The Bone Yard (13 page)

Vaccarelli was driven backward, sprawling on the grass, his Magnum flying. Miraculously, he made it to his feet, coming out of the somersault erect, ears ringing from the near concussion of the blast. He glanced around, but there was something warm and sticky in his eyes, and he was being blinded by the smoke from... Holy mother, from his own damned jacket burning!

Paulie Vaccarelli knew that he was standing there on fire, and then the panic hit him, made him run, the black-clad stranger long forgotten as he streaked across the night, a racing human torch.

The burning scarecrow figure lurched along for half a dozen strides, then Bolan saw it toppled by a rifle shot. Inside the house the gunners were attempting to regroup their forces, and the flaming silhouette had been a target too inviting to resist.

He swung their way and sent a high-explosive doublepunch through the ruin of the twin front doors, following it up with a hissing can of smoke to add confusion. The house was burning fiercely now at several points, and Bolan knew that there were only moments left until he heard the wail of sirens on his flank, announcing the approach of riot squads responding to the din and smoke of combat.

It was a roaring hell in there, but Bolan had to get inside and seek out Seiji Kuwahara, close down this end of the pipeline before the Executioner took another step along the campaign trail in Vegas. He knew from grim experience in the jungles of the world that you exposed yourself to needless danger any time you left the serpent's head intact, still able to deliver lethal venom even with its dying spasm. Kuwahara was the Oriental viper's head in Vegas, and when Bolan had disposed of this one, there were others of an Occidental cast who called for his attention, right. But first things first. He was advancing on the house, prepared to answer fire with cleansing fire when Bolan heard a labored engine drawing closer on his flank. Almost before the sound had registered, a sleek white Caddy cleared the side of Kuwahara's mansion, running straight and fast along an offshoot of the drive and making for the gates.

There was just time for Bolan to react, half turning, catching just the barest glimpse of Eastern profile, then the limousine was past him, powering along the drive.

The soldier hit a crouch and braced the 40mm cannon tight against his hip, one finger on the trigger as he tracked his target, estimating range and elevation.

When he opened fire, the Executioner was dead on target at a range of fifty yards, the mushrooming explosions marching right across the driveway, setting up a barrier of smoke and flying shrapnel that the hurtling Caddy could not bridge. He saw the crew wagon swerve, lurch, stall, and he was moving out of there and in confrontation with the dragon long before the first door opened, spilling human targets into view.

Mack Bolan recognized the ninja at a range of thirty yards, and spent no time debating how to handle him. The XM-18 thundered and the guy was simply gone, evaporated in a storm of needlelike fl6chettes that hit with such intensity he doubtless never knew that he was dying. And they were packed inside the Cadillac, the ninja trying to get out and face the enemy, a little man wedged in among them with his hands raised, trying desperately to shield himself from the death he saw approaching.

Bolan knew that he had found the serpent's head.

A twitch of his trigger finger and the launcher roared to life, unloading its remaining cylinders in rapid fire; fl6chettes, shot and high-explosives all impacting on the Cadillac's interior like a draft from hell itself. The windows on the Caddy blew outward and the crew wagon seemed to bulge for a moment, inflating like some kind of cartoon vehicle before it simply burst apart. Bolan rode out the shock wave and went to ground beneath the flying shrapnel, feeling pieces of the vehicle and occupants as they rained down around him in a grizzly downpour.

And from the distance, drawing nearer-sirens.

He could hear the numbers falling in his mind, their echoes louder than the straggling gunfire that continued from inside the Kuwahara house. Some of the enemy were still engaged back there, but he no longer had an interest in them. Captain Reese and his commandos would be more than capable of dealing with the stragglers. And Bolan had more serpents left to kill this night before the desert sun came up and burned away the sheltering darkness.

He was far from finished in Las Vegas, right — if anything the major battle lay ahead, and he had only fought a skirmish here with Kuwahara's men and the advance guard from New York. If he had severed and destroyed one viper's head, the whole damned nest awaited him downtown, and he did not intend to keep the serpents waiting long. The Executioner was done in Paradise, the snakes were driven out — for now — and he was moving on.

