The Killing Urge

by Don Pendleton

"Yeah." Cleavon reached under the front seat and pulled out a riot gun.

  * * *

  "We really shouldn't be doing this," Lomax told Barberi over his shoulder. "Why can't we wait until you're settled..."

  "Because I told you, shit-for-brains, that the hootch stores won't be open by the time we get settled in," Barberi said. "And I'll be damned if I'm goin' through a night with you clowns without a drink. Look, there's a place. Pull over."

  Lomax looked at Carol Niven. She wished someone with more experience was with them to tell them what was expected and what wasn't. "If we don't do it," she said, "he'll drive us crazy all night."

  "Good point." Lomax turned on the blinker and talked over his shoulder. "If you know what you want, get it quick," he told Barberi. "Things are awfully exposed here."

  Niven checked the parking lot as they approached. The package store, called Gambino's, was the corner building, brightly lit with yellow neon, the only place still open in a small business block. Lomax parked the wagon between two cars, and the three of them got out.

  "Hey, I came away without any cash." Stinky patted his pockets like an expert. "Would you lend me a few..."

  Frowning, Lomax reached into his pocket and fished out a ten-dollar-bill. "This is going to look good on the expense report," he remarked to Niven.

  They walked into the store, where a young man sat reading a magazine behind a small counter jammed with candy and cigarettes. His eyes just touched them as they walked in the door before flicking to the big clock on the wall that read 9:27.

  It was a medium-size place that used every available inch of space. Floor-to-ceiling shelves were filled with bottles of wine and liquor, with narrow aisles between.

  While Barberi moved over to the display of cheap vodka, Carol Niven wandered over near the check-out stand where she could keep an eye on the parking lot.

  "Can I help you?" asked the blond kid behind the counter.

  "In a minute." Niven smiled, as she watched a white Cadillac that had just pulled into the parking lot. Hadn't she seen a car like that back in Barberi's neighborhood? But of course there were more than two white Cadillacs on the streets of Seattle. Her senses were tingling a warning, but she shut it off, not wanting to make a foolish rookie mistake her first night on the job.

  She turned to the counter. "Can I have a Milky Way?" she asked the blonde.

  * * *

  Burnett pulled up just around the corner of the building, in its side parking lot. He turned in the seat to address the others. "I'm going to go in and check it out," he said. "When I'm sure everything's okay inside, I'll come back out. We'll wait out here and hit 'em when they leave."

  "What about the dude running the register?" Coolie asked.

  "We'll have to hit him, too," Burnett replied.

  "Look, man," Cleavon suggested as Coolie passed Burnett a shotgun over the seat. "We gotta off the dude in there anyway. Why not just go in and finish them off inside, then we can clean out the register, too, and make a few bucks."

  "Yeah," Juke said. "Maybe we can git a bottle of somethin' while we're there."

  "There's too much cover inside," Burnett told them as he turned off the dome light. "We need 'em in the open. We might be able to take the witness out right through the window." He opened the car door and climbed out. "Be right back."

  He shoved his hands in his pockets and walked into the store, walking up to the cash register with a smile on his face. The bitch was standing near the doorway unwrapping a candy bar, while a blond-haired punk ogled her from behind the counter.

  "Help you?" the kid asked.

  "You got pints back there?" Burnett asked.

  "What do you need?"

  "Whiskey, cheap as you got."

  He noticed the woman watching him and he nodded pleasantly at her, all the while wanting to knock in her snooty face and show her who was boss. He let his eyes wander over the store casually, seeing no one else except his pigeon and the woman's red-haired partner, who looked like a Republican lawyer on the make. Good. Piece of cake.

  The blond guy produced the pint and Burnett paid for it. "Thanks," he told the cashier, then nodded to the bitch. "Ma'am."

  He walked out the door, prepared to disperse his troops to firefight positions. Instead he barely got outside before seeing Cleavon approaching, with Coolie arguing with him and Juke trailing behind. They were all carrying shotguns.

  "What the hell are you doing?" he demanded, grabbing the long-haired man's arm.

