Detroit Deathwatch Read online

  Vincenti yelled, “Hey, fuck this, fuck this!” He took an angry stride toward the girl then underwent one of those characteristic transformations, smiling and gallantly helping the girl to her feet. He brushed her fanny with a solicitous hand, then slapped it and told her, “There’s johns all over the joint, honey. You didn’t need to come way up here. I hope you didn’t intend to pee in one of Papa Sal’s drawers.”

  Charley Fever fidgeted uneasily and said, “Sal, we need to move.” He shot a troubled glance toward Tony Quaso. “Bring your broad, Tony. We’ll talk about this later.” He moved behind the desk and sprung the door to the concealed stairway, then made a little gesture to the boss. “Sal?”

  Vincenti was staring at a small flashlight that lay on the floor, partially under his desk. A handkerchief had been wrapped about the lens and secured there with a rubber band.

  “Yeah, bring your broad,” he told Tony Quaso, an eyebrow raised in another characteristic expression that meant that Crazy Sal Vincenti was thinking into a problem. “We’ll take her with us. Part way with us, anyway.”

  Tony Quaso got the meaning immediately, as did the other men. The girl had been snooping at the boss’s desk. And now she was to be initiated into the secret of the subway to Lake St. Clair. No way. Tony’s broad was going to get dumped in Lake St. Clair—a long ways from shore.

  The whole thing was painfully embarrassing for a second-string riser like Anthony Thomas Quaso. He growled, “I’ll take care of it, Sal.” He grabbed the blonde and shoved her into the lineup behind Pete DiLani. The girl went unprotestingly, contrite, head bowed. Quaso fell in behind her, and Charley Fever brought up the rear.

  A faint light from below dimly illuminated the shaft. Vincenti halted about halfway down to call back, “What’s that light, Charley?”

  “Probably the battery lantern. The other guys must have left it on. Should be okay, Sal.”

  “Just the same, I don’t want no more surprises. Get over to the side there, Pete. Let the guy with the broad go first.”

  Quaso sighed over that “the guy” putdown. He nudged the girl with his knee, and the two of them squeezed past the capi to head the procession.

  Vincenti pulled DiLani on past, then followed by several steps. Charley Fever remained at the rear, just behind his boss.

  “It’s okay, Sal,” he said quietly.

  “Sure,” Vincenti replied.

  They hit the basement level and proceeded to the east side in that same order, the girl in front and guided from behind by Tony Quaso.

  A lantern affixed to the far wall was throwing out a thin flood of light, the beam ending in a spot on the floor about halfway across.

  Just as Charley Fever moved out of the stairwell shaft, something dark and quick blurred across the lighted zone, at the head of the procession.

  The blonde went hurtling off into the darkness in a plunge to the side, obviously propelled by a hard shove.

  A pencil of flame leapt out to merge with the beam of the lantern and something terrible happened to Tony Quaso’s head. It seemed to just burst open and fling all kinds of shit into the air.

  Pete DiLani was reacting in an off-balance backward dive, digging for his pocket as he went, and he caught the same sort of problem in the throat. Charley Fever actually saw a flattened chunk of metal the size of a quarter erupt from DiLani’s mouth, carrying with it teeth and bone and gums in a gushing spray like red vomit.

  Sal Vincenti was whirling about and firing both of his pistols into the floor as he spun. He got it high in the back, near the shoulder, and this time Charley Fever heard the little whooshing sound that could only be a very effective silencer that didn’t seem to be having much effect on firepower. Remembering it later (he would carry that memory to his grave), this professional gunman knew that those soft-nosed whistlers were blowing out of there under some hellish kind of muzzle velocity—very unusual for silenced weapons.

  At that very moment, though, Charley Fever’s mind was pitched into more urgent considerations. Without even thinking about what he was doing, he was flinging himself into a suicidal roll along that cement floor, trying to get his own bulk between those whistling missiles and the fallen body of Sal Vincenti.

