Eternal Triangle

by Don Pendleton

  But the guy was signing on in spite of that, in spite of age and something like diminished confidence that lingered just beneath the surface. He was signing on because he saw no other way to go, and Bolan could not fault him there.

  Instead he just said, "Thank you."

  * * *

  Pappas had been waiting for him when he reached the station house, and Weatherbee had cursed him silently, reminded for the umpteenth time that nothing ever came easily these days.

  "What brings you in so early, Al?"

  "I'm boning up a little, and I want to double-check some files for old times' sake."

  "What have you got?"

  "A lot of nothing, at the moment. I was hoping that a stroll down memory lane might jar the cobwebs loose."

  John Pappas stared at him with frank suspicion, dark eyes probing Weatherbee's as if he might pick out some vestige of deception, seize on it like a weapon and convert it to his own devices. When he came up empty, Pappas seemed disgruntled.

  "Anything that I should hear about?"

  "Not yet." It wouldn't hurt to prod him just a little. "If I break the case, you'll be the first to know."

  "I hope so, Al. I really do."

  "You know me, John."

  "Uh-huh."

  A pretty woman wearing navy blue and sergeant's stripes was hovering around them now, afraid to interrupt the chief of homicide, but urgently desiring his attention. Pappas turned to face her grudgingly, defeated in the staring contest.

  "Yes?"

  "Your call from Hartford, Captain."

  '"Kay." He shot a cautious parting glance at Weatherbee. "You'll keep me posted?"

  "That's a big ten-four."

  The files he needed had been formally retired, like Weatherbee himself, and Bolan's second coming had apparently not required their resurrection from the basement archives. Weatherbee was guided through the ranks of filing cabinets by a clerk with too much hair. The clerk apologized profusely, explaining that the files would be computerized "as soon as possible" — which, in the department's lexicon, might be a synonym for "never."

  When the several bulging files had been retrieved, and he had been instructed how to pursue cross-references, he was conducted to a solitary table fitted out with straight-backed chair and gooseneck lamp. The clerk excused himself, with more apologies, and disappeared.

  The Bolan files were like a dusty time machine for Weatherbee. With vivid clarity they took him back to younger days, many of the crime reports were terminated with his own inimitable scrawl. He browsed for several moments, letting the old emotions reassert themselves before he turned his full attention to his task.

  Five men had fallen outside Triangle Finance on the afternoon of August 22. Frank Laurenti had been the man in charge, and he had been the first to die. He'd left behind a widow — now deceased, according to the files — and a son, Francesco, Jr., whereabouts unknown. The TIF accountant, Pete Rodriguez, had been a bachelor when he'd died; his parents were deceased, but he had two brothers in the Pittsfield area, and a married sister in Los Angeles. Eddie Brokaw had been office manager, divorced, three daughters living with their mother and her boyfriend in Miami when the hit had gone down. The driver, Tommy Erwin, had left a wife and a girlfriend, both of whom professed to love him madly up until the moment of their meeting at his funeral. The button, Vinnie Janus, had been sighted by informants in a string of local gay bars, seemingly in search of a companion. Vinnie had left no heirs.

  It could have been a great deal worse, and Weatherbee resigned himself to checking out the several possibilities. Of the Rodriguez brothers, one had been eliminated during Bolan's blitz; the other had escaped to Michigan, where he was sitting out a term of twenty-five to life for aggravated sexual assault. The sister in Los Angeles had not thought enough of Pete to send him flowers, let alone pursue his killer through the years.

  The Brokaw girls — or two of them, at any rate — were settled happily in Florida, with no apparent interest in obtaining vengeance for the man who'd battered and abused their mother on a nightly basis prior to the divorce that set them free. The eldest daughter, Marilyn, had never quite recovered from the family rift. A teenage alcoholic, she had not felt a thing the night her V-8 graduation present married with a semi on the highway south of Lauderdale.