  Cleavon jerked his arm away and glared at Burnett. "I'm just gonna go take care of this shit, that's all," he announced. "I'm sick of your big-deal military crap."

  "You stupid son of..."

  Cleavon pushed him aside. "See you in hell, sucker," he said as he strode through the door.

  "Back him up!" Burnett yelled, ripping the .45 from the waistband of his pants, charging the door.

  He had it halfway open when Cleavon's first shot exploded through the plywood counter, throwing the blond kid backward, screaming. Then everything seemed to happen in flashes. Burnett got through the door. Cleavon pumped his second shot. The woman's hand came out of her purse with a .45. She blasted the punk in the belly from a distance of five feet.

  Cleavon spun then crashed to the floor, giving Burnett a clear shot at the woman. For a second she stared with wide eyes at the man she had shot. That hesitation let Burnett's first shot catch her in mid-thigh. She fell, firing wildly at him as he dived away into one of the narrow aisles. The woman seized her chance to crawl to cover behind a display of single bottles of wine cooler, chilling in a barrel full of ice. The screams of the youth behind the counter were punctuated by Cleavon's guttural curses.

  Then Coolie and Juke were through the door, charging into the guts of the place. Burnett jumped gleefully to his feet, firing through a line of wine bottles at the bodyguard in the far corner. Bottles exploded in succession, crashing all around him. The red-haired man ducked, bottles broke and liquor poured all over the store, the floors becoming slick, and strewn with shards of shattered glass.

  "Concentrate fire!" Burnett yelled. Juke and Coolie were in the aisles, shooting randomly at the corner. Remembering the bitch, Burnett turned to the barrel of wine cooler at the front of the store, firing at an exposed section of the woman's leg, hitting her in a hail of glass and wine. She crawled around the other side of the barrel and returned fire, driving him farther into the store.

  He saw movement in the aisle beside him and came over the top of the shelves. His pigeon was on hands and knees, trying to crawl to safety.

  "Hey, buddy," he called. As the man looked up, Burnett extended his arm over the racks and squeezed off a shot. The old man's head disintegrated into a shower of blood and brains.

  In the back of the store Juke and Coolie had dumped over a whole aisle of racks. The bodyguard went down in a pile of broken glass. Burnett rushed to add his fire to the others', tearing the already dead body to pieces.

  "Now what?" Coolie's jaw was clenched, his breath coming fast.

  Burnett looked around. "Did you ever wonder what a fire in a place like this would be like?"

  "What about the woman?" Coolie asked.

  "She's down and cornered," Burnett said. "Let's do it."

  They ran back through the store, coming up the aisle that Cleavon had dragged himself into. He was sitting in a puddle of blood and liquor.

  "Shit! The bitch blew out my stomach!" he yelled. "Get me outta this damn place!"

  "Can you walk?" Burnett asked.

  "If I could walk, asshole, do you think I'd be laying here?"

  Juke bent down to pick him up.

  "Wait!" Burnett grinned. "Looks like a belly wound, my friend. Ain't nothin' we can do about no belly wound."

  "Get me to a goddamn hospital!" Cleavon yelled.

  "We gotta hurry," Coolie said. "We've been here too long."

  "C'mon, Burnett!" Cleavon yelled, pulling his hand away to look at the gaping wound in his abdomen. "This shit is
gonna kill me if you don't."

  The man's gun lay beside him on the floor. Burnett gently pushed it out of reach with his foot. "I think you're already dead, partner," he said, laughing and stepping over the wounded man's legs. "Let's go, people!"

  "Burnett!" Cleavon screamed. "I'll kill you!"

  Burnett turned and snapped off a crisp salute. "Take your best shot, partner."

  They hurried past the counter, the screaming boy just moaning now as the life drained out of him. A steady stream of blood was flowing out from under the wine display.

  "Outside," Burnett ordered. "Quick. Coolie, start the car."

  Coolie and Juke ran outside, while Burnett took a disposable lighter from a display near the counter. "Whoever's still alive in here," he called, "you're in for a hot time!"

