Don Pendleton - Death Squad

The little tape player had surprisingly good tonal quality. A thick voice swelled up from the tiny speaker, saying, "How the hell did they get onto me? How did they know? You find out! You hear me? That's what you're getting paid for!"

A reedy, sneering voice came in, following a short pause. "Don't remind me of my sins, Varone. Don't get too shook up, either. We'll have this guy on ice soon enough."

Lyons's eyes flared wide, then narrowed speculatively. He moved closer to the tape player, hardly breathing, listening intently to the damning conversation. His eyes swiveled to Bolan moments later, his lips twisting with disgust as the thick voice whined, "We ain't been giving you two grand a month to just..."

It was a short recording. When it was finished, Lyons turned the machine off, dropped into a chair facing Bolan, and said, "That put a ball of mush right in the pit of my guts."

"You know the guy?"

Lyons was staring levelly at Bolan's belt buckle. He nodded his head in silent affirmation.

Bolan slowly brought out a package of cigarettes, lit one, and offered the pack to Lyons. The policeman ignored the offer. Bolan returned the pack to his pocket, slowly exhaled, and said, "It's Lieutenant Charlie Rickert, isn't it?"

"Where are you getting these names?" Lyons snapped. "Where'd you get mine? How did you—?" He smiled suddenly, with the lips only, and clamped his mouth shut. "I'm not running a private agency here, Bolan," he continued in a more pleasant tone. "Don't you ever come here again. The next time I see you, I'll do all my talking with my gun. Now get out of here."

"Don't take it all out on me," Bolan replied mildly. "I just made the recording. I didn't say the words." He was moving toward the door. "I'll leave the player with you. Give my regards to your lovely wife."

"Leave my wife..."

"Okay, okay. You really better do something about those moles, though. They're playing hell with your lawn." He smiled, stepped through the door, and closed it lightly behind him.

Lyons stepped quickly to the window. Already the bold bastard was moving past the corner of the hedges and out of sight. Lyons sighed, a grim smile playing at his lips.

Janie came through the swinging door at that instant and cautiously poked her head around the corner. "I see you got rid of him," she said.

"Yeah, but I have a feeling it's not for long," he replied. He raised a hand to the back of his neck and squeezed down strongly on the bunched muscles.

"You didn't buy anything from him, I hope," his wife wailed.

"Yeah," he said softly. "Yeah, I'm afraid I bought quite a bit."

The horse was behind the camouflage netting when Bolan and Washington returned to the base camp, and the big vehicle was the object of multiple attentions. Hoffower and Loudelk were spraying the van with a fast-drying paint. Fontenelli was crawling about on the roof with an electric drill. Blancanales and Zitka were struggling with a large framework of wood shelving, being arm waved through the huge doors by Schwarz.

Schwarz spotted Bolan's approach. He stepped through the shelf framing and swung down off the tailgate, grinning at Bolan in quiet exuberance. "We're almost set," he announced. "I got all solid-state, self-contained gear. All we have to do now is get it set in the racks, install the antenna mast, run a few connections—and we're in business."

"The antenna problem is my biggest worry," Bolan told him, critically eyeing the big rig. "With all those things sticking up out of there, it's going to look suspect as hell."

"I already thought of that," Schwarz assured him. "No sweat. I'm running just one whip, horizontal along the roof, with couplings per set. That will be the only thing showing, and it'll be hardly noticeable. Chopper is punching me some holes, and I'm running the antenna leads along the inside to each coupling."

"I'm not sure I understand that." Bolan grinned. "But I'll take your word for it. Good show, Gadgets. How much longer before you're finished?"

"Couple hours, at the most. It'll work, Sarge."

Bolan slapped him on the shoulder and went on to the house. He found Harrington and Washington conversing in low tones on the patio. Harrington raised his voice, lifting it toward Bolan, and announced, "Yeah, man, we had a swingin' afternoon. That Varone cat has his fingers in just about everything."

Bolan pulled a chair away from the patio table, turned it around, and settled onto it in a straddling movement, his arms draped across the backrest. Tell me about it," he said, alertly interested.

Harrington did likewise, bouncing his chair about to directly face Bolan. "First off," he said intently, "I get the idea that even his recording outfit is slightly off-color. You know what a 'cover' is, in record talk?"

Bolan shook his head in a negative response.

"Well, some outfit comes out with a pretty good record, see, and they plug hell out of it—promotion, you know, a bit of oil to the deejays here and there—you know the routine. The thing starts climbing in the sales charts, hits the top forty, and it looks like it's going all the way. A hit, see? So I guess it's a pretty much accepted practice for other companies to bring out a record just like it—same song, see. This is called covering. You could think of it as legitimate competition—except that the outfit that brought the thing out in the first place has took all the risks and spent all this money in plugging and promoting."

"I'm following," Bolan assured him.

"Well—Tri-Coast never puts out anything but covers. They call it covering, I call it stealing. They use the exact same arrangements, never change a damn note. And here's the worse part— they pick up these starvin' kids who are trying to make it big out here in Hollywood, see, pay 'em a damn thin fee for cutting the record, and that's it. The artists never make another penny off that record, no matter how many it sells, and Varone is rolling in profit. He's the worse kind of rat, Mack—he's exploiting kids, the rock groups and folk singers who are just dying for that big chance. He's giving them crumbs and making a killing for himself."

"But nothing illegal," Bolan observed quietly.

"Not that anyone could say for certain. There's talk that his distributor leans pretty hard on deejays and the small record shops. Payola for the deejays and kickbacks to the record shops if they sell a certain quota. I don't know if there's a law against that or not."

"Okay, how about the other activities?"

Harrington put on a grim smile. "Now we're getting to the nitty-gritty. He's pushing everything, from girls to acid. I get the idea he's a silent honcho in a big modeling agency out on Wilshire. He's also collecting money from a guy who has an office up on the Strip, calls himself a theatrical agent. The only flesh he peddles, though, is girl flesh. Showgirls, mostly, strippers and that type. And I smell a call-girl operation, loud and clear."

Bolan nodded his head. "You said something about acid."

"Yeah, hell, the whole bit. Grass, speed, acid, goofballs, the big H—everything that kicks or purrs."

"How do you know?"

Harrington grinned. "I found someone who shared his bed and board for a while."

Bolan's eyebrows rose. "A girl?"

"Yeah. And what a girl. All boobs and butt, beautiful as a rose and just about as brainless."

"She knows quite a bit about Varone's operations?"

Harrington shrugged. "In a general sort of way. You can never tell about these dumb ones. How much detail they know, I mean. She came in to record a cover for Varone 'bout three months ago, then stayed on to keep his bed warm for a few weeks. Lived right there in his apartment above the recording studios. Then he got tired of her and showed her the way out." A faint smile briefly lighted Harrington's face. "She's like a damn recorder herself, Mack. Push one button and she records. Push another and she plays back. I can't figure a guy like Varone letting her learn that much, then turning her loose on the world. Unless he just figured she was too damn dumb to have learned anything about him. She is dumb, Mack. But all her mental energies seem to work through her memory cells. No kidding, she's like a damn tape recorder."