Fatal Combat

“And that is?”

“You’ve made a serious dent in the local crime syndicates,” Price said. “We’ll continue to work up the other identifications you sent. I’ll let you know if anything pops up.”

“I’ll stay after it on this end,” Bolan said.

“Striker?” Price said. “Be careful. And good hunting.”

“Thanks,” Bolan said. “Cooper out.” The sirens of the approaching police cars had become louder. Cruisers were pulling up around the abandoned buildings and closing on both sides. Bolan frowned. He shut his phone and looked at Davis. “Our boys—” he jerked his head at the dead men “—were all Mafia hit men. Hired to kill me, or to kill both of us.”

“Cooper,” Davis said, his face lurid in the red and blue lights of the approaching cruisers, “what’s really going on here?”

“Murder, and covering up murder. It isn’t the what that concerns me most,” Bolan said. “It’s the who.”

5

Reginald Chamblis worked the blades through the air, feeling them move, feeling them sing, feeling them speak to him. Each was a custom bowie knife the exact length of his forearm. Each was razor sharp and handmade. As the cutting edges cleaved the air, as the needle tips of the blades thrust here and there, in and out, he saw the targets he was striking on a succession of phantom opponents.

He moved as he worked. The man was light on the balls of his feet, his knees slightly bent, his entire body coiled with dynamic tension. He stalked his way from one end of the training hall to other, the polished hardwood floor silent beneath him. In the corners, wooden kung fu dummies stood at mute attention, the sticks of their “arms” pointing at specified angles and heights. The rankings and awards arranged neatly on the far wall lent the place an air of respectability.

Not one of the certificates was less than ten years old.

Chamblis had spent his life working to find new and greater challenges. In high school, everything had come easily to him. He was well-liked, good-looking, athletic and smart. He excelled in his classes. He played football and basketball, though not quite at the level of those who earned scholarships for doing just that. He majored in business and minored, simply because he enjoyed it, in philosophy. He graduated with a 4.0 GPA and spent three of his four years at university as the editor of the school newspaper and president of half a dozen student organizations. He conquered it all—and at least a dozen of the campus’s most desirable young women—and never appeared taxed in the slightest by any of it.

The truth was that even then, Chamblis was bored. He had never told anyone, but back in those days, he looked at the people around him who struggled to accomplish their goals and felt a mixture of envy and confusion. They confused him, because he did not understand how any human being could fail to achieve what he or she desired. He envied them, because he had come to associate his boredom with never being forced to work hard.

He vowed to change that.

He hit the street running after graduation. He parlayed his business degree into entry-level positions at first a finance firm, then a high-tech start-up. He moved to Detroit because, of all the cities he had ever visited, it was in Detroit that he had felt the least comfortable, the least safe. He set out to build a career there.

He currently owned three companies, all of them profitable, all of them controlled by him. His firms made circuit boards, time and frequency synchronization equipment, industrial toolholders and tool bits. He had been profiled in every major business magazine on both coasts; he was heralded as the man almost single-handedly bringing domestic manufacturing back to the United States.

It was in Detroit that he first thought to punish and challenge his body as well as his mind. He began studying martial arts. He earned a black belt, and then another. He moved from style to style, learning, doing, being, becoming.

And he was still bored.

He was rich. He could afford to hire other executives with similar promise and drive to run his companies for him, and he did. He took up the sports of the idle rich, traveling the country and beyond. He found extreme sports, and for the briefest of moments, the adrenaline rush of cliff diving, of free climbing, of white-water rafting and other dangerous pursuits almost kept him interested. But it wasn’t enough.