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  Nobody was actually saying that Jaunty Joe had a homosexual thing going with Larry Awful. But the gossipy possibility had served as a subject for quiet jokes—especially because of the physical appearance of Stigni. A better nickname for him would have been “Buzzard”—and it is surprising that no one had ever hung it on him. Mob people are big on descriptive nicknames, particularly the behind-the-back variety.

  But the hardmen generally liked Stigni. He took up for them, acted as a buffer for Quaso’s harshness, saw to their general needs and comforts.

  And he did so in this instance. “I told the boys to don’t look like they’re standing at attention out there,” he explained to the Chief. “Don’t worry, they’ve got eyes and ears open. These are good boys you’ve got here, Joe.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know,” Quaso admitted, dismissing the entire incident in a characteristically sudden reversal of mood.

  Larry Awful moved to the bar and mixed a drink for the boss. Quaso went to a small desk near the windows, produced a small notebook from his breast pocket, and opened it to the entries of the day. “We’ve got trouble, big trouble,” he told his head man.

  Stigni brought the drink, commented, “We’ve had it before, right?”—and craned his head for a look outside. Although the penthouse capped a twenty-story building, the highest structure in the area, the crew boss closed the drapes that were immediately behind Quaso and mildly scolded him, “Stay away from open windows, boss.”

  Jaunty Joe glanced toward the draped window and chuckled. “This guy is no superman, Larry,” he replied. “Anyway, we think he’s out snooping around the prairies.”

  “You never know,” Stigni muttered, unconvinced of either statement. “How’d the meeting go?”

  “We’re screwing it down. Everyone is cooperating. Our man in Austin is beating the drums for a mobilization of all the reserve cops. There’ll be a badge behind every rock in the state before nightfall.”

  Larry Awful made an uncomfortable face and lit a fresh cigarette to cover the emotion. Such things had never been done in the “old mob.” You could juice a cop, sure, that was part of the game. But you never hid behind one. You couldn’t really trust them that much.

  Quaso was saying, “And we’re trying to backtrack the smart ass. I finally got the story out of Woofer and a pretty fair description of the plane he used. Our guy at the airport is trying to run it down. Checking all the flight plans and air traffic control razzmatazz. Meanwhile we want to stay plenty hard right here. Our smartass might get some big ideas and decide to storm the citadel. The general feeling is that he won’t. We think he’s just feinting, shadow-boxing, trying to provoke a response that will give us away. We’re not playing that game, I mean the Texas Plan isn’t. I sent the alert to St. Loo. Lileo’s bunch will be swarming all over, might be here already.”

  “That’s what bothers me,” Stigni quietly commented.

  “Huh?”

  “Well if we have a cop behind every rock and Lileo swarming, that sounds like plenty of trouble right there. Besides, I don’t trust Lileo.”

  Quaso laughed and took a stiff pull at his drink. “You’re right, he’s a smartass, himself. As for the cops, that’s Lileo’s problem. Let him worry about it, eh?”

  “We’re not going after Bolan ourselves? He hit our territory, boss.”

  “Our job is to stay hard and run the shop. That’s our job, Larry. That’s your job. Let the battlefield specialists handle the open warfare.”

  Larry Awful was not liking that decision, not even a little bit, but only his face was revealing the secret. Quaso caught the look, though, and jeered at it. “Hey, you want to be a big hero, Larry? You want to take a whack at big bad Bolan’s head? Christ, he could smell you a hundred yards away. You haven’t taken a goddamn bath since—”

  That particular insult was aborted by a muffled explosion that vibrated the desk and sent Quaso’s drink sloshing against the sides of the glass. Several paintings on the far wall tumbled to the floor and a chandelier started swaying.

  Quaso’s eyes popped wide as his head jerked toward the sound. He yelled, “What the hell?”

  “Your cunt castle!” Stigni yelped, and took off running toward the master bedroom.

