California Hit (6 page)

The coffee was boiling over on the stove. He took it off.

She wasn't in the bedroom.

The bathroom was empty.

Mary Ching was not there.

The China doll had taken a powder.

So, she'd taken off.

So, what the hell, it was her right. She owed Mack Bolan nothing, he owed her nothing, and the quiet disappearance did not necessarily classify her as one of the enemy.

Of course, though, it could.

A whole host of threatening possibilities were standing there at the edge of Bolan's mind... Mary Ching could very well turn into the greatest threat San Francisco had to offer him.

The only thing that he was certain of was that she had left of her own will. She had not been dragged out of there. She had simply released the safety chain, opened the door, and walked away. All the signs attested to that.

But... had she left there as friend or enemy?

Either way, there was no good reason why he should continue his residency of that Russian Hill apartment. It had served all his purposes, and now it had quite suddenly become more of an ominous liability than an asset.

And, as suddenly, Bolan was very tired. It was a weariness not of the flesh, but of the inner man — and the inner man had just about had it.

It was that special brand of weariness often known by a man who is called upon to stand too tall, for too long a time, and too utterly alone.

If there had just been someone else — anyone else — to whom he could say, "Okay, that's it I've had it for now. You take over for awhile."

There was no one like that.

There was no hole deep enough to hide him for more than a brief moment, no sanctuary to embrace him in safety from the largest manhunt in history — there was no God damned place to go, except out to fight.

And Bolan was sick of the sight and smell of blood.

He was wearied with worrying about all the incidental non-combatants who straggled across his battlefield.

And he was fed up with looking at every other human being as a potential jackal who might rip the flesh off of him.

He was tired of mistrust and suspicion — humbled by the reminder that he was just a man, after all — and thoroughly shaken by the idea that he had an entire city to conquer... and not just any city but this particular city.

So... what the hell. It was just another jungle, after all, San Francisco was.

The same rules applied in every jungle.

Kill that enemy son of a bitch, kill him now before he has a chance to do it to you.

Bolan's stomach rolled, and he instinctively understood what was happening to him. It was one of those defense mechanisms of the soul, one of those alert little angels of the inner being that kept sounding the alarms whenever the animal in there became too large, too strong, and too difficult to handle.

It had happened before.

It would happen again... if he lived that long.

It was a point of crisis, he understood that, a crisis of the inner man. But it wasn't a matter of fear or cowardice; it was simply a deep, deep revulsion of what he was doing, of what he had become.

Puke it up, then. Puke it out of your system, Bolan, and then get back out there and fight.

He'd done it in Korea. He'd done it several times in Vietnam. And he'd been doing it quite regularly ever since Vietnam.

Okay. The enemy had not defeated him yet. The righteous wrath of the law had not defeated him yet. He was damned if he was going to defeat himself.

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together.

That line from T.S. Eliot flashed across Bolan's struggling consciousness, and he knew immediately that his inner man had not yet given up the fight.

Call it a subliminal awareness, or call it the computer-like ability of the human brain to reason effectively, or call it that inner angel — Bolan didn't give a damn what anyone called it.

It had provided his answer, and at a time when he needed one the most. And it was not just an answer to himself. It was an answer, also, to the enemy.

Bolan was not leaning together with anyone.

He stood alone — and, of course, that was the only way to fight his kind of war.

The enemy, though — the enemy were the hollow men, the stuffed men, leaning together.

He would, by God, see how well they could stand alone.

The warwagon had been stowed away under tight security in a rented garage a block away, and it was here that Bolan had gone without further dalliance.

The little Ford Econoline van was outfitted with everything required to wage war. It was, in fact, a rolling arsenal. Bolan was not only a highly trained warrior — he was also a master gunsmith and a munitions expert. He could build weapons, modify them, refine them, and improvise a variety of deadly combinations — and he knew how to put all of them to their best use.

Bolan was, in the literal sense, a one man army. He alone was the strategist, the tactician, the logistician; he was G-2, scout, recon patrol, armorer, medic and warrior.

And it was time to get this war in gear.

