Bolan leaned back into the Cadillac to avoid any direct encounter; they had met eyeball-to-eyeball on a couple of occasions, and he did not wish to push his luck this time—not with so much riding on it.
He heard the big bodyguard yelling to someone to “Get us an escort!” as the powerful engine of the Mercedes roared to life.
The Talifero vehicle went past him on screeching tires and ignored the driveway circle to swing out across the grass for a direct route to the gate.
There was a scramble of bodies at the far side of the building. Car doors slammed, engines cranked. Then two crew wagons sprang away in the wake of the Mercedes.
Something, evidently, was up.
Mike Talifero seldom lost his cool—or so the story went.
Bolan went on to the door and indignantly told the captain, “Well, that was a hell of a thing. The guy just hops in his chariot and drives away without even a wave. After asking me to meet him here at …”
The guy on the door was nervous, edgy. He was giving Bolan a respectful once-over as he replied, “I’m sorry, sir, I guess he got some bad news a few minutes ago. And he has this meeting with someone big.”
Bolan gave the guy a “who-the-hell-do-you-think-you’re-talking-to?” look and told him, “Well, yes, but he runs out and drives away the second I arrive.”
The captain became flustered and said, “Well, no … I don’t think … I mean, he had to meet someone down at the airstrip. I’m sure he’s coming right back. Why don’t you just go in, sir? The bar’s open, you can help yourself, make yourself comfortable. I guess he won’t be gone more’n about ten minutes.”
The guy was holding the door open for him.
Bolan was still being indignant. “I don’t know. I believe I’ll just go on back.”
“Only about ten minutes, sir, maybe less. Wait, let me get …”
The guy would not have asked Bolan who he was if he’d been busting to know. It simply wasn’t done. Not in this outfit. You either knew, or you acted like you did. He was now halfway through the doorway and trying to catch the eye of another guy inside.
“Will you c’mere!” he called angrily to the inside, then turned back to Bolan with, “Jess will show you the bar, sir. Just make yourself comfortable.”
Bolan was allowing himself to be talked into staying. He was grumbling as he stepped through the doorway, “Well, I don’t like to be treated this way. You can tell him that for me. My time is important, too. I have a territory to watch, myself.”
“Yes, sir, yes, sir, I know, these things happen, don’t they? I bet he didn’t even see you. He had this bad news, and he was late to meet the plane. You know how these things go sometimes.”
A big ugly kid in shirt sleeves with an oversized .38 clipped to his belt was standing there taking it all in. This was Jess. He must have thought he was Jesse James, the way he was wearing that hardware. Maybe it was where he got his name; it worked that way in the mob.
Bolan growled, “Hi, Jess. How are things on Third Avenue?”
The kid was torn between a smile and a frown.
Bolan said, “Haven’t I seen you around there?”
The door captain was awkwardly off-balance, trying to hold the heavy glass door open and keep a foot inside at the same time. Again he implored the visitor, “Just make yourself comfortable, sir.” Then he fled to the more comforting environment outside, leaving the hot potato for Jess to handle.
That one was scratching the back of his neck and thinking about Third Avenue. He told the big-shot visitor, “I operate mostly around the Bronx, sir. But I guess you could have seen me …” He was obviously hoping that Bolan had seen him, highly flattered by the notice. “I get around quite a bit.”
They were walking toward the bar.
Bolan asked him, “What’s going on here, Jess? Why did Mike go flying out of here that way?”
“Oh, something went sour.”
“I hope not what I’m thinking,” Bolan said ominously.
“Hell, I don’t know, sir. Are you here about the …?” His head jerked toward the direction of the locker rooms.
Bolan snapped, “I sure am.”
“Well … I dunno, sir. They weren’t in there very long with the guy. I only heard him yell once, and then it didn’t sound like … well, it sounded like Bible stuff. Something about putting a goat out in th’ woods, I don’t know. Then just a couple minutes ago Mr. Talifero came busting out yelling that they’d hit the guy too hard, too fast. I don’t know—”
Bolan snarled, “You go fix me something cold and strong, Jess, while I see about this. Which door?”
