Texas Storm Page 8

  Joe Quaso hated him.

  The two bosses were bent over a large map of Texas which was spread across Quaso’s desk, discussing in quiet tones their strategy for the night.

  The apartment was aswarm with hardmen, some roaming restlessly from room to room while others gathered in sullen clumps and talked of minor things or gazed vacantly into one of the five television sets in the apartment. These were tough boys, recruited with the greatest discrimination from the various jungles of the nation. Many were combat veterans of Vietnam. All were young, hard, hungry.

  New groups were arriving almost hourly, and the man-loading of the penthouse was reaching its outer limit. The glass doors to the garden terrace had been opened and that area also was brimming with bored, restless young men from around the country.

  Two of Quaso’s housemen were retelling for the umpteenth time the adventures of the morning, for the benefit of those in the Bolan Bunch who had just arrived from Florida. The story had grown with each recital, with the effect that the archopponent was now being credited with near supernatural powers.

  Afternoon was blending into evening and a spectacular Texas sunset had turned the skies to red fires when a harried houseman, who had been kept busy passing out sandwiches and beer, approached the desk where the two bosses labored and announced that Mack Bolan was “on the telephone” and asking to speak to Mr. Lileo.

  Quaso told his houseman to shut up and get lost and take his lousy jokes elsewhere, but the man insisted, “No sir, I think it’s really him, I think it’s the guy.”

  The two bosses exchanged glances. Lileo’s eyebrows raised. He said, “Well, let’s find out.”

  The houseman punched a button and shoved the desk phone over. Lileo winked at Quaso, picked up the instrument, and said, “This is Lileo.”

  A voice of cold steel told him, “Do a standard right face so I can get a good look at you.”

  Lileo chuckled and replied, “What, you’re looking right through telephones too, eh? How do I know this is Bolan?”

  “It’s me,” the voice assured him. “But I’m not looking at you through the phone, Lileo. I’m looking through a twenty-power. It’s mounted on a four-sixty Weatherby. The back of your head is centered in the hairs and you’re just about an inch below pointblank for this piece, which means you’d get it just above the vertebrae. But I’ve heard you have a pretty face, and I’d like to see it once before I mess it up forever. Right face, please.”

  The Chief of the Bolan Bunch laughed again but this time it sounded a bit hollow. He said, “This is childish, guy. You’re not spooking anyone.”

  “That’s not the intent. There, that’s great. You have a good, strong profile. Now do it again so I can check the color of your eyes.”

  Lileo’s hand closed over the mouthpiece. He snarled, “Check this joint out! You find a guy playing games with a telephone, bring me his head!”

  The houseman had brought another telephone for Quaso.

  A hush spread from the desk outward like ripples in a pool, engulfing the penthouse in a tense silence as the word spread that “something is up.”

  Grim-faced young men jostled their way through the crowds, searching for only what instincts could recognize or explain.

  Quaso had a receiver to his ear and the voice was saying, “You crashing the party, Quaso? Move a little closer and I’ll have you both in a tight two-shot.”

  Quaso took an uneasy step backwards.

  “What the hell are you trying to pull off, guy?” Lileo asked, his voice vibrating with tension. He was gazing angrily out into space now, through the glass window and toward the nothingness of suburban Dallas at twenty stories up.

  “There, now you have it,” the cold voice told him. “You’re looking right at me.”

  “Keep him talking,” Quaso whispered urgently.

  “I’m looking at nothing but another building about half a mile away,” Lileo said into the phone. He said it casually, but the eyes were searching that distance out there, a gap of open space reddened by the setting sun.

  “That’s me,” the dirty bastard said. “On the roof. But it’s a little more than a half-mile. My range finder calibrates it at just a bit over nine hundred meters. Like I said, that’s about an inch of trajectory-drop for the Weatherby. You’d like this piece, Lileo. Say the word and I’ll show you how good it is.”

