Johnny Bolan picked the trooper up a few miles east of Yuma, clocking close to eighty-five on Interstate Highway 8. He had been careful in the towns, obeying posted limits and avoiding notice, but the interstate had been his chance to make up time, unwind the Jimmy's power plant and let his mind free-float toward possible solutions for his problem. Thus preoccupied with private thoughts, he missed the tiny winking lights at first, receiving no warning from his radar detector. The cruiser had been parked along a side road, screened by billboards and accumulated tumble-weeds. Its driver had been on the verge of dozing when the Jimmy hammered past him, giving him a final chance to make his quota for the day.
The patrolman had closed his distance to a hundred yards when Johnny caught it, and the younger Bolan spent a heartbeat weighing possible reactions. He could always stop and take the ticket, but there might be other problems if he did. The radar-sensitive "fuzz buster" mounted on his dashboard was illegal in several states, and if the cop took umbrage to it now, there might be an arrest, a comprehensive search that would uncover weapons and explosives, sundry other gear. Above all else, an interruption of his journey put more heat on Mack, and that was Johnny's prime consideration as he floored the 4x4's accelerator.
He would have to lose the tail, and while that would involve a detour, some wasted time, it had to be a damn sight faster than submitting to a search and possible arrest. Whatever, he was in it now, the Jimmy pulling slowly but inexorably out in front, the squad car dwindling in his rear-view mirror as he held the pedal to the floor.
The patrolman would not be shaken off easily. Engaging the Police Pak in his cruiser, he was after Johnny like a shot, his siren whooping in syncopated rhythm with the flashing colored lights. A straight shot into Pima County on the interstate would gain him nothing but a caravan of cruisers, Johnny knew, and long before he got that far, there would be roadblocks waiting for him on the highway. He would have to lose his tail, and soon, then settle down somewhere to wait it out while troopers scurried up and down the highway, searching for their prey. They would grow tired of it eventually, but it was a nuisance, and he didn't like to think what might be happening in Santa Rosa while he dawdled in the desert, wasting time.
Above all else, he did not want to think about what might already have transpired in Santa Rosa. Knowing that he might be too late, that the aborted phone call might have been the last that he would ever hear from Mack, he could not let it go. While there was any hope at all, he would continue, and when hope was gone, he would begin the task of dishing out revenge.
But at the moment he was searching for a side road, anything to get him off the interstate and offer him some room to run. A half mile farther he caught one, cranked the Jimmy through a hard left turn, fishtailing as his tires bit into dirt and gravel, spewing shrapnel in his wake. The trooper nearly overshot his turnoff, but he made it with a scream of tortured rubber, jouncing after Johnny on the one-lane track. The younger Bolan was already generating clouds of choking dust, and while it would not put the trooper off his track, it had to slow the opposition down a little.
Johnny took advantage of his lead, accelerating, conscious of the fact that if he blew a tire or fouled his engine with accumulated dirt and sand, he would be finished. No more speeding ticket, now; he would be on the hook for reckless driving, resisting arrest and any other charges the trooper could dream up before they reached the local jail. A search of his belongings would be mandatory, and from there, the list of charges would begin to snowball, adding felonies to misdemeanors, piling time on top of time.
And time was something the younger Bolan did not have.
Another dirt road branched off the first, and Johnny took it on an impulse, following the rutted tracks that other off-road drivers had prepared for him. The cruiser on his tail was built for highway driving, flat-out speed, but it was not a rover. Lacking the Jimmy's four-wheel drive, stronger springs and armored undercarriage, it should not be able to compete long-distance over rugged, rocky ground.
John lost him at the next branch in the road. It came upon him suddenly, without a hint of warning, and he took the south fork, curving back in the direction of the interstate by slow degrees. A quick glance through the driver's window showed him that the narrow track lay close beside a deep ravine, all choked at the bottom with tumbleweeds and cactus, the remains of some forgotten, prehistoric stream. Behind him, choking on his dust and blinded for the moment, his pursuer overshot the track, his squad car losing traction, nosing into empty space and tilting crazily before it made the twelve-foot drop. The highway patrolman might scramble free with only minor whiplash to serve as a reminder of the episode, but it would take a wrecker to extract his cruiser from the steep ravine.