The guy’s eyelids were fluttering. “The men’s locker room, sir. Second door down.”
“Stay clear!” the VIP who’d noticed Jess around Third Avenue commanded, and the kid nodded and strode on to the bar.
The Beretta was in Bolan’s right hand and the silencer was threading itself aboard when he hit that door at full stride.
Everything Mack Bolan had ever been and ever wanted to be was concentrated on that terrible point in Jersey, that awful moment at the end of the turkey chase—at the very doorway to hell.
16 INTERDICTED
The room was long, narrow. Lockers and benches lined both sides, leaving a narrow aisleway through the middle. It T-ed off at the rear, becoming much wider. Latrines and showers back there—showers left, the others right.
Three, at least, of Mike Talifero’s people were in there.
One was in shirt sleeves, shoulder-rigged, leaning with his back to the wall, near the entrance, his attention riveted to the activities in the rear.
The other two were in the wide area, wearing white rain slickers and rubber boots—white originally, but now splotched and splattered with something else.
In that initial glimpse, only one of these was in clear view. He was standing back at about the middle of the area, hands on slickered hips, watching whatever the other guy was doing.
The other one was only now and then visible, moving in and out of sight as he busied himself with something back there in the hidden zone.
A human arm, complete from elbow to fingertips, lay on the floor between the two.
A scene straight off hell’s front porch, sure, with all the usual trimmings of odors and electric tension which moved the small hairs on observing flesh; but something very vital to this scene was missing—a loss that only accentuated the bizarre and unreal and terribly inhuman quality of the moment. Sound was missing, as though it had fled before something too terrible to be contemplated through human ears.
Yeah, and it was somehow worse, in this silence.
A human being was being taken apart back there, without benefit of anesthesia—quite the contrary, with every technique at human disposal geared to the positive lack of such relief, and without a murmur from the victim.
The guy at the door straightened quickly at Bolan’s entrance but gave him only partial attention as he growled, “Ay, this’s no damn sideshow. You ain’t allowed in here.”
The Beretta was at Bolan’s side, partially concealed behind his leg. “Mike sent me,” he told the guy. “What’s the problem?”
“Shit, you tell me,” the doorman replied in hushed tones. “It’s spooky. The goddamn guy just sits there smiling at them, no matter what they do. Sal is about ready to walk on the ceiling back there, and I don’t blame ’im.”
Bolan quickly and quietly put the Beretta away.
Something was off-key. But what the hell …?
“That’s why, then,” he said.
“Why what?”
“Why Mike said to scrub it. And I didn’t get it. You know.”
The doorman shivered and said, “Yeah. I know.”
“Go back and tell Sal I said to clean the guy up. I have to take him out of here.”
The guard gave Bolan a guardedly piercing look and said, “Now I don’t get it.”
Bolan shrugged. “Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to …” He showed the guy a
twisted grin and again shrugged his shoulders. “Go get him.”
“Not me, I’m not going back there. I just ate.”
“Okay. Go out and tell Jess to move my car down in front of the door.”
“What are you doing? I mean, what …?”
“I got the bad straw. I get to dump the guy on Bolan’s doorstep.”
The hardman smiled sympathetically and commented, “Wherever that is, eh?”
Bolan’s insides were yelling at the guy to move it, move it, but he held onto the grin and quietly urged him along. “We know about where. But we better have this guy out of here before Mike gets back.”
The doorman nodded, gave Bolan a final pitying look, and hurried out of there.
The apprentice turkey-maker had become aware of Bolan’s presence. He watched the door guard hurry outside before he took a couple of steps up the aisleway toward Bolan to call up, “God, sir, he’s still …” The guy did a double-take then, and quickly recovered. “Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you was—”
“He sent me,” Bolan said, as he walked down there.
