Terrible Tuesday Read online

  “Suckered me again, didn’t you,” Rickert declared weakly.

  “You suckered yourself, guy,” Bolan told him. The cold gaze shifted briefly to the burning vehicle. “Them, too. You sold them security, Rickert. You delivered nothing but a flaming coffin.”

  “Fuck ’em,” Rickert growled.

  Not exactly King’s English—but it was the answer that Bolan sought. He’d found them—and buried them in the same moment.

  “You did,” he assured the security boss.

  So much for “them.”

  All that remained, now, was to find “him.”

  CHAPTER 20

  ACES A PAIR

  The entire mountaintop was in flames when the marshals arrived on the scene—and the total image was straight out of War and Peace. Dazed and damaged men wandered aimlessly in the rain or sat in the mud with heads bowed in absolute defeat. Others, not so fortunate, lay about the tumbled landscape in lifeless lumps. Vehicles had been demolished, buildings gutted and everywhere was ruin.

  Hell had visited the heights that day, and all who’d been there knew it.

  The marshals disembarked from their vehicles and stood in silent awe for a moment before moving on in their grim duties. Brognola and a big, square-jawed man stepped into the rain and quietly contemplated the devastation.

  “Jesus Christ,” the head fed commented in a choked voice.

  “Not so pretty, is it?” said the other.

  “Prettier now than before,” replied the fed.

  “Say it again, Sam. It gave me chills just thinking of this joint. How could we ever have touched it?”

  “Think of some others, then,” Brognola suggested. “Nothing says this is the only one.” His gaze flicked to a gutted limousine, which was partially buried in a burning building. “If there’s anything left to identify, I’m sure you’ll find brothers of the blood in that car. That means cancer cells, pal, and they already could have spread everywhere. What a nightmare. We’ve got to—”

  “Not in my territory, I hope.”

  “Naw, I’d think not.”

  “That’s not what’s clawing your guts, Hal.”

  “No—you’re right—I guess I—”

  Two marshals, who were coming down out of the bus behind Brognola, were now gazing past him and grinning with unabashed admiration at a tall figure in dripping black who was walking in. The guy was braced from head to foot with every gadget and artifice of warfare old and new. One had to wonder how he could even move under all that load. He was pushing a limping, battered man ahead of him and a soggy young lady was hurrying along at his side.

  Double jubilation, sure. And let the gut claw for something else. The epitaphs were for the other side.

  “That’s Charlie Rickert,” growled Brognola’s companion.

  The chief fed snapped eyes at the marshals, who immediately moved forward to take charge of the prisoner.

  “Handle with care,” said the tall man as he turned Rickert over. “We made a deal.”

  The marshals hustled the silent prisoner away while square-jaw snapped, “What kind of deal?”

  The tall man was giving the guy a searching look, as though trying to place the face.

  Brognola harrumphed and quickly leapt into that breach. “Striker, this is Tim Braddock.”

  Recognition showed, then. “Captain Braddock,” Bolan said.

  “Chief, now,” Brognola corrected him.

  “Deputy chief,” said Braddock. A faint smile was setting into the chiseled features as he stretched forth a hand to the man in black. “This is, uh, quite a way outside my jurisdiction, though. I have no official status here. As a private citizen, I’d like to shake your hand, Mr. Striker.”

  The protocol was perfect.

  Bolan took the hand and gripped it, solemnly replying, “My pleasure.” He then presented the young lady. “Mr. Braddock—my partner, Miss Beautiful.”

  “Miss Mischief is what he really means,” the girl said, eyes a’sparkle despite her soggy condition.

  “Can’t we get out of the rain?” Brognola suggested.

  Bolan’s sharp gaze flicked to the bus. “Who’s inside?”

  “Just my driver.”

  “Same guy?”

  “Same guy, sure.”

  Bolan decided, “You can take us down the hill and drop us.”

  All four moved inside. Brognola gave the driver instructions and escorted his guests to the lounge area.

