his side.
It seemed that he had made a conquest.
If all went well, he would very soon make another.
While Bolan cultivated the distaff side of the House of Thornton, Schwarz and Blancanales invaded an impressively modern skyscraper in downtown San Diego for a call upon the master himself.
The solid oak door was marked GOLDEN WEST DIVERSITIES, INC. and the suite of offices on the other side of it were strictly gilt-edged, redolent with the sweet smell of success.
Among the diversified interests of Maxwell Thornton was petroleum, real estate, electronics, agriculture, and transportation. He had also been very active in politics, as a behind-the-scenes power in local, state, and national campaigns.
Blancanales had donned a pale blue nylon suit with coordinated accessories — the collar of the shirt with exaggerated dimensions, the tie immaculately knotted, powder-blue hat low over the eyes — altogether a splendiferous image, and altogether the perfect picture of a Mafioso in full dress.
Schwarz wore old-fashioned pleated slacks, sport shirt with loose tie, checkered sports coat, no hat. He looked like a cross between a Tijuana pimp and an Agua Caliente racetrack tout.
Both images had been meticulously contrived.
The receptionist stared at them for a moment, then announced, "I'm sorry, Mr. Thornton is in conference."
"You'd better get him outta there, honey," Blancanales growled in his best Brooklynese.
Schwarz had spun the woman's appointments book around and was studying it.
Blancanales nudged the flustered receptionist again with, "Hop, now!— go tell the man we're here."
"I-I'll see if he's back in his office," the girl replied, thoroughly intimidated now. She depressed a button on her desk intercom and said, "Mr. Thornton — two gentlemen to see you. It appears urgent. They — I think you should."
A tired voice sighed back, "Do the gentlemen have names, Janie?"
Schwarz brushed the receptionist's hand aside and held the intercom button himself as he replied, "Yeh, but you wouldn't want 'em shouted around this joint, Thornton."
"Come on in," was the quick response. The girl showed them the way. Blancanales patted her shoulder as he brushed past her and into the private office of Maxwell Thornton.
The entire outside wall was glass, and there was a fair-sized balcony beyond that with potted trees and other growing things. The city was spread out there for inspection in a most impressive view.
The man sat at a kidney-shaped desk with probably fifty to sixty square feet of surface on top which supported nothing except a telephone, an intercom box, and an open fifth of Haig & Haig. The guy was drinking the Scotch from a water glass, undiluted.
He didn't look the part of millionaire, civic light, city father. He looked like a guy who'd just stepped down from a hot bulldozer to hurry into a hand-tailored suit which still somehow didn't quite fit. A tall man, lanky, sort of gangly and rawboned, well past fifty.
The voice fit the rest of him as he waved his visitors to chairs and told them, "Well, I guess the shit has hit the fan, hasn't it?"
Schwarz picked up the bottle of Scotch and sat down. Blancanales remained standing. He said, "Bolan's in town."
Thornton sighed, sipped at his drink, then said, "I know it."
"Gettin' loaded ain't gonna help."
"Get fucked," Thornton growled. "Bennie send you? What's he want me to do, lead a vigilante army?"
"Bennie don't send us," Schwarz informed him.
The gray steel eyes came up in a quick flash. "New York? You're from New York?"
Blancanales jerked his head in a nod and ambled to the window.
"Who are you?"
Schwarz replied. "The boss is Harry DiCavoli. I'm Jack Santo. You're in trouble, Thornton."
The millionaire grunted and said, "I was born in trouble. I suppose you heard about Howlie Winters."
"We heard," Blancanales spoke up, from the window. "We wanta talk to you about that, Thornton."
"You people squeezed him too damn hard!" the man declared angrily. "I told you he wouldn't hold still for that."
"You told me nothing," Blancanales/DiCavoli replied.
"I told Bennie, and I urged him to relay the advice to New York. Look ... Winters was a square. A guy like that will dabble in the shit pile, but he won't take a bath in it. I told you this whole thing was too much for him to swill."
"I guess you better speak for yourself, man," Blancanales said.
"What do you mean? Look...." The guy was getting hotter by the minute. He pushed back his chair and lifted himself to his full height, and it was an impressive one. He was waving his arms as he spoke. "I had to swim in shit to get where I am. I'll never deny that, except in a court of law. I've had the course, buddy. I've been there and back, several times. You goddam ghetto street-corner lawyers didn't invent the game, and you don't play it very well. The only edge you've got is that you play it rougher than most. Well, get fucked, will you please? I've had it up to the throat with you, all of you."
Blancanales muttered, "You want me to go back East and tell 'em that?"
The guy had moved away from the desk. He was standing spread-legged, coat gaping open, hands thrust into hip pockets, glowering at the man at the window. His eyes dropped, slowly, and his voice was dying away as he replied, "No ... I guess I don't want you to do that."
