and they started playing “Brown-Eyed Girl” for the third time that night. That, combined with worry over John and lack of desire to continue being hit on by drunks, caused her to gulp down the remainder of her beer and depart.
She had a bad feeling about all of this.
When she came out onto Duval Street, the autumn breeze cutting through her shoulder-length red hair, she pulled out her cell phone, hoping that maybe she hadn’t heard the chirp of the ringer over the din of the cover band.
But there were no messages, no missed calls, no sign of Johnny.
As she ambled quickly down the sidewalk, expertly weaving her way around drunken college students and the like, she called Jean-Louis, her “associate”—a euphemistic term for extra muscle, in both the physical and firepower departments—in the hopes that Johnny might have contacted him.
“No can do, Lo,” he said. There was a lot of noise in the background, so Jean-Louis was probably at the Cutter’s Wharf, his preferred watering hole.
“I’m going to the warehouse.”
Jean-Louis hesitated. “You sure that’s such a good idea, boss?”
Lola snorted. Jean-Louis only called her “boss” when he was trying to talk her out of something. “I know it’s a bad idea, Jean-Louis, but in six months, he’s never missed a scheduled call-in. He’d only miss one if something awful had happened—I have to know.”
Minutes later, she’d arrived at her own bungalow on Whitehead Street, her cherry-red, fully restored 1965 Mustang convertible in the driveway. Sliding the key into the driver’s door, she slid into the seat and turned over the 289 2V engine.
Purring like a happy cat being scratched behind the neck, the engine went smoothly into reverse at Lola’s moving of the gearshift.
This late at night, the traffic was fine on Whitehead, and moving decently on Route 1 to the bridge, though it seemed agonizingly slow to Lola.
A pit opened up in the bottom of her stomach as she turned off Route 1 onto the side road that led to the dive shop, the warehouse and the restaurant across the street.
But Lola saw none of those things. She saw only the flashing lights and the yellow crime-scene tape.
Dozens of sedans and SUVs were parked, all with the rapid-fire sequence of colored lights that indicated they belonged to law enforcement. There were people wearing the uniform of the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office, and plainclothes agents wearing windbreaker jackets with “BATF” stenciled in big white letters on the back.
The tape cordoned off both the warehouse and the dive shop.
The pit in Lola’s stomach grew wider.
She parked the Mustang and managed to talk to Deputy Hobart, who’d always had the hots for her, into letting her past the tape.
Several agents were standing over two dead bodies, using various pieces of crime-scene investigation equipment. One victim was a giant of a man, wounded in both the forehead and left arm, the former likely to have been the fatal shot. But Lola barely noticed that, instead focusing on the one with the mangled left thigh: Agent John McAvoy.
“Noooo!” Lola cried out as she raced toward the body, her eyes welling with tears.
One of the agents stopped her, wrapping his arms around her in a bear hug that kept her arms at her side.
“Let me go!”
Another agent stared hard at her. “Who the hell are you, lady? And what are you doing in my crime scene?”
“My name is Lola Maxwell—I was working with Johnny—with Agent McAvoy.” Then she remembered the password Johnny had given her in case she ever found herself speaking to a BATF agent about this case. “Galleria.”
The agent blinked twice, then looked at the person manhandling Lola. “Let her go.”
After she was free, Lola knelt so she could see Johnny better, years of training keeping her from actually disturbing the body and any evidence it might contain. It looked like his thigh had been hit by a large-caliber bullet that shredded the femoral artery. He would’ve bled out in moments.
The other body meant that nothing would come of it from an investigative standpoint. The Samoan—who looked like one of Lee’s goons, the one they called Pooky—killed the BATF agent, and the BATF agent killed Pooky. Lola had been a cop too long to know that this was just two murders that had conveniently solved each other. The paperwork would be clean and easy, the cases would improve the county’s crime stats, and life would go on. No one would avenge Johnny’s death because they knew who killed him.
Her heart ached from the sight of his glass-eyed stare, but she vowed that she would carry on, the cold fire of vengeance burning behind her tear-filled eyes.
1
The satellite phone had interrupted Mack Bolan’s fishing.
Strictly speaking, that wasn’t entirely true. He’d been on a rented boat in the middle of Bear Lake near Atlanta, Michigan, all day, but not a single salmon had taken the bait at the end of his line. Was it really fishing if you didn’t catch any fish?
Bolan rarely took downtime, as there was always something that needed his attention. He valued his R and R, and he was a practical man. He had never subscribed to the notion that the rest and relaxation was the most important part of fishing. If one wanted to rest and relax, there were plenty of ways to do it, and he wouldn’t have had to leave his rented cabin or take the small motorboat into the middle of Bear Lake.
No, he wanted to fish. But the salmon weren’t exactly cooperating.
The Executioner took very few vacations, but it was time for him to kick back and clear his mind, take time so that his body could heal from all that he’d put it through in the past few weeks.
But he’d been in Montmorency County for twenty-four hours, and he was bored, so he quickly snatched up the sat phone when it signaled an incoming call.
“Striker,” the gruff voice of Hal Brognola said, “sorry to interrupt your time off, but it’s been twenty-four hours, so I assume you’re ready to go back to work?”
Brognola knew him well. “What’s the mission?”
“There’ll be a Stony Man plane on the tarmac at Atlanta Municipal Airport within the hour to take you to Key West International Airport. The full mission brief will be there.”
“Anything else?”
“It’ll all be in the intel package. Let me know if you need anything else.”
Bolan disconnected with Brognola after his goodbyes and steered the boat back to the shore.
It took fifty minutes to return the boat, pack his few things into a duffel, check out of the cabin, and take his rental car to the airport, where he returned it. Stony Man had sent a private jet just as Brognola had promised. Bolan could see Charlie Mott, one of Stony Man’s pilots, waiting on the tarmac.
Bolan went easily through security, his credentials allowing him
