Don Pendleton - California Hit

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.

His eyes had not yet met Bolan's gaze, and he seemed to be avoiding such a confrontation.

Bolan told the old man, "Save it, DeMarco, he won't be needing that."

Rivoli's lips moved again and he whispered, "No mercy, I said. Shoot to kill. You hear me? Shoot to kill."

Bolan said, "Okay."

He snuggled the Auto Mag beneath the old man's arm and squeezed off once. The big piece roared and bucked against the Capo's chest.

DeMarco lurched forward, eyes wide and stricken with a mortal awareness, and his mouth formed the words, "Missed... you missed."

Bolan told him, "I never miss," and he walked to the window while he tucked away the Auto Mag and re-fitted the gas-mask to his face.

It was not until then that DeMarco became aware of the mess behind him. The Tiger of the Hill had lost his face plus a goodly portion of skull to the rear... and the big mean bastard in the black suit had been right about the uselessness of that tourniquet.

Ten thousand tourniquets wouldn't put Little Tony back together again. Pieces of him were splattered all over the bed, even on the walls.

DeMarco yelled, "You bastard you, you bastard! What're you doing this to me for?"

But the window was up, and the bastard was gone, and actually he'd done nothing whatever to Don DeMarco. Except shoot up his house, and fill it with smoke, and splatter Little Tony all over his bedroom, and kill off God only knew how many of the house boys.

The Don went over to the window and closed it. He got the hell away from it quick and staggered back to the bed to stare with fascination at what was left of his old friend Tony's kid... little Tony.

His lip curled, and he said quietly, "Some tiger. The only tiger on this hill, kid, just climbed out that window."

And then the Capo went to the liquor cabinet, poured himself a drink, then he sank wearily into a chair and waited for someone to come up and take care of him.

He was two minutes into the hit and the numbers were rapidly running away from him when Bolan dropped to the ground beneath DeMarco's bedroom window.

The smoke at ground level was beginning to dissipate and it was straggling about the neighborhood in puffy clumps.

People were still running about in confusion at the front of the property. Bolan could hear men cursing and shouting inside the house.

Someone in there was yelling, "The fans, get the goddam fans going, blow that shit outta here!"

Another guy leaned out of an upstairs window, coughing and gasping for breathable air. He saw Bolan and took a shot at him, and Bolan quickly responded with a quiet phu-uut from the silenced Beretta. The guy gurgled and disappeared back inside. Bolan went on, making tracks across the rear yard and wishing he'd had another thirty seconds of good heavy smoke to cover his withdrawal.

He made it to the garage and was girding himself for the leap to the roof when another man materialized from the thinning smokescreen.

This one was wearing a gas mask with a neat SFPD emblem on the cannister. He had black hands, and one of these was filled with a snubnosed .38 Positive — and Bolan knew damned well then that he had overrun his numbers.

The guy barked, "Freeze! One move and I'll fire!"

Bolan hesitated for a sluggishly bloated second of solar time, and it was like an eternity in the universe of pure mind. This was the realization of all the Executioner's harshest nightmares — a gun-to-gun and eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with the law. Cops were special things. Some were rotten, sure, some as rotten as any of the enemy — but they were soldiers on the same side, in Bolan's mind, and that made them special. Mack Bolan did not live to gun down cops.

At the same time and in that same framework of mind, this was no goddam game of touch-tag he was playing. He could not simply roll over and play dead at the first appearance of a dutybound cop. There was a hell of an important war to be fought!

Yeah, it was agonizing. It was a hell of an agonizing real life nightmare.

Sgt. Phillips was realizing with a harsh jolt that neither had the drop on either. He had reacted in pure instinct, with all the training of his adult lifetime focusing into this undiluted moment, this hellishly painful and entirely non-academic moment in the life of a law officer.

The big guy was just standing there, poised in that special way on the balls of his feet, the very mean-looking black Beretta peering up from the gun hand. One side of his consciousness was trying to appreciate the confrontation from a strictly ethereal standpoint, and he actually imagined for one flashing instant that part of him was hovering overhead in a spectator's view of the scene.

Two men, one dressed in black, the other born in black, with a hell of a lot more than the color of skin separating them. One a cop, the other the most wanted "criminal" in the country. Both wearing gasmasks, and each with a trained gun laying down on the other.

And yet there was so goddammed much that these two gladiators shared in common.

The moment came unfrozen, the big guy moved almost imperceptibly, and the Beretta dropped ever so slightly.

"Okay, fire away," Bolan told the law.

"I mean it, Mack. I won't enjoy it, but I'll drop you in your tracks like a Wang Dang Doo."

Gasmasks or not, eight thousand ocean miles and too damn many years between notwithstanding, the message had been sent and received and the Executioner knew his challenger.

The Beretta dropped another inch and the familiar voice said, "Well, damn. Is that you, Bill?"

"That's me." The mask came off but the revolver did not waver. "Don't make me drop you."