Death List

4

“This is a money-laundering operation?” Bolan asked.

“This is it.”

“This right here.”

“This right here,” Pierce repeated. He put his hand to his face. Bolan realized he was struggling not to laugh. Bolan, himself, could not help but grin.

The words “Coin Op Laundry” had been painted, many years ago, on a sign that was struggling not to fall off the ancient brick building. The street it faced was narrow even by congested Chicago standards. Trash was piled high on either side of the building, strewed in clumps across the pavement and blowing past in whirls and eddies of dust and debris kicked up by passing traffic.

“Get your shotgun,” Bolan ordered.

“How you want to do it?”

“You take the back. I’ll go straight in the front.”

“They’re loaded for hell and gone in there, Harmon,” Pierce replied. “You sure you want to just stick your junk in a hornet’s nest like that?”

“I’ve done it before.”

“Not here to judge you,” Pierce said.

Bolan shot the Mob enforcer a quizzical glance before stepping out of the car. The pair went to the Lincoln’s trunk. This time Bolan selected an AK-47 knockoff and threw a MOLLE rifleman bag loaded with 30-round magazines over his shoulder.

Pierce raised an eyebrow at the assault rifle. “Why the AK?”

“I want to make an impression.”

“It does do that,” Pierce admitted. The little enforcer waved, took his shotgun and made his way around the corner of the laundry building into a fetid alley so narrow he had to turn sideways to get through.

Bolan, meanwhile, held the AK lowered, against his body. He glanced up and down the street. There was no police presence and no civilians moving around that he could see, which was good. They were about to make enough noise that police response would be inevitable. They would need to get in, get this done and get out before they could be confronted by law enforcement.

No time to be subtle, in other words.

Bolan put the AK-47 to his shoulder, snapped the selector switch to automatic fire, then kicked in the front door of the laundry. The largely hollow receiver of the Kalashnikov rifle rang like a drum when it was fired, making the weapon sound like the Hammer of God to the uninitiated in close quarters. Bolan was counting on that blitz effect to take down however many Toretto gunmen might be holed up in the laundry.

First, though, he had to make sure he wasn’t dealing with any innocents. It was fine for Pierce to claim this was a Mob money laundry, but as the old Russian proverb said, “Trust, but verify.”

“Federal agent!” Bolan bellowed. “Hands where I can see them!”

The irony of impersonating a Mob hit man impersonating a federal agent was not lost on Bolan. He was nominally a federal agent himself, even if he had kept the government at arm’s length for many years now.

The cramped coin-op laundry looked like any of others Bolan had seen over the years. The walls were dominated by inset dryers. Rows of large, front-load washing machines were laid out in three long lines that jutted into the square space. The floors were scuffed-and-stained linoleum that probably dated to the moon landing.

Then there was the fellow with the Beretta 93-R, presumably a Toretto gunner, who leveled the piece at Bolan but did not fire. He was standing behind the dingy service counter at the back of the room, the sort of place an attendant would dole out change and sell single-use packets of detergent and fabric softener. He stared openmouthed at Bolan, his eyes wide.

“I said,” Bolan enunciated carefully, keeping his sights between the gunman’s eyes, “federal agent. Put the gun down.”

“You’re no Fed. You put yours down.”

“Last chance,” Bolan said. “You one of the Torettos?”

“You stupid cop.” The sound of a bell ringing came from the rear of the laundry, echoing along a small hallway that led to the back of the building. Footsteps pounded on the linoleum.

Reinforcements, Bolan thought.

Where was Pierce? Why wasn’t he covering the back?

The gunman grinned. Clearly he thought his own guys were coming to back him up, which made all the difference in his attitude. “You stupid cop,” he said again. “Yeah, we’re Torettos, all right, and that’s the last name you’re ever going to—”

Bolan shot him in the face.

