"He's the Beacon's owner, editor — you name it. Likes to call himself the "Voice of Vegas." Been around forever. Mostly he takes potshots at the IRS or FBI. He doesn't care much for you federal boys."
"His privilege."
"Yeah." The captain's tone informed him that the feeling might be mutual. "It's funny no one briefed you on him..."
Bolan's gut was telling him that it was time to disengage, and he could feel the numbers falling in his head.
"I assume that I can count on your cooperation, Captain?"
Reese's face was devoid of all expression as he answered.
"By the book, LaMancha. You've got your job; I've got mine."
Bolan nodded.
"Fair enough. We understand each other."
As he retraced his steps along the corridor to daylight, Bolan thought he understood the homicide detective. Reese had the typical Nevadan's thinly veiled suspicion of the federal government, the world outside the borders of his state.
The local leaders often seemed to see themselves besieged by hostile outside forces, persecuted by the blue-nosed moralists who stubbornly refused to see the silver lining of a legal gambling economy. Reports of mob influence in the industry were commonly dismissed as slander or, providing evidence of guilt was overwhelming, minimized as transient aberrations in a squeaky-clean administration. Never mind that local politicians from the legislature to the highest of judicial benches had been busted and convicted for accepting bribes from mobsters. Never mind that union leaders closely tied to La Cosa Nostra had been climbing into bed with top official spokesmen for a generation now, and federal agents had been lately capturing their antics with videocameras for all to see. Nevadans by and large were still defensive and defiant, stubbornly refusing to believe. And it was not, Bolan knew, that most of the state's citizens were actively involved in the corruption. Not that they supported it, by any means.
But he had seen the same phenomenon in action elsewhere — locals closing ranks against the allegations from outside that seemed to signify a "ganging up" by hostile forces, amounting to a persecution complex in extreme examples. Bolan hoped that Captain Reese would not turn out to be one of those extreme examples. The captain of homicide could do a lot to help clean out his town if he was willing to admit the dirt existed in the first place. It would take some courage, sure, to go against the men whose money talked in Vegas, but it could be done. With any luck at all, Mack Bolan would be showing Reese the way within the next few hours. And Las Vegas was all primed and ready for his kind of action, certainly. The different factions of the Mob were at one another's throats and the media was standing by in hopes of giving them some overdue exposure.
Everything Bolan needed was in readiness, except a handle on the Yakuza, and what exactly they wanted in this desert town so many thousand miles from home.
Not what, precisely; that was obvious in Vegas, the town that skimming built. In actuality the question was more how they planned to go about achieving what they sought.
And whether Bolan could move fast enough to stop them short of resolution. If he could not, then Las Vegas was in for a bloody season of suffering. If he could — well, there would still be blood enough to go around.
The warrior did not care for the alternatives, but he was used to playing by the rules that others had established for him. It was how you bent the rules that made the game your own. And Bolan was playing to win in Las Vegas. All the way.
5
Sam Reese slumped down into the vinyl-covered swivel chair and cocked his feet up on a corner of the cluttered desk. His narrowed eyes were focused on the door, but he was seeing Frank LaMancha, hearing him as if the Fed was still in the office.
"You've got a gang war on your hands." There had been something out of place about LaMancha, something cold and almost deadly in his eyes, his voice.
As if he knew exactly how it felt to drop the hammer, and did not mind the feeling one damned bit.
Sam Reese had pulled the trigger twice in his career with metro, and he knew it took a special kind of man to pop those caps dispassionately. A killer, for sure.
That was the reading that he got from Frank LaMancha. The guy was a killer.
The federal agents Reese was used to dealing with were usually clinical, detached, like CPA's examining a ledger full of dry dead figures. They knew their jobs all right, but they were used to working at a distance from the crimes they were investigating, and they generally lacked the took, the feel, of troopers long accustomed to the trenches. But that LaMancha had the bearing of a man who did his fighting one on one. A soldier's bearing. There was a trace of military ramrod in his stance, the posture that a CPA could never emulate regardless of the guns and badges handed to him back in Washington.
