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“Spare magazines?” Bolan asked.
“Two, Agent Cooper.”
“Well, swing by the station and pick up some spares. That’s issue?”
“Department approved list,” Davis said.
“All right,” Bolan said. “Now. Are you in or out, Davis?”
“Uh… Well, in, of course, sir. I mean, the department assigned.”
“No, Davis. You. You personally. We’re about to walk down a dark hallway. If you’re going to do it, you need to know that it’s coming. That it might get bad. That it almost certainly will. Think carefully. I don’t want a quick answer. I want to know if you’ll stick this out.”
Davis looked away. Bolan watched him swallow, hard. He was thinking about it. The subtle change to the set of the younger man’s shoulders told the soldier what Davis’s answer would be…and that he meant it.
Davis turned to meet Bolan’s gaze. “I’m in.”
“Good,” Bolan said.
“So who are you, Cooper? Really?”
“Like the card says,” Bolan said. He reached into his pocket and produced a business card. The front of the card was blank except for the engraved words, Matt Cooper, Justice Department.
Davis turned the card over and ran a hand through his thick, close-cropped hair. “These contact numbers?”
“They’ll forward to my wireless,” Bolan said. “If we get separated, call any of them. You’ll reach me no matter what.”
Davis nodded. He reached into his jacket. “I have the list your supervisor said you wanted.”
Bolan almost smiled at that. The idea of Brognola as anyone’s mere “supervisor,” perhaps fighting with the photocopier or drinking coffee in a break room, struck him as laughable. He knew precisely what Davis was talking about, however. He had sent the request to the Farm by text message while reviewing the files transmitted to his phone. He needed a place to start, and the murder victims were it.
Innocent people had died, their blood on the knife of some psycho killer…or killers. Government profilers would look for patterns in victims in order to find serial killers. If this was a serial killer, a group of them—it was rare, but it had happened before—the common thread among the victims would tell Bolan where to look next. If there truly was no thread, and the victims were chosen merely for convenience, then looking deeper into the circumstances of their murders would likewise give him something to go on.
Bolan was no detective; he was a battle-hardened, experience-trained soldier. But he understood predators. After witnessing the aftermath of the latest killing, he had no doubt that he was dealing with at least one truly deadly bipedal monster.
The Executioner was going hunting.
“Every victim so far,” Davis said, handing over the list, “as tabulated by the folks at the department. You’ll find current addresses and, where possible, some notes from the files that seemed relevant. You realize, though, sir, that the killings are apparently random. It’s not likely we’ll find anything.”
“These notes are handwritten,” Bolan said, ignoring Davis’s other remarks.
“The notes? Yes, sir, Agent Cooper.” Davis nodded. “I made them.”
Bolan nodded. Initiative even though he thought Agent Cooper was barking up the wrong tree. That was good. It meant Davis wasn’t afraid to speak his mind.
He would, however, have to be careful. Brognola hadn’t said it out loud; it hadn’t been necessary. A group of killers operating for this long, under these conditions, the killings until recently covered up—it reeked of police corruption. Brognola wasn’t normally so down on local law enforcement. The fact that he’d spoken so harshly of the men and women on the ground here was a coded message to Bolan, just in case Brognola’s words ever went beyond the walls of his office. The man was smart, and he hadn’t stayed where he was in the Justice Department for so long without having a few tricks up his sleeves. Assuming the walls had ears was one of these.
“So where do we start, Agent Cooper?”
“At the beginning,” Bolan said. “First name on the list. We’ll shake the tree and sees what falls loose.” There was, of course, the possibility that going back over the territory trod by the killers would make them nervous, bring them out. Depending on how professional they were—a well-financed and trained terrorist cell, for example—this might make little difference. But it might cause something to break. Bolan could feel it; he could see it in the pavement; he could smell it in the air. Things were going to get bloody before it was over.
“I know that neighborhood,” Davis said. “It’s not exactly one of Detroit’s more affluent ones.”
“Good thing I’ve got a cop to go with me,” Bolan said. He put the car into gear and looked up to check the rearview mirror.
He heard the gunshot just as the mirror exploded, pelting him with sharp fragments of plastic and glass.
2
“Down!” Bolan shouted. He stomped the accelerator to the floor, whipping the steering wheel hard over. The powerful engine growled in response, and the Charger burned rubber as it heeled around, pushing Bolan and Davis back in their seats. The detective crouched behind the dash and Bolan did his best to slide, fractionally, into his bucket seat as he urged the car forward, toward the danger. Bullet holes starred the windshield, joining the one that had taken the mirror with it. Bolan ignored them, his right hand clenching the wheel, his left hand snaking into his jacket to reverse-draw the Beretta.
