Death Squad

Chapter Eight The Borning Dead

It was just a few minutes before 3:00 A.M., and Zeno Varone knew that there was no sleep in the cards for him this night. He had been pacing back and forth across his sumptuous office for fully ten minutes, ever since the investigating police cleared out, his anger building into a great weighted ball right in the middle of his throat, and he knew that ball would not dissolve until he could spray it back out onto the lunatics who had placed it there. He halted in midstride, legs spread far apart, and brought a fist crashing onto the back rest of a leathered chair.

'How the hell did they get onto me?' he yelled. 'How did they know?' He whirled about and jabbed a stiff index finger toward the man who calmly perched on the comer of his desk. 'You find out! You hear me? That's what you're getting paid for!'

The other man casually took a drag from his cigarette and blew the smoke toward the ceiling. 'Don't remind me of my sins, Varone,' he replied lightly. 'Don't get too shook up, either. We'll have this guy on ice soon enough.'

'Soon enough?' Varone was all but frothing at the mouth. 'I'm telling you, right now is not soon enough. Those sonsabitches walked out of here with twenty grand—yeah, yeah, not like I told your pals—twenty grand in cool cash that wasn't even mine. That was family money. Not to mention, hell, not to mention what they did downstairs. I don't even know if my insurance will pay off on this stuff. They'll probably call it an act of war or something. Do you realize? I'm out of business. I'm out of business until I can get all that stuff replaced.'

The other man nodded his head soberly and leaned across the desk to crush out his cigarette. 'I wonder how your distributor, Strecchio, is taking his loss?'

'Hell, he don't have a nickel of his own in Tri-Coast. It's all organization money, every nickel of it. What's he got to cry about? The discs were mine, not his.'

The man grunted, then eased onto the floor and stepped over a window, thrust his hands into his pockets, and gazed down onto the street. 'You've overlooked the most important item,' he said.

'What have I overlooked?'

'Well, we'd managed to keep your name clean all this time. You're not in our files, you're not on the Attorney General's list—but somehow you got yourself onto Bolan's list. So now you're on everybody's list and in everybody's files. Bolan exposed you, Varone. He blew the whistle on you.'

'That son of a bitch!'

'Yeah. You hadn't thought of that, eh?'

'Listen! You gotta do your job! You hear? We ain't been giving you two grand a month to just...'

'Cut it!' the man demanded, his voice deepening in anger. 'Don't ever tell me what my job is, Zeno. My job is what I make it. And don't ever tell me what you give me. And for God's sake, don't fall apart. Now—we know a lot about the guy already. We know how he operates, we have a ling on some of his vehicles, and pretty soon— pretty soon—well have this Bolan on ice. Don't sweat it.'

Tm calling in the family.'

'That would be your very worse mistake! Why do you think they left you living, Zeno? Don't you see this is what they want you to do?'

'Don't tell me. Your cops—they're pretty hot stuff, eh? They run a tight city, eh?' Varone began laughing in an almost hysterical outburst. He went over to the liquor cabinet, mixed whiskey and water in a careless blend, and gulped half of it down. The other man was glaring at him with an angry frown. Varone wiped his lips with the back of his hand and said, That's the same thing I told 'Milio, you know. Well, Where's poor 'Milio now? Huh? Let me tell you something, Mr. Hot Stuff. Your cops are dead on their ass. Know that? They're from nowhere. I'm going to bring some' real class into this problem. I'm not going to sit back and let this guy dance lightly around, stealing and killing, slapping me on the ass, terrorizing my broads, tearing up my property. I'm not going to do that. You're outta your mind if you think I am.'

'You're making the same panicky mistake 'Milio made,' the visitor pointed out. 'You're deciding to fight the guy on his terms.'

'No, no—not on his terms; my terms, Charlie. We fight on the same terms, see—only I got a hell of a lot more experience. And a lot more class.'

'Class will tell, won't it? You know, Zeno, at this moment you are looking and thinking and talking Just exactly like the small-time hood you really are.'

'Get outta here, you bastard you!' Varone snarled. His hand tightened around the glass, the knuckles whitening with tension.

'You're sure that's what you want?'

'I'm sure.'

'All right, gladly,' replied the other in a pleasant voice, and Charlie Rickert, full-time cop and part-time Maffiano, went quietly to the door and got out of there.

'Hey, I'm ready for some R and R,' Andromede announced. He dropped to the floor In front of the couch and flaked out, face down, his forehead resting on an unflung arm.

'He got rich in one day and he's bitching,' Fontenelli observed, winking at Blancanales.

'But oh, my nerves,' Andromede said in a muffled voice.

Blancanales was delicately applying a burn ointment to a reddened area of Fontenelli's shoulder. 'Don't find many men with hair on their shoulders,' he muttered, then added, 'It's not a bad burn, Chopper. Could a been a lot worse, considering.'

Fontenelli merely grunted.

'Hell, it's three o'clock,' Andromede announced. 'Let's get some sacktime.'

'We're gonna hit 'em, and hit 'em, and keep on hittin' 'em,' Fontenelli declared, in a fair imitation of Bolan's voice, 'until Flower Child starts crying for some sacktime.'

'Up your butt, brother,' Andromede replied quietly.

Bolan entered from the kitchen, carrying a sandwich and coffee. 'How's the shoulder look, Politician?' he asked.

'More pain than damage,' Blancanales assured him.

'But not enough pain to straighten his brain,' Andromede added. He rose to a kneeling position and rocked back on his haunches, staring expectantly at Bolan.

Bolan was positioning a TV tray in front of a chair. He sat down, pulled the tray closer, and sampled the coffee. 'We got lucky,' he said simply.

Fontenelli flexed his massive shoulders and directed a veiled gaze at Bolan. 'The sarge pulled leather on me tonight,' he announced casually.

Deadeye Washington, seated in a large recliner across the room, chuckled and said, 'And you're able to talk about it? I guess you did get lucky, then.'

'Yeah.' Fontenelli was still staring at Bolan. 'I think everybody oughta know—he also pulled me outta one hell of a bad spot. He was free and clear, and he came back to get me out. I'll never forget that, Sarge.'

Bolan swallowed a chunk of sandwich and nodded his head. 'I'd like to think you'd do the same for me, Chopper.'

A grin slowly spread across Fontenelli's dark face. 'Sorry I got out of line. It won't happen again.'

Bolan winked at him, then turned his attention to Gadgets Schwarz. 'Did you get Varone's office doctored up okay?' he asked him.

Schwarz stared solemnly back at Bolan. 'Sure. That jazzed-up joint was a natural. Never saw such an overdecorated layout. He's rigged good. And I got a twelve-hour recorder with a voice-impulse starter up on the roof of the next building. Bloodbrother was assisting, so he knows where it is. We can slip up there twice a day and change the tapes, and that gives us a twenty-four-hour automatic surveillance on the place.'

'Great.' Bolan washed down the last of the sandwich with a swallow of coffee. He glanced at his watch. 'I'd like to have that first tape before ten this morning. Take Bloodbrother to cover you. Oh, and since Giordano is