stop to draw a breath in the middle of his sentence; clearly he suffered from some kind of pulmonary issue.
“How rich?” Bolan asked.
“Six figures for each hit. The families have pooled their money into a war chest for the right man. That man is you, Harmon. At least, that’s what we thought. You going to...make a liar out of me?” Aldo asked.
“No. Six figures I can work with. But I’ll need the list and the details. As much information as you have.”
“Not quite so fast,” Rosa said. “We called the meeting for the restaurant so David here could lay it out for you. There’s a test we need you to pass first. It will show us that we’re not wasting our time, our money and all our plans on you. If you can pass the test, you can have the list. We can’t afford to have anyone try and fail. If what we’re doing got out, all the families would suffer for it, and we’d miss our chance. The man who takes on this job has to prove he can succeed.”
“I’m waiting,” Bolan prompted.
“David is an expert on the Toretto family,” Rosa stated. “He’s going to go with you, give you the lay of the land. We want you to remove the thorn that is the Torettos from our side. I don’t care how you do it. I don’t even care if people know you did it for us. That’s actually part of why we need them taken out. They struck us because they think we’re weak. They think they can defy us. We have to show the other families that anyone who defies us will die. Make it big. Make it loud. Or make it quiet, so long as it’s horrible. We want to make a statement.”
“Right. I feel like there’s a catch.”
The Corinos looked at Pierce, who swallowed hard. “Nobody knows where the Torettos are headquartered,” he said. “We know some of their territories, and we know some of their holdings, but they’ve guarded their whereabouts carefully when it comes to the Toretto bosses. That’s one of the reasons we haven’t been able to take them down before now.”
“David is modest,” Aldo said, wheezing. “David himself is one of the reasons we haven’t been...able to take down the Torettos. Because David was given the job, and he couldn’t do it.”
Pierce turned red but shifted so that he was facing Bolan and away from the Corinos. “We need the help of a professional,” Pierce said. “Somebody skilled in assassination. Somebody who can help me root out the Torettos and decimate them once and for all.”
“I’m your man,” Bolan said.
“We’ll see,” Aldo told him. “We’ll...see.”
Chicago’s South Side
“You mind telling me what that was all about?” Bolan asked, as Pierce guided his Town Car through the seedier sections of town. The smaller man had not discussed their destination with the man he thought was Vincent Harmon. He had merely motioned to the car, fired it up and started driving. Bolan had been content to give Pierce some time with his thoughts, but his patience had its limits.
“It’s a long-standing thing,” Pierce said. “Son of a friend of the family, I told you. In syndicate circles, family is everything. If you aren’t blood, you’ve got to work twice as hard, be twice as hard, to show them you deserve to be here. And when somebody like Seb figures he should be the field commander for our street guns? Well, somebody like me, who fought his way up through the ranks over years of service... He figures I don’t rate, and I should be pushed outta the way. All because my father worked for the Corinos all his life but wasn’t a member of the family itself. The syndicate has changed, Harmon. We used to believe in loyalty.”
“Yeah,” Bolan said, unable to help himself. “It’s like a guy can’t shark loans at three hundred percent interest and then sell his clients’ daughters into prostitution to pay off their debts anymore.”
“Hey, hey, that’s not fair,” Pierce protested. “I don’t go in for any of that crap. I don’t run girls and I don’t have a hand in any of that type of thing. It’s my job to keep the other families from killing the Corinos. I run our guns and I make sure security is tight. I’m a security specialist, Harmon, not some loan shark’s leg-breaker.”
“It’s a dirty business,” Bolan said. “I’m not sure anyone can dip his hands in that river of blood and come up clean.”
“Says the guy who kills people for a living,” Pierce shot back.
“Touché.”
“Anyway,” Pierce said, “I’m not going to be doing this forever. I’ve been saving my money. I’m gonna open up my own shop.”
“To sell what?”
“It’s not important,” Pierce replied. “C’mon, let’s focus on the task at hand. You know where we are?”
“The south side.”
“No kidding.” Piece sounded annoyed. “I remember I used to walk into the room while my old man was watching television. I’d say, ‘What you watching, Dad?’ And he’d say, ‘A movie.’ Look, Colonel Obvious, this is Toretto territory. We’re way behind enemy lines down here. Keep your eyes peeled for gun barrels pointed our way.”
“What’s your plan?”
“This is your show,” Pierce said. The Corinos figure you’re the guy who can bring down the Torettos where I’ve failed. Well, fine. Show me you can do it.”
Bolan shrugged. “You don’t think we should gear up first?”
“Trunk’s fully stocked,” Pierce said. “We’ve got everything you could ever need.”
“You might be surprised,” Bolan replied. He paused, mulling over the situation. It was not the first time he’d had to think on his feet. “You don’t know where the Toretto headquarters is, but you know this is their territory. That means they’ve got business holdings in the area that you do know about.”
“Right.”
“Take us to one,” Bolan said. “Someplace where a lot of money changes hands.”
“We know the Torettos have a laundry,” Pierce told him. “But they keep the location as secret as their headquarters. For obvious reasons.”
“Doesn’t matter. Someplace that handles a lot of cash would have to have that cash laundered. We find the first, it leads us to the second, assuming we leave at least one person alive.”
Pierce stared at Bolan for a long moment before turning his eyes back to the road. “What about a numbers joint? Sammy Pinch books for the Torettos out of the back of a bar on 79th. The Rose, it’s called.”
“Numbers? There’s still money to be made with all the lotteries that offer the three-number game?” Bolan asked.
“You’d be surprised. The payoffs are larger and a bettor can run a tab. Can’t do that with the state lottery.”
