Poison Justice

Hobbs cleared his throat, staring at the game. “With all due respect, sir, I think there’s a lot of anger in you.”

Peary bared his teeth at the kid, wondering if he was serious or being a smart-ass. He looked at the board while running a hand over the white bristles of a scalp furrowed in spots by some punk’s bullets long ago. Double sixes might get him back in the game.

He was shaking the dice when Marelli shouted an order for somebody to grab him a bottle of red wine from the cellar and some more cannolis while they were at it. Peary looked at Grevey and Markinson, wondering who would make a move as butler or if they had enough pride not to kiss ass. To their credit, he found both marshals with their faces buried in newspapers. They glanced at each other from their stools at the kitchen counter, passing the telepathy for the other to go fetch. Peary heard the thunder of his heart in his ears, then The Butcher cranked the volume high enough to bring down an eagle soaring over Windham High Peak.

It was more than he could take. The kid had to have seen it coming, but Peary didn’t give a damn if a missile plowed through the roof. He was up and marching, the .45 out, the kid bleating something in his slipstream. The marshals were dropping their papers now, jowls hanging, but Peary was already sweeping past them.

Marelli was squawking for someone to shake a leg, when Peary drew a bead on the giant screen TV. The peal of .45 wrath drowned out the shouting and cursing around him. Marelli leaped to his feet, dousing his flamingos and island girls with blood-red wine. Peary became even more enraged when he saw the picture still flickering behind the smoke and leaping sparks. One more hollowpoint did the trick.

For what seemed like an hour suspended in time, Peary savored the shock and bedlam. He found less than ten feet separated himself from The Butcher and considered ending it right there. Marelli was bellowing, but it was clear to Peary he didn’t know whether to shit or go blind. The kid, the marshals and the other agents on sentry duty around the lodge were now swarming into the living room, hurling themselves into a buffer zone between him and the wise guy.

Peary wrenched himself free of someone’s grasp. They were all shouting at him, arms flapping, hands grabbing whatever they could. Marelli was already launched into a stream of profanity, threats and outrage, interspersed with taking the Lord’s name in vain, among other blasphemous obscenities. He might have turned his back on Church and God, but he itched to shoot the hood for blasphemy alone.

Peary heard them asking if he was nuts, what was wrong with him and so on. Turning away and heading for the door to grab some fresh air, he heard Marelli railing how he wanted a new and bigger television, and he wanted that lunatic bastard off his detail or he wasn’t talking to nobody. Peary encountered a marshal with an AR-15 who shuffled out of his path, but stared at him like something that had just stepped off a UFO.

“What?” Peary shouted, holstering his weapon. “You never see a TV get shot before?”

Peary rolled outside, breathing in the clean, cool mountain air. Alone, he laughed at the chaos he heard still bringing down the roof. What a few of them in there didn’t know was a lot, he thought.

Losing a television was soon to become the least of Marelli’s woes.

PETER CABRIANO TOOK a look at the bloody mass of naked flesh hung up by bound hands on the car lift, and believed he could read the future.

The empire was either his to save, or his to watch go down in flames. That was the problem, he knew, with narcotics trafficking. It built kingdoms, but it also tore them down. For some time now, he’d been scrambling to avoid this day, branching out into other avenues for fast cash. But narcotics had been the Family’s bread and butter since the early eighties, and without the Colombians there would be no promise now of steering the Family into other business ventures, which he knew were the wave of the future.

There was no time to dwell on rewards not yet earned; he needed quick solutions. One answer was already in the works, but where there was one loose tongue he feared a whole goddamn chorus of squealers was out there ready to bring the walls crashing down.

Even though his Italian loafers were covered in rubber galoshes, he veered away from the oil splotches, found a dry spot in the bay, stood and considered the dilemma while his two soldiers watched him, awaiting orders. He was forty-six years old, but with a lot of life to live, two young sons to think of bringing into the business and worlds still to conquer. The keys to the kingdom were recently handed to him after his father died behind bars in Sing Sing from testicular cancer and complications of syphilis. The death three years earlier of his younger brother had left him sole heir, and no man who considered himself a man ever let a sister anywhere near the handling of Family business. He wondered how the old man would take charge of the present crisis. Two things he knew for sure. One, the old man would never snitch. Two, he would take the fight to his enemies. Part of the problem was figuring out who his enemies were.