The guy was apologizing. “I never saw nothing like this before. This is the damnedest … I’ve worked with Sal before, sir. This ain’t his fault. I’m telling you, there’s something queer about this turkey.”
The pot calling the kettle …
Two large suitcases were opened along that back wall.
Turkey kits.
A miscellany of clever tools, gadgets, devices—the sort of stuff you could pick up at any respectable hardware store. Hacksaws, a blowtorch, several different sizes of cutting pliers, other odds and ends of cutting and drilling tools.
A couple of heavy meat cleavers. Power tools, even. A sander and grinder. A jigsaw … for trimming nails? Several small electrical devices, even something that looked like a miniature dentist’s drill.
A cattle prod.
Medical stuff. A stethoscope. Hypodermic syringes, complete with carefully racked supplies. Rubber tourniquets, many, of varied sizes.
Some kind of black goop in a gallon can, tarry-looking.
They had brought in a swivel chair from somewhere and backed it into the shower area. A heavy-duty extension socket was strung from a wall outlet and a floodlight suspended from a shower head, to give the ghouls their necessary visibility.
A tape recorder sat upon an appropriated bench, the mike suspended from overhead with the extension light.
And, yeah, this place was hell’s front stoop.
Bolan could not see the man in the chair.
The other one—Sal, no doubt—was an elephant of a guy. He was standing on the blood-slicked shower-room floor in a white rubber slicker and probably sweating like hell inside it while another man’s blood sweated like hell all over the outside of it.
Sal was grunting and breathing hard as he labored over the thing in the chair … and, yes, something was definitely out of focus here.
Bolan steeled himself to stoop down and pick the severed arm from the floor. It was cold already. He handed it to the apprentice and told him, “Wrap it up; we’re taking it with us.”
The guy’s eyes goggled and he said, “What?” But he accepted the grisly object and grabbed for a towel.
Loudly Bolan called, “Sal! Come here!”
The fat man turned around to send a hard stare out of there; then he sighed and waddled forward.
Bolan still could not see the thing in the chair.
The fat man declared, “If I’m not left alone, how am I ever to complete my task?”
He spoke from educated years, and Bolan had to wonder, but very briefly, what had brought the man to this place, this time, this circumstance.
But only very briefly.
“You’re not completing it,” he coldly advised the turkey man. “Mike says we scrub it. We have other ideas now. Patch ’im up, clean ’im up, we’re taking him out of here.”
The guy seemed prepared to argue his case. “That isn’t fair. There are all manner of ways to get around these things. It’s just a question of time. I feel that I must protest—”
“Okay, Doc,” Bolan interrupted, guessing at antecedents and probably scoring, “you take your protest to the college of surgeons, eh. But right now you make that guy ready to travel. And don’t give me any more shit about it.”
The turkey man sighed and turned toward his tool kits.
And then Bolan saw Bruno.
And he shivered and ground his jaws and bit his tongue to keep himself cool.
Bruno was nude and strapped into the swivel chair with a broad leather belt encircling the torso.
Ankles were adhesive-taped to the base of the chair, one wrist likewise to the chair arm. The other wrist, Bolan had just handed over to Sal’s apprentice. Near the stump of the remainder, a heavy rubber tourniquet was biting deeply into the flesh, and black goop was caked over the raw opening, which, even so, continued seeping red
Horrible, twisting things had been done to the thigh-hip area, great discolored patches of broken flesh attesting to that. Other atrocities had been committed upon the torso and smeared with the black goop.
The eyes were brimming with fresh thin blood, brought there probably by the fact that all the hair just above and about the eyes had been viciously uprooted, probably with blunt-nosed pliers.
Blood was oozing from both corners of Bruno’s mouth, and his chin looked as though it had been singed.
But, yeah, the big softhearted guy who’d lost it all in the surgical tents of Vietnam was sitting there with a beatific smile shining through it all.
A-maze-ing, yeah.
