When he reached the office he tried the doorknob, but it wouldn’t turn. He reared back and gave it a snap-kick, next to the knob. The door buckled and the jamb splintered, and the door swung open, half torn off its upper hinge.
Inside, a man stood beside a small floor safe with its door open, throwing documents into a flaming metal wastebasket. He was a white guy with thinning brown hair combed back from his face, and he was wearing plastic-rimmed glasses, a pale blue short-sleeved shirt, khaki pants and an expression of terror. He was drenched in sweat.
“Stop what you’re doing,” Bolan commanded.
The guy had an armful of files. He froze.
“Drop them on the desk,” Bolan said. He was still carrying the M-16 and the open bag, but he hadn’t pointed a weapon at the man. His presence was all he needed.
The man did as he was told. The look on his face was one of utter defeat. Bolan realized he was only a lab rat, put into a position of authority over this operation. But he was no tough guy, no gangster.
He relaxed his stance, leaning against the doorjamb. “There’s no need to keep feeding that fire,” he told the man. “This whole place is burning down.”
“The fire at Devilweed?” the man said. “That was...”
“I guess it’s becoming a habit,” Bolan said. “You’re the boss here, right?”
“Yeah,” the guy said. He sounded both afraid and resigned. “Yeah, that’s me. I mean, on this end. Production.”
“There’s another end?” Bolan asked.
The man shook his head. “Don’t even ask.”
“I’m asking. Nicely, this time.”
“What are you going to do if I don’t answer? Torture me?”
Bolan shrugged. “If I have to.”
“You might as well get started, then.” The man looked into the dying flames in the wastebasket. From the big room outside, Bolan could hear the crackle of the much larger fire. He didn’t have much time to wrap this up, not if he hoped to get out alive. “I don’t know who you are or why you’re here. And I’m not a brave man, by any means. But I’m a loyal man, and the people who employed me to run this place took a chance on me that nobody else would take. I’ll be damned if I’m going to betray their trust.”
“Took a chance?” Bolan asked, curious in spite of the urgency.
“I did some things,” the man said. “Doesn’t matter what. I shouldn’t have, but I did. I spent some time in prison for it. And let me tell you, that’s no picnic. When I came out, I didn’t think I’d ever work in my field again. But...somebody hired me, I’m not saying who. And while this might not be the most noble use of my talents, it’s profitable, and I understand that many people enjoy the product we manufacture here. So I’ll say it again, torture me if you must, but don’t expect me to say anything.”
Bolan couldn’t bring himself to like the man, but he at least respected his honesty and forthrightness. He couldn’t fault a man for wanting to be loyal to someone who had given him a much-needed break. Too bad that loyalty had come at the price of Angela’s life.
“I can’t leave you here. You’ll be coming in with me,” Bolan said. Sweat was pooling under his balaclava.
“I guess I understand that.” He paused for a long moment, then continued. “Can you give me a minute?”
“Give me your phone,” Bolan said.
“My phone?”
“Your cell.” He wouldn’t need the man if he had that, and once he turned him over to the police there was no way he’d get the information he wanted.
The man looked as if he might object, then thought better of it. He probably realized that Bolan could just wait and then take it. He fished in his right hip pocket, pulled out a smartphone and held it out.
Bolan stepped forward and took it. “Is there anyone you want to call? You may not get a chance once the police get hold of you,” he asked.
The man didn’t even think about it. “No. There’s no one. Not anymore.”
“Okay.”
The fire in the wastebasket had dwindled to embers. Bolan kicked over the can, scattering the ashes, and left the office. Outside, the lab was empty. Flames had run across the ceiling and spread out from the truck. Bolan couldn’t wait much longer without being here when the firefighters showed up. He wanted to drop off the chemist at the local police department and be on his way. He was beginning to wonder if he had made a mistake, leaving the man alone in his office, but then he heard the crack of a single gunshot.