  He got off one shot from the Colt, firing instinctively, while realizing through some division of consciousness that he could not even see anything to shoot at. Then something like a sledgehammer hit the meaty part of his upper arm. He didn’t feel a thing beyond that initial jolt, just numbness and sudden warmth. But that arm was dead from the shoulder down, and a weakness was spreading all over him. The Colt flew, and skittered across the floor.

  Numbly, almost blindly, he came to his knees and got an arm under Sal. The old man was conscious, his eyes open, scared, pleading, “Help me—help me, Charley.”

  A shadow moved up and fell across the lantern beam.

  Charley Fever muttered, “It’s okay, Sal.”

  Then he looked up, maybe even defiantly—he couldn’t remember, later, exactly what his emotions were at the moment. But it was, yeah, that fuckin’ guy. He was dressed in a black outfit like frogmen wear, skintight, rubbery-looking. He was dull black all over, even his face and hands, and even his damned gun was black—an automatic with the damnedest looking silencer Charley Fever had ever seen. The guy had these damned belts strung all over him and loaded down with battlefield stuff—he must have been carrying a hundred pounds of hardware. But it didn’t seem to be bothering him. Tall guy, very tall, powerful-looking and sleek like a damned black panther, broad at the shoulders, tapering.

  The worst was the goddamn eyes. They were straight from hell.

  Charley Fever told the Executioner, in a voice so calm he surprised himself, “I’m taking Sal upstairs.”

  “So go,” the big guy said. Like the eyes, so the voice.

  Somehow Charley got the stricken capo onto his good shoulder and staggered away with him to the stairwell, expecting all the while to catch another sledgehammer somewhere, maybe in the head like poor Tony.

  He was halfway up the stairs before he clearly realized that no more sledgehammers had come, and he could not figure that out.

  Why hadn’t the guy blasted him again?

  Why did he do that? So go! Then just let him walk away like that? Why did the guy do it?

  It was a question that seemed to have no answer, at least not from anywhere in the past experiences of Crazy Sal’s good third arm. But it would bother him, for quite some time.

  Mack Bolan himself would have been hard pressed to come up with the answer, at that moment.

  Nor was he even pondering the question.

  He was busy helping a blonde young lady with blazing eyes readjust her shaken dignity and professional composure.

  “Damn you, Mack Bolan!” she cried, biting back the tears that were threatening to overcome what was left of her status as a liberated female. “Do you know how long I’ve been working on—I was this close, this close, to getting to the bottom of this place!”

  He quietly informed her, “I was up there, Toby. Top of the steps. I heard it. The only thing you were close to was the bottom of the lake.”

  “Well, damn it anyway, just damn it!” she fumed.

  And, yeah, it was a very small underworld. The blonde spitfire was Toby Ranger, his swinging little buddy from the Vegas war … and certainly the sexiest “fed” to ever hide a badge.

  6: CROSSED

  Bolan had first met Toby Ranger in Las Vegas, at a moment when all his chips were riding the showdown hand. She was leader of a song and dance group called “The Ranger Girls”—and what a group. They were four of the most beautiful things on the strip, and their act was, in show biz terms, socko. It was a combination of looks and talent that could have worked all the right kinds of magic for four bright kids on their way to stardom. But these kids were working another sort of magic that Bolan did not suspect until that final, climactic moment that saw him leaving them behind, supposedly forever. The last thing Toby had said to
Mack Bolan in Vegas was, “We’ll cross again.”

  Sure. It was, after all, a small underworld. All the same, Bolan had lived many lives and died far too many deaths since that blitz through Vegas. It was a small underworld, sure, but also an infinite one for the guy who was trying to bring the whole thing down.

  Friends had come and gone along that wipe-out trail. Some had simply spun off along the backwash of the man who lived on the heartbeat. One or two guys—like Leo Turrin and Hal Brognola—seemed to be unshakably tied to the Executioner’s destiny. Many—too many—had been buried along that trail.

  It was the latter group that weighed so heavily on Bolan’s continuing forward motion. He had discovered the hard way the truth of Henrik Ibsen’s declaration: “The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.”

  And he had learned that no man could stand truly alone, no matter how hard he might try. There was something in the human movement that kept tossing together people of like destiny.

