New Orleans Knockout Page 4

  Silence descended on the group like a heavy pall. Johnny Powder slowly closed the trunk hood and leaned on it to keep it down. One of the under-bosses lit a cigar; another spat in his hands and rubbed it in.

  Frank Ebo was the one to break the silence. Though not an underboss in the true sense of the word, he held rank here by virtue of his supreme responsibility for the capo’s skin. “I don’t like it, Tommy coming in here wired this way. He led the guy right here, Marco. It was a bad move.”

  “Aw, bullshit,” Carlotti said in a flat, dispirited voice. “That son of a bitch didn’t need me to lead him anywhere. Listen. He knows all of us, everything about us. He just used me as a messenger boy. Imagine that. Using me as a messenger.”

  “Some message,” someone grunted.

  “You better count your blessings, Tommy,” another boss suggested.

  Indeed, that seemed to be the mood now pervading the entire gathering. As for the “message” itself—it was one that needed no elaboration, delivered in a manner most certain to be fully understood by this particular gathering of men.

  Vannaducci sighed and told his group, “We betterget inside and talk about this. This boy moves fast, and I think we got ourselves real trouble this time.”

  Yes, there was big trouble in River City. But it was only the beginning, and all the king’s men knew that truth without the smallest reservation. On the eve of Mardi Gras, the Executioner’s war had reached the Golden Empire.

  If, however, there had been any lingering doubts on that score, they were to be immediately dispelled.

  Richard Zeno, consigliere to the Vannaducci Family, was hurrying across the lawn toward the group.

  “Marco,” he called breathlessly ahead. “Just got word from town. They say Mack Bolan’s running wild in the French Quarter. He’s hit Toby Never’s place, Joe DelMonico’s, and Marty Jackson’s Jazz Joint. All hell’s breaking loose over there!”

  Yes. For everyone at that gathering, the Executioner’s message was loud and clear. And here was a “boy” who would not be impressed by tribute from the broker.

  5: CO-OPTED

  Literally translated from the Latin, the word “carnival” means “farewell to meat.” In Roman Catholic tradition, Carnival commences on the twelfth night after Christmas and reaches its climax on Shrove Tuesday, the day of feasting before Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent.

  As celebrated in the city of New Orleans, the tradition actually has closer links to Pagan Rome and the bacchanalian orgies of that period.

  Though there is much pomp and memorable splendor to the official activities of a New Orleans Mardi Gras—with parades and formal costume balls, the crowning of kings and queens, organized events and celebrations spanning a two-week period—the big climax is on Fat Tuesday, and the real action for the million or so visitors is to be found in the streets of the French Quarter, which, at such times, has been described as “the world’s largest insane asylum.” It is no place for the faint-hearted or weak-minded. Vehicular traffic is barred from the district, except for official and emergency vehicles. Mounted policemen appear as small and isolated islands of purely symbolic security in the surging waves of humanity sweeping those streets, and even the cops sometimes flip out and become one with the giddy sea of revelers.

  It is impossible to preserve order under such conditions, even though every cop and auxiliary at the city’s command is pressed into the situation. This thought was occupying the gloomy consciousness of Lieutenant Jack Petro as he sat at the conference table with his peers in city hall and listened to the reading of reports on the newest thing in Mardi Gras—a new King Carnival, as it were—the impossible, the unbelievable, the spectacular Mack Bolan and his series of punches to the city’s groin that were threatening to outweigh all other worries in the official mind.

  The mayor was greatly upset, and understandably so. “Why now?” he kept asking. “Why is this guy doing this now?—at a time like this?”

  It was a purely rhetorical question, of course—born of official anguish and desperation. Actually, what better time for a guy like Bolan to invade New Orleans? From his point of view, naturally. With nearly a million visitors on hand and thousands more arriving every hour, all with nothing to do but churn aimlessly through the city, choke the public facilities, sing and dance and get drunk in the streets, jam the jails and the hospitals—the police couldn’t even guarantee the visitors safety from one another. How could they possibly even hope to cope with a guy like Mack Bolan running wild through that insanity?

