Blood Rites. Don Pendleton

slugs had struck the car in which she sat.

      That almost changed her mind, a small voice in her head saying, Stay here!

      “No way,” she answered.

      Had she already lost her mind? Garcelle decided she would leave that worry for another time. Right now, the one thing she was focused on was getting out of here alive.

      She found the latch at last, yanked it, and threw her weight backward against the door. It gave and nearly spilled her to the pavement, as a dome light flared above her, telling anyone nearby that she was on the move.

      “Damn!”

      She rolled out of the Mercury, landed on all fours, and reached up to shut the door, hoping that Channer’s men were all too busy fighting for their lives to notice her. Those men had come specifically to kill her, but there was a chance her unknown rescuer would keep them busy long enough for her to sneak away.

      What did she owe a perfect stranger, after all?

      Only her life.

      That almost stopped her. Almost. But she told herself she’d suffered through enough already, and she couldn’t help the stranger, being unarmed herself. Police were bound to show up any minute, and the last thing Garcelle needed was to wind up in a jail cell.

      No. She was definitely running. It was every man—or woman—for themself.

      Garcelle began crawling toward the nearest cover, some tall trees, the nearest of them about fifty feet away. She could duck behind them, scramble to her feet and run, if no one cut her down before she reached them. A bullet struck the pavement near her left foot, stinging Garcelle’s calf with asphalt shrapnel.

       Move!

      Throwing caution to the wind, she vaulted to her feet and ran as if her life depended on it—which, in fact, it might.

      No warning shouts behind her. That was good, at least. If she could get a head start on whoever tried to follow her, maybe she could lose them in the dark. If not…well, it was better than remaining in the stranger’s car, a stationary target.

      Garcelle slammed into a solid body. She recoiled from the impact, lost her balance and fell back to the ground.

      One of the Rasta goons stood over her, leering, his automatic weapon aimed at Garcelle’s face.

      “And where do you think you’re goin’?”

      * * *

      FOUR MEN HAD MANAGED to escape the third car, all moving well enough despite the shot Bolan had fired to stop their progress. He didn’t know if that meant he’d missed the driver, or if they’d begun with five men in the vehicle, but Bolan had no time to work out the specifics.

      All four had to die.

      They hadn’t seen him yet, but they were moving in, holding a kind of skirmish line formation as they scuttled through the shadows, dodging lighted areas as best they could. It didn’t help much, since he had them spotted from the start, but stopping them required a measure of finesse, to keep the fight from tipping into chaos.

      Bolan took the point man first, a clean shot through the chest that sat him down and left him slumped there, his shoulder supported by a hedge he’d probably hoped would cover his advance.

      The other three had seen their comrade drop, and while they couldn’t tell precisely where the killing shot had come from, they immediately laid down fire to sweep the nearby shadows. Bolan was beyond their killing radius, so far, and seized the opportunity to drop a second gunman, double-tapping him from thirty yards to plant him facedown on the unforgiving pavement.

      The remaining two were close to losing it. He saw it in their jerky movements. He heard it in the curses they were flinging at an unseen enemy and their random fire into the night. He stitched them with a short burst, half his Steyr’s magazine exhausted now, and watched them fall together in a snarl of flaccid arms and legs.

      That left the girl and who else, still alive on Bolan’s killing field?

      He went to find her, didn’t have that far to look before he saw the posse gunman looming over her and grinning like he’d just unwrapped the greatest Christmas present ever.

      The range—some forty yards—was nothing for his rifle or its telescopic sight. Backlit by floodlights from the parking lot, the posse thug was perfectly positioned for a clean shot through the head, chest, any part of him that Bolan chose. Playing it safe, he aimed for center mass and stroked the Steyr’s trigger once, sending a 5.56 mm mangler downrange and closing the gap in less time than a heartbeat required.

      The Rasta shooter toppled over backward, slowly, like a falling tree, and hit the pavement with a solid sound, skull thumping asphalt. Bolan scanned the killing ground for any further opposition, then moved to help the woman stand, gripping her arm.

      “If this is where you want to stay,” he said, “it’s fine with me.”

      She seemed to think about it for a second, then shook her head. “No.”

      “Okay, then. We should get a move on.”

      He released her and walked back to the Mercury, the woman following a step or two behind. Still considering if she should bolt? He gave her all the room she needed, but she climbed into the shotgun seat beside him as he slid behind the steering wheel.

      Bolan twisted the ignition key, gunning the Marauder’s engine. “Guess I should introduce myself,” he said. “Matt Cooper.”

      “I’m Garcelle. But you know that, of course.”

      “Do I?”

      She blinked at that. “My father sent you…did he not?”

      “Afraid I’ve never met the man,” Bolan replied.

      “I do not understand.”

      “I found you by coincidence,” he said. “A lucky break.”

      “Unbelievable,” she said. “I thought… So, you’re a policeman?”

      “Strike two.”

      “But, then…?”

      Leaving the parking lot and rolling west, he said, “Start with your name.”

      “Garcelle. Garcelle Brouard.”

      And suddenly, it all made sense. “Which means your father would be—”

      “Jean Brouard.”

      Top Haitian gangster in South Florida, perhaps in the United States. And yeah, it all made perfect sense now.

      Bolan had come looking for a war, and he’d dropped into the middle of it, picking up a prize that might prove useful—or turn out to be a deadly albatross around his neck.

       3

       Richmond Heights, Kendall, Florida

      The doctor wasn’t licensed in America, although he’d had a thriving practice in Jamaica. He’d been arrested for trafficking in Class A drugs, served three years and was stripped of his professional credentials…before he was forgotten by the state. No one in Kingston missed him when he’d slipped away to Florida—at the suggestion of the Viper Posse—to help in situations such as this one.

      “You will live,” he told his patient. “I have stopped the bleeding and repaired the tissue damage. I am pleased to say the bullet missed your humerus and caused no damage to the shoulder socket.”

      Winston