Like tonight.
It was something to think about.
She stood up. She wore an expensive dark blue dress that clung softly to her sleek figure, topped by a fur jacket. Jewelry glittered on her fingers.
She pulled on a pair of white gloves.
"Let's go say farewell to the children, David. I want to talk to Miss Garner again, too."
"She's not going to tell you anything about Bolan," her son said.
Denise Parelli smiled.
"Perhaps she will."
He held the door open for his mother and they left the office, crossing the asphalt area between the office and the warehouse, walking quickly because of the cold, raw wind cutting across the complex.
One of the Parelli soldiers was waiting at the door of the warehouse, Uzi in hand. He opened the door and stepped back with a deferential nod.
Denise swept through first, David right behind her. As the soldier closed the door behind them, Denise paused to let her son take the lead. Here among the men, she had to allow her son at least the pretense of leadership, she reminded herself.
David stalked over to the hardguy in charge of the detail guarding the kids.
"Everything all right in here?" Parelli snapped.
"Yes, sir, no trouble," the head cock replied. He gestured casually with the barrel of the shotgun he held cradled in his arm. "This bunch won't give us no trouble."
About twenty-five small children were huddled in a group along one wall, appearing incapable of giving anyone any trouble. They looked cold, miserable, scared and wholly submissive.
All of them were under ten, most of them about eight or nine years old. They were dressed warmly enough for the chilly warehouse; a sickly child would bring less in the markets they were intended for.
None of them had been abused other than a little slapping around.
A haunted look in their eyes, a look of hopelessness and despair, indicated that they had already given up.
Good, Denise thought. Her customers did not want kids who were strong-willed, who would give trouble when told by adults to do things. Her customers, and their customers, wanted kids who would obey, no matter what the orders were.
"Gus says the truck is ready." David nodded to the hardguy with the shotgun. "I'll tell him to have it back up to the loading dock."
"Whatever you say, Mr. P."
There were a half dozen or so soldiers in the warehouse.
Denise could feel them watching her.
No one questioned her right to be there, but she knew they had to sometimes wonder why David always brought his mother along with him.
There was probably perverse gossip of all sorts among the men about her relationship with her son, she knew.
Let them talk.
After all, when you came right down to it, the gun carriers, the soldiers, were nothing more than cannon fodder...
Bolan fodder was more like it, she told herself... and their opinions and idle speculation were worth less than nothing.
"Where's the woman?" Parelli snarled at the man with the shotgun. "I want to talk to her."
The guy jerked his head toward a small door in the wall opposite where he had lined up the children.
"We've got her tied up in the can."
"Get her out here."
"Right away, Mr. Parelli."
A moment later, one of the soldiers led Lana Garner from the small, smelly rest room.
Holding her right arm so tightly that she winced in pain, the hood led her over to where Denise Parelli and her son stood waiting.
Lana had been treated more roughly than the children, Denise could see at a glance. Her blouse was torn in several places, her right cheek bruised. A small trickle of dried blood encrusted the corner of her mouth.
She stared defiantly at the Parellis.
"I don't care what you do to me, I won't tell you a thing!" she blazed at them.
Denise smiled.
"My dear, what could you possibly know that would be of interest to us? There's only one reason you're still alive and it really has nothing to do with you."
Lana shook her head, more angry than afraid as she stared at the Parellis while the hood maintained his iron grip on her arm.
"You're crazy if you think holding me will stop Mack Bolan. He's going to find you and he's going to kill you!"
David slapped her brutally with an open hand across the mouth, spinning her around. The blow drove her to one knee. She would have fallen to the cement floor if the hardman had not yanked her back to her feet.
"You shut up about Bolan, bitch. That bastard's a dead man if he gets near this place. And there isn't much chance of that, is there? He doesn't have a clue where we are, now does he?"
She opened her mouth to shoot back a hot retort, then paused abruptly, grinning at him savagely.
"Oh, no you don't. You're not going to trick me like that! You just want to find out how much Bolan does know about you. You want to know if he's located this place. Well, you can just wait and find out, you slimebag!"
Denise stepped close to Lana until their faces were only inches apart. Denise lifted her gloved hand and softly stroked the fingertips along Lana's bruised cheek.
"You shouldn't call David names like that, dear," she said softly. "I am his mother, after all."
"I'm sorry." Lana closed her eyes. "I was wrong."
"That's more like it," Denise murmured sweetly.
Lana spit on the floor between Denise Parelli's feet. "I should have said that he's a son of a bitch!"
Denise sighed.
"My dear, my dear. I'm afraid you leave us no choice but to teach you some manners."
"The hard way," David chimed in.
His smile said he was savoring the experience. He nodded to a hood standing next to Lana.
The nearby soldier stepped up and slammed the butt of his shotgun into the small of Lana's back.
She cried out and fell to both knees, scraping them on the rough concrete when the man holding her released his grip.
Against the wall, the children saw this and began whimpering, a strange, eerie sound in the spacious warehouse, as if they knew that the brutalized young woman was the closest thing they had to a friend in this horrible nightmare.
David lifted his hand to the soldier who had struck Lana.
"No more." He looked down at the woman sprawled before him and licked his lips in anticipation. "Not yet, anyway. Business first."
He stepped over to Lana, reached down, cupped her chin in his hand. He jerked her head up so that she had to look at him.
"Don't touch me, slimebag," she snarled vehemently.
"When this is over," he told her with a reptilian smile, "we won't need you for anything. Except for maybe one thing... until you die. That oughta be lots of fun. For me, and for the boys."
Before she could respond, there was the rumble of a truck's engine outside and the loading dock door began to screech upward.
The big trailer rig had been backed up to the warehouse loading dock, its rear doors wide open.
The foreman walked in from the loading dock.
"We're ready to load, Mr. Parelli."
David lost interest in the woman sprawled before him. He looked at his mother and saw the barely perceptible nod. "Load 'em up and move 'em out." He looked back at Lana with a leer. "Then we fix you."
18
The fashionable neighborhood bordering Evanston was quiet. There were lights on in some of the big houses behind manicured lawns, but few cars moved along the broad, tree-lined boulevards.
Bolan parked Lana Garner's car a block away from Senator Mark Dutton's house, where he lived with his wife and teenage daughter.
Bolan had chosen one of the darkened houses when he parked the car. He loosened the bulb in the dome light and there was no flash of illumination when he slipped out of the vehicle, quietly closing the door and angling for the thick shadows underneath trees.
It took only a few moments for him to make his way through the backyard toward a high wooden fence that closed off the Dutton property from prying eyes.