  He laughed, enjoying power in a way he had thought he'd never exercise again. God, this was as much fun as Nam! He'd torched many villages there.

  He picked up a late-edition newspaper from a rack near the door, checking the late sports scores as the Cadillac pulled around in front, Coolie behind the wheel motioning him to hurry.

  Backing out the door, he fired the disposable lighter, touching it to the rolled-up paper. Coolie had leaned over and opened the passenger door for him. As the flame climbed the paper, he tossed it into the store and jumped in the car.

  The fire spread rapidly across the floor of the building, a pure blue-and-white alcohol flame, far prettier than the orange gas and napalm fires in Vietnam.

  "Pull around the side again," he ordered.

  "We gotta get out of here," Coolie objected.

  "Just do like I say!" Burnett ejected the clip from the butt of the .45, picking a fresh one from the seat and stuffing it in with a click.

  Coolie backed up, tires squealing, and came around the side of the building where the picture window gave them an excellent view of the inside. Burnett rolled down the window.

  Fire had spread through the entire structure, fueled by hundreds of bottles of spilled liquor. Near the front, where the flames were the highest, bottles began exploding in bright white balls of flame. It was the most beautiful thing Burnett had ever seen.

  They had a perfect view of the woman. Flames all around her, she nevertheless had managed to dismantle the wine cooler display, pulling two long metal poles from it. Using one of them as a crutch, she pulled herself with difficulty to her feet. With whatever strength, she began swinging the other pole, banging it against the plate-glass window.

  "I hear sirens!" Coolie yelled. "We gotta..."

  "In a minute," Burnett smiled at the woman's efforts to free herself.

  All at once the window cracked, then shattered into thousands of pieces. The rush of smoke and heat pouring through the opening could be felt in the car.

  As the woman used the pole to knock out the remaining pieces of glass, Burnett took the safety off the gun and snapped one into the chamber.

  Hair singed, she was just trying to climb through the opening when Burnett sighted down at her good leg and squeezed one off, shattering her knee in bloody fragments. Her face twisted in pain and she was knocked back into the inferno.

  "Okay," he said, smiling at the others. "Let's get the hell out of here."

  Coolie peeled out, just seconds before a fire engine came roaring down the street, passing them.

  Burnett turned in the seat and watched out the back window as the building rumbled on its foundation with the force of hundreds of small explosions. Finally the walls collapsed inward as a brilliant ball of white light rose majestically in the sky, lighting the night like a man-made sunrise. The man realized then that above all he was an artist, rendering his own form of destructive magic on an unappreciative world.

  7

  It was almost midnight. Bolan, Carver and even the Giancarlos had spent the evening securing the windows and doors on the first floor of the big house. Now Bolan sat in the kitchen staring at a plate of spaghetti, for which he had no appetite at all. It wasn't that he wasn't hungry, he just couldn't seem to bring himself to eat food that might have been purchased at the expense of someone's life. Perhaps that made him an idealist.

  Carver sat across from him, drinking a cup of coffee that he had brought back from a convenience store. He hadn't even pretended to try to eat here.

  "You know," he said, "I grew up in a dead end neighborhood where nobody seemed to have a chance in life. I wanted to believe that America wasn't like that, that a man could make a good life for himself, no matter who he was. I worked to put myself through college, then went to work for the Company so I could try to defend the ideals I wanted to believe in, all over the world. You know what I ended up doing?" He shook his head and took another sip. "They were training me to teach Central American peasants to write anti-American slogans on walls so that the ruling juntas could launch antiterrorist campaigns and ask the American Congress for more money to fight the terrorists that I was inventing. It was stupid."

  "The Company's too political," Bolan said, stating the obvious.

  "So I quit that and end up here, laying my life on the line for some cheap hood who calls me a jungle bunny and makes me sleep in his kitchen." Carver set the cup down hard on the table. "What's it all mean?"

  "I don't know, Roy." Bolan pushed his plate aside. "I don't like what goes on any more than you do. The bureaucracy doesn't exist to serve the people anymore, it exists to serve itself."