Sam Reese had little love for Feds. Very few had come to be his friends across the years. They were useful in their place — for running operations interstate and such — but they were chiefly skilled at getting underfoot and making simple cases complicated. They assumed an elitist attitude that made them stand aloof from other law-enforcement personnel — and many working cops suspected them of undermining local efforts in pursuit of broader, secret goals.
Sam Reese had put in more than twenty years with metro, rising through the ranks to reach command grade long before its merger with the Clark County Sheriff's Department. He remembered all the federal sound and fury under Kennedy — the wiretaps and surveillance, bugs in offices and counting rooms — all of it leading to a handful of indictments that were bargained down to nothing when they came to trial. When push came to shove the boys from Justice seemed to make their best moves in the headlines, leaking "confidential" information, making allegations, spreading notso-subtle innuendos.
They must have spent a century of high-priced man-hours chasing leads and fattening their files without approaching a solution to the problem. And Reese admitted that there was a problem. No frigging doubt about it. The syndicate was nothing new in Vegas.
Hell, the Siegel-Lansky mob had started everything in '46, and even after Benny bit the big one, there were others standing by to cut themselves a piece of pie. You did not need a microscope to find the Mob in Vegas — but finding them was one thing; getting rid of them was something else again.
Ironically, the greatest blow against the Vegas Mob had been delivered not by any law enforcement agency, but by a single dedicated man.
Sam Reese was a lieutenant with Intelligence when it came down and nothing that had happened since had dimmed the graphic memories. The soldier's name was Mack Bolan, the guy they called the Executioner, and he was famous nationwide for taking on the Mob before he ever came to Vegas. Reese had read about his exploits in the papers, but nothing on paper had prepared him for the grim reality of Bolan's desert blitz. The captain frowned, remembering the hellfire hours of the soldier's lightning visit, feeling something down inside himself turn over slowly at the memories.
Joe Stanno ran his body shop out of the old Gold Duster in those days. They called him Joe the Monster, and with reason. But he could not measure up to Bolan when the bad shit hit the fan. He called for reinforcements and the Mob sent in the meanest bastards they could muster — no less than the bloody Talifero brothers, with a private army at their backs.
Reese closed his eyes as he recalled the hot reception Bolan gave the brothers at McCarran International. The nervy bastard shot the tires right off their charter jet, leaving twenty guys laid out like slabs of beef along the runway.
Joe the Monster lost it all in Bolan's final hours on the Strip, along with half the Talifero team — the other twin got smoked somewhere back East, and the Executioner had left Las Vegas cleaner than he found it.
For a while.
It was not a solution, no. But Reese suspected it was never meant to be. Acting on his own initiative against the odds, the man they called the Executioner had made a difference in Las Vegas, and that was all that counted.
Part of Reese admired the gutsy bastard, th
ough it would not do to say so in mixed company. A part of him was almost sorry when the guy flamed out in Central Park.
No, scratch the "almost." Reese was sorry when the soldier bought it.
Goddamned sorry.
Now the telex out of Justice had arrived, on top of all the other problems he was looking at. It said the Executioner was still alive and kicking ass. No word on where the hell he had been hiding for so long, just a curt advisory to keep the eyes peeled. Bolan might resurface anywhere, at any time, and bagging him was suddenly the number-one priority again.
The Feds thought he was heading west, but then again.
Reese did not want to think about the consequences of a second Bolan visitation. Not with all the crap he was facing on the job. He had a psycho killer on the loose who liked to butcher joggers and another with a taste for little girls. He had a rising murder rate among the Cubans, with a drug war in the offing. Kuwahara's Japanese were squaring off against the Brotherhood and now he had LaMancha and his goddamned strike force horning in. They would be breathing down his neck at every turn and muddying the waters in their efforts to be "helpful" — if he let them. "Your town is set to blow wide open." Great.
