The Violent Streets te-41 Read online

  The lady cop looked surprised at his question.

  "What? Oh, of course, you wouldn't know. Courtney Gilman is the only child of Thomas Gilman."

  She waited, expecting some reaction from the Executioner. It was not forthcoming. His blank expression told her that she wasn't making herself understood.

  "Tom Gilman is a senior state legislator," she said at last. "Street talk has it he may be our next governor. He's got all the marks."

  "So we're talking about some sort of political arrangement," Bolan summarized.

  "Possibly," Fran agreed. "Or blackmail — I don't know. At least it's an angle."

  "It needs more checking, Fran. Where do I find this Gilman?"

  "Gilman senior? Right here in St. Paul. I think he's originally from somewhere upstate, snow country. But we're the state capital here... where the action is, you know?"

  "He's worked his way up from councilman to the legislature, and the word is he won't be satisfied short of the statehouse. If his son is our man..."

  "If he is," Bolan cautioned.

  "Okay, right," the lady said, nodding. "Mr. Gilman could lose everything if the media pegged him as the father of a murdering maniac. He might try to make a deal... something... with Fawcett, or someone higher up."

  Bolan thought for a moment.

  "We're flying blind now," he said. "I need more than speculation before I hang the mark of the beast on a man."

  "We can check it out," Fran insisted. "Confront Gilman."

  Bolan shook his head.

  "Not we, Fran. This is my game. You don't even know the rules."

  She bristled at once. She fought to keep her voice down as she answered.

  "I'm a police officer. This town is my territory, not yours. Who do you think..."

  Bolan cut her off, quietly but firmly.

  "You already suspect Fawcett, and if you're right, he couldn't run a scam like this alone. Who do you turn to?"

  This time her response was hesitant, halting.

  "I have friends on the rape squad..."

  "And if there is a cover-up, highly placed, they can't do any more than you can on your own," he finished for her. "Let it go, Fran."

  Her face was set in an expression of grim determination.

  "No way, buster. I'm not handing this over to you feds on a silver platter. The department can clean its own skirts."

  "It's already been handed over," he said with finality. "I'm sorry, Fran, but you're out. Accept it."

  Bolan sympathized with the lady, sure, and he let her know it.

  "You've been of help," he offered. "Believe it. You can be of more."

  "Name it."

  "Teach me about rape," he said simply.

  She looked at him, making no reply.

  "What makes this headcase tick?" he continued. "I need to be inside his head, to see where he lives."

  "Careful," she said, her voice softening, "it's dark in there."

  "Why does he rape and kill?" Bolan prodded.

  "Why not start fires, say, or rob gas stations? Why the sex angle?"

  Fran leaned toward him, raising a slim index finger.

  "Rape is a crime of violence, not sexuality," she said, secure, on familiar ground now. "Think of it as a personal assault, no different really from a shooting, or a beating."

  Bolan nodded his awareness.

  "But what comes before the fact?" he asked.

  "Maybe rapists are inferiority complex types," she replied, "driven by the need to assert themselves and exercise control over a captive audience.

  "That's one theory, anyway. That they perform not sexually, but emotionally. Each attack reaffirms their identity, makes them somebody to be reckoned with. For those few moments, they exist — they cannot be ignored."

  "Do many rapists kill?"

  "No. Maybe one in a thousand will deliberately kill his victim. We're dealing with a special breed of cat."

  "A woman hater?"

  "Possibly, but not necessarily. He probably hates everybody, and most of all himself. He ambushes women at night because he doesn't have the brains to build bombs or the nerve to climb a tower and shoot it out with the police."

  "You read a lot from one sketch," Bolan said.

  Fran smiled.

  "Don't forget the M.O.," she said. "These crimes are not only identical, they carry the killer's personality. With practice, you can read a crime like a signature."

  Bolan nodded. He understood that, sure, from the hard-won experience of his wars overseas and against the domestic Mafia cannibals. They left their marks, all right, like some sort of fingerprint.