Bolan's nights had gone into a surveillance of the China Gardens. But his days had mostly been spent on the roof of the "drop" — in excellent binocular command of the DeMarco mansion. He had watched doors, windows and grounds. He had timed arrivals and departures of visitors and of tradesmen; he had made careful notes of the placements and routines of the palace guard; and he had sketched layouts of the probable floor plans for all three levels of the joint. He knew where and when DeMarco slept; he knew where he ate, and a couple of times he had even known what.

And now he was going to bust that joint.

Not wide open, not all the way. All he wanted at the moment was a visible crack or two here and there in the defenses.

He wanted to show DeMarco how hollow he really was.

The warwagon had a shiny new decal on each side. It was now "Bay Messengers, Inc." — and it had been since a few hours after the arrival in the bay city.

That van had been in the DeMarco neighborhood at least twice each day for the past three days; the driver, a tall man in Levi denims and a white wind-breaker, had even attempted to make a parcel delivery to the DeMarco house; it was a mistake, of course — no one by the name of "Lamancha" lived at that address,

At any rate, the DeMarco palace guard had acquired at least a passing familiarity with Bay Messengers.

And now Bay Messengers was going to give them a chance to get better acquainted.

Bolan got into the denims, pulling them on over his blacksuit, and slipped into the nylon windbreaker. Then he carefully stuck on a false mustache and pulled a billed cap low over his forehead.

Most people, even sharp-eyed mob people, were not too much on faces when things appeared to them out of the usual context. Sure, anyone would recognize the Executioner in his combat blacks. But to most of the world Bolan's face was no more than an artist's sketch seen in newspapers and magazines, and maybe a few times on television — and the human eye tended to identify things by setting, role, and other general characteristics.

Mack Bolan was a master at what he termed "role camouflage." He had developed the art in Vietnam and perfected it in such places as Pittsfield, Palm Springs, New York, and Chicago.

It had not let him down yet.

The choice of weapons was the next consideration.

The Beretta would, of course, be at the top of that list. But he needed a grabber, a heavy punch, something that would not unnecessarily encumber him, something that...

His decision focussed around the newest thing in the Bolan arsenal.

He had field-tested the thing two days earlier, and found it awesome.

It came in a handsome little attache-type case and it was such a new item that factory ammo was not yet available. For this honey, Bolan had taken the time to make his own ammo.

It was called "the .44 Auto Mag" and it was the most powerful going in hand guns. It was three and a half pounds of stainless steel — yeah, stainless steel — and measured overall eleven and a half inches. A guy with a small hand wouldn't want to get involved; it took a big strong hand to cope with the recoil from more than a thousand foot-pounds of muzzle energy, and especially long fingers for a comfortable grip and trigger-squeeze.

The Auto Mag had been designed primarily as a hi-punch hunter's handgun, and she'd drop anything that the heavy rifles would bring down in most big-game situations. Bolan had experimented with different loads, and he'd finally settled for a combination of twenty grains of powder charge behind a 240 grain bullet, for damn near 1400 fps of muzzle velocity and a performance uniformity that was really outstanding.

At twenty-five yards the big bullets tore up a one-inch bull in rapid fire, and with a two-hand stance he'd grouped a full clip of those blitzers into an area the size of a man's heart at a range of one hundred yards.

Amazing, yeah.

It was a hell of an impressive looking weapon, too — all silver with ventilator ribs across the top of the barrel — she looked, in fact, just mean as hell, and this was one of the reasons Bolan selected the Auto Mag for the mission. The psycho warfare was almost as important as the other.

The Beretta was sighted in for a pointblank range of twenty-five yards; Bolan had the Auto Mag worked in for precision targeting at one hundred yards; between the two he figured he had a good one-two punch capability.

And there would be no dangling weapons on shoulder straps, nor any of the usual encumbrances of big-punch arms.

He shoved the Auto Mag into the waistband of his denims and concealed the overhang beneath the wind-breaker.

So... he was ready.

Russian Hill was ready.

Bolan just hoped to hell that Mary Ching would not be found among the enemy.

Either way, Bolan had survived another crisis point.

He was coming out shooting.

