Panic in Philly

by Don Pendleton

  “So what’s your second impression?” Thomkins asked somberly.

  “Sir?”

  “Where’d he go?”

  Strauss raised his hands in what was becoming a characteristic gesture as he replied, “Hell, I can’t imagine. I’ve been thinking about those trees over there, just inside the wall. It’s not inconceivable that …”

  “Glad you said that,” Thomkins growled in a somewhat softened tone. “Saved me from saying it. What’d he do, whip out his Batman cape and fly over there?”

  “A superb athlete could … well, maybe. I don’t know, Cap’n. I just said it’s not inconceivable.”

  Persicone stood up with a sigh and joined the debate.

  “It’s a purely academic question,” he suggested. “We have to accept the obvious. Bolan fell right into the blast and was annihilated.”

  “You know better than that,” Thomkins replied acidly. “That’s a cop-out and you know it. You were right at my elbow. You saw the whole thing as clearly as I did. And you saw the guy falling away in the other direction, away from the blast.”

  The FBI man lit a cigarette and blew the smoke toward the gutted truck. “Eyes can play tricks,” he said. “Especially at a time like that. All we saw was the guy falling out of the spot. We were all so tensed up we were ready to jump at anything. We projected a path of fall, away from the spot, which was the only light available at the moment. But away where? Away down, that’s where; it was the only route the guy had. Then the blast came, and suddenly we had a lot more light than our eyes could handle. Face it, we lost the guy the instant he left that pole. By the time our eyes adjusted to all that light—and our minds, I might add, to the whole unsettling event—well, all I’m saying is that we thought him into that path-of-fall. We don’t know what the hell we saw.”

  “I know what I saw,” Thomkins insisted.

  “Look, Wayne, look—we were a half a block away. You’ve got to consider the darkness, the angle of vision, the sudden blindness from the blast. Let’s let logic make the decision. We did not find a broken body, not even any blood. We covered every inch of the surrounding area, we searched the trees, we’ve looked into every conceivable fall-zone. Now, I don’t care how superb the athlete or anything else—no guy is going to get up from a fall like that and simply walk away, or even crawl away. So … we are left with one inescapable conclusion.”

  “I’ll buy that conclusion,” Thomkins growled, “when I can find something factual to pin it to.”

  Persicone smiled faintly and said, “You’re a stubborn cop.”

  “Thank you,” Thomkins replied.

  Strauss said, “With your permission, Cap’n … I’d like to have the firemen assist me with—I’d like them to lift me in that bucket of their’s.”

  “Yeah, go ahead,” the head cop agreed. “Just don’t try any swan dives outta that bucket.”

  Strauss grinned and hurried away.

  The two men watched his departure for a moment. Then Persicone quietly declared, “That’s a good man.”

  “Yeah,” Thomkins agreed. “He doesn’t buy your theory either, Joe.”

  “He’s got a personal interest in this case now,” the FBI man pointed out. “Bolan left him with egg all over his face.”

  “Not just him,” Thomkins observed sourly.

  An embarrassed silence enveloped the pair. Thomkins returned to his eyes-on-toes meditation. Persicone began pacing back and forth between the shattered telephone pole and the brick wall.

  Presently a fire captain ambled up, grinning. He snapped a curious glance at the pacing FBI agent, then told Thomkins, “It’s subject to lab verification but I think I can tell you what triggered the explosives. My boys are putting some pieces together. Looks like a remote-control detonator.”

  “Radio?”

  “Yeah. Solid-state miniature.”

  The cop said, “Okay, that fits our theory. Put some more pieces together, will you, Cap? Find me some toes and fingers, even an eyeball or a testicle. Find me a piece of the guy that pushed the plunger.”

  “If he was in that truck,” the fireman replied, “you can probably forget it. It’s a miracle nobody else got hurt. It appears that the blast went up more so than out, which accounts for the small-area containment. Your bomb boys agree with us on that. It’s possible to plan an explosion that way; maybe the guy did. Anyway, if he went up with it—well, forget the pieces.”

