California Hit (7 page)

The nerve! The nerve of that cocky bastard to send it to him to give to... The coldness pressed harder upon the Tiger's heart as he realized that no, no, it wasn't addressed to the old man at all, it was addressed in care of the old man... the goddam thing was meant for Tony Rivoli himself!

Where did the wise bastard get his name? Where was everybody suddenly coming up with the Tiger's name, Christ's sake!

Rivoli whirled about to shout an instruction to the two gatemen, but the words stuck in his throat. Heavy black smoke was billowing up over there, totally obscuring that area of the yard, and he could not even see the damned gate or Jerry the Lover or the other boy or anything but the damned smoke.

In just one fucking second?

Shit, he was hitting! In broad daylight and with cops prowling all around, the nervy bastard was hitting.

Rivoli raced into the yard to give the signal to the upstairs boy, the signal which would be relayed to all the outside boys, to bring them in quietly into a ring of steel around that house, around the whole neighborhood, to seal the smart bastard inside, to cut away all of his running room and even his walking room, to grind him surely and securely within the confines of that house on the hill, and to begin his education into the fantasies of mercy.

And then the Tiger ran on into the smokescreen, to see what the hell had become of the boys at the gate, and to continue wondering why the bastard had sent the mark of death to him — why him? — why the Tiger instead of the Capo?

Despite smarting eyes and bursting lungs, Rivoli found the smoke bomb and hurled it across the street. He also found the two boys lying in their own blood, great gaping holes between their eyes, and he found the electric gate standing wide open.

The Tiger staggered clear of the suffocating chemicals and made a run for the front porch. Then he saw the same crap coming up all along that fence, saw it billowing and drifting in a solid cover toward the house itself, saw the new bombs erupting in close sequence and in the exact pattern the goddam Bay Messengers van had taken — and Tony Rivoli began right then and there to re-examine his own fantasies.

The mark of death had come to him.

The guy had delivered it personally, and had stood there smiling at him, laughing at him inside — that guy with the paisano mustache in the Levi's was Mack Bolan!

That heavy coldness at the top of Tony Rivoli's heart was the hand of death. He knew it. The guy was there, and he'd come to kill the defender, not the lord of the manse, and the Tiger of the Hill was not at all certain now that he'd set the proper defenses for a hit like that.

Hell no, he wasn't sure at all.

"Shoot to kill!" he screamed at the top of his lungs. "Forget the other stuff! God damn you, all of you, shoot to kill!"

It was to be a sad lesson in fantasies for Tony the Tiger Rivoli.

Bolan left the van and the excess clothing at the south corner, and he came in with the smoke, over the fence and onto the grounds — a gas-masked, black-clad, striding apparition of doom with a single idea in mind.

It was another numbers game, and he would have to hit and git with no unnecessary messing around, or else he would have the law breathing down his withdrawal route.

He crossed the garden-patio and lobbed a fragmentation grenade into a choked and gasping babble of confused voices near the corner of the building; under the cover of that explosion he kicked the French doors open and moved inside with the Auto Mag at the ready. He left the doors open and the smoke came in with him, moving quickly ahead of him and spreading rapidly in an ever-extending blanket of cover.

Thudding feet and an almost hysterical panting signalled the approach of at least two defenders from the front reaches of the house. Someone nearby gasped, "Jeez, get over there and see if those doors are open! The fuckin' place is filling up with smoke!"

Another voice cried, "Bullshit, what was that explosion? I ain't going out there until I know what..."

Then Bolan loomed up from within the swirling smoke, and the two gawked at him in frozen immobility while the Auto Mag roared its throaty message of massive destruction. The two gunners died on their feet while considerable areas of their assaulted anatomy sought a place to settle from the explosively expanding push of the big 240 bullets.

Bolan stepped over the bodies and went on toward the grand stairway, a curving nineteenth century masterpiece of mahogany and marble.

Several someones up-above pumped a wild volley of shots along his path. Again he gave voice to the impressive Auto Mag, in rapid fire, splintering the vertical rungs of a railing up there and sending a fine cloud of powdered plaster drifting along that upstairs hallway.

Someone up there groaned, "Gee-Zus Christ!" and the sound of scurrying feet told Bolan that he had them on the run.

He was well along the stairs and feeding a new clip into the Auto Mag when another guy came running in from the foyer.

The guy yelled, "Hey what?.." And then he saw the thing in black on the stairway.

