Survival Mission. Don Pendleton

for reasons Bolan hadn’t grasped yet. Nine rounds in the ALFA, and he could reload in seconds flat if he was free and clear. Driving at speed would complicate the process, but—

      Bolan attacked, gunning the Volvo forward on a clear collision course and rapid-firing with the ALFA autoloader. Three, four, five rounds through the chase car’s windshield as the gap between them narrowed. Then his enemy was swerving off to Bolan’s left, plowing into a trailer clearly built for catering, its drab facade showing a poor painted rendition of a sausage on a bun.

      That left one car in line, and Bolan wouldn’t fire on it until he had at least a rough fix on its occupants. The Volvo’s high beams only showed him one man in the vehicle, but what did that prove? Bolan had no friends in Prague—this might be a cop off duty, maybe working undercover, or a journalist who stumbled on the chase by sheer coincidence. Maybe a stupid rubbernecker with more curiosity than common sense. Shooting him first and asking questions later did not mesh with Bolan’s modus operandi.

      So he brought the Volvo to another squealing hault, leaped out, keeping his car between himself and the third vehicle, finally recognizable as an Audi A4 sedan. It braked in turn, the driver stepping out with no one else behind him. Watching Bolan carefully, the last arrival circled his own car, approached the Citroën and peered inside. He pulled a flashlight from a pocket of his windbreaker and played its beam around inside the car.

      Blood on the dash and windshield. Huddled, vaguely human shapes.

      He straightened, said something in Czech. Stood waiting for an answer until Bolan told him, “Sorry. Failure to communicate.”

      “American?” the stranger asked, his English sharply accented. When Bolan offered no reply, he said, “You’ve killed the driver, and it looks as though his friend up front may have a broken neck. These two,” he went on, waving vaguely toward the backseat, “could wake up at any time.”

      Bolan still couldn’t read the stranger, so he asked, “You want me to take care of that?”

      “It’s better if we leave them as they are, I think. They’ll have a devil of a time explaining this. It ought to be amusing.”

      Bolan watched the stranger moving toward him, held his ALFA lowered but prepared for instant action. “This is your idea of humor?” he inquired.

      The Audi’s driver shrugged. “Not normally, but I have learned to find amusement where I can,” he said. “One never knows when life may suddenly present a spectacle.”

      “And you just happen to be there,” Bolan said.

      “Ah. It was not a coincidence. I think you understand this, eh?”

      “It’s sinking in,” Bolan replied.

      The stranger’s draw was smooth and fast, his pistol aimed at Bolan’s forehead even as the ALFA centered on his chest.

      “And now, what you would call the punch line, I believe,” he said. “You are under arrest.”

      3

      Baltimore, Maryland

       Two days earlier

      The sixth victim, another working girl, had been discovered floating in the Chesapeake off Locust Point, near Fort Henry. As with the five preceding kills, her throat was slashed back to the spine, a case of near decapitation after a savage beating and a list of signature indignities well recognized by homicide investigators. FBI agents were working on the case, inspiring all the usual resentment from embarrassed local cops. The newspapers and smiling TV anchors babbled on about a “Ripper” in their midst, a stalker who had psych profilers baffled.

      The truth, as usual, was rather different.

      At Baltimore P.D., they knew that all six victims were employed—read owned—by Luscious Luther Johnson. Thirty-six years old, imprisoned twice for pandering and living off the proceeds of prostitution, Johnson was an aging dog who’d never managed to learn any new tricks on the street or in the joint. He liked controlling women, playing God in lives blighted by sexual abuse and drugs. He liked the money, too, of course, but that was secondary to the kick he got from reigning over female serfs.

      Before his second prison term, Luther had disciplined unruly girls with belt lashings, a wire coat hanger sometimes, but nothing permanent. Something had changed inside him while he served his time at Roxbury Correctional, perhaps a hardening of attitude precipitated by the fact that two of Luther’s “bitches” had been brave enough to testify against him at his trial. One of them left the state thereafter, while the other kept working the streets around Patterson Park as if she hadn’t a care in the world.

      Big mistake.

      Divine Jones had been first in the series, succeeded by others who balked at the offer to join Johnson’s stable or held back too much of the cash they’d received from their johns. No disrespect of any sort was tolerated.

      Police had questioned Luther at least a dozen times so far. But knowing he was probably involved and proving it were very different things. A team from Vice had worked on putting Johnson back in stir for pimping, using Maryland’s three-strikes law to send him up for life, but Luscious Luther wasn’t quite as careless as he’d been in the past. He kept no records of illicit business, paid his taxes on a chain of coin-op laundries and had generally kept his nose clean in the public eye.

      Bolan had been passing through “Charm City”—also known to some as “Mobtown”—with no plans to hang around beyond a night’s rest at a local Motel 6, when he heard about the case on CNN. He’d made a couple calls, stayed over for an extra night of observation on the scene and saw a chance to do some good.

      Like any other pimp who has a thriving urban racket, Johnson paid his dues. He tithed religiously to the Peruzzi family, which Bolan thought might rate a visit at some future date, along with bagmen from the Baltimore P.D. and City Hall. None would protect him if the Feds collected evidence to try him as a six-time psycho killer, but until that evidence appeared Johnson was golden.

      And he wasn’t hard to find.

      His second night in Baltimore, Bolan had followed Johnson on the pimp’s rounds, collecting cash from go-betweens, glad-handing people who appeared to be his friends, drinking at half a dozen bars where songs with indecipherable lyrics threatened long-term hearing loss. Bolan was on him when he spent an hour with his number-one old lady at her place, waiting for Johnson in the shadows when the man emerged.

      From that point on, Johnson’s night of celebration went downhill. His bluster vanished with a glimpse of Bolan’s cold eyes and a close look at the sleek Beretta in his fist. Disarmed and cuffed with plastic zip ties, Johnson had directed Bolan to a small apartment that he called his bank. Inside it, with his hands freed to accommodate the combination lock on a wall safe beside a small desk, he’d given up roughly a quarter-million dollars gleaned from others’ suffering and degradation, smiling all the while.

      “I jus’ keep that aroun’ for incidentals, yo. Man like you’self know how it is.”

      “You’re right,” Bolan replied. “I do.”

      “So, we good here, o’ what?”

      “Almost. About the women…”

      “Riiight. You want a lady now? I’d say you can afford a fine one.”

      “The six women that you killed.”

      “Whoa, man! You trippin’ now. Pigs axed me all about that, and I done been cleared, awight?”

      “Well,” Bolan said, “there’s cleared, and then there’s cleared.”

      “Man, what you tryin’ to say?” Johnson asked, trying to prolong the conversation as he quickly reached into an open drawer of the desk and pulled out a small gun.

      But Bolan was faster with his response, letting the Beretta speak for him, with one sharp word that brooked no contradiction. Johnson hit the deep shag carpet with a look of dazed surprise in all three eyes, shivered