She retraced her steps and reached the doorway to the office she had just vacated. It was small, belonging to some middle-ranking secretary of Spinoza's from appearances, and it had yielded nothing in her search for information, but right now it was her only sanctuary.
Lucy made it to the door with heartbeats left to spare — and found it locked. She cursed the modern doors that locked themselves each time they closed, and just this once she wished that security had not become such an obsession in the hotel industry.
She turned away, pulse pounding in her ears now that the jumbled voices were almost on top of her. One of them sounded so familiar, somehow, almost... There was no time to make the connection. She was running blindly, biting off a sob that rose unbidden in her throat. There had to be some service stairs around here someplace, had to be some... And she found them, almost stumbling as she veered hard left to reach the doorway marked Emergency. If there had ever been one, Lucy thought, this must be it.
She put her weight against the door, expecting hinges stiff with long disuse, and almost fell through as it opened without resistance. She stumbled through, gasping, and just found the strength to close the door behind her.
She was clear.
She took a backward step... and bumped against the man who had been standing, watching her.
No stifling the cry this time, as Lucy Bernstein turned and recognized the man she had seen earlier with Frank Spinoza, the same face from her ordeal the night before at Bob Minotte's.
Recognition was mutual and his reaction was as coolly, cruelly practiced as a soldier's own conditioned reflex in the heat of combat. He took a closer step, the smile etched deep into his face like marks on marble. She saw his fist coming, knew that it was hurtling toward her jaw, and yet she found herself unable to avoid the blow.
Lucy Bernstein's head impacted on the concrete wall behind her and the darkness of the stairwell swallowed her alive.
* * *
Abe Bernstein paused outside the doorway of the Gold Rush presidential suite and took the time to brush imaginary lint off of his coat lapels. He wanted to look perfect for the party, give the New York imports something to remember in the final fleeting seconds of their lives. Finally satisfied, he knocked three times, not loudly, but with firm authority. The sound would carry, and he knew that they were in there, having checked in the several crew chiefs himself. There would be five of them, not counting their commander who had driven off with Paulie Vaccarelli and the hit team. Five of them with guns and the experience to use them — if they got the chance.
"What is it?" Curt, discourteous and spoken through the door, as if they had been talking to some newsboy peddling his papers.
"Room service," Bernstein told the faceless voice, struggling to keep contempt and anger from his tone. Compliments of the management.
As he spoke, he stepped back from the doorway, making room for the three mercenaries to form a semicircle at the entrance of the suite, their silenced Ingram machine pistols already primed and leveled from the waist.
Inside, the nameless crew chief was still fumbling with the lock, then he had it, stepping out to greet them in his shirt-sleeves, one hand resting on a hip beneath his shoulder holster. And the guy was good, but nowhere close to as good as he thought he was. The little backward step was adequate, the shouted warning excellent, but there was simply no way that his best fast-draw could beat the combined firepower of the three Ingrams. Savage streams of nearly silent fire converged upon him, punching through the fabric of his shirt and letting loose a crimson flood as he was blown away.
The mercenaries entered in a rush, still firing, taking out the other four crew chiefs as they were trying to respond on several seconds warning.
None of them was up to it, although the last one, lurching from the bathroom with an automatic in his hand came closest to achieving some success. He actually got off a shot before two Ingrams sliced and diced him with converging figure eights and draped him back across the leaking water bed.
Bernstein watched from the doorway approvingly, as his commandos brought the bodies all together in the middle of the room and rolled them one by one onto the plastic shower curtain taken from the bathroom. There would be some staining of the carpet even so, and most of it would have to be replaced wherever they encountered opposition, but he wrote it off to the anticipated costs of renovating the hotel.
The Gold Rush was being remodeled, and very soon it would be opening again under the new-old management of its creator. Some new carpeting and wallpaper would help create the aura of a born-again establishment.
"All right, let's go," he snapped, once again consulting the Rolex. "We can't afford to fall behind."
They had three other suites to go before the main event with Frank Spinoza, making sure that he did not have any troops at his beck and call. It was unlikely that the single pistol shot had registered with any of their targets down the hall. But even if they still possessed the slim advantage of surprise, there was no time to waste. Abe Bernstein meant to have his cleanup finished when the sun came up behind old Sunrise Mountain to the east of town. He meant for this new day to find him in control of the city he had done so much to shape and build.
It was a long time overdue, and he refused to wait an extra moment longer than he absolutely had to.
It was time, and past time, for cleaning house. And now that he had started, nothing in the world would slow him down.
Abe Bernstein had a job to do, ordained by fate, and he was working on it with a vengeance.
* * *
Mack Bolan made a drive-by of the Gold Rush, picking out the uniformed security on front and side entrances, noting their numbers and their armament. He sensed that they were bogus, knew it with a certainty when one guard stepped inside and let him glimpse an automatic rifle standing just inside the smoked-glass doors. Still he did not want a confrontation with them there, where innocent civilians might be inadvertently sucked into the cross fire.
