“Wow, you come to quick decisions,” she commented when they’d leveled out. “What hit you?”
“A trailer park,” he replied tightly.
“That’s it!” she cried.
“That’s what?”
“It’s where I got my … The blond man said they would be at the camp!”
It was odd, Bolan was thinking, how things had a way of coming together.
It was such a small damn world, and he had to wonder if—via some dimension which the sense perceptions of man had not yet pierced—it was not far smaller than anyone could imagine.
It seemed remarkable to his mind that Bruno Tassily had known Mack Bolan in Vietnam—however briefly. That, moreover, Bruno had worked for nearly a year at the elbow of Dr. Jim Brantzen; that Brantzen himself had been the first sacrificial victim to the Executioner home-front crusades; and that … Hell, there was so much of “coincidence” in the lives of men, sometimes a guy simply had to wonder how much of it was truly coincidence.
Bruno had gone to Vietnam to save lives, Bolan to take them.
Bruno’s war had never started; Bolan’s had never ended.
Bruno had come home from Vietnam to die, Bolan to “live” more vigorously than ever before—Bruno as a man philosophically bankrupt, Bolan just now coming into an understanding of himself and his world.
And then, from Bolan’s near-death arose Bruno’s new awareness of some of the values of life.
The guy had pulled him out of a half-filled creek, sodden, bleeding to death, with a wound one shade lighter than gangrenous. Bruno the conscientious objector had, in effect, resurrected the Executioner, whose only justification for living lay in killing.
Yeah. Paradoxical. And small, a very small and intricately mazed dimension of being, this place called life.
Smaller yet. The resurrected Bolan had been beating it along the withdrawal trail, seeking a neutral zone, almost home free when he decided to pull in to a deserted trailer park to let the trail ahead cool awhile. And it was from there that the Executioner’s withdrawal game had changed, because of a telephone call which he hadn’t really wanted to make, and because of a fear which had been born in his dreams.
Very small world, yes.
Because the Executioner was at this very moment hotting it back to that very same trailer park, one which had been deserted such a short while earlier, but one that would accommodate a hell of a lot of big camping vans … when they were not out rolling the highways searching for heads.
An electric little sensation popped from that compartment of mind where men store their most elemental and vestigial thought processes, and it sent an involuntary shiver along Bolan’s spine.
He was wondering where this paradoxical circle of cause and effect would find its natural end. The thing that had wrecked Bruno in Vietnam had been his exposure to countless maimed young bodies.
How would Bruno “take” the deliberate maiming of his own body?
Bolan experienced another tremor, and the girl beside him caught it.
“You’re very worried about Bruno, aren’t you?” she asked in a tiny voice.
No sense denying it. He said, “Sure.”
“Me too. Bruno is so … sensitive. He has a very low threshold of pain. I have seen him go to bed sick over a stubbed toe.”
Bolan’s stomach lurched, and his foot found the floor beneath the accelerator.
Perhaps Bruno had dreams, also.
Maybe it was the dreams that had defeated him at ’Nam.
Maybe he’d had premonitions of his own fate.
12 MOMENT OF TRUTH
He parked the car in a cluster of trees about a hundred yards downrange and told his charge, “I’m going to have to leave you alone for a short time, Sara. You follow my instructions to the letter. Get out of this vehicle and go into the middle of that field out there. Lie down. Don’t show your head, and don’t make a sound, whatever you may see or hear. Don’t let anyone approach you, not anyone.”
He gave her two small grenades.
“Even if you knew how to use a pistol, which I’m sure you don’t, you’re better off with these. No big deal here. You just depress the little gadget here and throw it like a baseball. For you, throw it to the ground, right in front of your target. But not too close to your own position. If I’m not back in five minutes, take off. But not in this vehicle. On foot. Stick to the fields, away from the roads. Get to a telephone and call the cops, then stay put. If I do get back—”
“If?” she gasped.
“If I do get back, I’ll let you know it’s me. I’ll call you in a way that only I could. Got that?”
Sara nodded and forced a weak “Yes” through a very dry throat. She took her grenades, carrying them very delicately, and left.
Bolan watched her fade into the darkness; then he began his own move.
He circled in from the rear, pausing every twenty yards or so to sample the atmosphere for sounds, odors, presences; and when he reached the perimeter of the property, he settled there for a full minute, frozen, reading the place, getting its feel, its vibrations; then he moved on in.
The arrival was somewhat anticlimactic. He had somehow expected to find a congregation there. Instead, he found a lone command van and a single crew wagon parked beside it.
There were no sentries.
The curtains were pulled across the van’s windows; dull light seeped through.
It was worse than anticlimactic.
The sports car—and therefore Mike Talifero—was not at this “camp.”
And what of Bruno?
There was but one way to know for sure.
Bolan sprang the Beretta Belle from her side-leather and affixed the silencer, then followed the shadows to that camper door. He tried it, found it locked, rattled the catch, and rapped lightly with the Beretta, calling out as he did so in a convincing New England accent, “Come on, what is this, you all tucked in for the night?”
A drapery moved at the big window, and a blunt face appeared there, squinting out through the darkness.
Bolan stayed with the shadows as he delivered a Talifero laugh and again called, “Going to keep me waiting out here all night, boys? In this no-man’s-land?”
The drapery fell back into place, and he heard a hasty rustling inside; then the door cracked open and a guy inside was apologizing, “Sorry, sir, we just—”
Bolan never did learn what “we just” were doing. He exploded through that doorway at that instant, and the guy fell away from there with nine-millimeter whistler up his nose.
Another guy who had been hastily mopping spilled beer from a table just inside hastily released the whole can and nearly turned himself inside-out trying to find a path to his hardware. Another whispering phu-ut from the Belle opened an inside-out pathway right between his eyebrows—and there was something a bit messier than beer to mar that gleaming table now.
No one was left in sight or sound.
But then he heard a guy cough from someplace down the aisle, and a testy voice called out, “What the hell’re you guys doing out there? Stop the grabassing around!”
Bolan stepped down to there and snapped open a folding door.
It was the john, and a guy was seated there, pants at half-mast, reading a funny book.
“Hey, what … Jesus!” The reaction to the intrusion began as an angry snarl and finished in fading resignation.
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 rumored, in the tighter circles, that Scalisi was actually a Taliferi, a gestapo super-goon doing a bit of secret-polici
ng for the New York headshed.
Bolan needed no rumors. 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 installment 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 omertà 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 installment 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 dos. 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 summonded 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 re build, 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 …”<
br />
“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 hardcore 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.”
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