He hurried back in. The man was sitting in his desk chair, his head tilted back. There was a quarter-sized hole in the back of his skull, and droplets of blood spattered the ceiling. His hands were limp at his sides. The soldier took the formulas the chemist had been using and left the building.
16
The ringing phone woke Nuncio.
He sat up in bed and grabbed it. The TV was on. It was a habit he had fallen into after his wife’s death—he could no longer fall asleep without its sound and light filling the room. He snatched up the remote and pressed the mute button. “Yeah?”
Nuncio listened to a panic-stricken voice on the other end, Gordon Hawkins. Once he would have used the word capo to describe Gordon’s role in the organization, and the more he heard, the more he thought it would come to that again. And soon.
When Gordon had filled him in, he hung up the phone and swore. It wasn’t even seven-thirty yet, and he liked to sleep until eight. But he wasn’t going back to sleep now. He wasn’t sure he would ever get to sleep again.
He paced for a minute, then returned to the phone and called Marco Cosimo. “The Ivory Wave lab was hit last night,” he said.
“I know,” Cosimo replied. “It’s on the morning news.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? I had to hear it from Gordo.”
“I figured you knew.”
“Fuck!” Nuncio exploded. “First the house, then the distributor and now this! Who the hell is trying to kill me?”
“Nunce,” Cosimo said, “if whoever was doing all this wanted you dead, I think you’d already be dead.”
“Yeah, maybe. But still, it’s all getting closer and closer. We’ve got to do something.”
“You got something in mind?”
“More of what we’re already doing. Shaking the trees to see if anything falls out. But we need to think about defensive measures, too. I have to be safe enough to function. And we need to keep senior staff protected.”
“Definitely,” Cosimo agreed. “Everybody might have to hole up somewhere. Your place, or the office building?”
“Let me think about it,” Nuncio said. “Both have advantages. We can handle more people at the building, and still keep business running. Whatever’s left of it. But home will be more comfortable, if we’re in for a long siege.”
“You remember what they used to call it,” Cosimo said. “Going to the mattresses.”
“Right.”
“If we need to, we can bring mattresses to the building. Whatever it takes, Nunce. We got to put a stop to this and we got to do it fast.”
“You don’t have to tell me that,” Nuncio said. He would never admit it to any of his people, but he was getting scared.
He was old, by some standards. Certainly older than a lot of his predecessors ever lived to. Luciano, the guy he’d looked up to most, the guy he considered his spiritual godfather for the way he’d applied business methodology to the rackets, had made it to the age of sixty-four. Capone, forty-eight. Bugsy Siegel, forty-one. Albert Anastasia, fifty-five. Joe Gallo had died on his forty-third birthday. Those with shorter life spans had usually died at the hands of others. Everyone in the life remembered the story of Anastasia’s murder, sitting in a barber chair when two soldiers started shooting at him. Anastasia was tough enough to come out of the chair at them, but he c
harged their reflection in the mirror instead of the shooters, and he died in a pool of his own blood.
Nobody ever said the life was safe. But part of Nuncio’s rationale for taking things into more legit areas was to make it safer. He wanted to watch his grandchildren grow up, and he wanted to die peacefully in his own damn bed with the TV on. Watching his brother go to prison had been scary; imagining his own bloody death was more so.
“Listen,” he told Cosimo, “I’ll meet you in the office later and we’ll come up with a plan. In the meantime, don’t trust a fucking soul. All I know, your wife could be putting rat poison in that famous Bolognese sauce of hers.”
“I’ll be there, Nunce,” Cosimo said. “You watch your back.”
* * *
ACROSS TOWN, DOMINIC CHIARELLO sat in a café with Artie D’Amato. There were no other customers in the place. The barista was a hooker Artie had known for years, who had wanted to get out of the business after a client had sliced a three-inch gash down her cheek. Artie hadn’t wanted a scarred woman pouring him coffee, so he had paid for plastic surgery, throwing in breast implants at the same time, and employed her to run the shop. She could be counted on to keep her mouth shut. Just the same, the men spoke in low voices. The morning customers had been chased away and Massimo loomed in the doorway to discourage newcomers.
