The Executioner ejected the almost-empty magazine of 7.62 mm rounds from his rifle and inserted the other magazine—the one loaded with armor-piercing rounds—into the weapon. He fired at the same spot in the window—with the same result. The round whinnied like a colt as it bounced off the glass.
But then Bolan switched the selector to full-auto. With the stock held firmly against his shoulder, he pulled the trigger back and held it, sending a dozen armor-piercing rounds cracking, then exploding the glass in the guardhouse.
The man behind the window saw his fate as soon as the glass began to crack. He dropped down behind the concrete, out of sight.
“Keep firing!” Bolan ordered Kunkle as he left the cover of the tree and sprinted toward where the third and final gate guard hid. The detective kept up a steady boom of 12-gauge fire that peppered through the broken glass and sent pellets raining down over the hidden man.
The pellets lost most of their velocity when they struck the concrete back of the guardhouse. But by falling over the man on the floor, they created just the diversion Bolan had hoped for.
Without slowing his pace, Bolan raced to the open door of the guard shack. The final guard was squatting, and looking straight at him, as he pulled the trigger of the AK-47 again and sent a half-dozen rounds into the man’s body. In the end, all of the concrete and bullet-resistant glass in the world didn’t help him, and the gate guard fell onto his face just as dead as the others.
Suddenly, the house and yard grew silent. It stayed that way for a moment, then a lone cricket worked up enough courage to let out a single “click.”
“Grab the suitcases!” Bolan yelled back through the gate, and watched as Kunkle let his appropriated shotgun fall to the ground and grabbed the handles of both pieces of luggage. Bolan turned to cover the house behind them, but not a single round was fired as the detective jogged toward him, awkwardly lugging the New York Jets collection as he ran.
Bolan took one of the suitcases as soon as Kunkle reached him, then turned toward a Mercedes-Benz parked just outside the guardhouse. They had left the Cadillac Escalade several blocks away, on the other side of the mansion.
In the distance, Bolan could hear sirens.
Kunkle’s NOPD contact—Ernie Foreman—had squashed the burglar alarm call. But the fighting on the outside of the house had definitely gotten the attention of the neighbors, and one or more of them had called the police.
Which meant Bolan and Kunkle had to get away. Fast.
Bolan dropped the AK-47 as he swung the driver’s door open. He was about to slide behind the wheel when he saw movement in the backseat and whipped the Desert Eagle from his hip holster.
The barrel moved into alignment with a whimpering Doberman pinscher puppy.
The Executioner holstered the Desert Eagle again, then lifted the frightened animal from the backseat and set him down on the ground. The last he saw of the little dog was his stubby tail as he sprinted toward the house.
The keys were in the ignition, and Bolan called out to Kunkle again. “Put the suitcases in the back and get in. Quick.”
The detective did as he was told, and Bolan started the engine. A second later, they were gliding away from the house, toward the rapidly approaching black-and-white patrol car. It passed by, siren blaring and lights flashing, speeding toward Bill Dill’s house.
15
Kunkle was in a confusing state of conflicting emotions. He had been in gunfights before as a New Orleans police officer, but never on a scale such as the one he had just survived.
He sat as still as a statue as he watched Cooper drive the Mercedes three blocks from Dill’s house before twirling the steering wheel into a right-hand turn and heading back toward where they had parked the Cadillac Escalade. In his chest, he could feel his heart beating as if some giant was pounding a huge kettle drum beneath his sternum. He was frightened. He was euphoric. But most of all, he was just simply amazed.
He had never seen anyone—in or out of law enforcement—who could fight like the man guiding the Mercedes.
Who in the world was Matt Cooper? He wasn’t just some normal federal agent—they had broken far too many laws for the man to have really been a Justice Department agent like he said. No bureaucrat would hang his butt out to get killed—or later prosecuted—like Cooper had just done. No, Cooper was something special. Very special. Something that the general public, and law enforcement nationwide, didn’t know anything about. The only thing Kunkle was certain about was that Matt Cooper wasn’t his real name.