  “Drink?” he inquired of all at once.

  “Coffee, if it’s handy,” Bolan said.

  “Me, too,” said April Rose, the teeth beginning to chatter just a bit.

  Brognola draped a blanket over the sodden figure and grinned inside. She was sticking damned close to Bolan. He’d been wondering about those two. Now it was patently obvious. A bit sad, though, too—considering their chances.

  The bus got slowly underway as the head fed handed out the coffee.

  Braddock gave the blitzer time for a tentative sip of the hot liquid, then repeated his earlier question. “What kind of deal, Striker?”

  Bolan smiled faintly as he replied, “I gave him life.”

  “What’d he give you?”

  “Information.”

  Brognola injected himself at that point. “I guess he’ll tell us about it, Tim.”

  “Not yet,” said the big cold man. “You wouldn’t want it until I’ve checked it out.”

  Sure. Brognola knew how this guy checked things out. The evidence was all about them. He’d been “checking out” FACES. Look at it now. But the head fed had no complaints.

  Braddock was saying, “If my presence is cramping your style—”

  “Not at all,” Bolan assured him. “Maybe you can tell me something. Do you know of any official surveillance on Bunny Cerrito?”

  The big cop winced and grunted, “Who?” He recovered before a response could come and amended it with: “Never mind, I heard you. Yes, our OrgCrime Unit gets Palm Springs advisories on his movements.”

  Brognola growled, “What’s with Cerrito? I’ve had no rumbles on him since, uh …”

  “Since DiGeorge,” Bolan finished it. “Right. But—”

  “He enjoys elder statesman status,” said Braddock. “That’s all we’ve noticed since—come to think of it, though, he has been coming into our town quite often, of late.”

  “Is he connected to McCullough?” Bolan inquired.

  Braddock’s face fell.

  Brognola said, “Well there’s a—it’s what brought Tim out …”

  Braddock picked it up with a sigh. McCullough is dead.”

  Bolan said, “Do tell.”

  “And his wife and daughter. We found them hacked to pieces in the basement of their home—and the pieces floating in an acid bath.”

  Some indefinable emotion tugged at the stoic Bolan features but it quickly vanished. “When was this?” he asked quietly.

  The bus was approaching the gate area.

  Brognola went forward to instruct the driver while Braddock handled the inquest.

  “We discovered them about noon,” the cop explained. “They’d been in the acid for several hours. Luckily, it was a fairly mild solution. There was still enough left to distinguish the bits and pieces.”

  April shuddered.

  Bolan asked, “Enough left to positively identify?”

  “The ID is tentative, but it will probably stand,” the cop replied. “It’s already fairly solid on the daughter. Had a nasty accident a couple of years ago, lot of broken bones. Forensics found some convincing matches with X-rays from her medical files.”

  “The others?”

  “Evidence enough,” Braddock sighed, “that the coroner is fairly convinced.”

  Bolan said, “Damn!”

  He was looking at his lady as though seeing another in her place.

  Brognola returned to the group in time to catch the eye signals between the two. He said to April, “I suppose you’ll want to be toddling along with the m
an.”

  “Better believe it,” she murmured.

  Bolan said, “Well, maybe—”

  “Damnit, no!” she said, quietly defiant.

  “What’s going on?” Brognola demanded.

  Bolan told him what was going on. “It isn’t done, Hal. I need to check something out. Do us all a favor, though—stay off my shadow. I’ll keep you informed.”

  “Do that,” the fed said gruffly. “There’s enough here to keep me busy the rest of the day, anyway.” He looked at his watch. “Which isn’t saying a hell of a lot, anyway.”

  The time was five o’clock.

  Plenty of time left, though, for that damn guy to burn down a few more mountaintops.

  Bolan and the lady were on their feet. Brad-dock was looking pained, apologetic and a bit flustered all at once. He said to the blitzer, “I never thanked you properly.”

