California Hit

by Don Pendleton

  Tonight, probably, would be the night. The guy could even try a daylight hit. But in San Francisco? Right here at the top of the town? With two damned cops per square foot all over the place?

  Probably not.

  Rivoli checked the time. It was a little past eight o’clock. It was daylight. The old man had gone back to bed. How could he go to bed at a time like this? Bolan might be out there somewhere, watching the joint, checking it out. He could be.

  Now if the boys just didn’t get uptight and.…

  The Tiger went out through the French doors to the garden-patio and casually circled the grounds. The fog was lifting. It was now holding at about rooftop level, but the air below it was still saturated with moisture, cold, uncomfortable. Miserable goddam crap! The outside boys would be getting stiff and disgruntled if this kept up.

  Rivoli made a mental note to make hourly shifts. As unobtrusively as possible, he would have to rotate those boys between the cars and the open-air stakeouts. The inside boys stayed inside, period and bullshit. There would be no juggling around with those hard boys inside.

  A police car went by out front, cruising slowly, and the sight of it disrupted the Tiger’s chain of thought. He frowned and headed that way. Those jerks would scare the guy off. Imagine, patrolling in a marked cruiser. How dumb could a cop get? Were they trying to scare the guy away?

  As he reached the front of the big house, Rivoli noted that a delivery van was standing at the curb down by the service gate, and a guy was coming out of the van with a clipboard under his arm.

  Cool it, goddammit, cool it! Don’t go slapping that guy up against the fence and frisking him, f’Christ’s sake!

  The Tiger hurried forward to personally supervise the reception of the deliveryman, groaning inwardly with the certain feeling that the two gatemen were going to over-react—and that those cops in the cruiser would nose into the act. One thing Tony did not need at this point was cops swarming all over the place and asking a lot of jerky questions.

  His worries were apparently an over-reaction within himself, though, and this he discovered as soon as he was within earshot of the service gate.

  Apparently the boys knew this guy, this delivery jerk. He was a tall guy wearing Levi’s and a white jacket, and Rivoli himself had seen the Bay Messengers truck around the neighborhood. The guy had shoved his hat back away from his forehead, and he was grinning and scratching the bridge of his nose with a pencil.

  Jerry the Lover Aspromonte was jawing around with the guy through the closed gate, obviously kidding him about something, and Rivoli caught the scrap of a comment, “… told you the other day, meathead, LaManchas don’t live here.”

  The guy sort of giggled and told Jerry the Lover, “Aw shit, ain’t you ever gonna let me live that down?”

  “Shit it ain’t my fault you can’t read th’ fuckin’ addresses,” Aspromonte was saying when Rivoli got there.

  “I got it right this time,” the guy insisted, with a pleading glance at the new arrival. “You gonna take the damn package or ain’t you?”

  Tony Tiger didn’t give a damn about this jerk and his small worries. The cop car, sure as hell, had come to a complete halt and the dummies were idling there beside the van and ogling the little exchange at the fence.

  Rivoli angrily punched the electronic lock and swung out through the gate, causing the delivery jerk to dance back out of the way. The Tiger crossed the street and leaned into the cruiser.

  “You guys need something?” he inquired quietly.

  One of the guys in there was a fucking spade. In plain clothes, at that. He showed Tony an ivory smile and told him, “Routine patrol, Mr. Rivoli. Don’t you be concerned—we have the entire neighborhood under surveillance.”

  Where the hell did these guys get off, dropping his name around that way? How did that black bastard know what his name was?

  Rivoli muttered, “Why the hell should I be concerned about anything?” He whirled around and crossed back to the other side of the street.

  The delivery jerk was standing there, arms crossed over his chest, grinning at him with that fuckin’ paisano mustache curling down over his upper lip and into his mouth. He probably sucked on it, he probably liked the taste of hair in his teeth.

  Rivoli snarled, “What the hell are you smiling at, guy?”

  The smile froze and the jerk just stood there. He mumbled something about just trying to do his job, then he turned back to Jerry the Lover and said, “Hey, take the package, eh?”