A lot of guys thought if they just kept talking, it would mask their movements, like the telltale clenching of a hand on the butt of a gun as the owner prepared to fire. Bolan had seen every trick in the book. He had walked battlefields from one end of the Earth to the other. He wasn’t falling for something like that. It was obvious the gunner was going to plug him, and now that he had confirmed these were Mob goons, he didn’t have to worry that this might simply be the best-guarded laundry in the state.

He didn’t know too many shopkeepers or hired clerks who carried Beretta machine pistols, though.

The sound of Bolan’s shot brought the other gunmen boiling out from the back room. He noted a couple of pistols, a sawed-off shotgun and what had to be Spectre subguns, something he didn’t encounter in the field too often. He dropped to one knee and started slapping the trigger on the AK, fanning the barrel from left to right at knee level.

The gunmen screamed and started toppling. Bolan dived behind the nearest line of washers. The machine shook and rattled as the gunmen hammered the appliances, screaming and trying to drag themselves back toward the rear hallway. The linoleum was suddenly awash in blood. There was a good chance at least one of them had been nicked in an artery and would bleed out quickly...but it wouldn’t be quickly enough for Bolan’s purposes.

Bullets had a nasty tendency to go right through interior walls and hollow-core doors. Appliances were among the few household items that could stop small-arms fire. Bolan didn’t want to trust his washing machine to stop many more rounds, though, so he rose, bringing the AK to his shoulder. A few quick bursts was all he needed to put down the opposition for good. He bounded over the bodies, conscious of the numbers counting down before the law would arrive.

The gunman hiding in the rear hallway nearly took Bolan’s head off. The Executioner ducked at the last second as rounds from the man’s pistol tore into the wall near the doorway.

The sound of a shotgun blast at close range was followed by the toppling of a body. Bolan risked a fast glance around the door frame and then took a second, longer look. Pierce was standing there. His scalp was covered with blood, but he was holding his shotgun and standing over the body of the Toretto gunman.

“What happened to you?”

“Don’t ask.” Pierce gestured to the rear door of the laundry. “I’ve got some unfinished business out back. This door—” he jerked his chin at the door facing the exit “—leads downstairs. I don’t know how many guys are going to be down there, so if you want to wait for me...”

“I’ve got it,” Bolan said, reasoning that an assassin like Harmon would take pride in being able to handle business himself. “Try not to take any more shots to the head.”

Pierce grunted and headed back outside. Bolan eased the door to the basement level open and stole a look down the stairway. The steps were solid, which was good. Open stairs would make his feet and legs a target the whole way down.

Of course, anybody down there would just be waiting to shoot him when he got to the bottom. He needed something. He went back out into the charnel house that was main area of the laundry.

Pausing to scoop up the Beretta 93-R and search its owner for more 20-round magazines—he found several—Bolan tucked the weapon into the waistband at his back. Then he grabbed a cardboard box that was by the front door. It was of heavy stock and large enough for his purposes. He took it to the basement stairs and flattened it at the top. Then he drew both of Harmon’s Berettas, thumbed the hammers back and the safeties off, and perched himself on the collapsed box.

“Federal agent!” he shouted, and pushed off.

The gunfire that greeted him told him the men in the basement had no qualms about murdering a government agent—or an unwelcome visitor—and that marked them as hostile combatants. The bullets didn’t find their mark: Bolan was sliding down the steps at a breakneck clip, riding the piece of folded cardboard like a toboggan. Bullets cracked and splintered the steps behind him. The shooters were too slow. The Executioner’s sudden slide had given him just enough of an element of surprise.

He hit the bottom of the steps with a jolt, rolled through a somersault and stood with Harmon’s Berettas in both hands. The basement was a warren, lighted by bare bulbs hanging from extension cords mounted to the ceiling. Folding tables were arranged in rows. Some were covered with stacks of cash. At least one bore plastic bags of white powder, which was either heroin or cocaine. The smell lingering in the room told Bolan it was the latter. Whatever the Torettos were laundering, it was tied to illegal drug operations.

