Don Pendleton - California Hit

A seventh guy was up on the set, standing beside the bed, posturing angrily and addressing the girls in quietly furious tones. He was an Occidental, and he wore a silk suit too.

The coalition, yeah.

Bolan moved quietly onto the beach set, found the lights, swiveled them about to his best advantage, and ignited them.

Everybody in and around the bedroom set came rapidly alive. The six Chinese boys were less demonstrative than any, but even they came around in a fanlike confrontation, plainly warlike, arms suddenly stiff and ready for anything.

The guy at the bed whirled about and did a quick little two-step off the platform like a bedroom phantom caught in the act. The girls grabbed each other, hid their heads and simply clung together.

All others were looking directly into Bolan's lights, so he could have appeared to them as no more than a vague shadow somewhere in the background.

The voice was not vague, however; it was harsh, and laden with ice as it commanded, "Cool it!"

"Who's there?" silksuit snarled.

"Death, if that's what you want, Clyde," Bolan promised.

Two of the China boys twitched. Bolan drilled them cleanly, with two sighing little phu-uts that were grouped so close as to sound like one, and then there were four.

The survivors stood rigid, frozen, not even interested in the condition of their fallen brethren, and the white torpedo took a tentative step forward, both hands stretched forward in a placating gesture.

"Hey wait, wait!" he urged, in a voice quivering with sudden respect.

"You wait," Bolan countered. "Send those girls out here, and don't be cute about it."

"You uh, that's all you want, eh?"

"Right now, yeah," Bolan assured him.

"Shit, guy, they're not worth it."

"They are to me," insisted the death voice. "Send them."

The guy sent them. Panda and Cynthey scampered panting and sobbing into the waiting darkness behind the spots. In the momentary close-up, Bolan had received an instant understanding of what they'd been put through. Those cute faces were now welted and puffy, bloated from a combination of blows and tears, and terribly, terribly unhappy. A dried trickle of blood remained at the corner of Cynthie's mouth.

As they hurried past, he quietly instructed them, "The van, right outside. Mary's waiting."

He gave them until the door up there opened and closed, then he told the coalition of five, "Now you guys draw straws to see who'll be the first man out behind me. Or else lean together for awhile and live to remember."

He withdrew in a quiet backpedal, and apparently the coalition had decided to lean together. There was no pursuit. The warwagon was fired up and Mary Ching was riding the clutch in a slow crawl when he casually opened the door and slid in beside her.

"Go," he said.

The two kids were huddled together on the rear deck, alternately crying and laughing in mutual hysteria, and Mary had taken the corner and proceeded several blocks up Van Ness before Bolan could edge an intelligent word into it.

"Tell me a safe place to drop you," he demanded.

"Sausalito," Cynthey replied without hesitation.

"You sure?"

She bobbed her head in an emphatic reply. "Our friends will take care of us. I just dare those goons to..."

"Sure you wouldn't rather have police protection?"

Both girls shuddered at that suggestion, and Bolan dropped it.

He turned a sigh to Mary Ching. "You know the place?"

"I know," she said, and she made it sound almost like Bolan saying it.

He scowled, freshened the Belle, and the porno girls plus two headed for the Golden Gate.

The story did not need to be told, but they wanted to tell it, so Bolan let them. It was nothing new, the usual routine, an incautious word dropped in a dangerous place, a visiting delegation of hard-eyed and equally quick-fisted inquisitors. They'd closed the place down and sent everybody home... everybody but the two female "stars" — and two hours of mind-blowing hell had ensued.

They'd wanted to know everything the girls knew — which they got very quickly — and a lot of things the girls could never know. When the proper answers were not forthcoming, there were hideous threats and stories of mutilated young bodies floating out through the Golden Gate, and there were blows and various other physical indignities.

None of the delegation were ready to accept the truth that the girls actually knew nothing whatever concerning Mack Bolan's plans and/or present whereabouts. Apparently they had come prepared to spend the night — and no doubt would have — had not Bolan himself provided the answer regarding his present whereabouts.

Cynthey was effusively grateful for the rescue; Panda was surly and resentful of the fact that Bolan's shadow had entered and clouded their lives. As the story went on, it became apparent that Panda had been the one with the leaky mouth. She was clearly jealous of the impression Bolan had made on the other girl, and it was during an angry denunciation of "all men including your fancy Mack Bolan" at lunch time, when the wrong ears were listening and their hell began.

Bolan did not feel responsible, except in the sense that any human is responsible for another. He had neither sought their company nor given any moves to maintain it. He had warned them of the value of silence, and they had blown it. As a result, they had endangered not only themselves, but Mary Ching as well, and they could quite easily have become the instruments of Bolan's downfall.

On the other hand, he certainly felt no resentment toward the porno girls. They were, after all, just kids. He was just damned glad that he'd gotten to them in time, and that the thing had worked out as well as it did.

He did feel strongly responsible, however, for a pair of somewhat different people back East. They were tied to him by the invisible threads of mutual love and hazard, and their beloved lives had been plunged into a torment of furtive existence — hiding that they may live — and all because of Bolan's lousy war.

And the guy had the nerve to ask him if it was important!

Then there was that other responsibility sitting there coolly beside him, a China doll who had also become special and was dangerously compromised by Bolan's war. And he was dragging her deeper into it with each passing moment.

So it was a lot of baloney; a guy could not stand alone, not absolutely alone, not so long as he lived in a world of people. The people were what the war was all about. And some of them, here and there along the way, were going to get burned. There was no way around that idea; there was no way to stand absolutely alone.

Important? Yeah, Corporal Phillips, it was damned important.

He told Mary Ching, "Your humble pad is now death row. Avoid it, write it off, don't ever go back there again."

Mary's eyes found those pathetic kids in the rear-view mirror; they found the tortured misery in the Executioner's gaze; she nodded her head and told him, "Okay. Okay."

She knew, now, what Mack Bolan was made of.

Sausalito is a picturesque little village lying directly across from San Francisco on the Gate's north shore. Bolan had spent a weekend there once, shortly after Korea. Under another time and mood, he would have greeted the quaint beauty of "the Portofino of the West" with a nostalgic appreciation; on this trip he felt merely tense and anxious to have the bedsy twins off his hands and mind. His numbers were getting crowded and — although San Francisco was only minutes behind him — he was a bit irritable over the fact that he'd left the town behind just when all the numbers were beginning to come together.

The warwagon, under the sure guidance of Mary Ching, was picking its way clear of the bridge approach and winding onto a narrow shoreside road, circling onto the bay.