Bolan knew it, without even touching the guy or chasing a pulse.
He resettled himself behind the wheel, shook away the emotions that were clutching at him and threatening to overcome, and he went on to pick up Sara.
She responded immediately to his signal, and when she came running up, he quickly told her, “Get in and don’t look behind you, Sara. Look at me, at me.”
But she was already getting in, and already her gaze had been drawn magnetically to what was in the rear, so visible in the illumination automatically provided by the interior lights; and she came unglued halfway into the vehicle, that tender jaw dropping in a grotesque scream-without-sound, horrified eyes locked onto that which was there.
Bolan grabbed her and pulled her on in, and held her close against him as he put vital numbers between them and that insane hardsite back there, and she shivered and groaned against him, choking on her own spittle as she fought the very strong need to scream her head off.
Some miles and some roads farther on, Bolan pulled over and stopped the car and took her in his arms to soothe her, and he told her, “That thing back there is not your brother, Sara. It is an illusion left behind by something that doesn’t need it any longer. Don’t worry. Bruno is okay. He died living … in heaven.”
Yes.
But some other dudes were not okay, and Bolan meant to see that they died living in hell, where they belonged.
The manila packet he’d left for Mike Talifero contained nothing but a marksman’s medal.
Mike would know what it meant.
The Executioner would be returning to Boots and Bugle.
17 FREE AND CLEAR
The night had become time-worn. Bolan and the girl had found another, final, opportunity for the trading of words, ideas, and mutual comforts—a poor substitute, Bolan averred, for life itself—and now they had arrived at a specially arranged rendezvous with a private ambulance from Trenton.
He parked the crew wagon across the rear door of the ambulance. Two white-jacketed attendants hurried out—well cued on their mission, what to expect, how to handle it.
Bolan stepped from the Cadillac and pulled the girl out on his side.
An attendant gazed at him for a second over the hood of the vehicle and remarked, “So you’re the guy.”
“Just one of them”, Bolan replied.
“Sure. I meant … I never expected to see you. Not living and breathing, that is.”
Bolan smiled tightly and assured the guy, “I’m doing both. Take good care of my friend, eh?”
“You know it. Uh, good luck. You know.”
“I know,” Bolan replied quietly. He pulled Sara aside and told her, “We keep saying good-bye. Let’s say hello for a change.”
“Mack, I … I’m not trying to stake a claim but … if you’re ever hurt and bleeding again … well, you know the place.”
He said, “Sure.” Then: “Sara. The hundred thousand I left with Bruno. I’m sure he stashed it somewhere inside the house. It’s free money, Sara. Belongs to nobody, and all the blood has been purged from it. I don’t need it. I pick it up as I do. Use it. Hear? Use it.”
She dropped her eyes and replied, “I … I don’t …”
“Think of it as insurance money if you’d like, or as a reparation of war. It was the mob’s money. I can’t think of a better—”
All in a rush she protested, “Mack, there are so many important things to talk about, let’s not talk about that.”
He said, “Yes, but I’ve brought nothing but hell into your life, Sara. I’d like—”
“You’ve brought life, where before there wasn’t any. Bruno would agree with that. I know he would. He’d been a … a zombie ever since …”
He smiled solemnly and said, “Okay. Let’s leave it there.”
The guys had Bruno on a stretcher, and covered, and were carrying him to the ambulance. Even these hardened pros were wearing sick faces.
Bolan told the girl, “It’s time.”
The guy called over, “You ride up front with us, miss.”
She replied, “Thank you. But I think I … I’d rather have the time to say good-bye to my brother.”
Bolan gently suggested, “Instead, tell him hello, Sara.”
“Yes, I … guess that would be more appropriate, wouldn’t it.”
He said, “I guess so.”
The guy was holding the rear door for her.
She climbed inside, then turned back for a final look. “Good-bye, Mr. Bolan,” she said in a trembly voice. “Stay hard, you hear?”
He smiled, solemnly, regretfully, and he replied, “Thanks, little mother. You too.”
The door closed, and a moment later another precious segment of Mack Bolan’s life was pulling away from him.
Bruno Tassily and his sister, Sara, were now, however—each in their own way—in the very best of hands.
Those two white-jacketed “attendants” were actually United States federal marshals, on volunteer “quiet duty.”
They would see that Sara had nothing further to worry about from the fiends of Jersey.
And now Bolan was free.
Free of responsibility, of obligation to anyone but himself, in this still very deadly jungle called Jersey.
Not, however, free to run.
Mack Bolan had run his last yard across Jersey soil.
One more brief appointment, a few miles along this road, with one Leo Turrin. And then, yes, Mack Bolan was going to show the Jersey guns what one free man could do, when he really wanted to.
He was going to show them with a smash right up their middle.
The Executioner was now free to make war.
And let the universe tremble where it would.
“It’s a mistake, Sarge.”
“Is it?”
“You know it. You stand to lose everything. While gaining nothing.”
“It’s not a game of gain and lose, Leo.”
“Call it what you want, but it’s nutty. Mike Talifero has gone completely crazy. With his own hand he shot four boys right between the eyes for letting you waltz in there and take over that way.”
