They were halfway down the slope and moving swiftly through the timber when Bolan abruptly came eyeball to eyeball with that obstacle. The guy was packing a grease gun close to the chest, and those eyes were both electrified and confused in the sudden confrontation.
Bolan's reaction was quicker and more positive. He doubled the guy over with a knee to the gut and snapped his neck in the spontaneous follow-through. The only sounds of the encounter were a grunting whoof from the midriff slam and the unmistakable pop of separating vertebrae.
The woman gasped with horror and fell to her knees in the underbrush.
Bolan set the safety on the grease gun and wordlessly handed it to the woman, then draped the dead man over his shoulder and continued the descent.
He heard her scrambling along close behind, breathing hard and beginning to come unglued. The grimness of her little adventure was settling in. He paused and turned back to tell her, "Come on. We're almost clear."
Those haunted eyes were now saucer-wide and inching toward hysteria-but she was fighting it. "I'm okay," she puffed. "Keep going."
Grimaldi was pacing the turf beside the helicopter with a. revolver in hand. He wasted no time with greetings, but hopped aboard at first sight of them and fired the engine.
Bolan stowed his dead cargo behind the seat then lifted the lady aboard and moved quickly in behind her. The little craft leapt off immediately and resumed the ground-hugging flight along the base of the ridge. Seconds later they were around, the bend, and lifting toward a more comfortable altitude.
Molly Franklin Copa, wedged small and shrinking between the two men, an automatic weapon on her lap, sat quietly with both hands covering her face.
Bolan donned his headset and told the pilot, "That was some kind of flying, Jack. Thanks."
"Say it again when I quit shaking," Grimaldi requested. "What's the cargo?"
"A Bad Luck Charlie," Bolan explained. "I couldn't leave it behind. Dead men do tell tales."
The pilot grunted an unintelligible response to that and turned a disturbed look toward the woman. "So do live women," he said with some discomfort.
"I think we'll enjoy her tales, Jack," Bolan replied. "Protect yourself, though."
"Yeah, sure." Grimaldi slipped on a pair of smoked glasses and donned a baseball-style cap. He grinned. "Think she'll give me an autograph?"
Bolan said, "I'm expecting much more than that." He plugged in another headset and placed it on Mrs. Copa's pretty head.
Yeah. A hell of a lot more than that.
So often, success is harder to live with than failure. Especially when success seems to come so easily. It had come to young Molly Franklin like a hand from heaven. She had "paid no dues," as the showbiz folk liked to put it. But it seemed that she'd been a good kid with warm ideals and a strong sense of gratitude-and that was the chief source of all her problems. She'd been a pushover for every sob story in town, an easy mark for sponging friends and relatives, and a sitting duck for all the vultures of the business who saw nothing but dollar signs when they looked at her.
So she'd had failure in success, agony with her joys, frustration with triumphs. Ten years of that had set her up perfectly for Nick Copa. He caught her on the rebound from a second miserable marriage-at a time when her career was being threatened by a growing drinking problem and an incompetent business manager.
They were quietly married in Vegas following a whirlwind, sixty-hour courtship. And Copa immediately set about putting the Molly Franklin Company in order. Apparently he'd made a few offers which certain people could not refuse, because he cut through a stultifying legal process which could have taken years to accomplish, Almost overnight he fired her manager, switched her to a different booking outfit, killed an exclusive recording contract, and took over the whole works himself. Several days later he ran off all the loungers and spongers from Franklin Place, the ridge-top estate which had been Molly's home for several years, replacing them very quickly with his own cadre.
All of which had seemed highly commendable to Molly, in the beginning. She'd admired Nick's strength and hardnosed business attitude-and although she'd known from the beginning that he was mixed up somehow in the rackets, she'd loved and trusted him and welcomed his strong hand in her affairs.
She'd thought it a marvelous idea when he converted her barn into a recording studio, then began producing her records from there. She did not know until months later that the studio was also being used as a pirate factory for the theft of other people's recordings..
Ditto the television studio in the barn's loft. Except that they never got around to producing any Molly Franklin packages from there. It seemed that there was never any production time available between the endless one-reelers of hardcore porn being filmed and processed there.
"You saw a couple of the stars in the pool today," she told Bolan. "They live in. Like me. But they have a hell of a lot more freedom than I have."
Bolan said, "I saw some unopened crates in the barn. What's in them?"
"Must be the video cassette stuff," she replied.
"What's it for?"
"Oh that's the big, coming thing-cassette players for television. It will probably make Nick a billionaire. He wants to record TV shows and movies and sell them abroad-on the black market, of course."
Of course.
She went on: "But the thing I hated most "Yeah?" Bolan prompted her.
"He's blackmailing people. And he's using me in that."
"Which people?"
"You know, official people. Politicians, mostly."
"How is he using you?"
"Oh I'm the bait-the celebrity, you know. I throw these big parties, see. And who in Nashville would turn down an invitation to a Molly Franklin party? And we have this live-in whore corps, you see."
Bolan growled, "I see, yeah."
"And these special bedrooms for special guests."
"Uh huh."
"Nick calls them the Candid Camera rooms." "I get the picture," Bolan told her.
She sighed and said, "The victims never do. They pay and pay but they never get the pictures. They don't pay with money, of course. And these are moving pictures, and I do mean moving."
Things usually sound trite only because they are so true to form, so much a normal pattern. This one was trite as hell, the oldest trick in the bag-and that was because it worked so well. Obviously it had worked very well for Nick Copa in Tennessee. His entrenchment there had come with miraculous swiftness.
The lady was making that very point. "I guess Nick is about the most powerful man in these parts, right now."
"We'll see," Bolan told her.
"And he's built it all in less than six months." "He could lose it a lot quicker."
"Does that worry you?"
Bolan-Omega shook his head. "Not a bit. Once a trench is dug, anyone can man it."
She got his meaning. "Okay. Doesn't worry me, either. I don't know why I've been telling you all this. You probably know all about it, anyway. Well listen… you never have to worry about me. I'll never talk to anybody about this. I know better than that. But I do want you to get that man off my back."
He asked, her, "What'd you have in mind?"
She shivered. "Whatever it takes. You can have the farm. I don't care if I never see it again. Make him an offer… I don't know. I don't care. Just keep him away."
Bolan said, "Okay. You have a deal. Can you believe that?"
She replied, "I guess I have to believe it, don't I. Okay. You want the man from Singapore. Right?"
So right.
And Bolan just had to believe that she could deliver. It was, after all, an offer which could not be refused.
CHAPTER 16
Toby Ranger answered the knock and stood at the doorway staring coldly at him for a moment before greeting him. "Well, look who's here. If it isn't Captain Cataclysm."
She turned her back on him and walked away. Bolan pushed on inside, sans invitation, and closed the door.