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The squalid tenements on either side of the narrow street were crawling with people and sagging with furniture, garbage and other debris. A tangled maze of clotheslines linked facing buildings across the channel dividing them. As the unmarked Crown Victoria threaded its way around a series of abandoned, stripped vehicles, some of them bearing the scorch marks of past fires, children and adults scattered. Davis drove while Bolan watched from the passenger seat, his eyes scanning the rooftops and tracking the figures that ducked in and out of the shadows. The Executioner was no stranger to house-to-house close-quarters battle in urban environments. This neighborhood looked like yet another battleground awaiting the first shot to be fired.
“I hate coming down here,” Davis said. “It’s like a war zone sometimes.”
Bolan nodded. He checked the list Davis had given him. “According to this,” he said, “we want 1021, third floor, apartment C. A Ms. Kendall Brown. It looks like her son Mikyl was the first documented victim of these ritualized blade murders.”
“Kendall Brown,” Davis repeated. “Got it.”
It took them a while to find the right building, as most of the designations were either worn, missing completely, or covered by piles of junk or even cardboard signs. In a few cases, the numbers on the buildings had been spray-painted over or even switched. Bolan raised an eyebrow at one of the more obvious examples; the street signs at that intersection were also missing on one side.
“Trying to hide,” Davis explained. “Could be a lot of things. Enemy gangs. Rival dealers. Creditors, tax collectors, any of countless state agencies, like Child Protective under the Department of Human Services. Most of the veteran agency folks know where they need to go, so these games don’t fool anybody. But I bet it’s hell trying to get a pizza delivered.”
The dark humor in Davis’s comment, which seemed otherwise unlike what Bolan had seen of the man so far, bespoke bitter experience, perhaps as a uniformed cop on the streets. Bolan let it go. He had seen enough ghettos and poverty-stricken crime zones like this one the world over to know it for what it was. It didn’t matter if a place like this existed among the shantytowns of a third world banana republic, or in some of the worst overrun cesspools in Europe, or anywhere in the industrialized West. Poverty and desperation were feeding and breeding grounds for predators, who made those very problems worse, as they incestuously preyed on the communities that spawned them.
Bolan’s jaw tightened. As many times as he saw this, it always moved something in him. There were innocents here, among the predators. They would be vulnerable to the creatures that hunted among them, terrorized them, bullied and brutalized and subjugated them. It turned the soldier’s stomach.
Davis parked the car as close to the building as he could, wedging it between a derelict pickup truck—the rusted bed was full of trash—and a garbage bin overflowing with neglected refuse. The two men could hear children playing in the bin. When the detective leaned on the horn, the kids took the hint and climbed out, scampering off while shooting glares of mistrust and disappointment back at Bolan and Davis.
“One of them’s going to get picked up and thrown into the back of a garbage truck one of these days,” he said.
“No time soon, from the look of it.” Bolan shook his head. “You’d better wait here.”
“I was worried you were going to argue with me about that,” Davis said. “I’ll keep the motor running.”
“Good idea.” Bolan nodded. He reached into his war bag and removed a pair of translucent plastic cases. Inside each case was an earpiece that resembled a wireless telephone earbud. Bolan fitted one of the small devices behind his left ear, where it all but disappeared. He offered the second case to Davis.
“What’s this?” Davis asked, accepting the earbud.
“These are short-range transceivers,” Bolan said. “They’re smart. They filter gunfire but provide good, audible communication between them. Speak in a normal tone of voice. You’ll be able to listen in on everything I’m doing, and I’ll be able to hear you if you speak or if anything goes down.”
“Standard issue at the Justice Department, Agent Cooper?” Davis said. He tucked the earpiece in his own ear.
“Something like that,” Bolan said. The devices had been developed, in fact, with the help of Stony Man Farm electronics genius Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz. Bolan had used them in the field many times.
“The useful range varies,” he told Davis. “If we get too far away to hear each other, there’s a problem.” He paused, double-checked and stowed his Beretta, and then checked the massive .44 Magnum Desert Eagle before replacing the handcannon in the Kydex holster behind his hip.
“Cooper,” Davis said.
Bolan stopped with his hand on the door handle, shouldering his canvas war bag with his free arm. “Yeah?”
“You’re not a cop.” It was not a question.
“No,” Bolan said. “I’m not.”
“Look, Cooper,” Davis said. “I am a cop, and I like to think I’m a good one. I know this place. It’s very unlikely anybody’s going to talk to you up there. You’ll be lucky even to find this Brown woman at home, and if you do, she probably won’t open the door for you. Nobody sees anything here, Cooper. They don’t call the police if they can help it, which means if they do call, all hell is breaking loose down here. They don’t talk to anybody if they don’t have to. It’s like this isn’t even the United States down here, Cooper. It’s bad. I know you’re some kind of government superhero or something, but it could be that all you’ll accomplish in there is burning the place down around your ears.”
