Save the Children (4 page)

He was in the kitchen.

Nothing stirred in the house.

With the Beretta pointing the way, he began a room-by-room search of the ground floor, his first impression confirmed. No lights. All of the first floor of the house was dark.

The NVD goggles did their job as he prowled without having to flick on any of the lights, but he found little of interest to slow him down: the usual layout of kitchen, living room, den, dining room.

In a study that had to be Parelli's, he did come across a personal desktop phone directory, a small plastic-covered notebook.

He took the directory, slipping it inside his black-suit.

A sweeping, curved staircase led him upstairs.

He paused at the balustraded top landing, eyeing the closed door nearest to him on his left, which opened off an unlighted hallway that stretched from the landing to both ends of the house.

A sliver of light from the room within spilled out from beneath the closed door; the room was the same one whose lighted window Bolan had spotted on his way to the house.

The other portals lining this hallway were shut and no light shone from beneath any of them.

He discerned the faint murmur of voices...

one male, the other, female...

from behind the wooden panel, but he could not make out what they were saying to each other, or the mood or tone of the conversation.

Whoever they were, and already Bolan had his guesses about the identity of at least one of them, they were pitching their voices low.

He opted to complete his search of the house before investigating the lighted room.

The second floor proved far more informative than the first.

He found a master bedroom with closets full of expensive men's clothing.

Next to the bed was a nightstand with a small notation pad, the top page of the pad blank.

Bolan played a hunch. He picked up a pencil alongside the pad and brushed the lead back and forth across the blank sheet of paper.

A phone number materialized; the impression from what had been jotted on the preceding page, which Parelli must have torn off and taken with him.

He sat on the bed and lifted the receiver of the bedside phone. Hearing the tone, he dialed the number.

The connection rang at the other end several times before a woman's voice answered.

"Harbor Yacht Club."

Bolan hung up the phone and continued with his search.

There was an alcove with a giant-screen TV set, atop which were stacked a pile of videotapes that he at first assumed would be standard commercial brands. Then he reconsidered and checked out their penned labels one by one. The small labels identified the tapes by single names.

Bobby.

Lisa.

Alison.

Something told Bolan to switch on the VCR and pop one of the tapes in.

He did.

And almost threw up.

He punched off the set, restraining an impulse to send a couple of bullets into the machine, so powerful and hot was the sudden rage that swept through him.

Two vacant-eyed children, the innocence of their nakedness made obscene by the presence of an adult male...

Bolan recognized the man in the four or five seconds he had glanced at the screen.

David Parelli...

Voices rising in anger at each other from behind the closed door down the hall snapped Bolan from the shock and repulsion coursing through him after his glimpse of the unspeakable acts on the tape.

He forced himself to put David Parelli's unholy sickness out of his mind for the time being so it would not interfere with his concentration.

He made his way out of that den of perversion, back into the hall, the Beretta ready in his fist.

In the corridor, the voices came to him with more clarity from behind the door of the lighted room; the only room he had not covered in his five-minute search of the house.

He eased along the carpeted hallway lined with modern artwork, his ears straining to hear every word and nuance of the angry exchange between the two voices behind the door.

A woman snarled in a spiteful voice, "Why don't you tell me the truth, Randy? You're rutting one of those goddamn bitches from one of your tv commercials and you don't have the stamina to satisfy two women, you lousy goddamn worm!"

"Maybe I'm getting tired of you and your bitching, Denise," an angry male retorted, "but I'm not screwing someone else, whether you believe it or not."

"You better goddamn well not be! What's left of you after I have you worked over won't be very pretty, worm. You're my bed partner until I decide different."

Bolan reached the doorway but he chose not to make his presence known just yet to the two inside. He continued to listen to the lovers' quarrel.

"Don't threaten me with your goons," the man sneered. "Maybe it was a mistake taking up with you. I shoulda never..."

"Spare me that," the woman shouted. "So tell me then why you don't think we should see each other for a while, and it better be good, Randy. When I take a man, I don't like him catting around on me."

The man seemed to regain some of his cool.

"It's just that after what happened tonight, after what you told me about that shooting at the health spa... don't you see, Denise, baby, I'm in a very sensitive occupation."

"You mean making porno movies?" the woman shot back derisively.

"Uh, yeah, if you want to put it that way."

"So what?" the woman called Denise demanded.