The fiasco, he realized, all began when Marelli got popped by the FBI. Or maybe it started before that. How in the world he let himself get talked into the purchase and sale of what came from a classified spook base in Nevada, and in whose hands it would end up….

So what, he decided, he loved money. The focus now needed to be put on what Marelli had on him.

Cabriano ran his hands over his cashmere coat, gauging the number Brutaglia and Marino had done on Marelli’s lifelong friend. A mashed nose, both eyes swollen shut, blood streaming off his chin where his lips were split open like tomatoes.

“Bruno. Wake him up.”

Cabriano took a step back as Marino hefted a large metal bucket and hurled the contents. The effect was instant and jolting. Cabriano listened to Berosa’s startled cry echo through the empty garage, the man shuddering against the sudden ice water shower, eyes straining to open.

“The beating’s as good as it’s gonna get, Tony. Talk to me about Jimmy. You don’t, I think you know what’s coming.” Cabriano listened as Berosa cursed, called him a punk. He chuckled and gave Brutaglia the nod. “You know, Tony,” he said, as he saw Brutaglia lift the small propane torch from a work bench, then twist the knob, a tongue of blue flame leaping from the shadows, “Jimmy, he figures he can just walk out on me, retire to a beach somewhere, the Feds throwing their arms around him. Maybe he thinks he’s gonna land some big book-movie deal, be a big star, a bunch of Hollywood starlets giving him blow jobs around the clock, telling him how great he is. He thinks he’s gonna rat me out, bring me down, I end up doing life like my father while he’s living the good life.”

“You’re nothing like your father.”

“Whatever you say, Tony. Maybe you’re right, but if you are it’s because my old man didn’t have to worry about snakes like you. He surrounded himself with loyal soldiers, stand-up guys who would go the distance, piss on a Fed’s shoe if they even glared their way. What the hell happened to you and Jimmy, huh? Even the young guys, they thought of you two as legends. I don’t get it. How do guys your age end up with a coke habit, anyhow? All your experience and you two get careless, don’t even know when the Feds have every inch of everything you own bugged.”

“It wasn’t the Feds who came to us. Way he told it, Jimmy went to them.”

“Then why is Jimmy stabbing me in the fucking back?”

“Think about it. Your father, he would never have approved of who you’re dealin’ with, what you’re prepared to help them do.”

“It’s business, Tony, business. My old man didn’t care for dope either, but he didn’t mind using coke money to build himself a hotel-casino, did he?”

“Different business.”

“How?”

“You punk, you don’t get it, you don’t have any honor.”

“You’re telling me Jimmy got all bent out of shape because of my new business partners?”

“What you’re planning…your father would have shot you himself.”

Cabriano was growing weary of the insults. No matter what, he knew tough when he saw it. He could burn the nads off Berosa, but the man wasn’t going to break. Besides, the old soldier knew he was dead already.

He saw Marino moving toward Berosa, waved him off. “I don’t suppose you’re gonna tell me where the disk is?”

Berosa laughed. “Why don’t you ask Jimmy?”

“That’s a good idea, Tony. See, what you don’t know is before the sun comes up Jimmy’s taking whatever his big dreams to hell with him. I’ve got people on the inside, Tony,” he said, and saw the stare come back, cold but believing. “Yeah, there’s still a few Feds walking around willing to take my money. I know exactly where Jimmy is. Seeing as how he wants to live out his golden years so bad, I’m thinking if I get my hands on him, put a little fire to his balls he’ll take me by the hand and walk me straight to the disk. What you did, Tony, you just told me you two are the only ones in my house I had to worry about.”

“You’re a disgrace to your father’s memory.”

Cabriano snapped his fingers at Marino to give him his .45. The old soldier was still cursing him when he took the big stainless-steel piece. Then Cabriano silenced the loose tongue with the first of three rounds through the face.

2

All the years the man in black had been in the killing business and the evil of the savage opposition never failed to amaze, sicken and anger.

