Save the Children

16

Sheba needed a drink. Badly.

She sat at her desk in the office on the third floor of the massage parlor.

The place had been cleaned up considerably since Bolan had come blitzing through.

The broken glass had been vacuumed, her lifting weights had been put back in order and the blood had been mopped up.

Her jaw still hurt like hell from the guy's punch, though. She nursed the swelling bruise with a hand towel full of ice cubes.

Whatever else you could say about Mack Bolan, that son of a bitch was no damn gentleman, she thought sourly.

Sheba stood and walked over to a bar on the wall between her office area and the weight room.

There was no liquor; she kept the bar well-stocked with carrot juice, wheat germ and the like. She hadn't developed her body to this point just to ruin it by pouring poison into it, she reminded herself, though a drink right now would taste damn good, she had to admit. The free-for-all with Bolan had given her a case of the jitters she seemed unable to get rid of.

Every time Sheba closed her eyes, all she could see was Mack Bolan blowing Jimmy Kidd's brains out.

She spent a couple of minutes making a health shake, then lifted the glass to her lips and gulped down the concoction. She lowered the glass and ran her tongue over her lips.

Then she looked up and saw Bolan standing in the doorway.

Instinctively, she started to take a step toward the desk and the button that would summon help from Jimmy's downstairs.

The Executioner stood on her doorstep, looking big, immovable and menacing as hell. His hands were empty but the way his right hovered near the front of his jacket, she knew he would fill it with a pistol before she could make one wrong move.

And there was no one she could call for help, she realized. She had made the move out of habit. Jimmy was dead, and the cops had closed up the joint and sent everyone away but her... and one other.

She was not about to let him see how afraid she was.

"What the hell do you want?" she demanded. "You've caused enough trouble around here."

"Where's Randy Owens?" Bolan asked.

She reached up slowly and touched her jaw where Bolan had punched her.

"Go to hell."

"I'm trying to save his life."

"Yeah, sure you are."

"Do you know a man named Floyd Wallace?"

Sheba thought for a moment, then shook her head.

"The name sounds vaguely familiar, but I can't say I do. Why? And why don't you just go back where you came from, you big bastard?"

"Back where I came from..." Bolan said softly. "I can't do that, Sheba. It's not there anymore."

She didn't know what he meant by that, and she didn't give a damn. She just wanted him out of here.

"Look, I don't know anything about Randy except that he's not here. I don't know where he went. I didn't ask him and he didn't volunteer the information."

"How long ago did he leave?"

"N-not long."

"You're lying, Sheba. When Randy didn't have any place to run, he ran here. He's got even fewer places now. I'd say he's got no place. They're after him, Sheba."

She saw his penetrating gaze studying every inch of the spacious room.

He knows, she told herself in cold panic.

"Who's after him?" she sneered.

"The same ones who'll be after you when they find out you're hiding him," Bolan said. "The Parellis are cleaning house. They murdered Wallace less than an hour ago. Randy is next."

Running footfalls erupted from a curtained closet on the far side of the workout room as Randy Owens charged from where he had been hiding, dashing full tilt for another doorway across the room.

Bolan leaped forward, moving past Sheba like a human cyclone, closing the distance to Randy before Owens could even get a grip on that other doorknob. Bolan's shoulder plowed into Owens's body, knocking him backward. The Executioner grabbed Randy's shoulders and spun him. Owens staggered, then Bolan looped an arm around the director's neck.

Owens struggled against the grip, lashing back ineffectually with his fists, trying at the same time to kick backward.

Bolan increased the pressure on Owens's neck, shutting off blood and oxygen.

Gradually, Owens quit fighting.

"That's good," Bolan growled into his ear. "Now take it easy. I don't want to hurt you."

Bolan eased the pressure a bit, enough for Owens to speak, all the while keeping an eye on Sheba.

Sheba lifted the ice pack back to her swollen jaw and stayed where she was, watching.

Owens fought for breath in Bolan's death grip.

"Wh-what do you want?"

Bolan released the hold, stepping back.

The maneuver threw Owens off balance. He took a couple of steps before he caught himself. Air rattled in his throat as he took deep breaths.

"Why did you come back here?"

Owens lifted a hand and passed it over his face.

"I had to. I had some cash stashed here and the masters of a lot of my films. Look, Bolan, I heard what you said about Wallace. I just want out! I don't want any more trouble."

"You've got it, whether you want it or not," Bolan assured the punk evenly. "Talk to me straight for a change and I might let you walk out of here."

"Yeah, I'll talk," Owens muttered glumly. "I've got to leave town! Parelli'll snuff me if you don't. I wish I didn't know what I do know."

"What do you mean by that?"

Owens laughed shortly, full of fear and panic.