  The lanky crew boss was halfway across the room and calling for reinforcements before the stunned Quaso could get his legs under him. Stigni hit the bedroom door at full gallop and bounced off.

  The two tagmen had come running in from the kitchen.

  By the time Quaso was up and moving, the other three were assaulting the door in a concerted attack. It gave way just as Quaso reached the scene, Stigni and the tagmen lunging through the opening and brandishing hardware.

  From that moment on, it seemed to Quaso as though he were watching a slow-motion scene on television, although actually the entire stunning thing spanned no more than a few seconds.

  In the foreground were his three boys—wheeling in half-frozen movements (it seemed)—off balance, half falling—trying to get set to handle that sense-boggling scene opening to them.

  In the near background were the three housemen, two of them sprawled in chairs, eyes bugging in death, garroted—the third lying face down in a pool of fast-spilt blood.

  Worst of all was back there at the windows, the big guy in the black combat rig, a big ugly silencer-tipped pistol at full extension and chugging death straight at Jaunty Joe Quaso.

  The frames of action seemed frozen in that immovable moment.

  Larry Awful, spinning on around in a continuation of the same motion that had catapulted him into that room and which was now sling-shotting him back outside—a terrible, bubbling hole flinging blood from the base of his buzzard nose—and Larry had never looked so awful.

  The other two boys—going down in a tumble together, dying together as they had lived together, in lockstep, their weapons firing in a frantic but useless final discharge into the floor.

  And then the moment moved on. The door swung back to close with a gentle click.

  Quaso had not even gone for his gun.

  He did so now, flinging himself to the floor and rolling out of that death alignment as slugs began punching through the closed door and sizzling the air above his head. He grabbed Stigni’s foot and dragged him clear, also.

  One of the boys from the foyer ran in, bug-eyed and yelling, “Boss! Boss!”

  Quaso screamed, “Hit the alarm! Bolan’s in there! Seal it off, close this goddamn building up tight!”

  The front man did a fast pivot and raced back out.

  Quaso steadied his revolver on the arm of an overturned chair and aligned the sights with the bedroom door.

  He muttered to his dear, dead friend, his punching bag since childhood, “Don’t know how the smartass got in there, Larry. But he’s sure as hell not walking out.”

  And then Quaso remembered the explosion.

  The safe! The bastard had blown his safe!

  Oh, Christ!

  Now, for damned sure, Quaso could not allow the smartass to leave that room alive.

  “Alert!” he screamed to the deserted penthouse. “Full alert! Everybody!”

  For the first time in his life, Joe Quaso was totally alone.

  And it was awful.

  10: DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON

  Bolan had dispatched the third houseman during that early, “silent phase” inside the enemy headshed. He had locked the door and opened the drapes at the wraparound windows to let some light into the problem, then began his search for hot intelligence—along the way spreading acid upon tape recordings, film cartridges, anything and everything that would offer no direct assistance to his Texas hit. He would have preferred to torch the joint, but a fire was utterly out of the question. Perhaps as many as a hundred families lived in the building; he could not gamble that the flames would not race out of control and punish the innocent along with the guilty.

  As things turned out, it was a short search. The wall safe had been concealed with very little imagination.
It was set into a panel in the walk-in closet, behind an array of hand-tailored suits.

  It was during moments like this that Bolan remembered and thanked his deceased fellow death-squadroneer, Boom-Boom Hoffower. The munitions expert had shown the Executioner some interesting tricks with simple explosives, including the technique for opening things such as locked safes without destroying the contents in the process.

  Bolan carefully worked in a thin strip of plastics, gently feeding the goop with fingertips into critical cracks and grooves. Then he set the detonator, stepped out and shut the closet door and stood clear.

  There would be one hell of a hue and cry in response to that blast. The numbers would be very close. Too close, really, but he had not felt that he had a choice in the matter. All the numbers were going to be falling close during this campaign.

