She drove past Harry's Club. The parking lot was filled with cars, vans and pickup trucks. More were parked for two hundred yards along the road in each direction.
"Look at the faded blue Oldsmobile station wagon," Joan suggested. "There'll be a couple of goons in it. With heavy weapons."
Bolan looked at the old car, which was parked near the entrance to the parking lot. He could see the two hardmen.
"They're just the doormen," she said. "Look at the maroon van over by the door. More firepower in there. Then around back. There'll be guys patrolling. I tell you, Mike, these guys expect trouble and are ready for it."
"So do I," he replied, "and so am I."
"Yeah, I can see you are."
She had watched in awe as he'd armed himself earlier. He was carrying a silenced Beretta 93-R in harness under his left arm, and a.44 Magnum Desert Eagle rode his right hip. He wore a pair of blue jeans, a black T-shirt and a black oversized nylon jacket that covered his two holsters. Anyone who looked at him up close or in good light would see a heavily armed man. Someone who gave him a casual glance at a distance or in poor light wouldn't see anything unusual.
"I'll drive you to another road," she said. "I can show you where there's only a hundred yards or so between the roads, and you can come up over a small hill and down on Harry's just by working your way through the woods. There's a fence, but it's nothing much. As I said before, there'll be a guard or two around the back of the building, but most of the heat's out front."
"When'd you do the recon?" Bolan asked.
"I've checked out this place before."
"Not from the inside, I suppose."
"No. I can't help you there. I've never been honored with an invitation. Harry's is strictly a men's club."
She turned right at the intersection of two roads. The second road followed another little valley. After a minute or so she pulled the car to the side of the road and switched off the lights.
"Right over the top of the hill," she instructed. "When you get to the top, you can see down on the place."
"Right. Give me thirty minutes. If I'm not back, go home."
"No way," she said. "Let's compare our watches. In exactly thirty minutes I'll drive past Harry's, in front. Then I'll turn and come back here. If you're out front, I'll pick you up there. If you come back here, I'll pick you up here. You're gonna have goons in pursuit. Either way, whether you're successful in there or not."
He stretched out his wrist parallel to hers, and she set her watch ahead one minute to match his.
"Thirty minutes."
Bolan leaped a shallow drainage ditch at the edge of the road, jumped over a sagging wire fence and entered the woods.
The Executioner was at home in the gliding shadows. This was what he had been trained to do, long ago — to work his way through undergrowth, silently yet quickly. He climbed the low ridge that separated the two roads, reaching the top in two or three minutes. The clubhouse was below, just as Joan Warnicke had said it would be.
The layout was simple. Harry Greene had hardmen on duty, but he had nothing in the way of a security system. The parking lot was dimly lighted. The ground around the building was grown up in weeds.
He worked his way down the slope, stopping often to scrutinize the ground ahead and below, picking his path carefully and watching for guards.
A man sauntered around the corner of the building and walked across the back. Reaching a shadow, he stopped to urinate, then he went back the way he had come.
Another man came from the opposite direction. He opened a door at the rear of the building and stood there for a minute or so, looking in. With the door open, Bolan could hear music from inside, and laughter. Then the man closed the door and walked on. Okay. He was the guard. One of them, anyway. He ambled around the building, seemingly bored, and when he could he opened a door and looked in, catching as much as he dared of whatever excitement was being offered inside.
The guard was a big fellow with his belt slung low, circling an ample belly. He wore a cap with the union logo, as well as a jacket — no doubt to cover his hardware, just as Bolan was wearing a jacket to cover his. In fact, jackets were a tip-off. The night was hot, and Harry Greene's pals wore T-shirts or undershirts with pants or shorts. A man with a jacket was hiding something.
From his vantage point on the slope, Bolan watched a car approach the gate, then saw it turned back by the pair in the light blue Olds.
Then he noticed something else. A young man and woman came out the back door of the cinder-block building. They stood there nervously, talking in low tones. The guard rounded the corner again.
"Tom…" the young man called.