It was cool in the basement, but the gunmen working here were shirtless and wearing only swim trunks. There were three of them. Two wielded automatic pistols. The third had a cut-down Ruger Mini-14 sporting a pair of magazines taped end-to-end.

Bolan shot the Ruger wielder in the face. His weapon made him the greater threat. As the standing corpse started to turn, its finger convulsed on the trigger. A single 5.56 mm round belched from the weapon’s chopped barrel, punched a hole through a stack of bagged cocaine and pierced the second gunman’s stomach at the navel. The button man folded, screaming.

The third shooter had managed to draw down on Bolan with reasonable calm, firing off a pair of shots as he squinted against the glare of a nearby hanging light. The mobster’s aim was close enough that it drove Bolan to the floor on his back. The angle was wrong, but there was no time to worry about that. Instead, Bolan took aim at the bare light bulb and neatly popped a round through it. The bulb exploded in the gunman’s face.

The shooter dropped his gun and clawed at his face. Bolan stood once more, aimed carefully, and put a round through his adversary’s forehead. Then he moved to stand over the gut-shot mobster, kicking away the man’s pistol as he did so. A quick search told him he had eliminated all resistance. There were no secondary exits from the basement, unless there was a hidden hatch.

A creak on the stairs behind him made him whirl. He leveled both Berettas at the sound, but it was only Pierce, holding his shotgun by the receiver and raising both arms in surrender. The blood on his scalp was drying in a runnel past his nose. He looked annoyed.

“Only me,” he said.

Bolan lowered his guns. “You settle your business out back?”

“Yeah. But not well. I was hoping to get somebody alive. They figured out what we were doing when you hit the front. Here I am, covering the back, when one of them throws open the door and hits me with a gumball machine.”

“A what?”

“A gumball machine, for crying out loud!” Pierce groused. “You know, the stupid thing that sits in the back of every coin laundry you’ve ever walked into, filled with gum that hasn’t been changed since Kennedy was shot. Nailed me right in the head with it. I hit him in the head with the shotgun and made sure he was out, but by then the rest of the guards were already dancing with you. When I went back to get him so he could answer some questions, he was already awake enough to dig for a backup piece. So I had to plug him.”

“It happens,” Bolan said. Was Pierce telling him the truth? Or was this some clever ruse? And to what end? He wasn’t sure what the Mob enforcer had to gain by lying, but he filed the suspicion away nonetheless. In this game, you simply couldn’t take anyone’s agenda for granted.

Pierce surveyed the dead men and whistled softly. “These guys, the guys upstairs... You’re a one man death squad, Harmon.”

Bolan shrugged off the memories the comment brought back. He had put a few notches in his pistol grips over the years, to be sure. “I do what’s necessary,” was all he said.

Pierce looked more closely at the dead men. “Wait a sec. I know this guy.”

“Who is he?”

“His name really was Mike,” said Pierce. “Mike Morelli. He’s a cousin to Paul Toretto, the Don of the family.”

“Let’s question him.”

Pierce looked at Bolan as if the Executioner was insane. “He’s been shot in the head, Harmon. You’re not going to get anything out of him except juiced brain.”

“His pockets,” Bolan said.

Pierce nodded. He searched the corpse, coming up with a money clip, a folding knife, a lighter, a few other inconsequential items and an electronic car key.

“Maybe Mike’s car has some clues,” Pierce suggested. “You grab it and follow me. We’ll get gone before the cops show, find a parking lot, then search it from top to bottom.”

“Solid plan. Hand me his lighter.”

“You’re not going to do what I think you’re going to, are you?”

“No time for anything else,” Bolan said. The first sirens were barely audible in the distance. Given that they were at basement level, that put the cops too close for comfort. The Executioner flicked the lighter and started one of the stacks of cash ablaze. The cops would call the fire department, which would stop the blaze from getting out of hand, but hopefully the fire would gut the basement before it was put out. Bolan’s policy was never to leave anything behind that could benefit an enemy, if he could help it. If the coke and the cash ended up in a police evidence locker, it might magically find its way out again. Better to destroy it in situ.