  That left Laurenti's boy. Weatherbee felt a nagging apprehension when the files refused to yield the usual information on Francesco, Jr. He had graduated high school at the age of seventeen… and dropped from sight. No forwarding address, no move to live with relatives when his mother died — no anything. From all appearances, the earth had swallowed Frank Laurenti's only son, as it had swallowed countless others through the years. Except…

  As an ex-policeman — Weatherbee was familiar with the stats on missing persons. More than 150,000 persons vanished every year across America, but the numbers were misleading. The majority of missing persons vanished voluntarily, escaping from their parents, bad marriages, debts, the law. Many reappeared, unharmed, within a relatively short time. A few were murder victims, lost forever while their killers were at large and unsuspected. A very few went missing under mysterious circumstances.

  Young Frank Laurenti, Jr., might have been a runaway, but something in his gut told Al Weatherbee that Frank belonged with the mysterious minority. If the boy had vanished voluntarily, he had covered his tracks like a pro. If not…

  Indeed.

  If not, then where the hell was Frank Laurenti, Jr.?

  It was a long shot, but he made a note before returning the files to their respective drawers. There might be other avenues worth following, a few more bureaucratic trails he could pursue before he gave the effort up as wasted. If the kid had entered military service, if he had been arrested anywhere across America, if he had changed his name or gone to jail, there had to be a record of him somewhere. All it took was time — the one commodity that Weatherbee did not possess.

  The Executioner was getting edgy, anxious to confront his faceless enemy. His wounds were nearly healed; in a few more days, there would be nothing to prevent him from embarking on a new blitz of his own, to rock the town in hopes of shaking something loose. Committed as he was to helping Bolan now, the former chief of homicide wanted to avoid a bloodbath in the streets. It went against the grain for him to help to prepare for a massacre.

  He didn't see John Pappas on his way back through Homicide, relieved that he would not be forced to face another inquisition. Pappas couldn't break him — Weatherbee had been around too long for that — but the chief could become suspicious enough to put surveillance on his former boss. A stakeout on Weatherbee's house would lead to Bolan, and he didn't even want to think about the consequences — to himself, to Alice, to the Executioner.

  The sudden sunlight stung his eyes, and for a moment Weatherbee was nearly blinded. As it was, he almost missed Frank Lawrence, just emerging from a dark Camaro parked with its front against the whitewashed cinder-block wall. Weatherbee raised a hand in noncommittal greeting, and the sergeant nodded, brushing past him as he headed for the double doors.

  Sergeant Lawrence didn't like him much, a fact that ranked somewhere below the falling value of the peso on a list of Weatherbee's concerns. He glanced at the sergeant's car, admiring how he kept it up, wondering what sort of accident had led him to replace a fender on the driver's side. The paint would pass a casual inspection, fooling nine out of ten would-be purchasers, but as he studied it more closely Weatherbee detected subtle differences in color, in the luster of the paint itself. The fender was a new addition, not a simple touch-up job; there was no sign of bodywork beneath the paint, no rippling of damaged steel restored to something less than its original condition.

  Weatherbee pondered the problem as he slid behind the wheel of the Buick. Why should Lawrence's Camaro or its damaged fender matter to him, anyway? With all the other problems pressing in on him now, why should he care if Lawrence came to work by rickshaw, with a grinning coolie in the lead?

&
nbsp; The answer was, it didn't make a goddamned bit of difference. He had the world's most wanted fugitive at home, a city that he loved was about to blow up in his face, and he was playing amateur detective like a schoolboy on vacation. It was time to get his damned priorities in order before he lost it all.

  He owed the Executioner his full attention. And in his gut, he knew he owed the guy a great deal more than that.

  22

  It had taken time for Lawrence to assemble all the pieces in his mind, but now he had them, and they fitted. It was incredible that no one else had put the thing together. It was so damned obvious, when you considered all the details… but then again, nobody else possessed his knowledge. No one knew it all except Frank Lawrence.