  Quaso cupped his phone and screamed, “Hit those drapes! Close ’em, damn it! Close the drapes!”

  The guy was still talking. “I could have taken you, Lileo, at any time during the past ten minutes. You’d have never known what hit you. And they’d be cleaning your skull off that wall forever. But I’m saving you, for now.”

  “I think you’re full of shit, guy,” Lileo told him—but he was crouching now, sighing and obviously relieved that someone had finally found the handle to the damned drapes and pulled them across the window. Instincts were screaming at him to get the hell away from there, but some tenacious braggadocio would not permit him to yield to such an uncertain threat. “If you could have pumped me, you’d have pumped me. I don’t buy your superman act, and I want to tell you something, guy. When I leave Dallas I’m going to have your head in a sack. Don’t think you’ve made any points with me because of this kind of childish bullshit.”

  The guy said, “No points intended, Lileo. Just wanted to show you what I think of your lousy band of head-hunters. Listen to this.”

  The telephone instrument virtually leapt from Lileo’s head as the receiving diaphragm rattled violently with an explosive report and Lileo took a dive.

  His ear was ringing and he nearly blacked out for an instant from the auditory shock.

  Quaso, too, flung away his telephone and sprawled to the floor, instinctively seeking the lowest horizontal level he could attain.

  Another explosive report blasted through the abandoned receivers before the first hard item of confirming evidence could travel the course and a heavy bullet crashed the glass window, ripped through the drapery, and plowed into the paneled wall above the desk like a woodsman’s axe, coming in at shoulder level. And they kept coming, one upon another in a coolly calculated pattern that searched that wall right to left then top to bottom directly along the centerline above the desk.

  The telephone was lying on the floor beside Lileo’s head. He counted ten reports and winced with each impact, and when it was done he heard the cold voice in the receiver, “There you go, head-hunter. Welcome to the war for Texas.”

  Tough young men were lying all over each other in wall-to-wall cautious flesh, even in those areas far removed from the scene of destruction. Not a man in the place was on his feet.

  Lileo lifted his head off the floor and snarled, “The son of a bitch!”

  Quaso was staring mutely at his ruined wall. Shards of broken glass littered the area and shredded splinters of wood were still settling.

  Someone close by, in a voice that carried throughout the room, cried, “Jesus! Look at that! He put a cross on it. A perfect cross!”

  “Through closed fucking drapes,” someone added.

  And thus grew again the soul-shaking legend of Mack the Bastard—half man, half demigod—the stone-cold killer who had executed more amici than all the past Mafia strife in history had accounted for.

  Half a mile away, an entirely human being carefully disconnected his lineman’s phone from a roof patch, stowed a tripod-mounted rifle in a shoulder bag, and made his withdrawal to a new line in the hell grounds.

  And, yes, he had been making points. He had moved caution, respect, and perhaps belly-bunching fear into the hearts of the enemy. It could prove to be an edge that he would sorely need before this night was done.

  Sure, he could have taken Lileo and Quaso both, as easy as pie. But to what good effect on the overall objective of this mission?

  The game, at this point, was to rattle some teeth—to demoralize the enemy, get them to jumping at every shadow, wincing with every sound of the night.

  A
confused and overly cautious enemy was likely to make mistakes—crucial ones.

  Bolan had not come all this way just for a shoot-out with the head-hunters.

  He had come to restore depth to the heart of Texas.

  But first he had to put in fear.

  And, yes, things were working.

  Ten minutes after the fusillade through Jaunty Joe Quaso’s penthouse windows, a number of heavily loaded vehicles erupted from the underground garage to form a caravan which sped away toward the inner city.

  And, several blocks back, an interested observer in Porsche hot wheels tagged along to scout the next fire line.

  14: RUNNING

  To give the devil his due, it was a mighty tough job of defense presenting itself to Lileo, Quaso, and company.