"So the cops are always wired to me, you know that."

"And you don't want any of Davey's heat shining your way, is that it?"

"Uh, yeah, something like that."

"I think it's something else," the woman spit. "I think you're screwing someone else, lover boy."

"Aw come on, Denise..."

"You get your clothes off, worm, and do like you're told." Threat dripped from the woman's command. "Or..."

It was the first indication Bolan had that the man inside the room was clothed.

He raised the Beretta in anticipation of what he sensed would happen next, all the while his peripheral senses registering the atmosphere of the dark house, but the only activity in the Parelli residence came from the other side of this door.

"Or nothing, you goddamn loony," the man in the room snarled, the sound of the voice coming closer to the door. "Get yourself another lapdog."

The door started to open.

The woman shouted heatedly, "I'm warning you, Randy..."

Then she and he stopped when they both realized that a heavily armed man in black in the hallway was aiming a Beretta at the spot between Randy's eyes.

"Back into the room," Bolan ordered the guy in a cold voice from hell.

Randy obeyed.

He was a well-muscled guy, cut from the same mold as those pretty boys Bolan had chased out of the New Age Center before the shooting started, except for the beginnings of sagging facial muscles bespeaking a lifestyle of too much pleasure and not enough morals, and a pronounced ferret squint around the eyes.

The woman standing beside the rumpled bed possessed the ripe, full-blown attractiveness of a middle-aged Sophia Loren; cultured beauty was the phrase that came to Bolan's mind, though there was nothing refined about the emotion that glistened in the dark eyes of her dusky, high-cheekboned face after her shouting match with the guy. She wore a black lace slip that looked good on her.

Bolan followed Randy into the room, not lowering the Beretta's snout where it rested on the bridge of the guy's nose.

Randy stopped moving backward beside the woman.

Bolan left the door open, standing in the doorway, his combat senses attuned to the ambience of the house.

The woman did not lose a beat. She regarded the big apparition in the doorway with a hand on her hip and open interest rather than fear in her eyes, as if she was used to guns being aimed at people in her presence.

"On the other hand, Randy," she spoke huskily to the man next her in a conversational tone that went with the open appraisal with which she regarded Bolan from top to bottom, "if you really must be going, perhaps you should... unless mean and ugly here intends to kill you."

Bolan demanded of the man, "Randy what?"

The man gulped audibly. A patina of sweat sheened across his forehead.

"O-Owens," he stuttered. "What..."

Bolan kept the Beretta on the dude but looked back to the woman.

"That would make you Mrs. Parelli."

"It would," she said with a nod, not breaking eye contact with him. "And what does that make you?"

Here is a woman with a will of iron, Bolan thought.

"The name's Bolan," he told them.

"Oh, Jesus..." Randy whined.

"You won't kill us," the woman said point-blank in her throaty voice. "If you were here to do that, Randy and I would already be dead. You're here for my son."

"Where is he, Mrs. Parelli?"

"You think I'd turn my son over to the Executioner?" she retorted. "Then you're crazier than everyone says you are."

Randy Owens was nowhere near as levelheaded.

"Denise!" he cried. His eyes were oval saucers of fear, focused unblinkingly on the silenced snout of the Beretta. "Tell him the truth! We don't know where David is," he blurted to Bolan. "He called a little while ago."

Denise Parelli swiveled her open appraisal of Bolan into cold contempt at the man standing beside her.

"Shut up, Randy."

Owens continued blurting to Bolan.

"It was you, then, wasn't it, at that health club! David told his mother he was going underground for a few days. He wouldn't say where, that's what she told me." He threw a nod to the woman. "She..."

Denise Parelli shifted her weight slightly and brought up her right knee hard into Randy's crotch.

Randy Owens emitted a startled wheezing gasp and doubled over, knees closed in, hands gripping himself in pain where the woman had kneed him. Slowly he collapsed to the floor at their feet, dry heaving into the carpet.

The woman shifted her look of contempt from the man back to Bolan.

"I don't know where David is. If I did, you could torture me and I would not tell you."

She glared defiantly at the man with the Beretta. "So what will you do now, Executioner? Kill me?"

Bolan lowered the Beretta until the nuzzle pointed at the floor. He had not vanquished the rage coursing through him after what he had glimpsed on the VCR in David Parelli's bedroom, but he had no idea how much this feisty woman knew about Bolan's intel on her son. And he did not have it in him to kill this woman tonight.