There were at least half a dozen shooters fanned out and moving up the street as if a small army of cops weren’t barely within earshot. They wore street clothes and carried themselves with a practiced, almost casual menace that Bolan immediately recognized. These were hired guns, street muscle, and they would have had to be paid well to mount the brazen assault they pushed.
The shooters had automatic rifles, a motley collection of Kalashnikovs, ARs, and other assault weapons. Bullets ripped a path up the hood of the Charger as Bolan crushed the pedal under his boot. He went straight for the lead gunner, a man in a leather jacket who held an AK to his shoulder. He shouted something as Bolan bore down on him.
“Holy—” Davis started to say.
The Charger slammed into the gunman with bone-crushing force. The collision flattened the car’s nose, driving its hood under the target’s suddenly airborne body. The windshield took the impact after that, turning to glass spiderwebs and blood tracings, jarring Bolan and Davis in their seats. The soldier slammed the Charger into Reverse and burned rubber again, whipping around, the car taking broadsides from the other gunmen. The shooters had been scattered by the Executioner’s automotive missile, but they had recovered quickly and were once again pouring on the fire.
Answering shots came from the officers on the scene, as the uniformed contingent recovered from the shock of the attack and began to get into the action. Bolan was grateful but wasn’t about to let the Detroit Police Department fight his battle for him. And there was no doubt in his mind that it was his battle, for the attack had been just too coincidental, too seemingly without motive, to be anything other than a hit directed at him personally. Unless Davis had some serious gambling debts Bolan didn’t know about, these were killers whose mission was to eliminate Agent Cooper.
As the bullet-riddled Charger spun about, Davis was up in his seat, his Glock in his hand, firing at targets of opportunity. The gunmen weren’t hard to spot, bold as they were, standing in full view of God, the Detroit PD and anybody, emptying illegal full-automatic weaponry on a public street. Distant screams told Bolan that the gunfight had caught the attention of the neighbors. But there were no innocents in the line of fire…yet. Bolan knew he would have to end this engagement as quickly as possible to prevent that from changing.
He fired out his window, the Beretta 93-R set for 3-round bursts, punching his enemies in the head whenever possible and going for center-of-mass shots when the angle was poor. The hollowpoint 9 mm bullets did their deadly work as Davis punctuated Bolan’s machine pistol blasts with single shots of his own.
Bolan pushed the Charger up onto the narrow sidewalk and between a building and a light pole, drawing sparks and the shrieking of metal on metal from the flank of the tortured rental car. One of the gunmen wasn’t fast enough; he fell under the crumpled bumper of the Dodge, causing the vehicle to bounce upward over the speed bump of his sudden corpse. Bolan dug in, accelerating again, causing Davis to grimace as the Charger burned sideways on squealing tires. Davis dropped one more shooter and Bolan punched yet another in the head and neck.
“Who are they?” Davis shouted over the din.
“Hired help,” Bolan said, dropping a nearly empty 20-round magazine and swapping it for a fresh one from the pouches in his custom leather shoulder holster. “And they didn’t just come from nowhere. Look for a vehicle with passenger capacity, or a cluster of cars.”
The Charger’s engine was starting to spew black, oily smoke, spraying the wrecked windshield with spurts of oil. Bolan urged it on, shooting across the street, charting a course directly for a man with a MAC-10 submachine gun dressed in dark pants and shirt with a stained trench coat over these. Something about this one, in particular, struck Bolan as familiar—just as the Charger struck its target. A spray of heavy .45-caliber slugs almost chewed through the roof as Davis and Bolan threw themselves to either side. The bullets ripped up the interior of the car and smashed out what was left of the rear window.
Bolan cut short, sharp circles with the car, his jaw set, his eyes roving the crowd and the players running among it, gauging targets of opportunity and screening friendlies from his mental computations. He gripped the wheel with one hand and fired with the other, the Beretta barking a deadly rhythm. He stroked triple bursts of 9 mm hollowpoint rounds from the snout of the machine pistol, cutting down another, and another, and another gunman. Bodies were beginning to pile up two deep, or so it seemed.
That was an illusion brought on by the adrenaline, the tunnel vision, the tachypsychia of mortal combat. Bolan, while not immune to the physiological effects of life-and-death battle, was certainly no stranger to these sensations. He was as comfortable operating with and through them as it was possible for a human being to be. Still, that did not mean a great deal. Bolan understood, as so many veteran operators did, that much of combat efficacy was simply learning to function efficiently and accurately despite the psychological effects of the fight itself.