The guard nodded and gestured for silence. The young man glanced around, then handed Tom a couple of bills. The guard glanced at the money and slipped into the youth's hand something that remained unseen. But there was no question about what it was.
The couple didn't return to the club immediately. First they went to a car and got into the back seat. Bolan could see them in there, sniffing the coke they had bought from Harry's goon.
He glanced at his watch. As long as the young couple sat in the car, they were a complicating factor. But they didn't take long. They soon climbed out of the vehicle and trotted, giggling, to the door and returned inside the club.
Now was the time to move. Bolan would wait a couple of minutes, enough time for Tom to make another stroll around the building.
He waited. When Tom didn't appear, the warrior moved closer, then stepped over a low wire fence. Now there was nothing between him and the building except ten yards of littered, weed-grown land.
So Harry Greene pushed drugs. He dominated a labor union, an organization that was supposed to promote the interests of working men and women, not exploit them. Every business in the area was the victim of his extortion, and every man, woman and child who depended on those businesses for jobs or for goods and services paid a percentage to Harry Greene.
And he'd killed a good man who tried to interfere.
"Hey, you! Where the hell you think you're goin'?"
Tom had finally shown up. Bolan shrugged. "Back in," he said. "Came out to take a leak. How's it goin', Tom?"
The guard swaggered up to Bolan. "Who the hell are you?" he demanded.
"I'm Mike. Who the hell you suppose?"
Tom thought about it a second. No more than a second. His eyes narrowed, and his ruddy face turned a little redder. Then he went for his iron.
Bolan had expected that. He drove a fist against the guy's nose, then threw a knee into his groin. Tom was stunned, but he pulled his gun. Before he could raise the muzzle, the Executioner punched him again, hard, under the chin. Tom's knees buckled, and he staggered. His gun hand fell loose, but the bulky man was still functioning, still dangerous, until Bolan slashed him across the throat with a karate chop. At last he dropped to his knees and sprawled facedown on the ground.
Bolan grabbed the revolver out of the limp hand and threw it into the woods. Then he dragged the guard a few yards away into the weeds and left him there.
In a moment Bolan was inside Harry's Club.
Most of it was one big dark room, filled with smoke and the smells of sweat and beer. A bar ran the full length of one side. Two hustling bartenders drew beer and poured whiskey for a score of men who pushed and elbowed one another to get their drinks faster. At the center of the opposite side was a sort of stage, a platform of raw lumber raised three feet above the floor. On that creaking platform, in the glare of harsh floodlights, a pair of nude girls writhed together on the floor — naked wrestlers.
Twenty-five or thirty tables filled the center of the floor. Half a dozen men sat around each one, drinking, smoking, yelling and banging their beer mugs on the tables to encourage the straining, sweating girls.
At a table front and center, Harry Greene sat smoking a cigar and watching the wrestlers with a detached, amused air. Lolling against his shoulder was a girl, probably no older than eighteen,
twenty at the most — pretty, with shoulder-length blond hair — and conspicuously stoned. She was dressed in ragged cutoff jeans and a skimpy halter. As Bolan watched, she drew a finger along the side of Harry Greene's neck and whispered something in his ear. He ignored her.
Also at the table was a man whose hawklike face seemed to cry out pitiless cruelty. Bolan wondered whether he was the man who had murdered Dick Lincoln. That might be an ironic touch with an appeal to Harry: to have at his table the hit man he'd hired to commit the murder he had just been acquitted of. Bolan knew the Harry Greenes of the world. It was the kind of jeering touch many of them enjoyed.
Hawk-face had a girl, too. She was enough like the other one to be her sister, though she was older, a little more worn. She wasn't draped across Hawk-face but was sitting bolt upright, staring with contempt at the naked wrestlers, smoking a cigarette and drinking whiskey from a water glass.
Hawk-face was wearing a loose red nylon jacket. If he wasn't Harry Greene's hit man, he was definitely his bodyguard.
