Colorado Kill-Zone Read online

  No? Why not?

  “We better get an ambulance, Mr. Royal.”

  That’s why not.

  “You crazy?” Royal growled at the guard. “He’d be DOA, anyway. Look, I’ve got no stake in any of this. I want these guys out of here. Put them on the boat.”

  “I’m not getting paid to bury bodies at sea, sir.”

  Unbelievable! Wake up, dammit—wake up!

  “You are now,” Royal heard himself replying to the reluctant accomplice. “Get to it. I have to call the Man.” He turned dazed eyes from the scene of carnage and lurched toward the house.

  “It’ll cost you a thousand for each of us, sir—with or without the Man.”

  Royal whirled about, arm outstretched at shoulder level, punctuating his angry words with a stiffly jabbing forefinger. “It will cost you your fucking head if you don’t!”

  He went blindly on, then, to the door and stepped inside.

  What the hell! He hadn’t asked for any of this. It was his villa, dammit—his, not the Man’s. Keep the goddam garbage where it belonged. He didn’t need it here.

  The “ladies” were sprawled about in little islands of gloom. One of them was bawling—for what possible reason, Johnny Royal could not fathom. The others simply appeared frightened, thoughtful—perhaps with the same sobering thoughts now occupying Royal’s own mind.

  The starlet of the moment, Angie Greene, placed a hand on his arm as he tried to brush by, fixing him with a solemn eye.

  “What happened out there, Johnny?” she asked calmly.

  “Why ask?” he growled. “You saw the same thing I did.”

  “I saw nothing,” she told him in that same controlled soundstage voice.

  “Just remember that,” he said, and went on to the telephone.

  Christ! How long had it been? A minute! No more than two, for sure.

  He got his connection and spoke coolly into it. “This is JR. Tell the Man.”

  “It’s me, Johnny. What’s happening?”

  “I thought maybe you’d tell me, Max.”

  “You talking about the gunfire?”

  “You heard it?”

  “Hell, I guess the whole damn bay heard it. Sounded like it came from up above the Holiday Inn, somewhere there. You worried about it?”

  “No, I’m not worried about it, Max. I’m stuck with it.”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “You better get over here.”

  “Tell me what you’re talking about, Johnny.”

  “Your meeting dissolved, Max. Three claps of the gavel, and it’s all gone to hell. Cass and the horsemen, they all got it.”

  “That’s crazy, Johnny. Those shots came from a mile away.”

  “They got here, Max. Now I think you’d better get here.”

  “Give me five minutes. Don’t call nobody else. You know?”

  “I know, Max. God’s sake, just come.”

  He hung up and went over to take the drink which the barman had been carrying since the shooting began.

  “Nothing happened here, Jorge.”

  “Okay. It did not happen, Señor Royal.”

  “What didn’t happen?”

  “Nothing didn’t happen, señor.”

  “That’s right. Angie!”

  “Right here, Johnny.”

  “Take the girls skiing. Use the outboard.”

  “Right.”

  “Angie!”

  “Uh huh?”

  “Tell the girls what Mexican jails are like. Tell them about the Napoleonic Code. Tell them how nice it is in a country like this to keep their goddam jaws wired shut. Tell them about the Man.”

  “I’ll clue them in,” she promised, and began moving the beauty parade outside.

  God’s sake! How had he ever allowed himself to be used like this? God’s sake! Shots heard around the bay, garbage on his patio, the whole goddam …

  No way, baby!

  The whole thing smelled, it stunk. If Max was behind this, if he’d set up this whole thing—God, what if he had!

  Royal hurried to the door and yelled to the men outside, “Forget it! Let them lie! Max can handle his own garbage!”

  He staggered into the bathroom, still slightly dazed and fuming over unthinkable thoughts, to wash the traces of gore from his face and hands—then decided he’d better change his clothes, also. Even his shoes were spattered with Cass Baby.

  Moments later, when Max and his retinue of torpedoes made the scene, JR was back in the saddle again and ready for the worst. He greeted them with a lukewarm smile and told the Man, “By the pool. I don’t appreciate this, Max. I think it stinks.”

