Save the Children (3 page)

The safety glass of the Vette's windshield disintegrated into thousands of diamond cubes that peppered the sports car's interior. A frigid blast suddenly howled in through the vacant space left by the shattered glass.

Bolan raised his head from where he had ducked at the first sight of the man aiming the shotgun. He felt something warm trickle down the front of his face but he could not brush it away. He flicked his head, throwing off the thin stream of blood before it could drip into his eyes.

He triggered the Beretta.

More golden flame licked the blackness before the gunner, still leaning out of the speeding Lincoln, could let loose another round.

The Beretta's 9 mm parabellums sieved the mobster's upper torso.

The shotgun flew out of his hands onto the roadway, followed by the hood's corpse.

The Vette rumbled over both without slowing.

Another glance in the rearview mirror showed Bolan that the gunfire had hardly discouraged the police cruiser closing in from behind, less than a quarter mile now, eating up the gap like a shark drawn by the scent of blood.

Bolan could see other police car lights flashing both from behind the cruiser on his tail and from a mile or so farther north along Lakeshore Drive.

The Lincoln and the Vette would be boxed in within the minute!

But Bolan could not erase from his mind the image of a dark-haired, bravely struggling woman those goons had tossed into the car.

It would only be the wheelman and the woman in that Lincoln now.

Bolan hoped she was still alive.

He was determined not to give up this chase until he found out for sure.

He squeezed off another burst from the Beretta, at the Lincoln's tires this time.

Sparks told him that the bullets found their mark.

And the tires were bulletproof, too.

Suddenly, the Lincoln began slowing down, wobbling erratically as if the driver had lost control, then regained it.

The Lincoln quit the roadway at a decreasing rate of speed, bouncing crazily down a grassy incline to come to a complete stop on the unlighted, deserted stretch of beach hugging the icy Lake Michigan shore.

There was no moon tonight. The only illumination came from streetlights along Lakeshore Drive and the high-rise apartment and condo buildings across the way.

Bolan holstered the Beretta, gripping his steering wheel with both hands. He downshifted, guiding the sports car off the pavement and along the Lincoln's tracks to halt some ten feet from the luxury vehicle.

He left the Corvette hurriedly but cautiously, staying low near the dark sandy ground.

Sirens closing in from three directions toward this inky beach seemed already on top of him.

He unleathered Big Thunder and drew a bead on the Lincoln.

"Out," he growled loud enough to be heard inside the armor-plated vehicle.

He expected one of two responses from inside the Lincoln: a door flying open with a blaze of gunfire behind it, or a more cautious response that would tell him all he needed to know.

When the front passenger door of the Lincoln inched open hesitantly, he could not check the soft sigh of relief that escaped his dry throat. He stayed his finger on the AutoMag's trigger.

The woman slid out of the Lincoln and he caught a brief, close-up glimpse of her face now. Under normal circumstances he would have considered her pretty, but at that moment her features were tense, like a taut mask; her eyes did not leave the fierce-looking weapon he held in both hands even as she obeyed his brusque command to leave the vehicle.

He lowered the pistol when the car's interior light also showed him the form of the driver slumped un-moving over the Lincoln's steering wheel.

A regular pocketknife protruded from the base of the man's neck. He was dead.

The woman must have plunged it in after finding herself alone in the back seat when Bolan had blown away the guy firing on him with the pump shotgun. She had obviously killed the driver with one well-placed stab, regained control of the Lincoln, clambered over into the front seat and guided the car off the parkway and down here onto the beach.

Some woman, thought Bolan.

He stepped toward her and kicked the car door shut, cutting off the dim glow from the car's interior.

The woman did not cringe from him.

"Wh-who are you? You're not one of them... Not one of the police..."

"I'm a friend," he told her. "What's your name?"

Something in his voice made her respond without hesitation.

"Lana. Lana Garner," she breathed.

She was not in shock but close to it, Bolan sensed. He grabbed her hand. She did not resist.

"We've got to get away," he told her. "Or you can wait for the police if you want to."

"No! Not the police!"

"Come on, then," he urged.

He started away from the Lincoln, heading north along the beach in the direction of more residential areas that bordered Lakeshore Drive.

If they could just elude the cops closing in on them...

The woman came with him, keeping pace, their footfalls muted by the sand that slowed their pace.

"What did those men want with you?" Bolan asked as they began jogging along, the AutoMag ready in his right fist.

"They... caught me," she panted. "I was... planting a homing device."