The Mercedes turned right again and pulled to a halt along the curb just behind where they’d parked the Escalade. Kunkle could still hear the sirens, but by then they were far in the distance. The houses along this street were all darkened; far enough away from the chaos still ensuing at Dill’s house that the people inside them hadn’t been disturbed.
It could not have worked out any better, Kunkle realized. The gunfire outside Dill’s house had alerted his neighbors who, naturally, had called 9-1-1. But their deal with Foreman to squash the call from the security company had given them the extra time they needed to gather up the Jets paraphernalia before fighting their way to safety.
Without a word, Cooper suddenly killed the Mercedes’ engine and jumped out of the car. Opening the back door on the driver’s side, he reached in and grabbed one of the suitcases. Kunkle, still feeling as if he was in a daze, followed the man’s lead. If truth be told, he had been following Cooper’s lead all night. He got out of the Mercedes, grabbed the other suitcase and lugged it toward the Cadillac. A moment later, both men were in the Escalade and driving off again.
Kunkle realized he had more or less blacked out for a few minutes. He remembered driving away from Dill’s house, then suddenly they were changing vehicles. Well, he thought, he would continue to follow Cooper. Doing so had kept him alive during the biggest and most violent gunfight of his life, so he didn’t have any intention of altering that procedure.
At least not until this postbattle shock or whatever it was had worn off and he was thinking straight again.
The two men had left sport coats in the front seat of the Escalade, which they slipped over their blacksuits, hiding both their weapons and the fighting suits themselves from eyes outside of the vehicle. Cooper had not spoken since they’d left the Mercedes.
When Kunkle broke the silence, he was surprised to find that his voice cracked like that of an adolescent boy. “What now?” was all he managed to get out as his heart continued to beat drumrolls in his chest.
“I’m taking you back to the hotel,” Bolan said simply. “By then, I should have just about enough time to hit my apartment, take a shower and change clothes before delivering this stuff to McFarley.”
Kunkle didn’t want his voice to screech again so he just nodded his understanding. As they drove on, he watched Cooper out of the corner of his eye. He had never seen a man who could fight like the big guy behind the wheel of the Caddie. He appeared to be a master of any weapon that happened to find his hands, and he seemed to know exactly what an enemy was about to do before that enemy even knew it himself. They had come within a hairbreadth of getting killed at least a dozen times during the long gunfight in and out of Dill’s house. And Kunkle had watched as Cooper killed several men a split second before they were about to drop the detective.
That was another thing Kunkle knew, he decided as he leaned back and tried to tune down the percussion section in his chest. He would have never survived a gun battle of this magnitude if Cooper hadn’t been leading the way.
The thumping in his chest was slowly diminishing, but in its place Kunkle noted that nausea was infiltrating his stomach. He had experienced this before—right after the other gunfights he’d been in as a cop. It was not the blood and other gore making him sick. He knew that from past experience. It was the gigantic dump of adrenaline that often followed such an encounter and had no other place to go.
“Can you…pull over a minute?” the detective ask
ed softly. He was at least pleased that his voice didn’t crack again.
Bolan didn’t seem surprised in the least, and he guided the Cadillac quickly toward the curb.
Kunkle opened the door, leaned out and threw up everything he’d eaten that hadn’t yet descended to his intestines. He ended the incident with a half-dozen dry heaves, then closed the door and sat back against the seat again.
The nausea was gone. But he still felt as if he wanted to sprint a mile or two, or bench press four-hundred pounds, or punch a heavy bag until his arms and legs gave out in exhaustion and he collapsed on the floor.
“It’ll get better,” Bolan said quietly. “It just takes a little time.”
Kunkle took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “How come all this isn’t happening to you?” he asked.
“I’m used to it,” Bolan replied, and Kunkle was half-surprised to hear no tone of reproach or sarcasm in the man’s voice. Then again, when he really thought about it, it wasn’t so surprising. It seemed Cooper just wasn’t the type of man who expected other men to live up to his personal standards.
