Too Bad snickered.
Spielke glared at the actor for a quiet moment before replying, “I sent them to Tampico.”
Royal groaned. “Those are top-quality girls, Max.”
“They’re a penny a dozen and you know it,” the Man replied heavily. “Get out of here, Johnny. Go home and stay put.”
“It’s scarey there, Max. You said you were sending me a couple of boys to replace Juan and Enrico.”
“I changed my mind,” Spielke grunted. “Waste of manpower, Johnny. If the guy had wanted you, he would have taken you with Cass and the others. Just go home and sit tight.”
Royal steeled himself to say: “Well that’s, uh, what I really came to tell you, Max. There’s no sense in me hanging around here, with all this going on. You can’t use my place until it’s cleared up, that’s for sure. I got space on the eight o’clock flight to L.A. I figured I—”
“You figured wrong,” the Man told him. “I canceled that space twenty minutes ago, Johnny. Don’t try it again.”
Royal’s anger at that news exceeded his common sense. “I come and go as I damn please, Max!” he yelled. “You don’t tell me when I come and go!”
A stillness as taut as a drawn bowstring descended upon that gathering. Royal’s face remained set in angry lines, but he knew he’d overstepped his line of grace. He lit a cigarette, the lighter clicking overly loud in the pall of silence, and muttered, “I’m sorry, Max. I just don’t feel up to it. Gladhanding and bundling a few of your business friends is one thing. Cold-blooded murder and open warfare is something else. I never dealt myself in for anything like this.”
A telephone at the table rang. Spielke’s gaze traveled there, then he nodded to the legbreaker closest to it.
Royal gratefully loosened under the welcome interruption and sucked on his cigarette as the guy scooped up the phone and growled into it, “Por que?”
“It’s Tony,” the torpedo reported to the boss. “He says the guy at marina del mar thinks he spotted the Canada chick. She left in a runabout with a guy named Franklin. Says they headed out south, just a few minutes ago.”
“Tell Tony to put the helicopter on it, check it out. If it is her, I want her—however they have to get her here.”
The legbreaker relayed the message and hung up.
The deadening silence returned.
Spielke began drumming his fingers on the table.
The men at the table were giving Royal silently amused attention.
What the hell? He’d already blown it. May as well go down for doubles. He nervously cleared his throat and said, “Leave the woman alone, Max. She couldn’t know a damn thing. You’ve already buried the bodies and erased every footprint around them. What the hell do you want, for God’s sake—holy sacrament?”
The fingers abruptly ceased their drumming.
The other shoe was about to come down.
Very quietly, the man said, “You’re a shitbag, do you know that? Who says you dealt yourself into anything? You Hollywood people are all one and the same. Shitbags, and nothing else. If it wasn’t for your agents and your managers and all the other shit moulders, you’d still be resting quietly at the bottom of the cesspools where you all started. You’ve got no head, no belly, and no legs to stand on. Men and women alike, you’re all the same. Who ever told you a pearly smile or a wiggling ass made you something special? They write the words for you on a cardboard and you learn how to read them off—and that makes you a special creation, eh?
“I sent for you, kid—you didn’t send for me. And you came running for the same reason all the others do. You came because you’ve got no head, no belly, and no legs—and there’s just no other place for a shitbag, is there, after they’ve torn the shithouse down. Who the hell ever told you that you dealt yourself into something? You oozed here, Mr. Hollywood. Now, dammit, let’s get something straight, once and for all. You go when and where I tell you to go. You come when and where I tell you to come. And you just sit there and quiver like a nice shitbag when I tell you to do that, too. Do we understand each other, Johnny?”
“Sure,” Royal replied quietly, thoroughly crunched. “I told you I was sorry, Max.”
Someone at the table chuckled.
The Man said, “Shut up and get to work, you guys.”
Royal strolled to the brick parapet, hoping perhaps to find himself—or what was left of himself—in the ocean view.
