"He can't do that, Dolly," said the cowboy in a hushed and scandalized voice. He shot Bolan an apologizing look as he said to him, "I'll give you a hand."
They went up the stairs in silence, the woman following slowly.
Smiley was in a garret room at the top of the house. Another girl shared the small room with her, a waif of perhaps sixteen with luminous eyes and a very frightened face. Smiley was conscious, but barely so. She wore only a flimsy, soiled shorty nightgown. There was no apparent recognition of the man bending over her and she made no protest as he gingerly examined her.
"Sedated, hell," Bolan growled. "You've got her bombed out of her mind. It'll take hours to bring her around."
The waif in the other bed raised to both elbows and said, in a quavery voice, "She's really okay. She started eating again last night. And I took her to the bathroom a little while ago. She's-"
"Shut up, Donna!" said the headwoman, harshly.
The girl rapidly batted those great eyes then closed them, lay back down, and turned her back on it all.
Bolan growled, "Get her clothes. Get some for Donna, too. She's coming with us."
"Now wait a minute," Dolly said.
"Do it, damnit!"
"Donna is still in the training program. It's too soon to-"
Boland roared, "What are you-deaf? I said do it!"
The kid came off the bed with a leap. "It's okay, Dolly," she urged breathlessly. "It's a good idea. I can handle her. I've been taking-"
"Sure it's okay," the cowboy said quickly. He was nervously moving the woman toward the door. "Go get the clothes. Mr. Lambretta knows what he's doing."
Indeed he did.
Minutes later, Mr. Lambretta's car was moving smoothly toward the gate with a pair of repatriated females in the back seat. He stopped at the gate to wedge a pebble into the locking mechanism, then went quickly on.
He caught the girl's frightened eyes in the rearview mirror and his voice was soft and warm as he asked her, "You okay, kid?"
"Yes sir, I'm fine," she assured him.
"Get ready for a surprise," he said. "This is not at all what you probably think it is. You're going to be with some nice people. Cooperate with them, help them all you can. Okay?"
"Okay," the girl replied faintly.
Smiley was totally out of it, the tousled head resting on the girl's shoulder.
Two blocks from the school, Bolan turned into another drive where an ambulance and several other vehicles waited. Toby Ranger and Tommy Anders, showing anxious faces, moved quickly forward to receive their lost one.
"She's fine," Bolan assured them. "A bit wobbly now, but I think she'll be all right."
Toby had gone immediately to the rear seat. Anders halted at Bolan's window and reached in with a warm hand. "No sign of Carl?" he inquired.
"Not yet. Do you have your portable judge?"
"We have him. We also have your man Oxley appropriately iced."
"Keep him there," Bolan said grimly. "The others, too. Smiley's bombed out but the youngster here will give you what you need for the judge. I want you to hit them quick. Let's cover this one good."
"You know we will," the comic replied quietly.
Yeah. Bolan knew that they would. It was an efficient strike team. They would be all over that school before the inmates knew what was going down. And with all the rules of evidence meticulously honored. The charges would be kidnapping, white slavery, transport of females and minors across state lines for immoral purposes, and probably a half-dozen other major felonies. Even so, Bolan knew…
"No bail, Tom," he muttered. "We can't have these people on the street for a while. We don't even want them communicating."
The little guy grinned sourly. "You can't bail 'til you're booked. Never fear. We'll keep them iced for at least twenty-four hours."
"It's a hell of a note," Bolan growled.
"Yeah. But it's the only note we got."
"It's the only note you've got," Bolan said, the eyes flashing.
"You aren't comfortable with our game, are you?"
"Not a bit," the big blitzer admitted.
The ambulance attendants were quickly taking Smiley away. Anders took a greatly confused teenage girl in tow. Toby Ranger paused at Bolan's window for a quick kiss and a misty-eyed thanks.
"It's going to be okay," she whispered.
"Be good to the kid," Bolan said gruffly. "She's had a rough time. Probably a runaway. Handle her gently, Toby."
He backed his vehicle out of there and went quickly on his way.
Time was becoming the all important factor, now.
And he only wished that he could share Toby's optimism. As a matter of fact, he did not. The "soft" was over. All that lay ahead was hard-double damn hard.
CHAPTER 8
Carl Lyons and Smiley Dublin, posing as Mr. and Mrs. Carl Leonetti, had made connections in the Orient with Dandy Jack Clemenza, a very ambitious minor echelon Mafioso who hoped to become the heroin king of North America. Clemenza had been making a pitch to the collective families of Mafia with assurances that he could, with their backing, corner the American import market in illegal drugs-and that, moreover, they could completely dominate the distribution and sale of the valuable substances within the United States.
Basically, that was the package on which Lyons and Dublin had been working. But the total picture was quite a bit larger than that-and it was the total picture which had been giving so much anguish to their partners, Tom Anders and Toby Ranger.
While Lyons and Dublin worked their wiles on the international scene, Anders and Ranger had thrown their total energy into the domestic side of the conspiracy with an attempt to draw straight lines of cause and effect relationships which would eventually ensnare and topple the whole large network of organized crime in America. Just as, in earlier times, the feds had used income tax evasion as an effective inroad to the heavily insulated higher ranks, they now hoped to ride the narcotics trails into those ranks-though with much more devastating results.
The entire set of jinks via Lyons and Dublin was intended to interface with that higher purpose. So much had been made in recent years of constitutional guarantees to criminals-especially with respect to the concepts of entrapment and illegally obtained evidence-that the professional criminals had been laughing up their sleeves and enjoying a free ride on this noble ideal of freemen while systematically plundering the rights and properties of those same men. It seemed to Bolan that very often the nobler thinkers of society tried to regard rights as some esthetic essence quite unrelated to the real world. The whole business of crime and punishment had thus become ritualized as some weirdly formal game between the good guys and the bad-with that distinction often blurred in the interplay of rights versus justice-and with never a thought to the real-world rights of society itself.
Bolan knew a thing or two about real world rights.
These involved the right of any good citizen to walk his streets without fear, to be free from intimidation and illegal exploitation, free from degradation and bodily harm and violence in all its guises-primarily, though, the right to work and save and build and keep.
There was no right to plunder.
Yet the noble thinkers seemed to believe that there was unless the rituals of the game were rigidly honored.
Mack Bolan lived in the real world. He therefore did not subscribe to such unworldly beliefs. Lawmen lived in the real world, also, and were forced to subscribe-if they were to be allowed into the game at all. Thus, the fantastic intrigues such as the present situation, the incredible personal risks, the often tragic consequences.
The SOG attempted a penetration of a highly organized and well layered outfit. The players within this outfit knew the game well and had mastered all the rituals. The game was also, as always, heavily rigged in their favor since the lawmen were the only players who were required to observe any rules whatever. The penetration-obviously so successful in the base phase-had just as obviously fallen apart between the layers. Lyons had served as Clemenza's personal courier by accompanying the heroin shipment from the Far East to an intermediate point in South America. Another courier had taken over at that point, moving the junk into the Central American corridor and eventually into the U.S.