“He can’t do that, Dolly,” said the cowboy in a hushed and scandalized voice. He shot Bolan an apologizing look as he said to him, “I’ll give you a hand.”
They went up the stairs in silence, the woman following slowly.
Smiley was in a garret room at the top of the house. Another girl shared the small room with her, a waif of perhaps sixteen with luminous eyes and a very frightened face. Smiley was conscious, but barely so. She wore only a flimsy, soiled shorty nightgown. There was no apparent recognition of the man bending over her and she made no protest as he gingerly examined her.
“Sedated, hell,” Bolan growled. “You’ve got her bombed out of her mind. It’ll take hours to bring her around.”
The waif in the other bed raised to both elbows and said, in a quavery voice, “She’s really okay. She started eating again last night. And I took her to the bathroom a little while ago. She’s—”
“Shut up, Donna!” said the headwoman, harshly.
The girl rapidly batted those great eyes then closed them, lay back down, and turned her back on it all.
Bolan growled, “Get her clothes. Get some for Donna, too. She’s coming with us.”
“Now wait a minute,” Dolly said.
“Do it, damnit!”
“Donna is still in the training program. It’s too soon to—”
Boland roared, “What are you—deaf? I said do it!”
The kid came off the bed with a leap. “It’s okay, Dolly,” she urged breathlessly. “It’s a good idea. I can handle her. I’ve been taking—”
“Sure it’s okay,” the cowboy said quickly. He was nervously moving the woman toward the door. “Go get the clothes. Mr. Lambretta knows what he’s doing.”
Indeed he did.
Minutes later, Mr. Lambretta’s car was moving smoothly toward the gate with a pair of repatriated females in the back seat. He stopped at the gate to wedge a pebble into the locking mechanism, then went quickly on.
He caught the girl’s frightened eyes in the rearview mirror and his voice was soft and warm as he asked her, “You okay, kid?”
“Yes sir, I’m fine,” she assured him.
“Get ready for a surprise,” he said. “This is not at all what you probably think it is. You’re going to be with some nice people. Cooperate with them, help them all you can. Okay?”
“Okay,” the girl replied faintly.
Smiley was totally out of it, the tousled head resting on the girl’s shoulder.
Two blocks from the school, Bolan turned into another drive where an ambulance and several other vehicles waited. Toby Ranger and Tommy Anders, showing anxious faces, moved quickly forward to receive their lost one.
“She’s fine,” Bolan assured them. “A bit wobbly now, but I think she’ll be all right.”
Toby had gone immediately to the rear seat. Anders halted at Bolan’s window and reached in with a warm hand. “No sign of Carl?” he inquired.
“Not yet. Do you have your portable judge?”
“We have him. We also have your man Oxley appropriately iced.”
“Keep him there,” Bolan said grimly. “The others, too. Smiley’s bombed out but the youngster here will give you what you need for the judge. I want you to hit them quick. Let’s cover this one good.”
“You know we will,” the comic replied quietly.
Yeah. Bolan knew that they would. It was an efficient strike team. They would be all over that school before the inmates knew what was going down. And with all the rules of evidence meticulously honored. The charges would be kidnapping, white slavery, transport of females and minors across state lines for immoral purposes, and probably a half-dozen other major felonies. Even so, Bolan knew.…
“No bail, Tom,” he muttered. “We can’t have these people on the street for a while. We don’t even want them communicating.”
The little guy grinned sourly. “You can’t bail ’til you’re booked. Never fear. We’ll keep them iced for at least twenty-four hours.”
“It’s a hell of a note,” Bolan growled.
“Yeah. But it’s the only note we got.”
“It’s the only note you’ve got,” Bolan said, the eyes flashing.
“You aren’t comfortable with our game, are you?”
“Not a bit,” the big blitzer admitted.
The ambulance attendants were quickly taking Smiley away. Anders took a greatly confused teenage girl in tow. Toby Ranger paused at Bolan’s window for a quick kiss and a mistyeyed thanks.
“It’s going to be okay,” she whispered.
“Be good to the kid,” Bolan said gruffly. “She’s had a rough time. Probably a runaway. Handle her gently, Toby.”
He backed his vehicle out of there and went quickly on his way.
Time was becoming the all important factor, now.
And he only wished that he could share Toby’s optimism. As a matter of fact, he did not. The “soft” was over. All that lay ahead was hard—double damn hard.
CHAPTER 8
QUESTION OF RIGHTS
Carl Lyons and Smiley Dublin, posing as Mr. and Mrs. Carl Leonetti, had made connections in the Orient with Dandy Jack Clemenza, a very ambitious minor echelon Mafioso who hoped to become the heroin king of North America. Clemenza had been making a pitch to the collective families of Mafia with assurances that he could, with their backing, corner the American import market in illegal drugs—and that, moreover, they could completely dominate the distribution and sale of the valuable substances within the United States.
Basically, that was the package on which Lyons and Dublin had been working. But the total picture was quite a bit larger than that—and it was the total picture which had been giving so much anguish to their partners, Tom Anders and Toby Ranger.