  "Go on," he urged.

  "Okay." She paused, collecting her thoughts. "This freak rapes his victims, and then he kills them with a knife. He mutilates them, but never sexually."

  "Explain, Fran."

  Another pause, and then she continued.

  "Ninety-odd years ago, Jack the Ripper tried to shut down London's red light district single-handed. He never raped his victims, but he indulged in extensive mutilation. More often than not, sex organs were removed, and never found. Now, that is a sex fiend."

  "And our headcase is no Ripper?" Bolan asked.

  Fran shook her head firmly.

  "No way. Oh, superficially there's a similarity, sure. But our man stabs and hacks without any real direction, without any sexual aim. He defaces his victims, diminishes them. And, thereby, he somehow enlarges himself."

  "Is he insane?"

  She shrugged. "Medically? Of course. Legally, who knows?"

  "What happens if he's arrested?"

  "That depends. Of course, if there is some kind of plot to cover for him, he could be committed quietly — again. And he's already escaped three times."

  "What if he goes to trial, Fran?"

  "Maybe the same thing. A state hospital instead of some private institution, but those places have revolving doors. He could be 'cured' and released in a few years. Possibly months."

  Bolan's voice was cool, determined.

  "Okay," he said, "you've helped."

  "That's it? End of lesson?"

  He smiled. "School's out. And thanks."

  "For what?"

  "Some insight, some direction," he answered. "I can get inside him now."

  When she spoke again, Fran Traynor's voice was almost pleading with him.

  "They're not stupid, you know. Psychos, I mean. They get reckless sometimes, but underneath they're frequently as clever as they are vicious."

  Bolan nodded. "Okay. I'll be careful."

  He didn't need to be told how clever — and dangerous — a maniac with a self-imposed mission could be.

  Bolan rested a warm hand on the lady cop's shoulder for a moment, left some change on the table for their coffees, then left her alone. As he hit the street in his rented sedan, the lady was already out of his mind, crowded from his thoughts by the multitude of things that remained to be done before the curtain could ring down on St. Paul's bloody stage.

  First, he needed to touch base with the Politician and see what he had learned about the registration of the two crew wagons. He would have to follow that lead wherever it took him, before he could fit all the pieces together in their final mosaic.

  And beyond that?

  Somewhere out there, in the large city just stirring into life with the warming rays of the morning sun, there was waiting for him a young man with a blank face and a seriously deranged mind.

  That young man, and perhaps several more besides, had an unscheduled appointment with the Executioner.

  It was one appointment that Mack Bolan was grimly determined to keep.

  10

  Mack Bolan had come to St. Paul on what seemed a simple mission.

  To help a friend.

  To relieve the pain of a suffering comrade-in-arms.

  But the nature of the Executioner's mission in the Twin Cities was rapidly shaping up into something else, something vastly different from what he had come to expect. The ca
mpaign had all the makings of a unique experience for Bolan in his home-front wars, and the very difference of the mission was what made it so desperate, so dangerous for all concerned.

  For openers, Bolan had less solid information about his enemy — or enemies — than he had ever carried into battle before. In his previous campaigns, whether against the Cong, the Mafia, or the new breed of terrorists that John Phoenix had been resurrected to fight, he had always gone into combat with at least a general understanding of the enemy's number and goals.

  He had always known their name and their game, yeah.

  But not in St. Paul.

  So far, the Executioner knew only that he was searching for one deranged young man who raped and murdered women for reasons best known to himself. An animal who had to be found and very forcefully neutralized.

  But along the way, he had already encountered five men who bore all the earmarks of syndicate hardmen, and they seemed to be intent on scuttling any search for the Twin Cities rapist-killer.

  That was a new one on Bolan, and he was a long way from having thought it completely through.

