Those who lived in affluent neighborhoods, in gated communities, in big houses hidden by landscaping and distance from the seedier elements around them, never really understood something that was essential to Bolan’s knowledge of human predation. There was no rich suburb in the world, no wealthy district, no beautiful area that was not within walking or driving distance of a festering pesthole that bred crime. There were those, Bolan knew, who said the key to avoiding danger was to be passive, to avoid everywhere that bad things were presumed to happen. If you did not live in a “bad neighborhood,” if you did not go to or through one, why, you could avoid most if not all of the random violence that might otherwise affect you in modern society.
This was dangerously foolish.
Bolan understood violence intimately. He had made combating violence with greater, more focused, more righteous violence his life’s work. He knew that violence, that predators, could find anyone, anywhere. Shirley Kingsley was proof of that. As Bolan and Davis sat on the floral couch in her living room, drinking coffee she had made for them, tears ran down Mrs. Kingsley’s face.
Shirley Kingsley was a widow.
Her home was in a gated community only a few minutes’ drive from the abandoned slums where Bolan and Davis had only so recently been fighting for their lives. Mrs. Kingsley had no idea that scores of Mafia gunners had died in Detroit within the past few hours. She would be aghast if anyone told her. As it was, Bolan was curious to know why news of the shootings had not made the local media. He wondered if Brognola, the Farm, or both were behind that. It was also possible that the shootings of what could only be known criminals weren’t lead story material, given that serial knifings promised to be much juicier. And the first news reports could not be far away, given what Brognola and the Farm had told him in his mission briefing.
“What bothers me most,” Mrs. Kingsley was saying, “is the senselessness of it. Norman was a good man. I don’t believe the poor dear had ever had an exciting thought in his whole life. He inherited money. We lived well, and peacefully. Even in death he provided for me. I’ve never wanted for anything. He was such a sweet, kind, generous man. I think about how awfully, how violently he died, and it hurts me so badly.”
Bolan’s heart went out to the woman. He, too, carried his battle losses with him. Those losses were seldom just.
“Did your husband have any reason to believe he might be targeted, Mrs. Kingsley?” Davis asked. He placed his coffee cup gently on the saucer provided for him.
“Targeted?” Kingsley asked.
“As for…forgive me, ma’am, assassination,” Davis explained. “Any reason someone would want to kill him. Him, specifically.”
“Oh, heavens, no,” Kingsley said.
“No threats were made that you can recall?” Bolan asked. “Any odd encounters he might have experienced?”
“I’m not sure I understand.” Mrs. Kingsley shook her head.
“If he were chosen specifically,” Bolan said, “rather than randomly, he might have encountered his murderer beforehand. He may have been marked, so to speak, by the killer.”
Mrs. Kingsley put her own cup down and folded her hands in her lap. “No,” she said. “Nothing like that happened, or if it did, Norman didn’t tell me. I suppose he might have kept something like that from me for fear of worrying me, but he was generally quite honest. I’m afraid I don’t know of anything like that.”
“Thank you for your time, Mrs. Kingsley,” Bolan said. “I apologize for putting you through this. I know this is not easy.”
“Thank you, young man,” she said. “Good luck to you both. I hope you find whoever did it. I truly do.”
“We will,” Davis promised.
They left, shown out by a housekeeper who regarded them suspiciously. Bolan nodded to her as they made for the carefully landscaped street.
“Random,” Davis said. “She thinks it was completely random.”
“And it may have been,” Bolan said. “We don’t have enough data to make that decision, not yet. But we’re at least finally talking to the right people.”
“You don’t strike me as the talking type, overall,” Davis said.
“I’m not,” Bolan said. “I’m the make-things-happen type, which is why I’m not surprised to see him there.” Bolan pointed.
The marked police cruiser passing slowly by began to accelerate. The driver had a flattop crew cut.
“Come on,” Bolan said. “Keys.”
Davis tossed him the car keys without argument and Bolan took the wheel. The engine roared in response to his turn of the key. He pressed the pedal full to the floor.
“What is it?” Davis asked.
“The driver,” Bolan said, as they cleared the development’s open gate at full speed, drawing shouts from the gate guard. Ahead of them, the police cruiser switched on its lights and sirens, heading toward the city and thicker traffic. “He was that uniform backing up your buddies Slate and Griffith.”
“He followed us?” Davis asked.
“Unless coincidence extends to the department dispatching a vehicle to the same affluent neighborhood to do nothing but drive by and then speed away when noticed,” Bolan said.
“I had you pegged as someone with no sense of humor, Cooper,” Davis said, deadpan.