  The fire captain threw another glance at Persicone and walked away.

  The FBI man stopped his pacing and told the cop in charge of the Bolan detail, “I’m not telling you your business, Wayne.”

  “Okay, don’t.”

  “Yeah, stubborn, yeah.”

  Another silence ensued, during which the two of them interestedly watched a young detective who was being swung high overhead in a fire department emergency rescue rig.

  While this was in progress, the two-way radio on Thompkins’ belt summoned him, and delivered the information that the search warrant was awaiting him near the Angeletti front gate.

  “Okay, hold it right there,” he instructed the caller. “I’ll be over there in a couple of minutes.”

  “Waste of time,” Persicone commented, with a faint smile.

  “We’ll see,” Thomkins told him. “Want to come along?”

  “Even if the guy did walk away, would he take refuge at Don Stefano’s joint?”

  “You’re the Bolan expert,” the cop replied. “Would he?”

  Persicone sighed and said, “Hell, he might.”

  A loud whoop sounded from overhead, halting the two men in their tracks as they trudged toward their vehicle.

  The bucket rig was swung out over the adjoining grounds and nestling into one of the trees which lined the wall over there. Strauss, his face glowing in the beam from the rig’s spotlight, was waving something in his hand and shouting down at them.

  “It’s a pocket, Cap’n!” he yelled. “A black pocket off a uniform! Ripped off, not burned!”

  “There you go,” Thomkins declared in a half-audible reaction to the find.

  “Give that boy a promotion and a cigar,” Persicone commented.

  “Bullshit,” said the chief of the get-Bolan detail. “It would’ve been easier the other way. That ties it, you know. That just flat out ties it.”

  They were hurrying to the car now.

  Persicone said, “There’s no sweetness to the victory, eh?”

  “Victory, what victory?” the Captain retorted. “If we don’t find the guy at Angeletti’s, do you know what I’m going to do next?”

  The FBI man was grinning. “I’ll bite. What?”

  “I’m going to assign a fire truck and an ambulance to the guy. And then I’m going to go home, get drunk, and go to bed.”

  Persicone chuckled and said, “You’re glad he made it and you know it.”

  “Get screwed,” the Bolan-chaser growled.

  The tart rejoinder could have been a benediction.

  For sure, the confusion over Mack Bolan’s freefall fate had added the edge to make it a night for miracles.

  Chapter 11/ Contained

  Bolan had scouted the area thoroughly two days earlier, even drawing sketches of the grounds with topographical notes of terrain irregularities and plotting probable floor layout of the house interiors.

  It was one of several similar two-story residences on that block, in a neighborhood which was classed as “upper-middle.”

  It was about a one-acre plot, and the house took up much of that.

  There was a brick wall on all four sides, a fancy iron gate with remote-control locks operable from a vehicle or from the house, a winding drive that skirted the property and took all the advantage there was of the limited ground area, circling to the back and through the carport, then back down to the gate. Made it look like a great deal more than it was.

  The Capo’s next-door neighbor was a pediatrician. The man across the street was regional sales rep for a paint company. Another n
eighbor was a retired university professor.

  It was an affluent neighborhood, but not a “rich” one.

  Bolan had learned that Angeletti had lived here for twenty-two years, since just after the death by pneumonia of his wife. It seemed to be all the home that the widower needed or wanted, with both the kids off to school during the earlier years and flinging around with their own things after that.

  There were no grandchildren—not even a son-in-law or daughter-in-law.

  Philippa had been ten when her mother died.

  Maybe that was why, said idle tongues, she had never learned to act like a woman.

  Bolan had heard no explanations for why Frank had never learned to act like a man. In some ways, sure, Frank the Kid managed. It was said that he’d laid every hooker in Philadelphia and adjacent areas. Only hookers, though—Frank had never shown a serious interest in any woman.

