Blood Rites

* * *

“ALL UNITS, CODE 30! We have shots fired at the Dolphin Mall, multiple injuries reported, still in progress.”

“Acknowledge that,” Corporal Tyrus Jackson told his partner. He was driving their patrol car, letting rookie Rick Lopez handle the radio.

Lopez snatched up the microphone and answered, “Unit 31 responding. We’re two minutes out.”

Jackson already had the Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor up to sixty-five, rolling toward Northwest 117th Avenue. He’d make a right turn there, if no one slammed into their cruiser, and they’d arrive at the mall shortly.

“The Dolphin’s massive,” he reminded Lopez. “Call back and find out where the shooting is. With multiples, we got no time to waste.”

“Roger that.”

Lopez raised the dispatcher, and the answer came back with a wisp of static. “Southwest parking lot.”

“Ninety seconds, if we’re lucky,” Lopez said, and cut the link.

Multiple casualties meant a psycho on a rampage, or some kind of gang activity. Jackson was betting on the gangs, but you could never tell. Miami wasn’t just a melting pot, it was a boiling pot, where races and religions clashed, the rich flaunted their money and the poor wanted a piece of it. In any given year, Miami Metro saw it all, from slaughters in the family to drug burns, hate crimes, even human sacrifice.

But multiples, with a shooting still in progress, meant his day had gone to shit, barely an hour after roll call.

“Here we go,” he said, and swung onto the ring road that encircled Dolphin Mall. He heard the gunfire now. Snap, crackle, pop, telling him there were automatic weapons in the mix. Not one, but several, which meant this wasn’t just a random head case run amok.

“What do we do?” Lopez asked, sounding worried.

“Same as always,” Jackson answered. “Whatever we can.”

* * *

“BABYLON IS COMIN’,” Salkey said, pointing at the police car entering the parking lot.

“I’m not deaf,” Maxwell reminded him, reloading as he moved to head off the patrol car.

They’d pinned the Haitians down but hadn’t killed them yet, though Maxwell reckoned one was wounded. He’d seen crimson spatters when they started firing on the Lexus, but their targets both returned fire, peppering the Lincoln MKT before Eccles had swung around behind a bulky pickup truck. They’d have to strip and burn the ride when they were finished here, which pissed him off to no end.

And now, police.

Tracking their progress through the parking lot was easy. The siren was wailing, blue and white lights flashing on the roof rack. As they turned into the nearest lane and started toward the Lexus, Maxwell rose before the cruiser, hosing it with Parabellum slugs.

“Die, Babylon!” he shouted as their windshield imploded, the driver’s face turning red-raw in an instant. The cruiser swerved and crashed into a station wagon, then stalled.

The young Latino passenger bailed out, whipping a sidearm from its holster, but he wasn’t fast enough. Maxwell cut loose on him, the Micro-Uzi’s bullets ripping through his brown uniform, releasing scarlet blooms on impact.

“Shoulda worn your vest,” he jeered, and turned back to the battle going on behind him.

Two pigs down, two Haitians still to go. Then they’d torch the Lincoln and find a way back to the boss, to report.

“Party time,” Maxwell muttered, and moved off to meet his enemies.

1 (#ulink_b6c2db23-889b-51ed-a5dc-8d9d60c9e89d)

Norland, Miami Gardens, Florida

Mack Bolan hit the ground running in Miami. He had driven down from Stony Man Farm, in Virginia, breaking up the journey with an overnight stop in Savannah, Georgia. The drive let him carry the gear he’d picked out for this mission without any hassles from airport security, and if something happened to the car—a confiscated narco-smuggler’s Mercury Marauder, whose records had been lost somewhere between its forfeiture and its delivery to Stony Man—there would be no comebacks on Bolan or the Farm.

