"Baltimore Trackdown" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pendleton Don)

5

After Mack Bolan dropped off Assistant Chief Jansen, he stopped at a phone booth that had a directory in it and found the address of a small printing firm. He located one close by but passed it up when he saw a one-man operation down the street.

Inside, the place had the musty, slightly alkaline odor of paper stock mixed with the acid tang of the printer’s inks.

A short, bald, middle-aged man with half glasses came from behind a rotary press that was hissing with every turn.

“Morning!” he said, smiling. “What can I do for you today?”

“I need a business card. On the front I want a name and a phone number, and on the back the nearest thing we can find that resembles a five-dollar gold piece.”

“Easy. And you need it in five minutes.”

“No, that’s the easy part. I don’t want it for two hours.”

“Should be a snap. Cost you as much as five hundred of them would.”

“I’ll give you fifty dollars.”

“Good, that’s what five hundred costs.”

Bolan wrote out the name and the number, and the little man pawed through one box after another. He turned, holding a piece of plastic that had something engraved on it.

“Found something I can use. I’ll set the type and burn a plate and we should be in business.”

“Brown ink on the front and gold ink on the back, right?”

“Cost you another thirteen dollars for cleanup on the press, if you want a good job.”

Bolan gave him a fifty-dollar bill and a twenty, and said he would be back.

His next stop was a phone booth, where he consulted a list of numbers that Nino had given him. He found the Baltimore godfather’s number at the top of the list. He had to go through three men before he got the Baltimore capo on the phone. Bolan had heard Augie Bonestra from Brooklyn testify on TV a few months back. Now he imitated his voice.

“Yeah, this is Augie up in Boston. Hear you got Bolan down there.”

“Right, Augie.”

“I sent a man down early this morning. Want him to watch how you handle the Bolan thing, case he ever comes my way. Guy’s name Lonnie Giardello. Can handle himself. Sent him down and then forgot to call. Should be there in an hour or two. Let him see what’s going on, Carlo.”

“Sure, Augie, no problem. I hope he brought a card.”

“He’s got one of mine. Good talking, Carlo. I got to get moving.”

They said goodbye and Bolan hung up. He grinned. He was not sure how close Augie and Carlo were, but there had been no hesitation about accepting the voice as genuine.

Now for the rest of his outfit.

Bolan went back to his small hotel and changed clothes. He wore a brown pin-striped suit, a red tie and a brown snap-brim hat that he’d bought in a men’s store. He looked like your average hoodlum soldier. Or maybe a little conservative. He could pass.

Back at the print shop the old man was blow-drying the ink with a hair dryer. He showed Bolan three cards. The Executioner picked out one and cut the other two up into strips with a small paper cutter and put them in his pocket. He thanked the printer and left. In his car, he signed the card boldly: Augie Bonestra.

There was no problem finding the fortified mansion where the boss of Baltimore lived. Bolan brought from the hotel a small bag packed with a few clothes to hide six charges of C-4 plastique with radio timer-detonators. He caught a cab to the big house, headquarters of the Mafia empire in Baltimore.

The cab stopped at the massive iron gate. A soldier ambled out and looked inside.

“Giardello?” he asked.

“Yeah, from Brooklyn. How did you know I was comin’?”

“Hey, this is Baltimore. We know everything. Crawl out and pay off the hack. It ain’t a far walk from here.”

The guard pointed Bolan to the side entrance and said someone would meet him there. A small man with sharp features and a sniffling nose opened the door, showed him to a bedroom and said Don Nazarione would like to see him when he was settled.

Bolan grinned, playing the part.

“Hell, how about now?” He adjusted a .45 automatic in his shoulder leather and walked behind the small man along the hall. The mansion was what he expected — overdecorated, plush, expensive, ostentatious.

They went up a small elevator to a huge office forty feet long on the third floor. On that level there was a putting green — a golf-green carpet with four holes and miniature flags. Across the green sat Carlo Nazarione behind a large, old-fashioned cherrywood desk with massive carved feet. An IBM computer sat on the edge of the desk with a daisy-wheel printer beside it.

