Devil's Horn Page 3

  Yeah, he was a juggernaut, an underworld entrepreneur, damn straight. He was a top dog, the top dog. He might be on the short side of five foot six and look like some scrawny runt tipping the scales at one-forty sopping wet. But now as he eyeballed the beautiful Broadway starlets and the sleek wives of upper-crust dudes he'd bought and paid for who were strutting their wares in his sprawling penthouse suite, he had to smile to himself. He might be short and skinny, but he was big where it really counted. He was proud of that, and he'd take on all comers. He smiled again as he ran back that little play on words through his head. He'd sampled just about every woman there. They knew who he was. They knew he was a damned tiger in the sack.

  Sipping at his glass of three-hundred-dollar French champagne, Ronny caught a glimpse of himself in the huge wall mirror behind the mahogany bar. A swarthy, dark-haired, dark-eyed Apollo, he thought. The Mediterranean blood ran thick in his family, and he had the image of a Caesar to uphold. He saw himself as a modern-day Alexander the Great — he caught himself just in time. It was good he hadn't let that one slip out — Alexander was a flaming faggot. Julius Caesar, maybe. Maybe even a Sicilian Hannibal.

  Yeah, he was feeling great, a billion-dollar stud in a two-thousand-dollar white suit made of Thai silk. God, he was looking good. Life was beautiful, and he was at the pinnacle of the whole frigging world.

  But it had been a hard climb to the top of his mountain. He owed his success to his late old man, but he defied the first son of a bitch to tell him that to his handsome face. Sure, Mario Bernelli had muscled out some of the stiffer drug competition in the old days, when heroin first hit the streets. Sure, Pop had commanded an army of soldiers that had bribed the big suits of the straight New York set into the alliance with the Devil's Horn, and bludgeoned any malcontents or deserters into a coma or black-bag city. If it hadn't been for the old man, some said, the kid wouldn't be shit.

  Okay, Brennan thought, I'll show you shit.

  And he had. The Devil's Horn had had some loose ends in the beginning. Guys running amok, doing their own thing on their own time and in their own way. Brennan had cleaned up the garbage quick, because he wasn't going to sit still for all that maverick crap. After all, it wasn't surprising to him, really, to have so easily herded up all the heavy muscle, be they crooked politico, bad cop, disgruntled mafioso. Whatever. The old man had had enough dirt on a lot of guys in the city, and on more than a few guys in Southeast Asia — the bad CIA apples and pissed-off Vietnam vets — to glue the Horn together. In his own mind Ronny had won the right to be top dog. And his was the hand that feeds, he thought.

  Too bad the old man had just keeled over one day in his study in that Long Island mansion that God only knew how much blood had been spilled to buy. Heart attack, uh-huh. Too bad the old man hadn't had one of his gunsels check his medicine cabinet on occasion. Yeah, that was just too damn bad. The old man, Ronny reflected, wasn't always as slick as he thought he was. Sure, he had suspected there was a traitor in the ranks, but the old man had never suspected that his dear, his loving, his one and only son was playing Judas.

  It paid, Ronny knew, to snowball people. Men, women, children, it was all the same to him. Men represented obstacles to be overcome, or money. Women were objects for his pleasure, either between the sheets or just stroking his ego; otherwise they got slapped around. Kids? Fuck 'em, he thought, who needs 'em? But kids were tools, too. Rebellious, disillusioned, know-it-all youth. Throw a little coke, crack, or some of the new smack their way, and they were his for life. When it came to dealing dope, that philosophy had cemented the golden crown right on his head. He briefed his cadre of pushers every week, without fail. If they missed a briefing, their ass was grass and he was the lawnmower. "You come away with every last dime these kids got," he always told his dealers. "You get 'em hooked anyway you can and keep 'em hooked. You guys are the doctors." And Ronny Brennan ran the hospital.

  He was the doctor of love and good times.

  He was the most beautiful guy in the whole world, and there wasn't a skirt chaser in his suite man enough to carry his jockstrap.

  "Boss, we got a problem."