  It was a good blow, not too much and not too little, with the right pressure in the proper places. The safe held ten packets of $100-bills—a tidy sum, probably clout money—also a stack of small notebooks and a four-by-six leather-bound ledger. The money itself was nothing but cream to the job—which was intelligence, not robbery. He scooped the entire contents into his chest pouch, wasting no time on inspection and evaluation of the yield.

  Bolan was crossing to the windows when the reaction came—the assault upon the bedroom door. The closure jamb splintered, the door shuddered inward.

  He was standing at the open window and waiting for them when they came tumbling in—and, at this range, the Beretta Belle could pick the legs off a fly.

  He punched three cool whistlers into that human traffic jam at the door and saw it dissolving—saw also the stunned, frightened man standing rooted in his tracks just beyond the doorway.

  The door was equipped with an automatic closing device. The first guy in had been spun completely around by a parabellum shocker between the eyes and flung back into the main room. The other two went down in a tangle of limbs, spinning off to the side, weapons blasting reflexively.

  The door swung shut before Bolan could get off a round at the guy outside—Quaso, probably, although Bolan could not confirm that. There had been no more than a momentary meeting of eyes, and Bolan had never seen Quaso in the flesh.

  He emptied his clip into the closed door to discourage further adventures on that front, then quickly ejected and fed in the reload as he went out the window.

  It was a tight ledge, hardly more than a foot wide—but it had gotten him in, it would get him back out. He made his way to the corner where the nylon line awaited him, and went hand over hand to the roof.

  From there the daring man in black went even higher, to the top of the air-conditioning tower, and there he set off a colored smoke marker.

  Seconds later a helicopter swooped down in a crabbing dive from high altitude to hover briefly above the building. Bolan stepped onto a rope ladder dangling from the bird; then man and machine went straight up like an elevator.

  A moment later they were in level flight toward open country. Bolan was inside and rubbing chafed hands; Jack Grimaldi was grinning like a Cheshire cat.

  “God that was slick!” the pilot crowed. “Did you make contact?”

  For reply, Bolan opened the chest pouch and slapped out several packets of the appropriated Mafia black money.

  “I guess you did,” Grimaldi commented, his eyes trying to estimate the value of the packets. Following a moment of silence, he asked the big man, “Cat got your tongue?”

  Bolan replied, “Call it fear. Give me a minute.”

  “Sure.” Grimaldi understood. Only a lunatic could live this guy’s life and not know fear. The guy looked cold and hard and fearless. Inside, though, he was like any sane man. He was human.

  At the moment, the entirely human blitz artist was siphoning off his nerves into an inspection of a leather-bound ledger.

  Grimaldi asked, “The blackbook?”

  Bolan growled, “Yeah. And very interesting.”

  “Any surprises?”

  Bolan nodded. “A few. But also a lot of confirmation.”

  “What kind of confirmation?”

  “Target confirmation.”

  The pilot raised an eyebrow and returned full attention to the task of aircraft control. It did not bother his feelings that Bolan did not confide everything in him. Mack Bolan was not an overly talkative guy in the first place. Which was fine. The less Grimaldi knew, the less he could be damned for. He didn’t really wish to know anything. Bolan would tell him what Bolan thought he needed to know, and he’d tell him when he needed to know it. And, sure, that was fine.

  “Can you get a fast plane?” the man in black asked, sort of offhandedly.

  “How fast?”

  “Fast enough to range me across this entire state in a single afternoon, with stops here and there. Then back to Dallas by nightfall.”

  “God. I don’t know, Sarge. This is a big state. It would take something like a jet fighter. I don’t know how the hell I could get hands on something like that.”

  “Can you fly one?”

  “Has it got wings?”

  Bolan chuckled, but it was not exactly a sound of mirth. “Doesn’t the military ever surplus-off their old jets?”

  “Well … yeah. Are you serious?”

  A flash of blue ice assured Grimaldi that the Executioner was indeed serious.

  “Well, yeah. There’s an outfit right here in the area that refurbishes surplused war planes. Sells them to small nations. No armaments, though. They’re stripped. Even so, I would have to grease a palm, probably, to get one on such short notice.”

