Don Pendleton - Baltimore Trackdown

They waited in the shrubs until a young guard approached, carrying an Uzi. The timing was critical. As the guard came near, Angela stepped out of the brush.

She jumped with feigned surprise and turned around. In the few seconds it took him to recover, Bolan rose out of the brush and brought the hardened edge of his palm down on the man’s neck. The man dropped and the Executioner dragged him into the shrubbery. Then he and Angela crossed to the far side of the walk, hidden again.

At the path near the fence, Angela sat on a patch of grass in the sunshine and opened her blouse for a little bit of all-over tan. The first guard to approach cleared his throat about twenty feet away. She pretended to be sleeping as she leaned against the wall. The guard walked quietly by, staring. He did not see Bolan rising behind him.

The Executioner swung the Uzi submachine gun he had confiscated from the other guard, smashing it against the side of the man’s neck. His neck cracked loudly. When the criminal soldier collapsed, he would never rise again.

Bolan boosted the woman over the six-foot block wall, then went over himself. They slumped against the wall, then as a neighbor’s dog barked, they calmly walked to the street and Bolan’s rented Buick.

Three miles away, Bolan pulled to a curb.

“What now?” Angela asked.

“That’s up to you. You’ve escaped. Can I drive you somewhere?”

“No, I like it here with you.”

“I have some work to finish. Do you have any relatives where I can take you?”

“No, just back to Carlo’s castle.”

Bolan turned around, opened the suitcase on the rear seat and slid the Uzi inside. Before he could stop her, Angela grabbed a grenade. She held the arming handle down and pulled the ring, removing the safety pin.

She sat in the passenger side of the car, holding the grenade in her right hand, a strange, wild look on her pretty face.

“I finally remembered where I saw you before. It was at our house the night Jo Jo died. Hell, he wasn’t much, but he was mine! He fathered my children. What am I supposed to do now — live off the goodness of the godfather for the next sixty years?”

She did not wait for a reply.

“No way! I’ll work the streets first, selling my ass! Then here you come, the big killer, the man who made me a widow. At least I remember, and I know I have to do something about it. Guns are hard to use. You can miss when you try to kill someone. But a grenade! There’s no chance to miss. So what if I have to stay here with you to make sure? I just let the handle pop off and I hold it right in your gut and blow both of us all over the inside of this car!” Her eyes were wild and she was breathing fast. She reached down and rubbed her breast. “I’ll blow us both to hell! Better that way. Damn sight better that way. Carlo can raise my two kids.”

Bolan knew she was very near to doing what she threatened to do. He had seen angry women before. He moved toward her slowly, and rested his hand on her shoulder. He patted her gently as she rambled on.

“Hell, I don’t care. I got cheated out of a husband. Somebody who treated me fine in spite of the bitchy things I did to him. That man was a saint.”

Bolan moved closer, speaking softly. He knew she was distraught and any sudden moves on his part could mean the end for both of them.

“Angela, I know things look a little gloomy now,” Bolan coaxed, “but they’ll be better. Think of your children!”

He caught her hand gently and eased the grenade away while holding the arming handle firmly in place.

Bolan leaned away from her, took a roll of black tape from the suitcase on the seat behind them and taped the grenade’s arming handle solidly in position. Then he put it back in the case.

She sighed and broke into tears. “Oh, damn! I have to go back. I’ll tell Carlo that you tricked me and forced me to help you, and that I almost killed you with a grenade. He’ll have to believe me.”

Bolan reached over, touched her chin and turned her face to him.

“Angela, you are a beautiful, sexy woman. Just relax and see how things look in a month or so. You’ll be married again within a year, or I miss my guess.”

She blinked. “You really think so?”

“Yes, besides, killing me won’t accomplish anything. Your children must be important to you.”

“Yes, of course. But I’m important, too.”

He dropped her downtown and watched her get a cab. The women were the real losers within the whole Mafia framework, he thought. The mobsters’ women always lost.

He consulted his watch — not quite noon. There was a little more than twenty-four hours before the mayor’s speech. He had a lot of important work to do before then.

Behind the rented Buick, a man in a rented Thunderbird watched Mack Bolan. The man was large — six foot four and 260 pounds of hardened muscle. He had black flashing eyes, dark hair that crowded his collar and was clean shaven. His name was Vince Carboni and he worked for La Commissione, the high commission of the Mafia bosses of bosses. His only job — to hunt down and kill Mack Bolan.

Vince Carboni snorted as he watched the man he had been hunting for two months. Now he would watch Mack Bolan, get in position and blow him away before Bolan even knew that Vince Carboni was in town.

He had been going to see Carlo Nazarione to warn him not to notify the Bolan Search Center in New York that the bastard was in Baltimore. Turning in at Nazarione’s gate, he saw two people walking down the street. One was a knockout blonde, the other one was Bolan.

Carboni had slowly passed to make certain, then circled the block and followed the pair to a car. They drove around and then stopped and talked. Later they drove downtown, where the woman got out and hailed a taxi.

Pure chance that he had spotted Mack Bolan, but he’d take it.

When Bolan’s Buick pulled away from the curb, Carboni’s Thunderbird followed two cars behind. He had practiced following cars around New York; if you can tail a car in Manhattan, you can stay with one anywhere. Carboni was an expert. As long as the victim did not know he was being followed, Carboni usually stayed three or four cars behind. If the other guy knew, it became a race, not a tail.

Carboni knew at once that Bolan had no idea he was being tailed. The Buick sedan wound through several streets, then stopped near a phone booth. Carboni parked across the one-way street and watched.

He had been waiting a long time for this chance. The commission first came to him a year ago. He had been happy working in New York as an enforcer and “eliminator,” as they called it now. But the commission offered him ten times the money he was making, and his own don urged him to take the job, so there was no problem either way.

He spent two months on weapons, learning everything he could about handguns, all the auto and semiauto submachine guns, and then taking a postgraduate course from an old sapper about gunk, juice, powder and plastic explosives.

For two weeks he spent sixteen hours a day reading everything the commission had collected on the Executioner. They had copies of every story printed in the United States.

Slowly Carboni filtered out fiction from fact, the hype and local paranoia from the reality. He knew more about Mack Bolan, his family, his involvement with the government at Stony Man Farm and his subsequent “disengagement” from Uncle Sam than anyone in the Mafia.

Now he planned to kill Bolan!

Carboni had missed the bastard in Portland, but just barely. This time he would not miss. It was a matter of pride now.

There was only one restraint. Vince Carboni was not going to sacrifice his own life just to get the Executioner. He could not spend that five-million reward if he were laid out in a coffin. Which was why he did not unlimber his .44 AutoMag right then and blast Bolan as he stood in the phone booth. Not with a hundred witnesses to identify both him and the car. He was too smart for that.