"The Porsche?"

He sensed her nod in the gloom.

"The senator's car," she said.

Then the police car, the one that had been tagging so close behind the Vette and the Lincoln, skidded to a noisy stop on Lakeshore Drive on the higher ground just above them, its headlights stabbing out into the darkness over the beach like angry alien eyes, joined a moment later by a mounted spotlight that commenced probing the night.

Bolan released the woman's hand.

"Get down," he warned.

She faded away into the gloom, somewhere at his back.

"Please, don't hurt those policemen..." she beseeched.

"Don't worry."

Big Thunder roared once.

The spotlight shattered, blacking out.

Bolan turned to urge the woman to resume their flight.

He could not see her.

She was nowhere near him.

She was gone.

Bolan shook his head, puzzled at this new development.

He could hear scores of other police cars, their sirens wailing, shrieking to abrupt stops above his position. Urgent voices and slamming doors told him that these cruisers were disgorging backup policemen. They hit the pavement running, and now he could see them closing in on this night-shrouded stretch of beach, toting rifles and angry, determined grimaces.

Bolan resumed his full-tilt jog along the lapping water line, continuing north.

He had done what he could for the woman, he told himself.

She had chosen not to accompany him.

So be it.

David Parelli was next.

So far tonight, the up-and-coming Mafia scumbag had been spared his due, and now it looked as if a U.S. senator was tied in to the rumors of "something big" going down in Chicago.

Bolan saw no reason to discount what the woman had briefly told him.

But before Parelli's turn came, the Executioner had to elude a cordon of Chi-town cops.

Most of them would be drawn first to the Vette and the Lincoln and the bodies, sure, but with so many trigger-happy cops against one lone figure trying to escape, and who had no intention of fighting back, Bolan knew he would need all the luck fate could afford to toss his way during the next short minutes.

The situation reminded him of Nam as he kept heading north across the sand.

Deeper into the night.

Bolan wore a combat black skinsuit, specially designed to his specifications. With blackface cosmetic and the infrared night-vision device goggles blocking out the whites of his eyes, the suit rendered him as one with the gloom of this moonless hour.

He wore the AutoMag holstered and tied low to his right hip, old-west gunfighter style; the Baretta rode in its speed rig beneath his left arm, near a sheathed combat knife, and canvas pouches at his waist carried extra ammo for his weapons. A wire garrote, a climbing rope and an array of grenades on military webbing slung across his chest completed his gear.

It had not been luck alone that guided him along that Lake Michigan beach away from a police dragnet. It had been equal parts luck and the skills honed by experience in hellgrounds that stretched from Nam through time, and too many other bloodbaths since, to the here and now.

The big man in black crouched near a line of oak trees fronting someone's expansive yard, across a country lane from the Parelli estate.

Bolan had adhered to his established modus operandi upon arriving in the Chicago area earlier that evening. He had established a "safe drop"...

in this case a north-side motel room...

where he had stashed his artillery and equipment before renting two cars. The backup vehicle was left at the motel with his war gear, and he had used the Corvette for what he had intended to be his hit-and-git on the New Age Center, where his intel had said Parelli kept shop most every evening.

It was a close call for the Executioner on that stretch of beach off Lakeshore Drive.

It took Bolan almost half an hour to pull away, so tightly had the police cordoned off the area, but the night was on Bolan's side, as were his experience and expertise.

He passed within a dozen feet of one police car, and closer than that past some rifle-carrying cops who did not see the wraithlike shifting of shadows as the night-hitter blended in and through their ranks.

A cab ride had brought him to the safe drop.

Then directly to this snoozing stretch of millionaires' row in suburban Lake Forest.

The fortress that was the Parelli mansion looked to Bolan like some medieval castle across the frosty street. The ghostly scene shimmered through the lenses of the NVD goggles in the chilly November night.

Head weapon for tonight's hit: an Ingram Model 10 submachine gun equipped with a MAC sound suppressor for night work. The short, compact weapon hung on a strap across his left shoulder and under his right arm so that it could ride free when he wasn't gripping it. The SMG could be palmed into firing position instantly with one flick of the wrist.

He had parked his second rental car, another Corvette, a quarter of a mile away and approached his position, slightly south of the Parelli acreage, for a quick recon of the fortress he now knew he would have to penetrate.

Objective: termination of a Mafia high-ranker named David Parelli.

The Executioner had missed on his visit to the New Age Center.

