"Just love you," April added shyly.
"Thanks, ma'am. We got the best band in C&W, I think."
"Oh, yes, the band's great. But we're talking about you specifically."
Manton beamed. "Me?"
The little sixteen-year-old trotted up like a colt, another can of Coors held out for him. "Here you go, Tim."
Manton snatched it from her. "Get lost, babe. I'll see you later. The grown-ups are talkin' business here."
She winced from his harshness, faded back into the crowd without a word.
"We are talkin' business, ain't we?" Manton asked Bolan.
Bolan smiled. "Well, I don't want to be accused of raiding any label's artists. That's unethical."
"Yeah, sure. But hypothetically, what's the deal?"
Bolan looked around again. "Is there somewhere a little more private?"
"Can't get much more privacy than the middle of this crowd," Manton bellowed, his stomach shaking with laughter.
"I don't like talking six-figure amounts in the middle of a crowd."
Manton's eyes widened. He licked his thick blubbery lips. "Right this way, Mr. RCA."
He guided them through the crowd, bulling his way to the stairs. Bolan and April followed him up the elaborate winding staircase to the second floor.
"This is Royce's bedroom," Manton said, opening the door.
Inside, a naked couple bounced on the bed. The man had gray wavy hair and a guitar tattooed on his right shoulder. The girl was the one who had been dancing topless downstairs. She still wore her bow tie around her neck.
Manton dug his foot under the pile of clothes next to the bed and kicked them into the air. They fluttered onto the startled couple. "Get the hell outta here, Gordy. Take the baggage with you."
"Sorry, Tim," Gordy said sheepishly, grabbing most of the clothes with one hand and the girl with the other.
Manton booted the door closed behind them and grinned slyly at Bolan. "Just blowin' off steam before we play at that OPON Festival tomorrow."
"I'm looking forward to catching your act there. By the way, where's Royce tonight?"
Manton shrugged massive shoulders. "Who knows? He's got his own friends. Now just what exactly is that six-figure amount you mentioned downstairs."
"Four hundred thousand. Maybe five hundred thousand."
Manton stared numbly. "Dollars?"
"No," Bolan said. "People."
"What? I don't get you."
Bolan's voice went harder. "Where's Royce?" Manton stared at Bolan, saw April backing up to cover the door. "What's goin' on here?"
"An exchange. Your life for Royce's whereabouts."
"Fuck you, amigo." Manton started to brush past Bolan.
Bolan's movements were so fluid, yet so powerful, it was like being hit by a tidal wave. Balance, speed and power united in a molten movement that slammed into Manton at a place—and a time, timing is everything—that ensured the slob would topple. When it was over, Manton was on the floor on his back, Bolan was straddling his chest.
Manton's left hand was being bent at a painful angle by the Executioner.
"Where's Royce?"
"He didn't tell me. We got in at the airport and he took off with that asshole he hired at the last minute. I told him we didn't need another roadie, but he's the goddamn boss."
"Last time, fatty. Where?"
"I don't know. Honest to God, man."
Bolan grabbed Manton's fat pinky finger and snapped it back. Manton's howl failed to cover the cracking noise.
"You broke it! Jesus, man, I can't play the guitar like this. Jesus."
"You've got four more fingers on this hand, then I start on the next. That means I ask nine more times. After the tenth time, well, you'd rather not know."
Tears of pain spilled from Manton's eyes. "Okay, okay. He'll fire me if he finds out I told you, man."
"Where?" Bolan asked again, calmly.
"I've got a phone number, that's all. He left it in case his agent calls. He's got some goddamn movie deal in the works, one that doesn't include the rest of us and—"
"What's the number?"
Manton recited it. "I don't know where he is, though," he added bitterly, grimacing in pain. "He's been hangin' out with his politico buddies lately. All the guys have bad breath and the chicks have mustaches. You know the type. . . "
Bolan climbed off Manton's chest, whipped out his Beretta and poked it into Manton's stomach. "You don't look too well, Tim. I think the stress of show business is getting to you. If I were you, I'd go have that finger taken care of. Then I'd rent a nice quiet motel room and stay there for twenty-four hours. I wouldn't make any phone calls. That would cause stress. And stress kills. I promise you. Understand?"
