Don Pendleton: Save the Children

A sliver of light from the room within spilled out from beneath the closed door; the room was the same one whose lighted window Bolan had spotted on his way to the house.

The other portals lining this hallway were shut and no light shone from beneath any of them.

He discerned the faint murmur of voices...

one male, the other, female...

from behind the wooden panel, but he could not make out what they were saying to each other, or the mood or tone of the conversation.

Whoever they were, and already Bolan had his guesses about the identity of at least one of them, they were pitching their voices low.

He opted to complete his search of the house before investigating the lighted room.

The second floor proved far more informative than the first.

He found a master bedroom with closets full of expensive men's clothing.

Next to the bed was a nightstand with a small notation pad, the top page of the pad blank.

Bolan played a hunch. He picked up a pencil alongside the pad and brushed the lead back and forth across the blank sheet of paper.

A phone number materialized; the impression from what had been jotted on the preceding page, which Parelli must have torn off and taken with him.

He sat on the bed and lifted the receiver of the bedside phone. Hearing the tone, he dialed the number.

The connection rang at the other end several times before a woman's voice answered.

"Harbor Yacht Club."

Bolan hung up the phone and continued with his search.

There was an alcove with a giant-screen TV set, atop which were stacked a pile of videotapes that he at first assumed would be standard commercial brands. Then he reconsidered and checked out their penned labels one by one. The small labels identified the tapes by single names.

Bobby.

Lisa.

Alison.

Something told Bolan to switch on the VCR and pop one of the tapes in.

He did.

And almost threw up.

He punched off the set, restraining an impulse to send a couple of bullets into the machine, so powerful and hot was the sudden rage that swept through him.

Two vacant-eyed children, the innocence of their nakedness made obscene by the presence of an adult male...

Bolan recognized the man in the four or five seconds he had glanced at the screen.

David Parelli...

Voices rising in anger at each other from behind the closed door down the hall snapped Bolan from the shock and repulsion coursing through him after his glimpse of the unspeakable acts on the tape.

He forced himself to put David Parelli's unholy sickness out of his mind for the time being so it would not interfere with his concentration.

He made his way out of that den of perversion, back into the hall, the Beretta ready in his fist.

In the corridor, the voices came to him with more clarity from behind the door of the lighted room; the only room he had not covered in his five-minute search of the house.

He eased along the carpeted hallway lined with modern artwork, his ears straining to hear every word and nuance of the angry exchange between the two voices behind the door.

A woman snarled in a spiteful voice, "Why don't you tell me the truth, Randy? You're rutting one of those goddamn bitches from one of your tv commercials and you don't have the stamina to satisfy two women, you lousy goddamn worm!"

"Maybe I'm getting tired of you and your bitching, Denise," an angry male retorted, "but I'm not screwing someone else, whether you believe it or not."

"You better goddamn well not be! What's left of you after I have you worked over won't be very pretty, worm. You're my bed partner until I decide different."

Bolan reached the doorway but he chose not to make his presence known just yet to the two inside. He continued to listen to the lovers' quarrel.

"Don't threaten me with your goons," the man sneered. "Maybe it was a mistake taking up with you. I shoulda never..."

"Spare me that," the woman shouted. "So tell me then why you don't think we should see each other for a while, and it better be good, Randy. When I take a man, I don't like him catting around on me."

The man seemed to regain some of his cool.

"It's just that after what happened tonight, after what you told me about that shooting at the health spa... don't you see, Denise, baby, I'm in a very sensitive occupation."

"You mean making porno movies?" the woman shot back derisively.

"Uh, yeah, if you want to put it that way."

"So what?" the woman called Denise demanded.

"So the cops are always wired to me, you know that."

"And you don't want any of Davey's heat shining your way, is that it?"

"Uh, yeah, something like that."

"I think it's something else," the woman spit. "I think you're screwing someone else, lover boy."

"Aw come on, Denise..."

"You get your clothes off, worm, and do like you're told." Threat dripped from the woman's command. "Or..."

It was the first indication Bolan had that the man inside the room was clothed.

He raised the Beretta in anticipation of what he sensed would happen next, all the while his peripheral senses registering the atmosphere of the dark house, but the only activity in the Parelli residence came from the other side of this door.

"Or nothing, you goddamn loony," the man in the room snarled, the sound of the voice coming closer to the door. "Get yourself another lapdog."

The door started to open.

The woman shouted heatedly, "I'm warning you, Randy..."

Then she and he stopped when they both realized that a heavily armed man in black in the hallway was aiming a Beretta at the spot between Randy's eyes.

"Back into the room," Bolan ordered the guy in a cold voice from hell.

Randy obeyed.

He was a well-muscled guy, cut from the same mold as those pretty boys Bolan had chased out of the New Age Center before the shooting started, except for the beginnings of sagging facial muscles bespeaking a lifestyle of too much pleasure and not enough morals, and a pronounced ferret squint around the eyes.

The woman standing beside the rumpled bed possessed the ripe, full-blown attractiveness of a middle-aged Sophia Loren; cultured beauty was the phrase that came to Bolan's mind, though there was nothing refined about the emotion that glistened in the dark eyes of her dusky, high-cheekboned face after her shouting match with the guy. She wore a black lace slip that looked good on her.

Bolan followed Randy into the room, not lowering the Beretta's snout where it rested on the bridge of the guy's nose.

Randy stopped moving backward beside the woman.

Bolan left the door open, standing in the doorway, his combat senses attuned to the ambience of the house.

The woman did not lose a beat. She regarded the big apparition in the doorway with a hand on her hip and open interest rather than fear in her eyes, as if she was used to guns being aimed at people in her presence.

"On the other hand, Randy," she spoke huskily to the man next her in a conversational tone that went with the open appraisal with which she regarded Bolan from top to bottom, "if you really must be going, perhaps you should... unless mean and ugly here intends to kill you."

Bolan demanded of the man, "Randy what?"

The man gulped audibly. A patina of sweat sheened across his forehead.

"O-Owens," he stuttered. "What..."

Bolan kept the Beretta on the dude but looked back to the woman.

"That would make you Mrs. Parelli."

"It would," she said with a nod, not breaking eye contact with him. "And what does that make you?"

Here is a woman with a will of iron, Bolan thought.

"The name's Bolan," he told them.

"Oh, Jesus..." Randy whined.

"You won't kill us," the woman said point-blank in her throaty voice. "If you were here to do that, Randy and I would already be dead. You're here for my son."