Nightmare in New York

girls if this guy walked out alive. Their lives would not be worth a nickel.

Bolan told the brownsuited pimp from Brooklyn, 'I've nothing personal against you either, soldier,' the Beretta phutted softly through its silencer and Brownsuit died without even knowing it, a high-velocity Parabellum angling in through the bridge of the nose and displaying several cubic inches of brain tissue in painless and instant death. If Bolan had to kill cold, this was the way he preferred.

He pulled the suitcoat up over the guy's head and stuffed in a small throw-pillow to lessen the spread of blood, tying the bundle into place with the coatsleeves. Then he put on his own jacket and stepped over the body for a tete-a-tStewith Tony Boy Laccardo, 'just down th' hall.'

He found him there, and killed him there, without a word and without a warning, as Tony Boy raised surprised eyes from a racing form. Bolan shoved the remains into a janitor's closet where he found a huge mop with which he sponged up the pool of blood on the floor of the hallway. Then he returned to the apartment, transferred Brownsuit to the same dress cart which had brought Bolan there, and he stopped off at the janitor's closet for a quick pickup of Tony Boy. He tossed the mop in too, covered the bodies with rags from the closet shelf, and took his cargo into the elevator down to the garage.

A dull-faced attendant glanced at Bolan without curiosity as he wheeled the cart to a loading dock near the exit.

Bolan yelled over to him, 'I gotta bring my car in.'

The attendant moved his head in a bored nod and went back to his funny book or whatever he was reading.

Bolan went out and proceeded unhurriedly to the corner of the building, then along the front toward a waiting blue Chevrolet idling in a no-parking zone at the curb. He approached from the rear, opened the right-front door, and slid in beside the wheelman. The guy did a double take on his unexpected guest, the eyes freezing still on the Beretta.

An icy voice told him, 'I want Sam the Bomber's address, and I want it with no shitting around.'

The wheelman's voice came choked and ragged and with no shitting around as he replied, 'Look in the glove box, I think there's some cards.'

Bolan looked and found a thin stack of business cards, embossed with Chianti's name in fancy gold lettering and the interesting announcement: Human Engineering Contractor. Bolan found that almost funny, but he pocketed one of the cards and slammed the door on the glove compartment with no show of humor and told his temporary companion, 'Okay, let's roll. Around the building and to the garage entrance, west side.' He restrained the driver for a moment to pull a small calibre pistol out of the man's waistband and toss it into the back seat, then he waggled a finger at the wheelman and the vehicle lurched forward.

Moments later they were easing into the underground garage and backing to the loading ramp. Bolan took the keys from the ignition, pushed the man out and slid out behind him, then handed him the keys and commanded, 'Open the trunk.'

The wheelman meekly accepted the keys then went reluctantly to the rear of the car, his eyes searching for some hint of help in the offing but finding nothing of comfort. The only other sign of human presence was the attendant in the little glassed-in office, hunched over his desk and utterly absorbed in something there.

Bolan leapt onto the dock and positioned the cart with his foot, then told the wheelman, 'Get up here.'

The Mafiosogave Bolan a questioning look, but did as he was told without overt challenge to that indisputable authority, even though the Beretta was no longer in view. He joined his captor and awaited further instructions.

They came coldly and simply, 'dean that junk out of my cart.'

The man shrugged and seized a hand full of rags and tossed them into the trunk of the car. Then he saw the blood on his hands, and his knees buckled and he almost fell. Calmly the death voice commanded, 'All of it!'

The guy already knew what was beneath the remaining rags. He shivered and clawed them away from the corpses, then quickly averted his gaze and whispered, 'My God, oh my God.'

Bolan's jacket opened and the Beretta peered out at the shaken man. 'You've got about one heartbeat to get busy, soldier.'

The man nodded and sent furtive glances in all directions, then leaned into the cart and lifted out Tony Boy and set him in the trunk with a distasteful grunt. Brownsuit was a bit heavier and the wheelman's legs were going rubbery on him. Bolan lent a hand and they got the big man fitted in atop Tony Boy, then Bolan put his prisoner to work mopping out the cart. When the job was finished, the bloody rags and the soggy mop went into the trunk over Brownsuit and Tony Boy, and Bolan told the wheelman, 'Okay, you too. Get in there.'

The guy's face went dead white and he gurgled, 'God no, not that, don't make me get in therel'

Bolan told him, 'You won't mind,' and phutted a painless Parabellum through an eyesocket. The guy fell over into the trunk and Bolan helped him stay there, shoving him on in beside his companions and doubling the legs over to clear the latching mechanism.

A muscle twitched in his jaw and he muttered, 'Pure war, Rachel, is pure hell. How are youmaking out?'

Then he closed the trunk and returned the dress cart to the apartment. Moments later he was behind the wheel of the blue Chevrolet and tooling out of the garage. The attendant looked up and nodded at him as he passed, and Bolan waved.

He pulled out into the street. He took out Chianti's business card for another look at the address engraved thereon, then he grunted and swung north toward the Triborough Bridge. He did not know the Bronx too well, but he would find Sam the Bomber Chianti, and he would deliver this hot shipment of rapidly cooling cargo.

Corpses were something that Sam the Bomber would understand. He had trafficked in them for almost as long as Mack Bolan had been alive.

Sam was going to discover, though, that the supply was beginning to greatly exceed the demand.

And he was going to discover that damned quick.

Chapter Four Engineers

Sam the Bomber began his climb to underworld prominence in the early 1940's, in a nation at war and suffering the inconvenience of a rationing of vital commodities — things such as butter, meat, gasoline, tires, sugar, coffee, and many luxury items. Commodity rationing was one of the minor hardships of a world at war, to be sure, but many Americans could not accept even this small sacrifice to national survival. Instead, they made rich men out of petty crooks by satisfying their selfish appetites with black market purchases of stolen commodities and/or stolen or counterfeit ration coupons. So proliferate were these black markets in wartime scarcities that rival marketeers in some areas of the nation engaged one another in territorial contests and gang wars to equal the bloody battles of the prohibition era. The American Mafia, ever alert to the smell of quick money, lost no time in dominating this lucrative side-effect of the war, and neighborhood punks like Sam Chianti found readymade careers awaiting them in this 'little world war' of black market racketeering.

Chianti pulled his first muscle job at the age of sixteen, when he threw a fire bomb into an automobile repair garage belonging to one Adolph Bruhman, a small time Bronx businessman who refused to honor black market gasoline coupons for unlimited sales to customers of Freddie Gambella, then an obscure underling in the Mavnarola Family. That fire bomb killed Bruhman, three employees, and two customers — and endeared the precocious hoodlum to Gambella, who was already busily establishing himself in the line of succession to Mavnarola's crown. Little Sammy Chianti, seventh grade dropout and neighborhood terrorist, became known as Sam the Bomber and participated in another fifty-six slayings before attaining legal age. He was adjudged sub-intelligent and unfit for military service by his local draft board in 1944 and again in 1946, but he was intelligent enough to repeatedly break virtually every law of his society over a period of some thirty years without once being convicted of a major crime. And he possessed intelligence enough to remain alive and viable in the ever-shifting structure and