"Look, the public supports what the Parellis and all the other families do, you know that. If there wasn't a market for gambling and prostitution and drugs, the Mob wouldn't be involved. But this thing with kids..."

Owens's voice faltered.

"What about kids?" Bolan snarled.

He fought the urge to grab Owens again and strangle the truth out of him.

"Nobody supports this system except the perverts the Parellis are supplying," Owens blurted. "Even the people who don't mind regular porn films are going to demand some sort of cleanup if this gets out! Carson blurted it out to me by mistake when he was drunk and hanging around the set one night.

"I swear to you, I was never involved in anything that used kids! Hell, there weren't even any kids in bit parts in the movies I've made!"

"What about the children?" Bolan repeated for the last time. "What happens to them?"

Owens took a step backward when he saw something in Bolan's eyes. The wall behind him stopped him.

"Look, all I know is that about four times a year Wallace and the Parellis gather up a bunch of kids and ship them off to God knows where."

The first step on the road to hell, Bolan thought.

"Why didn't you tell me this before, Owens?"

"I... guess I was more scared of Denise and her bunch than I was of you... then," the porn director amended hastily.

Denise, Bolan reflected. Owens was corroborating what Mark Dutton had said about David Parelli's mother being the real boss of the family.

"Did Mrs. Parelli say anything about when the next shipment is scheduled?"

"That's why they're so nervous." Owens nodded, eager to please. "That's why they're trying to cover up the loose ends. They're shipping out a bunch of kids tonight!"

Bolan had half expected this, had sensed it, but that made this new bit of intel no easier to hear.

"Tonight," he repeated bleakly.

"I promise you, that's what Denise said!"

So that was the undercurrent of urgency that had been running through this latest Windy City blitz.

It all fell together, now.

The Parellis would have some central point where they held the kidnapped children until it was time to ship them on their way.

And it was damn likely that Denise Parelli and her son would be holding Lana Garner at the same spot, Bolan thought.

Something as important as this would require that at least one of the Parellis was on hand to supervise the operation, and Lana would have been taken there for questioning.

Mafia questioning meant the worst kinds of physical torture until the victims screamed what they knew and pleaded for death, for release from the untold agonies these human monsters knew how to inflict.

"Do you know where the shipment leaves from?" Bolan rapped.

Owens shook his head vehemently.

"Don't have any idea, but I can tell you who knows."

"Who?"

"Senator Dutton, that's who. He'd know." Owens's voice dripped scorn. "The rotten pervert. Denise told me how the family had been keeping him supplied with young stuff to get him in line."

So the senator had lied about its only happening one time with that girl in Washington.

From the sound of it, squeaky-clean Senator Mark Dutton was a full-time pedophile.

Full-time scum was more like it.

Owens was shaking.

Bolan nodded at him.

"All right," he said. "Get the hell out of here before I change my mind."

Relief replaced the fear on Owens's face.

He scrambled past Bolan, then hurried toward the door and out.

Bolan watched him go, then turned back to the red haired amazon who still wore the black leotard that hugged and showed off her shapely figure.

"There won't be any more trouble here tonight," he said. "But if I were you, Sheba, I'd leave."

"I'm thinking about it harder all the time," Sheba said fervently.

"And don't raise a fuss after I leave."

"You got it," she promised.

He backed away, pausing in the doorway briefly before he turned and left Sheba's office.

For a second, Sheba stayed where she was, staring at the now empty doorway, then she heaved a weary sigh and walked over to the desk. She opened the bottom right drawer and took out a heavy brown bottle.

There were times when a goddamn carrot juice health shake just wouldn't cut it, she thought.

And this was one of those times.

Bolan took the stairs down, and left the building by the alley exit. An explosion shook the pavement under his feet.

He broke into a run and gained the mouth of the alley onto Rush Street, where vehicle and foot traffic had thinned considerably since his visit earlier that night.

Bolan had spotted Randy Owens's Lancia on his approach to the closed-up club and massage parlor, which was how he had known he would find Owens with Sheba.

Right now, the Lancia was a blazing inferno, bright red tongues of flame licking the air, surrounded by a growing circle of people who were lifting their arms to shield themselves from the heat, helpless to get any closer to the barely recognizable pile of twisted, flaming metal.

Bolan could see a shape hunched over where the steering wheel had been. He could guess what had happened.

Sometime between Owens's arrival at the massage parlor and the time he, the Executioner, showed up, Parelli's men had made the scene and planted a bomb, which they wired to Owens's ignition.

The porno director had not been able to outrun the vipers he had bedded down with.

"Justice, Randy," Bolan told the fiery, tangled wreckage across the street.

He left the alley unnoticed and double-timed it back to where he had parked the Camaro.