The soldier knelt beside him, waiting for his eyes to focus on the face of death. The runner's eyes crossed as the Beretta's muzzle came to rest upon his nose.
"I'm back," the warrior told the trembling thug. "Somebody has the merchandise I want. Somebody should deliver while they can."
"Hey, man, I swear to God..."
"Shut up and listen!" Bolan punctuated the command with his 93-R, tapping it against the guy's forehead. "Your job is to spread the word. You start with Gianelli, and you tell it straight. Somebody should deliver while they have a chance."
"I got it, man, I swear." The beads of sweat were standing up like marbles on his forehead now. "I'll tell 'im."
Bolan left as he had entered, scrambling down the fire escape until he reached the bottom landing, swinging out across the rail and dangling a moment prior to letting go. He stowed the satchel in the rented car's trunk and locked it down, secure as it could be while he was on the warpath.
There was something like a quarter-million dollars in the satchel, no big thing to Gianelli, but still substantial when considered on its own. The capo could afford it, Bolan knew; what he could not afford would be the loss of face, the sheer indignity of being ripped off. The insult would be worse than any loss of income, any loss of life. And Gianelli would receive his message, the Executioner was sure of it.
The would-be boss of Wonderland would read him loud and clear.
Francesco Scopitone had not answered to his given name in twenty years. His friends, acquaintances, police detectives and the like all knew him more familiarly as Frankie Scopes. And sometimes when he wasn't listening, the more courageous or foolhardy called him Frankie Scars.
The nickname was a natural, but its careless use could lead to fatal accidents. No matter that the history of Frankie Scopes's disfigurement was common knowledge. He preferred to act as if the scars did not exist, and his associates who planned on staying alive had grasped the wisdom of incurring temporary blindness in his presence.
Frankie Scars had been a handsome boy in childhood and on through adolescence, but like countless other boys his age, he had been drawn to the fraternity of street gangs, petty crime that sometimes escalated into brutal warfare. On the evening of his eighteenth birthday, Frankie's clique, the Gladiators, had collided with the Saracens — a rival gang — in mortal combat. Three boys died before police arrived, and Frankie had been slashed across the face, bone deep from ear to ear, emerging with a grisly, twisted smile that wrapped halfway around his skull.
The county doctors had advised him to consider plastic surgery, but Frankie's family had been poor. With seven mouths to feed and frequent bouts of unemployment, Frankie's father had ruled out expensive medical procedures. By the time he was old enough and rich enough to make arrangements on his own, it had become a point of honor to retain the scars and challenge any living soul to mention his disfigurement. Within the syndicate and on the streets, his brute ferocity was legendary. Homicide detectives in New York and Washington suspected Frankie Scars of intimate involvement in at least a dozen homicides, but witnesses were an endangered species, and the mutilated thug had never come to trial.
In recent years his business was narcotics. Murder was a necessary adjunct to the business or, some said, a sweet fringe benefit that Frankie Scars enjoyed. Unauthorized competitors could normally expect a single warning, often painful and humiliating; if they failed to take the hint they were assassinated publicly or else they simply disappeared.
Lately, Frankie was considering a war against the Colombians. Conveniently amnesiac concerning his own roots, he hated foreigners with an evangelistic zeal more common to the 1920s than the mid-1980s. Frankie loathed the Cubans, the Vietnamese, the Haitians, Arabs, Mexicans and Puerto Ricans. He especially despised Colombians because they held a stranglehold of sorts on premium cocaine, and they refused to quake in fear at his approach. The nervy bastards seemed to thrive on violence, dealing out sadistic punishment to traitors and informers, littering the streets with bodies in a style that Frankie Scars was forced to view with grudging admiration.
Two weeks earlier he had dispatched a pair of gunners to eliminate the leader of a ring that was importing flake direct to Washington from Bogota. His soldiers had been missing for three days before a jogger was attracted by the odor rising from the trunk of an abandoned Chevrolet in Hyattsville. Authorities had found a human jigsaw puzzle inside the trunk, bits and pieces severed, trimmed and rearranged with what appeared to be a chain saw.
It was time to teach the Indians a lesson, and the only question left in Frankie's mind concerned the where and when of the instruction. There had never been a question in his mind concerning how to do the job. Such foolish insolence could not be cured, it could only be annihilated, and the problem now was pinning down the clique, securing an address, a location, where his gunners could surprise a group of them. Nicky wouldn't like the bad publicity, but once he had a chance to think it over, he would realize that there had been no other choice. So sure was Frankie in his mind, that he had already decided to proceed without the capo's blessing.
But in the meantime there was business, product to be moved and money to be made. The world kept turning in spite of the Colombians or anybody else, and Frankie Scars was not about to let life pass him by.
Phase one of his campaign to purge the Indians was economic. In the short run he could undercut their prices, take a loss on street sales while he waited for phase two, the military phase, to coalesce. He had connections in Bolivia, and while their product couldn't hold a candle to the pure Colombian cocaine, its lower quality allowed for lower prices on the street. When the Peruvian was advertised as pure Colombian, the budget rates were even more astounding, and the customers were lining up from Constitution Avenue on back to Arlington with hands out, nostrils flared. He could supply them at the discount rates for two or three more weeks before the costs became prohibitive, and in the meantime he had spies and gunners scouring the city, searching for a target that would put them on the map.
He was expecting a delivery tonight, in fact, and had arrived an hour early at the warehouse to ensure security. The flake was coming in by truck, a dozen hefty plastic bags sewn into the upholstery of tacky furniture, three loaded chairs concealed within a shipment of two dozen. On arrival, Frankie's men would strip the chairs, retrieve the bags of crystal, stuff the chairs with pre-cut foam and ship the whole lot off to one of Frankie's discount shops in Delaware. The flake would stay behind, and by this time on Monday it would be fulfilling fantasies for congressmen and bureaucrats across the city.
Frankie checked his watch and nodded to the lookouts posted on the loading dock. The truck was due, and he would give them fifteen minutes more before he closed the warehouse, rerouting to the backup drop.
A sudden glare of headlights cut across the loading dock, and Frankie heard the truck now, engine growling, air brakes hissing as the driver put it in reverse and backed it in. The stevedores, all armed in case of unexpected trouble, were proceeding toward the dock, and Frankie followed, one hand wrapped around the roll of cash he carried in the pocket of his trench coat. He was passing through the giant doors, had one foot on the concrete apron, when the world exploded in his face.
The moving van appeared to swell before his eyes, as if it were inhaling monstrous breaths somehow, and then it detonated, roof and sidewalls peeling back along the welded seams, a fireball rolling outward and sizzling across the dock. The flames consumed his lookouts and a couple of the stevedores before the rest could scatter, left them dancing on the platform like burning puppets wreathed in flames. He was driven backward by the shock wave and the sudden heat. Automatic-weapon fire erupted from the firelighted darkness of the parking lot, precision bursts dispatching fiery dancers.