  “Okay. Money’s no problem, you know that. The war chest is bulging. Use what you need.”

  “What, uh—what’s the idea?”

  “The idea,” Bolan replied with a chilling sigh, “is that I need to execute three men this afternoon. One in Austin. One in El Paso. One in Houston. They’re big men. I’m hoping for a shock-wave effect. I want to rattle some teeth in this state.”

  “All in one afternoon?”

  “That’s the idea, Jack.”

  Sure. Okay. Grimaldi would get him the hot wings. And sure he understood “the idea.” It was psychological warfare. Death in the afternoon. At three widely scattered points, all from the same guy. Sure. Bolan intended to cram their omnipotence right down their greedy throats.

  “I’ll find you a plane, soldier,” Grimaldi said.

  Bolan smiled, the gaze softening momentarily then hardening again into a grim contemplation of things ahead. “I was afraid you were going to say that,” he muttered.

  “It’s going to be rough, eh?”

  “Double rough. These big men, Jack. You have a right to know. They are not regular mob people.”

  “But involved.”

  “Up to their ears. Makes it all the worse. More scary. Respected people are very dangerous people when they go bad. And these guys have gone all-the-way rotten. I have to take them out.”

  “Okay.” Grimaldi shrugged and looked away from those hard eyes. “You’re the doctor, the surgeon. If they’re all that big, though—well, I guess you know. There’ll be howls and rage in very high places. Things are liable to get very hot.”

  “So what’s new?” was the icy response.

  Sure. Sure. Some guys had to damn themselves.

  And, yeah, without guys like this, the world itself would be damned.

  Jaunty Joe Quaso was not feeling particularly jaunty at the moment. He was, in fact, in the dying stages of a screaming fit.

  “What the hell you mean, he got away?” he yelled at the discomfited hardmen. “Don’t tell me the guy just materialized in my bedroom, hit my safe, poured acid on everything in the God damn place, knocked off half of my house force, and then just goddamn it dematerialized. He’s got to be around here some place. He’s playing you boys for suckers. Rip out the goddamn walls if you have to, but find that smartass! If that guy walks out of here with my stuff, I swear I’ll see every one of you on the carpet. In front of the
council itself, I swear. I’ll run your lead asses clear out of the country!”

  A stocky man who had been assigned to the ground-level lobby cleared his throat with a noisy gargle and told the boss, “I think you’re right, Mr. Quaso. Nothing got by me. Not coming in or going out. I was right on that door every minute, I swear.”

  “Shut up!” Quaso stormed.

  “Yessir.”

  “Get in there and shake down that bedroom again!”

  The command was given to no one in particular.

  None moved.

  “He even killed Larry Awful! He killed your own boss, your own amici! You going to let him get away with that shit?”

  Someone said, “We’re going to miss Larry, Mr. Quaso. And the other boys, too. But we’re not going to find that guy around here now. He’s gone, sir, long gone. Probably out the window, that’s the only way.”

  “You want to show me how?” Quaso yelled. “You want to demonstrate that little trick for me, Tucker? You want to walk that ledge? Or try climbing down the face of this building? You want to try that?”

  The hardman dropped his eyes to the floor and muttered, “I’m not saying just anybody could do it, Mr. Quaso. But that guy …”

  Silence descended, a silence in which every sigh, every grinding of teeth and shuffling of feet became magnified, oppressively so.

  The bedeviled Texas Chief had apparently accepted the unacceptable. He began pacing energetically, as though trying to walk off his frustration, hands clasped behind his back, for all the world a Little Caesar with a truth too terrible to be borne.

  The remains of his decimated personal cadre stood in awkward attendance, exchanging troubled gazes and awaiting the next round of bossly hysterics.

  The telephone rang, and it seemed a welcome interruption of the deepening pall in that apartment. Several of the hardmen moved to answer the ring. The successful one scooped up the instrument and announced, “Yeah, penthouse.”