To Glitter Gulch.

To the Gold Rush.

To Frank Spinoza and the good-old boys.

If they were waiting for him now... for someone — braced for trouble — then there would be killing in the Mafia's open city such as Captain Reese had never seen.

"All right, we're set to go."

Abe Bernstein looked around him at the faces of his soldiers. Then his eyes fell on Jack Goldblume and old Harry Thorson, feeling pride well up inside of him until he was about to burst. It took a moment for him to continue but he finally found his voice.

"Spinoza's men have run into some kinda trouble at Kuwahara's and they won't be back. At least not soon. We've got a chance to clean it up tonight if everybody does his job and follows orders."

He turned to the tall mercenary dressed in a hotel security uniform, raising one eyebrow as he spoke.

"Your people in position?"

"Yes, sir. This hotel is sealed off tight. Nobody in or out without your say-so."

"Fine."

The old man nodded satisfaction.

"All of you have team assignments, wings to cover. Are there any problems?"

"Hell, no," Harry Thorson growled around the stub of his cigar. "Let's quit the goddamn jawin' and get on with it."

Bernstein smiled, half turning toward Goldblume.

"Square with you, Jack?"

"Fine."

But there was something in the newsman's voice that made Bernstein uneasy. A trace of weakness, perhaps. The taint of fear. He had arranged for two of Goldblume's team to watch him through the night, dispose of him if he seemed likely to jeopardize the mission. Their friendship spanned four decades, but tonight Abe Bernstein was about to realize a lifelong dream. And no damned friend was going to cheat him out of it, no way.

If Goldblume pulled his weight fine, but if he tried to weasel out.

Bernstein dismissed the topic from his mind and checked his Rolex.

"Okay. We start on top and work our way down, clearing each floor as we go, and meet back here within the hour. Cleanup detail starts at 1:00 A.M. What do you military fellows call it?"

"Oh-one-hundred hours," the tall mercenary responded, his face deadpan.

"Right, then. At oh-one-hundred hours, I want everybody back down here for cleanup. Anything still living in the joint by then had better be on our side."

He watched the teams led by Thorson and Goldblume as they headed for their separate banks of elevators, leading to the south and east wings of the hotel. His own team would take the north wing in a moment, ride up to the penthouse level and begin their killing at the top. Abe Bernstein felt that it was going to work this time. Sweet revenge was within his grasp and he could almost taste it now, it was that close.

His troops had reached the elevators, moving like real soldiers as they crossed the wide deserted lobby. Three of Spinoza's watchdogs were lying back behind the registration desk with throats slit, no longer interested in reporting to their boss exactly what was going on beneath his nose. Spinoza would find out for himself soon enough, and Abe Bernstein was saving that one for himself. He had made certain that his team would be the one to take Spinoza and the others — Johnny Cats, that goddamned Liguori from Chicago — all of them.

A clean frigging sweep. A royal flush, with the Mafia's local royalty flushed right down the goddamned sewer where they all belonged.

"Let's go," he said to no one in particular, already leading out across the lobby, trusting his specials to fall in behind him. He knew that when he turned around they would be there. They were good soldiers and always followed orders.

Abe Bernstein had heard that somewhere, but he could not make the mental linkup and he put the thought away.

No time for the abstractions now that they were down to the reality of action.

He was hunting big game now and when the smoke cleared there were going to be some very interesting trophies on his office wall.

Lucy Bernstein poked her head out of the office door and took a cautious glance along the corridor in each direction. There was no one in sight and she edged into the open, taking time to close the door behind her, wincing as the locking mechanism clicked audibly into place. She realized that she was holding her breath and it embarrassed her, but she was still afraid. It was more than an hour since the last paying guests had cleared the Gold Rush, and in that time, instead of digging up the leads she needed for the climax of her expose, she had been in and out of empty suites and offices, dodging and hiding wherever she could find a door unlocked.

