"Дон Пендлтон. Chicago Wipe-Out ("Палач" #8) " - читать интересную книгу автора

had to, he had to. They'd probably say, "Bring us that dollie, Pete the
Hauler, and let us decide what she's worth."
The king of the highways lurched to his feet and made a dash for the
toilet, both hands clapped across his mouth. Them goddam ulcers. That goddam
Bolan. Fuckin' no good sluts playin' around with older men. Why'd they have
to?..
He made it to the basin just in time, and there disgorged an untenable
collection of rage and sorrow and greed and fear - especially fear.
Pietro Lavallo had no ulcers.
He was suffering from inner rot.

4
Storm signals

As night draped itself across the huge city beside the lake, two major
storms also appeared to be in imminent descension. One was approaching from
the northwest, in the form of snow and high winds and plummeting
temperatures. The other was materializing within the city itself, and took
the form of worried officials, bustling police movements, and multitudinous
stirrings in diverse places.
The lights at City Hall continued to burn brightly into the night,
specifically in and about the offices of the mayor and commissioner of
police. Standard riot forces were ordered to duty in civilian clothes ,
uniformed patrols were beefed up and re-deployed, and special motorized
units were stationed at key points.
Never a city to disregard its own romantic flavors, Chicago's radio
disc jockeys that evening interspersed their regular format with funeral
dirges dedicated to various fictitious and Runyonesque characters: Sammy
Slink, Willie the Weasel, Tommy Torpedo, et al - and two local television
stations pre-empted network programming to run special "background
commentaries" on the life and times of one Mack Bolan.
The Executioner had come to town, and all of Chicago seemed to be aware
of his arrival. That other storm, advancing slowly from the north, drew
hardly any notice at all - except from the luckless city employees who were
ordered into all-night street service.
In a private room above a Michigan Avenue tavern, a small group of
quietly sober men were planning a storm of their own. Unofficially referred
to as "The Quad Council," these four represented the invisible power
structure which had welded the city and its environs into an impregnable
stronghold of criminal corruption. Its members were referred to only as
City, Labor, Industry , and Syndicate .
In this meeting were worked out the various lines of responsibility,
the "action interfaces," and the dimensions of effort to be thrown into the
upcoming war. From this meeting were fielded generals with strange sounding
names leading troops with even stranger talents, and a general of all the
generals was named to directly oversee the war effort on behalf of the Quad
Council.
This lord high enforcer was one Lawrence "Turkey" Rossi - usually known
as Larry Turk or, simply, Turk . The term Turkey , in general Mafia
parlance, is used in relation to a particularly gruesome method of