While Lyons and Dublin worked their wiles on the international scene, Anders and Ranger had thrown their total energy into the domestic side of the conspiracy with an attempt to draw straight lines of cause and effect relationships which would eventually ensnare and topple the whole large network of organized crime in America. Just as, in earlier times, the feds had used income tax evasion as an effective inroad to the heavily insulated higher ranks, they now hoped to ride the narcotics trails into those ranks—though with much more devastating results.
The entire set of jinks via Lyons and Dublin was intended to interface with that higher purpose. So much had been made in recent years of constitutional guarantees to criminals—especially with respect to the concepts of entrapment and illegally obtained evidence—that the professional criminals had been laughing up their sleeves and enjoying a free ride on this noble ideal of freemen while systematically plundering the rights and properties of those same men. It seemed to Bolan that very often the nobler thinkers of society tried to regard rights as some esthetic essence quite unrelated to the real world. The whole business of crime and punishment had thus become ritualized as some weirdly formal game between the good guys and the bad—with that distinction often blurred in the interplay of rights versus justice—and with never a thought to the real-world rights of society itself.
Bolan knew a thing or two about real world rights.
These involved the right of any good citizen to walk his streets without fear, to be free from intimidation and illegal exploitation, free from degradation and bodily harm and violence in all its guises—primarily, though, the right to work and save and build and keep.
There was no right to plunder.
Yet the noble thinkers seemed to believe that there was unless the rituals of the game were rigidly honored.
Mack Bolan lived in the real world. He therefore did not subscribe to such unworldly beliefs. Lawmen lived in the real world, also, and were forced to subscribe—if they were to be allowed into the game at all. Thus, the fantastic intrigues such as the present situation, the incredible personal risks, the often tragic consequences.
The SOG attempted a penetration of a highly organized and well layered outfit. The players within this outfit
knew the game well and had mastered all the rituals. The game was also, as always, heavily rigged in their favor since the lawmen were the only players who were required to observe any rules whatever. The penetration—obviously so successful in the base phase—had just as obviously fallen apart between the layers. Lyons had served as Clemenza’s personal courier by accompanying the heroin shipment from the Far East to an intermediate point in South America. Another courier had taken over at that point, moving the junk into the Central American corridor and eventually into the U.S.
According to the game plan, then, Lyons was to have returned to his Far East headquarters upon completion of the base leg. Instead, and according to a higher game plan, he had come on to Nashville in an attempt to bridge the layers and establish a meaningful rapport with the domestic distributors. Apparently he had failed in that attempt. And very probably, yeah, the consequences of that failure were tragic.
Bolan held little hope that he would find Carl Lyons, alias Leonetti, alive and well.
Meanwhile the game had gone on. The plays had already been called and there was nothing to be gained by calling an audible at the line of scrimmage. Anders and Ranger went on with their part in the intrigue, hoping against all odds that somehow the play could yet be saved, well aware that sometimes it is the busted play that brings the largest gain.
As a final, forlorn gamble, Bolan had been called in at the last moment to lend his own brand of razzle-dazzle broken field running to the problem. In any clear analysis, sure, that represented a violation of the ritual. But there was a hell of a lot more at stake here than some esthetic appreciation of constitutional rights and governmental restraints. These were real people inhabiting a real world—and the most vicious section of it at that. And Bolan understood their despair. He shared it. And though he had agreed to walk softly in this hallowed game of rituals and rights, he knew that he had used all the soft at his disposal.
It was, yes, a well layered organization. And Ray Oxley had been accurate in at least one important respect: it was an outfit which did not appear to follow traditional Mafia patterns. That was another negative for Bolan. He was working largely in the dark on this one, going on instincts as much as anything else as he sought the keys to this patchwork outfit. At this layer, it seemed to be composed mostly of minor minions of the organized crimeworld—guys who had always seemed content to operate relatively independent little territories at the very edge of Mafia power, primarily in quasi-legitimate business areas.
Roxy Artists was typical of the breed. Despite Oxley’s protestations to the contrary, he actually was an owner. He owned 23 percent of Roxy. But that was his sole interest in the larger network which included recording companies, booking agencies, theaters, clubs, hotels and casinos through the Western Hemisphere.
Moreover, Bolan was sure that patient probing would also uncover an invisible network of allied companies in such areas as real estate development and management, laundries, vending machines, janitorial services, and various other services and suppliers—such as the Juliana Academy and its rotten little approach to liberal lifestyling.
It was a disturbingly familiar game. Only the players, at the visible level, supplied the difference. But it was a difference which spelled insurance for the other levels and great difficulty for those hoping to penetrate beyond the visible, even though Bolan was practically certain that the same old familiar faces would be found hovering in the invisible background and pulling the strings.
And he was beginning to appreciate the full scope of the Justice Department’s interest in all this. No matter how legitimate a Mafia operation might appear on the surface, the Mafia mentality simply did not allow room for any business approach which was not inherently rapacious and destructive to its environment.