The don was not what Bolan expected. He stood six-four, had the classic Italian dark good looks, a full head of black wavy hair and was not more than forty years old.

“So you’re the hotshot from Augie?”

“Yes, sir.”

The capo came from behind the desk and Bolan walked up to him, went down on one knee and kissed the offered ring. He stood and stepped back, waiting as he knew he should for Nazarione to lead the conversation.

“Did Augie send me anything?”

“Oh, yes, sir!” Bolan reached in his pocket and took out the card. He handed it to the Mafia chief who looked at it casually and pushed it into his pocket.

“You’ve done some research into this problem?”

“Yes, sir. I’m the Boston expert on the bastard.”

“Good. You can tag along. You want something special, talk to Vinny here.” He pointed to the thin-faced man who had met Bolan at the door. “Outside of that, don’t get in the way, and if we get a Bolan alert, you’ll go along. You got a piece?”

Bolan opened his jacket, showing the butt of the .45.

“Yeah. We got some better hardware. Have Vinny show it to you.” The godfather nodded. The interview was over.

For the next half hour Vinny piloted “Lonnie Giardello” around the layout. He introduced Lonnie to everyone and left him with a six-man crew on alert in the basement recreation room. A door led to a driveway where a crew wagon waited, ready to roll.

“We’re on alert for Bolan,” one of the soldiers said. “That asshole surfaces anywhere in town, we get a call and we’re rolling in two minutes.”

“I’d like to come along,” Bolan said.

The soldier shrugged. “If Don Carlo says show you, we show you.”

“Good, I’ll be around. Don Carlo told me to get acquainted with the layout. What’s outside?”

“Six-car garage, tennis court, swimming pool and lots of lawn.”

Bolan nodded and wandered outdoors. In the garage he looked over the cars — two Cadillacs and one Lincoln. From his pocket he slipped out two packages of C-4 and pasted one under the front fender well on each of the two Caddy crew wagons. The detonators were set for channel one on his radio-controlled signal box.

He walked around, went back inside, found the kitchen and bummed a roast-beef sandwich and coffee, pleading that he had not eaten on the plane.

The Executioner met Nino Tattaglia in the hall and the turned-around hoodlum’s mouth dropped open in surprise.

Bolan came up quickly. “Hi, I’m Lonnie Giardello. Just down from Boston to watch the Bolan fight.”

“Yeah. I’m Nino Tattaglia,” he said, his face still showing surprise.

“Didn’t I used to know some of your people in Brooklyn? Bunch of Tattaglias up there. There was a Joe and Frank, as I remember. Any of your people?”

“Not that I know of. Need a guide around this place?”

“I could use one.”

They talked quietly then.

“What the fuck are you doing? Half the town is looking for you and you charge in here!”

“I was invited. Best way. I see you got away from that motel room before the cops arrived.”

“Yeah, barely. Somebody saw me. At least nobody in the family suspects me. Thanks for that.”

“Who killed the girl?”

“Big Jake, the guy you wasted first. He enjoyed it, the bastard!”

“Any way I can look in the weapons room? You have one here?”

“Sure. No one man runs it. Usually it’s locked. Let’s go check it out.”

It was in the basement next to the recreation room. Several of the pool players looked up and waved when Nino came in. He talked to a couple of them for a minute.

“The weapons room open? Wanted to show our loaner around.”

The men laughed, and the one Bolan had talked to first unlocked it. “We got in a special order this morning,” he said. “Look at these beauties!”

Spaced out on a workbench on clean wipe towels lay three Uzi submachine guns.

“Damn!” Bolan said. “They full-auto?”

“As full as you can get. They forgot to send us any ammo, but it should be here tomorrow.”

Bolan picked up one of the stubby little submachine guns that had been developed by the Israelis from the Czech models 23 and 25 chatter-guns years ago. It was still one of the most effective in the world.