  Carver sighed and sat back in his chair, looking around the large, modern kitchen. "Seems they should be here by now if they're coming."

  "Yeah?" Bolan shook his head. "Actually, I think this will be the last place hit."

  "Why do you say that?"

  "Because it should have been hit first."

  "What do we do tonight?"

  "We'll take four-hour watches," Bolan replied. "Go out and check around right now, then get some rest. I'll take the first watch."

  "Sounds like a deal," Carver said, standing, "though I don't know if I can sleep on that son of a bitch's bed or not."

  Bolan gave a tired smile and a wave as Carver left.

  He felt absolutely no sense of danger or urgency, which bothered him more than if he did, because it meant that one of his other teams was coming under the gun tonight. He was worried about their lack of training and experience, remembering how easily Joey Giancario had gotten the drop on them. And he was afraid because they were good people, and good people rarely seemed to stay alive for long around Bolan.

  The door to the dining room swung open, Angela Giancario coming through with an armful of dishes-there was nothing wrong with the Giancarlos' appetites.

  The woman carried the plates to the sink and set them down loudly. Then she noticed his full plate.

  "What's wrong?" she asked. "Don't you like my cooking?"

  "You'd better be thinking about getting back to your hotel," he said. "I really don't want you around for this."

  She sat down across from him in the chair that Carver had vacated. "Why do you dislike my family so much?" she asked.

  "You're a big girl. You figure it out."

  "I haven't done anything to you."

  "I know you haven't."

  She looked at him sadly. "I know my father hasn't led the best of lives. I'm not that naive. But when I look around at all the corruption, not just in criminal circles but in politics, in government, I don't see that what Old Sam does is that much different, or any worse."

  "You're talking to the wrong man, lady," Bolan stated with conviction. "What you're saying, basically, is that because some people behave like animals it's all right for other people to behave like animals. Sorry. I don't buy it."

  "How about you? I'll bet you're not lily-white, either. I mean, give the old man a break. He's out of all that now, he's retired. Joey's even running a string of legitimate businesses for him."

  "You don't retire on the blood of innocent people," Bolan said harshly. "And I've heard about his 'legitimate businesses' — Lucky Sam's Body Shop
s. He used to have body shops in Chicago, too, except they were called chop shops, where stolen cars were altered and painted for resale."

  "That was a long time ago."

  "Right," Bolan said. "I was reading the Oklahoma City Times this afternoon and it's interesting that auto thefts in the area have increased by fifty percent."

  Her eyes flashed angrily. "You son of a bitch."

  "Look," he replied. "I'm not blaming you. You didn't ask to have a mafioso for a father. So maybe the string ends with you. It happens."

  She shrugged.

  Bolan decided to give the woman a break and change the subject. "I heard your father say earlier that you're a writer."

  "I guess you can say that," she said. "I've had my name on the credit line of a lot of movies, anyway."

  "Such modesty," he said.

  "It's not modesty, Mr. Belasko..."

  "Mike."

  She smiled, a warm smile. "Mike. It's just that I've noticed that every film I've ever worked on ultimately has Giancarlo money behind it somehow, and that every script I've ever written is rewritten when I'm done with it, to the point that none of my work remains." She looked down at the tabletop, embarrassed. "I guess you could say that my father's bought me a pretty good career."

  "I'm sorry," Bolan said sincerely. "Maybe you should refuse the help and try it on your own."

  "I'm afraid Pm not that strong," she replied, "and not that good."

  He reached across the table and took her hands in his. "Trust yourself. I'll bet you're better than you think."

  She took his hand and lightly brushed it against her cheek. "That may be the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me."

  "Then I really do feel for you."

  "Angie!" Old Sam called from the dining room. "Where you at, girl? Come on in here!"

  She dropped Bolan's hand and stood. "His master's voice. I'd better see what's up."

  He watched her walk to the door, wondering if he was being foolish to feel sorry for her. "Get out of here soon," he reminded her.

  Halfway through the door she turned back to him. "You're really concerned about my safety, aren't you?"