“Understood,” Bolan said. “Keep your eyes open, Detective.”
Davis nodded. He watched, looking anxious, as Bolan made his way through the scattered garbage at ground level to enter the tenement.
The smell hit Bolan as soon as he cleared the outer doorway. The stairwell reeked of refuse, human waste and mold. There was a mound of trash blocking the inner entrance; he stepped over it, hands ready to go for the Beretta under his jacket.
The floor was covered in carpet so stained its original color was impossible to determine. It creaked under Bolan’s combat boots. Through the thin walls, he could hear and smell the usual signs of living at close quarters in an environment like this. Televisions blared. Repellant food odors hung heavy in the air. A domestic altercation of some kind simmered in one of the apartments he passed; there were angry screams in both Spanish and English. Bolan paused, hand drifting nearer the Beretta, wondering if intervention was required, until the voices grew more calm and quieted.
He moved on.
“Cooper,” Davis’s voice sounded in his ear. “Do you work alone?”
“What?” Bolan asked.
“There’s an old blue Chevy Caprice full of guys down here,” Davis said. “They’ve circled the block twice now, but I can’t read the plate from where I’m watching. They’re a little out of place in this neighborhood, and I don’t recognize them. I was kind of hoping you were going to say you had called in reinforcements.”
“No such luck,” Bolan said. “Watch yourself down there, Davis. Keep me informed if anything changes.”
“Will do.”
Bolan picked up his pace. He traversed the next stairwells with less caution; he could feel the numbers working against him and Davis. When he reached the third floor, he found apartment C and stepped well to the side of the doorway. He flattened himself against the wall, reached out and rapped on the edge of the hollow-core door.
It took several tries before he got a response from within. Finally, a woman’s voice answered, “What do you want?”
“Kendall Brown?” Bolan asked, as he came to the front of the door.
The door opened to the length of its chain revealing a middle-aged black woman wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants and bracing a toddler on her hip with one thick arm. The little girl, who was chewing on a pacifier, looked up at Bolan with wide eyes.
The woman nodded slowly. “What do you want?” she said again.
“I’m sorry to bother you, ma’am,” he said, smiling briefly at the child. She continued to regard Bolan with amazement. “I need to talk to you about Mikyl Brown, your son.”
The woman wanted to shut the door; Bolan could see her knuckles turn white. To her credit, she held her ground.
“Cooper,” Davis said over their wireless connection. “I think that car I saw is parked behind the building. I saw it nose out and then reverse.”
“Mikyl is dead,” Brown said. “Murdered. Police already been here. Can’t say they much cared about him, if you ask me. But they were here. They asked their questions. They left. Mikyl is still dead. What the hell you think you’re gonna do now?”
“I understand,” Bolan said. “I really do, Ms. Brown. I’m hoping that if I can better understand the circumstances of Mikyl’s death, I can bring his killer to justice. I’m part of a special task force.”
“Cooper,” Davis’s voice sounded in Bolan’s ear again. “Cooper, I think you’d better hurry.”
Kendall Brown closed the door, removed the chain and opened it again, after putting the child on the ground and giving the girl a gentle pat to send her toddling in the opposite direction. She lowered her voice. “I don’t know who you are, mister,” she said, “but it’s damned cruel what you’re doing. Mikyl was murdered in a gang fight. Stabbed to death. The boy who done it, not even a year older than my son, is in prison. Probably get out sooner than he should, too. Just how things go.”
Bolan’s eyes narrowed. “Mikyl’s murderer was convicted?”
“Cooper.” Davis’s voice was growing more urgent.
“Who the hell are you, mister?” Brown said. “I don’t need you coming up in here and reminding me of my boy.” She slammed the door in his face with considerable force. Bolan looked up and down the corridor; nothing moved.
“I’m coming out,” Bolan said. “Something’s not right, here. Keep the front covered.”
“Understood,” Davis answered.
Bolan paused at the stairwell. Beneath the noise of the apartments, both in and outside the building, he could hear something else.
Shuffling. There were men in the stairwell.
Bolan reached into the canvas war bag. He removed a flashbang grenade, popped the pin and watched the spoon spring free.
Below him, someone moved in response to the noise.
The soldier leaned over the stairwell railing and let the grenade fall.
He turned away, shielding his ears with his palms, squeezing his eyes shut. The actinic flash of the grenade was bright enough that he could see it through his eyelids. The thunder-clap of the less-lethal bomb made his teeth vibrate. He heard a scream.