Tony Rivoli Jr. was literally born into the DeMarco Family. His father, before him, had been captain of the palace guard through most of the early family history. The elder Rivoli had come west with DeMarco to stake out the virgin territory and he'd been the Don's trusted companion and personal gun during those bitter years of war, intrigue and the establishment of empire.

Big Tony had taken a DeMarco niece as his wife, and Little Tony had always regarded the mansion on Russian Hill as his natural home. He was born in the big oval bedroom on the third floor; later that entire level of the house had been converted into an apartment for the Rivoli sub-family. Little Tony still lived there — alone now, except for the steady parade of San Francisco's finest flesh, whom he managed to smuggle in while the old man slept.

Anna Rivoli, Little Tony's mother, died of natural causes one week following her only child's tenth birthday. Quiet household gossip insisted that she "drank herself to death." Big Tony was killed in a gun battle with a rival outfit in the early fifties, almost two years to the day later.

From that moment forward, Little Tony Rivoli's life had followed a curious pattern. The Don never publicly recognized him as a blood relative. He was always, "My old friend Tony Rivoli's kid... little Tony." But DeMarco had gone through the formalities of having himself legally declared the boy's guardian. He'd given him a home, an education, and later a position in the official household. But there was no warmth between the two, no obvious family ties, and certainly no hint or suggestion that little Tony would one day share in the DeMarco estate.

In fact the old man frequently reminded Rivoli that his "good fortune" depended entirely upon the Don's continued good health.

"That gun there was your papa's best friend, Little Tony," the old man liked to remind him. "It's yours, too, you know. That's the blood between you'n me, and don't you forget it. When I lose the need for your gun, then we've lost our common bond. You better remember that and you better stay on your toes. And you for damn sure better keep me alive as long as you can. 'Cause when I go, Little Tony, every damn thing you got in this world goes with me."

Rivoli was twenty-five when first he heard the whispered story that his father's death had been, perhaps, an unnecessary event. There had been tensions in the official family, rivalries, and a jockeying around for power — pressure from without and stress from within. As the story goes, Don DeMarco had begun to suspect the loyalty of Big Tony — and he had sent his house captain and old friend out on a personal hit purely as a test of that loyalty. And he had sent him into a "set-up" — an ambush from which there was no possibility of return.

Curiously enough, this rumor served only to intensify Little Tony's loyalty to the Don — as though he were trying to prove by his own example that the old man had been wrong about his father. This was supposed to explain why Tony Rivoli Jr. had become the tiger of the DeMarco palace guard. Certain members of the official family had their private reservations about this explanation, and they would quietly express their own ideas about Tony Rivoli's tigerhood to anybody but the tiger himself. Whatever the background, Little Tony was elevated to full captaincy in a formal "blood and kisses" ceremony on the eve of his thirtieth birthday, and he had been the militant spirit of DeMarco House ever since.

Nobody except Don DeMarco now called him "Little Tony" to his face. The tag had become a ridiculous one, anyway. The "House Tiger" stood just under six feet tall and weighed close to two hundred pounds. Hardened gunmen became nervous under his casual stare, and visiting dignitaries treated him with cordial respect.

It was common knowledge among the palace guard that Mr. Rivoli had "a mean streak" — especially concerning his women. He never had any particular woman more than once, and frequently his "victims" were carried out in the dead of night — bloodied and whimpering. Only once had an official complaint been brought against him in this regard, and on this instance the complainant had failed to show up in court. She had, in fact, failed to show up anywhere, ever.

At the time of Mack Bolan's smash into San Francisco, Tony Rivoli was thirty-three years of age, which put the two tigers into roughly the same age group. Bolan was not much taller and no heavier than the Tiger of Russian Hill. Each had come into a certain formidable reputation for ferocity and dedication to a cause. But these similarities met only on the surface of the men.

Mack Bolan's savagery was directed only upon the savages of his society. Tony Rivoli's ferocity seemed to be an inherent part of his inner nature, and it was directed primarily into a defense of savagery as a way of life.