He was not losing any sleep about Minotte or his soldiers at the stud farm. Vegas was a better place without them, and the means of their abrupt departure did not faze him in the least. Old Benny Siegel used to say, "We only kill each other," and for Reese's money, none of last night's crop were likely to be missed.
Minotte's "family" would lay him out in style down south, and Kuwahara might be burning incense for his hitters. But to Captain Reese the lot of them were so much garbage, ready to be carted off for landfill somewhere.
He was troubled, though, by what had gone down after Bob Minotte and his men were wasted at the hacienda.
There was solid evidence of someone crashing through Minotte's gate, but they were outbound, and the chase crews all had come to heavy grief a few miles down the highway from the stud farm. No sign there of Kuwahara's samurai, and Reese was wondering if Seiji's action was the only violent game in town. If not.
There's a wild card in the game. The rules are changing. Shit.
The homicide detective shrugged. No matter, if he had a single mob war brewing, or a double cross — whatever. Reese had no intention of permitting mayhem in the streets of Vegas. It was his damned town, and he would hold the line no matter what.
If they could find a quiet way of killing one another off, the captain would not bust his chops to interfere with family business. Laissez faire was SOP in Vegas, even if the vast majority of locals could not quite pronounce it.
Live and let live, even if it came down to dying. But if the war slopped over from the gutters to endanger innocent civilians, Captain Reese was ready to engage in some constructive carnage of his own. He had a list of names and he was not above some hard harassment, bringing in a few of them across his fender if he had to. Anything to make his point.
It might not come to that, of course. He might get lucky. But experience had taught him that the odds were always with the house, against the bettor in Las Vegas.
Captain Reese knew that there was only one sure thing about the present death game. He had not yet seen the last of brutal jungle warfare in the desert.
6
"I know exactly how you feel."
Frank Spinoza held the telephone receiver away from his ear, trying to mute the caller's strident tones. He rocked back in the leather-covered chair, legs crossed, examining the spit shine on his Gucci loafers and waiting for the caller to wind down a little.
"Certainly I've been in touch," he said when there was a moment of dead air. "The minute that I heard. The families share our mutual concern."
"They'd better," the voice on the other end informed him brusquely. "If the commissioners don't want to fight for what they've got in Vegas, I'll take care of it myself. And there are others who'll stand by me, too, you betweencher ass."
Impassive, Spinoza heard him out, even though his gut was churning now, trying out the soothing phrases he had learned by watching, listening as the capos talked among themselves.
But Johnny Catalanotte, as the on-site representative for the Midwestern family, had the strength of an army behind him, and he was no one to fool with.
Unless you had the talent.
"Believe me, John," Spinoza said, turning on the chair, "they're meeting on it now. It's top priority, no question. I'm waiting for their word."
And he proceeded to lay it on, spinning castles out of smoke for Johnny Cats. He talked an army into existence and had it standing by his shoulder, ready to move when the word was given, assuring his anxious caller that the word was on the way. By the time he finished Johnny Cats, while not eating out of his hand, at least was not gnawing on the fingers, either.
"I'll be waiting, Frank," the man from Cleveland told Spinoza solemnly. "But not too long."
"There should be something later in the morning, Johnny. By the time you get here, anyway."
"I hope so, Frank. For your sake."
"I'm not worried, Johnny."
"Someone better be."
The line went dead and Frank Spinoza cradled the receiver. He found his palm wet where he had been holding the phone and blotted it with clean-pressed linen.
He knew his answers had not satisfied the Cleveland connection. Johnny Cats was still steaming, but at least he was more rational, less primed for an explosion than Larry Liguori, the Chicago mouthpiece. Liguori was still agitating for a full-scale sit-down to resolve the Kuwahara situation. He would not be satisfied with anything Spinoza said or did until he saw some solid action taken to resolve the problem — preferably by serving up some Japanese heads on silver platters. Now, with Bob Minotte and his soldiers cooling at the county morgue, Liguori's adamant position was immensely stronger than it had been days, or even hours, earlier.