  The deep rumbling voice snapped Brennan out of his thoughts. He jerked his head sideways, anger jolting through his bones. Pete Balducci, his segundo, had walked up on him from behind, and Brennan figured his second-in-command must have seen him with his head up his ass. Balducci was a six-foot-six block of granite with slate-gray eyes behind hooded lids that looked like the slits of a tank turret. He was a big, mean, cold-blooded killing son of a bitch, Brennan knew. But that didn't mean he couldn't kick his ass. A good shot to the nuts... what did they say? The bigger they come.?..

  Sizing guys up physically and deciding how he'd take them down if push came to shove was a habit Brennan had developed early in life. More than once in the old days he'd gone out with his old man's soldiers when a head needed busting, or a kneecap needed shattering, or a competitor needed cement shoes. Friend or foe, it didn't matter to Brennan. Every man was his enemy. And in his position, he thought, a lord overlooking an entire kingdom, could never be too careful.

  "I thought I told you about walking up on me from behind like that," Brennan growled.

  "Sorry, boss."

  Brennan scowled. His segundo looked anything but frigging sorry, he decided. He was beginning to feel like he was surrounded by nothing but wiseasses.

  "We've been hit — I just got word from the street. Somebody walked into one of our main houses, cool as the breeze, and started blowing heads off."

  Brennan stared up at Balducci. It took a second for the shock to set in, then a ball of ice lodged in his gut. A feeling he hadn't known for some time. Panic.

  "What the hell are you talkin' about?"

  "Boss..."

  "Yeah, yeah, I heard ya!" Quickly, Brennan scanned the room. People were dancing, and the music was loud enough so that no one could have heard the exchange. Since midnight, the coke had been flowing, and the mirror trays on the bar and the coffee table were kept heaped with the white god. Even at three o'clock in the morning the party was still going strong, and showed no sign of slowing down anytime soon. The women had been looking his way for the past hour, Brennan had noticed, and he was getting ready to score some ass. Now this! A hit. Who?

  He ran the list of his enemies and would-be competitors through his mind, looking for that thorn in his side. Hell, he'd all but eliminated the competition in New York and New Jersey, and the families were playing ball with him. Somebody, though, had gotten cute.

  Now he had a war on his hands.

  Brennan cursed under his breath. He ordered his segundo into the conference room and followed him in quickly, his mind buzzing with fear and anger. As soon as Balducci shut the door, muffling the revelry beyond, Brennan started with the orders that would signal war. "Round up the boys, put the word out to your troops in the street. I want movement and I want ass kicked until there's some answers, understand?" "I already did, boss. I got my hitters running down all our dealers now. There's a team on standby with the phones open. You got any ideas..."

  "No, I don't got any ideas, goddammit!"

  And Ronny Brennan didn't have the first inkling. Things had been running along smoothly, maybe too damn smoothly, he now reflected. Had the good life softened him up? Had he lost that mean edge that had won and secured his position at the top of the heap?

  "Have you beefed up security on the floor?"

  Balducci spread his hands, an imploring look in his narrowed gaze. "Well, boss, I just heard about it, and..."

  "Yeah, yeah. Christ! I'll tell you what..."

  Suddenly the intercom on Brennan's desk buzzed. The red light on the miniconsole was flashing, which warned Brennan there was trouble. Unexpected guests. Bad company. Brennan and Balducci looked at each other as if they'd just been shot. That bad company, they both knew, was now in the building, had gotten past the security guard in the lobby and was now on the upper floor. Some fucking security, Brennan though
t. There was going to be hell to pay for this, and heads would roll. It was time to shake a few trees anyway.

  "Well?" Brennan snapped at his segundo, silently cursing the soldier's hesitation. What the hell is this? he thought, a murderous rage burning through every limb. Is everyone going to come unglued on me now because some wiseass has thrown a monkey wrench into the juggernaut?

  Balducci punched the intercom button. "Yeah?"

  But the only sound that came out of the box was a harsh gurgle. Like someone was choking, fighting to get words out. Struggling to... Damn! The slobbering, strangling noise sent ice fingers down Brennan's spine. Then there was a sharp crack. It was a sound Brennan couldn't mistake, because he'd heard more than one neck snap during his reign, and had broken some vertebrae himself on occasion.

