The Belle's silencer was making a warm impression on the guy's forehead.
He followed Bolan's eyes up and out of there, pussyfooting along, with his pants and drawers hobbling him.
Bolan had never met this guy, but he'd seen his mug shots here and there. He was Jack "Scales" Scalisi, up-and-coming muscleman from the Jersey City docks, suspected of complicity in several "unsolved" murders during the current intrigue up there; three arrests, no indictments.
It was rumoured, in the tighter circles, that Scalisi was actually a Taliferi, a gestapo super-goon doing a bit of secret-policing for the New York head shed.
Bolan needed no rumours. He knew that Scalisi was one of Mike Talifero's interrogation specialists.
He removed a pistol from the guy's shoulder harness and showed him where to sit. "Get your cock in hand, Scales, and tell it good-bye," he suggested in that graveyard voice.
This was language which a turkey-maker could understand better than anybody. Scalisi's face turned gray. His eyes fled the cold fury confronting him there, to dwell briefly on the two bloodied corpses now decorating his living room. The mouth wobbled, and the voice was dry and cracked when he finally found it. "Jesus, mister, I. What can I do? I don't want this. Do you?"
Under more relaxed circumstances, Bolan would have thought that very funny.
The voiced was pitched straight from hell, though, as he replied, "What the hell would I do with it, Scales?"
"No, I don't.. I didn't ... I mean, look, sir, I don't even know you. I got no beef with you."
Just a poor sweet guy, fallen in with the wrong friends, no doubt. Bolan asked him, "So what are you doing out here running around the hell grounds?"
Scalisi spread his hands and bunched up his shoulders to indicate his status as a poor victim of harsh circumstances. "Well, I . . . hell, a guy makes a living. Right, sir?"
"Wrong, sir," said the voice from hell. "What you're doing, Scales, a guy makes a dying."
"Well, shit, let's talk it over!" Scalisi squawked. "Let's figure something out!"
"You figure something out, Scales."
The guy still had the comic book in his hand.
He stared at it for a moment with glazed eyes, then told the big cold bastard who was standing over him, "I don't blame you for being sore. I'd be sore too. All these guys all over your ass."
It was easy to see that the turkey-maker was bleeding for the Executioner.
Bolan made it official.
He shot him in the knee.
The kneecap just blew away. Whiteness showed there for an instant; then welling redness bubbled and flowed.
The impact jerked the guy halfway around. He flopped back with shock and disbelief mingling with the beginning awareness of massive pain, both hands instinctively applying pressure to shut off the bleeding.
And he was already beginning to bleat, with only one small instalment paid.
This turkey-maker had little stomach for the shit, when it was coming his way.
"No more silly bullshit," the iceman told him.
"You start talking turkey right now, maybe I'll let you die quick."
The fear of Talifero and of the consequences of broken omerta was stronger, at that point, than the fear of death or pain.
Scalisi's mouth clamped shut, and he gave Bolan a pained go-to-hell look.
Bolan gave him, in return, another disappearing kneecap; and the guy fell apart then and there, at the second instalment of his tab.
"Leave me alone!" he screamed. "What are you doing? Whattaya want with me?"
"I want Mike Talifero," Bolan calmly told him. "And a guy named Tassily. I want them both, right now."
Those eyes went wild. Scalisi cried, "Mike is . . ." Then he choked and dropped his eyes and watched his life flowing away from him in spurts and rivulets.
"You get to call the next shot, turkey-maker. Balls? Or elbows? You call it."
"They took the guy to the camp!"
"What camp?"
"Down the road! The hunt club!"
"Make me believe it."
"Jesus, leave me alone! I came down and bought this joint out for the week! Mike didn't like it! He took one look and laughed like hell! Went right down and took over that fuckin' hunt club! They run foxes, I think, down there, but not right now! Down the road there, three or four miles! We're just using this joint as a substation! God's truth, that's it! Now, let's get together, let's—"
The Beretta Belle bought "God's truth"—with a softly whispering mercy round straight between the eyes, and the turkey-maker's mouth was still moving as he died.
His suffering had been minuscule, as viewed through the shredded souls of those who had tasted his own applications of shrieking death.
But the muscles in Bolan's cheek were jerking of their own accord as he trotted back to his vehicle. This was not his style.
He had always tried to kill clean, as any self- respecting "executioner" should.
Only the unrelenting awareness of Bruno Tassily's plight could have moved Mack Bolan into even this microscopic emulation of the turkey men.
And, of course, Jack "Scales" Scalisi had possessed undoubtedly a much higher threshold to pain than the gentle medic, who would find no mercy, no mercy whatever, not even with God's hallowed truth pouring through his lips.