Combat was as natural to Bolan as breathing. And he did not think these things, did not subvocalize them, did not consider them as he swapped out another empty 20-round magazine in the Beretta, leaning on the steering wheel with his left knee as he racked the Beretta’s slide and chambered the first round.
“Cooper!” Davis yelled. Again Bolan did not think; he did not need to ask. He flattened himself against his headrest and squeezed his eyes shut, tucking his chin, as Davis’s Glock came up in his direction.
The shots were deafening in the enclosed space of the Charger’s front seats. Davis had seen the man in the leather jacket before Bolan and had responded, as he was trained to do. The gunner held a drum-fed semiautomatic shotgun and managed to scrape the driver’s-side fender of Bolan’s vehicle with double-00 Buck pellets as he went down. Davis’s shots took the shooter in the neck and under the jaw, folding him in a heap like dirty laundry. Bolan’s ears were ringing, but he nodded once in acknowledgment to Davis nonetheless. The kid was good.
Bolan urged the Dodge back toward the Detroit police, who were using their vehicles as cover and firing straggler shots into what little resistance remained. As quickly as it had begun, the worst of it seemed to be over. Bolan hit the brakes suddenly, jerking the car to a stop, and leaned out his window, tagging a running gunman who was trying to break for a nearby alleyway. The man went down yelling, with a bullet in his leg, and Bolan was out of the rolling car with his Beretta in his fist.
Behind him, Davis scrambled into the driver’s seat and stepped on the brake again before shifting the battle-torn Dodge into Park.
Bolan was on his quarry like a hawk on a mouse. The shooter rolled onto his back, his leg spraying blood from a bad wound, his face already pale as he brought up his TEC-9. The Executioner slapped the ungainly weapon aside as he landed on the wounded man’s chest with one knee, driving the air out of the gunner’s chest.
“Junk,” Bolan said, snatching the TEC-9 from the man’s hand. He shoved the black muzzle of the Beretta into his face. “Always were a jam waiting to happen.”
“I want a lawyer!” the disarmed shooter squealed. “I got rights!”
“Give me a name,” Bolan said. “Or all you’ll get will be a bullet in the brain when I’m finished with you.”
The dialogue sounded corny even to Bolan, but it was the kind of language spoken by punks-for-hire. Bolan could hear Davis coming up behind him and hoped the young detective wouldn’t overreact to the soldier’s bluff.
“A name,” Bolan said. Sirens were erupting from the lot across the street as the police, having cleared their part of the gun battle, moved to seal off the area. It would be only moments before some of them blundered into this little scene. Bolan didn’t have time for that. He heard Davis behind him, running interference as the first of the Detroit PD closed in and started asking questions. He gave Davis mental points for that. The kid was doing well during his trial by fire. The noise and activity behind them increased as emergency response personnel started to arrive. More Detroit PD were showing up by the carload, too. The sudden war on this already tainted city block had brought half the department out in a bid to clamp down on the chaos.
In the noise and confusion, it shouldn’t have been a surprise that Bolan’s prisoner tried to make play. The knife came out with surprising speed. Bolan heard the snick of the blade opening just as he caught the movement; he was ready for it. He grabbed the would-be killer’s knife hand and wrist in a crushing grip. Behind him, Davis gasped, probably because he was watching Bolan’s knuckles go white. Something cracked in the wounded man’s hand and he yelped. The folding combat knife fell to the pavement.
“Give me a name,” Bolan repeated. “Or I’ll break the other one.”
“Don’t know,” the man blurted, shaking his head as his pride gave way to pain. “Contract job. Never saw a face.”
“Contract on who?” Bolan demanded.
“Jacket…” the man said, gritting his teeth. “Jacket pocket.”
Bolan carefully reached into the man’s jacket and pulled out a crumpled sheet of paper. The sheet was a photocopy of a photograph. The photograph showed Bolan meeting with Adam Davis outside the station house to which Davis was assigned. It was grainy and had obviously been taken with long-distance equipment. Bolan’s face was circled in a whorl of yellow highlighter.
Bolan signaled to the police officers nearby, who closed in to take custody of the wounded shooter. The Executioner led the confused Davis several paces away from the main knot of uniforms and support personnel before showing him the paper.
“But this…” Davis looked at it. “What does it mean?”
“It means somebody knew to watch,” Bolan said.
“Watch for what?”
“Outside interference.” Bolan folded the paper and pocketed it. Turning, he watched the wounded gunman being ushered, under guard, to an ambulance that was just rolling up. Several men in suits, badges displayed prominently on their belts, clustered around Bolan and Davis, giving them the hairy eyeball; these would be Detroit detectives eager to ask this representative from Washington just what the hell was going on, and what Bolan thought he was doing. The soldier could almost write this dialogue himself; he had heard it often enough.
