Free California Hit by Don Pendleton

bastard alive, all right.
    Had Bolan ever heard of the Tiger of Russian Hill?
    Probably not.
    Tony Rivoli was a family secret. He had never been in jail, never been questioned by any of those crime commissions or any of that jazz, never been mentioned in the press or "exposed" by those jerk magazines.
    No. Bolan the Quick would be expecting the routine, run of the mill sort of palace defense. Like old man DiGeorge had down at Palm Springs. A bunch of punk-ass lads who'd never shot anything but the bull's-eye out of a target, and some tired old men who should've stepped aside years ago.
    Bolan the Jerk had never run in on a real Tiger defense.
    And the tiger of this hill wasn't tipping his hand to the jerk. He just wished the guy had come on in that night, while everybody was up for the job, while his boys were primed and trembling with the anticipation of bagging the biggest game that ever hit this town. Yeah.
    So what the hell. The guy would show. Rivoli was positive that the guy would show. This was the palace, wasn't it? There was no secret about that. The guy would come. He was just being cagey, cautious, keeping them waiting; thinking that maybe the defenses would get too uptight, maybe over-anxious and careless.
    Tonight, probably, would be the night. The guy could even try a daylight hit. But in San Francisco? Right here at the top of the town? With two damned cops per square foot all over the place?
    Probably not.
    Rivoli checked the time. It was a little past eight o'clock. It was daylight. The old man had gone back to bed. How could he go to bed at a time like this? Bolan might be out there somewhere, watching the joint, checking it out. He could be.
    Now if the boys just didn't get uptight and...
    The Tiger went out through the French doors to the garden-patio and casually circled the grounds. The fog was lifting. It was now holding at about rooftop level, but the air below it was still saturated with moisture, cold, uncomfortable. Miserable goddam crap! The outside boys would be getting stiff and disgruntled if this kept up.
    Rivoli made a mental note to make hourly shifts. As unobtrusively as possible, he would have to rotate those boys between the cars and the open-air stakeouts. The inside boys stayed inside, period and bullshit. There would be no juggling around with those hard boys inside.
    A police car went by out front, cruising slowly, and the sight of it disrupted the Tiger's chain of thought. He frowned and headed that way. Those jerks would scare the guy off. Imagine, patrolling in a marked cruiser. How dumb could a cop get? Were they trying to scare the guy away?
    As he reached the front of the big house, Rivoli noted that a delivery van was standing at the curb down by the service gate, and a guy was coming out of the van with a clipboard under his arm.
    Cool it, goddammit, cool it! Don't go slapping that guy up against the fence and frisking him, Christ's sake!
    The Tiger hurried forward to personally supervise the reception of the deliveryman, groaning inwardly with the certain feeling that the two gatemen were going to over-react — and that those cops in the cruiser would nose into the act. One thing Tony did not need at this point was cops swarming all over the place and asking a lot of jerky questions.
    His worries were apparently an over-reaction within himself, though, and this he discovered as soon as he was within earshot of the service gate.
    Apparently the boys knew this guy, this delivery jerk. He was a tall guy wearing Levi's and a white jacket, and Rivoli himself had seen the Bay Messengers truck around the neighborhood. The guy had shoved his hat back away from his forehead, and he was grinning and scratching the bridge of his nose with a pencil.
    Jerry the Lover Aspromonte was jawing around with the guy through the closed gate, obviously kidding him about something, and Rivoli caught the scrap of a comment, "... told you the other day, meathead, LaManchas don't live here,"
    The guy