13 ONE FOR BRUNO
He gathered Sara and related, in a half-dozen well- chosen words, the result of his "probe" into the trailer park. Then, following an impulse of the combat sense, he returned to the park, went inside the van, and found the keys to the crew wagon that was parked beside it.
He checked the gas gauge, then hastily transferred Sara and all his effects to the limousine.
As they swung onto the road aboard their new steed, Sara's eyes were asking him the questions her lips would not, or could not.
He told her, "Bruno could still be okay. I think I know where they have him. Guy said a hunt club, three or four miles down the road."
"Oh!" she cried. "Boots and Bugle!"
His eyes flashed as he snapped back, "You know the place?"
"Well, sure, it's only ... I used to go there when I was in high school. To parties. I never could .. . those adorable little foxes . . . but they rent the place out for local do’s.
I've been there many times."
"Could you give me the layout?"
"Well, it's been . . . I guess it's the same. Sure. Let's see, it's—"
"Pencil and paper in the map case," Bolan interrupted. "Lay it all out. The property lines, buildings, interiors—I need approximate dimensions, distances, functions, anything and everything you can recall. And damn quick."
Sara's hands were already busy. As she worked her memory, she worked also her mouth—probably, Bolan guessed, as a release of unrelenting tensions. "You think they're doing . . . something . . . terrible . . . to Bruno. Don't you?"
Brutal truth was often far easier to handle than gentle half-truths. He replied, "Yes, Sara. I'd call it a dead cinch. Unless I can beat them to it. And they've already had. . ."
She took a moment away from artful fingers to dispatch escaped moisture from those deep-pool eyes.
Stolen gazes met in the light from the open map case, and she told the man, "I loved the way you called to me, back there."
He had summoned her from her security drop in the field with an impromptu identification signal. "Let's go, Little Mother. Time to build a universe!"
And she'd come running
Now he told her, "It's past time to rebuild, Sara. Way past time."
He was referring to her own very personal universe, and she whispered the reply, "Yes, I think I understand."
He wanted to leave her alone, to give her memory cells and her artist's fingers full sway, but she plaintively told him, "Talk to me, Mack. Hold me together. I can't . . . I can't believe that all this is actually happening. I mean, right here. This is home.
It's where I grew up, where Mama and Daddy . . How could this be happening here?"
/>
She was working as she spoke. He assumed that she could work and listen as well. And maybe she needed some anchor to hang on to.
So he let his own stream of thoughts flow into the open, giving utterance to ideas long held but seldom voiced.
"It's an imperfect world, Sara. Nobody with sane mind ever said any different. I'm a soldier, and not much else, but I . . ."
"Oh, you're much more than that," she said. "Go on, tell me, talk to me."
"One psychopath with a hunting knife, you know, can cow and dominate a hundred gentle people. Indirectly, he can enslave millions. It's been done. Many times. Past, present, and . . . I guess, future. It's that kind of world, Sara. It's our heritage. We have to understand that."
The girl was actually sketching the joint to scale —in that moving vehicle in bad light—even shading in terrain features. And with only about one-half of her mind The other half asked him, "Are you saying that these . . . men . . . are all psychopaths? I mean, these hoods?"
He said, "Sure they're psychopaths. The hard-core bunch, certainly. The ones who dominate. It takes a psychopath to rule brutal men."
Faintly the girl commented, "Oh."
"How's it going?"
"Fine. Please keep talking."
He sighed and checked the odometer. Another mile or two to go. He slowed, to give Sara more time. If he was heading into what he thought, then, he would need—and Bruno would need—everything possible going for him
"It's why the world is always in such turmoil," he went on, aware now that his voice was a sort of beacon for this girl's floundering sense of reality. "Maybe it takes a soldier to realize it. I think .. . there is a 'conqueror' instinct in the human animal.
Guys who seek power over other men often are operating from this instinct. All kinds of guys. All kinds of legitimate pursuits. The stronger it is, the more dangerous they are. If the guy is a psychopath, then look out. If he also is a guy who has no legitimate avenue to power, then the whole world had better look out."
In a murmuring voice, Sara asked, "How do you know a psychopath when you run into one?"
Bolan replied, "It shows, in many ways. This guy answers to only one idea of morality, that idea which tells him that anything for him is good, anything not for him has just got to be evil. And he can rationalize all the world's great values to fit that framework of what is good for him."
She said, "Selfishness, to a fault."
He said, "To a sickness."
A moment later, Sara told him, "It's almost done."
"It sure is," he replied, sighing.
"No, I . . . meant the layout."
"I know what you meant," he muttered.
"Are you going to leave me alone again?" "Have to," he said regretfully.
She finished the sketch with a flourish of shading strokes and placed it in his lap.
"What if I go crazy and start screaming my head off?" she asked.
"You won't do that."
