Bolan's heart leaped, and his car along with it. He powered on into the partially-blocked street and swung his vehicle broadside across the open lane, and he was out and running up the street with Luger at the ready when the other car halted, doors flew open, and bodies began ejecting themselves.
One man stood behind the cover of an open door and leaned across it, pistol in hand, firing deliberately at the advancing figure in the black suit. Bolan fired once, on the run, the big Luger thundering across the distance. A nine-millimeter missile punctured the glass of the car door and the Taliferi went down without a sound.
Three other men were racing for the demolition site. Bolan let them go, and they scurried through a break in the fencing and disappeared.
Bolan's chief interest lay inside that shattered vehicle. And he found her there, rolled into a little ball and stuffed to the floor of the back seat. She had bled profusely from a nicked vein at the side of the once-lovely neck . . . and they had allowed her life to bleed away with no apparent effort to stop it. More . . . they had done more. The fatigue jacket had been jerked away and down over the arms, imprisoning them at her side. The bra had been torn away, and they had taken a torch — probably a butane lighter, Bolan decided — to what Bolan remembered as rose-petal breasts. One nipple was charred and virtually incinerated; the entire chest area was a horribly seared and blotched abomination of once-beautiful womanhood.
In the name of god, Bolan wanted to know, what had they wanted her to tell them? What could any man need so desperately, so fearfully, that he could do a thing such as this to another human being?
Bolan stretched her out on the back seat and carefully arranged the jacket over the mutilated chest. His shoulders quivered and his head fell to his chest, and he was remembering the last words the little soldier had whispered to him. "Vaya con dios, soldada,"he whispered back, and then The Executioner walked numbly away from there and back to his own vehicle. Mechanically he removed the keys from the ignition and went to the trunk, got out the golf bag, and calmly withdrew his magnifico weapon. Ammo belts went around his neck, extra clips of 5.56 tumblers into his hip pouch, and he thumbed a high explosive round into the M-79, a 30-round clip into the M-16, and then he walked back up the street.
An arm appeared around the opening in the fence and one of the Taliferi was challenging him with the impotent yappings of a hand gun at more than a 100-foot range. Without breaking stride and without lifting the weapon, Bolan squeezed into the pistol grip and the M-79 replied.
The end of the fence exploded in flame and shredded wood and an anonymous scream from somewhere just beyond. Bolan went on, stepped around the shattered fence, and into the demolition site. A high building barricaded the west side of the lot; the high wooden fence completed the seal. He took in the scene with a single glance and knew that he had them. The only way out was past Bolan, and no one seemed inclined, at that moment, to try that perilous route. A man lay at Bolan's feet, his clothing still smoking from an almost direct hit of the HE round. He could hear the other two running along the fence.
Bolan calmly selected a flare round, thumbed it into the breech, and put a brilliant parachute in flight above the site. The running men halted in confusion, looking wildly about them, then made a break for a wooden shack near the center of the lot. Bolan watched them fight with the door, then scramble inside. He continued the deliberate advance, marching stiffly erect. A window shattered and a pistol roared. The bullet zinged harmlessly into the ground several yards ahead. Bolan's path was taking him in a slow circle of the shack as he inspected the physical dimensions. This was obviously a tool shed or something similar, no more than ten feet square, with a low flat room. Beside it and resting on a tubular steel structure about six feet above the ground was a large tank with a hose and a nozzle, obviously a gasoline storage.
Bolan halted then, loaded an HE round into the M-79, sighted onto the tank, and let fly. He was already thumbing in another flare round when the gasoline erupted in a towering explosion. Flaming liquid spilled immediately onto the shack — and then Bolan was sighting again, and the white hot flare went to join the party.
The shack was engulfed immediately in roaring flames. Bolan stood and dispassionately watched as two human torches erupted through the doorway and flopped convulsively about the rubble. When the flopping ceased, he turned his back on them and walked stiffly away, back to their vehicle.
Bolan placed his weapon on the roof and leaned into the car for a final farewell to a too-brief friendship, and when he came back out of the car he was looking into the bore of a very large and ugly .45 automatic.
He looked beyond, then smiled faintly and said, "Hi, Leo. We meet again."
Leo Turrin, lately elevated to an underboss role in the former Sergio Frenchi family, showed a strained smile and quietly said, "Watch the gun now, Bolan, and note that I'm putting it away."
"I guess it doesn't matter," Bolan replied in a strangely flat voice. "I'm sick of this war, Leo. I am sick to death of it."
Another man, also an Italian type, stepped into view then and commented, "If what I just saw is an example of your sickness, Bolan, I hope you never get well."
"Who is this guy?" Bolan asked, not really caring.
"We're telephone friends, remember?" the man replied. "I'm Harold Brognola."
Bolan said, "Great. What do we do now, shake hands?"
Brognola stuck his hand out. "Yes, I'd like to shake your hand, Bolan," he said soberly.
Bolan unsmilingly accepted the hand. "Thanks for the assist at L.A.," he murmured. The sound of distant sirens were beginning to break the night stillness. Bolan said, "I guess I'd better be getting along." He glanced at Turrin and added, "How's it been, Leo?"
"Hairy, as usual," Turrin replied, smiling.
Brognola agitatedly declared, "Dammit, Bolan, I have to talk to you!"
Bolan simply smiled, shouldered his weapon and began trudging wearily to his vehicle. The other men hastened after him. Brognola said, "Bolan, dammit, will you listen to me?"
"Will those cops listen to you?" Bolan asked, inclining his head toward the advancing sirens.
"Talk to him," Turrin advised. "What have you got to lose? Just talk to him."
"What about?" Bolan asked. "That same portfolio?"
Brognola snapped, "Yes, that same portfolio. Look, you said you were tired of the war. I'm offering you a possible way out of it."
Bolan threw him an interested glance. "Yeah?"
"Hey, those Miami cops are getting with it," Turrin warned. "Better make this quick."
Brognola said, "Look, it's all in here." He was thrusting a rather fat, oblong wallet upon Bolan. "Look it over in your leisure and call me at the contact number I have in there. That's all I ask, Bolan — just look it over."
Bolan took the wallet and thrust it inside the neck band of his nightsuit. "Okay," he said. "I'll look it over." He carefully placed the weapon inside his car and then climbed in behind the wheel. "Good seeing you again, Leo. Give my best to the wife, eh."
Turrin smiled and said, "Will do. She worries about you a lot, if that's any comfort."
Bolan nodded and cranked the engine. "Uh, get lost for the rest of the night, eh."
Turrin replied, "That means that you're rolling."
"That's what it means. So stay clear."
"Thanks. I'll do that."
Brognola irritably said, "Look, don't go getting yourself killed now. Break it off, dammit, and go someplace safe and read that portfolio."