  It was bad enough that the mob interests were so far-flung and multilayered in Texas; the guy could pop up just about anywhere, and it would take a very fine spread of defenses to cover every eventuality. Add to this the fact that the damned guy had such fantastic mobility and the job became a nightmare.

  If you then considered the guy himself and what he could do when he wanted to, then the nightmare became a very real fact of life. The stories about the guy were probably not all that exaggerated, after all. He was a stunning son of a bitch. Just look at what he had accomplished in less than twelve hours.

  He’d made a raid on the oil field, blitzed the place, made off with a star hostage.

  Next he’d popped up in Dallas, coolly invaded the head shed itself and made an idiot of Joe Quaso—knocking off half the palace guard and robbing the safe.

  A short while later he turns up at the edge of the state to execute a friend of the friends in El Paso, another in Houston, a third in Austin.

  And while the heads were together and trying to figure a way to cover that type of assault, the cocky bastard makes another audacious hit on the head shed—while talking to Lileo on the damned telephone!

  It was demoralizing, yeah. It was worse than that. All the boys were walking around on tippytoes, taking every breath like it might be their last and peering into every dark corner like the fiends of hell might come rushing out of there at them.

  And that wasn’t even the worst part. The guy was shaking hell out of the Texas Plan—that was the worst part. Lileo’s force had swarmed into Texas on an offensive mission—the Job: get Bolan. And the bastard had turned the tables before they could even get launched. Now the primary mission was an unnerving job of defense: save Texas from the Bolan crunch.

  Yes, the Texas Plan was wobbly already—after only twelve hours of this guy. And the old men in the East were damned unhappy about that. The instructions to Lileo and the Bolan Bunch were quite direct and quite clear: stop that son of a bitch from running wild through Texas!

  Stunning, yeah. A stunning son of a bitch.

  The problem was to figure some way to turn the tables around again. A show of counterforce, first, to reassure those running-scared friends who were central to the Texas Plan, to get them to stand firm and give Lileo time to set up an offensive of his own. Then to outsmart the smart guy, to set him up and let him walk in and hand over his head.

  There had to be a leak somewhere in the organization, that was certain. And the guy was using it to make monkeys of them all.

  So … why not put the leak to work for the right side?

  Lileo told Joe Quaso, as their vehicle wheeled into the new headquarters: “I have a plan, Joe. We’re going to get that bastard to running.”

  “Running where, though?” Quaso muttered worriedly.

  “Running wild,” Lileo replied. He grinned, looked at his hands, and added, “Yeah. Running hog wild.”

  Bolan followed the Mafia caravan to an old district close-in to the city, where once undoubtedly the cream of Dallas society lived but which was now a decaying neighborhood in which the fine old mansions of a bygone era had been converted to rooming houses and apartment buildings. Others had been torn out to make room for drive-in restaurants, service stations, and other commercial establishments. Here and there, however, remained a valiant holdout against decay and progress, its splendor slightly tarnished but not entirely eclipsed by the tides of time.

  It was one of these latter which proved to be the destination of the Lileo force—a three-story Southern colonial with plantation porches and white columns set on several acres of surrounding grounds, fenced with spiked iron.

  The place looked like a hardsite.

  Bolan marked the spot for future reference and passed on by.

  Those people would keep.

  There were more pressing matters to occupy his attention for now.

  He stopped at a public phone several blocks along and called a local television station. “Let me speak to the managing editor of your news department,” he requested.

  “Ringing,” the switchboard operator assured him.

  A moment later he told another young lady, “This is Mack Bolan. Tell the man, huh.”

  Following a flustered response and a brief wait, a man’s voice came on. “This is Les Moore, newsroom manager. Who is this calling?”

  Bolan said, “Let’s keep this short and quick. What I have to say should verify my identity. The name is Bolan and I am not in Texas for my health but for yours. Swamp rot is festering here in Lone Star country and there’s going to be the devil to pay if people here don’t come alive and face the problem.”

  “Uh—Bolan, I’ve got this on the recorder.”