The Man called to him. Johnny turned back with a forced smile and said, “Here, Max.”
“If it will make you feel better, you’ve got time to kiss those girls goodbye,” Spielke softly suggested. “They’re leaving at six on the company plane, the Tampico shuttle. Meanwhile I’m wining and dining them at Tres Vidas. Come to think about it, maybe you should go. A couple of amici are arriving on that plane. You can be the official reception committee.”
“Fine,” JR replied smoothly. “I’ll do that.”
“There’s plenty of time. Have a drink before you go.”
Royal nodded his head agreeably and turned quickly back to the parapet. He could hold that painful smile for just so long.
Max sure knew how to put a man down. And keep him there. The old one-two punch. Humiliate the poor bastard in open court and then turn on him with syrupy kindness.
The worst part of the humiliation bit was that all of it was true. It was true.
The one and only Seaward glided gracefully into Royal’s area of perception. Hell, it was moving.
He turned back to the table, as much for graceful conversation as anything else, and asked, “Where is Seaward bound?”
“She’s bound to ride that hook till the day I die, I guess,” Spielke grumped, without looking up from his labors. “God knows I’ll never get a chance to—”
“She’s underway, Max.”
The Man bounded to his feet and crossed to the parapet in two quick hops. His hands gripped the brick top of the wall and Royal thought for an instant that he was about to vault over the parapet.
“What are those idiots doing?” he yelled.
“Looks like they’re bringing her in to the pier,” Royal observed.
Spielke raced to the wall-mounted telescope and laid his eye to it. “Oh no!” he groaned. “No one’s at the helm! She’s on auto-pilot!” He swung about to scream toward the table: “Paul! Angelo! Seaward is running aground! Get down there and bring her to!”
The next few minutes at that point on the Mexican coast were a dizzying kaleidoscope of frantic happenings.
Briefly, Royal felt like a movie director on an extravagant location shot who had just given the “action—cameras” command.
Seaward was looming larger and larger, picking up speed as she came, bearing down on the pier toward which Too Bad and his boys were running an obviously hopeless footrace with the pace of events.
As his hired hands scampered recklessly down the steeply descending stairway, Spielke stood rigidly at the parapet, beating a soft and slow tattoo on the bricks with both fists, staring with hypnotic intensity at the advancing vessel.
In the background, a few hundred feet off Seaward’s quarter, a speedboat was executing a sharp power turn and making for deep water.
A half-mile or so beyond the speedboat, a small helicopter was churning low across the bay on a closing course.
Too Bad took the bottom flight of stairs in a single leap and ran onto the pier, the others trailing out behind him.
“They can’t make it, Max,” Royal observed quietly.
“They’ll make it. They have to make it.”
Not in the real world, Max. They did not have to make it. Royal knew that they would not. And Spielke must have known it.
The cruiser, with three men aboard, lurched away from the pier and had barely gotten clear when Seaward reached landward.
Like a slow motion replay, she smashed into the pier and rammed on through the flimsy structure, sending men and materials spinning crazily off to either side.
Nor had
the cruiser escaped entirely. It was damaged and foundering, and the three men aboard were hastily abandoning the wreckage.
Royal heard a groan escape the Man’s taut lips, and then Seaward landed totally and began climbing rock with a groan and a screech to eclipse all other sounds of that moment.
Just before the final crunch, however, Royal would have sworn he heard distant gunfire, a chattering sound such as an automatic weapon might make.
And he had glimpsed again, momentarily, the helicopter—much closer, now, and in a strangely clumsy attitude—falling, it seemed, toward the water. But he would not connect up that fragment of vision until some time afterward.
For now, the moment at hand was moment enough.
Seaward was aground on the rocks, her bow ripped and gaping, listing badly to starboard already—and her engines still laboring to drive her onward through the mountain.
“I’m sorry, Max,” the actor said, because he really was—but not for the Man.
The boss was ashen, frozen at his post. “I don’t understand,” he mumbled. “How could such a thing happen?”