He slipped out the 32-round magazine that would hold the 9 mm parabellums and whistled.

“What we could do with these in Boston!”

“Get your own,” Nino said.

The other Mafia soldier laughed and returned to the pool game. It was his shot.

Bolan picked up a tool off the bench and went to work on one of the Uzis. In two minutes he had stripped off enough parts so he could remove the firing pin. He reassembled it and did the same thing to the next one. Just as he finished that one, two more soldiers came in to look at the new weapons.

As they fawned over the Israeli burp guns, Bolan planted another cube of C-4 plastique under a case of ammunition. This one had been set for detonation by a transmission on the second radio channel. The triggering device in Bolan’s suitcase looked like a radio the size of a pack of cigarettes.

Nino and Bolan eased out of the room, watched the pool game and then wandered outside.

“You are crazy!” Nino said. “The first time they try to shoot those weapons they’ll find out they have no firing pins.”

“Let’s hope it isn’t too soon. Right now I need you to show me three more vital spots where I can hide these little surprise packages of C-4.”

“Plastic explosives? Just be sure to tell me before you light the damn fuses.”

They put the other three plastic bombs in hidden places around the mansion. The last one went in a small niche in the wall opposite Nazarione’s office.

They walked outside in the soft Maryland evening.

A horn bellowed on the ground.

“Bolan alert!” Nino explained. “Let’s go!”

They ran for the crew wagon near the basement door. Bolan got in the first car and Nino the second. When they were filled, the big Cadillacs roared out the driveway, barely waiting for the gate to completely open before racing through.

“Where is he?” Bolan asked the Mafia soldier wedged in the back seat next to him.

“Damned if I know,” he said.

The driver explained that some big dark guy supposed to be Bolan was busting up a gambling spot uptown.

When they got there, the ruckus was still going on. Two of them covered the rear door and five others, including Bolan, stormed into the club and spotted the troublemaker. He held a chair in one hand and a butcher knife in the other. The five converged on him; he swung the chair at Bolan.

The Executioner grabbed the chair, jerked it forward, throwing the man off balance. As he flailed his arms and dropped the knife to regain his balance, one of the Mafia soldiers slammed into him with a shoulder block that carried him to the wall. They grabbed his arms, twisted them behind him and marched him out the back door.

The man was about twenty, blond and blue-eyed.

He gave his name and it checked with the ID he carried.

“Can’t be our man,” one of the hoods said. “Too young, too blond — no way.”

Ten minutes later the Caddy was heading back toward the Nazarione mansion. The man at the club had been enraged at losing his week’s pay on the gaming tables and tried to even the score by breaking up the place. The on-site security swore up and down the guy was Bolan and they were not going near him without shooting first.

“Hell, he was no more the Executioner than I am,” said one of the soldiers beside Bolan.

“Yeah, or me,” Bolan said.

The goon looked at him and laughed. “You look about as much like his picture as that dude we left in the alley back there with his arms broke.”

Bolan had not been able to stop the “penalty” the young man underwent for smashing up two tables in the club. He could have stopped it, but it would have blown his cover.

One man swung up an Uzi submachine gun. He shook his head. “Damn, I wish to hell that ammo had arrived. I’d have greased his ass good with thirty rounds and never let up on the trigger.”

Bolan watched the man caress the gun. The odds were two to one its firing pin had been removed. The Executioner still did not like the odds. He would get to the third Uzi if he could before he bailed out of the place.

He had learned part of what he wanted to know about the enemy camp. They were “up” for this battle with Mack Bolan. They had some good equipment, and some of the men were sharper than he had seen before in the average Mafia goon squads.

When they got back to the mansion, there was a general meeting of fifteen soldiers and one lieutenant as they talked about the operation that afternoon when Chief Jansen got away.

“How did he get the two guards outside?” the lieutenant asked.

“Shot them, the radio said,” one of the hoods volunteered.

A man named Frank was the leader of the discussion. Now he looked around.

