Vigilante Run

McWilliams started to go for the revolver in the back of his waistband, but his arms suddenly felt heavy and warm. He kept trying to reach for the gun, but his limbs wouldn’t obey. His head felt wobbly as he looked at Carleton, confused.

Carleton smiled tightly. “Thank you for the information. Good day.”

McWilliams could only watch as his visitor stood and strode out of the bar, the envelope in one hand. As the well-dressed man swept past a trash can at the entrance, he dropped something in it. McWilliams caught a glimpse of what he thought was a syringe.

He was already slumping in his chair, his throat closing, his breath catching as he tried and failed to cry out. He struggled to draw air, feeling and hearing the croak that left his lips.

Eventually, someone in the bar noticed him sitting there, flailing, and rushed over to try the Heimlich maneuver. By then it was far too late. Pick McWilliams was dead of anaphylactic shock before the EMTs were even called.

Z IPPERS A RCADE WAS A strip club sprawled in a commercial-industrial area on the northern fringes of Syracuse, with an auto yard on one side and a custom upholstery shop on the other. The Executioner had contacted Barbara Price to cross-reference the local data Paglia had provided. Given the size of the city and the scope of the operation—neither of which was particularly significant in the grand scheme of things—there wasn’t much, but Aaron Kurtzman had managed to turn up a few morsels.

The upholstery place, a family business in Syracuse founded forty years previously, was legitimate. The auto yard wasn’t. Tracing its ownership and the ownership of Zippers produced a common front company that was itself a placeholder for a trust that owned multiple other properties. Most of those properties had been connected to Purist-related violence. The trail went all the way back to something called the Diamond Corporation, headed by one Roger Kohler.

Kohler would receive Bolan’s attention in due time. For the moment, the soldier needed to find whoever was killing the Purists—and anyone else who stumbled into the path of the killer’s bullets.

Bolan left his SUV parked nearby, in the parking lot of a closed service station. Its windows were boarded over and bore faded paper signs proclaiming For Sale or Lease. He circled to the rear of the block of businesses and walked casually through the neighboring lot behind them. A dark, three-quarter-length windbreaker worn over his blacksuit covered his hardware from casual observers. Nothing in his manner was furtive or otherwise suspicious. He walked as if he belonged there, at a brisk but unhurried pace. He saw a few pedestrians. Traffic was moderate. It consisted mostly of delivery trucks, most likely headed to the assembly warehouse and lumberyard visible in the distance.

The back door of Zippers was labeled and unmanned. Bolan spotted a closed-circuit television camera aimed in his direction and paused. He looked hard at the device, then resumed his course. Up close, he confirmed what he’d thought to be the case—the cable leading from the rear of the camera terminated directly against a four-by-four wooden post set in the asphalt overlooking the rear of the club. It was a good bet nobody had taken the time to hollow out the post in order to run a cable down its length. The device was a dummy, the kind anyone could buy from a novelty catalog. As he approached he noticed the generic warning sticker pasted to the back door, claiming the building was protected by an alarm system.

Reaching out with his left hand, his right inside the windbreaker, Bolan tried the door handle.

The metal fire door swung silently open.

“Gotcha!” yelled the Purist in biker leathers and colors who stood just on the other side of the door. The twin muzzles of the sawed-off double-barrel shotgun in his fists looked very large as Bolan stared down their bores. He heard the metallic clicks of the weapon’s twin hammers being cocked.

“Wait—” Bolan said.

The roar of the shotgun was deafening at close range.

4

Bolan folded his knees beneath him as he spoke, dropping down and back in a controlled fall. The shotgun blast washed over him—he could feel the heat on his face. As he landed on his back, his chin tucked in to protect his head, he lashed out with a vicious kick that caught the gunman at the ankle.

Bone snapped. The man dropped like a felled tree, screaming. He’d spent both barrels in the shotgun. Bolan was up and on top of him before he could maneuver to reload. The Executioner drew his Beretta 93-R from its custom shoulder holster. The sound suppressore was already affixed, and three flat slaps signaled the biker’s end.

Ears ringing from the close-range shotgun blast, Bolan bent to pick up the fallen weapon. He dropped it into a nearby trash can, where it wouldn’t be quickly found and used against him. Then the soldier stepped over the corpse and made his way cautiously through the door, leading with the Beretta. He had lost the element of surprise with that 12-gauge detonation. He would have to rely on simple, brutal force. He shrugged out of his windbreaker and let it drop, giving him un-obstructed access to his combat harness and gear.

The corridor was empty. Bolan’s combat boots were loud on the creaking floorboards. He stopped, listened. There was no sign that anyone within had heard the shotgun, which made no sense.

He was staring down a dirty, poorly lit corridor lined in old wood paneling and cluttered with piles of old newspapers and a couple of stinking plastic bags of trash. The corridor terminated in a T leading left and right. Tattered posters for X-rated movies papered the far wall. From somewhere ahead came the muffled bass of dance music, obviously from the main area of the club. Bolan took another step and the floor creaked again. He froze.