  “What is this great big worry you got there, guy?” the Tiger growled.

  “I got a delivery for a Tony Rivoli, in care of Roman A. DeMarco. It’s this address, I got the right address, but this guy won’t get serious. He keeps telling me LaManchas don’t live here, just because I—”

  “Okay okay, whatta you mean you got a delivery? What kind of a delivery?”

  “This little package here, that’s all.”

  The jerk was holding it in the palm of his hand. It was square, like maybe a ring box or something done up in brown wrapping paper.

  Rivoli saw the police cruiser in the edge of his vision, moving slowly on along the street.

  “Who the hell sent it?”

  “Well why don’t you just take it and maybe you’ll know who sent it. Hell I just run the things around, I just drive the damned—”

  Tony the Tiger snatched the package out of the guy’s hand and moved on inside the fence.

  The guy moaned, “Hey I gotta have somebody sign.”

  “Sign it and give the jerk a buck,” the Tiger instructed Jerry the Lover. Then he went on to the front entrance to the house, fuming inwardly over spade cops who dropped his name around like they had a right to or something.

  A package?

  Who the hell would be sending the Tiger of the Hill a goddamned package? A package of what? In all his thirty-three years, no one had ever sent Tony Rivoli a package of anything. Not even on his birthdays. Not even, by God, on Christmas. It couldn’t be a damn bomb, it was too small.

  It couldn’t be a.…

  Something froze around Rivoli’s heart and his fingers trembled slightly as he tore at the wrapping. Too late he had an impulse to yell back to Jerry the Lover to stop that jerk, to hold him there a minute… the van was already moving along and cornering onto the street at the side of the house.

  Yeah. Yeah, it could be, and it was.

  It was a marksman’s medal, done up real fancy in a jewelry box with a velvet cushion under it.

  The nerve! The nerve of that cocky bastard to send it to him to give to.… The coldness pressed harder upon the Tiger’s heart as he realized that no, no, it wasn’t addressed to the old man at all, it was addressed in care of the old man… the goddam thing was meant for Tony Rivoli himself!

  Where did the wise bastard get his name? Where was everybody suddenly coming up with the Tiger’s name, f’Christ’s sake!

  Rivoli whirled about to shout an instruction to the two gatemen, but the words stuck in his throat. Heavy black smoke was billowing up over there, totally obscuring that area of the yard, and he could not even see the damned gate or Jerry the Lover or the other boy or anything but the damned smoke.

  In just one fucking second?

  Shit, he was hitting! In broad daylight and with cops prowling all around, the nervy bastard was hitting.

  Rivoli raced into the yard to give the signal to the upstairs boy, the signal which would be relayed to all the outside boys, to bring them in quietly into a ring of steel around that house, around the whole neighborhood, to seal the smart bastard inside, to cut away all of his running room and even his walking room, to grind him surely and securely within the confines of that house on the hill, and to begin his education into the fantasies of mercy.

  And then the Tiger ran on into the smokescreen, to see what the hell had become of the boys at the gate, and to continue wondering why the bastard had sent the mark of death to him—why him?—why the Tiger instead of the Capo?
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br />   Despite smarting eyes and bursting lungs, Rivoli found the smoke bomb and hurled it across the street. He also found the two boys lying in their own blood, great gaping holes between their eyes, and he found the electric gate standing wide open.

  The Tiger staggered clear of the suffocating chemicals and made a run for the front porch. Then he saw the same crap coming up all along that fence, saw it billowing and drifting in a solid cover toward the house itself, saw the new bombs erupting in close sequence and in the exact pattern the goddam Bay Messengers van had taken—and Tony Rivoli began right then and there to re-examine his own fantasies.

  The mark of death had come to him.

  The guy had delivered it personally, and had stood there smiling at him, laughing at him inside—that guy with the paisano mustache in the Levi’s was Mack Bolan!

  That heavy coldness at the top of Tony Rivoli’s heart was the hand of death. He knew it. The guy was there, and he’d come to kill the defender, not the lord of the manse, and the Tiger of the Hill was not at all certain now that he’d set the proper defenses for a hit like that.