  “We’ll see,” Max replied coldly, and led his boys to the patio.

  They swarmed it, like so many angry bees on territorial patrol, calling terse comments to one another and comparing findings.

  “Did you move them?” the Man wondered aloud to JR.

  Royal shot a quick look at his beachmen before replying to that. “I thought about it. Naw. That’s where they fell.”

  Too Bad Paul, the crew boss, made a funny sound in his throat. He was squinting toward the heights, up-beach.

  Max looked at his crew boss and said, “Yeah. Figure that, Too Bad.”

  “Did you set this up?” Royal demanded, his anger surfacing.

  “Almost wish I had,” the Man replied, sighing. “What do you make it, Too Bad?”

  “One, two, three,” the big guy growled. “Cass first—caught him dead in his chair. Then Scapelli—knocked him off his running feet. Then Fats. He had ’em snockered. The hit on Scapelli is unbelievable—maybe pure luck. He was running across the zone, just like he should’ve been. The guy would’ve had to have led him by a yard to make that hit.”

  “Who d’you know around here can shoot like that?”

  “Nobody.”

  “Okay. Let’s find the drop.”

  Royal watched with growing squeamishness as the torpedoes righted the chaise longue and lifted the ghastly corpse onto it. They fussed with the positioning of the body and demanded Royal’s cooperation toward a reenactment. He grudgingly cooperated, and even told them about the spray of life fluids which had showered him with dying debris.

  One of the men set up a gadget which looked like a surveyor’s theodolite and began “shooting angles” from each of the victims.

  At that point, Royal confided to the Man, “Uh, Max, Scapelli didn’t die right away. I don’t know if that means something.”

  “It means you used your head,” Max replied coolly.

  “Well, I didn’t know. I just didn’t …”

  “You did okay. Don’t worry about any public embarrassment, Johnny. We’ll take care of all that.”

  “Oh, sure, I knew you would. I hardly knew these guys, Max.”

  “Don’t worry about it. We’ll take care of it. You just mind the store. Uh, how many witnesses we got here, Johnny?”

  “Just, uh, Jorge and me. The beach boys. The skipper.”

  “Okay. They’ll be taking a paid vacation, so you better be thinking about some new help. Never mind—I’ll send you some. Who else, Johnny?”

  “What?”

  “Witnesses. Where’re all the broads I usually see around here?”

  “I sent them out on the bay, Max. They’re skiing.”

  “Before or after?”

  “Uh …”

  “Before or after, Johnny?”

  “After.”

  The Man sighed. “Nobody’s going to get hurt, Johnny. Now, dammit, how many times I have to tell you that?”

  The big crew chief lumbered over, smiling soberly. “Okay, we got it. Within a fifty-yard radius, anyway. Heck says it’s more’n half a mile from here. Can you beat that? Two head hits and a lateral running pickoff at better’n half a mile?”

  “I can’t beat it, Too Bad,” the Man replied. “Can you?”

  “Wish I could. Heck and me are going up to check it out, if that’s okay with you.”

  “Do that,” th
e Man replied. He gave Royal a hurt look and walked off across the patio. Royal followed with his eyes as the boss of Acapulco went on to the pier and engaged the skipper in a brief conversation.

  Moments later, the cruiser was roaring away and the Man was walking slowly back toward the house.

  So. He was bringing the girls back. Too bad. Too damned bad for them.

  Royal went to the bar and filled a tumbler with Scotch.

  Max did not rejoin him, but sauntered idly about the patio.

  Jorge was already gone.

  JR’s own security men had been whisked away.

  He felt suddenly naked, stripped of all the pretense upon which his life had been built—and John Royal began to see himself in the bottom of the glass of Scotch.

  His villa? This was not his villa. It belonged to the company—the corporation—the outfit. Everything in it belonged to them. Just mind the store, Johnny. Sure. The whore store. The one and only John Royal was nothing more than a whoremaster. A rose, by any other name …

  Now, even the stiffs were gone, the telltale bricks scrubbed clean, the “embarrassing” corpses whisked away somewhere to probably never turn up again.