“The whole idea is to learn from that mistake. If you’re put on guard, do it! Your life depends on it. If we got a job going down and you’re out there, the guys inside depend on you. So make damn sure nothing and nobody gets at you or past you. With this Bolan bastard, you don’t ever get a second chance. Just ask Big Jake or Tony L. Their funerals will be day after tomorrow. Only the families of the men are to attend.”

That quieted them for a moment. Frank saw the mood.

“All right. So next time we get him, and then all of you can go to his funeral!”

They cheered, Bolan with them, then they quieted.

“You might wonder about another try for Assistant Chief Jansen who we missed today. Don Nazarione just decided we blow him away. It’s all we can do now. Okay, that’s all for tonight. You guys will be getting more briefings. We think the more you know about what we’re doing, the better you can help get it done.”

Bolan got next to Frank as they walked out of the recreation room. He had been introduced before.

“Frank, I got to make a phone call. Augie said contact him tonight sometime. He said be careful about the line. What’d he mean by that?”

“You’re reporting back to Augie Bonestra in Boston, right? I’ll check, but I’m damn sure what he meant was not to call from any phone inside this place. The cops have a way of putting two and two together. Wait a minute — I’ll check with somebody.”

Bolan went up to the first floor with Nino and waited around the TV set until Frank came back.

“Yeah, Lonnie, I was right. Call Augie, but do it from a pay phone down at the shopping center. It’s a mile straight down the road. Harder to trace calls from a pay booth.”

“Wheels?”

Frank went outside with Bolan and whistled up a crew wagon. The driver bailed out, and Bolan thanked him and drove to the front gate. It opened automatically. Frank had called the gate guard telling him to let the next car through.

Bolan grinned as he wheeled down the road. He knew there was no way he could have sneaked out of Don Carlo’s armed fortress without somebody getting suspicious. He also knew that Nazarione would not want a long-distance call from his house to another Mafia family don. They had to let him go outside to make the call.

At the shopping center Bolan parked and walked across half a block of parked cars to a phone booth. He called the Baltimore police department and left a message for Chief Jansen. He told them, “I have a tip that Carlo Nazarione is going to try to shoot down Chief Jansen in the next twenty-four hours. Tell him to lie low for two or three days.” Bolan hung up before they could trace the call. Even if they had the automatic readout of the calling number on their system, the Executioner would be miles away before any radio-dispatched police unit could arrive at the pay phone.

He wasted another half hour, then rolled back toward the big house that Mafia money had built.

The Executioner pulled up to the entrance. The heavy iron gate stood open. Unusual. He drove ahead, saw no one in the guardhouse. More lights were on now in the drive and in front of the big house than before, when he had driven away. Trouble. Bolan put the rig in gear, angled the car down the middle of the drive, kicked the lights up to bright, then hunched low and jumped out and sprinted fifteen feet into the shrubbery at the side of the drive.

In the darkness, he ran for the gate. It was a trap. He turned and saw the car swerve toward one side of the drive, but it recovered and rolled slowly into the lighted section in front of the house.

Twenty shots barked into the quiet evening, then a dozen followed, and soon more gunfire ripped and punctured the heavy car, blasting out all the glass, killing the engine, blowing out the tires. Somebody wanted to be sure that the driver wound up with his head in a bucket.

Mack Bolan sprinted out the front gate, which was still unmanned, and ran down the winding roadway toward the first lights at the corner a block away. Just as he turned into the next street, he heard tires squealing at the gate. The Executioner ran into the dark driveway of the second house and stepped behind the attached garage.

He touched his .45. It was still in place and loaded. Evidently the godfather had sensed something wrong and called Augie Bonestra in Boston. It would not take them long to discover the hoax and set up a trap of their own.

Bolan saw a crew wagon wheel along the street, moving slowly, with men staring out rolled-down windows.

Maybe next time, the Executioner thought. There was no chance they were going to find him tonight. It might take him a little longer to get back downtown, but he would catch a taxi sooner or later.

As it turned out, it was later.