This one's reflexes were working better than the others Bolan had encountered thus far, and a long-barreled .38 revolver was tracking up the stairs and suddenly making a mess of the polished mahagony.

At that distance the guy should not have been missing, but Bolan made allowances for an excited overeagerness, and he covered the guy's embarrassment with 240 grains in the teeth. The gunner's whole head seemed to cave in and fly away. Bolan continued his rush up the stairway.

Another revolver roared and a bullet buried itself into the wall behind his head as he reached the top. He saw a door rapidly open and close at the far end of the hall and — just beyond that — he spotted the window he was looking for.

The lower edge of a brooding layer of cloud strata — the condition they called fog in the bay city — was lying just above that window. Below it and trapped, there was a densely churning atmosphere of chemical smoke — a condition called personnel cover in the war zones — and Bolan meant to invite it in.

He sent a single shot crashing into the windowglass. It shattered. The Executioner held his position commanding the stairway and patiently waited for the friendly atmosphere to come inside.

An agitated voice down below was announcing to other cautious presences, "He's upstairs I guess, yeah, with a fuckin' cannon or something, I don't know what. Lookit Joey there, just lookit 'im."

"Well where's Mr. Rivoli?" asked another quivering voice.

"I think he's upstairs covering Don DeMarco," the other one obligingly revealed.

The Executioner smiled grimly behind his mask, and a two hundred pound package of sudden death merged with the atmosphere of doom and moved unhurriedly into the choking no-man's-land of that upper hallway.

It would have been much simpler, sure, if he'd just taken the guy while he was down there at the gate. But simplicity was not the name of the game.

The idea was to show Big Daddy DeMarco how vulnerable, how utterly defenseless, how hollow he really was.

And once the idea had sunk in that he had no one else to lean against, then maybe. . .

Yeah, Bolan was betting his very blood on it. Don DeMarco would want to lean with Mr. King.

And the Executioner would be content with nothing less.

It was not his idea of fun to terrorize a tired old man of seventy-two. But Roman DeMarco, of course, was not any ordinary old man. With an iron hand he still commanded an empire built of terror and intimidation, savagery and murder — and he could yet turn out to be a formidable foe.

But Bolan would shake this whole damn town apart, if that was what it took.

And he meant to pin a marksman's medal to Mr. King's forehead, whoever and wherever he was. He meant to pin it there with a 240 grain Auto Mag express.

But first... he had to rattle the house on Russian Hill.

He had to bag himself a tiger, and at the very foot of the throne. He knew precisely where to look.

Sgt. Bill Phillips of the Brushfire Squad was speaking calmly into the radio hookup with his Command Central. "Mark it Hotel Eight on the grid and consider it a positive. It's the DeMarco place on Russian Hill, and if it's not a full assault, then it's at least a probe of some type. He's got them covered up with smoke and — belay that, it's no probe, round one of the artillery war just started. Let's make it a ringer-dinger. Better get some firefighting units up here also."

The voice of the Captain snapped back in a clear staccato. "We're deploying on the grid. Give this character plenty of room, Bill, don't crowd him. Now that's an order."

"Yessir." Phillips sighed and hung up the mike, then he smiled faintly at his white partner. "What he means is, don't blow it," he said quietly.

"He means don't get your head blown off, eager beaver," the other cop replied, chuckling.

"Yeah, well, whatever," Phillips said. He drew his revolver and carefully checked it, then put it away. "They'll be on grid in about two minutes."

The patrolman nodded. "If they get lucky."

"The guy could be halfway to the Golden Gate by then."

A series of booming reports issued from the big house.

The Sergeant's partner grinned and he said, "Not from the sound of that. I'd say he's run into a slight delay."

The black cop lifted a gas mask from the equipment rack. He opened his door and stepped into the street.

The other man said, "Now Bill... dammit..."

"I'm just going to cover the front," the Sergeant assured his partner. "Stay with the vehicle." He donned the mask, drew his revolver, and ran toward the booming sounds of open combat.

The black man from Brushfire was going to have himself at least a little piece of World War III.

Bolan opened the door and stepped quickly back, allowing the smoke to precede him into the anteroom of the master suite. Two gunners came staggering out almost immediately, choking, eyes streaming, and their hands clasped atop their heads.

"Keep moving," Bolan advised them. "Down the stairs and down the street, and don't even look back."

One of the men was already bleeding from an arm wound. Both of them hurried down the hall, wheezing, gasping and totally out of the war.