  A standing joke among the cops was the probably imaginative but entirely possible story of the lady from Omaha who one year was had five times in a crowd on the corner of Bourbon and Toulouse, without once leaving her feet and with no idea whatever of who was tapping her at any given moment. She hadn’t missed a Mardi Gras since—or so the story went. The true stories that wound up on the official police blotter—and these probably represented a small fraction of the total crimes—were much less humorous and were often tragic. There was no way to effectively police a Mardi Gras.

  And now the big Mack was adding his imposing weight to the problem. There would be blood flowing with the whiskey and wine, gunshots mingling with the cries of merriment, and a lot of hot corpses to serve up in the “farewell to meat.”

  Some farewell!

  Some Mardi Gras!

  Petro forced his mind back to the oral reading of too-familiar reports. Barely eight o’clock of the morning and already the guy’d had a busy day. He’d knocked over an armored truck and gotten away clean with about $400,000, killing fourteen men in the process and critically wounding another. Then he’d sashayed into the French Quarter to bust Carlotti’s palace on Royal Street. Known dead there: five. Carlotti himself missing. Next he’d taken a walking tour of Bourbon Street and closed three of the most troublesome dives in the city. None dead in that foray, but a lot of property damage and some damned well terrified people. It was rumored that Joe DelMonico, whose B-girl clipjoint was one of those hit, was frantically seeking air transportation out of the country. Toby Never’s private club, a bar and whorehouse on lower Bourbon, was mysteriously emptied of patrons and employees in the early postdawn and was now decorated with “Closed for Mardi Gras” signs—on a street where nothing closed ever and especially not during Carnival. Marty Jackson’s Jazz Joint, a long-suspected “powder house” for street pushers, was similarly shuttered; reliable informants reported that the proprietor—known on the street as “Acid Malloy”—had checked into a local hospital for “tests and rest,” and that all of Malloy’s stock for Mardi Gras had been torched.

  Yeah. A busy guy. In a busy town.

  Petro’s mind was wandering again—and it was just as well when the clerk stepped behind his chair to whisper into his ear, “Lieutenant, there’s an urgent call for you. A male, Northern accent. Won’t identify himself but insists it’s urgent and can’t wait.”

  The rackets specialist gladly accepted the excuse to duck out of Morning Reports. He quietly followed the clerk to the anteroom, leaned against the wall while lighting a cigarette, then picked up the indicated line.

  “Petro here,” he announced.

  A pleasant male voice inquired, “This the same Petro who testified at the congressional hearings a while back?”

  “Guilty,” the lieutenant replied. “What’s urgent? Who’s this?”

  “This is Bolan.”

  “Who?”

  “Mack Bolan.”

  Petro snatched the cigarette from his mouth and jabbed it in the direction of the clerk, then made a sign with his fingers. The guy nodded and poked a button on the base of the control instrument.

  Petro growled into the phone, “Come on, don’t piss me around. I don’t have time for Carnival gags.”

  “Believe it or don’t, Petro, but stay on. I understand you’re the department liaison with the New Orleans Crime Commission. That still hold?”

  “Right. Uh, what’s this I hear about Acid Malloy? If
you’re who you say, then you should know all—”

  “There was a shipment for Malloy in the armored car I hit this morning. Came in on the Villa Merchant at Gulfport last night. Fifty kilos, uncut. I delivered it, tied to a magnesium stick. The shock was too much for Malloy. He decided to take a rest.”

  “What happened to Tommy Carlotti?”

  “He went to the farm.” A dry chuckle. “With a very heavy foot.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Ask him. He’s still out there with Marco and what’s left of the cadre. Strategy meeting.”

  “And Scooter Favia?”

  “He tried too hard. Had to punch him. You satisfied now?”

