"Дон Пендлтон. California Hit ("Палач" #11) " - читать интересную книгу автора

muzzle-down at the hip. Clamped into the snap-away leather beneath his left
arm was the black Beretta Brigadier - a nine millimeter autoloader with a
muzzle silencer, his most trusted weapon. A number of extra clips for both
weapons were carried in a web belt at his waist - also a light assortment of
personal munitions, including a small fragmentation grenade and an
incendiary flare. On the ground at his feet rested a flat canvas bag - a
"satchel charge" of high explosives.
The place he watched occupied a chunk of high-rent ground completely
isolated from the rest of the neighborhood by a couple of acres of asphalt
parking area. At dead center was the joint itself, with access along a cozy
little pathway winding through artificial shrubbery and plastic flowers. A
man-made brook encircled the building, flowing beneath quaint footbridges
and jogging around rustic benches emplaced in synthetic arbors.
The China Gardens, they called it, but most of it was
bastard-American-Oriental with two wings of weathered stucco, painted-on
dragons, and false eaves for the flat roofs. One of those wings housed a
dining room, which featured a Chinese menu native only to America. The other
provided a ballroom-lounge with pretty Chinese hostesses and cocktail
waitresses - the only genuine Oriental touch to the entire place.
At front and center was a two-story structure that was supposed to look
like a pagoda; apparently nobody had ever told the owners that a pagoda is a
sacred place - a temple, not a saloon. No one seemed to mind but Bolan.
Business had been good and the trade lively throughout its surveillance.
But Bolan had seen the joint in the daytime, and it had looked as seamy
as most of these places are in honest sunlight. At night it was swankly
glamorous and sure to catch the eye of the unwary tourists who couldn't spot
a clip-joint until confronted with the bill. The China Gardens was more than
a clip-joint, though. It was a bag-drop and a crossroads of many diverging
trails in San Francisco's underworld, a favored meeting place and watering
hole of the area's most secretive citizens. During the three long nights of
patient stakeout, Bolan had identified several California mob captains -
including a Peninsula gambling czar and the narcotics boss of Berkeley. He
had also recognized a miscellany of muscle men and runners, plus a couple of
black bagmen who were probably from the city's Fillmore District, the black
neighborhood.
So, yeah, it seemed the perfect place to start a war.
The timing was about right. They'd closed the door an hour ago. All of
the legitimate customers and employees were long gone - and everyone left in
the joint now would be a valid target. There were plenty of those left.
Johnny Liano was in there. He'd made it big in Berkeley when the kids
began turning on with drugs instead of politics. Pete Trazini was also
present, the shylocker and numbers king of depressed Richmond who'd lately
been boasting that he was getting bigger than Bank of America.
About a dozen lesser Mafiosi were inside, too, some of them with Liano
and Trazini - hardmen; personal bodyguards who probably followed their
bosses even to the bathroom.
The parking lot was deserted except for a cluster of vehicles parked
near the rear entrance. The neon marquee out front was extinguished and both
wings of the building were darkened; only the pagoda was showing lights, and
these were all on the upper level. Wisps of fog drifted sullenly past the