Nightmare in New York

'This kid outside here,' the bodyguard replied, jerking a thumb at the door. 'Neighborhood punk, I seen 'im around before. He got one of your cards too, and something in a little brown envelope. Says he's gotta give it to you personal.'

Chianti got to his feet and went to the door. A boy of about fifteen was leaning against the wall of the outer office, whistling softly under his breath and ogling the swank decor.

Chianti barked at him, 'Where'd you get these keys, kid?'

'Guy outside,' the boy replied with obvious nervousness. 'Guy in a blue Chivvy. He parked the car out there and gave me the keys. Told me to bring 'em in.' He glanced at a business card in his hand. 'Are you Mr. Chianti?'

'Course I'm Mr. Chianti,' the contractor growled. He crossed to the door and peered out through the glass porthole. Sure as hell, the car was parked over there across the street.

'Well I got this for you too.' The boy was extending a brown envelope.

Chianti reached for it and the boy jerked it back. 'The guy told me to collect twenty bucks.'

'What the hell for?'

'He just told me to make you give me twenty bucks.'

The thing was becoming humorous to the contractor's contractor. He pulled a bill out of his wallet and said, 'Okay, I'll tell you what we'll do. I'll lay the twenty bucks on this table here. You put the envelope down there. Then if you can pick up the twenty without getting your arm broke, then it's yours.'

The boy dropped the envelope and snatched the money in one lightning motion, jerked the door open, and was gone. Chianti was laughing and Totti said, 'You want me to get it back, boss?'

'Naw, Jesus the kid has guts, let him have it.' He picked up the small envelope and said, 'Now I wonder what… ?'

The envelope came open and a small metallic object fell into Chianti's palm. His eyes raised in bafflement to his bodyguard's face and he grunted, 'A marksman's medal. Now what the hell… ?' Then the bafflement turned to something else and the color left his face.

In an awed voice, Totti declared, 'That's Bolan's calling card. They say he leaves those things on — '

'I know what it is!' Chianti screeched.

The bodyguard strode to the door and threw it open.

Chianti yelled, 'Shut that goddamn door!' and ran into his office.

Totti did as he was told and followed his boss inside. Sam the Bomber was standing carefully at the wall near the front window and peering through a slit in the Venetian blind.

In a half-stifled voice he said, 'I don't see nothing.

Look… go back and get Ernie and Nate. Then go out there and check that car out. No. You stay with me. Give Ernie the keys. Tell 'im to be careful.'

Totti jerked his head in an understanding nod and hurried out.

This had to be the living end, the contractor's contractor was thinking. The son of a bitch had come to them. Sam almost had to admire that. He also had to fear it. And why not? There was something very bizarre and downright spooky about a fox that whistled at hounds. A fox, especially, with a six- figure bounty on his pelt.

Bolan was watching from a rooftop several doors down and across the street from the Chianti residence. The neighborhood told Bolan quite a bit about his prey. Sam the Bomber had grown up in this district, and he had seldom ventured more than fifty miles in any direction out of it. Here he was a big fish in a small pond, a local boy made good, and here he felt secure in a familiar environment which he had learned to manipulate to his own advantage. Yes, this told Bolan quite a bit about Sam Chianti.

He grinned when he saw the boy come flying out the front door with a scrap of green clutched in his hand. Bolan had been right about that item, also. Tomorrow Sam might drown the boy's father in the East River and terrorize his mother into white slavery, but today he would play the benign neighborhood patriarch and let the kid con him out of some pocket change because it was good for the image. Yeah, Bolan had known a hundred Sam the Bombers.

Now Bolan lay on the back side of the peaked roof and watched two nervous soldiers come slowly out of the house, peer up and down the street, and cross over to the blue Chevrolet. They walked around it, stared through the windows, and walked around it again. Then the heavy one stood in the street and nervously scanned the neighborhood while the other one, a tall skinny guy raised the hood and peered at the engine. Bolan smiled. They were looking for a bomb. The skinny one slipped under the car on his back and emerged a couple of minutes later at the rear. He got up and brushed off his clothes, then sent a hand signal to someone watching from inside the house.

The chubby one stepped up to the vehicle and opened the door on the passenger's side. He leaned inside, jerked quickly back out, said something to the skinny soldier, and snatched open the rear door to scoop something off the seat.

They had found the wheelman's revolver. Now they stood in a tight huddle and the skinny one was jerking his head in some emphatic argument, then he took something from the other man — the pistol, Bolan supposed — and ran across to the house and went inside. A moment later he re-emerged with another guy in tow, a huge mart with shoulders like a lumberjack and overdeveloped pectoral muscles which caused his arms to swing like an ape as he walked.

The chubby one, meanwhile, had gone to the rear of the vehicle and was just standing there contemplating the trunk door. He said something to the other two as they approached. The musclebound newcomer leaned into the passenger compartment and the skinny guy went to the rear and fitted the key into the trunk door.

Bolan's angle of vision was from above and to the rear of the vehicle. He could not see the men's faces as that trunk lid raised, but he had no trouble seeing the overall reaction to their discovery there. Both of them stiffened and staggered back a step or two, with all the precision of carefully rehearsed choreography, and one of them let out a loud yelp.

The big guy leapt clear of the passenger compartment, hardware now visible in his hand, and moved with surprising agility to join the other two. He saw, and also reacted violently, lunging immediately forward to get both big paws inside there for a tactile verification of what his eyes were telling him. Then he straightened up and turned a frozen stare toward the Chianti residence. A door cracked open over there and a peevish voice called out, 'Well what the hell is it?'

The heavyweight yelled back, 'It's them three engineers from Brooklyn, or what's left of 'em.'

The door at the house immediately clicked shut That decided Bolan's course of action. He grimaced and eased the Beretta up, clamping down on the peak of the roof with his armpit, letting his elbow find comfortable support on the opposite downslope. He had already calculated the firing range at roughly twenty yards. Ordinarily this would be an ideal range for the Beretta — he had worked it in with consistent two-inch groupings at twenty-five yards, pretty accurate for a handgun — but now he had to calculate the effect of the silencer on muzzle velocity and track deviation. And he definitely wanted that silencer in operation, especially now that Sam the Bomber was obviously not going to expose himself. Bolan had not really counted on getting Chianti this time, anyway. It would be enough, for now, to rattle his teeth a bit. And whispering death, Bolan had found, had a peculiar psychological effect on Mafia hardmen.

He was sighting down the short range now, allowing for gross error through the silencer, and knowing that he would have to get all three in rapid fire if he was to get them at all. They were still clumped at the rear of the vehicle, the heavyweight continuing to stare toward the house, the other two darting nervous glances into the bloody trunk.

Bolan fired once, twice, three times in quick succession — the 9mm Parabellums singing down to the street on slightly diverging paths and each finding solid-soft matter to stop their travel.

The heavyweight yelled something in a twangy falsetto and pitched forward with both hands scrabbling for the raised trunk door, then he fell away to the side and rolled onto his back. The other two had gone down without a sound, the skinny one crumpling onto the rear bumper and hanging there, his clothing apparently caught on something; the thick one folding down on rubber legs to sprawl face down in the street.

Bolan was not yet done with the Human Engineering Contractors. The Beretta angled toward the far side of the street and continued its abrupt little coughs. The big picture window fronting Chianti's office began sprouting a rash of round holes, then shattered with a loud crash. An instant later, the glass porthole of the massive door