  One thing was clear enough for the moment. He had come into St. Paul operating on faulty perceptions, without all the necessary information. Clearly, the game was not to be a simple, deadly one-on-one between the headcase and the Executioner. It had already evolved into something more, something larger, more sinister.

  Someone had called out the guns in St. Paul; whether in support of Bolan's intended prey or on behalf of some unknown, unrelated cause, he couldn't yet be certain. He knew only that the gunmen existed, and that he undoubtedly would have to deal with more of them before he was finished in the city.

  The strong indications of organized crime activity — and possible police complicity, whatever its scope — indicated that there was more at stake in St. Paul than a relatively simple string of rapes and murders committed by some faceless madman.

  The Twin Cities had never ranked high in the American Mafia hierarchy, even before Mack the Bastard Bolan had appeared out of nowhere, rattling cages and finally blowing their whole damned house down. The syndicate had representatives and outposts there, nevertheless, and it carried out the same time-honored game of rape and ruin. However, the local action had never rated an Executioner visitation, either during the main war, or during Bolan's savage week-long "second mile" through hell.

  Never, that is, until now.

  Now it looked as if it might be time to correct an earlier oversight.

  Across the nation, the crime syndicate lay in smoking ruins. But just as the V.C. had managed to avoid massive sweeps in Vietnam, just as the Japanese diehards had held out on isolated Pacific islands for decades after Hiroshima, there were still outposts and pockets of resistance that had weathered or entirely escaped the Executioner's cleansing fire.

  And St. Paul, apparently, was one of those holdouts.

  Syndicate chieftains had been reduced by the long Bolan blitz to the status of feudal warlords during the Dark Ages. Stripped of the seemingly omnipotent Mafia umbrella that had sheltered them for decades in America, they were now more cautious, more isolated from one another, more interested in perpetuating their local scams than in grand delusions of national power and prestige.

  But that did not indicate any lessening of virulence at the local level. Hell, no.

  Even a dying snake was dangerous if you came within reach of its fangs. And the Mafia viper, though hacked to pieces and scattered to the four winds, was still showing grim, reflexive signs of life.

  At bottom, the stakes were — and always would be — basically the same for Mack Bolan. Civilized Man vs. Animal Man. The builders vs. the predators of the world.

  From youth, Bolan had cast his lot with the civilized, the builders. Not that he had ever had any real choice in the matter. Given his upbringing, his sense of morality and duty, there was, quite simply, no option.

  There had been no choice when he went to Vietnam to face Animal Man in the jungles of the delta, or when he reenlisted for a second tour of duty.

  And there had been, yeah, no choice at all when the deaths of his parents and sister were laid at the doorstep of the malignant Mafia outpost in Pittsfield, so many lifetimes ago.

  No choice, finally, when on the eve of victory in his Mafia wars, Bolan had been called to another front in the same war everlasting, to fight against worldwide terrorism as the reborn Colonel John Phoenix.

  When Pol Blancanales called, seeking Bolan's help, there had been, again, no options for the Executioner. He had come to St. Paul because he had to, and if the enemy's number and name had been changed behind the scenes, that didn't alter his duty or devotion one iota. On the contrary.

  Bolan would see his task through to the end, whatever that end might be, and he would strike against Animal Man with his last breath of life, if necessary.

  There could be — hell, would be — no turning back short of victory or death.

  And yeah, it looked like war everlasting all right. Mack Bolan vs. the cannibals in whatever twisted shape they might assume.

  The Executioner knew he couldn't have it any other way.

  11

  A swift conversation with Pol Blancanales netted Bolan the information that the hardmen he'd encountered earlier that morning were driving vehicles registered in the name of Twin Cities Development, Inc. And the Politician's encyclopedic mind had filled in the fact that TCD was, in reality, a dummy corporation manufactured to front for the numbers and shylock operations of one Benny Copa, mobster.

