Hard Targets Read online

  “Might as well,” Bolan replied.

  He knelt to one side of the corridor, giving the enemy a smaller target as they suddenly came into view. The range was thirty yards or so; the targets, three unhappy shooters armed with long guns, stopping short at the sight of two grim-looking strangers on their turf. Bolan triggered the buckshot round before they could react, one blast from the Milkor equivalent to three 12-gauge shells packed with double 0 buck.

  The pellets spread enough at that range to hit all three Gallo soldiers, though the loser in the middle took the worst of it, blown backward, airborne, leaving blood trails in the air. His sidekicks spun away in opposite directions, going down, and Johnny pinned them with a single round apiece to make it stick.

  Ears cushioned by the Surefire plugs, Bolan heard Johnny ask, “If you were Gallo, where would you be?”

  “Looking for a way out,” he answered.

  “Right. So, likely not a panic room.”

  “One exit, whether he decides to run or ride.”

  It clicked, their voices overlapping: “The garage.”

  * * *

  PLANNING TO FLEE and actually getting out, Vinnie Gallo had discovered, were two very different things. He was barely out of his study when two of his men buttonholed him, asking where they ought to go, what they should do. Wanting the boss to do their thinking for them, as he always had.

  He told them, “Get into the fight and hold the line,” with a vague nod toward the front door of the mansion, where the racket was increasing. Gallo’s goons looked nervously at one another, then took off to do as they’d been told.

  Suckers.

  An escort might have helped him reach the car, but it would also draw attention to him, which he definitely didn’t want right now. If he could pass unnoticed through the chaos that surrounded him and snag a ride, he had a good chance of surviving.

  If he kept his head down.

  If the damned gate wasn’t blocked.

  He knew it wasn’t shut, because his enemies had rolled up to the front door of his mansion like a trick-or-treat parade from hell. He’d heard the car horns, shooting, crazy yelling back and forth as if savages were closing in.

  No problem.

  Gallo had prepared for every possibility, including an escape plan just in case his wall was breached, his home invaded. Shortly after buying the estate, he’d had a tunnel dug between the mansion and its separate garage, completely reinforced with cinder blocks and I-beams. Entry to the tunnel from the house was through a storage closet with a false wall at the back. Its exit, at the other end, was through a metal cabinet in the garage’s southwest corner.

  Gallo loved that cloak-and-dagger nonsense.

  This night, it just might save his life.

  He made it to the closet without meeting any of his other soldiers on the way, unlocked it and was just about to step inside when someone called out from behind him, “Vinnie! Where ya going?”

  Turning, he saw Al Cavallaro bustling toward him, with an Uzi submachine gun clutched beneath one arm. Gallo was fumbling in his head for an appropriate response when Cavallaro spoke again.

  “Ya figure it was time to sweep the place, or what?” he asked, grinning in a sarcastic, sour way.

  There was no point in bullshitting. “I’m getting out of here. You wanna come?” Gallo asked.

  A blink from Cavallaro, then he said, “I thought ya’d never ask.”

  “Come on, then.”

  With Cavallaro behind him, Gallo stepped into the closet, found the hidden latch that held the secret door secure and opened it. A ten-foot flight of wooden steps descended into darkness, brightened when he flipped a light switch hidden underneath a shelf lined with jugs and bottles of cleaning supplies.

  “We’re going down there?” Cavallaro asked.

  “I am,” Gallo answered. “You can stay here, if you’re claustrophobic.”

  “Hell, no. Let’s get moving.”

  Pissed at being saddled with a nag, and wondering what he could do about it, Gallo started down the stairs, into the womb of earth.

  * * *

  “THIS JUST MIGHT be the worst freakin’ idea you ever had,” Mick Strauss declared.

  “Nobody made you tag along.”

  “Hey, what’s a partner for?”

  I wonder, sometimes, Leo Kelly thought, but kept it to himself. They were within a hundred yards of Gallo’s gate, and he could see it standing open, an unprecedented circumstance. Closer, he saw a body sprawled inside the opening, and then another. Gunfire, audible when they were still a quarter mile from the estate, was louder now, and punctuated by explosions.

