Don Pendleton - Collision Course

Caine set the empty shot glass of bourbon on the bar and eased down a few swallows of his Bud Light to cool the burning in the pit of his stomach. He knew he was a cliché. Strangely, that realization really didn’t make him feel any better.

The bar was working class, which he definitely wasn’t, but slumming made him feel better. His father would have been right at home here, smoking unfiltered cigarettes and downing bourbon like water while watching the flickering images of sports on the TV above the bar. Caine had learned everything he believed about politics by listening to what his father said and then doing the opposite.

A talking head on the TV was explaining why collateral damage wasn’t the same as those killed by deliberate acts of terrorism. The bartender moved over and took Caine’s empty shot glass. She was forty and skinny and tired. She had a plain face and a smoker’s squint. Caine had forgotten her name.

“You want another shot?” she asked.

“Let me ask you something,” Caine said.

She looked down the bar at the handful of other customers to see if they were happy. Once she decided they were fine she turned back toward Caine. Her eyes were green.

“What’s that?”

“You know what the electoral college is for?”

“You think you’re funny? You think I’m stupid ’cause I tend bar so you can ask me these questions then laugh at me?”

Caine blinked in surprise. Whatever he’d been expecting that wasn’t it.

“No,” he answered her. “I don’t think that. I was using the question as a lead-in, more of a rhetorical thing, so I could pontificate. You know, like drunks are supposed to do.”

The bartender looked at Caine, evaluating him. She picked up the empty shot glass and placed it in the steel-lined sink behind the bar.

“Fine,” she said. “The electoral college are the ones who actually cast the votes for the President, right? They look at the popular vote for their state, then cast the votes of their electoral college for the person who won the popular vote.”

“But they don’t have to,” Caine said. He was starting to feel the bourbon now.

This caught the woman by surprise, and she gave him a look like he was trying to be sly.

“No, it’s true.” Caine laughed. “They are free to cast the electoral votes for whomever they wish. They don’t, by law, have to cast them for whoever wins the popular vote.”

“That true?” she asked.

Caine smiled up at her. “Pour me another good one, if you please.” He slid a twenty across the bar, and the bartender smoothly went through her motions. “Supposedly it’s because of demagogues,” he continued.

He slid the hard liquor down his throat with a smooth, practiced motion. He reflected that there was a handgun in his car. He didn’t believe in guns, not anymore, but it was there, in the trunk. There was no way Charisa would ever have let it into the house, but Charisa wasn’t there anymore. He’d lost his wife and gained a gun.

How great was that?

Of course he didn’t have the house anymore, either. The settlement had been very clear; they split the house right down the middle. Didn’t much matter that the slimeball lawyer she’d left him for had a sprawling ranch-style twice the size of their old fixer-upper.

“Why?” the bartender repeated.

“What?” Caine blinked up at her.

“Why demagogues?” She sounded exasperated. “You were talking about the electoral college, remember?”

Caine gave her a dour smile and shrugged. The bartender snorted and dismissed him, moving down the bar. Someone came into the bar from the outside, and Caine realized it had started to rain.

He left a good tip by way of apology and headed out the door. Outside the rain turned everything gray. He couldn’t stop thinking about Charisa, about everything he’d lost.

He would never get her back, he knew. Would never get back his Army buddies who’d fallen in Mogadishu, either. Or his brother, Justin, who’d joined the Marines and never came back from Iraq.

But if Stephen Caine couldn’t get justice, he’d get revenge.

Someone would pay.

Vincent Paolini had held everything he’d ever wanted in his hands before he lost it all. He’d worked his way out of his childhood of rural poverty and to the university at Naples on a soccer scholarship. His soccer playing had been good enough to make old men cry and present him with an unending parade of female admirers.

But if blood could tell, then it told in Vincent Paolini’s case.

He was the son of a fifth-generation made man, and he’d learned in the cradle that anyone who pissed off a Paolini had to pay. He’d beaten an American sailor to death in the waterfront bar of Ravenna with a pool cue. Just like that his future as a European professional soccer player had disappeared.

He’d fled, and his friends had covered for him enough to obstruct the investigation. He joined the Spanish foreign legion, the lesser known refuge of rogues and desperate men than the French version, but just as brutal and just as elite.

He’d done three years in the Spanish legion while memories in Italy faded. He’d hunted the Taliban in Afghanistan, served as peacekeeper in Bosnia and in Liberia. He’d been trained as a light infantry commando and had been in dozens of firefights.

During that time his father, now an old man retired to his vineyards and dog breeding, appealed to the Palermo capo. In return for certain services, the capo had promised to use his influence to bury the investigation of the American sailor’s death.

Paolini had killed three people, two men, one a World War II veteran, and a woman to clear his debt. By that time he’d found he had a flair for the Family business and he’d risen to the position of the capo’s right-hand man.

Now, thanks to the mystery hitter, Vincent Paolini was the Palermo capo. Right now the Palermo capo felt something he thought he’d put behind him in the mountains of Afghanistan: fear.

He was afraid he’d gotten cocky, telling himself that despite the smooth ambush the mystery killer had pulled off, Paolini was still the better killer.

Had he been wrong?

He’d just seen five hardened killers gunned down in less than ten minutes. He hadn’t seen carnage on that scale since he’d witnessed the ethnic cleansing in Africa as a legionnaire. The guy was good, Paolini admitted. But, dammit, he was better—he had to believe that.

He had to.

BOLAN’S MUSCLES STRAINED and jumped beneath his skin as he climbed handover-hand up the elevator shaft, clinging to the thick cables like a spider to its web. He’d sent the elevator up a few floors, pressing multiple buttons so that the passenger car would stop at every floor in between. Once the elevator was in motion, Bolan had pried open the shaft doors and begun his journey upward. He hoped the ruse would give him enough time to hunt down and catch an angle on Paolini.

He knew that common sense told him to take his information and run. The Palermo capo’s operation had been thrown into disarray, and Bolan had what he needed to move up the food chain toward his ultimate prize. The payoff was bigger if Stony Man exploited the information he’d obtained than if he killed a single Italian Mob lieutenant.

But he was going to do it anyway.

PAOLINI STOOD IN THE SHADOWS and watched the elevator going up, plotting its progress by the lighted numerals above the doors. The lift had stopped on his floor, and the doors slid open to reveal nothing more than Delgaro’s bloody corpse. The doors slid shut again and the elevator rose. When it finally halted, Paolini had recalled it and, stepping inside, had quickly pushed the button to send the elevator all the way back down before stepping out.