Read Online The Bone Yard by Don Pendleton - Free Book Online

Spinoza. Me, I'm not forgetting Bob Minotte. And my people aren't forgetting, either. We're remembering who iced him, and who let it happen."
    "You need a rest there, Julio," Spinoza replied stiffly. "You're talking crazy."
    "Am I, Frank?" DePalma's voice was balanced on the thin edge of hysteria. "You think so? Maybe you should think about some short-term life insurance."
    Spinoza felt the color flooding his cheeks as he faced the rival mafioso, and The Man's words echoed in his head.
    Keep the lid on, Frank. We're counting on you. He said, "I'll write that off to your condition, Julio."
    "Oh, yeah? Well, write this off, you..."
    DePalma came for him, had actually begun the move, when something struck the giant plate-glass window on Spinoza's left. The thick pane shivered, shattered, coming down in a sheet of glistening shards around them, jagged pieces of glass bouncing on the deep-shag carpet, some of them rebounding off the tabletop and causing men to flinch.
    But every eye was on the shattered window now, no longer captured by DePalma's rush. Even DePalma himself was staring dumbfounded at the mess, his fists half-raised.
    "Well, what the..."
    It was Johnny Cats. Spinoza recognized the voice despite its strangled tone and Mr. Cleveland never got the sentence finished. Because something strange was happening to Julio DePalma. One instant he was standing there, both hands raised as if he had been wakened in the middle of a boxer's nightmare, then he underwent a ghastly transformation right before the gaping eyes of the assemblage.
    Julio's face was folding in upon itself, imploding, teeth and lips and nose and all sucked inward as if someone might have pulled the plug and all of him was going down some hideous internal drain. His skull appeared to mushroom outward, bits and pieces of it spinning off in free-flight, spattering the hardmen who still flanked him, staining them with viscous crimson streamers.
    DePalma vaulted backward, going through the motions of a sloppy somersault and touching down upon the carpet in a sodden heap. He shuddered once and then was still, no single tremor of vitality remaining in his flaccid form.
    Spinoza was still gaping at the carcass on his rug when one of DePalma's hardmen gave a strangled cry and raised both hands to clasp his face. But he was much too late to catch it now as flesh and bone and blood exploded in a pink halo, the compression spinning him around and draping him across the fallen chair once occupied by Julio DePalma. Only then did Frank Spinoza hear the rifle fire, his conscious mind at last connecting visual and auditory input to complete the picture, danger warnings flashing in his mind with neon-bright intensity.
    He pushed off from the table, saw the others moving for the cover of the table, of the walls, and on the way down there was just the briefest impression that another body had touched down on the periphery of his vision. Julio's other hardman, sure, and he was wallowing along the carpet now with red geysers spouting from his severed jugular where steel had triumphed over yielding flesh.
    Spinoza felt the carpet on his face, a worm's-eye view with giant furniture surrounding him on every side. He closed his eyes and burrowed down, willing the floor to open up and swallow him alive, to hide him from the rolling thunderclaps and wrenching screams that rang inside his skull.
    They were under fire, goddarnmit. Someone out there had the sheer audacity to fire on him, on all of them.
    And in the inner sanctum of his empire, yet.
    Liguori's words came back to him: "A goddamn sneak attack. Pearl Harbor in the frigging desert." Spinoza hugged the floor and prayed for daylight, for salvation, reaching in his mind for some forgotten god or anything that could transport him far away from there and on to safety. Overhead, his answer was the rolling thunder of a biggame rifle.
    * * *
    Two blocks down and diagonally across the street from Frank Spinoza's Gold Rush, the