Deep Recon

“Maybe. But I can’t do my job and babysit you two. So stay here.” Looking at Faraday, he said, “Car keys.”

Faraday looked confused.

Glowering at Maxwell, Bolan said, “You want my help, we do things my way, and that means I go alone with no chance of you two following. I either take your car, or I slash the tires and go rent one of my own. Pick one.”

Maxwell bit her lower lip, then nodded toward Faraday, who handed over the Mustang’s keys.

“Smart choice.” Bolan departed the bungalow.

The Mustang’s engine turned over as soon as Bolan applied the key. The old car hummed like the well-oiled machine it was, and the Executioner was silently impressed with at least one aspect of Maxwell’s character: she kept this four-decade-old car in pristine shape.

Once he’d put some distance between himself and Maxwell’s bungalow, he took out his sat phone, which was also equipped with a GPS and a secure Internet connection. The latter enabled him to quickly obtain the precise address of Micky’s on Sugarloaf Key, and the former provided directions.

Sure enough, it took almost exactly twenty minutes to get there. Bolan found a parking lot belonging to a bowling alley a block away from Micky’s, and he parked the rather distinctive Mustang there.

The Executioner played a serious game, one with his life on the line constantly, and he would only trust someone he could count on to back him up. Every indication showed that Maxwell and her “associate” didn’t qualify.

He pulled his jacket around him closer as he walked toward Micky’s. The sun was setting and the temperature was plummeting. The wind that came in off the Atlantic was bitter and cut through Bolan.

Micky’s was a large shack that probably had been used for storage once upon a time. From a distance it looked fairly rickety, and Bolan wondered how it survived hurricane season. But as he got closer, he saw evidence of steel reinforcement. A battered sign gave the name of the place, and what few windows there were were frosted over.

This area of Florida specialized in open-air eateries and drinkeries, and for a place to be this enclosed bespoke a certain illegality.

As if to reinforce that, Bolan walked through the thick metal door to find his nostrils assaulted with cigarette smoke. There were few interior public spaces left that allowed smoking, and while Bolan wasn’t completely up on the Florida State code, he was fairly certain that bars in this state qualified. Places like this, though, bars that catered to the scum of humanity, tended to be smoke-filled throwbacks to a bygone era, a testament to how little the criminal element had changed.

The bar floor was nowhere near large enough to cover the full space of the building. In and of itself that didn’t say much: the Florida Keys weren’t structurally sound enough geologically to support much by way of basements, so the bar’s storage facilities were probably aboveground. Still, Bolan was sure there was more than liquor stored in the area he couldn’t see.

Bolan strode in like he owned the place, heading straight for a wooden stool at the bar. With a single glance he took in the interior: a bar along the left wall, a bartender standing behind it drawing the tap for a customer who sat at the far end, and a floor with a lot of wooden tables. While most of those tables had one or two men sitting at it—there wasn’t a single woman in the place—the one between the jukebox and the pool table was empty.

So much for “practically living there.” Bolan was running out of patience with Lola Maxwell already, and the op was less than twenty-four hours old.

He ordered the lightest beer they had. The bartender glared at him, and Bolan glared right back.

“You a cop?” the bartender asked.

Assuming a cover identity without a moment’s hesitation, Bolan spoke in a New York accent. “Jesus H., is that a stupid question, or what? You really think I’m gonna just say, ‘Yeah, I’m a cop’? I swear to Christ, the sun must bake your brains down here.”

“When’d you come down from the Big Apple?” the bartender then asked with a smile.

Florida was filled with transplanted New Yorkers, so the accent wouldn’t be hard for a bartender to place, but Bolan’s cover required him to play dumb. “What makes you think I’m from New York? And we don’t call it ‘the Big Apple,’ either, asshole.”

“Look, maybe you’ll want to try one of the places out on Route 1.”

“Yeah? Kenny V hang out there, too?”

The bartender frowned. “You’re here to see Hot Lips?”

“Christ, you don’t really call him that, do ya?”

At that, the bartender smiled. “I’ll get your drink.”

As the bartender pulled the tap for the light beer, the door opened to the sound of someone talking a mile a minute.

“So I says to the bitch, I says, ‘Hey look, bitch, if you don’t wanna be doin’ the deed, then you shouldn’t’a been all cozyin’ up to me like you was.’ And she was sayin’, ‘I thought we was just dancin’,’ and I told her, ‘Yo, bitch, when you dance with your cootchie all up against my leg, my guess is that you wanna be doin’ more than dancin’, you feel me?’”

That had to be Kenny Valentino. He had a shaved head, a chin beard and a gold tooth on the left side of his mouth. He seemed to be talking to himself, but as he entered Micky’s, Bolan could see the wireless phone device in his left ear.

“I’m at the joint now, I gotta bounce. Hey, tell Delgado that Lee owes me, a’ight? Good. Peace.”

He tapped the side of his wireless device, then signaled the bartender. “Yo, Marty! Draw me a beer!”

Marty, the bartender, nodded as he brought Bolan his beer. “That,” Marty said to Bolan, “is the guy you’re looking for.”

“No kidding,” Bolan said sardonically. “Kinda worked that out on my own, know what I’m sayin’?” He also was starting to understand where the Hot Lips nickname came from, if he was blithely mentioning Lee’s name over an unsecured mobile phone line.

Kenny said hello to pretty much everyone in the bar, and engaged them in quick conversations. Though “conversations” may have been the wrong word, since none of the people other than Kenny actually said anything.

There were only two people Kenny didn’t acknowledge. One was Bolan. The other was the man at the far end of the bar whom Marty had been serving when Bolan came in.

Bolan paid close attention to all the exchanges, especially the one between Kenny and a short, overweight Latino gentleman with pockmarked skin. After Kenny acknowledged him, the Latino looked right at the man at the end of the bar.

That man then got up and went over to Kenny.

The world seemed to move in slow motion for just a second. Bolan immediately noticed the bulge of a handgun. As the man reached under his windbreaker, Bolan leaped up from his own stool and ran toward the man, reaching for his Desert Eagle.

Even as Bolan moved, the man pulled out a Smith & Wesson .38-caliber handgun.

“What the f—” were Kenny’s last words, as the man squeezed the trigger four times, putting each shot in Kenny Valentino’s chest. The first bullet ripped into his chest, instantly pulverizing his heart. The subsequent three shots, which shredded his lungs, ribs and esophagus, were unnecessary, as the .38-caliber round tore the aorta to pieces, beyond the ability of even the finest hospital to repair.

A cacophony of voices exploded in the bar.

“Shit!”

“He killed Valentino!”

“Shoot the bastard!”

“I never liked the little asshole.”

Pointing his Desert Eagle at the man’s head, Bolan said, “Drop it now.”

The man dived under the pool table. Bolan fired two rounds at the table, the .357 rounds blowing massive holes and sending splintered wood and pulverized felt everywhere.

As Bolan ran toward the pool table, the man popped up, now holding a second S&W .38 and firing both as he ran toward the door.

The Executioner was forced to dive for cover as bullets whizzed over his head.

The other men in the bar—including the pockmarked Latino who had signaled the assassin—had mostly moved toward the exits. Apparently, no one thought highly enough of Kenny Valentino to avenge his death.