Bolan growled, “Hurry it up! I have to get this guy out of here before Mike gets back. And you both better hope I do.”
And he was not kidding about either statement.
Sal was grunting and sighing and pulling things from the medical bag.
“It ain’t our fault!” the apprentice whined. “He started right off like that. Well, almost. For about ten minutes he sat there and groaned and gritted his teeth. Then with the first big hit he just flipped out. Started yelling Bible stuff at us. Ever since, he’s been just like that. We didn’t hardly get started, even.”
“He was quoting from Leviticus,” the fat man informed Bolan, looking around at him with a resigned smile. “I trust that you will find it in the sixteenth chapter, unless my memory has fogged completely. ‘But the goat, on which the lot fell to be the scapegoat, shall be presented alive before the Lord, to make an atonement with him, and to let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness.’ So you see …” Sal spread his arms and shrugged, then waddled over to the “scapegoat.”
Bolan muttered, “Yeah, I guess I do.”
He sure did.
He saw that something or someone with more authority than the turkey-makers and Bolan combined had interdicted that planned fragmentation of a soul.
“It’s a form of autohypnosis,” the fat man was explaining. “Imposes what amounts to neural blocks across the sensation centers of the central nervous system. There are ways to overcome this, if I had been given the time. It is quite simply autohypnosis, despite the superstitious shivering of my young friend here.”
Yeah, okay, Doc, Bolan was thinking. Call it whatever you like. But the simple truth was that Bruno had snookered them all. Maybe the guy had known what he was about all the while, from the moment he dragged a half-dead hell-fire guy out of blood creek.
One thing was fairly obvious. Whatever Bruno had lost at Vietnam, he’d evidently made a shortcut back through the maze and found it again in this most unlikely outpost of hell.
The turkey-maker was telling him, “All right, my grim friend, your man is as ready to travel as he’ll ever be.”
“Carry him out to the car,” Bolan commanded. “It’s parked at the front door.”
The turkey man gave Bolan a go-to-hell look, but they took Bruno out, and Bolan followed, carrying the severed arm wrapped in a towel.
Jess was standing in the dining room
with a tall frosted glass in his hand, looking as dumb as he was.
Bolan said, “Watch your swinger, Jess,” and went on past.
The guy who had been guarding the door to the turkey chamber was now walking quickly ahead of the little procession, hurrying to let them out.
He called outside to the door captain, “Open, mister … his door, Tank. The back door. We’re bringing the meat out.”
Bolan told the guy as he swept past, “Stay hard, man.”
“Thanks, I will. You too.”
The turkey man and his helper put Bruno on the rear deck of the crew wagon and apparently intended to leave him there, draped across the hump there. “Put ’im in the seat, damnit!” Bolan yelled.
They did so; then Bolan shoved the fat man away and growled, “Beat it!”
“I am blameless,” he said, as he huffed away.
“The hell you are, guy,” Bolan told that retreating back.
He produced a small manila envelope from an inside pocket and handed it to the door captain. “Give this to Mike the instant he gets back,” he instructed. “Tell him I have everything in hand.”
“Yes, sir, okay, I’ll sure tell ’im, sir.”
Most of them seemed to be relieved over the departure of both the VIP and the “meat.”
Bolan had to reflect again that many of these men probably hated the turkey-makers almost as much as did Bolan himself. So why did they …? What price some men were willing to pay for … for what? Was this … life?
He got behind the wheel and shook the dust of that place from his feet.
The chain was down and awaiting his exit when he reached the gate. He went on through with a curt wave, and powered on out to the roadway, ran quick and silent for a thousand or so yards, then pulled off the road and leaned over the seat.
“Bruno! Can you hear me? It’s Bolan. Are you there?”
Very slowly that abused head turned, and the blood-rimmed eyes stared at him without seeing. Seeing something, yeah, but nothing of this world.
The smile was still there.
He gave a rattling sigh, the eyes went glazed, and Bruno very quietly departed.
Jersey Guns Page 9