Bolan worked his way into the crowd as quickly as possible. He got a few curious stares, but it was the way he'd figured — the crowd was too big, too drunk, too absorbed in ogling to take much notice of one more big man.
Even so, he figured he shouldn't approach Greene immediately. That might attract attention. He worked his way toward the bar, being careful not to let anyone jostle him enough to feel his guns. With a beer in his left hand, he would look more like everyone else, less purposeful. He pushed up to the bar, asked for a beer and found that all drinks were on Harry.
Bolan worked his way toward the center table.
The two wrestlers scrambled to their feet, grinned and bowed and scampered down from the platform and out.
An amplified voice boomed from speakers overhead. "A big hand for the Wrestling Bares! And our thanks to Harry! And… now! Hey, guys! A hand for Donald and Donna!"
A youthful couple, boy and girl, trotted out and climbed onto the platform. They, too, were stark naked, and were followed by one of Harry's hardmen, who carried a mattress over his shoulder. When he heaved it to the center of the platform, the crowd hooted and yelled its approval.
The young couple stood for one awkward moment, facing the obscene congregation that had raised its collective voice to a frenzied shriek. Then they embraced, as if seeking refuge in each other.
Bolan recognized them. They were the couple who had bought coke from Tom out back and had sat down in the car and sniffed lines. Possibly they were only half-aware of what they were now doing.
What they did mesmerized the crowd, which made Bolan's job easier. He shouldered his way forward, and the men who cursed at him supposed that all he was doing was trying to get closer to the platform.
He muscled his way toward the front, drawing little attention. Among these people, rude pushing was nothing uncommon. He was too big and muscular to be challenged, particularly in a crowd of mostly jocular drunks, and he got where he wanted to be. Suddenly he was standing arm's length from Harry Greene — a little to Harry's left, and a little nearer the platform.
Harry was in an ebullient mood. He dragged deeply on his cigar and shoved it into an ashtray. "Hey, Don, Donna!" he yelled. "Louder and funnier!"
Bolan glanced at the young couple. They were down on the mattress now.
"Hey, Donna!" Harry yelled. "Smoke his cigar! C'mon, honey!"
The warrior stepped away from the crowd and into the narrow space between Harry's table and the front of the platform.
"Hello, Harry," he said.
"Down in front, you idiot!" Harry bellowed.
"I'm a friend of Dick Lincoln," Bolan said as he drew the Desert Eagle and shoved the muzzle toward Harry.
Greene screamed in terror.
The big.44 bucked and roared. The huge, high-velocity slug decapitated Harry Greene. More correctly said, it blew his skull apart, showering everyone around with brain and bone fragments, leaving the corpse sitting with no head except a nearly intact lower jaw.
Hawk-face drew a pistol from inside his jacket, but the second shot from the Desert Eagle struck him in the chest and threw him violently backward, his chair toppling and his corpse sliding across the floor behind it.
The young blonde who had been lolling against Greene screamed hysterically and slapped frantically at her face and hair, trying to flick away the bloody bits of head that were sticking to her.
The older woman stared into her whiskey, as if trying to see whether any part of Harry had corrupted her drink. "I'll be damned," she muttered to Bolan, and she raised her glass and chugged it.
It was time to get out of there. The warrior took advantage of the moment of shock and disbelief, during which no one would be able to oppose him effectively. He shoved his way authoritatively through the screaming crowd, heading toward the door at the rear.
The door was blocked. Tom, the guard, had staggered up and was standing there, his meaty hands grasping the doorframe on each side.
"You!"
"Hey, Tom," Bolan said. "Somebody's whacked Harry."
Blood was streaming from Tom's broken nose. "Harry…?" he muttered.
"Harry," Bolan repeated firmly. "So get out of the way, buddy."
"God Almighty," Tom breathed as he staggered back from the door.
Bolan brushed past him.
A window shattered, and a man scrambled through the broken glass. It was impossible to tell whether he was furious to hunt for the killer of Harry Greene or just terrified.
"Out the back!"