Bolan entered the suite and shot two locks out of a door on the far wall, then he kicked it open.

The smoke puffed on through, and it was met by a spray of slugs that chewed up the door casing and nothing else.

Bolan reached through the opening and fired once at the opposing muzzle flashes.

A gun clattered to the floor and a guy yelled in a high-pitched squeal.

The man in black went on in and closed the door with his foot to keep the polluted atmosphere out.

The Capo was standing by the window, swaying slightly and dressed in pajamas and robe. He looked old and sick, and the small amount of smoke that had entered the room had been enough to upset the leathery old lungs.

The Tiger of the Hill stood at the foot of the bed, staring with glazed eyes at the smashed remains of his gun hand. The blood was gushing out and soaking into the bed, and Rivoli was just standing there watching it run.

Bolan removed his mask and told the tiger, "You forgot to sign for the delivery, guy."

The house captain tried to say something in a voice that wasn't working.

The old man croaked, "My God, my God," and he staggered over to his nephew-once-removed-but-never-acknowledged.

DeMarco took the cloth belt from his robe and made a fumbling attempt to apply it as a tourniquet above the mutilated hand.

His eyes had not yet met Bolan's gaze, and he seemed to be avoiding such a confrontation.

Bolan told the old man, "Save it, DeMarco, he won't be needing that."

Rivoli's lips moved again and he whispered, "No mercy, I said. Shoot to kill. You hear me? Shoot to kill."

Bolan said, "Okay."

He snuggled the Auto Mag beneath the old man's arm and squeezed off once. The big piece roared and bucked against the Capo's chest.

DeMarco lurched forward, eyes wide and stricken with a mortal awareness, and his mouth formed the words, "Missed... you missed."

Bolan told him, "I never miss," and he walked to the window while he tucked away the Auto Mag and re-fitted the gas-mask to his face.

It was not until then that DeMarco became aware of the mess behind him. The Tiger of the Hill had lost his face plus a goodly portion of skull to the rear... and the big mean bastard in the black suit had been right about the uselessness of that tourniquet.

Ten thousand tourniquets wouldn't put Little Tony back together again. Pieces of him were splattered all over the bed, even on the walls.

DeMarco yelled, "You bastard you, you bastard! What're you doing this to me for?"

But the window was up, and the bastard was gone, and actually he'd done nothing whatever to Don DeMarco. Except shoot up his house, and fill it with smoke, and splatter Little Tony all over his bedroom, and kill off God only knew how many of the house boys.

The Don went over to the window and closed it. He got the hell away from it quick and staggered back to the bed to stare with fascination at what was left of his old friend Tony's kid... little Tony.

His lip curled, and he said quietly, "Some tiger. The only tiger on this hill, kid, just climbed out that window."

And then the Capo went to the liquor cabinet, poured himself a drink, then he sank wearily into a chair and waited for someone to come up and take care of him.

He was two minutes into the hit and the numbers were rapidly running away from him when Bolan dropped to the ground beneath DeMarco's bedroom window.

The smoke at ground level was beginning to dissipate and it was straggling about the neighborhood in puffy clumps.

People were still running about in confusion at the front of the property. Bolan could hear men cursing and shouting inside the house.

Someone in there was yelling, "The fans, get the goddam fans going, blow that shit outta here!"

Another guy leaned out of an upstairs window, coughing and gasping for breathable air. He saw Bolan and took a shot at him, and Bolan quickly responded with a quiet phu-uut from the silenced Beretta. The guy gurgled and disappeared back inside. Bolan went on, making tracks across the rear yard and wishing he'd had another thirty seconds of good heavy smoke to cover his withdrawal.

He made it to the garage and was girding himself for the leap to the roof when another man materialized from the thinning smokescreen.

This one was wearing a gas mask with a neat SFPD emblem on the cannister. He had black hands, and one of these was filled with a snubnosed .38 Positive — and Bolan knew damned well then that he had overrun his numbers.

The guy barked, "Freeze! One move and I'll fire!"

Bolan hesitated for a sluggishly bloated second of solar time, and it was like an eternity in the universe of pure mind. This was the realization of all the Executioner's harshest nightmares — a gun-to-gun and eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with the law. Cops were special things. Some were rotten, sure, some as rotten as any of the enemy — but they were soldiers on the same side, in Bolan's mind, and that made them special. Mack Bolan did not live to gun down cops.