"Yes, sir," Manton said, not moving.
ONE PHONE CALL and forty minutes later April and Mack were parked off a dirt road in Laurel Canyon, staring up a slight hill to the single house nestled in the trees at the top. Lights flickered in all the windows, but the only sound was the breeze filtering through the trees.
Bolan flipped open the trunk of their rented Trans Am, reached into the yawning darkness and plucked out the Linda with the Aimpoint. He handed it to April. "Help yourself to the extra clips," he said, nodding at the trunk. "Courtesy of the United States Air Force."
"Nice bunch," April commented as she stuffed the military webbing with clips. "First they fly us out here, then they supply us with ammo, grenades, the works. I wonder how many arms Hal had to twist."
Bolan did not answer. The weapons came as they may. He snapped the folding stock onto the butt of the Beretta and strapped the military webbing that dangled with grenades.
April smeared greasy camouflage cosmetics on her face, then checked over her weapon. "Do you think Dante's up there too?"
"I don't know. I hope so. But even if he isn't, Royce Banjo is. And he'll talk."
She took a deep breath, clutched her gun. "We're getting real good at crashing parties."
Bolan nodded as he smeared some coloring on a spot she missed behind her ear. "Only this time it's going to be party crushing."
They crouched low and started up the hill.
15
The first guard hunkered in the tall thistle weeds less than fifteen yards away, trying to light the tiny stub of a once-impressive marijuana joint. His rifle, a Charter Arms AR-7 Explorer .22, lay in the wet grass beside him. He held the joint carefully between thumb and forefinger, sensitive to the danger of lighting such a short butt.
"C'mon, baby," he muttered under his breath as he struck the wooden match against a protruding rock. His match flared briefly, and with practiced movements he touched the tip of the joint to the flame and sucked in a lungful of bittersweet smoke.
The smoke was still swirling around his lungs when Bolan's wire garrote bit into his throat, cutting off the passageway. The marijuana smoke burned inside the guard's chest, making him more desperate to exhale than to inhale. The guy clawed at the wire, raking off strips of his own skin with his fingernails, but it had already sunk too deep into his flesh. His fingers couldn't dig under it. Then he saw his own blood as it squirted from the razor-thin wound circling his neck. By the time the wire severed his carotid artery, he was dead.
Bolan unwound the garrote and let the body slump silently forward. Even in the dim moonlight he could see the marijuana smoke seeping like steam from the gaping slash in the throat.
Bolan waved and April scurried through the weeds to his side. "One down," Bolan said.
She glanced at the dead man, gritted her teeth. "Let's do it."
The house was another fifty feet up the hill. The only cover for Bolan and April was the field of knee-high thistle weeds, but the house itself was surrounded by a cluster of half a dozen fruit trees: lemon, orange, avocado. Whoever had built the place had landscaped it with great loving care. But the present occupants had not done much to preserve either the house or the trees. The two-story building needed paint as badly as the trees needed water
and pruning. On several of them, the outer bark had been blasted away where they had been used for rifle practice. No fruit would grow on them again.
Small thing, Bolan thought, as he and April climbed slowly toward the house, but it made him angry anyway. It should not have surprised him, of course. People who had no regard for human life would not fret over a few dead fruit trees. So Bolan was about to give them something to truly fret about.
They heard the second guard before they saw him. He was loping down the dirt driveway, dodging around the half-dozen cars parked there. He gripped a Winchester 1200 Defender shotgun lazily in one hand. He used the other hand to drum out a beat on the fenders of the cars he passed.
"Hey, Ben, you seen my Doors album? I'm getting pissed at having to come to you every time I want to play it, man."
He listened for an answer. Silence. Immediately he swung the 12-gauge into both hands, sweeping it in front of him at hip level. "Ben? You taking a smoke or what?"