“Dario was a good kid,” Artie said. His eyes were liquid; Chiarello was afraid he would start crying. There was nothing wrong with spilling a tear for a fallen soldier, but Artie had a tendency toward blubbery weeping. It was, Chiarello thought, unseemly. “Kind of a pussy hound, but a good kid just the same. Loyal as hell, too.”
“I know,” Chiarello said. Loyal to Artie and therefore to him, but not, Chiarello assumed, loyal to Nuncio, or he wouldn’t have thrown in with them so easily when Dominic decided to break with his brother. “You got any ideas? Anybody pissed at him?”
“Not that I know about. If Nunce found out...”
“If Nunce found out, he would have come after me first, not Dario. Me, then you, that’s the order it would go. Dario’s way down the food chain.”
“You’re probably right.”
No “probably” about it, Chiarello thought. He left it unsaid, though. The man was grieving. Not an appropriate time to argue about trivialities.
“On the other hand...”
“What, Dom?”
Chiarello hadn’t seen the body himself. Somebody in the neighborhood had found it and reported it to the police. Dario’s wallet had been gone, but his fingers were intact, and they had his prints on file. They had run those and learned the mangled corpse’s identity. A detective had called Dario’s mother, who had been unwilling to identify the body. But she had called Artie, and he had taken care of that no doubt unpleasant task. From what he had described to Dominic, the kid had looked as if he’d been dragged around the city from the axle of a garbage truck, and run over a few times for good measure.
“You said he was really beat up.”
“As bad as I’ve ever seen. Just had the shit kicked out of him, and then some.”
“Like, tortured?” Chiarello asked.
“Could be, I guess.”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know, Dom. One thing, though. If he was tortured, given the condition he was in when I saw him, he probably talked. I don’t know how you could take that kind of punishment without talking. But there wasn’t any finesse to it, just pure destruction. Demolition—the kid was demolished. That handsome face was just gone.”
“So it could be that my brother caught wind of something but wasn’t sure enough to come after us. But now he or his people have had a conversation with Dario. Which means now they are sure, and we’re next on the list.”
Artie nodded. His face was as pale as Chiarello had ever seen it. “That’s possible, sure.”
“Seems more than just possible to me. I don’t know how they got on to the kid, but if we don’t do something fast, we’re dead men.”
“What do we do?”
“We could hole up in a cave somewhere,” Chiarello suggested. “But I’d rather take the fight to them.”
“You want to go up against your own brother?”
“He’s been legit for a while now, right? I’m betting he’s gotten soft. But I haven’t. Have you?”
“Tell you the truth, Dom,” Artie said, “it’s been a while since I’ve had to get violent with anybody.”
“We’ll bring in some out-of-town muscle,” Chiarello said. “But we’ve got to move fast. Before anybody does to us what they did to Dario. It’s kill or be killed, Artie, and I’d rather be the one doing the killing.”
17
“Mack, I’m going to have to have you stand down.”
Bolan couldn’t quite believe what Barbara Price, Stony Man’s mission controller, had said to him. “Sorry?”
“Stand down. Believe me, the call comes from above my pay grade.”
“Who made it, then?”
“You’d have to ask Hal. But I’m guessing above his pay grade, too.”
“The President wants me to lay off drug dealers? Since when?”
“I’m just telling you what I’ve been told, Mack.”
“This isn’t even a Stony Man op,” he argued. “This is personal.”
“I know it’s not, but we’ve been providing a great deal of support,” Price said.
