Collision Course

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

1

Mack Bolan had parked in the shadows under the New Jersey freeway overpass. The low-slung black Honda Prelude had heavily tinted windows and boasted a nitrous-augmented engine. Inside the vehicle the Executioner waited, a cell phone and a silenced Beretta 93-R machine pistol on the seat beside him.

The parking lot was hidden from the major urban arterial by an abandoned factory, its windows broken and graffiti covering its walls in a dozen hues of paint. A sour wind, smelling strongly of the ocean, pushed garbage around the vacant lot.

A scrawny one-eyed dog emerged from the mouth of a secondary alley and trotted across the broken asphalt. It nosed around a refuse pile, then lifted its leg against an overturned garbage can.

Bolan shifted inside the car and the dog’s head came up, the animal wary and feral. It growled low in its throat, then lazily trotted back toward the safety of the alley it had emerged from.

Ten minutes later a silver TrailBlazer with government plates rolled out of the same alley through the chain-link fence and came to a stop beside the Prelude, nose pointed in the opposite direction.

The driver’s window on each car powered down smoothly, and Bolan nodded to the man his old friend Hal Brognola had sent to meet him. The guy was big, with a shaved head and a bristling goatee. Despite the leathers he was wearing, something about the cool appraisal the man gave Bolan screamed “Cop.”

“I’m Danson,” he said in a gravelly voice. “A friend of mine told me to come see you. Said helping you would clean the slate between us. Since I owe the son of a bitch from way back, I came and brought what he asked.”

“What do you have?” Bolan prompted.

Danson lifted a manila envelope from the seat beside him. As he handed it through the open window, Bolan could see the word Hate had been tattooed across the scarred knuckles of the man’s big fist.

The envelope wasn’t very heavy, and Bolan quickly opened the flap to check its contents.

“Robert Scone. Goes by the street name Sideways. Biker thug. Did a stretch in Attica a couple years ago for aggravated assault on his old lady, a dancer named Shayla. Did a pretty good number on her and got three years,” Danson stated.

Bolan grunted and gently shook the contents of the envelope out into his lap. There was a stack of photocopied sheets held together by a paper clip, a police rap sheet from the City of Newark and a blowup of an official mug shot. There was also a pint plastic bowl with a sealed lid. When Bolan held it up he saw the pink of ground hamburger and two horse pills filled with white powder. He looked at Danson.

“Read on,” Danson said. “You’ll figure it out. Anyway, Sideways was connected to the Outlaws motorcycle gang as a prospect member when he went into Attica. Inside he made his bones against the Black Gangsta Disciples. Typical swastika-wearing bullshit.”

Bolan placed the plastic container beside his Beretta and held up the mug shot picture. He let his gaze roam across the photograph, memorizing every detail. His eyes flicked to the information typed beneath the snapshot. Sideways was a big man, six-five and 260 pounds at the time of incarceration. His priors included a DUI, simple assault, several counts of possession of a controlled substance and domestic violence.

“After he made his bones,” Danson continued, “he got serious about his career as a criminal. When he got out, he freelanced as muscle for a couple of the Jersey syndicates, arson for hire, collections, extortion, that sort of thing.”

Bolan nodded and slid the picture to the bottom of the pile of paperwork he held. He scanned down the page until he found the annotation for Scone’s current address. He memorized it.

“The organized-crime squad put some of their confidential informants in his path and started hearing that Sideways was making a rep for himself as a real gunslinger, hijacking freight trucks and teamsters coming out of the Newark airport.”

“They nab him?” Bolan asked.

“Yes and no. A cigarette truck on its way into the city gets nabbed. The Newark police finger our man Sideways and do a takedown on the address I just gave you there.”

“He was holding?”

“No. No cigarettes, nothing to connect him to the heist. Still, it looks like they got him on a parole violation because the team found some crystal meth and a handgun in the house.”

At the mention of handgun Bolan looked up. He knew where Danson was going now and realized why Brognola had organized the meet with the undercover cop.

“So he’s cooling his heels in lockup?”

“No. His girlfriend, Shayla, took the rap. Copped to it, said both were hers.”

“Shayla? The girl he beat up?”

“Same one. A regular Romeo and Juliet, this pair. Only Shayla has a prior herself. A pandering charge that went to probation she got while the love of her life, Sideways, was upstate in prison.”

“So she’s in jail now?”

“Exactly, Sideways is drinking beer and screwing her little sister as we speak at the address that’s in his file.”

“And the handgun Newark copped on the raid?” Bolan asked. The question was rhetorical.

“An HS 2000 Croatian pistol,” Danson confirmed.

Bolan nodded curtly. His finger found the button on the armrest of his car door and he began to power up the window.

“Looks like I need to pay our friend Sideways a little visit,” he said.

“You tell Hal we’re square now.”

Bolan nodded before the window went up and then pushed the accelerator down on his car. Within a minute he had connected to the arterial and was gunning it across the overpass above his rendezvous site.

Jersey Shore

BOLAN LEFT THE CAR behind and merged with the night.

Sideways had made it easy for him. Or rather Shayla had. The house was surprisingly isolated. She’d taken her money from dancing and put it into a rundown, one-story Cape Cod overlooking the shore. It had been a fixer-upper with potential when she’d made the down payment on the house, but nothing had been improved and Sideways obviously wasn’t the handyman type. Now the little white house merely looked shabby, with a weed-choked lawn and three Harley panheads parked under the lean-to that served as a garage.

Bolan moved up from the trees along the road, his movement masked by the droning of the cicadas and the sound of night surf battering the gray sand forty feet behind the old house.

Low lights were on in the house behind drawn shades, and the hard riffs of Metallica bled out through the closed windows and doors. The volume was surprisingly subdued given the biker stereotype.

Bolan, dressed in a blacksuit, crouched in the tall weeds at the edge of the yard. A massive pit bull was curled up on the front steps. It made soft snuffling noises as it slept. From where Bolan knelt the animal looked upward of eighty pounds of solid muscle. The soldier carefully unbuttoned the flap of the cargo pocket on his right pants leg and pulled out the plastic container Danson had given him and opened it.

Bolan took the two horse pills that had come with the meat and pried them apart, one after the other, and gently sprinkled their contents into the hamburger. Once he had spilled the tranquilizer powder into the meat he rolled it into a ball and held it loosely in his right hand.

He checked the wind coming in off the ocean, felt it push into his face. Satisfied, Bolan rose out of the weeds like a liquid shadow and lobbed the meatball in an arc over the thirty yards toward the front door of the one-story house.

The hamburger hit the walkway in front of the stairs with a muted little splat, and Bolan instantly folded himself back down into the weeds. The pit bull got to its feet in the blink of an eye, and Bolan could hear its deep-throated growl clearly. It sounded like the idling engines of one of the Harleys parked in the lean-to behind it.

The guard dog descended the wooden stair on stiffened legs, back hair bristling and teeth bared. Bolan remained motionless, draped in the night.

The dog suddenly stopped growling. Bolan saw the beast’s snout suddenly shift as it caught the scent of the meat. Again the dog moved almost too fast to see, lunging forward and snapping up the ball of raw hamburger in a single chomp.

The dog worked the food around in its mouth, then swallowed it. With a last, suspicious glare into the night, it turned its nose and returned to the porch. It curled up again and went to sleep.