“So we’re both crazy. That defines the game, doesn’t it?”
“There’s nothing I can say to change your mind, is there?”
“Not a thing, Leo.”
“Damnit, he already had a hundred guns on that place. Now he’s calling them all in, from all over Jersey.”
“Fine. I like them in bunches. They get in each other’s way. Is Augie still there?”
“So far as I can determine, yes. That’s one reason Mike had such a violent reaction. You made an ass of him in the presence of his lord and master.”
“Did you come down in Augie’s plane?”
“Hell no. I came under my other hat. Augie was already here when you called.”
“So that was him.”
“Who, what?”
“Mike had gone to an airstrip to meet ‘someone big’ while I was there.”
“Okay, yeah. That would be the little private field three miles south of the hardsite.”
“Who owns that joint, Leo? The hardsite, Boots and Bugle.”
“Some local. No connection. But he knows the color of the money he’s getting. He has rented to them before.”
“Okay. Just stay clear, Leo. Go back the other way.”
“Sure. I’ll be in Trenton. Hal, too.”
“You give me two hours, damnit. Two hours!”
“I’d rather not give you two minutes. You know that. And if Hal—”
“Okay, let’s lay it flat. I’m collecting a debt. Tell him I said that. I’m collecting from him.”
Turrin shifted about in obvious discomfort. “He knows that, Mack.”
“Okay. I don’t like it this way either, Leo. Nothing asked, nothing expected, that’s the best way. But this time it’s special. No writs or clouted courts for those guys, not this time. I’ve got to flatten that joint.”
Turrin sighed. “For the sak
e of a dead man.”
“For the sake of men not yet dead,” Bolan icily corrected him.
“Sure, I get you.”
“And for my own sake.”
“I get that, too.” Turrin was smiling his solemn smile. “So give ’em one for me, Sarge.”
They each smiled that special smile of two men who thoroughly know each other, and they shook hands, and then Mack Bolan returned to the wars, free and clear, with all goals clearly defined.
18 TALIFERI
All of the crew bosses were assembled in the dining room at Boots and Bugle.
Each of these was a full-time officer in the Taliferi. Every man in the Taliferi was an officer, a rank-holder. These were the elite of the outfit, of all the outfits. There were no “button men” or “street soldiers” in the national police force of the mob.
Their allegiance was claimed by no one Mafia family, though they came, in their origins, from all of them. Now they served the idea, the thing itself, La Cosa Nostra, that bodiless yet terribly effective alliance for larceny which held all the Mafia families together as one. And which, in turn, held together as one all the organized-crime outfits on the American continent.
The Taliferi were, to the dark world, what the FBI represented to the fifty United States. But that is a poor comparison. Put the FBI under the total control of a despotic President and his cabinet, answering to none other, and the comparison would be more realistic.
The identical-twin brothers, Pat and Mike Talifero, between themselves technically constituted the entire Taliferi. They were the Commissione’s men, and the Commissione comprised the ruling heads of the individual Mafia families. Pat and Mike served this body, as their hard arm, their “voice of authority.”
Pat or Mike could hit a capo, it was said, on their own authority, for specified high crimes against the thing, only. But it was said that the two were empowered to act in such matters without prior approval of the ruling council (each of whom was a capo) if it could later be shown (to the satisfaction of the surviving capi) that their action was justified.
This is a terrible power to be placed in the hands of any human being, especially when it was being placed there by the persons who would be most directly affected by the use of that power.
The story was probably true, nevertheless. The Taliferi had done that very thing on two separate occasions during the Bolan wars; that is, executed one of their own bosses, on their own say-so.
And this is perhaps the best illustration of the incredible machinations of the world of the Mafia. A world peopled by violent and greedy men, living an ethic which Bolan characterized as “psychopathic,” so fearful and distrustful of one another that they authorized and erected a personal “doomsday device” to ensure fealty to one another.
This is tantamount to the U.S. Supreme Court hiring itself an executioner to assassinate on the spot any of its members suspected of misconduct.
It was not a world of reasonable men, this world of the Mafia.
Therefore, the Talifero brothers were, it seemed, a necessary ingredient of any practical “alliance” of competitive families.
And they did compete. The primary purpose of the alliance was to arbitrate the inevitable disputes arising from the division of criminal spoils and, of course, to put forth a united front to guard against encroachment by other ambitious organizations. La Commissione was at once a Board of Trade, a House of Representatives, a Supreme Court, a Department of State, a Labor Department, and a Department of Defense.
And the Taliferi were their teeth.
Long ago the brothers had begun delegating their authority to sharp up-and-coming youngsters in the various families. Like any government function, the bureaucratic spread grew as the job grew, and the job grew as the bureaucracy flourished and sought new tasks to justify its existence.
For some time now the Taliferi had been a national gestapo, replacing the old Murder, Inc. head-shed of the early years, wielding a power like no “family” had ever dreamed of.
But it was, in essence, a family in its own right.
It was a family of “elite” cutthroats, many of them fairly well educated and polished, but cutthroats nevertheless.