Where it was all headed, whatever the fate of humankind, he couldn’t say, nor he thought, was it his place to venture a guess. He was a soldier, from beginning to whatever his own end of the line. As such, he believed common sense, basic decency and having eyes to see and ears to hear, could read into the telltale signs, sift through all the deceit and schemes of the age, and figure out where and how bad it could all get. No matter what the spin or political correctness of the time, no matter how much money was tossed around to turn eyes blind, two and two still equaled four in his game. Yes, there were subtle forms of evil spawning across the land, luring the impressionable or the weak and naive who floundered on the fence toward the abyss. But it was the leviathans of terrorism, international crime, mass murder and other forms of sabotage against the national security of the United States and the free world that was part and parcel of his War Everlasting.

Being only flesh and blood, there were days, however, he woke up and wondered how it had all come to this, where those in charge of running societies, those with power and money and the chance to make a real difference would have the world at large believe right was wrong, wrong was right, up was down and so forth. But they said the Devil was a liar, and his greatest lie was making man believe he didn’t exist.

In the realm he walked it was clear a powerful force of darkness never slept. To him the laws of good and evil were as immutable and ironclad as Mother Nature. Up the stakes from murder of innocents by automatic weapons to weapons of mass destruction, morph a drug dealer or local hood into a dictator savaging his country in genocide, starvation and torture, and only the face of evil and the numbers of victims and depth of atrocity changed. Again, it wasn’t his duty or destiny to be a preacher, politician, or Sunday-morning talking head. But there was clear and convincing evidence enough, from Baghdad to Bogotá to Beijing, that certain and many inhuman factors were hard at work on the planet to push the fate of humankind toward a point of no return.

For the man named Mack Bolan, also known as the Executioner, only a few good men and women rising up to tackle the extremes in action of the Seven Deadly Sins could somehow, someway, save the future, steer it all back on course before it was too late. Without question he counted himself among their ranks.

Big Tony’s Used Foreign Imports was Bolan’s launch pad for the new campaign. It was planted in a decent section of Brooklyn, a sprawling lot carved out between 6th and 7th Avenue, Prospect Park a short walk southeast. But the Cabriano Family hadn’t seized their fortune on turning overpriced European wheels. For a moment, as the Executioner crouched behind the garbage bin at the end of the alley, the sound-suppressed Beretta 93-R out and waiting targets inside the garage, he felt a sense of déjà vu. A hundred lifetimes ago and too many ghosts of the good, bad and innocent to count, the soldier had taken on the Mafia. Back then, he’d been a one-man army, waging war against an invisible empire, at first striking down la Cosa Nostra out of a blood debt owed to his family.

Gradually, as the enemy body count grew, he came to see the true scourge of evil that was the Mob. These men who spoke of honor and respect and loyalty, even attended church—baptisms and marriages before the priest—corrupted everyone they touched, consumed every life that stood in their way to grabbing more profit, more power on the blood and terror of others. Back then it was gambling, prostitution, drugs, murder for hire, bribery, the usual list of sins. Over the years, between his own war and the savaging of the Mob by the Justice Department, the Mafia had nearly been decapitated.

Nearly.

Like when throwing the light on cockroaches, they skittered underground in recent years, erecting legitimate businesses to clean dirty and blood money, sons of Dons and capos earning law and business degrees. Armed with education, and with an eye toward the future, the inheritors reached out to incorporate other homegrown gangs of thugs into their ranks, being equal opportunity employers in the new politically correct age. They dealt in wholesale shipments of narcotics from Latin America drug cartels, joined hands with other criminal organizations as far away as Moscow, reaping a big fat buck the common denominator, one for all. At present, with the insatiable hunger for weapons by terrorists that could wipe out tens of thousands, the game had grown even more deadly serious.

That, Bolan knew, was pretty much the gist of Peter Cabriano’s rise to power and present status on the bad-guy list. With his father having wasted away behind bars, a younger brother who was a criminal defense attorney, but died—irony or justice?—from a cocaine overdose, Cabriano was king of New York. And he was reaching out to some of America’s worst enemies.