“Comes with the job,” Bolan said. The cruiser’s engine growled and the Crown Victoria shot forward between two slower-moving vehicles.
The marked car led them on quite a chase. Bolan, an experienced wheelman himself, was forced to employ many tricks to keep up. The cop car had the advantage of an official presence in its lights and sirens.
Bolan reached out and switched on the cruiser’s own lights and sirens. There was no dash-mounted unit; the lights were concealed in the grille. The unmarked Crown Victoria chased its white-and-blue-striped counterpart through red lights and across tight intersections.
“He might start shooting,” Davis said. His hand drifted toward his holstered gun.
“I don’t think so,” Bolan said. “If he had intended to take a shot at us he would have done so already. Slate and Griffith wouldn’t have braced us and made threats if something more severe were planned. No, he was sent to keep an eye on us when we made it clear we were looking for a fight.”
Davis was silent for a long moment. He grimaced occasionally as the car came dangerously close to another vehicle. Bolan was very careful to avoid pedestrians, but there were times when he was surprised himself that he did not clip the car’s mirrors off as he shot between other moving vehicles.
“Cooper,” Davis said, “it’s as if you calculated the benefit of injuring those two specifically to elicit a response.”
Bolan said nothing. The kid was smart. He allowed himself the ghost of a grin.
“There.” The soldier pointed. “He’s taking that side street. Hold on.”
Bolan punched the accelerator and ripped the wheel to the side, forcing the car through a powered slide as its rear-wheel drive pushed it through a rubber-burning, skidding, squealing arc. The rear of the car clipped a light pole, but not badly. Davis looked back, then forward, and saw the trash bins.
“Uh-oh,” he said.
The bins were heavy-gauge steel and huge, designed to be moved by sanitation trucks or not at all. There was very little room to maneuver. Bolan whipped the wheel left, then right, the nose and the tail of the car clipping brick facade with each adjustment. Sparks flew. He clipped first one trash bin, then another, always just on the edge of losing control.
The marked police car stayed ahead of them, but Bolan’s expert handling of the powerful cruiser was closing the gap. Officer Glase would be getting desperate by this point, using all his best moves and seeing Bolan’s lights flashing in his rearview mirror no matter what he tried. The trick was to pressure him in a way that didn’t send him dangerously close to pedestrians. Bolan used the nose of the car to urge Glase this way and that, nudging him with his presence alone, using the specter of the pursuit car to prod Glase in a direction leading him toward less population density.
“It gets pretty industrial up here,” Davis said, nodding in the direction Bolan was herding Glase.
“I know.” Bolan said. “I remember. It’s not my first trip to Detroit.”
“No?” Davis said. “How long?”
“Been a while,” Bolan said vaguely.
They shifted left, then right. Cars surrounded them. One of them, ahead, spun out as Glase sideswiped it. Bolan veered around the car. He nodded to the radio, but Davis was already reaching for it. The detective called in the accident.
“You want me to call in backup?” he asked.
“We’re already chasing a Detroit police car,” Bolan said. “We don’t know who we can trust and who we can’t.” He couldn’t spare Davis a meaningful glance, but the detective could probably hear the gravity in his voice.
As they drove they monitored the police band; if Glase was calling in help, he wasn’t doing it over the marked car’s radio. Bolan kept tight to the other man’s tail until the two cars’ bumpers were practically touching. That’s when Glase tried to get tricky.
Glase hit the brakes. It was the obvious move and Bolan was waiting for it. He accelerated to meet the bright red lights. The push bars mounted to the front of the unmarked vehicle rammed the bumper, doing little more than trading paint. The momentum shoved Glase’s vehicle forward.
“Pursuit Intervention Technique,” Davis said.
“I don’t often hear the PIT maneuver referred to that way,” Bolan said. “But no, I don’t want to force him off the road. I want him scared.”
“More deliberate manipulation?”
Bolan said nothing. He was too focused on his driving.
Glase turned hard right and rammed through the chain-link fence outside a freight yard. Beyond the fence, rows of trailers waited. Huge metal containers, of the type carried by flatbeds and transferred to cargo ships, were also arrayed and stacked here. Glase had to be nearly standing on his cruiser’s accelerator as he tried to lose himself among the trailers.
“Do you know this area?” Bolan asked.
“No,” Davis said. “Not specifically. I couldn’t say if there’s another way out or not.”
“We’ll just have to wing it,” Bolan said. He slowed the car.
They made a cautious circuit of the freight yard. Bolan kept one eye on the mirror at all times. He warned Davis to keep watch over the entrance, while trying to angle their own vehicle to block any straight path back the way they had come.