Royal could not say, but he was getting a pretty good idea. And whoever was responsible was certainly no shitbag.
He turned away from that agony and went back across the garden, through the house, and to his car.
And then he started laughing.
He giggled all the way home, and when he got there, he went straight to the bar and snagged a bottle and took it to the beach for a solitary toast to a singular event.
He drank to the guy who did it to Max the Man.
7: The Call
There had been no time for an appreciation of the events to landward. Bolan had barely dragged himself aboard the boat when he noticed the approaching helicopter.
His was the only small boat in that particular area, and the chopper was obviously making straight for them. It could be a perfectly innocent flight, of course. But he could not count on that, nor even allow it as a possibility, and he needed to know their intentions at the earliest possible moment.
“Make spray!” he commanded the lady at the wheel. “And keep an eye on that chopper!”
The powerboat leaped off and executed a tight arc westward. Bolan sent a final glance at the slowly moving Seaward. She was picking up headway nicely and maintaining that doomsday course.
Other things were now pressing his attention.
He went quickly forward for a binocular check on that helicopter. It was a small bubble-top with three men inside—and, yeah, they’d altered their course and were dropping lower in a quick intercept path. As Bolan watched, the side hatch opened and a familiar object came into view. It was a rifle, tipped with a suppressor.
He yelled to the girl, “Maintain speed but hold ’er steady. We have a game.”
She nodded and cast a frightened look toward the approaching helicopter.
Bolan hauled the Uzi off the floorboards and readied the chamber, then took a position at the gunwale, concealing the fierce little weapon as best as possible behind his leg.
The chopper bore in hard a’beam, no more than fifty feet off the deck, then hung there while its occupants eyeballed the two in the speeding boat.
They made the girl, but apparently that was all they made, judging by the casual reaction. One of the guys had a hand-held PA, and the initial approach was a soft one.
“Boat below—please lay to. Emergency situation. Lay to, please, Miss Canada.”
Marty shot a despairing look over her shoulder to Bolan. The ruckus produced by the chopper, combined with the sounds of their own motion, made verbal communications impossible. Vision itself was difficult, due to the buffeting by wind and spray. Bolan shook his head at her silent inquiry and made a hand signal, calling for an abrupt change of course to starboard.
She responded immediately to the signal, the speedboat cutting across the chopper’s course to pass beneath its belly.
The boat came about in a tight circle, making a full power run toward the east shore—returning to the general area of the Seaward’s anchorage.
The yacht was halfway home now, and Bolan was again close enough to note the reaction from the top of the bluff. A fast-moving string of human forms was descending that stairway. Bolan shook his head at that and turned back to the threat from the air.
The bubble-top was closing quickly on the new course—and this one was a gunnery run. The rifleman was kneeling in the open hatchway. He began firing from about fifty yards out. The rifle was semiautomatic, as evidenced by the spacing of the rounds, and the targeting was pretty damned effective.
“Throttle off!” Bolan yelled, as his craft took two hits through the fiberglass hull.
Marty heard that command, and her response was instantaneous. From full throttle in a speeding boat to no power whatever produces a dramatic change in forward motion. Unlike a rolling object—and very much unlike a flying object—the hull of a speeding boat settles down quickly in its confining medium.
Bolan was braced and ready for the lurching slowdown, the Uzi up and ready. The chopper swooped on past—and, this time, in just the attitude Bolan desired.
The first burst from the Uzi hung a wreath around the tail rotor, disintegrating it. With loss of the opposing rotational force, the craft instantly lost stability and began windmilling around its main rotor. It swung crazily across Bolan’s bow, tilting and flinging the kneeling rifleman into the water as the pilot fought for control.
The next burst swept the cockpit, and that was the end of the air-sea battle. The chopper hit the water on its side, and dug in, and immediately disappeared from view.
Marty gave a strangled little cry and sagged against the wheel.
“We’re shipping water,” Bolan told her. “Let’s go—but take it easy.”
