"I'd best get going. It's already past ten. Go back to sleep. Wake you when I get back." He smiled sadly. "We'll truce a bit when all the hurts are better."
She said, very quietly, "No truce is possible, Mack, with blood between us. Understand that."
He understood that.
"See you later," he said, and went out of there.
Bolan took a cab to the yacht club at Edgewater Park and reclaimed his battle cruiser. It was more than that, of course. It was also base camp, mission control, home. All tamper seals were intact, indicating no breach of cover security.
He changed into a quiet business suit and rummaged through a file of ID wallets until he found one he liked. The Beretta Belle was snugged beneath the suit jacket at the left arm.
The time was nearly ten-thirty when he fired the power plant and sent the big cruiser back onto the streets of Cleveland.
Police patrols were in great evidence. The radio scanners were showing plenty of activity on the official airwaves, also. The downtown streets were relatively calm and quiet, though. He nosed the cruiser into a commercial park-yourself lot and went the rest of the way on foot.
It was a nice night, very clear, stars twinkling from their faraway habitats. And Bolan felt about that far, at the moment, from...Right, Susan. Bloodied truces were a bit difficult to manage.
He signed in at the security station in the lobby, showing the uniformed guard federal credentials and telling him, "No announcements. I get up there and discover I was expected, I'll come down all over your ass with enough charges to bury you forever."
The guy went white and assured the federal agent that no announcements would be forthcoming.
He took the elevator to the thirty-fifth floor and found the suite of offices he sought behind gilt-edged lettering:
CLEVELAND PIPELINE ASSOCIATES
How appropriate.
The reception room was brightly lighted. A guy in wrinkled plaids sprawled there with a Playboy at his lap.
Bolan asked him, "Are they here?"
The guy asked, "Who are you?"
Bolan showed him the credentials with the left hand and chopped him with the right as the guy bent toward the inspection. He fell back into the chair with a grunt. An ID wallet revealed the role. He was a Pinkerton.
Sure. Very clean, very proper.
Bolan found The Four in a large central office made up like a board room. Gleaming mahogany panels at the walls, highly polished circular table with cush chairs of crushed velour, the ever necessary portable bar with all the juices, four very startled "gentlemen" gaping disapprovingly at the intrusion.
Though he'd never placed eyes there before, Bolan could identify each of these "gentlemen" in his own place.
There was the silver-haired and sleekly sophisticated politician who'd built a lifetime on the take and erected a Hollywood shell around that rotten core. Paceman.
And the boyish executive with eyes that could snap from puckish to malicious with the twitch of a lid, a real live Neanderthal with twentieth century manners and a cannibal's appetite. O'Shea.
Slot Two held the shyster lawyer cum instant millionaire, a shifty-eyed scoundrel who'd sell you a car with no engine but guarantee full satisfaction on all non-mechanical parts in the small print. Scofflan.
Finally, Numero Uno—hearty chairman of a dozen nonexistent corporations with fat accounts in too many foreign banks to count, not a Jew but a kike, the kind who gives a fine race that terrible reputation, a guy whose only God is money and whose only morality lies in the fastest way to make it. Hirschbaum, sure.
The chairman of the board harrumphed and gnashed the stump of a cigar as he demanded an explanation for the uninvited visit. The others sat tensely with frosted drinks numbing the hands and tumbling thoughts, no doubt, enervating the brains.
Bolan dropped a marksman's medal to the shiny table.
"Susan sends it with love," he said coldly.
Paceman twitched, and those eyes revealed the horribly nasty truth.
O'Shea and Scofflan simply looked stunned.
The chairman tried to turn it around. "Thank God she's all right," he boomed heartily. "You must be the young man who's responsible for all the ruckus around town today. Can't really say I approve but ..." He laughed heartily and shook his head while regarding the "young man" with a warmly tolerant face. "You do get results, don't you?"
Bolan replied, "Usually." He brought the Belle up and sent nine millimetres worth of results sighing into that warmly tolerant but quickly collapsing face.
O'Shea flung his arms backward in pure reflex, eyes twitching rapidly from malicious to puckish to pure boyish terrified. Round two added a third eye, pure mortal dead.
Scofflan made a run for it while the politician hung in there grimly for the final vote tally. Neither found comfort from rounds three and four.
A blue folder fat with legalistic papers sat face up between the chairman's dead hands. It was labelled CLEVELAND PIPELINE. Bolan retrieved the death medal and dropped it atop the bloodied folder.
And, yes, how very appropriate.
He ran into a highly distraught young lady on the sidewalk just outside the Terminal Tower, and he said, "Shame on you, Susan. You didn't trust me."
Hope flickered there as she tried to respond to that. "I—I remembered ... you told me a safe house is safe but once. I was afraid you weren't coming back. I—I knew…,"
He said, "It's okay now."
"Was he there? Did you talk to him?"
Bolan nodded. "He found himself guilty, Susan."
"Don't double-talk me, damn you!"
"You're right. Believe me, I am sorry. I gave him a bullet."
"Damn you! You promised!"
"I said your game, your way. You conned me, kid. I conned you back. None of it is on your hands. I'll wear it. Without shame. He earned it. Believe it."
"It wasn't for him, dammit! It was for them! My mother and my grandmother! How could you make me do that to them?"
"You didn't do it to them," Bolan said wearily. "In truth, neither did I. He did it to them. Long time ago. All those years, masquerading as a man. All the while, nothing but a shell with maggots inside."
She cried, "Oh, God!"
He said, sadly, "It's goodbye, I guess."
Those blues flashed, then quickly receded. "Yes. I guess it is."
He started to walk away.
"Mack! I am going to write this story!"
"Good for you. Watch the quotes."
She smiled feebly. "Nice old giant. Nice old weary, miserable giant. Watch those ten-league boots, huh?"
He smiled back, trying to pack an eternity into one final look—then he went on and did not look back
No man was an island, no—nor an entire continent. At the moment, this one felt not even like a piece of one.
It was the ultimate con job, perhaps. Upon himself, by himself.
All he knew was that he was headed for the loneliest "home" in the universe.
But at least, by God, it would not be the coldest. The Cleveland pipes would flow next winter.
He hoped.
Epilogue
Dateline Cleveland. Slug it: "Baby, It's Gonna Get Cold Outside"
This began as a story I could never write. Well, tonight I'm writing it. Tomorrow I hope the whole world will be reading it. It's a story not so much of greed and unbridled lust and rotten people as it is a story of human gallantry, unbelievable personal sacrifice, the sublimation of an entire magnificent human personality into the grim necessities of maintaining our precious civilization by whatever tools are handy, by whatever means can point toward a positive good.
It's a savage world, the man said, and the meek shall never inherit while the savages rule the heights. The man who said that is Mack Bolan, a tremendous giant who strolls all the heights and who could rule, you better believe it, but chooses instead to serve the meek.
I am in love with this man. I so proclaim it to all the world and one day I hope to lie
in his arms again as I did so unreservedly and so very proudly earlier today. But let this revelation not cloud the story I am about to tell—because, as you shall see, there are two sides to every human relationship—and this man also coldly and with great premeditation executed my own grandfather a few short hours ago.
"I gave him a bullet," said Mack the Giant as though he had conferred some sort of honour thereby.
And maybe he did. I will tell the story and let the reader judge. It began one chilling day in the study of my grandfather's home. His name is, or was, Franklin Adams Paceman—a proud name, is it not? No, it is not. You see, my grandfather was a rotten shell of a man with nothing but maggots inside. I know this may sound ...
Executioner 030 - Cleveland Pipeline Page 13