They were not hunting her — not yet — but she felt cut off now, under siege. She had accomplished nothing, losing track of Frank Spinoza and his friend almost at once, and now the only thing that she could think about was getting safely out of there, away from what she sensed was brooding danger. She had been right, the lady news hawk knew, when she suspected that her grandfather was lying to her.

There had been no labor trouble at the Gold Rush this night, not if all the bellhops and domestic personnel around the place were any indication. Strange, but now that Lucy stopped to think of it, she had not seen a woman anywhere around the hotel and casino since she'd left the crowded lobby better than an hour ago. It was as if the female staff — the cooks, the maids, whatever — had been cleared away to preserve them from the coming storm.

Now she was all alone inside the cavernous hotel that had so quickly taken on the characteristics of an armed encampment. That was a story in itself, but first she had to be alive to write it — and she feared that if she was discovered, her short career might be abbreviated by a one-way midnight ride into the desert.

Lucy did not plan to end her days as cactus fertilizer, and she moved along the corridor with grim determination, looking for an unobtrusive exit that would get her out of there and on the street again without attracting any unwelcome attention along the way. She reached the bank of elevators, hesitated with her finger on the button, finally decided against it. If the elevator did not dump her right into the lobby, she would run the risk of being stopped at any one of several floors along the way, or else emerging into hostile hands upon arriving at her destination. No, the elevator simply was not safe enough to suit her needs.

Lucy was turning away from the stainless-steel doors when the approaching sound of voices reached her ears. She hesitated, gauging their direction, bolting as she realized that they were just around the corner from her, closing swiftly.

She retraced her steps and reached the doorway to the office she had just vacated. It was small, belonging to some middle-ranking secretary of Spinoza's from appearances, and it had yielded nothing in her search for information, but right now it was her only sanctuary.

Lucy made it to the door with heartbeats left to spare — and found it locked. She cursed the modern doors that locked themselves each time they closed, and just this once she wished that security had not become such an obsession in the hotel industry.

She turned away, pulse pounding in her ears now that the jumbled voices were almost on top of her. One of them sounded so familiar, somehow, almost... There was no time to make the connection. She was running blindly, biting off a sob that rose unbidden in her throat. There had to be some service stairs around here someplace, had to be some... And she found them, almost stumbling as she veered hard left to reach the doorway marked Emergency. If there had ever been one, Lucy thought, this must be it.

She put her weight against the door, expecting hinges stiff with long disuse, and almost fell through as it opened without resistance. She stumbled through, gasping, and just found the strength to close the door behind her.

She was clear.

She took a backward step... and bumped against the man who had been standing, watching her.

No stifling the cry this time, as Lucy Bernstein turned and recognized the man she had seen earlier with Frank Spinoza, the same face from her ordeal the night before at Bob Minotte's.

Recognition was mutual and his reaction was as coolly, cruelly practiced as a soldier's own conditioned reflex in the heat of combat. He took a closer step, the smile etched deep into his face like marks on marble. She saw his fist coming, knew that it was hurtling toward her jaw, and yet she found herself unable to avoid the blow.

Lucy Bernstein's head impacted on the concrete wall behind her and the darkness of the stairwell swallowed her alive.

Abe Bernstein paused outside the doorway of the Gold Rush presidential suite and took the time to brush imaginary lint off of his coat lapels. He wanted to look perfect for the party, give the New York imports something to remember in the final fleeting seconds of their lives. Finally satisfied, he knocked three times, not loudly, but with firm authority. The sound would carry, and he knew that they were in there, having checked in the several crew chiefs himself. There would be five of them, not counting their commander who had driven off with Paulie Vaccarelli and the hit team. Five of them with guns and the experience to use them — if they got the chance.

"What is it?" Curt, discourteous and spoken through the door, as if they had been talking to some newsboy peddling his papers.

"Room service," Bernstein told the faceless voice, struggling to keep contempt and anger from his tone. Compliments of the management.

As he spoke, he stepped back from the doorway, making room for the three mercenaries to form a semicircle at the entrance of the suite, their silenced Ingram machine pistols already primed and leveled from the waist.

