would feel anything again.
Baltimore, Maryland
SPENCER LOUCKS NURSED his ancient green Jeep Cherokee up to the gas pump. Like everything else in his life, his Jeep—Teal Steel, as he liked to call it—was falling apart. He’d always skated through life, counting on his sense of humor to grease the skids when the going got rough, but things had gone so wrong that even that wasn’t enough anymore. First he’d lost his job. Next, a bout of post-breakup sex with his psychotic ex-girlfriend had led to a situation that Loucks had carefully avoided his entire life: fatherhood.
The kid was the one thing that kept Loucks going. He glanced into Teal Steel’s backseat to make sure the little guy was secure in his car seat. The kid lived with his mother, technically, but she wasn’t really equipped to handle a child so the boy spent most of his time with his dad. She’d been—there was really no way to sugarcoat it—a crack whore. She’d ended up in prison where she served five years for committing multiple felonies. In prison, she’d finally shed her various drug addictions, but she’d picked up an attitude. Now she reacted to every situation as if she was being attacked with a shank in the prison lunchroom.
She’d also found Jesus in prison, and she considered it her mission in life to ensure that everyone else on Earth shared that experience. Unfortunately, the confrontational way with which she dealt with every person she encountered led to her making few converts. Not that she didn’t try; most of the time she left the boy with Loucks because she was busy out working with her church group.
The one thing she had going for herself was a superb body, which was what had attracted Loucks to her in the first place. Now, because of that hot body, Loucks was hopelessly intertwined with a psycho baby mama who would be part of his life for the rest of his life. At least he had the boy. He carried the little guy into the gas station, where he prepaid the attendant five bucks for gas. Five bucks would be barely enough for him to return the boy to his home, the way Teal Steel sucked gas, but it was all he had left after buying diapers and groceries.
Loucks set the nozzle in Jeep’s filler spout and locked in the lever. He looked in at the boy, once again sleeping in his car seat, and waited for the lever to click off when the pump hit five dollars. He didn’t have to wait long before he heard the “click.” He looked at the pump. The pump had shut off at $4.88. Christ. Twelve cents worth of gas was barely a dribble, but given his current financial situation, Loucks needed every penny’s worth that he could get. He looked at the baby in the backseat of the Jeep, then at the man working in the gas station’s partitioned operator’s booth inside the station. His over-developed sense of justice made him want to go and get his twelve cents worth of fuel, but the guy running the station probably didn’t even speak English. Loucks was torn.
He leaned against the Jeep, contemplating not just the situation at hand, but all the bad decisions he’d made that led him to this point in his life. He was forty years old, and he could barely afford to be screwed out of twelve cents worth of gas. He was so lost in thought that he didn’t notice the bright yellow sports car that pulled up beside him. At that moment he vaguely heard a crack in the distance, but before he could register the sound, his brain ceased functioning because of the .30-caliber bullet that pierced his head, splashing gore across the green expanse of the Jeep’s roof.
MACK BOLAN TURNED THE Ferrari 599 GTO into the gas station, driving up the approach at a slight angle to avoid scraping the undercarriage of the low-slung Italian sports car on the pavement. It was, after all, a borrowed ride, a loaner from Hal Brognola, a top official at the Department of Justice and also the man in charge of the supersecret forces operating out of Stony Man Farm. As such, Brognola was the closest thing to a boss that the Executioner had, but he was also one of the soldier’s oldest friends. When the rare opportunity for a vacation had arisen, Bolan had asked the big Fed if he could borrow a set of wheels. He’d expected a well-worn government fleet vehicle just about ready to make the transition to taxicab duty, at best a Crown Victoria with steel wheels and dog-dish hubcaps, at worst some toady little crap wagon.
Instead, Brognola had surprised him with the keys to the Ferrari, luxurious sports coupe with a potent V-12 engine lurking beneath its long, sleek hood. The car, painted a shade of yellow so bright staring at it too long might cause permanent burns on the corneas of a viewer’s eyes, had been confiscated as part of the estate of a drug kingpin that Bolan had brought down. It was a rare treat for the Executioner to be able to enjoy the fruits of his labors.
And he was enjoying the Ferrari very much, as well as the long weekend itself, spent in Nags Head, North Carolina. But even more than the Ferrari, he’d enjoyed the company of the long, lithesome blonde seated in the car beside him.
Patricia Jensen, the stunning woman riding shotgun in the Ferrari, was an old friend. In truth, she was more than a friend; Bolan supposed she was what the hipsters called a friend with benefits. He’d met her years ago, while working on a case in Washington, D.C. He’d been shot in the thigh, and she was the doctor who stitched him up. Bolan knew she would gladly be more than a friend with benefits if he asked her, but the soldier had long since accepted the fact that his life didn’t allow for long-term attachments. People who got too close to him ended up dead.
Bolan inserted his credit card into the pump and began filling the tank with the high-octane gasoline that the finicky Italian thoroughbred demanded. While the fuel filled the tank, he thought about the woman sitting inside the car. He’s known her for nearly twenty years, and she seemed even more beautiful now than when he’d met her. Back then she was fresh out of medical school, finishing her internship. When he first met her, she’d had big hair, as did most other young women at the time. Now her hair was cut in a stylish bob, which made her gray eyes look even more startling than they had when framed by the big MTV hair she’d worn when they’d first met. She maybe had a few lines on her face that she hadn’t had back then, but they just gave her face more character. The rest of her hadn’t seemed to have changed much at all.
Something made Bolan break off his meditation on Jensen’s charms. He couldn’t place it, but for some reason he sensed danger. He had no reason to expect danger in a gas station just off the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, but the soldier hadn’t survived countless battles by ignoring his intuition. He’d scanned the surroundings for potential danger when he drove into the gas station, as he always did whenever he entered a place, an action that was as unconscious as breathing for him, and he’d noted nothing out of place. The only other people at the station were the clerk and a sad sack-looking man filling gas in a rusty old Jeep, neither of whom seemed to present an obvious threat. Bolan noted that the sad sack had a toddler in a car seat in the back of the Jeep, making him an even more unlikely source of danger.
But something was wrong; Bolan could feel it. He started scoping out the surrounding buildings, his hand automatically resting on the Beretta 93-R in the shoulder harness beneath his charcoal sport jacket. There wasn’t much for buildings in the surrounding area. The freeway bordered the station to the west and another gas station sat across the road to the north, but that station was out of business and completely deserted. A fast-food burger joint shared a parking lot with the station, and behind that was a storage rental facility. The only thing even slightly out of the ordinary was an SUV parked along the road to the east of the station, next to a large empty lot. Bolan couldn’t tell if the SUV, an older Chevy Tahoe SS, was empty or not because of the dark tinted windows, but something seemed out of place.
Bolan tapped on the Ferrari’s passenger window to get Jensen to roll down the window and hand him his binoculars so he could get a better look at the Tahoe, but before she could get the window down, Bolan heard a muffled crack and saw the head of the man driving the green Jeep burst open. The angle with which the bullet hit the man’s head told Bolan that it had to have come from the vicinity of the Tahoe.
The soldier threw open the Ferrari’s passenger door and he pulled Jensen from the vehicle. “Get down!” he told her,