  Hell no, he wasn’t sure at all.

  “Shoot to kill! he screamed at the top of his lungs. “Forget the other stuff!” God damn you, all of you, shoot to kill!”

  It was to be a sad lesson in fantasies for Tony the Tiger Rivoli.

  8: A MEETING OF TIGERS

  Bolan left the van and the excess clothing at the south corner, and he came in with the smoke, over the fence and onto the grounds—a gas-masked, black-clad, striding apparition of doom with a single idea in mind.

  It was another numbers game, and he would have to hit and git with no unnecessary messing around, or else he would have the law breathing down his withdrawal route.

  He crossed the garden-patio and lobbed a fragmentation grenade into a choked and gasping babble of confused voices near the corner of the building; under the cover of that explosion he kicked the French doors open and moved inside with the Auto Mag at the ready. He left the doors open and the smoke came in with him, moving quickly ahead of him and spreading rapidly in an ever-extending blanket of cover.

  Thudding feet and an almost hysterical panting signalled the approach of at least two defenders from the front reaches of the house. Someone nearby gasped, “Jeez, get over there and see if those doors are open! The fuckin’ place is filling up with smoke!”

  Another voice cried, “Bullshit, what was that explosion? I ain’t going out there until I know what—”

  Then Bolan loomed up from within the swirling smoke, and the two gawked at him in frozen immobility while the Auto Mag roared its throaty message of massive destruction. The two gunners died on their feet while considerable areas of their assaulted anatomy sought a place to settle from the explosively expanding push of the big 240 bullets.

  Bolan stepped over the bodies and went on toward the grand stairway, a curving nineteenth century masterpiece of mahogany and marble.

  Several someones up-above pumped a wild volley of shots along his path. Again he gave voice to the impressive Auto Mag, in rapid fire, splintering the vertical rungs of a railing up there and sending a fine cloud of powdered plaster drifting along that upstairs hallway.

  Someone up there groaned, “Gee-Zus Christ!” and the sound of scurrying feet told Bolan that he had them on the run.

  He was well along the stairs and feeding a new clip into the Auto Mag when another guy came running in from the foyer.

  The guy yelled, “Hey what…?” And then he saw the thing in black on the stairway.

  This one’s reflexes were working better than the others Bolan had encountered thus far, and a long-barreled .38 revolver was tracking up the stairs and suddenly making a mess of the polished mahagony.

  At that distance the guy should not have been missing, but Bolan made allowances for an excited overeagerness, and he covered the guy’s embarrassment with 240 grains in the teeth. The gunner’s whole head seemed to cave in and fly away. Bolan continued his rush up the stairway.

  Another revolver roared and a bullet buried itself into the wall behind his head as he reached the top. He saw a door rapidly open and close at the far end of the hall and—just beyond that—he spotted the window he was looking for.

  The lower edge of a brooding layer of cloud strata—the condition they called fog in the bay city—was lying just above that window. Below it and trapped, there was a densely churning atmosphere of chemical smoke—a condition called personnel cover in the war zones—and Bolan meant to invite it in.

  He sent a single shot crashing into the windowglass. It shattered. The Executioner held his position commanding the stairway and patiently waited for the friendly atmosphere to come inside.

  An agitated voice down below was announcing to other cautious presences, “He’s upstairs I guess, yeah, with a fuckin’ cannon or something, I don’t know what. Lookit Joey there, just lookit ’im.”

  “Well where’s Mr. Rivoli?” asked another quivering voice.

  “I think he’s upstairs covering Don DeMarco,” the other one obligingly revealed.

  The Executioner smiled grimly behind his mask, and a two hundred pound package of sudden death merged with the atmosphere of doom and moved unhurriedly into the choking no-man’s-land of that upper hallway.

  It would have been much simpler, sure, if he’d just taken the guy while he was down there at the gate. But simplicity was not the name of the game.

  The idea was to show Big Daddy DeMarco how vulnerable, how utterly defenseless, how hollow he really was.