Roxy Artists would serve as a case in point. Since the same invisible interests controlled both the agency and the various showplaces—including even recording companies and distributors, perhaps even radio stations—any promising young talent falling into Roxy’s clutches was a tailormade mark for the game of rape and loot. The kid would be fully exploited from every possible angle while sharing very little of the profits, squeezed dry, then flung back into the dust to make room for another. Some of the unfortunate ones would no doubt be turned out for prostitution (whether male or female), doping, organized thievery, con games, or whatever. As always, wherever encountered and at whatever level, a Mafia presence was a societal cancer.
In this particular instance, the tip of the iceberg represented by Oxley and his Roxy Artists was a monstrous growth which threatened to undermine the entire social structure built up around the entertainment industry.
And, no, Bolan was not feeling particularly concerned over the legal rights of the plunderers.
Until Nashville, he had been only minimally aware of the existence of the hood called Nick Copa—also known variously as Cupaletto, Copaletta, Cupaletti, and Copoletto. He was a cousin to the late Anthony “Tony Danger” Cupaletto, a Californian. Copa was now about forty-two years of age and had no criminal record, although it was known that his early years had been spent as a feared enforcer for the DiGeorge Family of southern California. The federal government’s crimewatch had carried no mention of Copa, or whoever, until very recently and even that mention was followed by a question mark.
On the other hand, Gordon “Crazy Gordy” Mazzarelli was quite well known to federal watchers. Though the thirty-five-year-old professional gunman had never been convicted of a felony, the arrest record was quite extensive and covered a period of thirteen years—most of it involving viciously violent crimes. He was regarded in the underworld as a sadistic and conscienceless enforcer for the Mafia masters, and he was generally given a wide berth by all who knew his reputation.
Mazzarelli had been a resident of Tennessee for only a few months, apparently arriving on the scene at about the same time that Copa first became visible in the area. There was no record of prior association between the two. Copa was a Californian whereas Mazzarelli was a native of East Chicago and had apparently confined his operations to the Midwest until very recently.
So the patchwork effect was evident at this level of the outfit, as well. And this was indeed a bother to the methodical mind of Mack Bolan. Something new seemed to be arising from the patchwork, and it was something quite larger and far more elaborate than a mere distribution network for narcotics.
Perhaps Bolan himself was indirectly responsible for this new look in Mafia organization. The whole national pattern had fallen out of focus with his shatteringly successful command strike against the national headquarters in New York, several campaigns back. So maybe the Nashville Look was an inevitable consequence of the leadership vacuum at the national level.
The Executioner intended to get a closer look.
He would give the soft approach one more go. Not because of any personal regard for the constitutional rights of the players—they had relinquished those rights when they entered the game—but because of his great personal respect for the other side. The SOGs had a considerable investment in this exercise in terms of time, energy, and perhaps life itself. Bolan had no wish to trample on that investment.
So—he would try the soft game once more. But he was not losing sight of the fact that this was a war and that they were the enemy. And if soft walking produced nothing more satisfying than the bones of Carl Lyons then it was going to quickly become a damned hard war, indeed.
Assuming, of course, that Bolan could survive one more soft walk.
There were no rights to guarantee such an outcome—except, maybe, the rights vested by jungle law—and, of course, Mack Bolan understood that law very well.
CHAPTER 9
ACES FULL
The little bubblefront helicopter lifted off with a rush and began climbing over the city on a southeasterly course. “It’s just a few minutes away,” Grimaldi warned his passenger.
Bolan nodded his head in silent response and continued his preparations. Alr
eady the river was far behind them, the downtown area quickly giving way to the gently rolling suburban terrain. This was bluegrass country, sort of poised between the high mountains to the east and the Mississippi River delta lands to the west. Geographers referred to the middle Tennessee country as the Highland Rim. Residents simply called it God’s Country—and Bolan had to agree with them. But a particular patch of it was soon to become hellgrounds, and there was no way to avoid that determination.
He completed the cosmetic job on his hair. It was jet black once again and quite a bit more conservatively styled. The Beretta Belle was in a snapaway shoulder rig, nestling inconspicuously beneath expensive threads.
“How does it look?” he asked his friend, the Mafia pilot.
“Looks like you invented them, guy,” the pilot muttered.
Grimaldi did not like this operation. He had tried his best to talk Bolan out of it.
“Then I guess I’m ready when you are, Jack.”
Grimaldi turned a searching look on his friend as he replied to that. “You’d better be damned ready. Like I said, it wasn’t much of a recon. But trouble screamed up at me from every corner of that joint. I counted six vehicles in the main parking area. There’s room for another four in garages. The helicopter pad is about fifty yards from the rear of the main house. From the air it looks like it’s had plenty of use. And those damn barns … listen, I didn’t see a head of stock anywhere. No horses, no cows, nothing. But things are happening inside those outbuildings. Lots of activity. Guys all over the place, very busy. And I could smell it from a thousand feet up. It’s a hotspot, buddy. So you watch your ass in there.”
“Thanks, I’ll do that,” Bolan replied drily.
Yeah. He would do that. He would have preferred a first hand look before settling into that joint. But time was in the saddle, riding every consideration of the day. So he’d been forced to settle for a quick flyover by Grimaldi while the Juliana Academy thing was going down. And the pilot had liked not a damn thing he’d seen there. How much more dislike would a trained scout have found at Nick Copa’s highland hideaway?
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