No sooner had the flash faded than Bolan hoisted himself up over the railing. He dropped, colliding heavily on the landing below, absorbing the impact with his legs. Rising from his crouch, he drew the double-edged combat-survival dagger in his waistband. The trio of men in whose midst he had landed, either held or were reaching for automatic weapons. They were dressed in what Bolan recognized as expensive suits, probably tailored to hide their shoulder holsters and submachine-gun harnesses. All three continued rubbing at their eyes or holding their ears.
The nearest of the gunmen managed to fix Bolan with bloodshot eyes, fighting the involuntary tears streaming down his face. His gun came up, but Bolan stabbed him in the neck and ripped the knife forward and away. The dying man spun, spraying the wall crimson.
Bolan kicked out the knee of the second man, dropping him to the floor. The third was on his hands and knees, trying to find the micro-Uzi he had dropped. The Executioner fired a kick to his ribs and was rewarded with an audible crack as the gunman rolled over. He threw his knife arm backward, sensing the second man surging back to his feet, and rammed the double-edged blade into the hollow of the gunner’s throat. Yanking the knife out in a circular motion as he wrenched the man’s head around, the soldier levered him down to die on the stairs.
Bolan checked left, right, and then up and down the stairwell, very quickly. Then he threw himself to the floor, landing with his knee in the back of the man he had rib-kicked. Air gasped from the gunman’s lungs and he lost his grip on the Uzi again. Bolan kicked the gun away and moved to secure the man; he had plastic zip-tie cuffs in his pocket. He rolled his prisoner over so the man’s back was on the floor.
The would-be killer wasn’t down for the count. His hand snaked into his jacket and came out with a backup pistol, a tiny chromed .25ACP. He fired a single round. Bolan swatted the gun aside and plunged the blade of his knife into the most quickly lethal target. The blade penetrated the gunner’s eye and turned him off as if a switch had been thrown.
Bolan drew a breath.
He followed the path of the bullet, but it had lodged in the railing of the stairwell, taking chips from the paint. The small-caliber slug would not have been much of a threat, but the whole point of Bolan’s maneuver had been to neutralize these attackers before they started firing at close quarters. Most pistol and machine-gun rounds would pass right through an interior wall of a dwelling. They would penetrate most exterior walls, for that matter. In slums like these, gunfire would scythe through the residents as if the walls weren’t there. Bolan could not permit that to happen, which meant he had to keep moving, and quickly, to get clear of the tenement.
“Davis,” Bolan said quietly, wiping his knife clean on one of the dead men’s jackets. He sheathed the blade. “I have engaged multiple hostiles. Well dressed and heavily armed.” He began methodically stripping the gunmen’s weapons, separating slides and bolts from receivers and tossing the results in opposite directions. “See if you can get some uniforms in here, including the medical examiner. Tell them to sweep the building,” he suggested. “I don’t want to leave a lot of firearms in component parts for the neighborhood kids to play with.” He took a moment to snap pictures of the dead men and transmit them to Stony Man Farm.
Bolan took the stairs two and three at a time as he made his way back down, counting on speed and initiative to save him should there be any more shooters positioned as backup somewhere below. When he hit ground level, he made his way for the rear of the building, stepping over a homeless man sleeping in the alcove. The street person shouted curses after the soldier, who ignored them.
Bolan spotted the gunman’s car, parked exactly where Davis said it would be. There were two thugs sitting in it, one on the passenger side and one behind the wheel.
Bolan drew the Beretta 93-R and flicked the selector switch to 3-round burst.
They noticed him coming before he got more than a few steps. Bolan saw the driver bring a small handheld two-way radio to his face. He was lining up the men in the car for a shot when the first bullet hit the pavement at his feet.
There were more gunmen, hidden behind the building—a lot more. There had to be at least one other vehicle Davis hadn’t seen. The gunmen were grouped on the fire escape of the adjacent position, covering the rear entrance from elevation. No doubt they thought this afforded them the tactical advantage.
Against any man but the Executioner, it would have.
Bolan rolled into a tight ball and threw himself forward and right, behind the concrete abutment supporting the metal posts of the roof over the rear entrance. Bullets kicked up cement dust as automatic gunfire ripped through the space between the tenements. Beyond that, Bolan could hear the shouts of men and women reacting to the sudden warfare in their midst. In a neighborhood as bad as this, they would be accustomed to the occasional shot, even a short exchange among gangs or rival drug dealers. A prolonged firefight like this would be something else entirely, and cause for real concern among even the most hardened denizens of this Detroit ghetto.
Bolan was pinned down. He could not retreat through the building at his back; that would invite the gunmen into the tenement, too, which was the problem he had just worked to avoid. He could not break right or left; that would give the shooters a clear shot. They would pick him off easily before he got the chance to shoot them all.
His only way out was directly across the alley, into the space beneath the shooters, where the fire escape itself would foul their aim. He braced himself, coiling his body like a spring, and prepared to make a dash for it.
Breaking for it, Bolan threw himself into the alleyway.