Parelli had been lucky so far tonight, but Bolan intended delivering the guy some bad luck real soon, even if he had to tear the Windy City apart to find the punk.

At first, the Parelli property did not look too different from any number of similarly walled estates in this neck of the woods. The rich like their privacy.

But the aura of respectability ended when you got a closer look at the main gate, which reminded Bolan more of a penitentiary than of a millionaire's manor.

The drive to the gateway was angled so that any vehicle seeking forceful entrance could not pick up enough speed to ram through. Entrance onto this property was not gained; it was permitted.

Two sentries could be seen strolling back and forth just inside the gate.

From his vantage point, Bolan observed that each man toted a rifle slung over his shoulder. Those two sentries looked as if they were the only ones at the gate, and they did not seem particularly keyed-up or jumpy as a car happened to pass by while Bolan watched.

He read this one of two ways.

Either word of the attack on the New Age Center had not yet reached Parelli, which seemed highly unlikely, given that it had happened more than an hour ago and Bolan had served notice of his presence in Chicago by leaving one of the Executioner's calling cards, the marksman's medal; or, far more likely, the lack of beefed-up security here meant Parelli was not at home.

This did not deter Bolan.

He had to penetrate the Parelli mansion, find Parelli.

The wraith in blacksuit started to move out from cover of the line of leafless oak trees, then checked himself.

Headlights splashed across the wall of the estate as another car approached.

This sedan moved slowly enough for Bolan to get the license plate number.

He watched the car pull over and park alongside the wall about midway between Bolan's position and the front gate.

The driver, whoever he was, killed the headlights and engine of the car.

Bolan wondered what was going on. A new player in the game?

He eased himself past a collection of garbage bags that had been set out for the city truck the next day. He wanted a better look at this new arrival.

It seemed to him too soon for another run-in with the mystery lady who called herself Lana Garner, but the way this bloodhunt for a Mafia target was unraveling, Bolan could not be sure about anything.

He gained the southwest corner of the wall and moved soundlessly along its base, advancing on the parked car from the rear and to the right.

He paused, the silenced Ingram now snug in his grip. Through his NVD goggles, he made out the form of a single person in the car, sitting behind the steering wheel.

Male, though Bolan could not discern the man's facial features.

The faint strains of an old-fashioned ballad floated across to Bolan. He saw a brief flare as the man lit a cigarette and continued to stare at the gate. The two rifle-toters inside the compound glanced his way, then seemed to lose interest, as if they recognized the car and accepted its presence here.

The man appeared at ease inside his car, his overcoat collar snug around his neck, smoking his cigarette lazily.

On the back of the car, Bolan saw a bumper sticker that read: I Am a Policeman and Proud of It.

The nightstalker's gut tightened, angry, like a fist inside of him.

Was the dude in this car the worst wart of all, he wondered. Filth who abused public trust every bit as much as the bribed politicos who kept the system oiled to further their own aims for more power at the expense of others while criminals ran free to maim and murder?

The police in bed with the Mob?

But why would he advertise? Or was he a cop who numbered among his duties keeping an eye on the Parelli estate?

There was no way Bolan could be sure.

He faded farther back from the car, moving around the corner of the wall to distance himself from the guards and the man in the sedan.

He stepped away from the wall and unhitched the looped climbing rope with the three-pronged metal hook from his military webbing.

He twirled the rope twice above his head and a loose-armed toss released the end with the hook in the direction of the wall's top. One of the grapnel's sharp points bit into the brick with a barely audible metallic clink.

After a pair of tugs to test the hold, he silently scrambled up the wall at full speed.

He gained the top of the wall, and lay flat. A few moments later, he straightened into a sitting position and reset the climbing device on his webbing. Then he snapped his wrist around so the MAC-10 filled his right fist.

He dropped loose and easy to the ground just inside the walled perimeter, landing in a crouched position...

a spectral shift in the frozen darkness, nothing more...

his penetration wholly undetected by the sentries. He saw them across the distance where they huddled together for warmth under a single light by the gate a couple of hundred yards to the north.

And yeah, those two hardguys were alone.

The night penetrator scanned what he could make out of the grounds of the estate, his MAC-10 and his senses probing the night for danger.

A narrow asphalt path wound its way through a miniforest of towering fir trees.

Ahead, one lone second-floor window of the Parelli home glowed in the gloom.

Bolan left the base of the wall, advancing on the house on a zigzag course from tree to tree, ever wary, but finding the security force conspicuous by its absence.

