"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.
According to the game plan, then, Lyons was to have returned to his Far East headquarters upon completion of the base leg. Instead, and according to a higher game plan, he had come on to Nashville in an attempt to bridge the layers and establish a meaningful rapport with the domestic distributors. Apparently he had failed in that attempt. And very probably, yeah, the consequences of that failure were tragic.
Bolan held little hope that he would find Carl Lyons, alias Leonetti, alive and well.
Meanwhile the game had gone on. The plays had already been called and there was nothing to be gained by calling an audible at the line of scrimmage. Anders and Ranger went on with their part in the intrigue, hoping against all odds that somehow the play could yet be saved, well aware that sometimes it is the busted play that brings the largest gain.
As a final, forlorn gamble, Bolan had been called in at the last moment to lend his own brand of razzle-dazzle broken field running to the problem. In any clear analysis, sure, that represented a violation of the ritual. But there was a hell of a lot more at stake here than some esthetic appreciation of constitutional rights and governmental restraints. These were real people inhabiting a real world-and the most vicious section of it at that. And Bolan understood their despair. He shared it. And though he had agreed to walk softly in this hallowed game of rituals and rights, he knew that he had used all the soft at his disposal.
It was, yes, a well layered organization. And Ray Oxley had been accurate in at least one important respect: it was an outfit which did not appear to follow traditional Mafia patterns. That was another negative for Bolan. He was working largely in the dark on this one, going on instincts as much as anything else as he sought the keys to this patchwork outfit. At this layer, it seemed to be composed mostly of minor minions of the organized crime world guys who had always seemed content to operate relatively independent little territories at the very edge of Mafia power, primarily in quasi-legitimate business areas.