When no answer came, he pivoted and bolted back up the driveway, legs pumping and arms churning so fast for cover he did not think to yell a warning to the others.
He was just spanking around the front fender of a blue Pinto when something huge jumped out at him. White eyes burned intensely from behind a grease-smeared face. Powerful muscles strained beneath skintight black material. The word Armageddon came to mind as he hefted the shotgun to blast the thing away.
But something had a hold of his hair, yanking his head back so sharply he lost his balance. As he struggled to regain his footing, he saw that it was a woman who was tugging his hair. His back was arched backward when he first saw her face. Then he saw the flash of steel in her hand and felt the flaming blade plunging into his heart.
April held the handle tightly, letting the body's falling motion pull itself free from the thick blade. She wiped it clean and handed it back to Bolan.
"That's two," she said.
Bolan studied her a moment. He wanted to hold her, ask her if she was all right, maybe even stash her safely to the side while he blitzed the damn house alone. But there was no time now for assessing emotions, nor fancy heroics. The odds of success were better with both of them going in. And she had already proven a dozen times on this mission that she could handle herself in the field as well as any of the Stony Man team. The emotional toughening, the ripening, would just have to come in its own time.
"How do you want to do this?" she asked. He recognized the impatience, a side effect of adrenaline.
"You take the front, I'll take the back." He looked at his watch. "Give me five minutes to get into position. The lights in the windows indicate that some of them are upstairs. I'll assume that the rest are in the living room at the front of the house. Once I come blasting through the back, I want you to count to ten. Slowly. That will give everybody upstairs a chance to get down the stairs and head in my direction. Those already downstairs will also be distracted toward me."
"That's when I come in."
"Right. They should all be focused on me, their backs temporarily to you. Come in shooting." "Except for Royce Banjo."
"If at all possible. You know what he looks like?"
"I do read magazines, Mack," she said.
"Okay, then. You're on." He started to jog away, turned, came to her and pulled her close, and kissed her roughly on the lips. She kissed him back just as roughly, lips grinding with something more than passion between them. He released her and hiked away without a word.
Bolan eased soundlessly through the weeds, then the overgrown yard, until he was pressed flat against the side of the house. He slid along the rough wood, brushing off pieces of chipped paint with his shoulder. His foot touched something and he hesitated. Only a spent shotgun shell, red and gold in the moonlight. A dozen of them lay scattered next to a torn, rusted lawn chair. Under the chair were four crushed cans of Lite beer. Someone had been sitting in the chair swilling brew and shooting at the trees.
Which meant that there were no neighbors close enough to complain about gunshots—either that or they were used to the sound. Good, Bolan thought, because they're about to get an earful.
He had to work fast now. It would only be a matter of minutes before someone inside realized that the guy with the shotgun hadn't come back yet.
He edged along the house, ducking under the shaded windows, working slowly toward the corner. Then there would be a quick swoop around the rear and through the back door. Only this time there were more of them inside than there had been at Byron York's survivalist camp.
But he had April now, armed and ready. He pictured her crouching by the front door, her heart thumping wildly. He tried to force the picture out of his head, but his concern for her had settled deep in his gut already, where it burned like a glowing branding iron. He had already come to accept his own death, but could he ever accept April's?
No time to brood on it now. Not with less than two hours until Sunday. Not with Dante and Zossimov still on the loose. . .
A window was hefted open in front of Bolan. A man with a red bandanna tied around his curly brown hair stuck his head out. Cupping his hands around his mouth he shouted, "Hey, Ben, tell him where the goddamn Doors album is! Steve—" The curly-haired man with the bandanna turned his head slightly and noticed Bolan pressed against the wall. He opened his mouth to warn the others. Thereby he requested his own doom.
Bolan let the Beretta fulfill the request. A stutter of three bullets drilled into the man's face. The man recoiled backward and his already dead skull bounced into the window. A symphony of broken glass accompanied his collapse.
"Cops!" a woman inside shouted.
"They're shooting at us!"
Bolan could hear the scramble for guns inside. A shotgun blast kicked out the rest of the window above Bolan as he ran for the back door.