“Man,” Pierce said as the stack of Mob money started to burn behind them. “That hurts to watch.”

“It’s going to hurt more for the Torettos before we’re done.”

5

Bolan climbed back into the Lincoln with a plastic bag in one hand. Pierce pulled away from the curb, checking his mirrors and side-eyeing Bolan. When the big gold boat was moving down the road once more, Pierce finally jerked a thumb at the bag.

“So?” he asked. “What was so important we had to drive to three different electronics stores?”

“This,” Bolan said. He produced a small electronic device from the bag. He also had a battery pack and adapter.

“What is it?”

“Cell phone jammer.”

“Those aren’t legal,” Pierce said. “How’d you buy one over the counter?”

“I didn’t. I dropped enough comments about hating obnoxious cell phone users until I caught somebody’s attention. A guy at the third store sold me this out of the back room.”

“Amazing how common crime is these days,” Pierce said, as if he meant it. Bolan shot him a look and the enforcer grinned.

They drove in silence for a while, circling in wide loops around the neighborhood. They were waiting for Bolan’s phone to vibrate.

The search of Morelli’s car had revealed a GPS unit. Bolan had told Pierce he had certain contacts who might be able to help. Leaving the mobster in the car, he’d gone off to make an encrypted call from his secure phone.

The smartphone was the only device he carried that had not been Vincent Harmon’s and it was carefully password-protected to prevent unauthorized access. Externally, it was indistinguishable from a popular commercial model. It was a vital piece of mission equipment, giving Bolan a direct link to the support team at Stony Man Farm. There were ways for him to contact the Farm through an unsecured channel, such as from a pay phone or even a prepaid burner phone, but they required security protocols and took longer to establish.

Transmitting photos of the GPS unit’s serial number to the Farm was all that had been necessary for Bolan to get what he’d need...eventually. A member of the cyber team at Stony Man, led by Aaron “The Bear” Kurtzman, would trace his or her way through the unit’s network and GPS satellite data to connect the dots. The question Bolan needed an answer to was a simple one: where had Mike Morelli been?

While they’d waited for the trace to come back, and with nothing else useful to do, Bolan had done what he did best: look for a way to stack the deck in his favor. Bolan was an honorable man, but this was war. It was a war against terror. It was a war against crime. It was a war against society’s predators. And in such a war, there was no such thing as a “fair fight.” The Executioner would always take every advantage he could.

Given the lack of intelligence on the Torettos’ stronghold, he’d decided he needed a cell phone jammer. In the old days, before the days of smartphones, a Mob outfit would typically equip its soldiers guarding a hardsite with two-way radios. These days, with everyone toting a phone in their pockets, it was more likely they’d rely on prepaid burner phones for communication. Jamming the cell signals would put the Torettos at a disadvantage unless they had, and were prepared to deploy, radio communications. More importantly, if there were reinforcements available at another location, the jammer would prevent the Torettos from summoning help.

First, though, Bolan needed an address.

As if on psychic cue, Bolan’s phone began to vibrate. He thumbed it, put it to his ear and answered, “Harmon.” That would let Barbara Price, the Farm’s mission controller, know that Bolan was not alone and would be overheard.

“Understood,” Price said

“Do you have an address for me?” Bolan asked.

“We traced all of the repeat locations in the GPS,” Price told him. “Most are strip clubs, bars and so on. One is an address owned by a holding company that belongs to the Toretto crime family, if indirectly. We figure that’s Morelli’s house, given that he stops there almost every night. The only other repeat address is an isolated estate in a wealthy suburb of the city. We can’t get a solid lead on its ownership, but it correlates with some database traffic from the Organized Crime Task Force.” She recited the address. Bolan repeated it a few times silently to himself.

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