  The clerk was giving Petro a negative signal, which meant the call was probably nontraceable. Petro told his caller, “Maybe. What’d you want from me?”

  “Information.”

  “Go to hell!” the cop snorted.

  “Okay. But your town could go there with me. You could save a little. I have a trade for you.”

  “What’re you trading?” the lieutenant asked in a milder tone.

  “Some intelligence your crime commission has been digging for these past few years. Books, ledgers, records—the whole interconnecting network of Vannaducci’s money outlets in the legit community.”

  “Where’d you get all that?”

  Another dry chuckle. “Let’s say I inherited it.”

  “How long you been in this town, Bolan?”

  “Long enough. I have their numbers now. I’m aiming for a clean sweep. In case I stub my toe along the way, though … well, I think you should have this information.”

  “And what do you want from me?”

  “Someone is doing a hell of a sweet job of electronic surveillance on the money man, Rocco Lanza. It’s not feds, and it’s not local cops. I need to know if that crime commission is running the exercise.”

  Petro hesitated, then said, “Why do you need to know?”

  “Just believe that I do. And that the knowledge could save a lot of ruckus. Look, Petro, I don’t like busting your town. Especially at a time like this. I’d like to get it over with as quickly and painlessly as possible. What about this surveillance?”

  “What’s so important about that?”

  “It’s damned important.”

  “How, uh, how do you know it’s not a police operation?”

  The guy chuckled again, but it wasn’t so pleasant this time—more like ice cubes clinking into a metal basin. “I remain alive by knowing things like that, Petro.”

  “You think maybe Marco is bugging his own people?”

  “I’ve entertained the idea. There are other possibilities.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like maybe some of the amici up north are bugging Marco.”

  Petro paused to think about that briefly, then he sighed and said, “Well maybe you’re right about that.”

  “Thanks, I’ll take that as an answer to my question. You’ll receive my part of the deal by special messenger. It’s already on the way.”

  “Yeah, sure it is.”

  “You can believe it,” the cool voice assured him. “No reason for me to con you.”

  “Bolan, wait! You still there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Look, man, you’re right, it is a bad time in New Orleans. We got nearly a million civilians jamming this town right now. So go away. What the hell do you think cops are for? We’ll clean up our own.”

  “How long have you had Mafia in your town, Petro? You’re not old enough to remember back that far. Your father isn’t old enough.”

  “We’re working on it,” the lieutenant said, bristling.

  “No way your way. I know it and you know it. It’s like trying to cure cancer with aspirins. Eases the pain a little now and then, but your vital tissue keeps disappearing.”

  Petro snapped, “You’ll get no quarter in this town, Bolan! You’ll be shot on sight!”

  “I haven’t asked for quarter. If you see me, Petro, bang away.”

  “Look, dammit—Bolan, wait, don’t hang up! Damn the—okay, okay! I won’t bullshit you, guy. Most of the cops in this town would rather shake your hand than slap leather on you. Unofficially, of course. The others are probably on the take and scared to death you’ll upset their plans for early retirement. None of that’s the point, though. Look—you’re a decent guy, I buy that. You’ve never shot a cop, and I’d almost bet my life that you never will. That’s not the point, either. The point is that there’s a million civilian visitors in this town and more pouring in every hour. They’re half nuts already. You start gunplay in the streets, and a thousand will get trampled in the panic. You’ve just—aw, hell, it’s no good with a telephone between us. Let’s meet. You say when and where. You have my word I’ll be clean.”

  The guy’s voice softened to near warmth as he said, “You’re a good cop, Petro. I knew that before I called you. But I can’t meet you. There’d be no point to it, anyway. Don’t worry about your Carnival. There’ll be no gunplay in the streets.”

  “Wait, dammit—”

  “Sorry. Thanks for the cooperation. Stay hard, cop.”

  Petro found himself spluttering into a buzzing disconnect.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” he quietly told the police clerk.

  “I got it on tape,” the clerk said. “What do you want me to do with it?”

