understand.
For the kid's sake.
Johnny's survival would depend on it.
Disguised, the Executioner left the hotel and toured two more possible loansharking hits, then drove to the north side of Portland, to Portland International Airport.
The 9:55 flight arrived ten minutes late.
Johnny Bolan Gray marched down the ramp wearing a tie and jacket and carrying a briefcase. These two Bolans, one half the age of the other, both branded by the same vigilante cause, were now together in the middle of the heat, dead center in the limelight as the local media brought the Executioner story right up to date. Mack Bolan decided to risk it nevertheless. He knew that role camouflage could serve as well defensively as offensively, and he put that into play. Right now he was just a guy in Portland, Oregon, who was meeting his brother. Maybe some business deal, or just family business. Nothing of note.
Johnny glanced at his brother without recognizing him, looked away, then looked back and smiled. The Executioner showed the kid the front of the morning paper.
'Sounds as if you've been busy,' Johnny said. 'Shall we go to your hotel? I've got a bundle of material for you.'
At the hotel, Johnny took a room on the same floor, then showed Mack what he had brought.
'The LEA report on the gunrunners came over the computer late last night.' He handed Mack a sheaf of printouts. 'I've got a printout from Justice on the Portland Organized Crime Task Force. They list the Canzonari family and all of its businesses. There's some information about a gun store that seems so clean and legal and aboveboard they think it must be dealing in illegal arms somehow. That's about it.'
Bolan turned to an inside page of the morning newspaper and folded it back.
He looked at the picture of the black girl and another of the battered roof of a Datsun in a parking lot.
'Last night this woman jumped from a fourteenth-floor window. Her sister's quoted as saying that the girl was in financial trouble, may have been involved with loan sharks.' Bolan glanced briefly at Johnny as he spoke.
Johnny nodded slowly. 'I'll look into it.'
Bolan examined the LEA reports on the guns. The texts boiled down to one grisly truth: a huge shipment of arms was heading for the West Coast, possibly camouflaged as industrial machinery.
It was thought to be arriving between the twelfth and the fourteenth. Today was the tenth.
It was believed that a ship, of Japanese registry, would be carrying small arms of all kinds, machine guns and submachine guns, small mortars, hand grenades and LAW rockets and launchers — enough of an arsenal to wage a small war.
The LEA spokesman feared the guns would be handled by one of the West Coast families, making available fully automatic rifles and submachine guns to every Mafia soldier in America. The rest of the weaponry might go to Terrorists training somewhere in the continental United States.
'Let's get moving. You try to find this woman in the paper, the sister of the dead girl, and I'll check out that gun store.'
An hour later Bolan was standing outside a gun shop on the east side near the approaches to Ross Island Bridge. The sign over the door said NORTHWIEST GUNS, INC., and in smaller lettering, Firearms of all types, Loading Equipment, Camping Gear, Surplus. It was the kind of store Mack Bolan could get lost in. It displayed a dizzying assortment of weapons: air guns, fancy target pistols, Uzis, Ingrams and others that he hadn't even heard of. He talked to a clerk and moved on. Nowhere did he detect any kind of weapon or even a round that was not legal.
In the back corner he found an armorer repairing guns and rifles. The man had a small machine shop and could make parts.
The only problem with the store as a whole was proportion. It was built inside a warehouse. When Bolan went outside, he realized the exterior was almost twice as large as the shop within. That left one hell of a lot of room for storage. He would check that out later.
The Executioner drove past one of the brothels on the list. He watched two cars turn into a parking lot in the back. Bolan parked in the street. Nobody could see the customers entering through the front. Another car rolled into the lot. If the brothel had this much business in an afternoon, it must be roaring at night.
Bolan found a phone and called the Portland Central Police Station. He reached Lieutenant Dunbar.
'Dunbar, I just drove past a whorehouse. It's still in operation. Why?'
'Hey, guy, we got other things to do besides bust hookers. Like a girl who took a leap out of a fourteenth- story window. Besides, we closed down three houses last night. Any idea what it does to booking when we bring in fifteen girls and about twenty johns? It raises hell with the whole operation.'
'So you want me to raise hell in this town? Work on it, guy.' Bolan hung up and drove away. As he neared the hotel, he wondered about the gun shipments. How could you fool the port customs officials that guns were really industrial machinery? They must have a system. Big bucks under the table? It would be interesting to find out.
6
A Cadillac limo swept uphill through Washington Park, curved along Southwest Fairview Boulevard and turned into a large estate overlooking the park and two-thirds of Portland.
Don Gino Canzonari's personal bulletproof crew wagon swung to the rear of the house and the four-car garage. The driver bailed out quickly and opened the rear door for a tall muscular man.
He was clean shaven, with dark, piercing eyes, and moved like an athlete.
He was a Black Ace, the only man Don Canzonari had ever known who carried a hit specialist from La Commissione's elite corps.
Vince Carboni stepped out of the Caddy and looked at the backyard of the Canzonari-family headquarters. Three acres of lawns and gardens trailed slightly upward toward a mass of evergreen trees. Carboni didn't care that he couldn't tell one tree from another. He was a city boy born and bred, and he was proud of it. He straightened the jacket of his seven-hundred-dollar suit and stepped along the sidewalk in his two-hundred-dollar Italian imported shoes.
Everything was so green he could not believe it.
Carboni ignored the beauty, the strangeness.
He was there on business.
'Where?' he asked curtly.
'Right this way, Mr. Carboni. Mr. Canzonari is waiting for you.'
Carboni swept past the driver, who held the door, adjusting the Colt Commander under his jacket.
The house was palatial, even the rear entrance, but Carboni did not notice. He would not have appreciated the cherry-wood paneling in the vestibule as he marched along, a snarl slowly taking over his face. Gino Canzonari sat on a screened-in porch in the far wing, indulging in a breakfast of fresh orange juice and prunes.
It was a little after eight in the morning.
Canzonari rose from the chair, grunting as he hoisted the 250 pounds on his five foot five frame.
'Vince! Good to see you!'
Don Canzonari had met Carboni before, and knew his reputation for being disrespectful. But he was a good hit man, the best contract specialist the Commissione had. No one was better suited to take out the Executioner.
Canzonari responded to Vince Carboni's silence by saying, 'The guy left a marksman's medal at the loan office where he gunned down three of my boys from a sniper spot.'
'Must have used a high-powered rifle,' muttered the visitor. 'What else?'
'He whacked out Leo the Fish in a bar in Leo's home turf with fifty people around. Nobody knew anything