Bolan took out his secure smartphone and began moving deliberately from corpse to corpse, kneeling over his fallen enemies with the phone so he could snap their pictures. Davis followed him, looking as if he was ready to draw the Glock he had only just reholstered. Bolan couldn’t blame the kid. The abrupt battle had the Executioner’s own system working against the fight-or-flight dump of adrenaline that lingered even though the gunfight itself was over.
“What did you mean by ‘outside interference,’ Agent Cooper?” Davis spoke up.
“Somebody knows that a Justice Department agent was assigned to poke around this case,” Bolan said. “Seeing you with me was all it took for our man with the telephoto lens, or whoever hired him, to finger me as that agent.”
“You’re talking about somebody inside the Department.”
“I am,” Bolan said.
“You don’t sound surprised.”
“I’m not.” Bolan continued his grisly work, photographing all of the dead men. Then he walked to the bullet-riddled Charger and put his back to the car’s pocked flank. “Keep an eye out for me while I do this,” he said.
Davis nodded. He watched nervously, looking this way and that, hand near his gun, as Bolan transmitted the photographs and a terse report of what had produced them. The Farm would collect the data and run the images through advanced facial recognition software, comparing the dead men to profiles in meta-databases across the globe. There was no law enforcement or government agency whose files Stony Man Farm could not access. At least, if there was, it was hard even for Bolan to imagine what those might be.
No, if these men had criminal records, Barbara Price and her people would dig them up. Bolan had no doubt that most if not all of the shooters would have long rap sheets. Things would get really interesting, however, when Bolan had the chance to see just where these gunners’ backgrounds pointed.
In the meantime, he would just have to keep shaking the tree, despite the target painted on his back. Davis, as his liaison, was no safer.
“You think I’m a dirty cop?” Davis asked bluntly. The steel in the man’s tone was mildly surprising. Again Bolan raised his estimation of the younger man.
Bolan looked at Davis. “If I thought that, I wouldn’t have asked you what I did.”
Davis looked away. Bolan could see him thinking about it. Finally, the set of Davis’s shoulders relaxed. “You’re right,” he said. “Everyone knows it, and nobody wants to say it out loud. Everyone knows the walls have ears. Nobody wants to say who’s on the take and who isn’t.”
Bolan nodded. He didn’t say so, but he liked that Davis was still idealistic enough to be offended when he thought his integrity was being challenged. There wasn’t enough of that in the world, as far as Bolan was concerned.
“Is the CIA analyzing your pictures?” Davis ventured.
“Not exactly,” Bolan said.
“But somebody is,” Davis pressed. “You’re running identifications on the gunmen.”
“Which reminds me,” Bolan said. “Make sure we get a full run-up on the guy they’re taking in.”
“I’ll check back with the station and make sure. Unless someone suicides our boy in Holding.”
Bolan looked at Davis sharply. The detective managed not to grin for only a moment.
Bolan shook his head. “Let’s hope not.” Davis laughed.
The pair surveyed the damage to the Dodge Charger, but it was clear the car was critically wounded. Bolan paused just long enough to grab the rental car agreement from the glove compartment and pocket it.
“I don’t think you’re going to get your security deposit back,” Davis said mildly.
“I almost never do,” Bolan said.
Davis managed to beg, borrow, or steal an unmarked Crown Victoria from among the police personnel on the scene. He did not explain and Bolan did not ask. The silver-gray sedan was among three other vehicles parked along the increasingly crowded, chaotic street.
Bolan climbed in as Davis brought up the car, transferring his war bag from the Dodge to the Ford. As he did so, Davis pointed past him to the cordon being set up. There were a pair of television vans and a crowd of reporters gathering, shouting questions at the officers keeping them at bay.
“That’s going to be trouble, isn’t it?” Davis said.
“Yeah,” Bolan told him. “Nothing we can do about that now. Let’s get started.” He looked through the list Davis had provided and read the first address aloud. “You know this place?”
“There isn’t a cop in the city who doesn’t,” Davis said. “It’s not exactly one of our more affluent neighborhoods. A real hellhole, to be honest, Agent Cooper.”
Bolan said nothing at first. He opened his war bag and removed several loaded 20-round magazines for the Beretta. Davis looked over, wide-eyed, as he caught a glimpse of the hardware and ordnance inside.
“You don’t exactly travel light, do you, Agent Cooper?”
“If I could carry more, I would,” Bolan said. He began replacing magazines in the pouches of his shoulder holster. “Welcome to the war, kid.”
“Yeah,” Davis said. “Yeah.”
3