On that morning following the strike against North Beach, Rivoli's tiger force was under full alert. The tiger himself had been up the entire night to personally supervise the defense arrangements, and he greeted the arrival of daylight as an unwelcome intrusion into this highly stimulating game of suspense.

He had been hoping that Bolan would come on in and make a grab for the old man. Nothing in Rivoli's secret fantasies would have provided more entertainment than to have Mack Bolan at his mercy.

Tony Rivoli, of course, did not know the meaning of mercy. It was a nonexistent quality of human relations that strong men grovelled for and ended up screaming for. But it was something which Tony Rivoli had never in his entire lifetime actually dispensed — neither in fact nor in fantasy. In the tiger brain of Tony Rivoli, mercy was simply a fantasy of the weak, and nothing would give him more real pleasure than to reduce Mack Bolan to one of those screaming pulpy lumps of whimpering flesh.

He would take him alive, of course. All of his gunners had been solemnly informed that the man who killed Mack Bolan would get a bullet in each knee. Rivoli wanted the bastard alive — alive and whole and sweating and dreaming of mercy, yet knowing all the while that there would be no mercy.

The defenses had been set up with that very idea in mind. Nothing obvious. Hell no, don't scare the bastard away. Let him think it would be easy — as easy as that hit on Dum-Dum Fasco at the China Gardens. Let him think it would be waltz job, a quick in and a quick out like he'd always had. He would find it a quick in, sure. That's exactly where they wanted him, in. But the only way out would be through Tony's playroom on the third floor — and he would find that a worse way than none at all. Yeah, they'd take the bastard alive, all right.

Had Bolan ever heard of the Tiger of Russian Hill?

Probably not.

Tony Rivoli was a family secret. He had never been in jail, never been questioned by any of those crime commissions or any of that jazz, never been mentioned in the press or "exposed" by those jerk magazines.

No. Bolan the Quick would be expecting the routine, run of the mill sort of palace defense. Like old man DiGeorge had down at Palm Springs. A bunch of punk-ass lads who'd never shot anything but the bull's-eye out of a target, and some tired old men who should've stepped aside years ago.

Bolan the Jerk had never run in on a real Tiger defense.

And the tiger of this hill wasn't tipping his hand to the jerk. He just wished the guy had come on in that night, while everybody was up for the job, while his boys were primed and trembling with the anticipation of bagging the biggest game that ever hit this town. Yeah.

So what the hell. The guy would show. Rivoli was positive that the guy would show. This was the palace, wasn't it? There was no secret about that. The guy would come. He was just being cagey, cautious, keeping them waiting; thinking that maybe the defenses would get too uptight, maybe over-anxious and careless.

Tonight, probably, would be the night. The guy could even try a daylight hit. But in San Francisco? Right here at the top of the town? With two damned cops per square foot all over the place?

Probably not.

Rivoli checked the time. It was a little past eight o'clock. It was daylight. The old man had gone back to bed. How could he go to bed at a time like this? Bolan might be out there somewhere, watching the joint, checking it out. He could be.

Now if the boys just didn't get uptight and...

The Tiger went out through the French doors to the garden-patio and casually circled the grounds. The fog was lifting. It was now holding at about rooftop level, but the air below it was still saturated with moisture, cold, uncomfortable. Miserable goddam crap! The outside boys would be getting stiff and disgruntled if this kept up.

Rivoli made a mental note to make hourly shifts. As unobtrusively as possible, he would have to rotate those boys between the cars and the open-air stakeouts. The inside boys stayed inside, period and bullshit. There would be no juggling around with those hard boys inside.

A police car went by out front, cruising slowly, and the sight of it disrupted the Tiger's chain of thought. He frowned and headed that way. Those jerks would scare the guy off. Imagine, patrolling in a marked cruiser. How dumb could a cop get? Were they trying to scare the guy away?

As he reached the front of the big house, Rivoli noted that a delivery van was standing at the curb down by the service gate, and a guy was coming out of the van with a clipboard under his arm.

Cool it, goddammit, cool it! Don't go slapping that guy up against the fence and frisking him, Christ's sake!