He glanced around the bedroom and focused on a walk-in closet on the other side of the bed. "In there." He motioned with the Beretta.

The woman glared down at the moaning, semiconscious Randy.

"What about him?"

Bolan felt the butt of the Beretta burn in his grip.

"I heard you say he makes TV commercials. I don't suppose he dabbles with kid porn on the side?"

The woman blinked at that.

"Don't make me sicker than I already am standing here looking at you," she snarled angrily. "I keep a young man. I'm not a pervert and I wouldn't sleep with someone who was."

Bolan removed his finger from the trigger of the 93-R.

"You just saved this punk's life," he told Denise Parelli. "In the closet, both of you."

"I'm not going in any damn closet," she said viciously, "especially not with that rat!"

"Oh, yes, you are," Bolan corrected her quietly and he clipped her on the chin with the butt of the pistol.

Mrs. Parelli's eyes rolled back in her head, her knees buckled and she started to collapse.

He stepped forward quickly and caught her in his left arm, then carried her unconscious figure over to the closet.

He deposited her gently on the floor of the closet, then returned and dragged the still moaning Randy by the jacket collar, dumping him alongside Mrs. Parelli.

Randy whined every step of the way, drunk with the pain of his kneed genitalia.

Bolan leaned over and clipped Owens with the butt of the Beretta.

The porno star stopped whining and started snoring.

Bolan locked the door of the closet and left the room. He retraced his way quietly down the winding staircase, through the kitchen and back out into the night. Once outside, he took the route of his approach across the grounds, through the miniforest of firs.

He encountered no more men in his withdrawal.

At the base of the wall he repeated the climbing rope exercise.

The two sentries at the front gate paid him no more attention than they had on his way in.

Before returning to his waiting Vette a quarter mile away, he paused only an additional moment to check on something he had been curious about, and the answer provided no answer at all, just another question in a night of violence and intangibles.

The sedan with the policeman and bumper sticker was gone.

Fifteen minutes later he stood at an outdoor telephone kiosk adjacent to a shopping mall, closed at this hour, speaking with Aaron Kurtzman.

Not long before, the Executioner had been offered amnesty by the U.S. government. For a brief time Bolan had worked in the system...

strictly off the record...

heading the nation's covert anti-terrorist force, from a top-secret command center called Stony Man Farm, in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains.

During that period, Bolan's energies had become focused on the real force behind international terrorism, the KGB, until that terrible day when the special woman in his life, the brilliant, beautiful April Rose, had died in the assault on the Farm.

Embittered, tormented by this loss, Bolan had again broken the shackles of establishment authority, resuming his one-man war against evil wherever he found it. He realized that the evil of the Mafia, of child-molesting scum like Parelli, was no different from that of nations like Iran or the Soviet Union, who sought to wreak havoc upon civilized people around the world with their barbaric deeds.

He rethought just what it was he was trying to do with his life, with his skills and sacrifices, and he realized you could not give evil a name.

It wasn't the Mafia.

It wasn't the KGB.

It wasn't the loony who starts blowing people away when his brain snaps.

Evil was all of them.

He understood evil to be that dark side of the collective human psyche, the self-destructive impulse inherent in the species, manifesting itself as the homicidal maniac, the Mafia, the slave state trying to devour the whole world map.

For Bolan to direct his attention at any one of those manifestations to the exclusion of the others was to undervalue both what he fought to accomplish and the memory of his allies who had fallen along the way. Those friendly ghosts had made the ultimate sacrifice because they had believed in what he was doing and had wanted to help.

The Executioner now took on the bad guys wherever he found them. That was how it broke down in simple language. He financed himself from his war chest, money he confiscated from those whose evil machinations he dismantled.

Support also came via connections from his government days. But those friends could not go public and say so. Powerful allies in the Justice Department and at Stony Man Farm...

even at the White House...

channeled intelligence data and, at times, actual covert support to the lone warrior who was accomplishing with his "crazy" one-man wars what the U.S. government in all its might and wisdom knew it should be doing but could not for whatever reason.

Such an ally was "Bear" Kurtzman, the irascible Stony Man Farm computer wizard, wheelchair bound since sustaining a serious wound in the same assault on the Farm that had taken April's life.

