California Hit (11 page)

"What? — oh! The kids."

"Yeah. I just want to reassure myself about them. It can be a hell of a tough world for kids."

She whispered, "Yes, it can."

Something, Mary Ching knew, was very much out of place inside Mack Bolan. It was like, suddenly, he was a total stranger. Cold, hard... deadly.

She pressed against him as they went up the street, and she told him, "Hey, tough guy, I wish I knew what that contact said to you on the phone."

Bolan did not reply.

She tried again. "I mean, okay, you sold him your package. But what did he sell you in exchange?"

"He sold me," Bolan quietly told her, "the idea that this is one hell of a lousy war. Especially for women and children."

Whatever that meant. Mary felt a prickling at her scalp. It wasn't what Mr. Tough said... it was the voice he said it with.

In a small voice, she asked him, "After you've reassured yourself about the kids... what's next after that?"

"Brushfire," he said.

"What?"

He showed her a smile which was more like death stretching itself. "A Brushfire is next after that, Mary."

She knew it was an understatement. What was next, she was convinced, was a roaring conflagration.

It was three o'clock and only ten hours into the California battle when the warwagon crept to the curb outside the production studio on upper Geary Street. Bolan was wearing slacks and a shirt open at the neck, crepe soled shoes, a conservative blazer, and the Beretta Belle snugged within easy access.

He parked in a loading zone directly in front of the studio and gave Mary Ching a curt nod of the head. "Try it," he said.

She exited and went to the studio entrance, then returned quickly to the vehicle. Her eyes were large and worried as she reported, "Closed, locked. Shouldn't be. They're usually working right into the early evening."

He asked, "Could they have finished, wrapped it up?"

Worriedly, she replied, "Hardly. Just started yesterday."

He said, "Okay. Here's what you do. Sit right here. Don't budge for anything and don't let anybody move you away. If you hear gunfire, though, beat it quick. Go exactly one block north on Van Ness and wait for me there, even if you have to double park. Time it, and if I'm not there within two minutes, then you split. Every hour on the hour after that, cruise past the corner of Powell and Geary. You have that?"

"I have it," she assured him.

Bolan left her then and proceeded directly to the studio entrance.

The door was mostly glass, not designed for extraordinary security precautions, with an ordinary mechanical lock, the type that is built into the inner hardware. It silently came apart under the first probe of his handy little tool, and he let himself in.

There was a reception area with a low wrought-iron railing to one side, a freight counter on the other. Behind the railing was a desk and a couple of cheap couches; swung off farther into the reception area were two private offices, an unfamiliar Italian name lettered upon each one.

There were no signs of life in that forward area.

Set into the far wall was a rugged looking door of solid construction, no visible hardware. Stenciled across it in thick white letters was the admonition:

STUDIO

ABSOLUTELY NO ENTRY

Bolan found the secret to the door at the reception desk, via a push-button which was hung to the underside. He pressed it. The door hummed a brief note and cracked open.

He went through without pause and into the darkened interior of the studio. It was a bit larger than he'd expected, long but rather narrow in the approaches with — probably — dressing rooms and offices to either side. At the far rear everything opened up again and it was a single large warehouse-like sound stage with overhead lofts and scattered with photographic and sound equipment.

Bolan noted three small "sets" — one had a thin layer of sand spread along the cardboard backdrop of what might pass as an ocean if something of more optical interest were placed in front of it — like, say, a beautiful nude young body. The other two sets were mockups of, respectively, a bedroom and a living room. Both were rather grim scenes; Bolan would not have liked to live there.

The only lights in present operation were a pair of white spots on the bedroom set.

A cluster of guys were standing across the front of the set and blocking most of the view into the bedroom. It wasn't so blocked, though, that Bolan couldn't catch a glimpse of a couple of scared looking lads seated cross-legged on the bed. They wore white terry-cloth robes which probably would have bottomed out around their thighs if they'd been standing, and that's all they were wearing.

The guys were mostly in shadow, but Bolan could see that they were not dressed for either bedroom or studio work. There were six of them, and the suits they were wearing were not silk, but they may as well have been. These were Chinese boys, and they looked as ornery as anything Franco Laurentis could have fielded.

A seventh guy was up on the set, standing beside the bed, posturing angrily and addressing the girls in quietly furious tones. He was an Occidental, and he wore a silk suit too.

The coalition, yeah.