Inside, the nameless crew chief was still fumbling with the lock, then he had it, stepping out to greet them in his shirt-sleeves, one hand resting on a hip beneath his shoulder holster. And the guy was good, but nowhere close to as good as he thought he was. The little backward step was adequate, the shouted warning excellent, but there was simply no way that his best fast-draw could beat the combined firepower of the three Ingrams. Savage streams of nearly silent fire converged upon him, punching through the fabric of his shirt and letting loose a crimson flood as he was blown away.

The mercenaries entered in a rush, still firing, taking out the other four crew chiefs as they were trying to respond on several seconds warning.

None of them was up to it, although the last one, lurching from the bathroom with an automatic in his hand came closest to achieving some success. He actually got off a shot before two Ingrams sliced and diced him with converging figure eights and draped him back across the leaking water bed.

Bernstein watched from the doorway approvingly, as his commandos brought the bodies all together in the middle of the room and rolled them one by one onto the plastic shower curtain taken from the bathroom. There would be some staining of the carpet even so, and most of it would have to be replaced wherever they encountered opposition, but he wrote it off to the anticipated costs of renovating the hotel.

The Gold Rush was being remodeled, and very soon it would be opening again under the new-old management of its creator. Some new carpeting and wallpaper would help create the aura of a born-again establishment.

"All right, let's go," he snapped, once again consulting the Rolex. "We can't afford to fall behind."

They had three other suites to go before the main event with Frank Spinoza, making sure that he did not have any troops at his beck and call. It was unlikely that the single pistol shot had registered with any of their targets down the hall. But even if they still possessed the slim advantage of surprise, there was no time to waste. Abe Bernstein meant to have his cleanup finished when the sun came up behind old Sunrise Mountain to the east of town. He meant for this new day to find him in control of the city he had done so much to shape and build.

It was a long time overdue, and he refused to wait an extra moment longer than he absolutely had to.

It was time, and past time, for cleaning house. And now that he had started, nothing in the world would slow him down.

Abe Bernstein had a job to do, ordained by fate, and he was working on it with a vengeance.

Mack Bolan made a drive-by of the Gold Rush, picking out the uniformed security on front and side entrances, noting their numbers and their armament. He sensed that they were bogus, knew it with a certainty when one guard stepped inside and let him glimpse an automatic rifle standing just inside the smoked-glass doors. Still he did not want a confrontation with them there, where innocent civilians might be inadvertently sucked into the cross fire.

He drove around the block and parked his rental in an alleyway behind a liquor store just down the street. Another moment to select and stow his arms, and then he hiked back, taking about thirty seconds to reach the service entrance off Fremont Street.

And they were waiting for him, naturally. He saw them from a half block away, two men in sky-blue uniforms proclaiming them to be Gold Rush security. The mismatched weapons in their holsters told him they were private — still professional, but lacking care for detail and appearances. As he approached the soldier kept one hand inside the wide slit pocket of his topcoat, wrapped around the Beretta's grip. His finger curled around the trigger in anticipation, and the full weight of the silent weapon in his grasp was reassuring, almost comforting.

A warrior came to trust his weapons, to rely upon them as he might upon a trusted friend. Right now, the lethal 93-R was in good hands — and so was the Executioner.

The guards had noted his approach and they moved out to head him off. Some brief exchange was whispered softly between them, lost to Bolan's ears.

No matter, he did not need to hear them. He was deep inside their minds, anticipating any move they might make. He knew they would block him, standing shoulder to shoulder across the narrow service entrance when he tried to step around them. On the left, one of them raised a hand, palm outward, with the other resting ominously on his holstered sidearm, like a warning.

"Sorry, sir. We're closed."

"Try back next week," the other one chimed in. "Right now we got some union trouble."

Bolan's smile was icy, but the men were busy looking elsewhere and they never saw it, concentrating as they both were on the hand that poked out of his open topcoat, rising into view and bringing with it silent death. They saw the weapon simultaneously, each man peeling off in opposite directions with a single practiced motion, going for their weapons, maybe knowing they could never hope to make it.