“There!” Davis shouted, pointing.
The police cruiser was gunning past them. Bolan jammed on the brakes, threw Davis’s unmarked vehicle in Reverse and burned rubber in the opposite direction. The maneuver he was contemplating would be tricky to time.
As Glase neared the bottleneck that was the opening in the fence, Bolan turned the wheel. The rear of the Crown Victoria circled and bashed the flank of the police cruiser, driving it just far enough to the right to cause Glase to slam into a concrete-anchored support pole. A section of fence crashed down on the spiderwebbed windshield. The engine raced, critically damaged.
Bolan was out of the car before it had stopped moving fully, throwing the gearshift into Park almost as an afterthought. He drew his Desert Eagle; the firepower it offered would easily punch through most of the police cruiser. Davis followed as backup, deferring to Bolan’s play.
“Don’t move!” the Executioner shouted. “Step out of the car!”
Glase didn’t move. Bolan stepped closer. The officer could be shamming, waiting to pull a weapon at the last minute. Bolan did not intend to give the crooked cop a chance to put a bullet in him.
“I think he’s unconscious,” Davis said.
“Cover me,” Bolan said. “It could be a trick.” He reached in through the open driver’s window and gave Glase a shove. The man moaned. He had hit the steering wheel, and there was a light gash on his forehead.
Bolan opened the car door and grabbed Glase by the shoulders, aware that at any moment a knife or a gun could appear. Glase made no hostile moves. It was clear, after a few moments, that he was out of it. Bolan arranged him in a sitting position on the pavement, using the crumpled fender of the police cruiser as a backrest.
“I’ll get the first-aid kit,” Davis said. Bolan nodded.
The soldier crouched near the officer, his Desert Eagle held firmly in his right hand. “Glase,” he said. “Wake up.”
Glase muttered something. Davis came back with the kit and applied a bandage to the man’s forehead, while Bolan kept the officer under his gun. He snapped his fingers in front of Glase’s face a few times. The officer’s eyes finally focused and he shook himself like wet dog.
“Try not to move too much,” Bolan said. “I just might put a bullet in you to settle you down.”
Glase’s expression hardened when he realized he was staring down the barrel of a pistol. He moved, suddenly, as if jerking for the door of the car behind him. Bolan could see the barrel of a shotgun mounted between the front seats. He grabbed Glase by the shoulder and shoved him back down.
“Get off me!” Glase spit. “I’ll kill you, I’ll kill your family—”
Bolan balled his left fist and punched Glase in the cheekbone, hard. Glase’s head snapped back. Normally, the Executioner would not risk a closed-fist punch to an opponent’s mouth; getting someone else’s teeth caught in your knuckles could lead to infection and diminished combat readiness. With Glase more or less frozen in position, he calculated his shot for maximum effect and minimum risk.
Glase sputtered and opened his mouth to speak again. Bolan grabbed him by the hair with his free hand and bounced the officer’s head off the side of the police car.
“Cooper,” Davis began.
Bolan was not out of control; he simply needed to establish, with Glase, who was in control, and establish it firmly. Interrogations, or, in this case, messages were about power relationships. One had to seize the initiative immediately and then keep it if one’s goals were to be achieved.
“You listen to me,” Bolan said. He shoved the barrel of the Desert Eagle into the spot where he’d punched Glase, pressing just hard enough to make the weapon’s presence known. “The only reason I’m not boring a .44-sized hole through your brain right now, punk, is that I want you to carry a message. I want you to go back to whoever sent you. I want you to tell them we spotted you and we owned you from the moment we put eyes on you. I want you to tell them that justice is coming. You got that? Say it.”
Glase looked at him blankly. “Say it!”
“Justice,” Glase repeated. “Justice is coming.”
“Good,” Bolan said. He stood, hauling Glase to his feet, and gave the officer a hard shove. The crooked cop staggered but stayed upright. “Start running!” Bolan ordered.
Glase looked back at him, and something in Bolan’s face was sufficiently convincing. He ran, his gait unsteady, his pace hastened by what had to be true fear.
“You’ve done that before,” Davis said. “I thought you didn’t kill cops?”
“I have, and I don’t. Usually,” Bolan said. “But he doesn’t know that.”
A crackle of static from the radio in Glase’s cruiser contained the words “knife” and “assault.” Bolan looked at it. Davis hurried over and stuck his head in the open doorway.
“Cooper!” he shouted. “We’ve got a report of a possible attack. Right now!”
“In progress?” Bolan asked.
“In progress!” Davis said.
They ran for the Ford.