Bolan moved quietly onto the beach set, found the lights, swiveled them about to his best advantage, and ignited them.

Everybody in and around the bedroom set came rapidly alive. The six Chinese boys were less demonstrative than any, but even they came around in a fanlike confrontation, plainly warlike, arms suddenly stiff and ready for anything.

The guy at the bed whirled about and did a quick little two-step off the platform like a bedroom phantom caught in the act. The girls grabbed each other, hid their heads and simply clung together.

All others were looking directly into Bolan's lights, so he could have appeared to them as no more than a vague shadow somewhere in the background.

The voice was not vague, however; it was harsh, and laden with ice as it commanded, "Cool it!"

"Who's there?" silksuit snarled.

"Death, if that's what you want, Clyde," Bolan promised.

Two of the China boys twitched. Bolan drilled them cleanly, with two sighing little phu-uts that were grouped so close as to sound like one, and then there were four.

The survivors stood rigid, frozen, not even interested in the condition of their fallen brethren, and the white torpedo took a tentative step forward, both hands stretched forward in a placating gesture.

"Hey wait, wait!" he urged, in a voice quivering with sudden respect.

"You wait," Bolan countered. "Send those girls out here, and don't be cute about it."

"You uh, that's all you want, eh?"

"Right now, yeah," Bolan assured him.

"Shit, guy, they're not worth it."

"They are to me," insisted the death voice. "Send them."

The guy sent them. Panda and Cynthey scampered panting and sobbing into the waiting darkness behind the spots. In the momentary close-up, Bolan had received an instant understanding of what they'd been put through. Those cute faces were now welted and puffy, bloated from a combination of blows and tears, and terribly, terribly unhappy. A dried trickle of blood remained at the corner of Cynthie's mouth.

As they hurried past, he quietly instructed them, "The van, right outside. Mary's waiting."

He gave them until the door up there opened and closed, then he told the coalition of five, "Now you guys draw straws to see who'll be the first man out behind me. Or else lean together for awhile and live to remember."

He withdrew in a quiet backpedal, and apparently the coalition had decided to lean together. There was no pursuit. The warwagon was fired up and Mary Ching was riding the clutch in a slow crawl when he casually opened the door and slid in beside her.

"Go," he said.

The two kids were huddled together on the rear deck, alternately crying and laughing in mutual hysteria, and Mary had taken the corner and proceeded several blocks up Van Ness before Bolan could edge an intelligent word into it.

"Tell me a safe place to drop you," he demanded.

"Sausalito," Cynthey replied without hesitation.

"You sure?"

She bobbed her head in an emphatic reply. "Our friends will take care of us. I just dare those goons to..."

"Sure you wouldn't rather have police protection?"

Both girls shuddered at that suggestion, and Bolan dropped it.

He turned a sigh to Mary Ching. "You know the place?"

"I know," she said, and she made it sound almost like Bolan saying it.

He scowled, freshened the Belle, and the porno girls plus two headed for the Golden Gate.

The story did not need to be told, but they wanted to tell it, so Bolan let them. It was nothing new, the usual routine, an incautious word dropped in a dangerous place, a visiting delegation of hard-eyed and equally quick-fisted inquisitors. They'd closed the place down and sent everybody home... everybody but the two female "stars" — and two hours of mind-blowing hell had ensued.

They'd wanted to know everything the girls knew — which they got very quickly — and a lot of things the girls could never know. When the proper answers were not forthcoming, there were hideous threats and stories of mutilated young bodies floating out through the Golden Gate, and there were blows and various other physical indignities.

None of the delegation were ready to accept the truth that the girls actually knew nothing whatever concerning Mack Bolan's plans and/or present whereabouts. Apparently they had come prepared to spend the night — and no doubt would have — had not Bolan himself provided the answer regarding his present whereabouts.

Cynthey was effusively grateful for the rescue; Panda was surly and resentful of the fact that Bolan's shadow had entered and clouded their lives. As the story went on, it became apparent that Panda had been the one with the leaky mouth. She was clearly jealous of the impression Bolan had made on the other girl, and it was during an angry denunciation of "all men including your fancy Mack Bolan" at lunch time, when the wrong ears were listening and their hell began.

Bolan did not feel responsible, except in the sense that any human is responsible for another. He had neither sought their company nor given any moves to maintain it. He had warned them of the value of silence, and they had blown it. As a result, they had endangered not only themselves, but Mary Ching as well, and they could quite easily have become the instruments of Bolan's downfall.

