Dragon's Den. Don Pendleton

along it. He could sense the quarry somewhere ahead; his instincts had taken over the moment he entered the house. He could almost smell the fear on his enemy. Pratt had no intention of running. If anything, Bolan suspected the guy would make a stand right here on his own turf, even if it might kill him, and that made it doubly important Bolan take him alive. Pratt remained the only one who could tell the Executioner why so much dope had been funneled into Los Angeles over the past couple of months.

      Bolan began a room-to-room sweep, the FNC ready, but met no further resistance. He also didn’t find Antoine Pratt. After completing his search, Bolan headed for the stairs. He made it halfway down before the front door burst wide-open and a trio of hoods in gang colors came through the door followed by a fourth who matched the photo of Pratt in Bolan’s intelligence from Stony Man. Two of the gangbangers had their hands full with cases of beer.

      All four wore the same expression of surprise upon seeing the Executioner, but none of them were ready to deal with the threat. Bolan leveled the FNC in their direction and neatly shot holes through the cases of beer they carried. The man walking next to Pratt—who obviously acted as bodyguard to the Bloods lieutenant—seemed to be the only one prepared for action as he reached beneath the loose T-shirt he wore and produced a semiautomatic pistol.

      Bolan triggered a 3-round burst that blew the man’s skull apart and showered his companions with gray matter.

      The remaining three black youths froze in place.

      “Grab the floor!” Bolan ordered the trio.

      They immediately dropped what remained of their brews and did as ordered. Bolan continued down the steps and relieved them of their pistols before securing their hands behind them with plastic riot cuffs. That done, Bolan hauled Pratt to his feet and tossed him face-first against a nearby wall. He placed the hot muzzle of the FNC at the base of Pratt’s skull.

      “What are you, the feds?” Pratt asked. He made a good attempt to hide the fear in his eyes, but it didn’t fool Bolan for a moment. “I want a lawyer.”

      “Shut up, Pratt,” Bolan said. “Here’s how this goes. I ask questions and you give me answers. If I even think you’re lying, I kill you. Simple enough?”

      Pratt just nodded, the hatred evident in his features. Bolan didn’t give a damn right at the moment. He would have taken the opportunity to clean out the Bloods altogether had he not felt it would detract from his mission. The key here would be to get to the source of the opium imports. Then, and only then, would he be able to shut down the pipeline. The Bloods couldn’t profit from the supply if he neutralized the supplier.

      “Word has it you’re running this outfit with Lavon Hayes out of the picture,” Bolan said. “I know you’re on the receiving end of this recent influx of drugs. Tell me who’s supplying it.”

      “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” Pratt sputtered. “We haven’t seen a dime of that stuff, which means somebody’s going to end up dead because they’re cutting into our territory.”

      “The only one that’ll wind up dead is you if I don’t get a better answer.” Bolan’s tone implied the validity of the threat.

      “Then I’m dead, whitey, because I don’t got no answers. Whoever’s running this stuff through here had better watch their ass. L.A. belongs to the Bloods.”

      “L.A. belongs to law-abiding citizens,” Bolan said. “So here’s a new slogan for your graffiti artists—stay out of my way and end this business. Otherwise I’m going to come back here and punch your ticket. Get it?”

      “I thought you was going to kill me.”

      Bolan’s cold and friendless smile matched the tone in his voice. “Not today.”

      “You leave me alive, you won’t be long for this life.”

      “Yeah, sure,” Bolan said. “If I hear you’re still in operation a week from now, it’ll be you who’s not long for this life.”

      Bolan grabbed the drug-dealing gang member by his collar once more and took him to the floor. He then turned and left through the front door. He reached the rental he’d left parked a half block away within a minute and soon reached the expressway.

      The probe hadn’t revealed much in the way of viable information, but Bolan now believed these drugs had nothing to do with the Bloods. He’d taken the mere chance that a grasp at straws might lead him somewhere; instead, he’d come away with more questions than answers. The Executioner had been in L.A. six hours, and he still didn’t know where the opium had come from or why somebody would have wasted seven people over a couple hundred kilos, especially when they had already managed to get twenty times that inside the country in the past sixty days. Bolan hoped Stony Man’s far-reaching network came up with something more solid.

      In the meantime, he still had a couple more doors on his list.

       3

      Even from early childhood, Rhonda Amherst knew she wanted to be a police officer.

      She didn’t necessarily believe in destiny, but she felt something like that every time she thought of her inevitable entry into law enforcement. On her twelfth birthday she’d become copresident of the Neighborhood Watch Program of suburban L.A., and by fifteen she had joined the Sheriff’s Explorer Program. By eighteen she’d been accepted to UCLA under a scholarship, and during her years in college she served with the Big Sister program. Amherst graduated UCLA with honors at age twenty-two holding a degree in criminal justice.

      That’s when life really began for Amherst. She went straight into the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Recruit Training Center, graduated top of her class, and soon she returned to patrol the same streets of the neighborhood where she had grown up. Amherst volunteered for every special assignment or training course she could manage when they came along—few and far between as they were—but it eventually paid off and got her the notice of the entire LASD and eventually led to her promotion to sergeant. One of her favorite volunteer jobs involved boat patrols done in extra shifts. From a very early age she had taken to the water like a bird dog. Before she knew it, her CO recommended Sergeant Amherst for a position as his lieutenant when he took the captaincy at Marina del Rey Station. Four short years later, he suffered a stroke that disabled him permanently, and since Amherst happened to be testing for a captain’s slot, she seemed a shoo-in for the position. She had just completed her second year as captain, not only one of the youngest captains in the department but also the first female to achieve that rank so quickly.

      What had gained Rhonda Amherst the most respect in her position was that she’d accomplished everything through hard work. She didn’t subscribe to the political maneuvering that involved others. Most of her subordinates and fellow officers would have described her as easygoing and friendly, a leader’s leader who really cared about each and every officer under her command, but also as a tough and no-nonsense cop. She held a second-degree black belt in tae kwon do, and possessed an unrivaled record of felony arrests.

      All of her success came from the internal drive to protect others with integrity and honor. That same drive caused her to put down the bottle of scented bath crystals she had just started to pour into her garden tub and go answer the jangling telephone. She’d heard a little activity over the scanner but chose to ignore it as it didn’t sound like anything going down in her district. Beside the fact, she tried to reserve at least one night a week where she didn’t think about work, time she chose to devote to herself.

      “Yes?” she said into the receiver.

      “It’s me.”

      “Nesto, to what do I owe such a pleasure?” Amherst teased him. “I haven’t heard from you in weeks. You don’t call, you don’t write—”

      “This is more of an official call, I’m afraid.”

      Amherst had known Nesto Lareza since high school. They were just about as best friends as a man and woman could be next to taking it to the romantic level, which they had once tried in an exercise