  The big guy grinned at him and said, “Sure you did. I like your force, Chief. It’s a hot team.”

  He always had a way of passing it back. And now he turned to Brognola and almost casually inquired, “Did you get a wire on Jimmy the Grease?”

  Casual, hell. “Yeah,” the fed grunted. “Left his hotel at three o’clock in a rented car. He’s wired.”

  “Where’d he go?”

  “North on Pacific Coast Highway. Why?”

  “Playing on the spine, Hal,” the damn guy explained while explaining nothing at all. “Get me a fix on him and pass it to me, earliest possible. I’ll be rolling on his track.”

  April Rose smiled sweetly, and triumphantly, over her shoulder at Brognola as she and her man made their exit, hand in hand.

  They disappeared almost instantly into the surrounding forest.

  “Quite a pair,” said Braddock, sighing. “It’s almost cute, isn’t it?”

  Cute, hell.

  It was damned well murderous.

  CHAPTER 21

  HIM

  It was over, really. The whole ambitious empire had been buried atop that mountain overlooking the sprawling metropolis of Los Angeles. What remained of the empire, in incidental fragments, would be summarily tracked down and expunged by the collective police efforts of those two good men he’d left back there at the gravesite. And the intelligence package so adroitly gathered by the computer tactics of Miss April the Beautiful would go a long way toward seeing to it that all involved in the intended rape of the public’s privacy would find their just receipts at the hands of the law.

  It had been one grand scheme, all right—and it could have worked beautifully except that someone had become just a bit too cute while trying to insure the outcome.

  One William the Cute McCullough, by name.

  The guy must have thought the world was stocked with dummies—especially those who stood to do him in. He did not trust the mob who had made him and enriched him far beyond any concept of a just reward—nor any of those individual “brothers” who both served and governed him—and he certainly did not trust the law, whose finer nuances he had habitually disregarded and trod upon and crapped upon throughout a long and blemished business career.

  He did not trust even his wife of five years, the former Eva Lynn Whitley—ex-beauty-queen and widow of a pioneer electronics developer and manufacturer—nor Eva Lynn’s daughter, Darlene, the comely but wild heiress to the Whitley patents, whom he had legally adopted shortly after the marriage.

  He had not trusted even his pals in Sacramento and Washington who’d worked so diligently to bring the pieces home, even to the point of obtaining government grants and blessings for the bogus “spatial energy” studies.

  No. He’d trusted none of them. And he thought the world was full of dummies just like himself.

  So he got too cute.

  It was very likely that McCullough himself had engineered the “problem” between his adopted daughter and Tanto Fortinelli, the hitman—or, perhaps, it was just one of those circumstances that inspire fated moments. Whatever, he’d used that entanglement as a too-cute invitation for an East Coast hitman to cruise over and hit a West Coast hitman. But the men back east were not such dummies. They sat on the request and chewed it, then spit it back out—suspicious, perhaps, that someone was trying to create a problem where no problem should exist. And they were right. McCullough would have loved to get them all out of his hair … forever. The “boys” had never been too understanding about letting go of a good thing—and Bill McCullough had been an extremely good thing for a very long time—in a completely symbiotic relationship with the whole crime structure.

  No. They would not let go gracefully.

  So McCullough was not entirely a dummy. He was greedy, as well—and a very devious, crafty dude. He would engineer a shooting war—then finger them all one by one, side against side, until finally he had the whole magnificent Big Brother operation all to himself. He intended to share it with no one.

  That, probably, was the California Concept in a nutshell.

  And certainly there were riches a’plenty to be harvested via the clandestine supersnoop operation. Handled properly—and not too greedily—a mere handful of strategically oriented corporations could manipulate at will the most sensitive business operations that held the world industrial community together: stock markets, commodities, currency exchanges, vital materials, the whole wide range of buying and selling and trading the dwindling resources of a troubled world. And that meant looting, raping, pillaging and sacking on a world scale never before experienced or even attempted.