  Copa had been born Benjamin Coppacetti in the Hell's Kitchen district of New York City, and had migrated westward at the tender age of sixteen, one jump ahead of some heavy-duty robbery and assault indictments in the Big Apple. He had never been a real power in the Mafia, no one to be reckoned with outside St. Paul, even in the days before Mack Bolan's syndicate wars, but he was a localized underworld honcho of sorts.

  He needed to know from Copa why the guns had been called out, and he needed that information before the day got any older.

  Benny Copa operated from second-floor offices set above a billiard parlour two blocks over off Arcade Street. The place was called Freddy's, but there was no Freddy in residence, and no one in the neighborhood was quite sure anymore if he had ever existed.

  Bolan found the place easily and parked his rental sedan a block past the darkened entrance, near an intersection. He had passed an alley as he circled the block, and he found it now on foot, moving cautiously along behind the businesses that faced the street. In a moment, he had reached the rear entrance of Freddy's.

  And the place was locked. Naturally.

  No pool hall would be open at that hour of the morning.

  The cheap lock yielded quickly to the Executioner's pick, and he found himself inside a darkened doorway. The service stairs were immediately to his left.

  Bolan's combat senses made a quick remote probe of the ground floor, picking up no sounds of human occupation. When he was satisfied that he wasn't leaving unknown dangers behind, he moved to the staircase, Beretta Belle in hand and ready to meet any challenge.

  There was a hardman stationed at the top of the stairs, leaning back against the wall in a metal folding chair and dozing after a long night on duty. Bolan was almost on top of the guy when he woke, trying to right his leaning chair and reach holstered gunmetal in one awkward, unbalanced motion.

  The Beretta coughed its single deadly word, and the guy went down with a thud, the chair rattling out from under him as he fell. His passing left a viscous crimson smear on the grimy wall.

  Bolan had to assume that the racket of the hardman's dying had alerted everyone inside the adjacent office. He hit the door with a flying kick and burst in, the Belle up and seeking targets.

  There were three of them, all clustered around a big desk littered with loose cash and crumpled bits of paper.

  Three pairs of eyes locked onto Mack Bolan at his explosive entrance, noting his hard eyes and deadly
side arm. Two of the men, conditioned by a lifetime in the mob's gutter wars, broke for their weapons, peeling off in opposite directions in an effort to divide Bolan's attention.

  It almost worked.

  But almost isn't good enough.

  Bolan nailed the one on the left, plugging a 9mm mangler through the bridge of his nose before he could reach gun leather. Then he spun to take the guy on the right. Round one pinned the guy's gun hand to his chest as he was coming out of his death spin. Round two entered his gaping mouth and exited from the rear in a shower of blood and bone fragments.

  And the sole survivor was taking it all in with astonished eyes, standing behind the desk with both hands flat on the broad top and making no move to leave it. His round eyes never left the smoking muzzle of Bolan's lethal Beretta.

  Mack Bolan had known from the moment of entry that this man would be Benny Copa, and that he would not be packing. The self-styled honchos of the mob considered themselves exempt from the dirty chores of the gun-bearers, and Bolan had learned from experience that that arrogance made them vulnerable in a pinch.

  The pinch was on Benny Copa now, and he knew it.

  Bolan crossed the office, his eyes and gun never wavering from Benny's pallid face. When he was less than a foot from the mobster, his Beretta almost grazing the little guy's nose and letting him savor the cordite smell of death, Bolan gave the guy a light push that dumped his slack form into a waiting swivel chair.

  And at that, Benny Copa recovered enough of his voice to break the silence.

  "Easy, man," he said, not quite pleading. "There must be some mistake."

  "You made it, Benny."

  Copa thought that one over quickly, licking dry lips.

  "Well, hey, I mean... it can't be all that bad, can it?"

  Bolan's face and voice were hard, unyielding.

  "That depends on you."

  And Bolan could see the guy's face and mind working, trying to read the possibility of a deal — or survival — into Bolan's words.

  "Okay, yeah," he said at last. "I can dig it. Let's talk a deal here."