At the same time and in that same framework of mind, this was no goddam game of touch-tag he was playing. He could not simply roll over and play dead at the first appearance of a dutybound cop. There was a hell of an important war to be fought!

Yeah, it was agonizing. It was a hell of an agonizing real life nightmare.

Sgt. Phillips was realizing with a harsh jolt that neither had the drop on either. He had reacted in pure instinct, with all the training of his adult lifetime focusing into this undiluted moment, this hellishly painful and entirely non-academic moment in the life of a law officer.

The big guy was just standing there, poised in that special way on the balls of his feet, the very mean-looking black Beretta peering up from the gun hand. One side of his consciousness was trying to appreciate the confrontation from a strictly ethereal standpoint, and he actually imagined for one flashing instant that part of him was hovering overhead in a spectator's view of the scene.

Two men, one dressed in black, the other born in black, with a hell of a lot more than the color of skin separating them. One a cop, the other the most wanted "criminal" in the country. Both wearing gasmasks, and each with a trained gun laying down on the other.

And yet there was so goddammed much that these two gladiators shared in common.

The moment came unfrozen, the big guy moved almost imperceptibly, and the Beretta dropped ever so slightly.

"Okay, fire away," Bolan told the law.

"I mean it, Mack. I won't enjoy it, but I'll drop you in your tracks like a Wang Dang Doo."

Gasmasks or not, eight thousand ocean miles and too damn many years between notwithstanding, the message had been sent and received and the Executioner knew his challenger.

The Beretta dropped another inch and the familiar voice said, "Well, damn. Is that you, Bill?"

"That's me." The mask came off but the revolver did not waver. "Don't make me drop you."

Bolan removed his mask and it dropped to the ground. "You might as well," he replied. "I'm a dead man the minute those cuffs go on me anyway."

Phillips felt the flicker of a smile, and he wondered if it had managed to reach the outside of his face. He said, "You hit the old man, eh."

"No. He wasn't the target. It was a tiger hunt."

"I'm going to cuff you, Mack. Throw the gun away and hold that wall up."

The next few seconds occupied a confused kaleidoscope in the mind and the memory of the Brushfire cop.

He certainly was no rookie — and even granted a bit of clumsiness and momentary inattention as he reached for the handcuffs, there was simply no intellectual explanation for the way the big junglefighter turned things upside down on him.

All Phillips knew was that suddenly the Beretta phutted, from the hip, then again and again. All the while Bolan was all over him, manhandling him into a sprawl to the ground, and the Beretta was coughing on in an uninterrupted song of whispering slugs and sighing death.

His own gun was lying at his fingertips and numbly Phillips realized that the zinging little missiles were not tearing into his own flesh, but were seeking more distant game.

Bodies were toppling out there somewhere, in the misty smoke, and the grunts and muffled shrieks of the dying and the grievously wounded served only as a postscript to the booming of opposing weapons as the return fire chewed the turf and whistled screaming tracks in the air above their heads.

The kaleidoscope cleared abruptly. Bill Phillips was back in Vietnam again and his team leader was once again dragging him out of a life and death situation. As he disentangled himself and reclaimed his own weapon, he knew that enemy pursuit had caught them in an open firefight, with a wall at their backs and a regrouped army pressing in from all other sides. Sergeant Bolan was giving 'em hell, throwing everything at them but his own fingers and toes, and giving the rest of the squad a chance to break for cover.

Phillips mumbled, "I'm on you, Barge." Bolan grunted, "About time. Watch that left!" The big silver gun was in Bolan's hand now and the thing was tearing up Phillips' eardrums and totally eclipsing the reports of his own weapon. It served to return him to present time and place, however... and, really, the situation was little different than it had been so many times before. Bolan yelled, "Garage roof! Go! You, then me!" The Brushfire cop reacted instinctively to the command, as he had done to that same voice so many times in the past and with such memorable results. That voice had brought him through Vietnam in one whole piece. He threw a round into a shadowy running figure off to the left, then he flung himself in a wild roll toward the corner of the garage.

Bolan was on one knee and firing the silver hawgleg like an automatic repeater, the big sounds booming, rolling and echoing around the confined area, and guys were still screaming and flopping about out there.

Hot little things zipped through the air about him but Phillips gained the roof in one mad fling, and he found reason to be thankful for all those morning workouts in the police gym. Before his mind even fully appreciated what it was he was trying to accomplish, he was up there at the edge of that roof and throwing a rapid fire into the receding smokescreen, and suddenly Bolan was there beside him and panting, "And a Wang Dang Doo to you too. Let's blow!"