He drove around the block and parked his rental in an alleyway behind a liquor store just down the street. Another moment to select and stow his arms, and then he hiked back, taking about thirty seconds to reach the service entrance off Fremont Street.
And they were waiting for him, naturally. He saw them from a half block away, two men in sky-blue uniforms proclaiming them to be Gold Rush security. The mismatched weapons in their holsters told him they were private — still professional, but lacking care for detail and appearances. As he approached the soldier kept one hand inside the wide slit pocket of his topcoat, wrapped around the Beretta's grip. His finger curled around the trigger in anticipation, and the full weight of the silent weapon in his grasp was reassuring, almost comforting.
A warrior came to trust his weapons, to rely upon them as he might upon a trusted friend. Right now, the lethal 93-R was in good hands — and so was the Executioner.
The guards had noted his approach and they moved out to head him off. Some brief exchange was whispered softly between them, lost to Bolan's ears.
No matter, he did not need to hear them. He was deep inside their minds, anticipating any move they might make. He knew they would block him, standing shoulder to shoulder across the narrow service entrance when he tried to step around them. On the left, one of them raised a hand, palm outward, with the other resting ominously on his holstered sidearm, like a warning.
"Sorry, sir. We're closed."
"Try back next week," the other one chimed in. "Right now we got some union trouble."
Bolan's smile was icy, but the men were busy looking elsewhere and they never saw it, concentrating as they both were on the hand that poked out of his open topcoat, rising into view and bringing with it silent death. They saw the weapon simultaneously, each man peeling off in opposite directions with a single practiced motion, going for their weapons, maybe knowing they could never hope to make it.
He took the tall one first, a single measured squeeze dispatching silent death to close the gap be
tween them, a parabellum mangler opening his cheek beneath one eye and boring through to find the brain. The guy kept going through his paces, traveling without a conscious object now, colliding with the wall and then rebounding in a boneless mass across the doorway.
By the time he hit cement, the sentry's partner was a fading memory, wet pieces of himself adhering to the window and the wall behind him where Bolan's single round had exited behind one ear. He sat down hard, no longer reaching for the pistol that was still secure inside his holster. Bolan checked the alley once again in each direction, taking time to drag the bodies ten feet from the doorway and depositing them together in a waiting dumpster.
They would be there when the trucks from Silver State Disposal came to get them with the other garbage in the morning.
Two down, and how many left to go?
The Executioner had no way of determining the answer in advance, and even if he had been able to predict the odds against him it would not have made a qualitative difference in his actions. He was here to fight, to spread the cleansing fire among his enemies, and he would carry out that mission whether five guns or five hundred waited for him in the Gold Rush, right.
The Executioner was not a gambler, normally. He much preferred to make his moves on the basis of reconnaissance and hard intelligence, but sometimes there was only time for action.
Like now.
He would be gambling this time, with the highest stakes that any man possessed — his life. But more than that, if he should lose, it would be victory for the cannibals and a defeat for everything that Bolan cherished.
He was up against the house odds, but there were ways around those odds. A skillful player with the guts to stand up and defy the house could sometimes break the bankroll and come out a winner. Someone with the guts of a warrior. An Executioner, perhaps. H e slipped inside the service entrance, shedding his topcoat to reveal the armament he wore beneath it, moving boldly toward the main casino now.
Mack Bolan's life was riding on the line, and he was playing out the only hand available. It was a death hand, right, and for the moment he was dealing.
18
Spinoza faced the woman across his desk, reading the fear in her eyes and knowing he could use that fear against her, given time. She would say anything, do anything he asked her to when he was finished with her.
Given time.
But time was one commodity that he was running short of, and the others with him in the room — Liguori, Johnny Cats, and Tommy Dioguardi, from Minotte's family — were taking every opportunity to let him know of their impatience.
They were chafing at the bit, unsettled by the news from Kuwahara's. Paulie and the gunners from New York had run into a storm out there, and from all reports the few of them who walked away from it were looking at six-figure bail, for openers. It would take time to get them out — the ones who were not hospitalized already — and meantime the chieftains who were gathered at the Gold Rush had begun to feel exposed, unprotected. Spinoza was not worried.
There were still some forty guns at the hotel, and even if that bastard Kuwahara was alive, he would be tied up with the cops until they sorted out the shooting down in Paradise. If he was still alive, Spinoza meant to find it out and have a hot reception waiting for him when he made his bail, damn right. A welcome-home party that the little Nip would long remember.
As for the woman.
It was disturbing, Dioguardi's story of her showing up at Bob Minotte's just before the raid that took the Southern capo's life. She did not have the lethal look about her, but Spinoza had learned never to take anything for granted when it came to life and death. He put no faith at all in blind coincidence, and that meant she had a reason for her presence at Minotte's, and now here, in the Gold Rush.
Whatever that purpose might be, he meant to find it out within the hour. By any means necessary.
"All right, let's try it one more time," he said. "I want your name, the reason that you're here... and after this is settled, we can all relax. You can go home."
"Like hell..." Liguori started to intrude, but Frank Spinoza raised a hand and cut him off.