  “Holy—! It’s World War III,” Strauss said.

  “Still time to bail,” Kelly replied.

  “Screw that. Let’s do it!” As he spoke, Strauss jacked a round into the chamber of his Remington Model 870 shotgun, clutching the piece in a white-knuckled grip.

  Kelly’s own Remington—the improved Model 887 Nitro Mag—was propped beside him in the driver’s seat, where he could reach it quickly once he’d stopped the Crown Victoria and jumped into the fight. He wasn’t looking forward to it, but the call had come from Gallo that he needed help, and there was no way to avoid it, short of blowing off the godfather and hoping someone snuffed him before he issued orders for the rogue detectives to be whacked. All thoughts of Zoe Dirks had been driven from his mind.

  A do-or-die job, and it still might work to their advantage, if their luck held. Granted, that was feeling shaky lately, but there were a couple ways it could play out to Kelly’s personal advantage, so he wasn’t giving up. Not yet.

  One way to run it down, he and his partner happened on the battle site before the squeal went out and called for reinforcements to assist them. Drop whoever had invaded Gallo’s space and save the ritzy neighborhood from low-rent lunatics, and they’d be heroes. Break it down another way, and if they had to take out Vinnie G., that act alone should cripple any claims that they were bought and paid for by the Mob.

  A win-win situation, sure—as long as no one blew Kelly’s head off in the meantime.

  As for Mick, his kinks were getting old, had caused them trouble once too often. The department always got good mileage out of martyrs.

  They were through the gate now, rolling past more corpses, swerving around cars that had been shot to hell and stalled out in the driveway. Checking out the battlefield, Kelly imagined this would be the end of TV anchors calling Gallo a “reputed” gangster. Anyone who thought this kind of shit went down by accident, outside a straight guy’s house, would have to be a freaking idiot.

  “You ready, partner?” he asked Strauss.

  “Damn right!”

  “Okay, then.”

  Kelly stopped the Crown Vic, switched its engine off and left the key in the ignition. If somebody bagged it, what the hell? There’d be a hundred squad cars on the property within the next ten minutes, anyway. He grabbed his shotgun, popped the door and rolled out onto neatly manicured grass, just as a bullet smashed the driver’s window overhead.

  Chapter 15

  Bolan set the house on fire before they left. It wasn’t difficult: one 40 mm pyrotechnic round into the Electrolux ICON pro-style gas range as they passed through the kitchen and out, first detonation from the impact, then flames racing through the mansion’s gas lines to the furnace, water heater and laundry room. A mass inferno from a single trigger stroke.

  Bolan gave no thought to the soldiers who were trapped inside, the hanging art or lavish furnishings, the servants who’d be left without a paycheck in the morning. He was hunting Vinnie Gallo, and a little dose of hell on earth was waiting for whoever stood between him and his quarry.

  “Won’t be long before the cops and fire department show,” his brother said.

  �
��And Gallo knows it,” Bolan answered. “If he’s getting out, he can’t afford to wait.”

  “What are the odds he’s still inside?” Johnny asked, glancing back toward the mansion, all in flames.

  “I couldn’t tell you, but I won’t take it for granted.”

  Bolan had glimpsed Gallo’s garage on their approach, a five-or six-car building, well back from the house. There’d been no guards in evidence around it then, and he could see none now, in the light of the blazing funeral pyre that was the monster’s second home. If he was wrong, and Vinnie Gallo wasn’t running, taking out the cars was still a worthwhile move.

  It meant nobody else could get away, except on foot.

  The soldier had used three of the Milkor’s six rounds in the mansion, and reloaded on the run now, with his shadow and Johnny’s advancing like a pair of hulking giants on the lawn before them, from the firelight at their backs. The fight, from what he heard and saw, was focused on the house now, having moved on from the gate. A trail of shot-up cars and bodies lined the driveway, bloodstains glinting on the pavement and the short-cropped lawn.

