It wouldn't do any good. It was a rental car and Bolan would abandon it within blocks and hoof it to an elevated station about a quarter of a mile away. He would be well on his way before an APB could be put out on the car.
Bolan was not sure what to make of Detective Sergeant Griff, but one thing was certain.
The cop had some sort of connection with Parelli...
Bolan was not about to forget the way Parelli's mobster sentries had not paid any attention to the cop's car when Griff had parked outside the walled Parelli estate not too long ago tonight. And that meant Bolan would more than likely cross Griff's path again, probably before this night was over.
For now, Randy Owens's porn-movie operation was next on Bolan's hit list.
Another unknown equation, a senator named Dutton, needed some serious looking into, sure, but Bolan realized that Owens's link to the Parellis, even if it was just banging a mafioso's mother, could be the lead he was looking for to tear the evil in this town apart before another cold day dawned.
It was time for the Executioner to raise some more hell.
7
The address Griff had given Bolan was in a warehouse in that no-man's-land, deserted after dark except for the very lowest scum, near the teeming black ghetto of Chicago's South Side.
The neighborhood was rundown, with little traffic on the streets. Trash blew in the gutters as Bolan strode along the cracked sidewalk.
If Griff was telling the truth, there was trash in the warehouse up ahead, too.
A pornographer Bolan should not have let off so easy once before.
Or a trap. A police trap or, if Griff was a bad cop, maybe another Mob trap. Yeah, it could be that, Bolan knew.
He eyeballed the warehouse and its immediate environs carefully from a deep-shadowed doorway across the empty, dark street.
It was a towering structure, appearing as uninhabited as the rest of this vicinity at this hour.
A trap?
Maybe, but Bolan did not think so, not this time, and he would not have turned back anyway.
He wanted Parelli dead too damn bad...
The windows of the warehouse were boarded up and so was the big sliding door near the loading dock.
Bolan left the shadows of his position, moving rapidly, AutoMag in hand, across the street to the side wall of the warehouse.
A streetlight at the far end of the block cast a dirty circle of illumination down at the next corner that did not reach this far. There were several economy cars... and a Lancia that had to be Owens's, he thought... parked there.
He gained the wall of the warehouse and paused another moment, his combat senses flaring, his internal radar probing the night around him for danger.
Sounds of the city carried faintly to him from somewhere else, distant rumbles of an elevated train uptown in the Loop, of a siren heading somewhere, not in this direction. The barely discernible noises of the night were muffled by this warehouse district as if that were another world where people dared to congregate, not like this sleazy, night-blanketed neighborhood of desolation and danger.
He wore his blacksuit, blending with the wall of the building. He moved along it, looking for a way in.
There was a smaller door next to the big one, but Bolan did not try it to find out if it was unlocked. Even if it was, he did not want to make his entrance that way.
He turned down an alley that ran alongside the warehouse. He headed for the rear of the building.
There were high windows along this side of the building, but they were well out of his reach.
On the rear wall of the building, he found a smaller window, this one only eight feet or so off the ground.
Behind the warehouse was a vacant lot, and on the other side of that he saw the rear walls of other warehouses.
He had the night to himself, or seemed to.
With a quick little spring, he grabbed the narrow sill of the window and chinned himself up level with it.
The glass was smudged and dirty, but by squinting he could make out the general outlines of a bathroom inside.
No one was in the bathroom, at least not unless they were crouching directly beneath the window out of his line of vision.
He tried shoving the window up, but it had been nailed shut.
No surprise there.
He supported himself easily with one hand gripping the sill and the toes of his boots pressed against the warehouse wall. With the other hand, he slapped the AutoMag against the window, several short, sharp raps with the butt, dislodging the filthy panes of glass. He was then able to break the two pieces of wood that formed a cross in the center of the window.
There was some noise, but not much.
He doubted that it could have been heard even more than a foot beyond the bathroom door, and he was gambling there was no one that close on the other side.
He releathered the AutoMag, then hoisted himself up and through the little opening. His wide shoulders made for a tight fit, but he pushed himself on through and dropped lightly into the close confines and the terrible stench of this bathroom.
When he was standing on the peeling linoleum floor, he again drew the AutoMag, went to the door and put his ear to it.
From somewhere in the warehouse, the sound of soft music came to his ears.
Outside the building he had not been able to hear a thing.
The place was probably soundproofed, which made sense if it was indeed Randy Owens's studio for making porno movies, as Griff had claimed.
Bolan reached down with his left hand and turned the doorknob, easing the door open slowly.
Nearly impenetrable gloom gathered thickly on the other side of that door.
The building had an unpleasant, rotting smell that wasn't much better than the pigsty stench of the bathroom.
He made sure there was no one in the immediate vicinity of the bathroom, then slipped through the doorway, closing it behind him.
The place was not as vacant as it had appeared from outside.
In fact, it was packed with equipment and large sections of plasterboard that Bolan identified as parts of movie sets that had been disassembled and stored back here.
It was hard to tell too much in the gloom, but it looked like almost any kind of set could be put together from the pieces stored here: a bedroom, of course, but also exterior backdrops and sets for other rooms like a phony office or a living room, some of the sets already assembled.
Bolan flitted from shadow to shadow through the collection of studio mock-ups.
He was drawn by the music and lights emanating from one of the sets at the front of this ground-level section of the warehouse.
As he neared it, he saw that the main piece of furniture on this otherwise almost empty set was a massive water bed.
The set was lit by two big banks of klieg lights that cast bright, glaring illumination down upon the scene.
On the water bed romped a man and two women, all three of them totally naked.
They were trying to look as if they were enjoying themselves, but instead they just looked sweaty and tired.
Off to one side was a cameraman, perched behind his camera.
Next to him stood Randy Owens, who occasionally called out commands to his actors, usually telling them to move a certain way so that the camera angle wouldn't be blocked.
The setting stank of poor ventilation, stale sweat and sex.
The music came from a small stereo unit just out of camera range. Obviously, it was playing just to set the mood. The soundtrack for the film would be dubbed in later.
The soundtrack wasn't very important in this kind of movie, anyway.
Randy Owens looked not too much the worse for wear after being kneed in the crotch by Denise Parelli and knocked on the head by Mack Bolan a few hours ago. He looked haggard but with all his attention focused on his cast cavorting on the water bed as he directed them.
What interested Bolan the most were the four men standing with Owens.