New Orleans Knockout Read online

  An all-black marching band in dizzying uniforms was marking time right outside his window while continuing a piercing recital of “Basin Street Blues.”

  The intersection and the mounted cop, just fifty feet back, seemed swallowed and lost forever in the depths of the past.

  Someone tossed a candy sucker through the window. Bolan waved to the anonymous giver in the sea of faces and clamped the sucker between his teeth, then he closed the window and set the locks.

  If it wasn’t Mardi Gras yet, he was damned glad it wasn’t.

  Other vehicles were creeping through the chaos, horns blaring incessantly—one, a beer truck, the object of tumultuous attention by the crowd surrounding it just a few yards ahead. The brass band was stuck behind the truck, and the truck was bogged down completely now by a human wave that clung to every inch of its body.

  Another black hole was moving down the street toward the besieged vehicle, on a mission of rescue.

  This was something a person had to experience to believe.

  Bolan shook his head and stepped outside, to the lee side of madness. He’d wedged his wagon into the recess in such a manner that no vehicle could flow around the starboard flank. He went to the rear and fired up the auxiliary generator, simply for the sake of realism, then he grabbed a couple of dummy power cables and spread them along the length of the vehicle. It didn’t have to make sense; it just had to be there.

  A couple of large decals quickly affixed to the windows completed the job of cosmetic security; the warwagon was now a television network “Mardi Gras Mobile Unit.”

  And the Executioner had himself a forward base, in the heart of the synthetic madness that was “the Quarter at Carnival.”

  Day was fading quickly; night edging in and bringing with it an entirely new tenor to the revelries.

  Bolan stepped over an empty bottle of Boone’s Farm Apple Wine and went back inside.

  He stripped down to the blacksuit and carefully selected weaponry for the hard probe into Tommy Carlotti’s possible hideaway.

  He chose the AutoMag, without backup—loose cartridges in the pocket instead of spare clips—then he went out to join the insanity.

  The whole damn town was in costume for Carnival.

  And so was Bolan.

  The French Quarter of New Orleans is a quaint old section that actually embodies the romance and much of the historic culture of the city. Narrow streets designed originally for men on horseback form canyons between unbroken lines of storefronts and row-houses, many of these latter rising three or more stories high and featuring balconies projecting over the street.

  The contrast between “outside” and “inside” French Quarter can often be startling for the unsuspecting visitor. Aged and decrepit facades lining the narrow and usually dirty streets may conceal breathtaking splendor within—and such was the case with the address on Dauphine Street.

  Even the facade here seemed less seedy dressed in the festive trappings of Carnival—but it was still weathered wood and sagging balconies to the outside eye. An enclosed courtyard fronted on the street, secure and private behind a stucco wall, exclusive by virtue of a high wooden gate and two big black dudes costumed like Zulu warriors and standing guard over the invitation list.

  The balconies here hung out over the courtyard rather than the street. A party was underway in there—may have been for days—and the merry sounds from within were spilling forth to mingle with and sometimes overcome the less concerted sounds of the street. All three stories were brightly lighted, and Bolan could see costumed folk here and there on a wrought-iron stairway that apparently rose from the courtyard to the decorated balconies above.

  He decided against a bluff at the gate or at the front door, electing instead to allow himself to be carried along with the ever-moving crowd along Dauphine, then around the corner. From there he found the back way in, going up and over the top of an adjacent structure, then onto the roof of the target area.

  From that point, it was apple pie.

  He swung down off the roof and onto a third-floor balcony overlooking the courtyard, stood in the shadows up there for a brief visual orientation, then went inside to comparative silence.

  The heart of the party was obviously down below in the open area, fifty or sixty costumed revelers milling around with drinks held high, talking and laughing and having a grand time.

  A small musical group off to one corner was hardly heard above the overall sound of the party itself, and there was certainly nowhere to dance.

  Bolan had hardly entered the premises before he was struck by a definitely off-key atmosphere—a tingling sensation in the hairs of his nose and a lifting of instinctive hackles.