  The company took care of its own, sure.

  Some day, probably, they’d be taking care of JR himself with that same efficiency. Well, what the hell—it had been a good life, most of the time.

  Too Bad and Heck returned, solemnly excited and keeping it cool. They’d found the “drop.” Apparently they’d found something else, as well. They showed it to the Man and—for the first time in memory—JR saw Max the Boss lose his cool.

  The mighty one did a double take on that “find”—and then he did something really insane. He stormed over and kicked the chaise longue on which, minutes earlier, had reposed the remains of Bobby Cassiopea. A symbolic gesture, no doubt.

  “Idiot!” he screamed. “You fuckin’ idiot!”

  And Johnny Royal knew, in that moment, that something terrible had come to Acapulco, the paradise of the golden gods. Whatever it was, it obviously had come with Cassiopea—and it had killed him—and it had overturned, with three claps of the gavel, the cozy retirement of the one and only John Royal.

  The world had changed. JR knew that with certainty, no matter how the thing finally turned.

  He lifted his glass to the abused chaise and quietly toasted it. “Here’s to change,” he said, and meant it.

  3: The Scorch

  Bolan was in standard uniform for the Acapulco idle—swim trunks, casual shirt, sandals. It provided a comforting anonymity. On the other side of the ledger, it was impossible to properly conceal a weapon in such a get-up. He was not, however, anticipating an immediate need for weaponry.

  He was on a soft mission.

  He found the lady at her hotel, the Acapulco Royal, sipping coffee in the “island” dining room—a patio restaurant completely surrounded by a moatlike swimming pool. He spotted her from the bridge and recognized her immediately, which was not at all difficult. She was perhaps the most beautiful woman in Mack Bolan’s experience. The skin was sun-bronzed while suggesting a texture as soft as rose petals, the hair a shining contrast of softly waved gold framing the unforgettable face—widely spaced deep-set eyes, luscious mouth.

  She wore a white see-through bolero jacket which was meant only to enhance, certainly not to conceal, the mind-boggling configuration of planes and angles beneath. The bikini itself was a minor technicality of dress code. In this package, what you saw was truth in advertising. Even in this land of perpetual flesh display, this lady would be a traffic stopper. And, no, there was no problem with the identification.

  Bolan pulled out a chair and sat down opposite her. “I have bad news,” he said quietly.

  Cool blue eyes took his measure before that pleasant voice calmly advised him, “You’re in a no-parking zone, turisto.”

  He figured she could handle it. He gave it to her, right between the eyes. “Cass is dead.”

  Something quivered there, in that cool gaze, but it was the only reaction as she parried that charge. “Well, it is a unique approach. I guess now I’m supposed to ask, ‘Who is Cass?’ And then you’ll say—”

  “He took a bullet through the head on JR’s patio.” Bolan could have been discussing the menu, for all the emotion he was putting into it. “Right now I’d guess he’s in a weighted bag, somewhere in the cool depths of Pacifico. You see—it was the worst possible time, at the worst possible place. The Man is reacting in typical fashion, scorching every inch of earth between himself and the event. Your time is very short. If this were a parking zone, lady, I wouldn’t invest a single centavo in your meter.”

  She was fumbling for a cigarette, obviously trying to cover a rising confusion.

  He gave her time to get it together, then held a flame to the cigarette as he told her, “I’m your only way out. Now or never. You stand up right now and walk out of here with me or you’re shark bait for sure.”

  The lady had guts. And she was no dummy. A bit of color had departed that lovely face but it was the only sign of the emotions working at her. The voice remained cool and together. “How do I know you’re not one of the sharks?”

  “You don’t,” he replied, and stood up.

  She casually scooped up her purse, dropped some coins onto the table, and rose gracefully to join him. Truth in advertising, yeah. With double the effect, standing. Bolan wondered fleetingly what it was like to live inside a body like that, to have the entire world halt and jerk its head at every step you took.

  Apparently this one had learned to live with it. Or maybe to enjoy it.

  “Beautiful,” she murmured. “Your place or mine?”

  “Mine,” he said curtly, and took her quickly away from there.