"Stay cool! Stay cool!" a woman shouted.. "Zack, take the back door. James, you and Tina cover the front. Royce, grab that shotgun and—"
"You bet I will!" Royce Banjo's gravelly voice shouted above the noise.
Bolan did not wait for the troops to be deployed. He planted his feet in front of the flimsy screen door that guarded the back door and started pumping bullets through it. He heard a muffled cry, someone falling.
"Watch out!" the woman screamed. "They're coming in the back."
Bolan urged a couple more rounds through the door before dodging around the side of the house again. He heard a rifle butt knock through the glass window over the kitchen sink, then the explosion of a shotgun firing into the night.
"How many?" the woman demanded.
"Can't see them," someone answered.
"See any cop cars?" Royce roared.
"They're not cops," the woman answered. "Cops would use a bullhorn."
"Then who?"
No answer.
Bolan dropped flat to the ground, pressing close to the side of the house. Five feet ahead was the window through which he had killed the man with the bandanna. Resting on the windowsill was the tip of a rifle barrel. It swiveled back and forth, scraping along the sill, looking for a target.
April had prudently decided not to try and rush the front door. She must be pinned down somewhere, waiting for a sign.
I've got a sign, Bolan thought, plucking an RGD-5 antipersonnel grenade from his webbing. A .69-pound sign with 110 grams of TNT. Better than neon.
He crawled forward on hands and knees until he was directly under the window. He yanked the pin and with a soft hook shot, lobbed the apple-green grenade through the open window.
The man stationed at the window screamed. His yell was drowned 3.2 seconds later by the roaring explosion. Smoke billowed out of the window like a dragon's fiery breath. Amid the smoke, a man's shredded body somersaulted through the air, tumbling to the ground next to his twisted Winchester. His right arm landed ten feet away, near an avocado tree.
"Jesus, I'm hit in the leg!" Royce Banjo hollered from within.
Bolan arose in front of the window frame and s
prayed a burst around the room. An Uzi rattled somewhere in the smoke, and the windowsill in front of him disintegrated in a swirl of splinters and dust. Bolan swung away from the window just as more bullets zipped by, rustling a few lemon tree leaves as they took off toward the moon.
"The window!" Royce yelled.
"He's only hitting us one place at a time," the woman shouted back. "I think he's alone." "Then he's crazy," someone said.
"He's dead!" Royce Banjo spat.
Bolan angled around to the back of the house again and hardballed another RGD-5 grenade through the kitchen window over the sink. The explosion brought another chorus of agonized screams as hot shrapnel peppered the walls. A waterfall of smoke rushed out over the sill of the small window. Bolan heard a man's tortured moans. "My face! My face!"
Heavy footsteps rushed toward the back of the house. Bolan dived behind an orange tree as the bullets speared the darkness around him. Bark flew, severed branches dropped around him, dirt clods kicked up into his face. At least five terrorists were firing from the kitchen windows, pinning Bolan facedown in the dirt.
He felt a tug on his sleeve, saw a sudden six-inch tear in the nightsuit, a flash of skin and a thick line of blood growing on the tricep like a red lizard. There was too much adrenaline to feel any pain. That would come later. If there was a later.
A chunk of flying bark nicked his cheek and he covered his eyes. "Now, damn it," he muttered. "Now!"
The monotonous drone of gunfire from the kitchen suddenly had a new voice. It was the angry buzzing of April's Wilkinson Arms Linda, chuffing out 9mm death nuggets in three-round harmony.
Bolan scrambled to his feet and zigzagged across the yard at a 45-degree angle. He fired another couple of bursts from the Beretta in answer to April's Linda. It was the conversation of soldiers, the message as clear as any civilian language: I'm coming. Then, with a running jump, he vaulted through the side window. The impact of his fall was broken by the mushy corpse of the man whose face once wore the red bandanna, but Bolan rolled over him and onto his feet in one continuous motion. His Beretta scanned the room.
Executioner 057 - Flesh Wounds Page 9