  “Be my guest. I want it known that I’m the one who hung the death medals on Spellman, Whitson, and Kilcannon this afternoon. I want it known also that a lot more awards will be handed out during the night.”

  “Everyone is wondering,” the newsman said quickly, “why those particular men—why them?”

  “Shouldn’t be so hard to figure out,” Bolan clipped back. “I don’t make war on civilians.”

  “Yeah but—you mentioned others. Are you speaking of people with the stature of the other three? You’re going to kill—?”

  “My time is limited and I hadn’t planned on going into details with you. The only ones who need to worry about the night already know who they are. And I know who they are, that’s the important point.”

  “You want me to put this on the air. Right?”

  Bolan said, “Right.”

  “Okay, but I want something in return.”

  “Name it.”

  “A quick interview.”

  “If it’s very quick, okay.”

  The newsman’s voice was crackling with interest. “Why Texas? You’re a Mafia-buster. Do we have that much, uh, infiltration here?”

  Bolan’s voice crackled back, “It’s no. infiltration, Moore. You’re being eaten alive.”

  “That’s hard to believe. There’s a border Mafia, sure. But—”

  “But hell,” Bolan said. “It’s like cancer. You don’t feel the pain until the terminal stages. The mob is about to eat your whole state. They’re into everything, and I mean every vital organ.”

  “But these men you killed today, Bolan—they were among our most respected citizens. Surely—”

  “That’s one of your larger problems,” Bolan said, quietly interrupting the argument. “Look, it’s all the time I have.”

  “Just one more. Uh, human interest angle. Personal question. Okay?”

  “Go,” Bolan growled.

  “How do you know? I mean, when you execute a man like Jerry Whitson, how do you know? Don’t you ever have doubts? Don’t you ever wake up in a cold sweat and wondering if you really know what you’re doing?”

  “The doubts come before, Moore, not after. If the doubt can’t be settled then I don’t move. I have to go now.”

  “Wait, just one—I didn’t phrase that right. What I meant to ask is how it feels to be judge and jury over these people. How can you be so sure of your own judgment? To just go out and kill a man without benefit of fair trial. Our whole country is based on the idea of justice and—” />
  “You said an interview, Moore, not a debate. I have to go—but I’ll tell you this much. If a kid goes out and knocks over a gas station, he knows that he’s handing his fate up to our justice system. He could get caught, he could get tried and convicted, he could serve time. That’s the system, and it usually works. But we’re not talking about that kind of system when we reach the subject of organized crime, big-time crime. These people have nothing but contempt for our quote system unquote. They buy the damned system, they own it, and they use it to their own advantage. They are above the system. Okay. I’m outside the system, too. That’s where they operate—okay, it’s where I operate. When our paths cross, there’s a reaction. Don’t talk to me about judges and juries in the same breath with Mafia.”

  “They get caught. Our federal prisons are full of big-time crooks who are paying the debt to society.”

  “Are they? A guy loots the economy of a nation, murders and tortures and terrorizes according to his own whims, corrupts governments and cannibalizes industries, makes junkies out of your kids, whores out of your women, and pimps out of your elected officials. So he’s sitting in Leavenworth on an income tax rap. He’s paying a debt?”

  “Well … at least he’s out of circulation.”

  “No way. These people go out of circulation with a bullet in the head. That’s the only way.”

  The newsman had an idea he could not let go. “But when you simply walk up to a man, put a gun to his head and pull the trigger—isn’t that?—I mean, every man deserves his day in court, an opportunity to face his accusers.”

  “They face me every time,” Bolan assured his interviewer. “And they know. Believe me, they know.”

  “Gerald Whitson, too? Did he know? Why he was being killed?”

  “He knew. These people are their own judge and jury, Moore. I’m just the executioner.”

  “Yeah,” the newsman replied in a choked voice. “Trial by ordeal, eh? If they manage to live, then they’re innocent. If you pull the trigger, then they’re automatically guilty.”