  So, sure, it was a good enough “home” for Stefano Angeletti. He didn’t have to impress anybody. Not lately. And there were no embarrassing questions from the federal tax people about how he could afford to live so high. Don Stefano did not live high, not in any way that showed.

  There were ways that did not show, of course. Bolan had heard also of the “much fancier joints” tucked away here and there for those secret week ends and seasonal vacations. Retreats, they were called. But the stories had it that the only thing Angeletti ever retreated from was his own family.

  He maintained a home for them—in which he stayed with them for tolerable periods—a home which was not really a home by any usual standard.

  It was actually a business headquarters, around which was fabricated a synthetic and baldly hypocritical environment of togetherness and familial devotion, intermixed with gun-toting bodyguards, late-night comings and goings and “business deals,” an occasional party of chosen ones, a steady procession of Philippa’s lovers and Frank’s hookers, and the ever-present tensions of a Mafia Capo’s struggle to maintain authority in a crumbling empire.

  The Angeletti family had been in trouble for some time.

  Some of that was attributable to Stefano’s advanced years. He was seventy-four. He had ulcers, high blood pressure, hardening of the arteries, and failing kidneys. But he had a strong old heart and he was still as mean as sin.

  Most of the problems had come from outside. Stefano had lost the protection of anonymity some years back, thanks to Kefauver, and later Bobby Kennedy and that sharp old bird from Arkansas, Senator McClellan. He’d been getting considerable harassment from the feds and, lately, from local police agencies as well.

  Also, Stefano had been subjected to gentle but insistent pressures from La Commissione to refine and update his operations, to bring in some new blood, to beef up, consolidate and firm up the ties with the national organization.

  Philly had been a family operation for much too long—it was an anachronism in the modern Mafia.

  Augie Marinello had once tried to engineer a marriage between Philippa and a young turk from one of the New York families … purely as a business arrangement and to give the Don an alternate heir who could be regarded as “in the family.”

  But Philippa herself put the death seal on that idea, and the Don himself had not pushed the thing since he’d not been overly enthusiastic over the project either.

  Frank was the Angeletti heir, and by God Frank was going to get some legs under him some day even if Don Stefano had to manufacture some for him.

  The gradigghia had apparently been intended to serve as Frank the Kid’s artificial legs.

  It took more than legs to make a Capo, however. It took a head, also, and nobody yet had figured out how to transplant a man’s head onto a kid’s shoulders.

  Such was the status and the state of the Angeletti household on that night of unlikely nights when Mack Bolan came to call.

  He had no clear idea of what he was going to do there, nor how. The Executioner was simply playing the game by ear, hoping to brazen his way out of an impossible situation and perhaps somehow to regain the initiative in a hopeless and decidedly unpopular war.

  He was strongly aware of the fantastic odds which were quickly marshaling to the other side’s favor.

  He knew that the entire neighborhood was crawling with cops, that blockades were undoubtedly being set up to firmly contain him within a closely defined geographical trap—that it was only a question of time until once again he would be hearing that dreaded command, “This is the law … throw down your weapons … dead or alive … your choice.”

  But no … they wouldn’t be saying it again. They would be shooting on sight, to kill—and actually he’d rather have it that way than the other. There was no decision to be made with a screaming bullet—no options, no alternatives.

  It might even be a tossup as to whose bullets got to him first. This was no social club he’d ventured into. Angeletti had no less than twenty guns prowling this place, perhaps twice that since the Emperor’s incident.

  He had beefed-up gun crews coming down from Buffalo and Manhattan, plus an elite field general delegated by the boss of the storm troopers, Mike Talifero.

  He had, maybe, also a couple of unsuspected wild cards in the personages of Leo Turrin and Wils Brown.

  Wils had worked with Bolan on their last brush. But maybe that one had been simply for old time’s sake, and maybe the war-maimed ex-football great had been kicking his butt ever since for not cashing in on that hundred-grand bounty collectible from Bolan’s blood.