On the other hand, he certainly felt no resentment toward the porno girls. They were, after all, just kids. He was just damned glad that he'd gotten to them in time, and that the thing had worked out as well as it did.

He did feel strongly responsible, however, for a pair of somewhat different people back East. They were tied to him by the invisible threads of mutual love and hazard, and their beloved lives had been plunged into a torment of furtive existence — hiding that they may live — and all because of Bolan's lousy war.

And the guy had the nerve to ask him if it was important!

Then there was that other responsibility sitting there coolly beside him, a China doll who had also become special and was dangerously compromised by Bolan's war. And he was dragging her deeper into it with each passing moment.

So it was a lot of baloney; a guy could not stand alone, not absolutely alone, not so long as he lived in a world of people. The people were what the war was all about. And some of them, here and there along the way, were going to get burned. There was no way around that idea; there was no way to stand absolutely alone.

Important? Yeah, Corporal Phillips, it was damned important.

He told Mary Ching, "Your humble pad is now death row. Avoid it, write it off, don't ever go back there again."

Mary's eyes found those pathetic kids in the rear-view mirror; they found the tortured misery in the Executioner's gaze; she nodded her head and told him, "Okay. Okay."

She knew, now, what Mack Bolan was made of.

Sausalito is a picturesque little village lying directly across from San Francisco on the Gate's north shore. Bolan had spent a weekend there once, shortly after Korea. Under another time and mood, he would have greeted the quaint beauty of "the Portofino of the West" with a nostalgic appreciation; on this trip he felt merely tense and anxious to have the bedsy twins off his hands and mind. His numbers were getting crowded and — although San Francisco was only minutes behind him — he was a bit irritable over the fact that he'd left the town behind just when all the numbers were beginning to come together.

The warwagon, under the sure guidance of Mary Ching, was picking its way clear of the bridge approach and winding onto a narrow shoreside road, circling onto the bay.

He should have received the initial ding when the first huge signboard blurred across his vision, proclaiming in red letters a foot high, SAVE THE BAY — but with everything else that had transpired that day, he wasn't as quick to draw the connection. Several signs and as many jogs in the road later, they came upon the houseboat, about a hundred yards off the road, snuggled into a cozy inlet and tied by heavy hawsers to a couple of accommodating trees.

It was small, as some houseboats go, but the letters blazed across it from stem to stern — BAYSAVERS — would be a difficult item for anyone to miss — and this time there was no miss inside Bolan's brain.

Already, though, Mary was swinging the van onto the little trail to the boat and Cynthey was on her knees directly behind him and proudly declaring, "That's it, that's the home where the heart is."

It was also a home where a lot of hell was likely to be unleashed, and it didn't even take an executioner's mentality to recognize that harsh fact of winner-take-all warfare.

He snarled at Cynthey, "Is this also the home of Baysavers Incorporated?"

Her eyes were baffled and recoiling from the savagery of his tone as she stammered, "S-sure, well n-no, I mean, Mr. Vericci gave us the boat. You've heard of him?" She shrank back all the way, reading the truth of Bolan's eyes, and wailed, "Oh, no!"

Oh yeah. He'd heard of him.

Bolan would never cease to marvel at the fantastic interconnections in the world of Mafia, and the way they always seemed to reach out and tie up a guy when he was least expecting it.

Touch one and you reach them all, that was the lesson the Executioner had learned many hot battles ago, but one which he apparently had not learned quite well enough.

A heavy car had already pulled crosswise onto the trail behind them, blocking the way out.

Movements, now — excitedly surreptitious ones — were taking place down there around that boat... and, yeah, all the numbers had crowded together on that narrow trail outside of Sausalito.

His leg pushed Mary's aside and his foot found the brake pedal to stand the warwagon on her nose.

He knew now, yeah, why he'd been feeling so irritable.

He had goofed, he had overlooked something, and that little sentinel of the inner mind had been screaming into his blindness that he had left something behind in San Francisco.

It wasn't his, heart, either.

He'd left his caution and his combat quick and maybe his whole damn lousy war.

He'd become weary of the stand alone.

He'd ridden blithely and blindly into the most outrageously obvious set-up of them all — and he'd come in stupid, deaf, and feeling sorry for himself.