Bolan had reconned the lot and surrounding block, but searched the premises again. Three gunshots, muffled slightly by the brick wall, had rung out moments ago. Assuming Big Tony Berosa had gone to judgment, Bolan watched the side door open, disgorging the Don of the day. He could have taken both Cabriano and his wheelman right then, but the Executioner had plans for the Don’s future.

Six to eight stops were mentally penciled in on the soldier’s hit list. Depending on how each situation shaped up, who gave him answers to questions that had drawn him into this mission, and provided he was blessed by good fortune—meaning he lived through the first couple of rounds—Bolan intended to net and skin some of the biggest man-eaters in a terror triangle that was, in his mind, both long in coming, and rife with apocalyptic overtones.

Feeling the weight of the mammoth .44 Magnum Desert Eagle riding on his hip, the weapon shielded from the naked eye by his long, loose-fitting black nylon windbreaker, Bolan watched the wheelman hold the door for his boss. Seconds later, the engine gunned, and the Towncar was rolling off into the night.

No problem. Bolan had Cabriano covered. Likewise, the Don’s home, pier, every business clear to his Grand Palace hotel-casino in Atlantic City was under the watchful eyes of official shadows, all of whom answered to the soldier.

Satisfied he was alone with two wise guys about to be burdened with disposal chores, Bolan checked his six. Clear down the alley, but he was mindful of roving blue-and-whites given the coming play. Inside his jacket pocket a thin wallet with credentials declared him as Special Agent Matthew Cooper of the United States Department of Justice. It would pass the smell test, but cops still didn’t like any G-man rolling into their town, shooting up bad guys and blowing up their places of business.

Worst-case, a phone call would be placed to Washington. There, Bolan’s long-time friend, Hal Brognola, could untangle any unforeseen red tape octopus. The big Fed was a high-ranking Justice official, but he also ran the nation’s ultracovert black ops agency known as Stony Man Farm. He was also liaison to the President of the United States, who green-lighted all Stony Man action. And woe be unto the lawman, lawyer or politician who needed to take a call from the White House if Bolan was not given free rein and full cooperation, with no questions asked.

Bolan didn’t have to wait long. The 1958 white Cadillac convertible with shark fins and whitewalls was bucked up against the back door to the garage. A squat bulldog he knew from Justice intel as Bruno Marino waddled through the door. The wise guy threw a look toward the lot, down the alley in both directions, then keyed open the trunk. Frank Brutaglia materialized next, cursing Marino as he lugged the tarp-covered cargo through the door in a fireman’s carry. Brutaglia was dumping the load in the trunk, both of them now grumbling and griping about who would dig the hole, when Bolan made his move. No tough guy farewell line, the Executioner rolled out of the shadows, Beretta up and chugging. The first 9 mm subsonic round cored through the back of Marino’s skull, Brutaglia yelping as he was hit in the face by blood and muck. Dead-weight was crashing into Brutaglia when Bolan slammed the next bullet between his eyes. He made quick work of putting them in their resting place, dumping them on top of Big Tony. It was a tight fit, but there was still a lot to be said about trunk space in the old classics.

The Executioner closed the lid on their coffin and leathered the Beretta. Retreating, he checked the parking lot. Before coming in, the soldier had considered fixing the fleet of fancy wheels with plastic explosives, but just as quickly dismissed the idea. This was a commercial-residential neighborhood, and no one on the block needed to pay indirectly for the crimes of these savages by finding their homes and businesses pummeled and damaged by raining debris.

Melting into the deeper shadows of the alley, Bolan determined for all enemies concerned reality was only just beginning to heat up.

JIMMY MARELLI WAS seething. The image of what the G-man had done, the blatant disrespect shown him, still burned in his mind. A change of clothes, a double Dewar’s or three, and the junior G-man kissing his ass all over the place and swearing he’d get a better TV did not calm the storm inside.

Marelli went to work on his fourth double and fired up a fresh Havana, since he’d chewed the end off the other one during a fifteen-minute tirade. As he blew his way on a thick cloud into the kitchen, he was thinking there was a time not too long ago, Fed or not, he would have beaten the G-man so bad he would have begged for death—take his mother, wife, sister, please, just stop the pain. They didn’t call him The Butcher, he thought, because he worked in a meat-packing plant.