  Something had been nagging at him from the moment he reached the station house, demanding his attention, though he couldn't put his finger on it. Meeting Weatherbee first thing was bad enough. It put the sergeant in a sour mood, reminding him that Pappas and the rest were still relying on a has-been failure to protect their asses. Lawrence would not be surprised if they consulted psychics next, the way things had been going. He could almost picture Pappas with a crystal ball and tarot cards spread out on his desk, attempting to discover Bolan's aura by communing with the dear departed.

  John would get a shock if he connected with the ghosts of Manny Ingenito and his driver, or the others who had fallen to the hunter's guns. Eight bodies in the past six days. Pappas was convinced that Bolan still stalked the streets of Pittsfield, picking off his targets with the cold precision of a murderous machine. It was just what Frank Lawrence wanted Pappas and the rest of them to think; if they believed the soldier was among them, kicking ass all over town, his final execution "by the mob" would come as no surprise, would be accepted as the natural conclusion of a one-man war against the odds.

  Except that Lawrence would know better. As would Bolan, while he sweated out the final microseconds of his wasted life.

  No sooner was Lawrence through the double doors of the station house than Pappas made a beeline for him, brandishing a sheaf of telephone reports. So far that morning they had received sixty calls, most of them from residents convinced that they had sighted Bolan driving, walking, shopping, even lounging by a motel swimming pool, all at different points around the city. One hysterical old biddy thought her son-in-law might be Mack Bolan; he was on the road a lot, and she had never really liked him, anyway. They were a waste of time, but each and every call had to be checked out, eliminated, added to the growing "loony file" of false alarms, dead ends and mistaken identity.

  Somebody had to check out the loonies, and Lawrence didn't mind. It gave him some time to think, some time alone, without the captain breathing down his neck. He knew there was something lurking just below the conscious level of his mind that might ensure his victory, the Executioner's defeat. If only he could focus, pick it out of all the jumbled thoughts and images collected in his memory…

  It came to him at lunch with such astounding clarity that Lawrence nearly choked on his salami sandwich. In a sudden flash of recognition, brighter than the sun, he had the answer, knew there could be no mistake. The pieces fitted, and Lawrence didn't even have to force them. The solution had been waiting for him all along.

  Al Weatherbee.

  The bastard had been loitering around the station more and more the past few days, until it almost seemed he had been restored to active duty. Asking questions, rifling the files… in search of what? He was supposed to be the frigging "Bolan expert," but he acted like a rookie starved for information on his first big case. Whenever Pappas asked for an opinion, Weatherbee would chew his lip and scratch his head awhile before producing dip-shit noncommittal answers that were worse than useless. If the old man meant to help them, he was failing miserably. But if he wanted information for himself or someone else — if he was helping Bolan — then it all made sense.

  The Buick finally clinched it for him, and he recognized at last that elusive "something" that had haunted him all morning. It was the glimpse of Weatherbee's sedan, no different from a million others, that had started Lawrence thinking. It resembled the four-door that had passed him, eastbound, on the night he'd shot Mack Bolan. Never mind that there might be a thousand four-door Buicks in the city, plus a few more thousand imitators, similar enough to pass at night when you were trying to avert your eyes, prevent yourself from being made. Car and driver, Weatherbee's obsession with the Bolan case, his sudden interest in collecting scuttlebutt around the station house — they added up to more than mere coincidence.

  A driveby banished any latent doubts. The former chief of homicide was home, his Buick in the driveway. Lawrence knew that he was right, knew what must be done.

  Weatherbee was in the phone book, and Lawrence called him from a booth at a service station three blocks over. He recognized the old man's voice immediately, and did not bother to disguise his own.

  "Hello?"

  "I've got a message for your houseguest."

  "What?" Suspicion in the tone, and caution now. "Who is this?"

  "Never mind. Just put him on."

  "There must be some mistake."

  "You made it, Al. Don't make it any worse. I'm waiting."

