4 - Prelude
Bolan left the car at the rear entrance to the apartment building and went up the service elevator to the fifth floor, padded softly down the hall to a door marked "511" and leaned on the doorbell. Forty seconds or so later he heard sounds within the apartment and a male voice called, "Okay, okay, just a minute."
He let up on the button and braced his good shoulder against the door. As soon as it cracked he shoved on in, nearly upsetting the man on the other side. "Wha- what...?" the man stuttered.
"You know me," Bolan snapped. "Get dressed. We're going out."
The man turned and ran toward the rear of the apartment, but Bolan was right with him. He grabbed an arm and swung the fleeing man around, driving a balled fist into his midsection. The man's breath left him in a loud grunt and he sank limply onto a small table. Bolan steadied him there until he was breathing normally again, then shoved him roughly toward the bedroom.
Several minutes later they left the apartment together, went down the back way, and got into Bolan's car. Not a word had passed between them since the original confrontation at the door to the apartment. Now the man gawked at the canvas-covered bulk in the back seat of the car and said: "What's that back there?"
"It could be dead bodies," Bolan replied quietly. "You could end up back there if you get stupid."
The man jerked around and faced stonily forward. A short drive later they were at the offices of Escorts Unlimited. The man opened the door with no outward sign of reluctance, and Bolan followed him inside.
"What are we doing here?" the man asked.
"Not we- you," Bolan replied. "You're going to give me a print-out on the entire prostitution operation. I want it all-call girls, house girls, streetwalkers, the whole thing. And I want it damn quick."
"Yes, sir," the programmer quickly agreed.
"Punch the wrong button and it'll be your death program. Make sure you understand that. If I get what I want, that's all I want. But if you screw me up, I'll screw you up. Understand?"
"Yes, sir, I understand."
Twenty minutes later they were going back out the door. Bolan was carrying a large manila envelope. "This is to be just between you and me," Bolan told him. "If I find out you've been talking about it, I'll figure you decided to try to screw me up. Understand?"
"Yes, sir, I understand," the programmer replied meekly.
Bolan left him on the sidewalk, got into his car, and drove off. He really did not give a damn if the programmer talked or not. But after he was finished with the lists, he'd mail them to Lieutenant Weatherbee. Perhaps they could be of some police value if the secret was maintained until that time. He glanced at his watch. It was just past one o'clock. The night had hardly begun. His face twisted into a wry smile. It was going to be a hellish night.
Bolan walked down a darkened hallway, paused in front of a door and held his ear to it for a moment, then leaned back against the opposite wall and opened the door abruptly with a swift kick. The scene that greeted him through the open doorway could have been a pornographic snapshot. An attractive young woman was holding a nude hands-and-knees stance atop a disarrayed bed, positioned crosswise with her feet and the calves of her legs protruding out over the side. A nude man stood between the protruding calves, thrusting vigorously from the waist, his hands tightly gripping the girl's hips. Both man and woman were staring at Bolan with dumbfounded amazement, though the man's physical activities seemed hardly disturbed by the intrusion. There was a strangely unreal quality to the scene, grotesquely silent and dreamlike. Bolan stepped into the room and delivered a smashing backhand blow to the man's face; he released the girl's hips and stumbled back across the room. Bolan felt bad about that, but he reminded himself that there was no morality in a holy war. The same hand that had disconnected the man swung back in a vicious open-hand slap to the girl's poised buttocks. She yowled and fell forward across the bed, then flipped to her side and lay there screaming obscenities. Her erstwhile companion scooped up a ball of clothes and scampered out of the room. A door was flung open down the hall and a youth of about 25 ran into the room shortly thereafter, a wicked-looking knife in one hand. Bolan took the knife away from him and tossed him across the room and into the wall. The girl stopped screaming and stared stupidly at the crumpled figure of the youth. Bolan turned to her and showed her his teeth. "Any more girls at work here?" he snarled.
She shook her head emphatically. "D-downstairs, in the bar," she gasped.
"We'll see," Bolan said. He strode from the room and began opening other doors along the hallway. There were six in all, and he scored again on the last one. Two naked women were on the bed, rolled together in a tight knot of arms and legs. Bolan could not see the head of either. "Didn't anybody hear the ruckus?" he asked loudly, then thrust a hand into the tangle and pulled them onto the floor. The ecstatic expression on the face of a woman of about 45 had quickly converted to one of baffled torment. "What is-get out of here!" she cried.
"Which of you is the working girl?" Bolan asked, grinning.
A well- proportioned younger woman slowly rose to her feet, giving Bolan a frightened once-over. "Where's your whip?" she asked sullenly.
"Right here," Bolan replied calmly. He thwacked her across the bottom with an open hand and shoved her back onto the bed, snared the older woman's clothing from a nearby chair and pushed her out the door, draping the clothing about her neck. "You'd better leave damn quick," he said, curling his lips menacingly. "I'm about to shoot up the joint."
The woman had started crying. She hurried down the hall and shot out the door, still naked. Bolan grinned and stepped back inside the invaded room. The girl was cringing on the bed, twisted bedcovers hastily pulled across her middle. "Tell Leo I don't like his Main Street joints," Bolan said. He tossed a marksman's medal onto the bed. Tell 'im!"
He left then and went silently down the back stairs to the alley, got into his car, and departed. Ten minutes later he pulled up at the back of a townhouse complex, consulted one of the lists from the manila envelope, smiled, and went to the back door. He returned to the car a moment later, took a crowbar from the back floor, and went back to the rear door of the building. A well-placed lever-action and a dull snap later the door was open, and The Executioner was inside. He was in a small service hall; he could see the kitchen through a glass porthole in a door to his right, another door was set into the far wall. Things were swinging on the other side of that door; a hi-fi going full blast and other sounds of merriment told the story quite vividly. He went in through the kitchen door, unholstered the.45, and immediately bumped into a nude girl who was leaning drunkenly across a tiled drainboard, vainly attempting to free ice cubes from a frosted tray.
"You're going to freeze a tit," he warned her, and brushed on past.
"Fat chance," she mumbled, hardly noticing him otherwise.
It was a large living room, richly appointed with oriental rugs and tapestries and further decorated with wall-to-wall living flesh. The lights were low and nobody seemed to be moving about; but the conversation from the floor level was animated and unrestrained. Nobody seemed to be aware of Bolan's presence. He went back through the kitchen, paused long enough to flip the ice cubes onto the drainboard for the nude girl, allowed her to kiss him in reward, then stepped onto the service porch and inspected the plumbing fittings of the laundry trays. He'd noticed the garden hose outside, on his way in; he went outside and brought it back in with him, screwed one end onto the fitting at the laundry plumbing, looped the other end over in a closing pinch, and turned on the cold water full force, then went back through the kitchen and to the living room, patting the ice-seeker's derriere on the way through, dragging the hose with him. He found the wall with the light switch and brought the overhead lights into the action. A murmuring arose and someone said loudly, "What's with the lights?" Bolan guessed that perhaps thirty people were present, all nude, and all bound together somehow in a confusing tangle of limbs and torsos. A girl in the center was beginning to shriek in a calmly controlled fashion; Bolan's roving eye found her and noted that she was the recipient of multiple attentions, any one of which would have no doubt proved sufficient to produce the muffled little shrieks.