  This place was a hellground!

  That was not an intellectual judgment, but a certain knowledge borne by soul-shaking experiences in similar arenas.

  He followed his quivers, as augmented by an almost imperceptible odor to which he had long ago become sensitized—that sickening turkey odor—and he located the source of it all in a small storage room set into the stairwell between the second and third floors.

  It was Blancanales and Schwarz.

  But they were not turkeys, yet—not quite.

  They sat half-upright on the floor, hands and feet tied together, backs slumped and twisted against the wall.

  Their clothing was impregnated with a mixture of dried blood and vomit, soaked with fresh sweat, urine, and probably everything else that could be squeezed from a living body and yet leave it living.

  There was fresh blood, also, from a fresh kill that lay twisted between them. Both were conscious but barely aware; neither had found the strength or perhaps the need to move aside from the burdening corpse of a local buttonman whom Bolan immediately recognized as one of Carlotti’s runners.

  Bolan pulled the little guy clear and went to work on his friends, cutting bonds and carefully massaging long-restricted circulation.

  Both of Schwarz’s eyes were swollen shut; the entire face was a swollen, pulpy mass from repeated beatings.

  Blancanales was in better shape, but not much; at least he could move glinting eyes around the swollen sockets and find room to extend a bloated tongue between caked dry lips.

  “God’s sake, Pol!” Bolan groaned.

  “Okay, I’m okay. Sarge, he …” The voice faded beyond perception, choked off by dried and swollen tissues.

  “Yeah, Pol—what!—say it again!”

  “He—God!—he’s got Toni.”

  “Who has her?”

  “Kirk. Jus’ now, minute ago. She … came to get us.” Those eyes flickered toward the wall. “Li’l guy there. Kirk shot ’im, took Toni.”

  Bolan growled, “Hang tight! I’ll be back!”—and he hit that doorway running.

  Spotting a guy like Carlotti in that festive variety of costumed figures would have been next to impossible; not to spot Toni—in any crowd—was just as impossible.

  They were headed up the outside stairway, climbing for the third-floor balcony—Carlotti dragging the girl along beside him.

  Bolan sprung the AutoMag and threw the big .44 to full extension across that short right angle to doomsday as he cried out, “Car-lotti!”

  The guy froze in a half turn, a big pistol filling his own paw, to gaze back for perhaps a heartbeat on the collector of mortgaged souls.

  It could have been a fair contest—gun to gun, damn near toe to toe—but the big little man who would wear no shoes but elevators from Rome was not up to a man-sized response to the challenge of life or death. Instead, he elected to cut bait, jamming the pistol against Toni’s head and screaming, “Stay away from me, Bolan—stay away!”

  Bolan stayed away.

  He wouldn’t have touched that guy with someone else’s hands.

  The AutoMag, however, had a mind of its own. It roared out fire and massive disgust, hurling 300 grains of splattering death crashing through that collapsing skull in a path from ear to ear, leaving not even a dying reflex to carry out
the threat to the girl.

  The guy was dead before the gun slipped from his grasp, the liberated soul shrieking out across the expanses of hell before the body caught on to what had become of the head.

  The remains toppled and wedged between steps and railing.

  Toni staggered against the balustrade with the soft moan, “Oh, God.”

  There is a particular quality to the sound of a heavy pistol in discharge, a report that batters the air and flails the ears for yards around—but not even that was enough to immediately seize the attention of the partygoers in the courtyard, just below. It was a slow, domino-type reaction—with first one mind and then another lifting to a perception of that which had occurred, to the sobering spectacle of violent death hanging above and dripping blood into the party.

  A woman down there shrieked—then another—and suddenly the party was over, the revelry gone, only the sounds from the street lifting like a returning echo into the sudden silence of the moment.

  Bolan had snared Toni and snatched her back beneath the protection of the second-floor porch. Now he gazed down on the crowd, AutoMag still bared, and called down to them: “Everyone go home, get out of here. The place could be a shooting gallery in a matter of minutes.”