  "If you'd tell me who you're calling for…"

  "I'm calling for the goddamned fugitive that you've been hiding, Al. Now I can take my story to the cops, or I can drop a pound of C-4 down your fucking chimney… but I'd rather talk to Bolan. Will you put him on?"

  He could almost see the old man thinking that one over, weighing odds and options. When he spoke again, there was a weary resignation in his voice.

  "Hold on."

  He had the bastard. Lawrence felt it in his bones. But he was not prepared for the electric tingling in his stomach when another, deeper voice came on the line.

  "I've been expecting you," the bastard said.

  * * *

  Dead air, for just a moment, and Bolan thought the caller might have hung up, satisfied to know that he was staying with the Weatherbees. If he had broken off, they could expect a raid — by gunners or police — at any moment. Either way it played, it would be worse for Al and Alice Weatherbee than for the Executioner.

  But he could hear the caller breathing now, as if afraid to speak. He tried to visualize the hunter, then gave it up as hopeless, concentrating on the open line.

  "You knew I'd call?"

  "It stood to reason."

  Bolan did not recognize the voice, but that meant nothing. The caller knew him well enough to trace his hiding place, as he had done in Hartford with the safe house. This time he was calling, rather than implanting high explosives, and the soldier knew that could only mean one thing.

  "You got my card," the caller said.

  "You didn't leave a forwarding address."

  "It was an oversight. I'd like to make it up to you."

  "I thought you'd never ask."

  "We didn't have much time to talk the other night."

  "I caught the gist of what you had to say."

  "I owe you one — you know that."

  "No time like the present."

  "Midnight's better."

  "Suits me fine."

  "I hope you're feeling well."

  "I can't complain."

  "The old man saved your bacon, guy."

  "He's been a friend."

  "I ought to blow his ass away for meddling in things he doesn't understand."

  "You'll have to get through me."

  "I'm looking forward to it, Slick."

  "So name the place."

  "Let's take it from the top. Remember Commerce Street?"

  "It sounds familiar."

  "Yeah, I'll bet. You got your start there, didn't you?"

  "It was as good a place as any."

  "What about the names? Do you remember any of them? Did you even know the fucking names?"

  "I'd like to know your name."

  The caller chuckled wickedly. "Don't worry, Slick. You'll kn
ow my name, all right. I'm gonna carve it on your chest before you get your ticket punched."

  "We'll see."

  "You're dead already, man. You're just too goddamned stupid to lie down."

  "Tonight."

  "You'll come alone?"

  "I wouldn't miss it for the world."

  He cradled the receiver, beating the caller to it, turned back to face Al Weatherbee. Alice was out, and Bolan felt a pang of apprehension for her, but he shook it off. The caller would have gloated over a hostage, delighted in the opportunity to terrorize his prey. Alice would be safe, at least until the midnight meeting was completed. Later, if the caller was alive, he might turn to the elimination of potential witnesses.

  "Our boy?"

  The gray-haired ex-captain's frown was dark as thunder. Bolan nodded silent confirmation.

  "Dammit, how'd the bastard get this number?"

  "Never mind. He won't be using it again."

  "You set a meet."

  It didn't sound like a question, and the soldier did not answer.

  "I'd appreciate a lift," he said.

  "Damned right. Between us, we can squeeze the little scumbag like a tube of toothpaste. By the time we're finished with him…"

  Bolan stopped the captain with his eyes. "I'm solo this time out," he told Al Weatherbee. "I need to find a rental agency and get myself some wheels."

  "Take mine."

  The soldier shook his head. "No good. If anything goes wrong, the trace would bring it home to you."

  "Goddammit!"

  Bolan understood the older man's frustration, but he would not further jeopardize the Weatherbees. Already, by saving Bolan's life, they had invited mortal danger, flirting with disaster that had not yet been averted, only postponed. If he failed to meet his adversary, if he let the hunter slip away, the Weatherbees might pay the price of Bolan's failure with their lives.

  "I'll get my things together."

  "Are you up to this?"

  "No choice," he said. "There may not be a second chance."