They would be hunting for him on the highway, soon, from Yuma eastward, all eyes searching for a Jimmy bearing California plates. It had to figure that the trooper had his number, that it had been broadcast well before the cruiser had been taken out. It was a problem he could live with, given time to make some superficial changes to the 4x4, and while he was reluctant to invest the time, he was not willing to accept the grim alternative.
He drove another seven miles on dirt and gravel, running roughly parallel to Highway 8. He found a row of dunes to screen him off from prying eyes along the road and pulled between them, shutting down the Jimmy's engine and climbing out to stretch his legs. He opened up the back and rummaged underneath the spare for tools and backup plates, selecting Arizona's from the several sets he kept on hand against emergencies. Five minute's work, and they were mounted, California tags sequestered with the other spares beneath the Jimmy's carpeting. He couldn't change the paint job, but there had to be a thousand similar vehicles on the road in Arizona, and the troopers would be looking for specific plates. Before he reached the highway, the new tags would be as dusty as the car itself, and no one would be able to detect the switch without a thorough search.
When he was finished, Johnny returned to the highway, drove another twenty miles to Wellton and found a drive-in restaurant. He killed an hour with a burger, fries and milk shake, watching squad cars rocket past, westbound for Yuma. When Bolan was halfway through his meal, a motorcycle officer pulled in behind him, eyed him hard for several seconds, then revved up his Harley and continued on his way.
The younger Bolan felt as if he might have aged a decade in that hour, waiting for a fraction of the heat to dissipate.
He would be forced to watch his speed from here on, avoiding further contact with the state patrol. He had already used his quota of luck for one day, borrowing against tomorrow, and he didn't need another run-in with the law to make that point. He still had miles to go before he reached the killing ground in Santa Rosa, and he had already wasted too much time.
Grant Vickers returned the microphone to its hook, frowning as he leaned back in his swivel chair and cocked his boots up on a corner of his desk. The sheriff's deputy had been properly solicitous, reminding Vickers that there wasn't much for them to do without at least a general description of the suspects or their vehicle. It was a not-so-subtle way of telling Vickers he was wasting everybody's time, and they would doubtless share a laugh at his expense in Tucson, but he had been left with no alternatives. Emergency receiving would report Bud Stancell's injuries, and it would be peculiar if the local law did nothing in a matter of felonious assault. His contact with the sheriff was routine, and he would let the matter rest right there unless somebody on the home front started asking questions. If it came to that, he knew that he could always stall them, falling back on lack of evidence, descriptions, and the like to camouflage his own deliberate inaction on the case.
He had gone looking for Camacho after leaving Becky at the clinic, and had been relieved to find the bastard gone. There was no sign of Hector, his companions, or the souped-up Chevy they had driven into Santa Rosa. Maybe they had gotten lucky, Vickers told himself; they might have found their pigeon, wrapped him up and hauled him back across the border to Rivera. Maybe.
But he didn't think so.
It would take a sheer, remarkable coincidence to put the stranger in their hands. Bud Stancell hadn't seen him, Vickers would have bet his life on that. Camacho had been angry and frustrated when he turned the jackals loose on Stancell; if their quarry had been hiding out at the garage, they would have simply murdered Bud, to silence him, before they stuck their excess baggage in the Chevy's trunk. The beating, Bud's survival, were a testament to Hector's failure in the hunt, and while he might have been recalled, Camacho's absence did not mean his boss was giving up, by any means. There would be other hunters, other crews, and that meant Becky Kent was still in jeopardy.
The lawman sat up straight and eased his gun from its swivel holster. Neither he nor the weapon had seen combat, but he knew the gun would do its job, provided that he had the nerve to use it. Opening the cylinder, he checked the load. He kept an empty chamber underneath the hammer, force of habit, even though he knew it wasn't really necessary. Now, considering the fact that he might actually have to fire the weapon, Vickers dug a box of ammunition from his top desk drawer and slipped another hollowpoint into the vacancy. That made it six potential deaths instead of five. Vickers thought it should have added more weight to the pistol, but he felt no change.
Six dead men in his hand. But would he have the guts to stand against Rivera? He had been on the bastard's payroll longer than he cared to think about, and there was every chance that he would be committing suicide by opposing Rivera's army. But if it came down to killing, and if he could get in close enough...