  Someone down there laughed drunkenly, but another was sober enough to note, “Hell, he’s serious.”

  “That’s Mack Bolan!” a man’s awed voice observed.

  Never had a Carnival party broken up so fast, so quietly, and so completely. One moment they were all there, gazing up at him with a mixture of horror and fascination; the next, they were all gone—most of them out through the gates and past the dumbfounded “Zulu” watchmen, some fading silently indoors and out through the house, Bolan supposed.

  Toni was working hard at getting it back together. She stammered, “Mack I—I found—I f-found—”

  He said, “I know. They’ll be okay, Toni. Get to the phone. Call the police. Ask for Petro—Lieutenant Jack Petro. Tell him what’s here. We need an ambulance, and we need it screaming.”

  “I—I …”

  “You can. Do it now. Then stay with the guys until help arrives. No matter what. Understand? No matter what!”

  “What … is happening?”

  “Bloody Monday is happening. I expect—”

  What Bolan “expected”—as a result of his final city recon—had already arrived. Four energetic hardmen came through that gate down there, shoving the watchmen in ahead of them.

  Then Richard Zeno stepped in.

  Bolan gave the girl a shove and hissed, “Now!”

  Haunted eyes turned back to give him a final flicker of understanding and gratitude; then she was gone.

  He moved back to the stairway and called down, “You’re late, Zeno. Party’s over.”

  Five sets of eyes lifted to that outstretched .44, but not a hand so much as quivered.

  Zeno yelled, “You can’t take us all, Bolan!”

  “I don’t want you all, not right now. I got what I came for. I believe it’s the same thing you wanted. I’m offering you a white flag to take it the hell out of here.”

  “You’ve got Tommy?”

  “What’s left of him, yeah.”

  “Send it down.”

  Bolan did so, using a foot to nudge and guide the limp remains to the edge and over. The body hit the courtyard and bounced, limbs flopping in the recoil like a rag doll.

  Without sound or sign, the hardmen bent backs to the task, bore up their ex-heir apparent and unceremoniously hauled him away, a man to each lifeless limb.

  Zeno followed them out, pausing at the gate to lift an impassive face to the man on the stairway; then he too was gone.

  A moment later Bolan heard the telltale sounding of the horn as the limousine began working its way through the crowd.

  In a way, it was sad. Not the death of an animal like Tommy Carlotti. But the death of an old man’s dream—even a savage old man like Marco Vannaducci.

  Bolan turned away from that moment and went inside.

  Bloody Monday had not ended.

  It had just begun.

  20: BURIED

  Bolan remained with his friends, lending all assistance and comfort possible under the circumstances, until the commotion of the emergency vehicles joined the other sounds outside. Then he made a quick and quiet farewell and went out the way he’d come—across the rooftops.

  He returned to the warwagon for a brief reselection of weapons, loading up for heavy combat and returning immediately to his rooftop highway. He used that super highway in the sky for most of ninety minutes, traversing the entire district from sector to sector and grid to grid—seeking the Stone-Agers, finding them, executing them, then moving immediately on to the next preselected target of the chase.

  Not once was he challenged by the law, and only twice did he encounter pitched-battle resistance from among those marked for death.

  They were mostly small-timers and gun soldiers—the flotsam and jetsam of the New Orleans crime world who were not considered important enough or worthy enough for saving by a besieged capo. They were expendables. Bolan spent them.

  The only fish of any consequence left behind was Enrico Campenaro—and this time a Vannaducci crew apparently got there first. The overambitious and turncoat enforcer would have fared far better under Bolan’s cleansing wind. His former amici had drawn and quartered him, beheaded him, and left the dripping head perched atop a small fishbowl like a grinning Mardi Gras devil—to drain.

  Bloody Monday, yeah, and Bolan was sick of the smell of it when he returned finally to his forward base, broke camp, and set horn-tooting sail upon that sea of human joy. Hardly a hair of Carnival had been disturbed by the bloodletting in its midst.