  “Play it for Morning Reports,” Petro muttered. “Next week.” He pushed himself away from the desk, took a dazed step toward the conference room, then spun around and headed for the ready room to await his surprise package from the new King Carnival.

  6: TRACKED

  It was still a few hours before noon when Bolan returned to an exhaustively scouted zone on the southern shore of Lake Pontchartrain, well removed from Mardi Gras madness—an upper-middle class neighborhood not far from the New Orleans campus of Louisiana State University.

  Rocco Lanza kept quarters there in an immodest split-level palace featuring bulletproof glass, covered pool-patio with same, and had sentry dogs roaming loose about the grounds, which jutted into the lake with water on three sides.

  Lanza was perhaps the single, most important cog in Vannaducci’s crime cartel. It was through the financier that the unimaginable millions of black bucks illegally siphoned from the economy of the South each year found their way back into the same economy in a clouded maze of clandestine investments that could only make the rich richer and the poor much, much poorer.

  Bolan had been interested in Lanza from the beginning of this Southern expedition—and it had been a mere stroke of luck that turned the Executioner on to the fact that he was not the only one “scouting” the Pontchartrain headshed of locally syndicated business-crime.

  It had started as a daring intelligence mission, with Bolan probing various angles and approaches for effective electronic surveillance. He’d gone in soft on a clouded night with tranquilizer darts for the dogs, and he’d sectored the whole place, stood in every room, explored the basement and the roof and the outbuildings—even the bottom of the pool—and he’d set up his gadgets for automatic collection of intelligence.

  With all that, it was not until two days later that he discovered that he was not the only one collecting data from Rocco Lanza. He’d accidentally punched in the wrong crystal while setting up a standby receiver, and the recorder began whirring away before he could correct the error. On time-scaled playback, the signal was weak and wavery, but the voice was unmistakably Lanza’s. The weak signal, he deduced, was caused by the fact that the miniature transmitters required for such work depended on precision beaming of the microwaves to the receiving station. Bolan had evidently blundered into a fringe area of reception.

  Then it had required several days of patient monitoring with a mobile receiver for Bolan to catch and track the quick-pulse transmissions, to draw a line-of-sight zone of probability between illicit transmitter and hidden receiver—but still he had caught no glimpse
of the “scout” and could only surmise the probable point of reception.

  On this visit, on the day the blitz began, Bolan came armed with a theodolite for precision visual sighting. And he came in a rented boat. He also came in time for the morning broadcast of purloined information. He positioned himself across the probability line, receiver and theodolite ready, and he got his sighting.

  The sober face became creased in an appreciative grin as he translated his reading into the focal field of powerful binoculars and immediately zeroed-in on the clandestine transmitter.

  And, sure, it was cute. Damned cute. A small package no more than four inches square, piggybacking the rotor motor on the television antenna atop the Lanza place, inconspicuous to a fault and broadcasting a pencil beam of intelligence in quick-pulse playback from probably a dozen miniature recorders stashed about that joint. Better than Bolan’s arrangement, for sure. And Bolan had learned from the best.

  It appeared to be a spanking new television antenna set-up, and it was easy to speculate on the fate of an earlier one and the machinations required to place just the right guy in just the right time and place to provide the new installation—as modified, of course, to suit the installer.

  The thought brought a smile to Bolan’s face as he swiveled 180 degrees to follow the downrange leg of the beam. Another boat, about a mile out, loomed into the vision field of the binoculars—a mahogany inboard runabout, again inconspicuous on the huge lake that stretched more than twenty-five miles northward.

  The Executioner donned a yachting cap and kicked his big cruiser onto a 360 course. This was going to be interesting. Also, it could turn out to be highly significant to the Southern campaign.

  It did.

  Bolan’s sudden move had been spotted, as he’d expected it would, but there was to be no contest between the two craft. The runabout leapt off its mark almost immediately, swinging northeastward on an evasive course, but the water was choppy out there, and the smaller boat was running against the wind and waves.