That much was true. After he left the burning Ivory Wave lab, he had hoofed it back to his motel room. He needed a place to bathe and patch up a few minor wounds, and he still had the key. He wouldn’t stay at that motel for another night, but a few more hours couldn’t hurt. While he was there, he’d provided Stony Man with the information on the cell phone he had taken from the man who—as his ID had shown, once he was no longer alive to protect his identity—had been named William Carper. He hadn’t, incidentally, needed his black Chevrolet SUV anymore, either, so Bolan had helped himself to that, as well.
But he was up against a brick wall. Carper hadn’t financed the lab himself—he had said as much—and though Bolan had destroyed the lab and plenty of product, those with the biggest investment in it could just turn around and start up a new lab, find a new distribution chain. If he couldn’t put them out of business, any impact he had made was purely temporary.
After cleaning himself up, he had called in to the Farm to learn what intel the phone might have provided. And instead he got Barbara Price, telling him to back off.
“Tell me what’s going on, Barb,” he said.
She sighed. “Here’s what we found out. Your guy with the phone was a regular caller to a company in Cleveland, called NDC Consolidated Industries.”
“Never heard of it.”
“It’s run by a former Mob figure named Nuncio Chiarello.”
“Former?”
“As far as anybody can tell, Mack, everything NDC does is on the up-and-up. Some of it’s on the slimy side—they’ve got financial interests in racetracks and casinos, legal brothels in Nevada, and in Ivory Wave. But they’ve also got businesses like Laundromats, restaurants, recycling centers, car washes and so on, throughout the Midwest.”
“Okay,” Bolan said. “We’ve known all along that everyone thought Ivory Wave was legal, but the tests came back positive for drugs, and I have more evidence of how they’ve been concocting the stuff. Why does their legit status stop me now, especially when I’m so close to getting who is behind all of it?”
“It’s not that. It’s—there’s something very strange going on in Cleveland. We’re just trying to wrap our heads around it, and we’re not quite there yet.”
Bolan sat on the edge of the bed. Apparently this conversation would take longer than he had expected. “Strange how?”
“Well, as I said, NDC is involved in what a
ppears to be strictly legal businesses. We can’t find anybody who has a line on anything crooked about them. Even Nuncio seems to have been clean for years and years. More about that in a minute. What’s going on now is that somebody seems to have started a war against him.”
“A war?”
“If I didn’t know better, Mack,” she said, “I’d think it was you. Somebody’s been slaughtering people who—if Nuncio was still mobbed up—would be considered soldiers. But now they’re colleagues, I guess. Employees. There were eight bodies discovered at a house Nuncio owns. They’d been enjoying a friendly, low-stakes poker game, and somebody came in and shot them up. Another body turned up this morning. This guy worked for an associate of Nuncio’s, but not somebody directly on the NDC payroll—a made guy named Artie D’Amato. Artie isn’t on the straight-and-narrow like Nuncio, and neither is his boss, Dominic Chiarello, Nuncio’s brother. Dominic just finished a twenty-five-year stint as a guest of the state of Ohio and went home to Cleveland. Almost immediately the bodies started piling up.”
“But one of the bodies is his own guy?”
“Loyalties there are, let’s say, fungible,” Price explained. “While Dominic was away, Artie maintained an arm’s-length relationship with Nuncio. They didn’t do any direct business together that we can determine, since Nuncio was straight and Artie wasn’t. But the relationship might have been a complicated one that could have involved some sort of exchange of funds, in either or both directions. For sure, Artie was helping to support Dominic’s wife. I haven’t been able to pin down exactly what the link between Artie and Nuncio was, but it’s possible that an attack on one of his guys could be considered an attack on Nuncio. Or it could be retaliation by Nuncio. It’s hard to say at this point.”
“So somebody you can’t name, but who could be the President, wants me to stay out of the fight?”
“There are all sorts of interested parties here. Earlier I said that Nuncio appears to be clean. That’s the appearance, but we don’t know if it’s a fact. The FBI has somebody under deep cover who has climbed fairly high up in the organization. They don’t want a freelancer coming in and possibly disrupting an investigation they’ve put years and a lot of money into.”
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