  Bolan could not speak for the revelers; he himself, though, was ready for Ash Wednesday and the thirty-nine meatless days to follow.

  Bloody Monday was not, however, done with Mack Bolan yet.

  As soon as he had worked his way clear of Carnival, Bolan punched in his mobile phone and leaned once again on the law.

  Petro responded immediately with the opening line: “I hope it’s you.”

  “It is,” Bolan replied tiredly. “It’s mostly done, down here. What’s the reading on the kidnap victims?”

  “They’ll make it. Starved, dehydrated, tortured beyond ordinary endurance—but the medics say they’re going to be okay, unbelievable as it may have seemed an hour or so ago. Hardly any lasting effects except for the big fella, Morales—or whatever name you’re running him as—he, uh, may have permanent loss of hearing in one ear. Also a kidney took a lot of damage—could lose that if it doesn’t begin functioning. I think they’re both lucky as hell and so do they. Uh, the young lady is …”

  “Is what?”

  “In love, I’d guess, with a certain fugitive who doesn’t really have a damn thing to offer her. Sad, isn’t it? Love means walls.”

  Bolan said, “She’ll survive it.”

  “So will I, but this all leaves me with an embarrassing problem.”

  “Just one?” Bolan asked.

  “One in particular. The damn ransom package. Who earned it?”

  “A dead man. Pay his estate.”

  “What estate? The poor shit doesn’t even have a legal name that anyone will admit to knowing. Turns out, by the way, he was probably the only person in the world besides Carlotti who knew about the kidnapping. Not even the mistress of the prison household knew. She fainted just from the smell of that room. Those top floors have been closed off for years. I personally know that to be true.”

  “What was the little guy’s connection to Carlotti?”

  “Oh, hell, an errand boy. Hardly even spoke English, lived over in the old Spanish section. Your girl told me that he helped Carlotti tie them up, that’s all. Never saw them again until tonight, and he was just working a hunch on the Dauphine address. He carried messages there for Carlotti from time to time.”

  “Toni’s a pretty damn good detective,” B
olan commented.

  “Yeah. Well, the whole thing was a tragic, stupid …”

  Bolan asked, “Anybody confirm the reason for the snatch?”

  “Your men aren’t up to saying much just yet. But apparently it was just about the way you laid it out for me. The guys never did like the setup. They balked at turning the operation over, especially after listening to their test tape. Carlotti panicked. Couldn’t let them go, afraid they’d talk to the wrong people. Didn’t want to scratch them without learning how to use the operation. He just couldn’t admit to his own sponsors that he’d goofed up a very expensive operation. He was trying to beat the secret out of your guys. The lunatic. Left them tied up there, no food or water, sitting in their own piss and shit—aaagh! I don’t know how or even why they held out. These, uh, guys … they’re a bit more than just …”

  “Leave it where it lies, Petro.”

  “I seem to remember hearing about a couple of—”

  “Leave it there.”

  “Sure. That’s all I was going to say. So what about this bag I’m left holding? That kind of money scares hell out of me. Don’t leave it on my doorstep, guy.”

  “It isn’t mine, Petro. It’s Able Group funds.”

  “Oh. Oh, I see. Okay. I’ll see that they get it back.”

  “Fine. Now let’s discuss the nitty of the night. What has become of the Mississippi hardforce?”

  “Well, they were causing a monumental traffic problem up on the interstate. Squad of city cops met them as they were moving onto the Canal offramp. Told them, quite firmly, to back off and bug off. The town was full.”

  Bolan said, “City cops, eh?”

  “Yeah. Led by our chief himself.”

  “How’d he know?”

  “I told him. He about blew my head off with sheer lungpower, then took immediate steps to close the city to undesirables.”

  “You said something about a traffic jam.”

  “Yeah. Ciglia stood up there and orated like a consitutional lawyer for more than an hour. Trying to bluster his way through.”

  “When did they spring loose?”

  “Just before you called.”