Hard Targets Read online

  But they wouldn’t be for long, unless they made things right.

  Penance was the flip side of forgiveness. First thing that they taught in catechism class: if you expected to be pardoned, then you had to make amends.

  In Billy Scars’s case, that meant completing the assignment that had sent him to the hospital with scrambled brains, then landed him in custody until his bond was posted. Nothing that he hadn’t been through in the past, but this time the arrest and injuries were incidental to the disappointment of his boss. And if he didn’t make that right, ASAP, he would be in a whole new world of hurt.

  He might even wind up as a turkey, an example to his comrades of what happened when you screwed the pooch with Mr. G. Billy Scars had seen a turkey once. It put him off his feed for two, three days, and that had been the point. You live and learn, until you cross one line too many.

  Then the screaming started, and never ended.

  Unless they took your tongue.

  First thing, he’d have to get in touch with Rick and Bobby, get them back on board before he made another move. From there, it would come down to squeezing anybody on the street who might know where this Bill Grayson and his soldier sidekick could be hiding out. They obviously couldn’t hide with anyone who had a Family connection, but that still left countless options to explore.

  And what if they’d already split? What if the soldier only came to get his pal away from Buffalo? By this time they could be down in Florida, or out in California. Hell, they could’ve driven straight to Canada after the skirmish and be on their way to freakin’ Europe or Hong Kong, for all he knew.

  And if he lost them, Billy Scars was done.

  But something told him that the pricks would stick around. The Grayson guy had wanted information on that contractor, Joe Dirks. He might be close, but hadn’t hit the jackpot yet. He wouldn’t want to go back home—wherever that was—empty-handed. Now he had a playmate who could fight, but that might also work against him.

  Spotting two men on the run was often easier than tracking one.

  And next time Billy Scars picked up their scent, he’d trail them all the way to hell.

  * * *

  “YOU KNOW WHAT this means, if you stick,” Bolan said.

  Johnny nodded. “Maybe it’s my fate, the same as yours.”

  “You’re choosing this fate with your eyes wide open.”

  “Right. Let’s do it.”

  Bolan didn’t argue anymore. His brother was old enough to make his choice, and setting him adrift in Buffalo while Bolan went his own way would accomplish nothing. On the other hand, it just might get one of them killed.

  “All right,” he said. “So tell me what you know about the Gallo Family.”

  “They run a fairly standard operation. All the usual involvements—prostitution, drugs, loan-sharking, gambling, labor racketeering, smuggling anything that you can think of in and out of Canada, and greasing anyone who needs a bribe to keep the wheels in motion. The legit side’s pretty much what you’d expect. They’re into garbage hauling and construction, bars and liquor stores, some restaurants, a slaughterhouse to keep them stocked with meat, pawnshops. The usual.”

  “The ranking hierarchy?”

  “Vincent Gallo’s run the Mob for going on eleven years. His underboss is Joseph Borgio, nicknamed ‘The Hammer,’ since he used one to collect his debts, back in the day. Across the border, Albert Cavallaro—‘Alley Cat,’ some call him—handles things from Fort Erie. He’s kind of a de facto underboss. The Bureau files I hacked, for what they’re worth, say fifty-seven members on the books, with four, five times that many known associates.”

  “You have the made men’s names?”

  “I do.”

  “And the specific operations Gallo owns?”

  “All right up here,” Johnny said, tapping his finger against his temple.

  “What about a map?”

  “I’ve got the Rand McNally street guide,” Johnny answered. “It covers everything we need for Buffalo/Niagara. My last hotel had street maps of Fort Erie, and I picked up one of those.”

  “You go across yet?”

  “No. It wasn’t called for.”

  Switching angles, Bolan asked him, “How’d your client take the news.”

  “It wasn’t news so much as getting her prepared to face the worst,” Johnny replied. “She’s definitely bright. I hope she’s strong.”

  “You like her?”

  “Not a factor.”

  “Are you sure? If you’re pursuing this beyond the point of no return to please her—”

  “I’m pursuing this because the Gallos tried to kill me. Worse, they put me in a corner where I killed a cop. That’s down to them and him, the way I see it. But I don’t forget. I don’t forgive.”

  “You know there’s nothing you can do to clear your name, right? You could walk into the station house right now, confess, and prove your case in court. You’d still be marked for life, with anyone you care about.”

  “I’ve got no name to clear in Buffalo. Bill Grayson did the shooting. He’s retired now. Gone like Keyser Söze.”

  “Maybe so. But you aren’t gone. They take you down or lock you up, the name won’t matter. Win or lose at trial, you’re history.”

  “No problem. I won’t let them take me.”

  Easy to say, Bolan thought, but he didn’t push it any further. They had plans to make, and bloody work to do, before the sun went down again on Buffalo. How many people breathing at that moment would be stone-cold dead tomorrow, or the next day?

  Enough, perhaps, to get his brother clear, nobody tracking him back to his real life and his SoCal sanctuary. Failing that, if it fell apart?

  Well, at the very least, they’d raise some hell before the long night closed around them.

