Limping, Carboni was well down the slope, angling for the road. Down the road about a mile, Bolan could see a pickup truck approaching. Carboni saw it, too, and hurried to get to the road before it passed.
Bolan wished he had brought the Weatherby Mark V instead of the Uzi. With the Mark V he could have picked Carboni off at half a mile.
Bolan ran forward, surprised at the strength and determination of the wounded man in front of him, yet hardly aware of his own injured arm. Carboni ran hard the last hundred yards and stumbled onto the macadam roadway before the pickup arrived. He dropped to his knees and waved.
Billy Olsen saw the man running toward the road and slowed. As the man fell to his knees and waved, the year-old pickup slammed to a stop.
Billys wife, Faye, frowned.
Were gonna be late, Billy.
Man needs help. Got blood on his leg.
He turned off the engine, stepped out of the rig and went around the front.
Looks like you could use some help, mister, he said.
Sure as hell can, Carboni said, swinging the big AutoMag around and killing Billy Olsen with one shot through the heart.
Faye screamed and moved to start the pickup. But the keys were in her dead husbands pocket.
Carboni saw her and laughed.
Need keys, lady. Dont worry, Im not going to hurt you. I just want your rig. Get out.
He took the keys from the dead mans right-hand pocket and returned to the pickup. He knew Bolan was around somewhere, but in another thirty seconds it would not matter.
I said get out of the truck, bitch! Carboni shouted.
The woman, numb from witnessing the coldblooded murder of her husband, was momentarily frozen in the seat. At Carbonis command, she leaped from the pickup and ran.
As soon as she was away, four rounds of 9 mm parabellums burst through the windshield; one grazed Carbonis shoulder. He started the truck, shifted into low and bombed down the road.
Bolan fisted Big Thunder, aimed and fired.
The .44 round is a .44 revolver bullet mated to a cut-down 7.62mm NATO rifle cartridge case. The AutoMag is as close to a rifle as any handgun can be. Ejected from the 6.5-inch barrel at 1,640 feet per second, the round ripped into the pickups engine block. It smashed into a piston, ripped the connecting rod away and jammed it into the crankshaft, instantly killing the engine. The pickup wheezed to a stop.
Carboni swore.
As a burst from the Uzi swept into the cab, Carboni slid out the far door and ran for the ditch. His right leg felt as if it was being dipped into fire with every step. His left leg had taken a bullet but did not hurt. He lay in the ditch watching for Bolan. This would be the time! He felt it. He would play dead and let Bolan investigate the pickup then blow the bastard away and collect the head money. Five million dollars!
He fought off a wave of dizziness and continued to watch the roadway and the pickup.
Five minutes later he was still watching.
A car approached, slowed near the body of Billy Olsen. His widow appeared at the side of the road and flagged it down. She got in and it turned around and raced away.
Carboni knew he had to move. Within minutes the woman would contact the police and the place would soon be swarming with cops.
Move... where? The ditch was too shallow to protect him if he stood, so he crawled away. He saw another farmhouse half a mile away, and recognized it as his best chance. Ahead was a cornfield. Yes! He would run through the corn toward the farm as fast as he could.
He tried to block the pain in his leg and the aches from a dozen bruises and cuts. He was moving, that was the important thing.
To take his mind off the pain of crawling, he concentrated on memories.
He had grown up in a neighborhood in Philly where if you werent tough you didnt survive.
Kicked out of three high schools, he finally went into business for himself instead of finishing his sophomore year. He became a hubcap specialist for garages, which paid him two dollars a hubcap and sold them for six to twenty. For a year he stole hubcaps on order, making as much as a hundred dollars a week.
Then he got busted and spent six weeks in juvenile detention, where he met guys as tough as he was. On the outside again, he and three of his new friends began a small protection racket.
For six months they prospered. The merchants wanted help controlling the kids on the long block, and if the Pro club told the teen gangs to quit harassing a certain shop, they did or found themselves beaten up.
One shop owner did not understand this form of American free enterprise and refused to pay fifty dollars a week for protection.
Carboni, the biggest of the Pro team, volunteered to have a talk with the slender Puerto Rican immigrant who was trying to make a living to support his six children, two sisters, an uncle and three cousins.
The young Carboni called him out in the alley and explained that all the other merchants gladly paid the money to prevent the small gangs of punks from ripping up their stores. The Puerto Rican had learned the money system and could count out change in dollars and cents perfectly, but did not know much English. His fifty English words were not ones Vince Carboni wanted to hear.
Carboni slapped him around a little and the Puerto Rican went for a knife in his pocket. Then Carboni got mad and began to take the goddamn greaser apart with his bare hands. The knife got knocked away before it drew blood, and Carboni, who was more than six feet tall and had done enough work in a gym to have developed powerful arms and shoulders, pounded the slender body until it sagged to the ground.
He picked up the unconscious form to give him one last pasting. He swung his big fist at the storekeeper, who was on the verge of consciousness, then swung harder, his scarred knuckles pounding into the mans jaw.
The crack of bones breaking came softly, but Carboni heard them. He left the body in the alley and swaggered away. Damn! He had broken the little guys neck! Hed killed the son of a bitch!
The police did not interrogate the Pro group. Everyone on the block knew that the Puerto Rican had refused to cooperate, but nobody said a word. Carboni went around to the store owners the next day and signed up six more. They quickly made verbal agreements and turned over two weeks in advance of the new seventy-five-dollar fee.
There was no more trouble with the shop owners for almost a year. Carboni took over the leadership of the Pro team as it moved into burglary and then into the armed robberies of a few liquor stores.
When Carboni held his first .32-caliber revolver, he knew he had found his true calling. He practiced until he was proficient with the little gun, then got a .38 and a year later a World War II .45 automatic, used and battered.
When he was nineteen he was invited to work for a loan shark who occasionally needed persuasion power with some of his customers. That marked the beginning of a long and fruitful association with the Mafia and the people who now would pay Carboni five million dollars for the removal of their most persistent threat, Mack Bolan.
Vince Carboni looked up and saw that he had reached the cornfield. He glanced back as he moved up to the side of the road, then peered over the low crown. He could not see the bastard Bolan anywhere. He crawled across the ditch, then rose and ran into the cornfield.
No shots.
He felt better. Now, he wanted to get to the farmhouse, set up a trap for Bolan and collect the five million. He would be a legend in the Mafia, the man who blew away the Executioner!
Fifty yards away, Mack Bolan was tying a makeshift bandage around his upper left arm, which was still bleeding. Although he knew where Carboni was, he had not been in a position to shoot. As he tied the bandage with his right hand and his teeth, he watched Carboni bolt through the corn.