Read Save the Children for Free Online Page B

nose.
    Randy stopped moving backward beside the woman.
    Bolan left the door open, standing in the doorway, his combat senses attuned to the ambience of the house.
    The woman did not lose a beat. She regarded the big apparition in the doorway with a hand on her hip and open interest rather than fear in her eyes, as if she was used to guns being aimed at people in her presence.
    "On the other hand, Randy," she spoke huskily to the man next her in a conversational tone that went with the open appraisal with which she regarded Bolan from top to bottom, "if you really must be going, perhaps you should... unless mean and ugly here intends to kill you."
    Bolan demanded of the man, "Randy what?"
    The man gulped audibly. A patina of sweat sheened across his forehead.
    "O-Owens," he stuttered. "What..."
    Bolan kept the Beretta on the dude but looked back to the woman.
    "That would make you Mrs. Parelli."
    "It would," she said with a nod, not breaking eye contact with him. "And what does that make you?"
    Here is a woman with a will of iron, Bolan thought.
    "The name's Bolan," he told them.
    "Oh, Jesus..." Randy whined.
    "You won't kill us," the woman said point-blank in her throaty voice. "If you were here to do that, Randy and I would already be dead. You're here for my son."
    "Where is he, Mrs. Parelli?"
    "You think I'd turn my son over to the Executioner?" she retorted. "Then you're crazier than everyone says you are."
    Randy Owens was nowhere near as levelheaded.
    "Denise!" he cried. His eyes were oval saucers of fear, focused unblinkingly on the silenced snout of the Beretta. "Tell him the truth! We don't know where David is," he blurted to Bolan. "He called a little while ago."
    Denise Parelli swiveled her open appraisal of Bolan into cold contempt at the man standing beside her.
    "Shut up, Randy."
    Owens continued blurting to Bolan.
    "It was you, then, wasn't it, at that health club! David told his mother he was going underground for a few days. He wouldn't say where, that's what she told me." He threw a nod to the woman. "She..."
    Denise Parelli shifted her weight slightly and brought up her right knee hard into Randy's crotch.
    Randy Owens emitted a startled wheezing gasp and doubled over, knees closed in, hands gripping himself in pain where the woman had kneed him. Slowly he collapsed to the floor at their feet, dry heaving into the carpet.
    The woman shifted her look of contempt from the man back to Bolan.
    "I don't know where David is. If I did, you could torture me and I would not tell you."
    She glared defiantly at the man with the Beretta. "So what will you do now, Executioner? Kill me?"
    Bolan lowered the Beretta until the nuzzle pointed at the floor. He had not vanquished the rage coursing through him after what he had glimpsed on the VCR in David Parelli's bedroom, but he had no idea how much this feisty woman knew about Bolan's intel on her son. And he did not have it in him to kill this woman tonight.
    He glanced around the bedroom and focused on a walk-in closet on the other side of the bed. "In there." He motioned with the Beretta.
    The woman glared down at the moaning, semiconscious Randy.
    "What about him?"
    Bolan felt the butt of the Beretta burn in his grip.
    "I heard you say he makes TV commercials. I don't suppose he dabbles with kid porn on the side?"
    The woman blinked at that.
    "Don't make me sicker than I already am standing here looking at you," she snarled angrily. "I keep a young man. I'm not a pervert and I wouldn't sleep with someone who was."
    Bolan removed his finger from the trigger of the 93-R.
    "You just saved this punk's life," he told Denise Parelli. "In the closet, both of you."
    "I'm not going in any damn closet," she said viciously, "especially not with that rat!"
    "Oh, yes, you are," Bolan corrected her quietly and he clipped her on the chin with the butt of the pistol.
    Mrs. Parelli's eyes rolled back in her head, her knees buckled and she started to collapse.
    He stepped forward quickly