"That's just what we come to find out."
"I can take the heat, if that's what's worrying you."
Schwarz had risen from his chair and edged his backside onto the desk. With Thornton engrossed in the confrontation with eastern authority, he was quietly and swiftly taking the telephone apart.
"That ain't all," Blancanales was saying. "We been waiting long enough for this deal. Now with Winters out of the picture, we ha
ve to wonder...."
"Don't worry, you'll get your stuff. With or without Winters. But listen — what's the name — DiCavoli? — listen, DiCavoli, this is no dime-store radio, you know. We're into defense security violation when we start messing around with this kind of gear."
Schwarz's ears perked up at that. His work at the telephone was finished. He moved toward the other men and joined the conversation. "That's right, Harry. It's not dime-store stuff."
Blancanales quickly picked up the play. "A radio's a radio," he sniffed. "What's such a big deal?"
Thornton coldly returned Schwarz's gaze as he replied to the other "Mafioso." "An L-band feeder horn is a hell of a big deal when you start stealing them from the military."
"Well we gotta know," Blancanales pushed on. "Are you going to deliver or aren't you?"
"Of course I'm going to deliver! But, my God, you don't just muscle your way into — "
"It's heavy stuff, Harry," Schwarz helpfully butted in. He was probing, now — feeling his way. At the same time, he was establishing a sympathetic relationship with the harried millionaire who'd lingered too long near the tar pit. "You can't pick up a feeder horn at the supermarket, y'know. This stuff is heavy, I mean heavy. What is it, Max — about six hundred megs?"
Thornton inclined his head in a deliberate nod. He was giving Schwarz a respectful examination now, wondering, pondering the enigma of a Tijuana pimp who spoke with an understanding of sophisticated communications gear.
Schwarz was "explaining" to Blancanales/DiCavoli. "Y'see, these data links, you pencil-beam into a dish antenna up in the L-band, around six hundred megacycles. It's like a beam of light, only you don't see it. You don't get no side lobes off the pulse envelopes, so there ain't much danger of the FCC or somebody latching onto you. Right, Max?"
Thornton again nodded his head. "It's foolproof," he murmured.
"And the stuff is hard to come by," Schwarz went on explaining. "You don't just walk up and ask a government contractor to make you one. You'd have the FCC all over your ass the second you tried to put it on the air — and in no time you'd have feds swarming all over your operation. What Max is saying is simply this: we gotta be patient while he carves one out of a contract. Right, Max?"
Thornton quietly replied, "Yes. Just like the last one."
"I guess I wasn't in on that one," Blancanales declared innocently.
"Just who are you people?" Thornton asked, his voice barely audible.
"We came with the man," Blancanales replied, dropping the street accent.
"What man?" Thornton asked wearily.
"Bolan," Schwarz said, soberly studying their victim.
The guy walked jerkily back to his desk and sat down. He poured several fingers of Haig & Haig into his glass and belted it, then wiped his lips with the back of his hand.
"I've been there and back," he declared quietly.
"But I sure talked myself into this one, didn't I?"
"Keep trying," Blancanales suggested. "Maybe you'll talk your way out of something."
"You're in deep shit, Max," Schwarz said gently.
The guy was trapped, and he knew it. He studied his empty glass for a moment, then raised resigned eyes to Gadgets Schwarz. "I was born in shit," he murmured.
"So now you got a chance to wipe yourself," Schwarz told him. "How about it?"
"Full redemption, huh?"
"We can't promise that."
"All right," the self-made millionaire muttered. "Pass the toilet paper."
14
Tar
Bolan's interrogation of Marsha Thornton was revealing very little in the nature of direct intelligence, but she was filling in quite a bit of background insight into the San Diego situation.
"Max is quite a bit older than I am, you know," she told Bolan in that curious turned-off voice. "I wouldn't mind that. I mean, I guess I love him. He's a perfect husband ... in every way but one. Gives me everything I want. Except himself. He… can't. So I have to go find that somewhere else."
"And Max just turns his head, eh."
"Yes. He understands. He just asks that I be … discreet. I guess I've caused him a lot of embarrassment, just the same."
"It figures," Bolan told her.
"Yes. Well, you'd have to know my husband to understand how gross all this could be for him. I mean, a man like him. Well... I have no apologies to make to anyone, except to Max I guess, and he won't let me. He simply understands. I've had a hunger ever since my boobs started budding, Mr. Bolan. I can't turn it off. Don't get the wrong idea. I'm no nympho. But when I'm hungry, I'm hungry."
Bolan murmured, "I can understand that." He was getting a bit of an itch, himself.
"You probably think I'm a nympho," she said, deadpanning a sidewise gaze in his direction. He got very few direct looks from this one. "It's okay, you may as well think it. Everybody else does. I've been in analysis. My analyst says I am definitely not a nympho."