Where had the good old days gone? he wondered, hurling open the fridge, chucking rolls of salami, prosciutto and three kinds of cheese on the counter. He hated living in the past, but couldn’t help wishing he could step back in time. Where a man’s word, his honor, was his own blood. Where a man did what he said he was going to do. Where busting heads or smoking another wise guy—execution-style or shootout—was business. Not like these punk kids today, who enjoyed inflicting pain, but only when it was safe to do so, no threat of payback. Cops, judges, politicians could still be bought, sure, but these days there was no heart in the younger generation, no pride, no honor in even the handling of the easy end. Speaking of easy, they all wanted easy street, but didn’t want to risk getting their hands dirty. They wanted the glory, make their bones and all, but the idea of being a bullet-eater—a survivor who could wear the wounds proud—had about as much appeal to them as rap music to a hillbilly.

Where, oh, where had the days of honor gone?

He knew. They died with the real Don. A bunch of punks who were more show than go had been weaseled into the crew by the kid. No dummy, Marelli saw the future. He was a frightening dinosaur to this new breed, still feared and respected maybe, but things had changed. And when the Old Man died he knew it was time to get out, before one of the youngbloods got popped by the Feds and he found himself filling the Don’s cell. Or some psycho punk with no honor and looking to make a name for himself, walked up behind him and shot him in the head.

Go west then, he’d decided. And he wanted to believe it had been a chance meeting in Vegas. However, the spook knew the kid was looking to go international with guys that would make the World Trade Center suicide bombers look tame and sane by comparison. He and Berosa had decided it was time to think about retirement. A talk ensued, a deal was struck and the kid took the bait. Problem was, the Feds seemed to know about the spook deal even before it happened. Come to find out the kid had been looking to engineer just such a deal with the Colombians and their new Mideast pals. That’s when, Marelli thought, he’d seen the end coming, sure a blade was poised to plunge between his shoulder blades, the whole deal falling into place too easy, and he never trusted easy. Pretty slick, then, putting every shred of detail about the Cabriano Family’s business, A to Z, including the spook angle on disk, and shipping it off where, if needed, it could prove his own life raft if the whole goddamned immunity deal sank like the Titanic.

Muttering a stream of profanity, he began conjuring up ways to get back at the G-man for the insult. Food, like Scotch, cocaine or getting a backroom hummer from one of the girls at the club, normally helped ease the tension, crystalize his thoughts. A fat sub wasn’t going to cut it. First he went to work on the half-empty pot of marinara. Setting another pot on the stove, turning the flame on low, he emptied the marinara into the new pan. To think he’d been cooking for these assholes galled him. Fuck ’em. If they insisted and pleaded for his linguini and white clams, however, he’d reconsider, only next time he’d flavor the sauce with some less appetizing ingredients.

He tossed the empty pot into the sink and grinned at the clattering sound that echoed through the lodge. He was taking a slab of Italian sausage out of the fridge when he found he had company. It was one of the marshals, Gravy or Groovy or something, perching himself on a stool, smack in the doorway, laying the assault rifle across his lap. Like he was making a statement: Jimmy would have to politely excuse himself in order to get past. Was this just another disrespectful asshole move, or was it something else? Marelli wondered. Did the guy want conversation? Was he boxing him in the kitchen for a reason?

Marelli washed a thick cloud of cigar smoke over the guy. Taking a butcher knife, he began chopping up sausage on the cutting board. “What?” he growled. “You wanna shoot my sauce off the stove?”

“He shouldn’t of done what he did, Jimmy. That’s just between us, okay?”

Marelli stared at the guy, didn’t trust something he read in the eyes. He’d been around the block too many times to buy into whatever the guy was selling. No matter how much he gave them, he knew he was still just a murdering scumbag to these guys, smart enough to know all about lines in the sand. He turned and dumped sausage into the pot, turning the flame a little higher. Why were the hairs on the back of his neck rising? Something felt all wrong.

“We’ll get you a new TV.”

“How about a VCR with that shake?”

Groovy nodded. “That can be arranged.”

Marelli grunted, took the knife and sliced open a sub roll.

“Hey, that smells pretty good, Jimmy, whatever you’re cooking.”