Las Vegas was a powder keg, and Frank Spinoza felt as if he might be sitting on the lid, waiting for it all to blow around him. When it went, he didn't know if he could salvage anything from the debris or not. If it went, not when, he reminded himself. Got to keep thinking positive.
Minotte was on everybody's mind, and Frank Spinoza, though he never liked the man from Baton Rouge, would not have minded something in the way of action, either. But he was under orders from New York to keep the lid on, no matter what. He did not necessarily agree with those instructions — might not even understand them fully — but it was not his place to question La Commissione.
He had not advanced to where he was by making waves or making enemies. And Frank Spinoza knew the desert that surrounded Vegas had as many unmarked graves as it did Joshua trees, each one concealing all that remained of someone who had rocked the boat unnecessarily. Unless he missed his guess they would be planting Seiji Kuwahara and a number of his kamikazes out there sometime soon, and he would gladly read some words above the dear departed... but not before the word came down through channels.
And they would have to be discreet about it. No more Wild West theatrics like last night.
Nervy bastard, that Kuwahara, attacking a man in his own goddamn house at that hour of the morning, coming at him with a frigging sword...
A knock on the office door distracted Frank Spinoza from his reverie. He swiveled toward the sound, taking a moment to blot his palms again with the handkerchief, now damp itself.
"Come in."
Paulie Vaccarelli stuck his head in through the door and mumbled, "Sorry for the interruption, boss."
Paulie was Spinoza's "private secretary," in the jargon of the business. He had never heard of shorthand and the only typewriter he was familiar with was usually transported in a violin case. But he was indispensable at coping with the daily problems that arose from managing an empire, and Spinoza valued him.
"What is it, Paulie?"
The gunner frowned.
"You got another call, line two. The Man."
Spinoza felt the old familiar tig
htening in his stomach but he forced a practiced smile and thanked his Number Two, waiting until Paulie retreated before he reached for the phone.
For an instant all he heard was the bottomless long-distance hum of the line, then the deep familiar voice filled up his ear.
"This line secure?" the caller asked him.
"Yes, sir. Checked out this morning." Damn the squeak in his voice!
"I've been waiting for some word," The Man informed him, recrimination in his tone.
"I was about to call you," Spinoza lied. "I just got off the phone with Johnny Cats."
A hesitation on the line.
"And how's he bearing up?"
"He'd like to see some action on this thing. They all would."
There was an expectant silence on the other end. Spinoza felt a sudden need to fill the yawning chasm.
"I've arranged a meet for later in the morning here at my place. Just to keep things cool."
"That's good," the caller said, and still his tone had reservations. "It's important that you keep the lid on, Frank. A deal is in the works, but any premature reactions on your end could dump it in the toilet."
"I'm on top of it," Spinoza told him earnestly.
"I hope so, Frank. I'm counting on you. Everybody's counting on you."
The words had their desired effect. Spinoza felt the burden settling down across his shoulders like a physical weight. Unconsciously, it made him squirm.
"Don't worry, sir. I've got a handle on this end, as long as Kuwahara pulls his horns in for the next few days."
The caller's voice turned sharp.
"No matter what, Frank. Keep the lid on. When it's time to move, you'll be the first to know."
"Yes, sir."
"I knew that you could do it." And the line went dead, the hollow humming in his ear again. As he reached out to cradle the receiver he saw his hand was trembling, and he brought it quickly back into his lap, covering it with his other. Spinoza sat staring at the silent telephone, skeptical that any deal New York came up with would be satisfactory to all concerned in Vegas. It sure as hell would not satisfy Minotte, cooling in a drawer down at the county morgue. And it would have to be some deal to satisfy Minotte's capo now or any of the others who were up in arms.
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