Baltimore Trackdown by Don Pendleton Page B

and turned her face to him.
    “Angela, you are a beautiful, sexy woman. Just relax and see how things look in a month or so. You’ll be married again within a year, or I miss my guess.”
    She blinked. “You really think so?”
    “Yes, besides, killing me won’t accomplish anything. Your children must be important to you.”
    “Yes, of course. But I’m important, too.”
    He dropped her downtown and watched her get a cab. The women were the real losers within the whole Mafia framework, he thought. The mobsters’ women always lost.
    He consulted his watch — not quite noon. There was a little more than twenty-four hours before the mayor’s speech. He had a lot of important work to do before then.
    * * *
    Behind the rented Buick, a man in a rented Thunderbird watched Mack Bolan. The man was large — six foot four and 260 pounds of hardened muscle. He had black flashing eyes, dark hair that crowded his collar and was clean shaven. His name was Vince Carboni and he worked for La Commissione, the high commission of the Mafia bosses of bosses. His only job — to hunt down and kill Mack Bolan.

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    Vince Carboni snorted as he watched the man he had been hunting for two months. Now he would watch Mack Bolan, get in position and blow him away before Bolan even knew that Vince Carboni was in town.
    He had been going to see Carlo Nazarione to warn him not to notify the Bolan Search Center in New York that the bastard was in Baltimore. Turning in at Nazarione’s gate, he saw two people walking down the street. One was a knockout blonde, the other one was Bolan.
    Carboni had slowly passed to make certain, then circled the block and followed the pair to a car. They drove around and then stopped and talked. Later they drove downtown, where the woman got out and hailed a taxi.
    Pure chance that he had spotted Mack Bolan, but he’d take it.
    When Bolan’s Buick pulled away from the curb, Carboni’s Thunderbird followed two cars behind. He had practiced following cars around New York; if you can tail a car in Manhattan, you can stay with one anywhere. Carboni was an expert. As long as the victim did not know he was being followed, Carboni usually stayed three or four cars behind. If the other guy knew, it became a race, not a tail.
    Carboni knew at once that Bolan had no idea he was being tailed. The Buick sedan wound through several streets, then stopped near a phone booth. Carboni parked across the one-way street and watched.
    He had been waiting a long time for this chance. The commission first came to him a year ago. He had been happy working in New York as an enforcer and “eliminator,” as they called it now. But the commission offered him ten times the money he was making, and his own don urged him to take the job, so there was no problem either way.
    He spent two months on weapons, learning everything he could about handguns, all the auto and semiauto submachine guns, and then taking a postgraduate course from an old sapper about gunk, juice, powder and plastic explosives.
    For two weeks he spent sixteen hours a day reading everything the commission had collected on the Executioner. They had copies of every story printed in the United States.
    Slowly Carboni filtered out fiction from fact, the hype and local paranoia from the reality. He knew more about Mack Bolan, his family, his involvement with the government at Stony Man Farm and his subsequent “disengagement” from Uncle Sam than anyone in the Mafia.
    Now he planned to kill Bolan!
    Carboni had missed the bastard in Portland, but just barely. This time he would not miss. It was a matter of pride now.
    There was only one restraint. Vince Carboni was not going to sacrifice his own life just to get the Executioner. He could not spend that five-million reward if he were laid out in a coffin. Which was why he did not unlimber his .44 AutoMag right then and blast Bolan as he stood in the phone booth. Not with a hundred witnesses to identify both him and the car. He