  So here he was, in the showdown battle of his war, with a lady fed crossing his trail once again.

  No. Not even Mack Bolan could stand truly alone.

  He did not, in the final analysis, live only to kill. There kept erupting those inevitable moments when something stronger than war and death entered his dimension of being. And this was one of those moments.

  The battle plan was off.

  All numbers were cancelled.

  There might never be another clear shot at Fortress Detroit—maybe the numbers would never again fall into place—and, yes, there was agony in that decision. But it was not, in the true sense, a decision at all. It was simply a recognition of that which was.

  The hit was off.

  He had known it the moment he recognized the leggy blonde leading that procession to her certain death. She had abandoned her cover in Vegas to help a doomed warrior shoot his way out of an impossible situation. Now it was time to return the favor—and, no, there was no decision involved.

  He dropped a marksman’s medal into the gore that marked the remains of Pete DiLani, then he took the lady fed away from that hole in hell.

  They found the tunnel and used it, emerging into the confusion at the boat basin just as a procession of police vehicles appeared on the circular drive near the house.

  A police car with a PA system was instructing all within hearing to drop their weapons.

  A boat that Bolan recognized as the cruiser that had pursued his own empty craft was moving slowly away from shore, loaded to the gunwhales with passengers.

  A handful of abandoned “friends” were clustered around the two remaining hardmen in that area, and the talk was far from friendly.

  Apparently the shoreline defenses had been recalled to the clubhouse, drawn there by the gunfire within.

  It would be a soft withdrawal for the Executioner and his lady, with perhaps no more than one or two sentries remaining to block their path. One or two were hazard enough, of course, and the thing could yet fall apart.

  Bolan told the girl, “Your buddies in blue seem to have the situation under control. Go back if you’d like.”

  She shook her head. “No, that would blow everything. Lead on, Captain Puff.”

  He took her hand and led her southward along the lakeshore in the beginning of a journey through more hellfire than the starcrossed man from blood had ever contemplated.

  The hit on the Detroit hardsite had been aborted—and the deathwatch over Detroit would find its birth in that abortion.

  7: ALERTED

  The Sons of Columbus Yacht Club looked like a disaster area. Police vehicles with beacons still flashing were semicircled about the clubhouse. A line of ambulances was backed into the flagstone walkway, doors open, receiving.

  A fire truck stood just inside the walls, inactive. Several firemen were on the roof, tearing out smoldering shingles and tossing them to the ground.

  A growing accumulation of shrouded bodies was neatly placed on the north lawn. These were beyond medical help, and were primarily a matter of statistical interest for the plainclothes cop who was moving along that lineup and peering beneath the shrouds.

  He quit that inspection to halt a fast-moving litter that was headed for the ambulances. “Who shot you, Favorini?” he asked the lucky one.

  Charley Fever turned a pained face toward the detective, glared at him silently for a moment, then said, “How’s Sal?”

  “They’re pumping blood into him,” the cop replied. “He’ll probably make it. Now mine. Who pumped you?”

  “The guy didn’t leave his name, Holzer,” Charley Fever said, turning away with a grimace of pain.

  The cop grunted to the medic and moved on. Who the hell needed names? The guy had left something even better. And a uniformed officer was at that instant hurrying over to deliver another one.

  “Found this near a body in the basement, Lieutenant,” the patrolman reported, handing over a military marksman’s medal smeared with dried blood. Two more DOAs down there. Tentative identification is Tony Quaso and Pete DiLani, but they’re pretty messy. We’ll have to rely on fingerprints for postive ID.”

  “Head hits,” Lieutenant Holzer grunted. It was a statement of fact, not a question.

  “Yes, sir. Dumdums.”

  Sure. The guy didn’t need to leave his name.

  Hell had received some wages this night, that was certain, and John Holzer had no doubts as to the identity of the collector. He dropped the little medal into an envelope, marked it, and added it to the growing collection.

  The patrolman want off to find the DOA team, leaving the lieutenant to ponder the remarkable evidence of a Mack Bolan hit.