  And, hell, it wouldn’t have stopped there.

  They would have soon been into the closets and under the beds of world leaders everywhere—in every sensitive area of human interchange and perhaps in even the most common areas of day-to-day humanity: the teachers, the bakers, the candlestick makers and all the mundane activities that provide the glue for men to live together responsibly.

  But Bill McCullough got too cute, too greedy, and perhaps a bit too careless.

  He sent to the east for a hitman. Any hitman.

  And he got Mack Bolan.

  April said, “I don’t understand. Who was trying to take him over? Who sent the gun crew to his house?”

  “He sent them,” Bolan said.

  “Who sent them?”

  “Him. McCullough. It was a set-up. They’d probably been on twenty-four-hour alert for weeks, just waiting the call. And not far away. He sent for them while I was in the house. And sent his beauty pageant wife down to entertain me and keep me there. Poor lady. She never had a prayer.”

  “But I still don’t …”

  “I was supposed to die there, April.”

  “Oh! I see! No I don’t see. Why?”

  “The lady was to die. The kid was to die. All the house people were to die. And an East Coast hitman would be left behind as proof positive of treachery and villainy from the east.”

  “Oh!”

  “Enter, then, Jimmy the Grease. Via the good offices of someone greatly respected—someone like old Bunny Cerrito, who must be getting senile—a retaliatory force would be gathered and sent east to return the favor.”

  April sniffed and said, “That sounds like burning the house to warm the bed.”

  Bolan chuckled grimly and told her, “Oh, it’s a lot cuter than that, even. McCullough was to die, too, you see.”

  “Mack, you’re talking in riddles,” she complained. “It’s giving me a headache.”

  He kissed that dear head to ease the ache and said, “Have faith, dear friend, and all shall be revealed to you.”

  “Don Quixote,” she muttered.

  He gave her a sharp look and replied, “No, I think it’s more like rough New Testament.”

  “Close enough,” she said lightly, backing gracefully out of that one.

  But he was not so easily put off. “You’ve been into my library,” he noted.

  “Is it sacred territory?”

  “No.”

  “Then I’ve been into it.” She took his hand and gave it a warm squ
eeze. “And I love it.”

  “I love you,” he muttered.

  “What did you say?”

  “I have to say it twice, eh?”

  “Endlessly,” she whispered.

  “Okay. April, Miss Mischief, I love you endlessly. But you pull another damn stunt like you pulled today and an end may come a lot sooner than either of us desire. Do I make myself perfectly clear?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said meekly.

  “I could have killed you, myself. Why do you think I demand firm separation from Hal and his people? There’s no place to hold hands in the hellgrounds, April.”

  “I know,” she said contritely. “I’m sorry. It shall not happen again. I promise. I understand. Have you ever boarded a galley?”

  He showed her a silly grin and said, “What?”

  “You know—with those ministers of death scarce a lance’s length away, and the terrible sea yawning two broad feet to either side of that narrow way?”

  He chuckled and said, “Damnit, April.”

  “Well I have to say something to alter that heavy old countenance. I mean, after all, there’s more to life than arms.”

  True. Very true. And this very able and admirable young lady had already added an important new dimension to the life of Mack Bolan.

  “Just keep me on my toes, pretty lady,” he growled.

  “I’d like to get you on your back, first. Or on my back. I mean …”

  She’d turned a fiery red and was sputtering in embarrassed confusion.

  “You know what I mean!”

  “I’ll let you show me,” he offered, grinning.

  “When? Damnit, when?”

  “Soon,” he replied. “Very soon.”

  And he sincerely meant that.

  But first a final item of business in the California sweepstakes awaited his attention. Not much. It was over, mostly. All that remained was almost a personal item.

  Yeah.

  But a very important item.

  CHAPTER 22

  HER

  The weather had broken. The ragged trailing edge of the system could be seen a mile or so offshore and there were blue skies beyond.