average Mafia goon squads.
When they got back to the mansion, there was a general meeting of fifteen soldiers and one lieutenant as they talked about the operation that afternoon when Chief Jansen got away.
“How did he get the two guards outside?” the lieutenant asked.
“Shot them, the radio said,” one of the hoods volunteered.
A man named Frank was the leader of the discussion. Now he looked around.
“The whole idea is to learn from that mistake. If you’re put on guard, do it! Your life depends on it. If we got a job going down and you’re out there, the guys inside depend on you. So make damn sure nothing and nobody gets at you or past you. With this Bolan bastard, you don’t ever get a second chance. Just ask Big Jake or Tony L. Their funerals will be day after tomorrow. Only the families of the men are to attend.”
That quieted them for a moment. Frank saw the mood.
“All right. So next time we get him, and then all of you can go to his funeral!”
They cheered, Bolan with them, then they quieted.
“You might wonder about another try for Assistant Chief Jansen who we missed today. Don Nazarione just decided we blow him away. It’s all we can do now. Okay, that’s all for tonight. You guys will be getting more briefings. We think the more you know about what we’re doing, the better you can help get it done.”
Bolan got next to Frank as they walked out of the recreation room. He had been introduced before.
“Frank, I got to make a phone call. Augie said contact him tonight sometime. He said be careful about the line. What’d he mean by that?”
“You’re reporting back to Augie Bonestra in Boston, right? I’ll check, but I’m damn sure what he meant was not to call from any phone inside this place. The cops have a way of putting two and two together. Wait a minute — I’ll check with somebody.”
Bolan went up to the first floor with Nino and waited around the TV set until Frank came back.
“Yeah, Lonnie, I was right. Call Augie, but do it from a pay phone down at the shopping center. It’s a mile straight down the road. Harder to trace calls from a pay booth.”
“Wheels?”
Frank went outside with Bolan and whistled up a crew wagon. The driver bailed out, and Bolan thanked him and drove to the front gate. It opened automatically. Frank had called the gate guard telling him to let the next car through.
Bolan grinned as he wheeled down the road. He knew there was no way he could have sneaked out of Don Carlo’s armed fortress without somebody getting suspicious. He also knew that Nazarione would not want a long- distance call from his house to another Mafia family don. They had to let him go outside to make the call.
At the shopping center Bolan parked and walked across half a block of parked cars to a phone booth. He called the Baltimore police department and left a message for Chief Jansen. He told them, “I have a tip that Carlo Nazarione is going to try to shoot down Chief Jansen in the next twenty-four hours. Tell him to lie low for two or three days.” Bolan hung up before they could trace the call. Even if they had the automatic readout of the calling number on their system, the Executioner would be miles away before any radio-dispatched police unit could arrive at the pay phone.
He wasted another half hour, then rolled back toward the big house that Mafia money had built.
The Executioner pulled up to the entrance. The heavy iron gate stood open. Unusual. He drove ahead, saw no one in the guardhouse. More lights were on now in the drive and in front of the big house than before, when he had driven away. Trouble. Bolan put the rig in gear, angled the car down the middle of the drive, kicked the lights up to bright, then hunched low and jumped out and sprinted fifteen feet into the shrubbery at the side of the drive.
In the darkness, he ran for the gate. It was a trap. He turned and saw the car swerve toward one side of the drive, but it recovered and rolled slowly into the lighted section in front of the house.
Twenty shots barked into the quiet evening, then a dozen followed, and soon more gunfire ripped and punctured the heavy car, blasting out all the glass, killing the engine, blowing out the tires. Somebody wanted to be sure that the driver wound up with his head in a bucket.
Mack Bolan sprinted out the front gate, which was still unmanned, and ran down the winding roadway toward the first lights at the corner a block away. Just as he turned into the next street, he heard tires squealing at the gate. The Executioner ran into the dark driveway of the second house and stepped behind the attached garage.
He touched his .45. It was still in place and loaded. Evidently the godfather had sensed something wrong and called Augie Bonestra in Boston. It would not take them long to discover the hoax and set up a trap of their own.
Bolan saw a crew wagon wheel along the street, moving slowly, with men staring out rolled-down windows.
Maybe next time, the Executioner thought. There was no chance they were going to find him tonight. It might take him a little longer to get back downtown, but he would catch a taxi sooner or later.
As it turned out, it was later.
6
The men of the Baltimore Police Department swore you could set your watch by the movements of Chief of Police Stephen C. Smith. He arrived at his second-floor office at 07:49 every morning. He went over the status reports on his desk from the past two watch captains, made any recommendations at once and cleared his desk.
By 08:02 he had greeted his front-office staff and had poured a cup of coffee from the communal pot, then started the rounds of his assistant chiefs, looking for any problems they might be having. He had delegated more work assignments than any former chief had ever done. It was working well.
This morning he was up as usual at 06:00. His driver called for him at his suburban home at 07:20 and he had twenty-five minutes to read the New York Times on his ride to work.
The chief’s sedan had just rounded the first corner heading toward the boulevard and eventually the expressway when another car jolted away from the curb and roared toward it.
Patrolman Donald Connors saw the car through his rearview mirror.
“Something’s happening, Chief!” Connors shouted. “Car back there coming up fast. Get down, Chief! Guns are showing out the windows!”
The chief glanced around, saw the long gun aimed at his car and dived to the floor of the back seat.
The black Cadillac behind them raced forward, a shotgun boomed and thirteen double O buck lead slugs slammed with thundering force into the chief’s sedan. They tore through the side windows, blew out the windshield, dug into the heavy side panels of the rear door.
Three of the slugs tore into Patrolman Connors just over the starched shirt collar of his uniform. He slumped over the wheel, dead. The horn was blaring. His foot lifted only slightly from the throttle. The car jumped the curb, knocked down a pair of small trees and rolled across a lawn until it crashed to a stop against the wall of a two-car garage.
Before the Mafia crew wagon could stop, another car raced up behind it and the driver lobbed a contact grenade over the roof so it landed on the black Cadillac’s hood and exploded.
Jagged shards of steel drove through the windshield and decapitated the driver. The second man in the front seat caught burning shrapnel in both eyes.
The driver’s foot lifted from the pedal and the Cadillac ground to a halt. The explosion had blown apart the ignition system under the hood.
Before the surprised hoodlums in the back seat could leave the car, a second grenade ripped open the gasoline tank. The gasoline ignited in a whooshing roar, creating a spectacular funeral pyre for the Mafia killers inside the car.
The man who had thrown the grenades pulled his rented Chevrolet to the curb, leaped out and ran to the chiefs wrecked car.
