"Is something wrong?"
"Charleen has been kidnapped. There was a note on the front door. It said not to go to the police or to tell anyone, and I would be notified in six hours about ransom. We don't have any money!"
"Mr. Granger, I'm sorry. It's the same people who hurt Charlotte. Stay there. Wait for their call. I'll talk to a friend and get back to you."
After Johnny hung up, he realized he had no way to contact Mack. A chill darted through him. He had once been involved in a Mafia kidnapping in San Diego, and his lady, Sandy Darlow, had been killed. Who else would want to kidnap Charleen, except the Mafia?
Johnny hurried to his room. As he waited, he paced up and down, staring at the phone, demanding that it ring.
Until it did, he could only worry.
Time and again a terrible scene returned to his mind. It was what he had seen when Sandy Darlow lay on that stainless-steel table in the garage in San Diego.
What he had seen was turkey meat.
10
Bolan powered the Thunderbird from the underground hotel garage and swept out of Portland on Southwest MacAdam Avenue, which turned into Riverside Drive and followed the Willamette River south.
He drove upstream until he came to Lake Oswego, a town as well as a lake about two and a half miles long, developed as a showplace for luxurious waterfront homes with docks.
The Executioner was interested in talking to Tony Pagano. He had never met Tall Tony. His intel indicated that in this posh community Pagano now headed a branch office for the Canzonari family.
It was not nickel-and-dime stuff. Here the trade was for ten to fifty thou. Rich people needed loans more often than the poor, and their credit was usually better. If one of them got in over his head, he went to his old man or his rich girlfriend and tapped them for the cash to prevent a scandal. Loansharking had been here for years.
Regardless of the affluence of the loan shark's victims in a place like Lake Oswego, Bolan had sworn long ago that he would remove every vestige of the Mob's loansharking operations from the face of the earth. The shark's customers might even resent it, but Mack Bolan's juggernaut of justice, out to avenge his and Johnny's family that had been so savagely victimized in the Vietnam war era, could not be stopped. The place must be hit. And the neighborhood had just better watch out for itself.
Bolan stopped at a new office building near the east end of the lake, just off State Street. The Lake Oswego Loan and Trust Company, as the name plaque identified it, was a sleek and modern building with an all-glass front, curves instead of corners, a revolving door and modern sculptures outside and in the lobby. The lawn had been manicured within a blade of its life every green shoot was properly clipped and trimmed. The big man in the beret and black-rimmed glasses paused inside the front door and shook the rain from his raincoat, which covered the hardware he carried.
He walked to a reception area, sinking halfway to his ankles in red plush carpet, his eyes meeting those of a tall redhead who rose behind her desk and smiled. He stopped in front of her.
"Good afternoon," she said. "How may I help you?"
"I understand Mr. Pagano is in today. I don't have an appointment but it's urgent that I see him."
"That might be difficult." She smiled, lighting her face with a special radiance that seemed to imply she was on his side.
She sat behind the desk and motioned for him to sit. When he did, she punched a series of buttons on a telephone console.
She spoke softly, then turned to Bolan.
"His appointment-secretary wants to know your name and the nature of your business."
"My name is Mack Scott. My business is old friends. I'm like a member of the family. Tell him we have a mutual acquaintance, Freddie Gambella."
She turned back to the phone. When her eyes found him again, a touch of surprise was on her pretty face.
"Marci says you can go right in. Her door is right over there, the second on the left down the main hall."
"Thanks."
"A pleasure, Mr. Scott. Anytime."
Bolan approached the main hall; the carpet below his feet graduated from red to dark blue. He entered the second doorway on the left.
The office was an interior decorator's dream, with subdued lighting, old-master prints in expensive frames on the walls and a typewriter and computer on the secretary's pedestal desk of glass and plastic.
The secretary's blond hair was pulled back in a severe bun. Her dress was sleek and tight, highlighting her subtle curves. She wore a lot of makeup and stared vacantly in his direction. "Mr. Pagano is extremely interested in seeing you. He was a friend of Mr. Gambella, as you know. He's busy on the phone at the moment. Can I get you a drink while you wait?"
"Coffee, please."
She brought him a cup from a fancy vacuum coffeepot. The brew seared his lips. Before it was cool enough to drink, a door swung open and a tall, thin man appeared. His face was little more than skin and bone. Bolan could not remember seeing deeper-set eyes. Small blue veins showed through the tissue-like parchment covering his features as the deadly black eyes swept over Bolan.
"You said you were a friend of Freddie Gambella's?" The voice was accusing. It was the sound of death squeezed through a reedy clarinet.
"Hey, I met him couple of times. Maybe not like a friend. I heard you were in solid out here. Stopped by to pay my respects." Bolan's voice had a touch of Brooklyn and the eastern twang that was pure Mafia-soldier inflection.
"Come on, Scott. We need to talk." It was a command.
Bolan left the coffee and followed the walking skeleton.
Tony Pagano's office was a barren cube.
Everything within it was white: desk, filing cabinet, pictures, walls, even visitor's chair. In front of the white draperies on the far wall was a white couch, into which Bolan lowered himself as Pagano chose a seat behind the desk.
"If you knew Freddie, you know he died in a twisted crew wagon in New York State a few years ago. Some bastard cut him down with what the cops figured was a bazooka kind of rocket."
"Tough. But Freddie always did things with a flair."
"You connected?"
"Used to be with Manny the Mover-Marcello."
"San Diego. Yeah, rough down there recently. You got a letter?"
"Manny didn't have time to write no letters."
"True."
"Hey, I'm just a soldier, wheelman, you know," Bolan said. "Nothing high up."
The living skeleton pondered this a moment, then nodded. "We're with Gino Canzonari, but my people work directly under me. Mostly loans, classy loans, nothing under ten grand and with plenty of interest. This is fat city out here."
"That's what I figured," Bolan said, dropping the mobster talk and rising from the couch. "Back away from the desk slowly, Tony."
The Executioner pulled the silenced Beretta from its shoulder leather.
Pagano stared. A marksman's medal plopped on the white desk and Pagano trembled.
"The safe, Tony. Open up. Anybody ask any questions you put them down, or both of you are dead."
"Okay. Easy with the cannon."
They went through a second doorway and down a hall to a room at the side of the building. They entered. No one was inside.
Bolan, locked the door and motioned Pagano ahead. The tall man moved a file cabinet on wheels, to reveal a safe. He fixed his deadly stare on Bolan.
"Look, we run a clean operation here. High class. Nobody gets hurt. These rich bastards can afford the interest. We ain't broke an arm in over two years."
"The cash, Tony. Put it on the table in one of those bank bags."
Pagano obeyed.
"Fill it up. Hundreds."
When Pagano was finished, he looked up.
The Executioner shot him once in the forehead, blasting him against a wall. The deed would spare the guy the pain of the explosion to come. The slime-bucket slumped to the floor, lifeless.