Kurtzman continued to oversee the intel network that fed into the still operational Stony Man Farm, from which the two Bolan-formed units, Able Team and Phoenix Force, continued to operate against terrorism at home and abroad.

Bolan briefed Kurtzman on the events of the past two hours, since the Executioner's arrival in Chicago.

"You're helping both teams smoke you out, big guy."

Kurtzman's response was concerned and melancholy. "You know that, don't you?"

Bolan watched his breath against the glass side of the phone booth turn to ice.

"I'm used to living under a death sentence, Bear. I can't let this one go, no way. I wanted Parelli when I hit this town. After seeing what I saw on that VCR of his, now I want his whole damn crew. And I'm going to get them."

"I believe that," grunted Kurtzman. "Wish I had something new on whatever the hell it is Parelli's trying to swing, but you know Washington. We're picking up the bits and pieces as fast as they drop. Trouble is, there's big bucks behind this one and I don't just mean Mob money. Some lobbyists and more than a few government contractors are in the puzzle, too."

"I need a connection between anyone close to Parelli and kiddie porn," Bolan growled. He thought of Randy Owens. "I've got one lead but I want Parelli first, before anything else. I want him real bad, Bear."

"We'll find him," said Kurtzman. "He's got a boat docked at the Harbor Yacht Club there in Chicago. That bit of information came in since we connected last."

Bolan nodded to himself, recalling the yacht club's phone number on Parelli's bedside note pad.

"This is hardly yachting weather, which might be just why he'd think no one would look for him there. It's worth a try. And trace those two license plate numbers for me, Bear."

"I've punched 'em through," Kurtzman assured him. "I'll have the data next time you check in. The sedan spotted outside Parelli's home, and the Porsche from the health club. Right, and I'll come up with whatever I can on this Lana Garner, too, though that could be a tough one."

"Thanks, Bear. I'll check back with you after I visit this Harbor Yacht Club. Right now that's the only lead I've got."

"Be careful, big dude," growled Bolan's friend with fervor.

"Always," Bolan assured him.

He broke the connection, returned to the Corvette and guided the sports car in the direction of the Lake Michigan shore, allowing himself to experience again the white-hot anger that threatened to explode from the fire burning in his gut.

This strike by the Executioner into Chicago had been shadowy from the beginning. Not so much in what Bolan intended to do...

that was as clear-cut as could be...

but in what exactly David Parelli had up his sleeve.

The ripples, the angles being lined up with blood money in a bid for something big stretching all the way from this young Mafia turk to the corridors of power in the nation's capital...

all of that now took a back seat, as far as Bolan was concerned, in light of what Parelli did for kicks in his spare time.

Child molester.

The two words burned like naked flame into his heart.

He would have to keep a check on his rage when he moved through the Windy City tonight on this kill hunt, because blind rage could make a soldier careless. He had to find Parelli. Bolan wanted that more than he remembered wanting anything ever before in his life.

Something in the back of his mind...

and he couldn't pin it down...

told him that the awful things he had seen on Parelli's VCR were only the tip of another iceberg in these murky waters.

Missing children had become a national epidemic in America.

A living nightmare that devastated families, feasting on the innocence of the helpless.

The children.

Was Parelli tied in with something like that?

Yeah, Bolan would find out.

As long as an animal like Parelli walked this earth, children everywhere were in danger of ending up like those kids on that horrible clip.

Bolan realized he was gripping the Vette's steering wheel harder than was necessary.

He lightened his grip, pulling the rage back under control.

Undercurrents in Chicago were making themselves perceptible to him, but just barely, on this night of blood.

Politics.

A cop who hung out around a Mafia homestead.

Child abuse.

Mafia.

And a tough, spirited fighter woman who called herself Lana Garner.

Who was Lana Garner?

Where
was she?

He steered the Vette on at the legal speed through the sparse evening traffic.

2030 hours.

He wanted to floor the gas pedal and push on deeper into this tangle with all the speed it deserved, but he could hardly afford being pulled over for a traffic violation at a time like this.

Bolan carried all sorts of phony id, but at this moment the trunk of the Vette carried the tools of his trade, the weapons that he had shed after his night hit on the Parelli estate.

He had donned his civvies over the blacksuit and removed the night camouflage from his face before driving to phone Kurtzman. He now wore the Beretta and the AutoMag in their respective shoulder holsters beneath his jacket.