time, although in the past he’d tracked his prey in jungles, forests, mountains, and deserts. Tonight, though, he was doing his hunting in a big city; in the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C.
He was a manhunter but no lawman; at least, no lawman officially recognized by any civilian judicial authority in the land. He wasn’t the type who brings ’em back alive either.
Steve Ireland, a few months short of thirty, was six feet, two inches tall, rangy, long-limbed. Lean to the point of gauntness, he was hollow-cheeked with sharp, jutting cheekbones. His hair was dark and needed a trim. His face was stiff, strangely immobile, all but the eyes. Deep-set eyes were alert and darkly glittering in that clean-shaven, frozen face.
He wore a lightweight utility vest, baggy T-shirt, wide-legged pants, and sneakers. His clothes were dark-colored but not black; they looked more dingy than sinister. Tucked into his waistband over his left hip was a 9mm Beretta semiautomatic pistol worn butt-forward, for a cross-belly draw. He liked it that way for a city kill.
The untucked T-shirt was worn over the piece, an impediment to speedy access but necessary for concealment. The utility vest also cloaked the weapon. Some spare clips were tucked into the pockets; at the back of the neck, a custom-made sheath held a long, slim, stilettolike throwing knife that ran down vertically between his shoulder blades. He was a dead shot who happened to also have a real facility with knives.
Whether the prey be man or beast, hunting is hunting. The rules are the same. The predator goes where the game is.
Steve stood in an alley between two brick buildings, across the street from the main entrance of a topless bar. It was after midnight on a midweek June night.
Washington, D.C., is a place of many parts. When the average citizen thinks about the capital, the first impression that usually comes to mind is a vista of stately white monuments, broad thoroughfares, and massive government office buildings. The bar wasn’t located in that part of town.
Washington is also the site of a sprawling inner city, an urban ghetto of teeming tenements, dire poverty, and rampant crime, including one of the nation’s highest murder rates. The bar wasn’t in that part of town either.
It was in a fringe area near the river but not in sight of it, a seedy, rundown marginal industrial zone on the edge of the warehouse district. There were a lot of gas stations, auto parts stores, some machine shops, a couple of trucking company lots, a tire regrooving place, and the like.
Doors were made of solid metal, windows were netted by protective antitheft grilles, walls and chain-link fences were topped with strands of razor-barbed concertina wire. After dark, the legitimate establishments were locked up tight, alarm systems switched on, and their personnel made fast tracks for points elsewhere.
A lack of residential properties and a broad-minded local zoning board had encouraged the rise of a number of leisure-time entertainment venues generally not welcomed in more finicky neighborhoods: a head-banging heavy metal music club, an adult emporium peddling triple-X-rated magazines and DVDs, some gin mills, and a couple of strip joints.
One of the latter was being dogged by Steve Ireland. No mere hole-in-the-wall dive, it aspired to a certain kind of gritty grandiosity. A one-story, shoebox-shaped structure with a flat roof, it and its adjacent parking lot occupied most of a city block. One of its narrow ends fronted a four-lane boulevard; that’s where the main entrance was located. Above it, a red neon sign bannered its name: The Booby Hatch.
Unlike most of the other buildings in the area, the club’s parking lot was not fenced in. It didn’t need to be. The management was wired into the territory’s organized crime syndicate and paid for protection. Muggers, thieves, vandals, and other malefactors knew better than to ply their trade here. Crooks being what they are, though, every now and then one would be too dumb or greedy or strung out to obey the prohibition; swift retribution was sure to follow, and another corpse would be found in a vacant lot, to be labeled by police and press as a “gang killing” and just as swiftly forgotten by officialdom, if not by the lawbreaking elements at whom the object lesson was directed.
A parking lot attendant stood on watch during operating hours, mostly to make sure that no hooker tricks or drug deals were consummated on the grounds. The syndicate had an in with the cops, but there was no percentage in allowing the kind of action that gives the vice squad and liquor-licensing authorities a pretext to hike the going payoff rate.
Some hustlers were allowed in the club, as long as they were reasonably discreet and presentable and took their johns off premises to do their business. That okay came with an obligation to kick back a certain percentage of their fees to the management. They were a draw, too, bringing in male clientele and getting them to spend plenty on overpriced, watered-down drinks. Club dancers weren’t allowed to date customers as a matter of policy, to keep management from catching heat from the vice boys. Although back rooms were maintained for select dancers to intimately entertain special friends and associates of the owners.
The street outside was well traveled day and night, mostly by cars and trucks in a hurry to get somewhere else. Police cars cruised back and forth at regular intervals, pausing to roust street hookers and pick up falling-down drunks and cart them off to the city jail.
When prowl cars came rolling along, Steve Ireland faded a few paces back from the alley mouth where he was keeping vigil, melting away into the inky darkness that dwelt in the narrow passageway between two buildings. They were commercial buildings, closed for the night, with narrow slitlike windows set high in brick walls, pale oblongs wanly glowing from dim lights burning within.
The boulevard was lined with heavy-duty street lamps that flooded it with a harshly unnatural, blue-white-tinged glare. But it penetrated no more than a few feet into the alley, which was stuffed thick with black darkness.
The wall on Steve’s left was lined with a couple of trash bins filled with cinder ash and metal scraps and shavings from the machine shop within. He ducked behind them when patrol cars came making their slow, sharklike glide along his side of the street.
His car was parked nearby where he could get it into action fast. He could have kept watch from inside it, but he preferred to be out here, where he could move around and stretch his legs. A lone man sittting behind the wheel of a parked car in this neck of the woods would attract too much attention from the law and street people.
Besides, until recently, he’d been cooped up for months in a small room in a private clinic, recuperating from critical injuries sustained during an overseas mission. He’d had enough of that to hold him for ten lifetimes.
It felt good to be outside in the fresh air, such as it was. Washington is built on what used to be swampland, and flaunts its origins throughout most of the year with heavy humidity. This late June night, the air was so thick and damp and hazy that it plastered haloed rings around street lamps and headlights.
There were dark bands of wetness under his arms, and his shirt hung limp with sweat. From long habit he went jungle-fighter style, wearing no undershorts beneath his pants and hanging free and loose.
The occasional street hookers who went strutting along the sidewalks took advantage of the sultry night air to peel down to the minimum, tube tops and short-shorts, the better to flaunt what they had. The turf was more or less off-limits, but a steady stream of them trolled the pavement, gambling on getting picked up by a cruising john and getting in his car and away before attracting the notice of a cop. They were on fairly safe ground as long as they kept moving and didn’t linger in doorways or on street corners.
Other denizens of the nighttime world made the rounds: winos, crackheads, lush rollers, bone thugs, penny-ante drug dealers, homeless