  Chapter 4

  Night Moves was closed when Bolan and his brother made their pass. The strip club—or “gentleman’s lounge,” if you bought that—opened at noon and rocked on until 4:00 a.m., two hours later than last call in most other cities across the country. In theory, that was due to the high density of industry, the city fathers granting second-and third-shift employees a chance to get sloshed with the regular nine-to-five crowd. Bolan didn’t know if that was true or not, and couldn’t have cared less.

  What mattered to him, at the moment, was a dive devoid of paying customers.

  No innocent civilians in the line of fire.

  Bolan had never been a blue-nosed moralist. He thought all people should be free to drink, gamble, engage in sex for pay or pleasure as they pleased, as long as no one else was harmed along the way. He knew the so-called War on Drugs had been mishandled and perverted from day one, leaving America with the world’s largest per capita prison population while completely failing at its stated goals. The thing he hated about “vice” was that it fed a monster.

  Call that beast the Mafia, Camorra, Bratva, Yakuza, a triad—pick your country and your poison. They were all the same. It was that predatory brotherhood the Executioner despised, and if he had a chance to wound the Gallo Family by shutting down a nudie bar, well, the voyeurs would have to get their kicks some other way. Shell out for cable, maybe, like the rest of working-class America.

  The two men parked and walked back to the club, Bolan’s brother talking on the way.

  “If anybody’s here besides a janitor,” he said, “my money’s on Fat Augie Cappiello. He looks after things for Gallo, keeps the books, picks out the girls for dates with VIPs.”

  “I’d love to meet him,” Bolan said.

  The front and back doors to the place were locked, of course. The rear door opened on an alley lined with garbage bins, wide enough to let a truck pass for collections. It was empty at the moment except for a stray cat watching them from two doors down. The cat to
ok off when Bolan fired a silenced round into the door’s dead bolt and blew the lock apart.

  Inside, they checked the place for cleaners and found no one. Augie Cappiello, fat or otherwise, wasn’t around to greet them as they barged into his office, but he’d left his ledger books—one set of them, at least—for Bolan to collect. There was no time to try the safe, without a drill or other heavy-duty tools.

  “What now?” Johnny asked.

  “There’s a menu on the wall, by the front door.”

  “Okay.”

  “Let’s find the kitchen,” Bolan said.

  They did. It was a minute’s work to snap the gas pipe underneath the grille, lower the microwave to full extension of its power cord, so that it rested on the floor close to the broken pipe, and set a can of sliced pineapple rings inside it. Bolan set the timer for five minutes and they left, jogging along the alley, slowing for the stroll back to the Mercury Milan when there were witnesses around.

  They were a half block east and rolling when the place blew, spewing fire and wreckage into the street. The echo trailed them toward their next engagement.

  “Think we should’ve left a note?” Johnny asked.

  “Leave them guessing,” Bolan said. “They’ll get the message soon enough.”

  * * *

  “YOU GUYS ARE late,” Joe Borgio said, glaring across his table in a corner booth at Giorgiano’s, with three cell phones and a spread of steaming dishes laid before him.

  “Sorry, Joe,” Leo Kelly said. “With this O’Malley deal, we gotta watch for tails, you know?”

  “Somebody on to you?” Borgio asked.

  Kelly glanced at Strauss, passing a silent question back and forth, then said, “Nah. I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t think so?” Borgio took a bite of sausage and kept talking with his mouth full. “Come in here, and you aren’t sure?”

  “You called us,” Strauss replied.

  Before Borgio could answer that, Kelly interjected, “It’s not a problem. Someone sees us talking to you, we’ll just say it was a field interrogation.”

  Borgio grunted. “Sitar den.”

  “Huh?”

  The mafioso swallowed noisily. “Sit down, then,” he repeated. “Christ, I get a neck ache looking up at ya.”

  They sat and waited while he ate, glowering the whole time. “So, are you any closer to these pricks, or what?”

  “You heard there’s more than one?” Kelly asked.

  “What, you think we spend the whole day sitting on our thumbs?”

  “No, it’s just—”

  “One, two, whatever. Are you any closer?” Borgio demanded.

  “It’s hard to say.”

  “Two of the shortest words I ever heard are yes and no.”

  “You want the truth?” Strauss asked.

  “Hell, no. I called you over here so you could lie to me. Of course I want the truth!”

  “Okay, then. So far, we’ve got nothing.”

  “One of your own goes down, I thought you put the world on hold until you cracked the case and brought the scalps home.”

  “Every cop in town is working on it,” Kelly said, “from the commissioner down to the meter maids. The trouble is, our guy went down with one of yours. That’s got some people worried. It makes them wonder what’s been going on under their noses while they weren’t paying attention. Reporters are butting in. The first place we have to look, for good appearances, is back at you and Mr. G.”

  “Screw that. You know damn well none of our soldiers popped your boy.”

  “And if we say that, how’s it look?” Kelly asked.

  “All right, all right. You got a name on one guy—Grayson, is it? How come you aren’t knocking on his door, wherever he comes from?”

  “The name’s a phony, Joe,” Strauss said. “Amazing, right?”

  “Making wise-ass comments right now isn’t the smartest thing you ever did,” Borgio advised.

  “Sorry.”