It all hinged on Rebecca Kent. If push came to shove, Vickers didn't give a damn about the town; a year or two at this rate, Santa Rosa would dry up and blow away. But Vickers held the woman in high regard. It would have been too much, perhaps, to say he loved her, but it could have come to that, in time. Unfortunately, time was something he did not have a surplus of just now.
It would be easier for all concerned if he could simply find the man Rivera's goons were looking for. He could arrest the stranger on some trumped-up charge, pretend that he was driving Mr. X to Tucson for safe keeping, and deliver him to Hector or whomever on the highway outside town. Unfortunately, Vickers had no more idea of where the stranger might be hiding than he had of where Camacho and his troops had gone. The bastard might be anywhere, assuming that he ever got to Santa Rosa in the first place.
Wounded, walking in from somewhere to the south, it would have been so easy for the pigeon to collapse and die before he reached the city limits. Hector might be wasting everybody's time and raising hell for no good reason, but the lawman knew Camacho and his boss would never understand that point of view. It would require a vast expenditure of time to search the desert thoroughly, and in the meantime, if the hunch was wrong, their quarry might be miles away and singing to the state police.
If only Vickers had some rough idea of who Rivera's men were looking for. A "gringo," sure, but what the hell did that mean in the States? It ruled out Mexicans and Indians, for openers, but Vickers knew that even blacks might be considered gringos, based upon the attitude of those applying labels at the moment. As a positive description, it was worse than useless, fitting four-fifths of the country's populace. He could go out in search of tramps, pick one at random, shoot him before he turned him over to the drug lord. But if Rivera had some means of identifying the man he wanted, it would be a wasted effort. And he knew that an effort to deceive Rivera, if discovered, just might get him killed.
There would be time enough for that, and if he had to risk his life, Grant Vickers did not plan to waste it on a goddamned tramp. He checked his watch, saw it was time to make another drive-by on the clinic, just to satisfy himself that none of Hector's goons had doubled back to play the answer game with Becky. If they touched her, tried to harm her... well, he would be forced to make a choice when that occurred. But in the meantime, there was time to kill, and he would kill it on the road.
Before he reached the sidewalk, Vickers turned and went back to his office. He opened the top drawer of his desk, withdrew the box of hollowpoints, another box of shotgun shells that lay half-hidden under rumpled correspondence. He would not be needing them, of course, but it was better to be cautious when tomorrow started looking shaky and you couldn't count on waking up to see the sun. The constable was not declaring war, by any means, but if war came, he meant to have an edge.
All things considered, Vickers thought it was the only way to fly.
"Why did you do it?"
Bolan did not have to ask what "it" was. They had danced around the subject of his occupation once before, and he had watched the lady chewing on it in the meantime, getting nowhere with her own attempts to put herself inside his mental process. Frowning thoughtfully, he cocked a thumb toward Main Street, baking in the noonday heat, and answered with a question of his own. "Why do you stay?"
She came back at him quickly, without hesitation. "People need me here. This is my home, I grew up just a quarter-mile away and went to school here, through eighth grade. Of course, there were more children then." She seemed to lose her thread of concentration for an instant, but she snapped back quickly. "I fulfill a necessary function."
Bolan spread his hands and offered her a weary smile. "My story in a nutshell."
Dr. Kent appeared incredulous. "You can't be serious. I help the sick, the injured. You kill people for a living. Any effort to compare the two activities is, well, ridiculous, that's all."
"Not really. Every time you clean a wound with antiseptic, you're killing germs. When you remove a limb that can't be saved, or cut a tumor out, you're acting in the interests of your patient... but you're also taking life."
"There's no comparison. To kill a human being..."
"May be absolutely necessary," Bolan finished for her, weary of the old debate and anxious for a change of subject. "All men have the right to kill in self-defense, or to protect their loved ones. I believe we have a duty to use force, if it will help prevent atrocities." He saw the skepticism in her eyes and gave it one last try. "If you could travel back in time and murder Hitler, thereby saving countless people from destruction, would you do it?"
"Certainly."
"If you observed a rape in progress, would you pull a trigger to protect the victim?"
Something like a shadow fell across her face, and there was a surprising gruffness to her voice as she responded. "I believe so, yes."
"And if you knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that John Q. Public has committed murder, that police can never touch him, and that he will escape, scot-free, to kill again unless you take him out yourself? What then?"
Uneasy, she turned away from him. "It's hypothetical. I couldn't answer that."