"Excuse my friends," he said, forcing a smile. "They're just a bit excited — and they don't take kindly to trespassers, eavesdroppers... that kind of thing."
The woman sat mute, just staring back at him, and underneath the fear, there was something else — a kind of grim determination, maybe, that told Spinoza to expect resistance.
Fine.
He had encountered stubborn types before, and where persuasion failed, the application of strategic force was often more effective. Spinoza reached inside his top desk drawer, drew out the Browning automatic and set it on the desk between them with its muzzle pointed in the woman's direction.
"Now. I understand you're scared," he told her. "And you've got good reason. If I don't get answers from you pretty quick... well, I can't be responsible for what might happen to you."
"I've got nothing to say," she informed him, her voice small and quaking. "You're holding me against my will. That's kidnapping. I'll stack that against a trespass charge any day, so go ahead and call the police."
"When I'm ready." Spinoza felt his smile going, but could not retrieve it in time. "First thing, I'm going to have those answers."
Silence once again and another toss of the head that set her hair in dancing motion all around her face.
"Goddamn it, Frank..."
"Shut up, Larry. Leave this to me."
And he could feel the others staring at him in amazement, wondering where he found the guts to talk that way to other capos, but Spinoza was no longer worried about their reactions. He raised the pistol, circling the desk to stand before the woman, and bent down, his face mere inches from her own.
"I'll ask you one more time," he said, and there was no mistaking the menace in his tone.
"Go to hell."
He hit her with his open palm, the shock of it exploding up his arm with stunning force. Her head rocked back, blood spurting from her nose, and when she opened her eyes again she had the dazed expression of a shell-shock victim. Frank Spinoza gave her time to clear her head before he stuck the pistol in her face and cocked the hammer.
"One last time," he told her now. "I want some answers and you'd better be convincing." He was giddy with the power of the moment, knowing that he could do anything he wanted to with this one. He could blow her head off, throw her on the desk and take her then and there with all the others watching... anything.
The others.
When he finished with the woman, he had plans for them as well. There would be rounds enough inside the Browning's magazine for everyone. A clean sweep, sure, and too long overdue.
The capo of Las Vegas smiled, a reptile's grimace, full of hunger unfulfilled.
* * *
Bolan cleared the service area and made his way in the direction of the large casino proper, moving cautiously, scanning the corridors to either side of him. He held the Mini-Uzi ready, waiting to respond to any hostile challenge, knowing that the savages were all around him now. The problem would be finding them, rooting them out and destroying them without walking into an ambush.
And he found them thirty feet along the corridor as he was passing by an office doorway with the legend Private painted on it. As he passed the door it swung open and a startled face confronted him, mouth working silently for several seconds as the brain attempted to translate its silent warning into sound.
The guy recovered instantly at sight of Bolan's rising Uzi. He leaped backward, slamming the door behind him and fumbling with the locking mechanism. And he had his voice back now, alerting anyone in earshot to the danger of an armed intruder in their midst. Bolan stitched a burst across the flimsy door, then hit it with a flying kick that tore the lock apart, following through into a diving shoulder roll. He caught a glimpse of hardman number one slumped back against a filing cabinet, clutching at the bloody ruin of his punctured abdomen. Others were unloading on him
now with handguns, and he let the dying take care of themselves.
Two of them were crouched behind a massive metal desk, taking turns at popping up to fire in his direction. A third was holed up in a tiny back room that appeared to serve as combination lounge and storeroom. Bolan pinned the two desk gunners down with probing fire and scuttled backward to the cover of another unattended desk that faced their sanctuary from across the room.
It was a weak position, right, with space beneath the desk for ricochets to find him if they started thinking straight instead of firing out of reflex. Worse, they had the chance to pin him down until sufficient reinforcements could arrive to rush him.
The Executioner would have to move swiftly if he meant to stay alive. Another moment might be all the time he had.
Bolan sprang a frag grenade from his combat harness, pulled the pin and let it fly, already counting down. The pitch was perfect, even under fire, deflecting off metal filing cabinets to drop down behind the desk, between the hostile gunners in their little foxhole.
"What the..." And that was all before the blast eclipsed their screaming voices, toppling the desk and spreading both of them across the walls like lumpy red wallpaper. A piece of shrapnel clipped the wounded gunner where he stood transfixed for a moment.
Then he slid into the graceless sprawl of death.
Three down and number four was screaming in his little pantry hideaway, half-blinded by the smoke and deafened by the harsh concussion of the blast. He lost it, lurching up and out of cover, firing blindly as he cleared the narrow doorway with no more idea of where his target was than if he had been shooting at the moon.
Bolan tracked him through the doorway, stroking off a three-round burst that picked the gunner off his feet and twisted him around, a human corkscrew, airborne, sprawling back across the smoking desk.
Before the body finished twitching, the Executioner was up and out of there, already moving back along the corridor to the casino, searching for the action. And it was just ahead of him, the Executioner could hear it now, the jangle of the play replaced now by the pop and crackle of small-arms fire.
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