  A forkful of spaghetti disappeared between Borgio’s lips. “Sorry’s no good to any of us,” he responded. “What I need from you is—”

  One of Borgio’s cell phones warbled at him, something from a musical that Kelly hadn’t seen in years. The mafioso frowned, picked up the middle phone and raised it to his ear.

  “Yeah? What? You’re shitting me. All right. Goodbye.” He snapped the phone shut, placed it almost delicately on the tabletop, then said, “Night Moves is burning up.”

  “Say what?” Strauss asked him.

  “That’s the club on—”

  “We know where it is,” Kelly said. “It’s on fire? Right now?”

  “That’s what Augie says.”

  “A torch job?”

  “How in hell should I know, sitting here with you two?” Borgio aimed a pudgy index finger at the nearest exit, adding, “Better get your asses over there and see what’s going on.”

  Rising from the table, Kelly said, “We’ll keep you posted, Joe.”

  “You’d better. With what we’re paying you, I want the skinny from the inside, not regurgitated TV crap.”

  North Park, Buffalo

  UNLIKE NIGHT MOVES, Willie G’s was open day and night, year-round, except on Christmas and Thanksgiving. A plain storefront on Colvin Avenue below Tacoma, it was ostensibly a check-cashing establishment that made its profit retaining five cents on the dollar. Since the customers demanded cash, at least two burly guards, well armed, were always on the premises. You had to get past them before you saw the backroom gaming parlor: five card tables where the stakes were high and everybody kicked back a percentage to the house.

  “Who’s Willie G?” Bolan asked, as he parked the Mercury downrange and scanned the street.

  “Beats me,” Johnny replied. “Does it matter?”

  “Not a bit.”

  They stepped out of the car, a breezy gray day suiting the jackets they wore to conceal their weapons. Bolan half expected there would be a lookout on the street, but Johnny had explained that North Park was a staunch Italian neighborhood. Most of its residents would look askance at Vincent Gallo and his Family, but few—if any—would contest an operation run with any vestige of discretion. Why court trouble, when it was so easy just to look the other way?

  Going in, they showed their guns first thing. The two big guards on duty took it badly, groping underneath a plywood counter for their hardware when they should have known they didn’t stand a chance. Two muted pistol shots, and they were down, twitching the final seconds of their lives away in blood, while Bolan and his brother stepped around them, toward the backroom action.

  Only three of Willie G’s five tables were in operation at the moment, jaded-looking women dressed in matching vests, white shirts and bow ties dealing poker underneath a cloud of smoke that hung over the scene like L.A. smog. All eyes turned toward the new arrivals, focused on their weapons, and the tableau froze.

  “What the hell is this?” one of the players asked. He was a flabby fifty-something, hunched beneath a toupee that didn’t fit his scalp or his complexion.

  “We’re collecting alms for charity,” Johnny replied.

  “What’s alms?” the toupee man asked.

  Another player said, “I gave already.”

  “Give again,” Bolan advised. “Give till it hurts.”

  “It’s hurting now,” another whined. “I haven’t won a hand the past two hours.”

  Bolan fired a muffled round into the middle of the nearest table, making all the chips jump. “You can keep the plastic,” he informed them. “We’ll just take the cash.”

  “You guys know who you’re fooling with?” the toupee man asked. “Who owns this game?”

  “I’m guessing Vinnie Gallo,” Bolan said.

 
; “You know that much, you gotta understand this is the worst mistake you ever made.”

  “Not even close,” the Executioner replied.

  “I’ve got the green,” Johnny said, holding up an old-fashioned expandable briefcase that seemed to be full.

  “Let’s get the pocket money, while we’re at it,” Bolan said.

  “You heard the man,” Johnny said. “Turn them out. It’s all for a good cause.”

  “What cause is that, again?” the toupee man asked, before he dropped a loaded money clip onto the table.

  “Pest control,” Bolan replied. “We’re exterminating rats this week.”

  “Starting with Vinnie Gallo and his Family,” Johnny amended.

  “This is a freaking miracle,” the toupee man said. “First time I ever saw two dead men talking.”

  Johnny swung his Glock and sent the toupee flying, while its owner yelped and hit the tabletop, facedown. Before he straightened again, his roll had disappeared.

  “You want your money back,” Bolan advised, “ask Mr. G. Tell him we tapped you for the new Joe Dirks memorial.”

  “Joe who?” one of the others asked.

  “Just tell him,” Johnny said. “He’ll get the message.”

  “Bet your ass he will,” the toupee man muttered.

  “As you’re leaving,” Johnny said, “try not to trip over the stiffs out front. I doubt Willie G’s got insurance that’ll cover you.”

  J. Edgar Hoover Building, Washington, D.C.

  HAL BROGNOLA HAD read somewhere that FBI headquarters, constructed in 1977 to move the Bureau out of the Justice building and into its own private playpen, was built in the Brutalist architectural style. He’d looked it up, discovering that it bore no relation to the “third-degree” sometimes dispensed in back rooms at police stations, but rather referred to linear, fortresslike structures made mostly from concrete. Critics said the style projected totalitarianism and urban decay, since the concrete often weathered poorly and invited vandalism by graffiti artists.