  Obviously the guy was as large as his reputation. It was no secret that this Mafia “club” was better guarded than the state prison. Its defenses were regarded as second to none anywhere. Yet the guy had romped in and just laid all over them.

  Nothing cute about the guy—no attempt to confuse the evidence or conceal the identity of the one responsible. Hell. He wanted them to know. Those little metal crosses were his signature—a signed confession for every crime.

  And, no, it was not too difficult to piece it all together and find a coherent sequence of events.

  The guy showed up first in a boat. He dropped anchor in plain view of God and everybody, and began whacking away with a high-powered rifle, dropping three of them in their tracks—head hits, in the dark, at a range exceeding several hundred yards.

  Then he’d come ashore. God only knew how, with fifty rifles guarding the joint. But he did it, and apparently brought his whole damned arsenal with him. This was certified by the shaky and barely coherent story of Billy Castelano, perhaps the luckiest man of the night, and didn’t he know it. Castaleno had sat in the grass, clutching a marksman’s medal in his hand and groaning. While a medic worked on a bleeding skull laceration, Castelano babbled about grenades and “combat stuff” and how the guy suddenly appeared “right out of thin air.”

  Holzer knew that Mack Bolan did not possess supernatural powers. But there was something uncanny about the guy. They had found the dead sentry propped into the fork of a tree, then Holzer had worked a hunch and straight-lined the guy, tracing him back to the most probable point of landing. A few minutes later the bushbearers discovered the rubber bag containing nothing but a sheaf of ballistics charts, trajectory graphs, and optic calibrations for a Weatherby .460—which bore out Holzer’s earlier diagnosis of a hi-punch weapon figuring into the first three casualties.

  Supernatural, no. Supermilitary, yeah.

  The weapon was obviously equipped with the most sophisticated optic system Holzer could imagine, and the papers left behind indicated that even this basic accessory had been further refined by a guy who knew what he was about.

  The weapon belonged to a guy who worked for what he got. It wasn’t as easy as he made it look.

  And, sure, John Holzer could respect this man, this determined fugitive who had violated just about every law in the bo
ok.

  Nothing in the book of rules said you had to hate the guy. In the still quiet recesses of his unofficial mind, Holzer even envied the guy. How nice it would be to cut through the maze of red tape and official legalities … to just pick up a weapon and go hunting for these cruds.

  Yeah. But he couldn’t do that.

  He trudged back to his vehicle, got in, sighed, and reached for communications.

  “This is Hotel One,” he told the dispatcher. “Code this for Metropolitan Alert and clear me through to Detroit Central. Also a conference patch to the federal task force, Artillery Armory.”

  “Stand by, Hotel One,” came the instant response.

  While Holzer “stood by,” his gaze swung magnetically along the still growing row of sheet-draped litters across that lawn.

  “Stand by, hell,” he muttered into the night.

  Then his connection came through, and he commenced the broadcast that had become a part of the contingency plans of every law enforcement agency in the area, including federal and Canadian.

  The alert was on.

  The hunter had become the hunted.

  And, for this one, there was nothing to be envied. There would be no red tape and no official legalities. The plan was clear. Mack Bolan was to be shot on sight.

  8: REALIZED

  Toby hated to admit it even to herself, but she definitely felt better with the big fellow around. He was a nice solid rock to lean upon, and it just didn’t make any sense to fight him. Toby needed a rock to lean on at the moment … and it felt good just to acknowledge that fact.

  She watched from the background as he silently and methodically disposed of the guard at the southern boundary, then she trotted beside him for what seemed a mile. It was too much effort to attempt conversation, and there was not that much to be said. He slid her a reassuring glance from time to time and paused twice to wait for her while she made necessary adjustments to the ridiculous shoes she was wearing.

  She was beginning to wonder if he intended to lope all the way to town, when he suddenly took a ninety-degree swerve and led her inland through the darkened grounds of a large estate. The place appeared deserted. He had stashed a car in there, close to Lake Shore Drive—and she had an opportunity to again watch the man at work, in the grimmest business of all—survival.