  And once the idea had sunk in that he had no one else to lean against, then maybe.…

  Yeah, Bolan was betting his very blood on it. Don DeMarco would want to lean with Mr. King.

  And the Executioner would be content with nothing less.

  It was not his idea of fun to terrorize a tired old man of seventy-two. But Roman DeMarco, of course, was not any ordinary old man. With an iron hand he still commanded an empire built of terror and intimidation, savagery and murder—and he could yet turn out to be a formidable foe.

  But Bolan would shake this whole damn town apart, if that was what it took.

  And he meant to pin a marksman’s medal to Mr. King’s forehead, whoever and wherever he was. He meant to pin it there with a 240 grain Auto Mag express.

  But first… he had to rattle the house on Russian Hill.

  He had to bag himself a tiger, and at the very foot of the throne. He knew precisely where to look.

  Sgt. Bill Phillips of the Brushfire Squad was speaking calmly into the radio hookup with his Command Central. “Mark it Hotel Eight on the grid and consider it a positive. It’s the DeMarco place on Russian Hill, and if it’s not a full assault, then it’s at least a probe of some type. He’s got them covered up with smoke and—belay that, it’s no probe, round one of the artillery war just started. Let’s make it a ringer-dinger. Better get some firefighting units up here also.”

  The voice of the Captain snapped back in a clear staccato. “We’re deploying on the grid. Give this character plenty of room, Bill, don’t crowd him. Now that’s an order.”

  “Yessir.” Phillips sighed and hung up the mike, then he smiled faintly at his white partner. “What he means is, don’t blow it,” he said quietly.

  “He means don’t get your head blown off, eager beaver,” the other cop replied, chuckling.

  “Yeah, well, whatever,” Phillips said. He drew his revolver and carefully checked it, then put it away. “They’ll be on grid in about two minutes.”

  The patrolman nodded. “If they get lucky.”

  “The guy could be halfway to the Golden Gate by then.”

  A series of booming reports issued from the big house.

  The Sergeant’s partner grinned and he said, “Not from the sound of that. I’d say he’s run into a slight delay.”

  The black cop lifted a gas mask from the equipment rack. He opened his door and stepped into the street.

  The other man said
, “Now Bill… dammit.…”

  “I’m just going to cover the front,” the Sergeant assured his partner. “Stay with the vehicle.” He donned the mask, drew his revolver, and ran toward the booming sounds of open combat.

  The black man from Brushfire was going to have himself at least a little piece of World War III.

  Bolan opened the door and stepped quickly back, allowing the smoke to precede him into the anteroom of the master suite. Two gunners came staggering out almost immediately, choking, eyes streaming, and their hands clasped atop their heads.

  “Keep moving,” Bolan advised them. “Down the stairs and down the street, and don’t even look back.”

  One of the men was already bleeding from an arm wound. Both of them hurried down the hall, wheezing, gasping and totally out of the war.

  Bolan entered the suite and shot two locks out of a door on the far wall, then he kicked it open.

  The smoke puffed on through, and it was met by a spray of slugs that chewed up the door casing and nothing else.

  Bolan reached through the opening and fired once at the opposing muzzle flashes.

  A gun clattered to the floor and a guy yelled in a high-pitched squeal.

  The man in black went on in and closed the door with his foot to keep the polluted atmosphere out.

  The Capo was standing by the window, swaying slightly and dressed in pajamas and robe. He looked old and sick, and the small amount of smoke that had entered the room had been enough to upset the leathery old lungs.

  The Tiger of the Hill stood at the foot of the bed, staring with glazed eyes at the smashed remains of his gun hand. The blood was gushing out and soaking into the bed, and Rivoli was just standing there watching it run.

  Bolan removed his mask and told the tiger, “You forgot to sign for the delivery, guy.”

  The house captain tried to say something in a voice that wasn’t working.

  The old man croaked, “My God, my God,” and he staggered over to his nephew-once-removed-but-never-acknowledged.

  DeMarco took the cloth belt from his robe and made a fumbling attempt to apply it as a tourniquet above the mutilated hand.