The two ex-partners from another time and another war scrambled to the rear and leaped over the fence into the adjoining grounds.

A moment later they were in good cover and with no visible pursuit from the other side. They lay there for a moment, breathing on each other and chuckling as they'd done so many times before, and presently the cop let out a deep breath and declared, "Well, I damn near got your ass shot up again."

Bolan said, "Do tell."

"If you'd just asked, I could've told you. Rivoli had a stacked deck on you. I mean he had troops all over this damned hill."

"I believe you," Bolan panted. "But I was just about home clean when you jumped in."

"I'm sorry, Mack. They brainwash you in those police academies. A guy gets all hung up on..."

"Forget it. You're right and I'm wrong. Hell, I'm as wrong as a guy ever got."

"Not quite," the cop reminded him. "You didn't throw down on me, brother." He laughed nervously.

"Although, for a minute there, Sergeant, I sure thought you had."

Bolan was breathing raggedly through his mouth and forcing some big ornery-looking bullets into the clip of the silver hawgleg. "You'll have to take me in dead, Bill," he declared quietly.

"Shit I'm not taking you anywhere," Phillips replied. "My gun's empty and I guess I'm at your mercy."

Bolan chuckled.

The Sergeant said, "Did you know that Gadgets Schwartz and the Politician are living here now?"

Bolan's head snapped to attention and he asked, "In San Francisco?"

"Yeah. You haven't been in touch, eh?"

"Hell no. Last thing in the world those guys need now is my touch of death. They holed up?"

"In a manner of speaking, yeah. They've got new names. Gadgets is doing electronics work for a guy down on the marina. Politician is doing something at the Boy's Club. He was always good with kids, you know."

Bolan said, "Yeah." He sighed. "They okay?"

"Yeah, they're great. Worry about you a lot. Keep track of your banzai war, you know."

"They have any money problems?"

"Not that I know about."

Bolan gave his old friend the cold stare and asked him, "You keeping track of my war, Bill?"

The cop said, "Sure."

"It was no accident that you showed up at DeMarco's"

"Course not. I've been sitting there waiting for you to show since three o'clock this morning."

Bolan grinned suddenly and said, "You're the spade cop out at the gate awhile ago."

Phillips showed him a baffled smile. "Where were you?"

"I was around. So... you came gunning for me."

The Sergeant dropped his eyes in embarrassment. He changed the subject. "Hell, I can't get used to looking at that face, Mack. What was wrong with the old one?"

Bolan shrugged. "Seemed like a good idea at the time. I guess it doesn't matter which face I'm buried with."

The dark face of the law clouded with an unhappy thought as Phillips said, "This is just a temporary truce, Mack. We'll probably meet again, if you ever come back to San Francisco. And I can't... I mean, you know. So don't come back."

Bolan reminded him, "I haven't left yet. I'll be around awhile."

"God, don't. Get out. Blow this town, man. It's hot. Captain Matchison wants your ass with a burning passion."

"Brushfire," Bolan commented thoughtfully.

"How'd you know?"

"I hear. Are you with Brushfire, Bill?"

"Yeah."

Bolan said, "Well, good luck. Everything okay with your life?"

"Until today, yeah."

"These tough Frisco cops didn't give you a hard time?"

The black man snorted, "Hell, I'm a tough Frisco cop myself."

Bolan agreed, "That you are." He got to his feet, squeezed the other man's shoulder affectionately, and told him, "Blow, cop, before we get into another Wang Dang Doo."

They shook hands and Phillips said, "That was a hell of a place, wasn't it."

"It was," Bolan agreed.

"So is this place, Mack. It's Wang Dang Doo times ten. Believe that."

A muscle rippled in the Executioner's jaw and he replied, "I believe it."

"Get out."

"I can't."

"The mission that important?"

Bolan sighed. "I think so."

"End of truce," the cop said. "Goodbye, soldier. Next time we meet, it's Wang Dang Doo." He glanced at his watch. "You might still have about thirty seconds to beat the grid. That's what we call the containment network. Thirty seconds, if you're lucky."

He turned his back and walked away.

Bolan faded quietly into the opposite direction.

Every second counted now. And he wasn't about to scrub this mission even if it was Wang Dang Doo times a thousand.

It was, yeah, a damned important mission.