Bolan said, "Okay."
"I hated those hoods. They just kept hanging around Max. Oh, they never came through the front door ... don't worry. But they were always around, always popping up, always underfoot. We'd go out to dinner, and there they'd be. We'd go to a club, and there they'd be." She sighed, a long painful effort. "I guess I figured they may as well be in the bedroom, too. Instant manpower."
Bolan told her, "You don't have to get into this if you'd rather not. I had the Winters telephone tapped. I heard your conversation with Lisa this morning."
That revelation drew not so much as a blink of the eyes. "Lisa's a good kid. We're about the same age, you know. Body age, not soul age. God, my soul must be a million years old."
Bolan could almost believe it.
"I guess, really, I was trying to punish Max by balling his underworld pals. I guess I was getting back at him."
"Humiliating him," Bolan suggested.
"That's what my analyst says. He calls it soiling myself in my husband's own dirt pile. Oh ... it's humiliated him, all right. But as soon as I realized it, I broke it off. You know, I cut out." The deadened eyes traveled to the dog. "That's when I got Thunder. Those hoods wouldn't take no as an answer, not from me. They'd just walk in and grab me by the ass, throw me a quick one, and walk out laughing. Boy. Talk about humiliation. Well, that was six months ago. Lisa was taking lessons at this kennels out on Cabrillo Highway, learning to handle the dogs. I decided to take the training with her, and I ended up with old Thunder here."
She surprised Bolan with a girlish giggle. "Today was the first time I ever ordered him to attack and wow, did you see him getting with it!"
He growled, "Yeah, I saw it."
"I'm really glad he didn't hurt you. You're a nice man, so far I guess. But I had to have Thunder, see. I found out those hoods were passing me around between them, giggling and snickering about me, and I'm sure it all got back to Max. His nympho wife."
The girl shivered and suddenly stood up. She was still clad only in the micro-bikini, bottom only, nothing else. She crossed her arms over the bare chest and walked out onto the sun deck. Thunder trotted along after her.
Bolan drifted out there, also. He stood behind her and gazed over her head at the impossibly blue Pacific with its foaming leading edges rolling onto the beach just below them.
It all seemed, suddenly, totally unreal.
These human moments stole up on a guy, surprising him in the midst of combat, reminding him of his mortality, his humanness.
At this moment, Mack Bolan felt entirely human.
He'd come to this town to blitz it, to wade through blood if necessary, to shake the rats out of their nests. He had not come here for a human experience.
But here he was in the presence of a lovely young woman, sharing her nakedness of body and soul.
He told her, very gently, "Look, Marsha ... all the perfect people are in heaven."
She tilted the shiny red head over her shoulder and smiled at him. Life was forming somewhere back there behind those glazed eyes.
Perhaps, he thought, she was having a human experience also. She asked him, the smile turning sober, "Do you have to kill my husband?"
He replied honestly. "At this point, I don't know. What can you tell me to help my decision?"
She shrugged, delicately. "I just wish you wouldn't. Maybe it's not too late. What can I tell you about Max? I can tell you how he likes his eggs, that he hates pretension and that he loves me very very much ... even at my worst. Is that enough to get him off?"
Bolan did not reply.
She shivered again and tightened the hold on her chest. "He's not like them, Mr. Bolan. Oh ... in his own way, he may be worse than them. More crooked, I mean. He'll admit that he's a crook, it's how he made his fortune. He's a real wheeler-dealer and he's kind of proud of it. But he's not like them." She shuddered. Her voice became tiny as she added, "He just can't get loose from them."
"What's their hold?" he asked her.
"Me, for one thing. But they already had him hog-tied before I came along."
"You how?"
"Oh, this rotten business. Do you know a man called Tony Danger?"
Bolan nodded.
"I went to a party on his yacht. A cruise to Ensenada. Two other girls. Two of Tony's hoods. We ... partied. While Tony took motion pictures of it. I was so stoned on grass, I...."
Bolan said, "Never mind, I know the routine."
"Yes, well, he showed Max some stills from that film. In my presence. Can you beat that? Max didn't say a word, didn't bat an eyelash. Tony told him the negatives were in New York. That they'd stay there in a special file. Just in case Max felt like busting out his britches, as Tony put it. Well, as rotten as I am, I guess Max would do anything to keep them from circulating something like that. I guess…"
Bolan muttered, "Maybe Max is making pilgrimages to the soiling grounds, himself."
She stared at him for a moment then said, "I hadn't thought of that. You mean maybe he's punishing himself for his inadequacy?"
Bolan shrugged. "I'm no psychologist. But it's a thought."
"Yes, isn't it," she agreed.
There was a definite luster in the girl's eyes now.
Bolan didn't want to spoil it, but he had to ask her. "Was Lisa Winters in that party — the boat trip to Ensenada?"
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