Shock Waves(11)

"Goddamn it!" he said again, with more feeling this time.

When Bill Rafferty came home from Vietnam, he had been full of dreams: a wife and family, a thriving law career, success and wealth. His stint with the NYPD was a means to reach those ends, a way that he could make ends meet and gather some experience firsthand while he was finishing his studies at Columbia.

Except that something — everything — had changed along the way.

Elaine had been a part of it, of course, her death a turning point for Rafferty. The young patrolman's wife of eighteen months had been abducted from a shopping mall by members of a street gang, raped, beaten and left for dead within a mile of where her husband studied law and justice. She had lingered in a coma for eleven days and died without regaining consciousness. The doctors whispered to him that it was a mercy in disguise.

Bill Rafferty had not returned to Columbia. He put the dream behind him. In time, he earned the reputation of a cop who went the limit on every case. He had eleven righteous shootings on his record when he walked into the middle of a major drug deal one Thanksgiving night and routed the participants; they shot him twice, but when the smoke cleared, Rafferty was all alone among the dead — including one of Augie Marinello's crack lieutenants in the local family.

The shoot-out earned Bill Rafferty his gold detective's shield, together with a prestigious assignment to the fledgling tactical-intelligence unit. It also earned him Augie Marinello's personal attention, in the form of a contract on his head. A bitter war spun out between the two antagonists, and Rafferty killed three hitmen and jailed half a dozen others who survived their injuries before he built a solid case against the capo mafioso for extortion on the waterfront. The boss of bosses had been fleeing an indictment when he ran into a different kind of justice, losing first his legs and then his life in Jersey.

The week Mack Bolan came to town that first time, digging in for war against all five of New York's Mafia families, Bill Rafferty was working uniformed patrol. He had seen the grim results, helped scrape a few of them off the sidewalks. He heard the talk among his fellow uniforms: that maybe Bolan should be helped instead of hindered by police; that he was doing everyone a service and would be more deserving of a goddamned medal than a bull's-eye painted on his back. Bill Rafferty had listened, considered it and kept his private thoughts to himself.

And there had been some changes by the time of Bolan's second hellfire visit to Manhattan, when the gutsy bastard dropped in on a meeting of the Mafia's commissione, putting death on the agenda. Bill Rafferty was working on the strike force then, celebrating Augie Marinello's recent departure.

On Bolan's third and last appearance in the city, Rafferty was heading up the organized-crime unit, making some impressive scores against the local brotherhood. The newest captain on the force, he made no bones about the fact that Bolan's intervention had done much to pave the way, creating strife between the families and generating chaos at the top.

Bill Rafferty was not averse to shooting in the line of duty; he had done enough of it in Nam, and later on the streets. And he had put his licks in on more than one occasion when subduing a belligerent assailant. But the Bolan war was something else again, beyond the limits of the law, a deviation from the game plan on a scale so massive it was difficult to comprehend. Bolan's methods were effective, but they were wrong. Still...

When Rafferty had caught the bulletin on Bolan's death on a rainy afternoon in Central Park, a part of Rafferty had grieved. Not only for the soldier but for everyone — himself included — who would have to carry on against the enemy without a champion to take their part. It was irrational, he knew, but Rafferty had felt a sense of loss when Bolan died.

And when the news came through just recently that maybe Bolan wasn't dead at all...

The nagging ghost reached out, the fingers grazing conscious thought this time before Rafferty drove it back into the shadows.

He reached for the telephone, and punched up the longdistance number from memory. For a moment the clicks and hums filled his skull, and then he heard a muffled trilling at the other end. After four rings, a groggy voice answered.

"Lo?"

"Get up. You're late for work."

"Like hell. Who is this? Rafferty?"

"I'm flattered, Hal."

"You're crazy, calling me at — what time is it, anyway?"

"Don't ask." Rafferty let his voice go serious. "I've got a problem here."

"Insomnia?"

"Enough to go around, unless I'm way off base."

A moment's hesitation on the other end, with background noise that told him Hal was sitting up in bed now, shaking off the cobwebs.