And the family of the elite was in session at the Boots and Bugle on this fated night in New Jersey.
Their co-capo, Mike Talifero, was presiding.
Brother Pat was still recuperating from grevious and near-fatal wounds received in the Executioner’s Vegas rumble.
Greatfather Augie Marinello, reputed “boss of all the bosses”—which simply meant that he was the most influential and feared member of La Commissione—was also present, though almost in a capo emeritus status.
Little actual information is recorded on the Talifero brothers. That they were brothers was obvious—they were identical twins—but even the name itself was suspect. Perhaps it is significant that it is a blending of two Italian words: tale meaning “such” and ferro, “iron.”
Mike was thought to be about forty years old, certainly no more than that. He was of Sicilian origin, and rumors had him a tenth-generation mafioso. He had originally come into the outfit, it appears, under the sponsorship of Marinello—at that time an underboss in the New York family which he now ruled.
There had been a time when the Talifero brothers rarely smiled. Since Miami, though, and that terribly dismal first encounter with Mack Bolan’s mind-blowing brand of blitzing warfare, the brothers had been given to smiling and laughing it up quite a bit. Those closest to them knew, too well, that Pat and Mike were in their most deadly moods when they were smiling and laughing it up.
Tonight Mike was smiling a lot and treating the boys to quite a few laughs as he briefed them on the plan for the night.
Twelve tried-and-true men were in his congregation, the elite of all the elite, and they had been brought to Jersey specifically to collect Mack Bolan’s hated head.
Each of those present was, at the moment, bossing a crew of ten to fifteen “free-lance” guns—small-time hoods scooped from the streets of Manhattan and north Jersey and pressed into this emergency service. These “soldiers” were not members of the brotherhood. Some were blacks, some were white Anglos, some were Puerto Rican and Irish Catholic and Jewish and whatever else could be bought by the week for the business end of a gun.
There is no national origin to crime.
It comes in every form and guise. The 99.9 percent of good people in the Italian-American community cannot be held to blame if some of their number seem to have a genius for organization and if some of those found a way to make crime pay.
But this was a Mafia party, let none wonder about it; the Mafia does exist, and it appeared to be alive and well in New Jersey on that night of nights at the makeshift hardsite at Boots and Bugle.
It was a council of war.
And the Taliferi were ready and waiting for a certain son-of-a-bitch to show his tail around that place once more, just once more on that hellish night of all nights in the life of smiling Mike Talifero.
19 APOLOGIA
He made a soft run to the rear of the property, circling in across adjacent farmlands on a cross-country approach, running dark and quiet until finally reaching a stand of trees which marked the property lines.
It was shortly past midnight.
Incredibly, twenty-four short hours earlier he had lain sleeping in the loft of the Tassily brooder house, recuperating in a forced détente. He had lived, it seemed, several lifetimes since then.
Already in Jersey he had killed more men than even a dedicated executioner cared to contemplate. But Mack Bolan did not count the dead, not the enemy dead. Body counts had meaning only as applied to the living ones.
And that was the purpose of this initial mission.
He had to go in there and count them, locate them, classify them, assess their strong and weak points, establish an angle of attack, determine objectives … and figure out a way to get out of there once the battle was ended to his satisfaction.
&
nbsp; Mack Bolan was not a wild-ass warrior.
Hell-fire and thunderation were his trademark, yes, but his blitzers were usually undertaken with cool military preparedness.
He was not anxious to die; willing, perhaps, if that was the way the numbers fell. But he would work those numbers to every possible personal advantage. Victory, for Mack Bolan, was measured not in points of time or as triumphant events; victory in war for the Executioner meant remaining alive to wage war.
He left the crew wagon in the trees and stripped himself to the black suit, forsaking all weapons except stiletto and garrote.
Then he gooped his hands and face and moved out, a fleeting shadow of the darkness, a silent sigh of the night, a mere “observer” at the edge of creation.
Moments later he was inside the enemy compound, moving catlike through the tall grass at the fence line.
When he moved, it was swiftly; when he paused, it was almost cataleptic in its abrupt cessation of all sound and movement.
On a soft penetration, Bolan became to all effects a part of the landscape, one with the universe enveloping him, in complete harmony with the non-life elements.
As the wind rustled through the grasses, so did Bolan.
As shadows leaped with scudding clouds or moving branches, so did Bolan.
And when the universe held still for a moment, so too did Bolan.
The asphalt and concrete boys of the urban jungles were clearly disadvantaged in this game with this child of the universe. Bolan was “at home” here; it was his sort of jungle, and the night was his bosom companion.
So it is no discredit to the street soldiers from Manhattan and Newark, Jersey City, and Brooklyn that the man from thunder moved undetected through their midst, studying their movements and divining their defenses, reading their fears and anxieties, exposing their weaknesses and contemplating their strengths.
He “sectored” them, and made “grid overlays” in the retentive web of his combat consciousness.
He “psyched” them, and made mental combat notes on how best to capitalize on the natural inclinations of this motley army of mercenary ragtags.
Jersey Guns Page 10