  Leo Turrin was a great guy and a good friend. But he had his own thing to protect—and Bolan had always felt that a good cop would go on being a good cop above everything else. There was no way of ever being “for sure” about a cop—especially one who was himself balancing delicately above a chasm of certain disaster.

  So … what else was there to play but the ear?

  Three times in ten minutes Bolan had heard the tense breathings and cautious footfalls of the police bush-beaters right at the boundary of the Angeletti property.

  Twice in as many minutes he had stood within touching range of curious Angeletti hardmen who were trying to figure out what was going on in the neighborhood.

  Once the old man himself had appeared on a screened-in back porch to ask the yard chief, “Did’ja hear anything yet on that explosion?”

  The reply had been to the effect that there had been a “car wreck or something down the block,” and Angeletti then volunteered the information that, “Must’a been bad; our damn phones are out.”

  Another yardman muttered something about hearing gunshots mixed in with that explosion. Before Angeletti could comment on that, yet another man had come hoofing around from the front to announce, “Cops wanta come in to shake us down. They say this Bolan’s in the neighborhood.”

  “Tell them to shake the neighborhood down, then,” the old man barked. “We’ll take care of our own!”

  “They mean business,” the hardman reported. “They say they’ll get a warrant if they have to.”

  “Let ’em get their warrants then,” Angeletti had replied, and slammed back inside the house.

  So … sure … what else to play but the ear?

  What did a dead man have to lose?

  And this was precisely the state of mind of the desperate warrior in black when the vehicle gate swung open and a gleaming foreign car—obviously of great value—eased onto the property, piloted, no doubt, by an elite “wild card” who had the whole wide bloody world to lose.

  Chapter 12/ Aces Wild

  Maserati it may have been, but it looked like a cruising shark as it crept silently along that winding drive. The top was down. The guy behind the wheel must have once been touched by the Grand Prix madness, or at least by the American image of how a European racing gentleman should look—or maybe it was the Red Baron Bolan was thinking of.

  He was bareheaded, except for a white silk scarf draped vertically from the top of the head down, then swished across the throat and trailing out to the rear.
He wore racing goggles and a white car-coat with the collar turned up.

  Both car and man could have just driven out of an ad as an answer to “What sort of man reads Playboy?” This guy could have started the whole idea.

  Most of what Bolan could see was an impression of a strong chin and plenty of good teeth as the Maserati came to a gentle halt at the intersection with the front walk.

  The yard chief was standing there, a hand raised in the air in a silent command. He stepped forward to the driver’s side and Bolan could hear the respectful challenge, “Identification please, sir.”

  The goggles went up and a strong, nicely modulated voice came back with, “How many times do I have to do this?”

  “Sorry, sir. Routine.” The yard boss accepted a wallet-sized folder, looked at something inside there, and handed it back. “Glad you’re here, Mr. Cavaretta,” he said. “You can go in from here. I’ll park the car for you.”

  The guy chuckled and replied, “The hell you will. I paid for it, I drive it, and I sure as hell park it.”

  “It’s a beauty,” the hardman said, backing off for a better look. “Must’ve cost some bucks.”

  “Try thirty thou’ as a base, then work up through another ten in specials,” said the playboy of the western underworld. After all, what comfort was a hunk of machinery like that if you couldn’t flaunt it at somebody? Then he volunteered the information, “Just got her today. This is here maiden voyage.”

  “What’ll she do? About one-fifty?”

  “Try one seventy-five. I would have been here twenty minutes ago but—what gives with all the roadblocks around here? Thought I was crossing over the iron curtain or something.”

  “Aw, that guy, you know, our wise guy has been playin’ games with us around here. Got all the cops in the state, I think, spooked up and chasin’ shadows everywhere. They say he’s in this neighborhood right now.”

  The guy in the forty-thousand-dollar shark laughed and said, “Let’s hope so, eh? A hot blonde in New York is waiting for me to come home and cool her down.”

  The yardman laughed with him. “Think this will be a pretty quick one, huh, Mr. Cavaretta?”