Which was good, Kunkle thought, because he had never met anyone who could have done so. He certainly couldn’t.
Cooper drove them up an access ramp onto a thoroughfare as Kunkle continued to come down from his battle high. When he was breathing almost normally again, a thought struck him. He had just killed a number of men. Not as many as Cooper of course, but several just the same, and it had hardly been in the line of duty. The fact was he and Cooper had broken the law the minute they set foot on Dill’s property. According to the law, they were both guilty of trespassing, burglary and even homicide.
Technically, they had broken the law. But with his emotions finally returning to normal, Kunkle was somewhat surprised to find that he felt no guilt. The laws of “man” might have been broken, but they had done nothing immoral. The New York Jets collection they had stolen had been obtained with money made in illegal ways, and the men they had shot had been thieves and murderers themselves.
A slight depression flowed over the detective. Matt Cooper was the man he, Greg Kunkle, knew he should have been. Not as fast, or deadly, or smart maybe. But totally moral. He was the man Kunkle had tried to be when he first put on the NOPD uniform years ago. A man with a genuine passion for helping people and protecting the weak and innocent from the strong-but-evil. But gradually, step-by-step and little-by-little, he had lost his way. It had started when he first accepted free meals at restaurants. Then he found himself “fixing” traffic and parking tickets for the restaurants’ owners.
No favor came without a price, Kunkle had realized even back then. And at that point, he should have quit and insisted on paying his way just like everyone else.
But he hadn’t.
Soon after that, he’d started taking money to look the other way when drug deals went down. Then he’d purposely contaminated the chain of evidence on several criminal cases in return for money. On several occasions, he had even provided a safe police escort for illegal drugs and guns being driven from one spot to another. He had rationalized it all by telling himself that all cops did these things because they didn’t get paid enough. And that rationalization had worked. At least for a while.
Cooper drove silently on. As Kunkle’s thoughts continued to race, he realized that was one of the things he really liked about the man. He didn’t speak unless he had something to say, and he’d bet his life that Cooper had never taken a bribe of any kind.
Kunkle’s brain was spinning, and it returned suddenly to the revival, and the spiritual experience he’d had a little over a week earlier. He had, both literally and figuratively, stumbled upon the service. He had been drunk because the rationalizations for his actions were beginning to wear thin. But he had found himself accidentally driving past the large coliseum, noticing the thousands of people parking and walking toward the service. And for some reason he still couldn’t quite define, he had pulled into the parking lot and joined them.
Kunkle remembered the music he had heard at the beginning of the service. Then a prayer that centered around the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina. The storm had hit the city years earlier, but many New Orleans residents were still reeling from the decimation it had brought. And it was to them that the night’s offering would go. When the plates were passed, Kunkle had been surprised to find himself pulling the last two twenty-dollar bills from his money clip and dropping them into the plate with the other coins and bills.
Which had made no sense to him at all—not even as he did it. It meant he would not be able to drop by the liquor store on his way home after the service.
Then the preacher had taken the pulpit. He had spoken calmly and sincerely—without any of the “fire and brimstone” Kunkle had half-expected. And it was during this sermon that the alcohol he had consumed earlier had begun to wear off. And, with it, had gone the last of the false rationalizations to which the detective was clinging so desperately.
Suddenly, Kunkle felt as if he was standing naked before both God and men, his sins tattooed all over his body for the entire world—and heaven—to see.
Tears had begun pouring from his eyes. And when the sermon ended, and the invitation to accept Christ as his personal savior was given, Kunkle had found himself walking down the aisle with hundreds of other sinners, eager to seek redemption and the inner peace he could no longer find through alcohol or other artificial means.
Ever since that night, Kunkle knew that his heart and soul belonged to Jesus. But his brain had been an addled mass of questions he seemed unable to work through.
“We’re here.”
