Читать книгу Collision Course - Don Pendleton - Страница 9

The squalid little Boston bar sat quiet and dark, caught between rundown residential neighborhoods on one side and the sprawling industrial wasteland surrounding a factory park on the other side.

The business was the kind of place that accepted food stamps and cashed welfare checks. On the first and fifteenth of every month it was a pretty lively place. It was early in the morning now, and the last of the homeless had been chased from the alleyway behind the one-story building. The tired old neon beer signs in the grimy front windows were turned off.

The only lights inside the tavern emanated from the crack beneath the door to the combination office and storage room in the back, just across from the entrance to the walk-in cooler. Muffled voices and sounds seeped out through the cheap wood along with the bar of pale yellow light.

Inside the room, against the far wall, crates of liquor devoid of tax stamps and cases of hijacked beer were stacked toward where Frankie Bonanno kept his desk, which was piled high with invoices, shipping recipes and defunct tax forms. A cheap accountant’s calculator sat on the desktop next to an overflowing ashtray where a cigar smoldered.

Next to the ashtray was a lady’s compact mirror with coke residue smeared across the glass and a sticky razor blade. Beside the mirror was a HS 2000 Compact Croatian handgun.

Just like Robert Scone, Frankie Bonanno was a big man. His forearms and shoulders were huge and hard from his time working the docks and cracking skulls. He was equally comfortable behind the controls of a forklift or swinging a sawed-off Louisville Slugger baseball bat. The knuckles on his hands had been broken so many times they were huge and misshapen.

His thin, greasy hair was swept back and plastered into place with the liberal use of gel in a vain attempt to cover an emerging bald spot the size of a tea saucer. His ruddy, acne-scarred complexion matched his alcoholic’s broken-veined nose. His pig eyes were scrunched tightly in pleasure as the skinny blond woman’s head bobbed up and down in his lap.

Suddenly the door to the office swung open in a swift arc and a living shadow rushed into the room. There was a whirl of dark fabric as a black overcoat came open and the masked specter’s arms snaked out. The gloved hands were filled with deadly technology.

One hand swept downward and leveled a sound-suppressed Beretta 93-R on the huddled form of the cowering blonde. The left hand swung out from the intruder’s coat and tracked straight onto the fat jowls and flabby chest of Frankie Bonanno.

Behind his mask Mack Bolan smiled.

There was a small mechanical click as Bolan’s finger depressed the trigger on the stun gun and twin electrode darts fired out and hammered into Frankie Bonanno. There was a crackle as 2,000,000 volts sizzled into the big mobster. Immediately the sickly sweet stench of charred flesh filled the cramped little room.

Bonanno’s shriek of pain morphed into a choking gurgle as he began to spasm and jerk in his seat, pants still down around his thick, hairy ankles. Blue bolts of electricity arced from the fillings in his teeth in an uncanny effect that produced a mouthful of fire.

Bolan hit the juice again and pushed another charge into the mobster.

The fat man looked up and saliva dribbled from his gaping mouth. Then there was a pause, two heartbeats long, as Bonanno slumped helpless in his chair.

Bolan turned his balaclava-covered face toward the cowering woman. “Get out,” he ordered.

The woman looked up at the Executioner in stunned disbelief. Mob hitters were not known for compassion, and she clearly suspected some trick.

“I said get out!” Bolan snapped.

This time she did not hesitate. The woman scrambled to her feet and scurried to the door.

From the chair Frankie Bonanno lifted his head, still confused by the events unfolding around him.

“Who are—?” he began.

“Shut up,” Bolan snapped. He pressed the cold muzzle of his Beretta against the oiled expanse of Bonanno’s forehead. “If you so much as twitch I’ll splatter your brains across the wall.”

Frankie Bonanno froze. The mobster was deeply afraid. When the masked gunman had burst through the door, his first thought had been the Feds. But one man did not make up a SWAT team, federal or otherwise. A lone man meant a freelancer, and if that was true then Frankie wondered why he was still alive.

Bonanno watched as the figure in black pulled a pistol from behind his back. The handgun was identical to the weapon already sitting on the desk, a factory-new Croatian HS 2000 pistol. The man dropped it with a clatter that shattered the overflowing ashtray and spilled cigarette butts across the desk and onto the floor.

The man dropped something smaller onto the desk between the two HS 2000 pistols. It was the size of a quarter and when Bonanno saw it lying there, an involuntary groan escaped him. His eyes showed sullen fear as they moved from the microprocessor chip on the desk back up to the intruder looming above him.

“Three months.” Bolan said, voice harsh. “Three months ago a six-man team took down the supply dock of Las-Tech in Jersey. They got away with a shipment of chips just like that one. Chips that can run the supercomputers needed to control the centrifuges used to enrich uranium to weapons grade, say in Iran. Microprocessors sophisticated enough to turn scud missiles into guided munitions.”

“I—I—” Bonanno’s mouth worked uselessly as he tried to force his brain to come up with some lie that might save his life.

“Then suddenly a capo in Palermo has those same microchips on the open market and they go to an arms dealer in Bosnia, then multiple loads of Croatian pistols start flowing back through Palermo out of Sarajevo and into Jersey. And look, you happen to have one.”