He heard the answering creak from around the corner.

They were waiting for him, playing it smart, they thought. Bolan quietly plucked a flash-bang grenade from his combat harness. He triggered the little hockey-puck shaped device—one of Kissinger’s little helpers, as Cowboy called them—and threw it at an angle so it bounced off the far wall and ricocheted around the corner. Quickly he crouched, turned away, and shoved his hands over his ears while opening his mouth wide and squeezing his eyes shut. The deafening, blinding eruption was mercifully brief, so bright he could see the flash through his closed eyes.

Bolan was up and stalking as the afterimages of the blast left floating green shapes in his vision. There were three of them writhing on the floor—two to the right and one to the left, where they’d been waiting to ambush him. Two handguns and a shotgun littered the floor. The men wore Purist colors. This time he didn’t bother collecting weapons; he simply moved on, reloading the Beretta to replace the partially spent magazine with a fresh twenty rounds.

He chose the right-hand corridor; the left was a dead end that terminated in a bare cinder-block wall. Bolan made his way down the hallway, keeping his head, arms and weapon steady and searching for adversaries. There was a shriek, and then another. Ahead of him, he saw movement. Suddenly, five half-naked women ran from a dressing room ahead and to the left, brushing past him as if he wasn’t even there. Bolan let the strippers pass, his Beretta held at low ready. He waited.

The two gunners ducked out, one high, one low. The bottom man got off a shot that went high and wide. Bolan drilled him with two bursts through the torso, the Beretta rising to sweep the top man in the same arc. The second man—both were dressed in Zippers T-shirts and khakis, probably what passed for club security in this crime pit—was punched backward as the slugs entered his neck and chin. The little .380 Colt Mustang he had been clutching fell from nerveless fingers and clattered on the floor.

Bolan took the corner wide to maximize his cover and keep any potential targets in his field of vision as he entered the dressing room. He passed the lighted mirrors and scattered lingerie without a glance, instead scanning every corner for hidden threats. The door leading from the dressing room to the main part of the club was shut. He planted one boot just left of the doorknob and cracked it open without trying the handle, diving low as he entered.

“Now! Now!” someone yelled. Gunfire ripped from three points at once and Bolan had no choice but to blitz forward, legs pumping. The club area was multileveled, colored lights washing down from scaffolding on the ceiling. One of the shooters was in the DJ booth, where deafening techno continued to bleat from mammoth speakers along the walls. Another was somewhere in the scaffolding—Bolan couldn’t tell where—and a third was on the move on the lower dance-floor level. Bullets ripped the slick tiling behind Bolan’s feet as he ran for the DJ booth. Strobe lights flashed from above, obscuring the muzzle-flashes from the gang members’ guns. There were no customers. Bolan had reached the club before it opened. With the strippers gone, he knew chances were good there no innocents to get caught in the cross fire.

With no cover afforded by the tiered but largely open club area, Bolan shoved the Beretta before him and unleashed a fusillade of 9 mm rounds at the DJ booth, forcing the gunman there to duck. Gunfire followed him as the other two shooters tried to claim him, but he was moving too fast and the colored, flashing lights were causing the Purists as much trouble as they were causing the soldier. Bolan threw himself flat beside the half-height doorway to the DJ booth. The biker within—a broken, older-looking man with a shaved head, wearing a leather jacket with one sleeve cut off—swung his short-barreled 9 mm Colt submachine gun in Bolan’s direction, but he was too slow. The Exectutioner stitched him up the groin and through the torso, emptying the Beretta with two last triple bursts.

The two remaining shooters concentrated their fire on Bolan’s position. He stayed low, letting them rip up the wall above his head, dousing him with drywall dust. The dead Purist had several spare magazines for his Colt, so Bolan appropriated them and the weapon, shoving the long stick magazines under his web belt at his side. He reloaded his Beretta and holstered it, then reached up blindly and began slapping buttons on the DJ board. On the fourth try, the music stopped. Bolan slapped a couple of more buttons and managed to switch off the strobe lights and the track lighting, plunging Zippers into darkness.

He waited for the shooting to stop, then crept silently from the booth, feeling his way along the outer wall of the club area, walking in a low crouch with a corner of the Colt’s telescoping stock tucked against his shoulder. Then he stopped and remained perfectly still, controlling his breathing.

“Gord!” one of the Purists finally shouted. “Gord! Gordy, man, where are you?”

“Over here, moron,” Gordy finally answered.

“Do you see him?”

“No, Chigger, I don’t see him. If I saw him, I’d be shooting at him! I can’t see anything.”

“I don’t hear him.”

There was a pause. Bolan waited. He very quietly slipped the combat light from his pocket and held it in his fingers, wrapping his remaining free support-hand fingers around the forestock of the Colt.

“I think he snuck out!” Chigger offered from a spot across the room and to Bolan’s right. “Maybe when the lights were out!”