Cooper’s words cut abruptly into Kunkle’s thoughts, and the detective realized he had lapsed into another of the semi-trances to which he seemed drawn since the revival. He looked up to see the back door to the Hotel Lafitte through the windshield in front of him. Slowly, he turned toward Cooper.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked.
Bolan was frowning slightly, as if he sensed the intensity of Kunkle’s thoughts. “Go inside, get some rest and wait for me,” the big man said. “Drink as much water as you can. These sort of things dehydrate you. I’ll either come by or call after I take this stuff to McFarley.” He nodded toward the suitcases in the backseat.
“Okay,” Kunkle said as he got out of the car. Then, just before he closed it behind him, he stuck his head back in. “Have you decided to trust me yet, Cooper?” he asked bluntly.
The man took a few seconds to answer, and during that time Kunkle could almost see the wheels turning behind his furrowed eyebrows. Finally, the big fighter behind the wheel of the Escalade spoke. “I think you should start calling me Matt,” he finally said.
Kunkle was so flooded with emotion that he merely nodded, then closed the door. Fishing his room key out of the side pocket of his sport coat, he turned to watch for just a second as Cooper drove away.
And as he opened the back door to the hotel, he felt as if a huge burden had been lifted from his heart.
16
By the time the Bolan returned to his condo it was nearly 0500 in the morning. Shedding his blacksuit, weapons and other gear, he set the two packed suitcases containing the Jets paraphernalia next to the desk, then sat down on the side of the bed.
Bolan couldn’t help yawning as he lifted his wrist and set the alarm buzzer on his chronograph for one hour. Then he lay down on his side.
The next thing he was aware of was the alarm going off. He twisted on the bed, cut the noise with the push of a button and stood up.
By the time he had showered and shaved it was almost 0730. He glanced toward the suitcases from Bill Dill’s house, then opened one of his own bags, pulling out a blue shirt, khaki pants and a brown corduroy sport coat. The Beretta went beneath his arm again in the shoulder rig, and the Desert Eagle took its usual place on his hip. But he didn’t forget the Cold Steel Espada or the little NAA Pug mini-revolver. He clipped the big Spanish folding knife int
o his waistband behind his back, and shoved the Pug down inside his underwear on his “weak hand” side.
The drive to Lake Pontchartrain took almost an hour in the early-morning traffic. But by the time he got there, Bolan saw that the parking lot was already half full. Men and boys working the night shift at fish canneries and other New Orleans businesses were already heading into the brothel on the lower floors for an “eye opener.”
Felix O’Banion met Bolan the second he stepped into the old mansion.
“Tommy up yet?” Bolan asked. He remembered McFarley making it clear he wasn’t a morning person.
“He hasn’t been to bed yet,” O’Banion said in his thick Irish brogue. “He’s been waiting for you.” Then, without another word, the Irishman led the way down the hall.
The soldier lugged the two suitcases along behind the man, then stepped into the elevator. A moment later, they were on the top floor and the doors were rolling open. O’Banion stepped off of the elevator, pointed toward McFarley’s door down the hall, then got back on. The doors closed again, and Bolan was left standing alone, half-surprised that he hadn’t been searched for weapons again.
It was a good sign. It meant that he had finally gained McFarley’s trust.
Bolan had to set one of the suitcases down in order to twist the knob on McFarley’s door. Picking it back up by the handle, he shouldered the door the rest of the way open and crossed the empty outer office. He still had not met McFarley’s secretary, and he hoped he wouldn’t. The photographs, plants and other items covering her desk led him to believe that she was an older, at least somewhat innocent, woman.
Eventually, she would be out of a job because Bolan was going to kill Tommy McFarley. But he had no desire to see her go down in the process.
Bolan set the suitcases down again as he opened the door to McFarley’s office. He found the New Orleans crime boss seated behind his desk. The man was in the process of opening the middle drawer of his desk, and Bolan remembered the Webley he’d seen earlier.
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