The warring parties were a tough Jamaican outfit called the Viper Posse, and a Haitian gang whose leaders hadn’t bothered thinking up a catchy name. Both dealt in drugs, illegal weapons, human trafficking and sundry lesser rackets. They’d been stepping on each other’s toes around Miami for the past two years, the body count increasing, but this last flamboyant battle at the crowded Dolphin Mall caused a ripple out of Washington, propelling Bolan to the Sunshine State.

Nine dead and thirteen wounded in the latest firefight, which was probably a record, even for South Florida. The body count included three known Viper Posse members, two illegal Haitian immigrants, two Miami-Dade police officers, and two shoppers caught in the crossfire. The wounded were bystanders, more cops and a couple of mall security officers. Local law and the feds were all over it, turning Miami’s Haitian and Jamaican enclaves upside-down, but cries of racial profiling had touched off protests in the streets, and when you got down to it, no police force in the States could chase the Viper Posse’s leaders once they split for home.

That was where Bolan came in.

He didn’t need warrants, indictments, subpoenas, or writs of extradition. He wasn’t logging evidence for use in court, and didn’t have to read a perp his rights before he brought the hammer down. He’d been hunting human predators of one kind or another from his youth until his staged death in Manhattan some years back, with nothing changed except his face and name.

His war was still the same. The opposition’s ranks were inexhaustible.

Most of the residents of Kendall, southwest of Coral Gables, were law-abiding people. However, those who stood outside the law had earned a reputation for ferocious violence.

While most posse members were nominal Rastafarians, purportedly worshiping late Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie I as a god and smoking ganja as a sacrament, the island-spawned gang also swam in a current of Obeah, a West Indian belief system with African roots, akin to Voodoo or Santeria. The practice of Obeah involved blood sacrifice. Animals were ostensibly preferred, but some practitioners were rumored to spill human blood for important rituals, or when they sent a special message to their enemies.

Murder was all the same to Bolan, whether carried out with automatic weapons or machetes, and he normally repaid the predators in kind. He had no fear of “magick,” black or white, but recognized that many people felt its draw and thereby left themselves open to victimization. When superstition crossed the line into mayhem and became a tool for terrorists, the Executioner was ready to step in and shut the circus down.

Beginning now.

* * *

GARCELLE BROUARD KNEW she was staring in the face of death as Winston Channer stood before her, showing a ghastly smile. A fall of dusty-looking dreadlocks framed his oval face, eyebrows replaced by rows of small, deliberately inflicted scars, more of them on his cheeks in tight spiral designs. His teeth were either capped or filed to points, so that his smile displayed a double row of fangs.

“You’re as good as dead,” he told her.

Garcelle kept her face impassive and replied, “So, get it over with.”

“Not so fast, child. I’ve got a message for your family.”

“You think that will change the way they deal with you?” She laughed, enjoying the expression on his feral face. “You’ll only make things worse.”

“Be worse for you, no doubt. Think Daddy will like it if I send ya back in pieces?” Channer narrowed his eyes and asked, “Why are you smiling?”

She kept the mocking smile in place while answering his question. “I’m imagining the things he’ll do to you. How long he’ll keep you tied up on his table, screaming.”

“You like the screams, eh? When I start on you, scream plenty for me, will ya? No one’s coming to help you.”

That was true, she realized. The Viper Posse occupied this whole apartment complex. She sat in unit 227, bound to a straight-backed wooden chair with plastic zip ties. She could scream until her lungs bled, and the other yardies wouldn’t interfere with Channer’s fun. Nor would the neighbors, who’d been terrorized into submission when the Viper Posse routed tenants from the Palm Glades complex and converted it into their headquarters.

Police? Forget about them. They patrolled Kendall’s white neighborhoods routinely, but required an urgent call to trespass on Jamaican turf around Three Lakes. The last time they’d visited Palm Glades, it sparked a confrontation that sent nine yardies to jail, and seven coppers to the hospital. The gang was not evicted, though, because it kept a battery of top-end lawyers on retainer and possessed a bill of sale for the suburban property.

No. She was on her own, and that was bad.

Fatally bad.