  A Smith and Wesson .44 Magnum appeared in Balducci's big fist. The segundo was already moving toward the door, but Brennan hesitated, his mind tumbling with fear. Pull yourself together, he told himself. You're in charge. Get a grip on yourself, pal. You're the man. You're the top dog. The eyes of the world are on you now. The reassurance sounded flimsy to his mind, and he felt like a man walking on slowly cracking ice. Still, he summoned the courage of thirty-some mean years of violence and treachery and followed his segundo to the door. The unthinkable was now happening, Brennan knew, and he had to deal with it, he had to do something.

  Walking on legs that suddenly seemed like deadweights, Brennan followed his hitter back into the big suite.

  Then the unthinkable became reality.

  The double doors to the foyer blew open and crashed into the walls like a thunderclap. Doors that were locked, bolted and chained. Bui the grim determination, the demonic fury that Brennan found in the eyes of the big man in blacksuit, who had breached his security and crashed his party, told him that there were few doors on the face of the earth that could hold him back.

  The revelers in the suite froze, voices fell silent as all eyes turned toward the man in black. Rock music blared during the split second of mass paralysis. Then the late-night partyers saw the gun in the intruder's hand.

  Balducci had spotted the Beretta 93-R before anyone else. He acted first, swinging his hand cannon toward the black-garbed invader. It was the last time he acted. The curtain of doom dropped over the segundo.

  The intruder's Beretta chugged out a silenced round, and a 9 mm parabellum slug cored a third eye in Balducci's forehead. Blood and muck sprayed over Brennan's face, splashing his white suit like some bright abstract painting.

  Several women screamed.

  Brennan saw the only gun he had in that room topple to the plush brown carpet, glimpsed the blood on his suit, then looked across the room. Instantly, he recognized one of his top dealers out of New Jersey, though the man was trying to hide behind the intruder's bulk. An imploring look in the ounce man's eyes asked Brennan for forgiveness. Brennan swore to himself he'd kill that son of a bitch if it was the last thing he ever did.

  The first shock of Balducci's slaying wore off within seconds, and Brennan was surprised at just how hard and mean he felt. He was going to deal with these two assholes himself. He was alone now. But hadn't it always been that way?

  Brennan turned his outraged attention on the big invader. And the heart of Ronny Brennan skipped a couple of beats.

  The invader was already halfway across the room.

  Brennan stared at that death's-head expression, felt his knees turn to jelly. The invader's ice-blue eyes seemed to bore right through him like a drill. The searching look told Brennan this guy knew who and what he was and intended to punch his ticket. And Brennan would have sworn he knew that face.

  Would have sworn he should know that face. But from where? And who was this...

  Then it finally dawned on Ronny the Top Dog Brennan just who his uninvited guest was.

  Mack Bolan. The Executioner. The one-man slayer of the Families.

  Ronny the Top Dog Brennan suddenly felt very small. And limp.

  4

  Bolan was locked on to the drug czar with grim death sights. Crashing the party was a direct approach, but Bolan wanted it no other way, knew it could be no other way. Ronny Brennan's world was about to go up in flames. And, as far as the Executioner was concerned, there were no innocents in this den of vipers.

  Damn right, Junior, Bolan thought. Your ass is fried bacon. And I'm the butcher.

  Bolan sensed the fear he'd brought with him into the suite, saw that the way to Brennan was unobstructed at that moment by human obstacles. He had everyone's attention, and he seized the moment.

  Breaching security had been easy. His blitzkrieg had taken the savages by storm, punched a gaping, bloody hole in their defenses. In the lobby he had taken out the security guard with a good right cross, damaging the man's ego more than his face. He had turned the top floor of the high rise into an open grave, drilling two 9 mm slugs through the foreheads of a pair of Brennan's goons, then snapping the neck of a soldier who had made a frenzied attempt to alert the druglord to the attack. Bolan's captive ounce man had come along for the ride. At this point, the dealer was nothing more than a shield against enemy fire, and no amount of sniveling or pleading for mercy would make the garbageman a breastplate of righteousness in Bolan's eyes.