The Tiger hurried forward to personally supervise the reception of the deliveryman, groaning inwardly with the certain feeling that the two gatemen were going to over-react — and that those cops in the cruiser would nose into the act. One thing Tony did not need at this point was cops swarming all over the place and asking a lot of jerky questions.

His worries were apparently an over-reaction within himself, though, and this he discovered as soon as he was within earshot of the service gate.

Apparently the boys knew this guy, this delivery jerk. He was a tall guy wearing Levi's and a white jacket, and Rivoli himself had seen the Bay Messengers truck around the neighborhood. The guy had shoved his hat back away from his forehead, and he was grinning and scratching the bridge of his nose with a pencil.

Jerry the Lover Aspromonte was jawing around with the guy through the closed gate, obviously kidding him about something, and Rivoli caught the scrap of a comment, "... told you the other day, meathead, LaManchas don't live here,"

The guy sort of giggled and told Jerry the Lover, "Aw shit, ain't you ever gonna let me live that down?"

"Shit it ain't my fault you can't read th' fuckin' addresses," Aspromonte was saying when Rivoli got there.

"I got it right this time," the guy insisted, with a pleading glance at the new arrival. "You gonna take the damn package or ain't you?"

Tony Tiger didn't give a damn about this jerk and his small worries. The cop car, sure as hell, had come to a complete halt and the dummies were idling there beside the van and ogling the little exchange at the fence.

Rivoli angrily punched the electronic lock and swung out through the gate, causing the delivery jerk to dance back out of the way. The Tiger crossed the street and leaned into the cruiser.

"You guys need something?" he inquired quietly.

One of the guys in there was a fucking spade. In plain clothes, at that. He showed Tony an ivory smile and told him, "Routine patrol, Mr. Rivoli. Don't you be concerned — we have the entire neighborhood under surveillance."

Where the hell did these guys get off, dropping his name around that way? How did that black bastard know what his name was?

Rivoli muttered, "Why the hell should I be concerned about anything?" He whirled around and crossed back to the other side of the street.

The delivery jerk was standing there, arms crossed over his chest, grinning at him with that fuckin' paisano mustache curling down over his upper lip and into his mouth. He probably sucked on it, he probably liked the taste of hair in his teeth.

Rivoli snarled, "What the hell are you smiling at, guy?"

The smile froze and the jerk just stood there. He mumbled something about just trying to do his job, then he turned back to Jerry the Lover and said, "Hey, take the package, eh?"

"What is this great big worry you got there, guy?" the Tiger growled.

"I got a delivery for a Tony Rivoli, in care of Roman A. DeMarco. It's this address, I got the right address, but this guy won't get serious. He keeps telling me LaManchas don't live here, just because I..."

"Okay okay, whatta you mean you got a delivery? What kind of a delivery?"

"This little package here, that's all."

The jerk was holding it in the palm of his hand. It was square, like maybe a ring box or something done up in brown wrapping paper.

Rivoli saw the police cruiser in the edge of his vision, moving slowly on along the street.

"Who the hell sent it?"

"Well why don't you just take it and maybe you'll know who sent it. Hell I just run the things around, I just drive the damned..."

Tony the Tiger snatched the package out of the guy's hand and moved on inside the fence.

The guy moaned, "Hey I gotta have somebody sign."

"Sign it and give the jerk a buck," the Tiger instructed Jerry the Lover. Then he went on to the front entrance to the house, fuming inwardly over spade cops who dropped his name around like they had a right to or something.

A package?

Who the hell would be sending the Tiger of the Hill a goddamned package? A package of what? In all his thirty-three years, no one had ever sent Tony Rivoli a package of anything. Not even on his birthdays. Not even, by God, on Christmas. It couldn't be a damn bomb, it was too small.

It couldn't be a...

Something froze around Rivoli's heart and his fingers trembled slightly as he tore at the wrapping. Too late he had an impulse to yell back to Jerry the Lover to stop that jerk, to hold him there a minute... the van was already moving along and cornering onto the street at the side of the house.

Yeah. Yeah, it could be, and it was.

It was a marksman's medal, done up real fancy in a jewelry box with a velvet cushion under it.