He turned over in his mind again what he knew about the man he had come to Chicago to kill, but it was not enough to give him a clue as to where Parelli would have gone to ground, if he was not here.

Bolan knew far more about David Parelli's late father.

Vito "The Butcher" Parelli had first come to Depression-era police notice when he'd been collared during a raid on Al Capone's old headquarters at the Montmarte Cafe in Cicero. Parelli had been sitting guard outside of Scarface Al's office, a tommy gun propped across his lap.

Vito had not opened fire with the Thompson on the cops, of course. That only happened in the movies. Vito and the score of other bodyguards on the speakeasy's premises were there in case rival bootleggers showed up looking for trouble, not to shoot it out with the cops. Hell, the fix was in.

The Butcher had gone on from such humble beginnings to claw and kill his way to the top of the heap of the ever-warring Chicago underworld, gaining hold of all the strings after repeal when the various bootleg factions had come together to organize into the multi-billion-dollar-per-annum business the Mafia had become in the years since.

Anyone who didn't like the way Vito ran things, well, that was how he got the name, The Butcher. Vito Parelli had killed, and ordered killed, plenty when he had to, and he had to a lot to keep hold of the power he wielded without mercy or compassion.

Vito had married a young beauty during the forties...

the daughter of one of his "business" cronies...

and she had borne him a son. Vito's iron grip on the Chi underworld had remained intact, repulsing anyone foolish enough to try for a piece of what Don Vito would not let go.

Until a power even greater than that of Vito The Butcher came along to snatch that power from him along with everything else in the meanest, roughest way to go.

Vito died after an agonized, protracted battle against cancers in his body that had done what the law and his Mob competitors had been unable to do.

What was known about David Parelli, now thirty-seven years of age, was that this father's son was not of the old school, not of his father's time.

At least, not on the surface.

David Parelli did not carry the almost standard nickname invariably bestowed upon young men on their way up through the Mafia ranks.

This Parelli was single and lived at home with his mother, had a college degree, business associates in the very top echelons of city politics and, according to Bolan's most recent intel, was driven by ambition and a war chest that wouldn't quit.

He was the kind of cannibal who was a lot more merciless than thugs like his father or Capone ever used to be because this new generation of Parellis knew how to play all the games the way respectable people played them.

Parelli had used the family name, sure, but had grabbed his own slice of the pie with a savagery all the more dangerous because of the finesse that masked his evil.

Bolan gained the end of the house that was hidden from view of those around the front gate.

Except for the illumination of the single second-floor window he had noted on his approach, the residence appeared unlighted, not even a porch light.

He knew something about the way Mafia households were run. He had been waging his war against these types for some time and had walked among them via the role camouflage of one of the elite Mob hit men...

the legendary Black Aces...

on more than a few occasions.

It was not unusual to keep such a relatively low profile as the Parelli household seemed to be keeping this evening.

The walled perimeter and armed sentries were not there for show by any means, and the joint would be set up to go "hard" at a nod from the boss. There would be accommodation for street soldiers brought in to protect the premises, if it was decided that a situation warranted "hitting the mattresses." But that kind of show of force was frowned on by the new breed of the family, except in the most extreme cases.

It appeared to Bolan now that he would encounter but a skeleton security force here tonight, which did not mean they would be any less formidable if bullets started flying.

He had come prepared for that, but he now considered making this a soft penetration if he did not find Parelli on the premises.

There was a door on this side of the house.

Bolan moved stealthily toward it, opened the screen door, tried the doorknob and found it locked. He unsheathed his knife and in a matter of seconds he had the inside door open.

He started to step into the side entrance when he heard faint footfalls coming in his direction from around the rear of the house. He sheathed the knife and faded back against the wall.

A sentry, armed with a rifle similar to those at the front gate, ambled around the corner of the house, not paying much attention to anything on his rounds except the cold. The guy was blowing into his clenched fists.

Bolan saw the guard clearly thanks to the NVD goggles, and when the sentry moved abreast of him, the Executioner stepped up behind the punk and brought down a stiff-edged palm at the base of the guy's skull. The guard grunted and his knees buckled as if his legs were made of rubber.

Bolan caught the man's body before it hit the ground. The Executioner dragged the unconscious sentry behind some bushes against the house. He knew the yardman would be out of it far longer than the time required for Bolan to complete his soft probe.

The nightsuited figure let himself quietly into the house, letting the MAC-10 hang loose from its ready position beneath his right arm. He unholstered the Beretta and had a look around.