  They’d halved the distance from the mansion to the overgrown garage when another one of Gallo’s golf carts zoomed out of the shadows there, charging across the grass in their direction. Bolan counted three men in the chunky vehicle, two firing as they came, the driver hunched over his steering wheel in kamikaze mode.

  Johnny, diving for the turf, called back, “How many of those damned things does he have?”

  Bolan ignored the question, snapped the Milkor to his shoulder, made target acquisition through the launcher’s Armson Occluded Eye Gunsight, and sent an HE round downrange to meet the mini-charger. Its explosion stood the golf cart on its nose, its occupants ejected like a troupe of acrobats escaping from a clown car.

  Bolan had the Spectre M4 ready as the tumbling bodies hit, stitching the nearest of them with a 3-round burst, while Johnny’s AUG cracked lethal greetings at another of the trio. Number three was nimble, springing to his feet as if the crash was something he had practiced, but he’d dropped his piece somewhere along the way and came up empty-handed. Trying to correct that, he was digging underneath his jacket for a sidearm when the Spectre stuttered through its sound suppressor again and put him down.

  Bolan and Johnny rose together and advanced toward the garage.

  * * *

  ROCKET WAS ROASTING, and didn’t like it one damned bit. He’d lost his homeys somewhere, and now he couldn’t find the ofay bastards he had come to deal with, either. Stumbling through a giant house on fire, he hardly knew which end was up, the fierce heat baking into him and making him feel dizzy as he lurched from room to smoky room.

  Standing at one end of a hallway leading nowhere, Rocket realized that there had been no need for his gang to come here. The honkies were killing one another just fine without him. Behind him, something cracked deep in the house, a sound like fat logs in a fireplace. Something else gave out a moan, as if it was getting ready to collapse, and Rocket started moving down the corridor. Where to? He didn’t have the first freaking idea.

  How could he get lost in a goddamn house, for Christ’s sake? He thought for a second. It was big, okay, but not that big. It wasn’t like a freaking super mall or something. Find a door and get the hell out. Bust a window if you have to. Had to be a way out, or the people couldn’t come in.

  Where in hell had he come in? Another question Rocket couldn’t answer if his life depended on it.

  Which, he had begun to think, it might.

  He wasn’t scared of fire—had set a few himself, in fact, and watched them burn—but this was something else entirely. This was being stuck inside an oven with the goddamn broiler on, and no way out. And if a person thought that wasn’t scary, he or she could think again.

  The AK-47 dragged at Rocket’s arms, twelve pounds of wood and metal getting hotter by the minute, so his palms were smarting where he held it. Rocket thought about discarding it, then wondered if he ought to blast an exit through one of the mansion’s walls. He’d seen it done in movies, but you’d need an outside wall, and wouldn’t there be doors and windows, anyhow, if you were standing next to one of those?

  The way his luck was running, Rocket figured he’d likely shoot his way into a pantry or a bathroom, and it wouldn’t be like something out of Penthouse, where he’d catch two smokin’ hotties in the shower, lathering each other up. More likely find a dead guy on the toilet, smoldering, before the roof caved in and buried both of them.

  In desperation, Rocket started sprinting down the hallway, wondering if it would ever end. He got his answer seconds later, as he came around a corner to confront a roaring wall of flame. The sound his throat made was a sob, mixed with a gasp for fading oxygen.

  He turned, tried to retreat, and that was when the ceiling buckled, knocked him flat and pinned him there. No longer Rocket, and definitely frightened, Cletus Washington began to scream.

  * * *

  MICK STRAUSS WAS scared, which always pissed him off and made him mean. Some would have said that he was mean to start with—teenage hookers, for example—and he wouldn’t have disputed it. But there were different kinds of mean, and at the moment he was killing mean.

  The first thing that had gone wrong, aside from coming out to Gallo’s place to start with, had been getting separated from his partner. Strauss had no idea where Leo Kelly was, or how they’d managed to lose track of each other. It occurred to him that Kelly might have ditched him purposely, but what would be the sense in that? Ten years together on the job, and all the stuff they’d done in tandem, forged some kind of bond.