"No, I I. . . suppose I won't."
"You're tougher than that."
"Darned right."
"Women are tougher than men."
"They are?"
"Yes, in many ways. Where it counts."
"Mack. I'm going to tell you this, but I don't want you to think . . . I mean, not to make you feel . . . Mack, I love you. I mean, love love. Know what I mean?"
Very quietly he replied, "Yes. Thank you, Sara." "Thank you," she said in a small voice.
He stopped the car, leaned across her, opened the door, dropped a grenade into each of those cupped little hands, and sent love love into an open field in the dead of night without even another's voice for a beacon, and in the shadow of their enemies.
It was a hell of a world.
But the only one they had.
Sara had done her work on a large sheet of tracing paper, the kind used for map overlays. It was a highly skilful piece of work, especially considering the circumstances and the time element involved.
According to Sara's sketch, a narrow lane led from the main road directly into the hunt club. She had indicated chain-link fencing surrounding the entire property, and she'd written "infinity" for the distance to the rear border—meaning, probably, a very deep tract of land.
The road frontage she had estimated as "about two football fields"—about two hundred yards, then.
The access lane went off at dead centre, ran to a recessed gateway "about four car lengths" off the road—eighty feet or so—then proceeded on a slightly curving path to the "clubroom," a single- story structure which was "twice as wide as my house and three times as long."
Bolan grinned, despite the tensions of the moment.
Some kind of a gal.
It sat upon a rise of land, this indicated only by shading strokes of the pencil. It could be five feet up, or fifty. Bolan bought it as a small knoll, considering the general topography of this particular area.
The interior of that main building was depicted in exquisite detail. Sara must have remembered it fondly. She'd shown a foyer and a large dining room/lounge dominating the front, smaller rooms at the rear, marked "Bugle Bar," "LR Gals," "LR Boys," "Powder Room," "Office" respectively, left to right. Bolan read "LR" as "locker room."
Other buildings fanned out from the main structure. The stables, leather shop, various other odds and ends. Fox pens and corrals were also depicted. Trails, running into the interior of the property. A meadow, woods, several streams.
That girl had a photographic mind.
And the mental photograph that she had recreated for the Executioner could become a damned nightmare—for a hard hit.
If the place was actually a "camp," then it would damn sure be a nightmare. There could be . . . possibly a hundred, maybe more, hard men inside that fence.
What was that message from "William Meyer & Company"?
Street-corner recruiting? A run on weapons? Yeah. Easily a hundred, if this was a field-headquarters site.
And the joint was eminently defensible chiefly because an invader would have a tough time pinpointing power pockets. They could have fire teams set up all around that property, patrols along the fences, patrols on horseback—why not?—and sentries, sentries everywhere.
It was the way the Taliferi operated. Massive power, scorched-earth capabilities. Sure, even in a field exercise. The guys did not gamble. They high- rolled.
But it would mean—unless they'd pulled all of their first-line troops in from all around that region of the country—it had to mean that they were going with a recruited militia. Green troops—street-corner soldiers who even had to go out and buy their weapons before they could join the party.
And all that "sirring" of Mike Talifero, as reported by Sara.
Sure, it fits. And it gave Bolan his "directions to the front."
This would be no hard hit.
This one would be soft, very soft.
For the big softhearted guy.
A soft probe for Bruno.
14 PURSUIT OF THE FOX
He removed his combat rig and placed it in the luggage compartment with the rest of his arsenal, retaining only the Beretta in shoulder suspension.
Then he donned, over the black suit, the same clothing he'd worn from Philly—Johnny Cavaretta's fancy threads, just the slacks and jacket.
The silk scarf, which he had used earlier to bandage the leg wound, was again dazzling white and glossy—and he had to wonder how Sara had managed that. He draped it around his neck and let it fall casually just inside the lapels of the jacket.
With that decorative effect, maybe the blouse of the skin suit would look like a turtleneck sport shirt.
Cavaretta's clothing did not fit Bolan all that well. Too much in the waist, not enough in the legs. He had to compensate for that by wearing the slacks down around his hips, and it came out about right then.
Cavaretta had been one of the VIP hit men, a Taliferi of high rank. Everyone knew, of course, that he was now gone forever. His head had been borne to Angie Marine
llo as a stand-in for Bolan's, delivered by the gleeful son of Philly boss Stefano Angeletti—and that had taken some engineering while Bolan himself prowled around the Angeletti head shed posing as Cavaretta.
Frank the Kid's glee had been , short lived, of course, woefully deflated—as reported to Bolan by Leo Turrin.
All of this simply illustrated the interesting fact that few living Mafiosi possessed a really clear idea of what the Executioner really looked like.
Pendleton, Don - Executioner 17 - Jersey Guns Page 8