  Bolan knew the lady well, though this was their first meeting. Her name was Martha Canada. Friends and associates called her Marty. Age twenty-five, career girl but not particularly militant about it, degree in business arts from Michigan State. Daddy was a retired GM executive. Mother deceased. Brother Jeremy a third-year student at Ohio State.

  She’d been with Cassiopea for only about a year, having dropped out of a post-grad course at Pontiac to accept the employment offer. Cass Baby had picked her out of a lineup of beauty contestants at the Michigan State Fair—but apparently he had tailored the job offer to fit her academic qualifications—which, in all fairness, were very good. She was a showpiece, though—Bolan was certain of that. Officially she’d been the guy’s executive secretary—a traveling secretary. A dream job, under most any other circumstances. Constant travel to all the major world capitals, continual contact with the beautiful and powerful people everywhere—all expenses paid, and a handsome salary to boot.

  Yeah. Bolan’s file on Martha Canada was detailed and complete, but still he did not know the inner secrets of this lady. And he did not know the full depth of her association with the mob’s glamour boy of international finance.

  The drive to his bungalow at Las Brisas—the fabulous hotel in the hills above the east bay—was a short and silent run. He made no attempt at conversation, nor did she. Apparently she’d known where they were headed from the moment she stepped into the jeep. The pink and white vehicles were a sort of trademark of Las Brisas—a special service to their guests.

  She broke the silence when he wheeled onto the terraced grounds of the hotel complex, though it was a bit of an absent-minded query—spoken from a corner of her consciousness. “Are there really two hundred swimming pools?”

  Bolan shrugged and fielded the question on the same level as given. “I haven’t had time to count them. Anyway, they’re sort of small.”

  “It all looks very nice,” she said quietly.

  Nice, yeah. Two hundred and fifty bungalows, or casitas, each with its own stocked bar and private pool, each nestled onto its own terrace behind flowering hedges to insure total privacy. Nice for honeymooners, or house nudists, or for celebrities seeking anonymity in a quiet, private club atmosphere.
The accommodations were swank and the service impeccable. An American travel writer had recently hailed Las Brisas as one of the three finest hotels in the world. Bolan could believe it. And the seclusion was doubly nice for a guy in his situation.

  The lady was telling him, “I had hoped that we would stay here this time. Mr. Cassiopea prefers the show and tell crowd, though.”

  Naturally. “Show and tell” was Cass Baby’s chief stock in trade.

  Bolan helped her out of the jeep and guided her along the path to his casita. She paused just outside, sighing—perhaps appreciating the breathtaking view of Acapulco Bay, perhaps trying to collect her mind and come to some final decision regarding the stranger beside her and that ultra-private bungalow to which he was escorting her.

  “It’s okay,” he gruffly told her. “You have nothing to fear from me.”

  “Why did you bring me here?”

  “You don’t have to stay,” he told her. “Follow the path on around to the office. You can get a cab from there.”

  “What’s it like inside?” she asked, peering at the casita.

  He opened the door and stood aside. “Check it out if you’d like,” he offered.

  She showed him a wobbly smile and went inside. “Oh, it’s quite nice,” she called from the interior.

  Bolan went in and closed the door. “Bar’s over there,” he said, pointing. “If you don’t see what you like, call the desk.”

  She helped herself from the fruit bowl, instead, and dropped onto a longue near the window, clutching a zapote rather absently in both hands.

  In here, suddenly, it was all very different. Mack Bolan was a man of singular purpose, indeed, and he had little time or energies for a pursuit of the mating game. He was not, however, immune to the tug of masculine sensibilities—and this lady was something very special. The place was, too; together, yeah, it was suddenly all very different. She was very appealing, distracting, troubling.

  He lit a cigarette and turned his gaze onto the bay. “It is beautiful, isn’t it,” he small-talked.

  “Oh, very.” She seemed as uncomfortable as he.

  “I suppose you’re wondering what I’m about.”

  “I’m working at it,” she quietly admitted. “You’re obviously not Mexican police. So what does that make you? FBI? CIA? What?”