Her voice was distant and choked as she asked him, “Shouldn’t we … look for survivors?”
“There are no survivors,” Bolan said grimly.
His attention was drawn landward by an uplifting of sounds from that quarter. Seaward had just crashed through the pier and was beginning to climb the rocks.
“That was terrible, simply terrible!” the girl cried. “How could you do it?”
He was not sure as to which particular event she had reference, nor did it matter. He was performing for effect, not for applause. Nor even for gratitude, though it would not have been particularly out of order.
“Are you driving the boat or am I?” he asked coldly.
“I’m certainly not,” she said in a muffled voice.
He pushed her aside and took the controls.
Half the naval base would be on the scene in no time at all, especially so if that gun battle had been noticed.
And the boat was taking on water at an alarming rate.
“Look for a good landfall,” Bolan told the surly lady. “How’s your swimming form?”
“Adequate,” she replied dully.
Bolan hoped so.
He’d won the battle but lost a boat.
And maybe—yeah—maybe he’d lost a lot more than that.
JR was sprawled lazily in the sand, on the beach in front of his villa, quietly toasting the event of the decade and watching appreciatively the hullabaloo on the bay. Every boat in Acapulco, it seemed, was converging on the disaster scene. It was not, after all, just any old day that one could see a genuine marine disaster. Even the excursion boats would, no doubt, be loading up with the latest in Acapulco sightseeing.
In fact, the Catena-Puerto Marques ferry was already on the scene and standing to, along with a miscellany of yachts and runabouts.
The actor chuckled with a vision of Max’s face, looking down on all that rubbernecking and chaos at his front porch, so to speak.
It could not, he reflected, have happened to a more deserving son of a bitch.
It was at this point in his reflections that JR noticed the swimmers—a hundred yards out, maybe, slowly making for his pier.
It was not all that unusual to
find swimmers at his beach. It was not, after all, his beach. All Mexican beaches are in the public domain. What was unusual about this particular pair was their distance from the shore—the fact that they were obviously coming from much farther out—and the apparent grimness of their effort.
Those swimmers were in trouble!
JR dropped his bottle and ran onto the pier, prepared not so much for heroics but to at least throw out a couple of life rings.
But then he saw that they were not in that much trouble. A man and a woman, they were using float cushions from a boat or …
Uh huh.
A picture had flashed across JR’s mind—a still frame, crowded with a lot of confusion and high moment—a helicopter, a speedboat, gunfire.
A ball of mush was forming at the pit of JR’s stomach. He turned his back on the swimmers and slowly retraced his steps along the pier, retrieved his bottle, went on to his patio, took a seat near the pool and a pull at his bottle. Then he sighed, went inside and got his pistol, loaded it, and returned to the patio.
They came up the steps a few minutes later. A gorgeous blonde in a fetching bikini, breathing hard and moving slowly on wobbly legs.
And the guy. The guy, yeah. Tall and powerfully built, a strong-jawed Clint Walker type, handsome, eyes of blue glinting ice—blowing a bit hard, himself, but steady as a rock.
The sodden clothing clung to him—and that wasn’t all; a big silver auto clung to him, also, strapped to the hip on wide leather.
Biggest damn gun JR had ever seen, but it was still in the leather.
He stepped into the open and showed them his own pistol.
The woman went hurtling off to the side as the big guy executed a startlingly sudden whirling dive. The silver pistol was in his hand before he landed. He could have blown JR to kingdom come, that much was obvious. For some reason, he did not. He could have, yeah. The whole thing had caught JR flat-footed and open-mouthed—frozen to the trigger.
They stared at each other across the guns for a tense moment, and JR was surprised to hear his own voice telling the guy, “It’s okay. You’re welcome here.”
That other voice was icewater cold. “Put the piece away.”
The actor dropped his little .25 plunker onto a longue and said, “I know who you are. You’re safe here, for the moment.”
Acapulco Rampage Page 5