The parked car wasn’t parked anymore. It was moving at speed—and coming right for him.
4
The Crown Victoria barreled down the narrow alleyway from the opposite direction. The gunmen in the Chevy saw it coming and tried to swerve, only to sheer bricks from the tenement on the driver’s side. Davis pushed the car’s engine to the red line. The vehicles collided with a scream of metal on metal and roaring 8-cylinder power plants. With his foot apparently still pushed all the way to the floor, Davis leaned out of his open window, extended his Glock and pumped its entire magazine into the windshield of the gunmen’s car.
Bolan couldn’t afford to admire Davis’s handiwork. The shooters on the fire escape did their best to track him and gun him down, but he was moving too fast, his rush under their guns had been just unexpected enough to work. When he was directly below them, he flattened himself against the building, raised the Beretta skyward in a two-handed grip and started firing.
To the men on the fire escape, the world erupted in flying, burning metal. Bolan’s rounds punched through from below, ricocheting from the metal grates of the upper landing, turning the metal basket in which they stood into a blood-soaked nightmare. One of the men above managed to trigger a blast that went wide, digging a furrow near Bolan’s heels, before he went down.
Footsteps sounded at one end of the alley mouth.
“Cooper!” Davis yelled as he reloaded his Glock. “More coming!”
Bolan ran for the passenger side of the car, ripped open the door and jumped in, pulling the door shut against damaged hinges. Davis slammed the gearshift into Reverse and stepped on it, sending the car skidding back the way it had come.
“Where to?” Davis asked.
“Get us back onto the street,” Bolan said, reloading the Beretta. He racked the slide. “You know this area. Where can we go where there are fewer people?”
“Two blocks over,” Davis said without hesitation. “There’s a strip of old commercial and residential structures targeted for urban renewal. Most of it’s boarded up. There are some homeless camped there, but not too many during the day. It’s more or less deserted right now.”
“Perfect. Don’t spare the gas.”
Davis pushed them through sparse traffic. A vehicle appeared to be following them—Bolan assumed it was the car Davis hadn’t seen, the one that had to have been nearby to transport the assassins—and where there was one, there might be more. Despite Davis’s skilled driving, the pursuit car began to gain on them.
Bolan drew the Desert Eagle from its Kydex holster.
“How did they find us?” Davis asked.
“They had to know where we would be,” Bolan said.
“Somebody in the department,” Davis said, frowning. “Somebody with access to my files. The list of addresses.”
Bolan said nothing for a moment. He was watching the hostiles’ car come up on their passenger-side flank. “Give us a burst of speed and then put us into a side street,” he said. “Get ready to bail out. Follow my lead.”
“Right,” Davis said.
The chase car drew alongside their vehicle, and the Executioner was waiting. The armed men inside the car, dressed in cheap suits like they were refugees from a business meeting, began to shift into place, going for weapons held below the level of their windows.
Bolan rolled down his own window and thrust the triangular snout of the Desert Eagle into the wind. He triggered a single shot. The .44 Magnum hollowpoint round blew apart the driver’s-side front tire.
Davis was no slouch behind the wheel. He jammed on the brakes and pulled the steering wheel hard to the right, ramming the nose of their vehicle into the rear flank of the chase car. The gunmen spun out, the maneuver that much more violent thanks to the wreckage of the front tire. Spikes flew in a tight arc as the rim cut through what was left of the steel-belted radial.
Davis continued his push and shot past the rear end of the chase car. He cut over again, pacing the front of the row of boarded buildings, until he found an enclosure that might have been a carport or an abandoned loading dock. Plywood splintered and flew apart as the grille of the Crown Victoria rammed past makeshift barriers.
“Out, out, out,” Bolan ordered. Davis bailed out of the car with him. Bolan pointed. “Take the back. I’ll take the front.” The other side of the narrow, crumbling city block was only a few sheets of plywood or molding drywall away; if Davis could not find an exit ready-made on the other side, he could easily make one. Bolan drew the Beretta 93-R left-handed and, with a weapon in each hand, headed for the ragged, gaping hole the car had made with its passing.
An almost eerie sense of déjà vu hit him as his enemies converged. The gunmen, looking for all the world like stereotypical mafiosi, were armed with a mismatched assortment of handguns, shotguns and automatic small arms. They were coming around both sides of the crippled chase car when one of them spotted Bolan emerging from the carport.
The soldier was a combat shooter borne of both training and long experience. He knew the mistakes men made in armed battle, and he knew how to exploit these mistakes. In a half crouch, walking smoothly and quickly with a gliding, heel-to-toe gait, he came at them, his weapons extended, his wrists canted at very slight angles to bolster the stability of each shooting wrist and maximize the visibility of his sights. The Executioner bore down on them, irresistible force and immovable object in one battle-ready vessel.