  If not, what was there in the world that anyone could count on?

  Still...

  He’d thought about just bailing, it was true. The minute he first missed Kelly, couldn’t spot him anywhere nearby, Strauss had been tempted to run back, jump in the black Crown Vic and haul ass out of there. Not really leave, but duck away and hide somewhere until the SWAT guys started rolling in, then follow them back to the killing ground. Safer that way, but he’d decided that he couldn’t live with it.

  Now he was freaking stranded on his own and scared to death.

  He’d shot one guy already—not a Gallo soldier, but black and wild-eyed, with an Uzi he was trying to reload when Strauss dropped him with buckshot from a range of twenty feet or so. Easy, and satisfying in its way, but he was still neck-deep in it, with no way out.

  So, where in hell would Kelly go?

  Strauss hoped he wasn’t in the house, a flaming hulk now, radiating heat enough to blister paint on cars parked out in front, and singe the hair of bodies lying on the broad front steps. If Kelly was in there, Strauss hoped he had the common sense to shoot himself or do what firemen had advised him: face the flames and breathe as deeply as you can, searing your lungs and ending it before you wound up being cooked alive.

  Bad news.

  He couldn’t check the house, regardless. Someone else would have to rake the ashes, hours or days from now. And if he couldn’t find his partner, Strauss supposed the next best thing would be to corner Vinnie Gallo, tell the bastard to his face what it would cost him to get out of this in one piece, maybe even dodging major prison time.

  Too late for that if Gallo was inside the mansion, blackened crispy-critters, but the godfather was wily. A survivor. Strauss imagined he would have an exit strategy, most likely more than one. Why let a fortress built to keep you safe become a trap?

  While Strauss was thinking that, he saw a light go on in the garage.

  * * *

  JOHNNY THOUGHT THEY had it made, when half a dozen Gallo men came out of nowhere, firing on the run. Maybe they’d gathered in the dark woods, waiting to find out which way the fight was going, whether they should join in or retreat. Or maybe they’d been in it from the start, scattered, divided, then had found
one another, closing ranks to try another round.

  What mattered was the hot lead flying too damned close for comfort as he hit the turf with force enough to drive the air out of his lungs. Fighting to draw a breath, he raised his head to get a quick count on the enemy—seven, not six—and aim the Steyr in their direction. Firing prone meant Johnny had to push up on his elbows, giving them a larger target than he wanted to, but otherwise he couldn’t use the AUG effectively.

  Even then, a bullet hissing past his head made him flinch involuntarily. The 3-round burst that he’d meant to kill the shooter farthest to his right struck low, shattering femurs, and the guy pitched forward on his face, howling. A fourth round, through the cranium, silenced his voice for good, and Johnny moved on to another target.

  His brother was doing his bit for the cause, and then some, with the Spectre M4 SMG, holding it sideways so the casket magazine wouldn’t be jammed into the ground and force the muzzle skyward. Hot brass spit from the ejector port in handfuls, while the silenced weapon sputtered death downrange. Before Johnny lined up his second target, Mack had taken down two Gallo soldiers, his 9 mm Parabellum hollowpoint rounds inflicting hydrostatic shock on organs that the slugs themselves would never reach.

  It was a hard and bloody way to die, but Johnny couldn’t think of any nice ways if he tried.

  He focused on the soldier in his sights and got it right this time, a short tattoo dead center on the running target’s chest. The Steyr’s 5.56 mm NATO rounds were tumblers, didn’t mushroom like a hollow-point when penetrating flesh and bone, but turned end over end, deformed by impact in the process, plowing a god-awful wound channel. Striking a heart, they shredded muscle and drove slivers of the shattered sternum into the surrounding tissue, similar to shrapnel from a frag grenade.

  Another Gallo soldier, down and out.

  Mack beat him to the rest, his Spectre sweeping left to right across the dwindling skirmish line to cut them down. It wasn’t disappointing, in the normal sense—Johnny derived no joy from killing, took no pride in it—but he preferred to hold up his end in a fight.