“Sarajevo is in Bosnia, not Croatia,” Bonanno muttered.

Bolan stepped forward and cracked the butt of his Beretta across the mobster’s face. His nose exploded and sprayed blood. His hand flew out and struck the open bottle of Jack Daniel’s whiskey sitting on the desk and knocked it over. Amber fluid gurgled out of the bottle and began to spread across the desk.

“You think I need geography lessons from you?” Bolan asked, his voice flat. “Next time you get funny I put a bullet in your kneecap.”

“I don’t know anything—”

Frankie Bonanno’s denial was cut short by the cough of the silenced Beretta in Bolan’s hand. The slug slammed into the armrest of the mobster’s chair, shattering wood with a sharp crack and driving splinters into the man’s beefy arm.

Bonanno howled in agony.

Bolan stepped in close and leveled his pistol against Bonanno’s broken, mashed nose.

“The name. Who facilitated the transfer through the Palermo capo and into Sarajevo?” Bolan’s voice was soft.

Bonanno rolled his eyes toward the shiny, factory-new HS 2000 sitting on the desk just a few feet away, he knew it would do him no good. He inhaled breath through his pain and began to talk.

“Some guy,” Bonanno said. “Got a Polack name or something. Taterczynski. Peter Taterczynski.”

“How is he connected? Where does he work from?” Bolan fired his questions hard and fast, keeping the other man off balance.

“He’s international, that’s all I know. He used the Palermo capo because he wants a screen between himself and primarie’s when it comes to operating in the States. The capo told my crew what to take, on spec.”

“The microprocessors.”

Bonanno nodded. “The microprocessors. Like I can move tech on my own? I deal in auto parts and cigarettes.”

“So straight trade. Armed heist for tech you can’t move in exchange for pistols you can.”

“Yeah, basically.”

“All set up by this player out of Sarajevo, Taterczynski?”

“Yeah, the Polack. But everything went through the Palermo capo’s guy. A lieutenant, really scary dude name Paolini.”

Bolan looked over at the desk where Bonanno’s cell phone sat in the middle of the guns and the mess.

“You talk to this ‘really scary’ dude named Paolini on that phone?”

Bonanno nodded, his eyes hooded. They shifted past Bolan and suddenly he jerked upward toward the desk just as the hinges on the door behind them squeaked as it was thrown open.

Bolan caught a flash of motion as he shifted and twisted hard and felt the jerking tug of a knife blade catch in the tough polymer fibers of his Kevlar vest.

The soldier grunted in surprise as he reacted. It was the woman, back for some mad reason of her own and trying to save her tormentor in the vain hope of future favors. The knife in her hand was a big bladed kitchen utensil with a serrated edge, and she clearly aimed to kill Bolan with it.

The Executioner grabbed the overextended woman by the tangled hair at the back of her head and flung her hard to the ground. Frankie Bonanno was in motion, rising out of his seat and grasping for the butt of his loaded HS 2000 with a sweat-soaked hand. Bolan stepped forward and lashed out with one big, strong leg.

The heel of his low-cut boot ground against the mobster’s wrist with an audible crunch on impact. The woman struggled to her feet, shrieking in rage, and threw herself at the black-clad intruder. Bolan drove his elbow backward into her soft belly and tossed her against the office wall. She slid down to the floor, her eyes rolling backward into her head. Bolan snapped his head back around as Bonanno reached for the HS 2000 pistol on his desk.

Bolan pivoted at the waist and fired three single shots into the fat man, pinning him to the seat, the Croatian pistol held uselessly in the man’s uninjured hand. Frankie convulsed as his lungs deflated and the Croatian handgun discharged into his desk. Bonanno’s eyes fluttered, and then a trickle of bright blood bubbled over his quivering lip and dribbled onto his chin.

Purposefully Bolan crossed to the desk and began to jerk open drawers. Casually he swept the mess on the desktop onto the floor. When the police came, they could make the link between the stolen tech and the smuggled pistols. Bolan would be several thousand miles ahead of any local investigation by the time they finished putting the pieces of the puzzle together.

He pocketed the dead man’s cell phone, a virtual treasure trove of information, Bolan knew. Inside the desk he found a locked metal box. He swept up the container and smashed it against the edge of the desk, busting the cheap lock. Inside he found several grams of cocaine and two grand in worn twenties and fifties.

He stuffed the money into a pocket to add to his war chest. He turned and made for the office door, stepping over the sprawled form of the unconscious woman. He doubted if anyone outside would have heard the pistol shot, or that they would call the police if they had. Despite that it was sloppy fieldwork to tempt luck and Mack Bolan had not survived this long by being sloppy.

Bolan jerked the balaclava from his head as he stepped out the back door of the bar and into the alley. He moved forward, folding his black overcoat around him like a protective cloak of shadows. He navigated the filthy alley at a brisk pace and turned out onto a narrow street two blocks from the tavern.

He used his pocket remote to disengage the alarm on the black Prelude and it chirped once in response. He opened the door and slid into the vehicle.

Behind him the ocean mist swirled and crept along the littered ground as the Executioner sped away into the night.