Some of them had seen Bolan make his way to the back. He glanced around, formed his judgment and acted. He trotted quickly to the parked cars to one side of the building, jumped on a hood and then the roof of another and from there sprang to the roof of the club. There he crouched and watched fifty men spill onto the ground behind the building.
"Tom! What the…"
"He musta come out of the woods," the big man replied.
Bolan checked his watch. He had two minutes to meet Joan Warnicke in front of the building. He crawled across the roof, toward the front, through standing water left from a recent rain.
The ground in front of the building was more crowded than that behind. Men were hurrying to their cars, anxious only to be away from the scene of a murder. Bolan slipped to one side of the roof, spotted a car parked in shadow and dropped on top of it. A moment later he was shoving his way through the milling crowd, unrecognized.
When he reached the road, Joan was there, cruising past. He stepped out into the beam of her headlights, she stopped and he grabbed open the door and threw himself inside.
"No great speed," he muttered. "Nothing conspicuous. They haven't got it figured out yet."
"I refuse to lie," she said as she drove away. "Especially under oath. And you remember what alibi I told Bill Fox I'd swear to."
"They'll be hunting for me," he said. "How long's it going to take to check the motels around this town?"
"You aren't going to be in a motel in this town. You're going to check out and…"
"Not to your place, Joan."
"You are too quick to assume, Mike. I was going to drive you to Hartford Airport."
Bolan laughed. "That's where I'm going, eventually."
"Eventually that's where I'm going to drive you. Tonight… I've got a better idea."
* * *
Satisfied that no one could possibly know where they were, Bolan still had the Beretta in hand when he responded to the discreet but firm knock on the door not long after seven in the morning.
The knock hadn't wakened Joan, so he slipped out of bed and went to the door.
"Who is it?"
"I need to talk to you," said a woman's voice, muffled by the door.
He edged away from the door; he'd already come too close. Contrary to what old movies showed, doors weren't bulletproof. He glanced toward Joan. A burst of fire coming through that door would…
"Mr. Belasko! I really need to talk to you."
<
br /> How did she know who he was? How did she find him?
They were in a small country inn at West Cornwall, Connecticut, a place known to Joan and favored by her for its setting in the beautiful upper valley of the Housatonic River. Their bedroom, one of only four in the inn, overlooked the rushing stream and a covered bridge, though he had seen little of this last night when they arrived about midnight. She had telephoned ahead and reserved the room. It was antique and cozy.
"Mr. Belasko," the voice persisted. "I want you to do for me what you did for Mr. Lincoln last night. I want you to do something about the men who murdered my father and grandfather."
Joan awakened. She couldn't understand the words coming through the door, but she saw Bolan holding the Beretta and talking intently, and she rolled off the bed and grabbed the Desert Eagle from the harness hung over a chair. Staring at it, apparently wondering whether it was loaded and cocked, she crawled across the floor and took a position opposite him, with the muzzle of the big pistol aimed at the door.
Bolan shook his head at her. "Trade," he whispered, and slid the Beretta across the floor to her.
She slid the big gun to him.
"Please, Mr. Belasko."
"All right. I'm unlocking the door."
The doorknob turned, and the door swung back.
The comely young woman standing in the hall was alone. She stepped through the door and glanced to one side, then the other, astonished to be confronted by a man and a woman aiming pistols at her.
"I…"
"Close the door," Bolan ordered.
She turned and closed the door.
He leveled the muzzle of the Desert Eagle at her. "Joan will search you," he said.
Joan rose, leaving the Beretta on the floor, and patted down the dark-haired young woman. Joan looked at Bolan and shrugged.
"All right," Bolan said. "You'll excuse us while we get dressed."
Five minutes later the warrior asked, "How did you find us?"
The young woman sat in a maple chair beside the small, cold fireplace. "My name is Gina Bear Claw," she said. "Tuesday, my father was murdered. I set out looking for you as soon as I got the word. I was too late. Yesterday my grandfather was murdered. Why? Because he dared suggest publicly that my father had been murdered. I…"
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