  Three long strides away from Brennan, Bolan saw that the druglord had decided to play it cute. Bolan let Brennan scoop up Slit Eyes's .44 Magnum, then he hammered a snapkick off the drug czar's jaw, hammering the king trashman into the wall like so much crumpled refuse.

  It was then, too, that a lone wolf among the party-goers decided to bare his fangs. Out of the corner of his eye, Bolan saw the big hero lunge for his Beretta. A real good-looking guy, Bolan observed, a lady-killer with enough arrogance in his eyes and enough swagger in his step to shame any pretty boy. But if the hero was trying to impress the women, he came up limp. Bolan hit the dude with a straight right, a thunder-clapping shot to the chops. The fury that Bolan threw into that jawbreaker whipped the lady-killer's legs out from under him as if he'd slipped on a banana peel. Then another would-be David charged the Goliath. Bolan pistoned a sidekick into that clown's guts. The guy was poleaxed by the blow to his knees, and whatever he'd been drinking all night came out in one long gory spew.

  Then Bolan's shield bolted. Bolan had known the ounce man would make another break for freedom at the slightest chink of daylight. With a sweeping right roundhouse he put out the lights on that garbage-man.

  Again, everyone in the suite froze. Again, Bolan held everyone's undivided attention. The Executioner drilled a parabellum round through the compact-disc player, shattering glass and metal, dropping a cloak of silence over the paralyzed throng. The acrid smell of fear now cut through the thick flowery scent of perfume and cologne.

  Quickly, Bolan swept up the .44 Magnum, tucking the hand cannon inside his combat webbing. Another piece of hardware, he knew, would come in handy, because this hit had gone hard in a hell of a hurry. Just in case the number of maggots multiplied too fast, Bolan had hooked two frag grenades to his webbing before entering the high rise.

  "Anybody moves, joyboy here gets skinned," the Executioner growled, hauling Brennan to his feet by the scruff of his skinny neck. "Like a snake. Any more heroes?" he asked the partyers, raking an icy stare over the faces of all the guests.

  There were no takers.

  The party was over.

  But Bolan had only begun to put the torch to the house. He was center stage, and his show was just getting on the road. He wanted to show these people just what Ronny Brennan was, just how little, weak and cowardly this lump of shit was when the chips were down. He wanted these people to know that when all else in their lives failed they'd better have something other than cannibalism to fall back on. And a piece of sewage like Ronny Brennan was not the answer. Brennan was now going to become the mirror image of their twisted passions.

  "You're dead meat, smartass!" Brennan rasped, screwing up his face in pain as Bolan grabbed him by the hair, shoved him
toward the coffee table near the bar. "I got thirty soldiers on the way. You'll never get outta here alive!"

  Bolan picked up the stash case the dealer had dropped. "Watch me," he growled, then kicked Brennan in the back of the knee, dropping him in front of his coffee table. As his eyes swept over the guests, challenging them to try to stop him, the party-crasher quickly opened the briefcase. He took out the packets of Brennan's smack and punched each one open on the coffee table with the butt of his Beretta, until a substantial pile of the poison powder was spread before Brennan's eyes. He wiped the butt of his Beretta on Brennan's suit to clean off the white junk, then fisted another handful of the druglord's hair.

  "This is what you people have been living for," the Man from Ice rasped to Brennan's dumbstruck party guests. He pushed Brennan's head toward the smack pile, then violently thrust the guy's face into the heroin. "This is what you've sold your souls to. This is the guy who's bought you, who uses you like toilet paper. He's shit, and that's just what he's made you. You guys, this is the maggot that's probably been sleeping with your women and laughing behind your back the whole time. This is what owns you. And this is what the last stop will look like for you."

  Brennan struggled to break free of Bolan's grasp. The Executioner slackened his hold, let Brennan lift his face a few inches, then plunged that white-powdered masklike face back into the smack. There was a crack of glass, and an even more audible and sickening crack of bone as blood sprayed from Brennan's pulped nose. The druglord sputtered, shaking his head like a wet dog, but Bolan held his face firmly planted in the fruits of his rotten harvest. Brennan coughed, choking on the powder that poured into his mouth and nose, and tears spouted from the creep's eyes.