"I can. There's nothing hypothetical about the syndicate, the terrorists, the animals that prey on people after dark in every major city, coast to coast. You read the papers, Doctor. It's a jungle out there."
"So, we all pitch in and act like animals?"
The soldier shook his head. "Not even close. We use our human senses, our intelligence, our strength, and stop the animals before they eat us alive."
"You've obviously given this a lot of thought," she said. "I happen to believe there's too much violence in the world already."
"Granted. But you don't eliminate the problem by ignoring it or forming a discussion group. You'd know that if you'd ever tried to talk a rapist or a killer into reconsidering his crime beforehand."
The shadow had returned to haunt her eyes, and now Rebecca Kent was looking at him strangely, looking through him, with her thoughts a thousand miles away. When she regained her voice, it was as distant as her gaze. "I don't presume to judge you, Mr. Bolan, but I can't believe you'll save the world by killing everyone who disagrees with you."
"If that was the plan of action, Doctor, you'd be dead already. We're not talking philosophical agreement here. It's raw survival, plain and simple."
She got up, restless, tried the telephone again, then sat back down. "Still dead," she said by way of explanation.
Bolan was not startled by the news. He would have bet that all the lines in town were dead, and they would stay that way until somebody on the outside had their fill of listening to busy signals and reported something wrong in Santa Rosa. Depending on the timing of that call, it might be hours more before a lineman started checking out the wires and found the point where they had been brought down by insulated cutters or a well-placed charge of buckshot. Hours more, perhaps, to fix the break, and only then would anyone begin to think about what might be happening in town.
Rivera would be finished with his work by then. Whatever he might have in mind for Santa Rosa, he would have time to spare before the outside world had an inkling of what was happening. The soldier wondered what would happen when the drug lord showed himself, how citizens of Santa Rosa would react. The constable would be outgunned, but he might rouse the townspeople, given half a chance, and offer some resistance to the occupying army. Individuals might take up arms against Rivera, in defense of homes and families. The dealer's mercenaries would have modern, paramilitary weapons and an old familiarity with murder on their side. In combat situations, Bolan knew, the numbers only mattered if the quality of troops on either side was roughly equal. Half a dozen seasoned veterans could stop an untrained army in its tracks, defeat them with a small assist from Fate.
Unless the inexperienced militia should get lucky.
In his youth, the Executioner had seen the plot spun out a hundred times on movie screens and television. Farmers, simple people, laying down their plows and taking up their guns against the bandits who were threatening their homes. It didn't matter if the heavies rode on horseback or on motorcycles, in a Model T or in the turret of a Panzer tank: the story was the same. In films, the good guys won because it made a better story, and you needed heroes if you meant to keep on selling popcorn at the matinees. In life, however, it was something else again.
In Vietnam and afterward, the Executioner had learned that there was never any guarantee of happy endings. In a real-life close encounter with the Reaper, you were satisfied if you could walk away, and never mind the hypothetical about what had been gained or lost. The winners were the living, and the losers got a toe tag for their trouble. A few days in the ground, and they would all look pretty much the same.
But it still mattered, damn it. Any way you stood the rule book on its ear, a few hard basics always read the same. Like good and evil, right and wrong. The fact that certain crimes against humanity could simply not be left unpunished, if humanity itself was to retain its meaning. Certain enemies were simply wrong, and you opposed them not because of politics or artificial border lines, but rather out of a concern for all mankind, a recognition that their evil, left unchecked, would constitute a danger to the species. Hitler had been such an enemy, but he was not alone, by any means. You did not have to look in chancellories or throne rooms for an enemy these days. Some of them rode in limousines, but others took the bus and bore a strange resemblance to the boy next door. You took them where you found them, and when you found them, you were ready for them, or they served you up for dinner like a sacrificial lamb.
The sound of wailing sirens cut the noonday heat like razors ripping parchment, drawing closer. Bolan fought a minor wave of dizziness before he regained his balance, then followed Dr. Kent along a narrow corridor to the waiting room.
"Grant got the county sheriff," she suggested, trying to sound hopeful as they peered through separate windows.
"Maybe."
"What else could it be?"
The soldier didn't answer, waiting for the sounds to take on substance, for the source to show itself. It might have been the county sheriff, but there was an alternative that came to mind.
It might be Doomsday.
For the Executioner.
For Santa Rosa.