Don Pendleton - The Violent Streets

"Explain, Fran."

Another pause, and then she continued.

"Ninety-odd years ago, Jack the Ripper tried to shut down London's red light district single-handed. He never raped his victims, but he indulged in extensive mutilation. More often than not, sex organs were removed, and never found. Now, that is a sex fiend."

"And our headcase is no Ripper?" Bolan asked.

Fran shook her head firmly.

"No way. Oh, superficially there's a similarity, sure. But our man stabs and hacks without any real direction, without any sexual aim. He defaces his victims, diminishes them. And, thereby, he somehow enlarges himself."

"Is he insane?"

She shrugged. "Medically? Of course. Legally, who knows?"

"What happens if he's arrested?"

"That depends. Of course, if there is some kind of plot to cover for him, he could be committed quietly — again. And he's already escaped three times."

"What if he goes to trial, Fran?"

"Maybe the same thing. A state hospital instead of some private institution, but those places have revolving doors. He could be 'cured' and released in a few years. Possibly months."

Bolan's voice was cool, determined.

"Okay," he said, "you've helped."

"That's it? End of lesson?"

He smiled. "School's out. And thanks."

"For what?"

"Some insight, some direction," he answered. "I can get inside him now."

When she spoke again, Fran Traynor's voice was almost pleading with him.

"They're not stupid, you know. Psychos, I mean. They get reckless sometimes, but underneath they're frequently as clever as they are vicious."

Bolan nodded. "Okay. I'll be careful."

He didn't need to be told how clever — and dangerous — a maniac with a self-imposed mission could be.

Bolan rested a warm hand on the lady cop's shoulder for a moment, left some change on the table for their coffees, then left her alone. As he hit the street in his rented sedan, the lady was already out of his mind, crowded from his thoughts by the multitude of things that remained to be done before the curtain could ring down on St. Paul's bloody stage.

First, he needed to touch base with the Politician and see what he had learned about the registration of the two crew wagons. He would have to follow that lead wherever it took him, before he could fit all the pieces together in their final mosaic.

And beyond that?

Somewhere out there, in the large city just stirring into life with the warming rays of the morning sun, there was waiting for him a young man with a blank face and a seriously deranged mind.

That young man, and perhaps several more besides, had an unscheduled appointment with the Executioner.

It was one appointment that Mack Bolan was grimly determined to keep.

Mack Bolan had come to St. Paul on what seemed a simple mission.

To help a friend.

To relieve the pain of a suffering comrade-in-arms.

But the nature of the Executioner's mission in the Twin Cities was rapidly shaping up into something else, something vastly different from what he had come to expect. The campaign had all the makings of a unique experience for Bolan in his home-front wars, and the very difference of the mission was what made it so desperate, so dangerous for all concerned.

For openers, Bolan had less solid information about his enemy — or enemies — than he had ever carried into battle before. In his previous campaigns, whether against the Cong, the Mafia, or the new breed of terrorists that John Phoenix had been resurrected to fight, he had always gone into combat with at least a general understanding of the enemy's number and goals.

He had always known their name and their game, yeah.

But not in St. Paul.

So far, the Executioner knew only that he was searching for one deranged young man who raped and murdered women for reasons best known to himself. An animal who had to be found and very forcefully neutralized.

But along the way, he had already encountered five men who bore all the earmarks of syndicate hardmen, and they seemed to be intent on scuttling any search for the Twin Cities rapist-killer.

That was a new one on Bolan, and he was a long way from having thought it completely through.

One thing was clear enough for the moment. He had come into St. Paul operating on faulty perceptions, without all the necessary information. Clearly, the game was not to be a simple, deadly one-on-one between the headcase and the Executioner. It had already evolved into something more, something larger, more sinister.

Someone had called out the guns in St. Paul; whether in support of Bolan's intended prey or on behalf of some unknown, unrelated cause, he couldn't yet be certain. He knew only that the gunmen existed, and that he undoubtedly would have to deal with more of them before he was finished in the city.

The strong indications of organized crime activity — and possible police complicity, whatever its scope — indicated that there was more at stake in St. Paul than a relatively simple string of rapes and murders committed by some faceless madman.

The Twin Cities had never ranked high in the American Mafia hierarchy, even before Mack the Bastard Bolan had appeared out of nowhere, rattling cages and finally blowing their whole damned house down. The syndicate had representatives and outposts there, nevertheless, and it carried out the same time-honored game of rape and ruin. However, the local action had never rated an Executioner visitation, either during the main war, or during Bolan's savage week-long "second mile" through hell.

Never, that is, until now.

Now it looked as if it might be time to correct an earlier oversight.

Across the nation, the crime syndicate lay in smoking ruins. But just as the V.C. had managed to avoid massive sweeps in Vietnam, just as the Japanese diehards had held out on isolated Pacific islands for decades after Hiroshima, there were still outposts and pockets of resistance that had weathered or entirely escaped the Executioner's cleansing fire.

And St. Paul, apparently, was one of those holdouts.

Syndicate chieftains had been reduced by the long Bolan blitz to the status of feudal warlords during the Dark Ages. Stripped of the seemingly omnipotent Mafia umbrella that had sheltered them for decades in America, they were now more cautious, more isolated from one another, more interested in perpetuating their local scams than in grand delusions of national power and prestige.

But that did not indicate any lessening of virulence at the local level. Hell, no.

Even a dying snake was dangerous if you came within reach of its fangs. And the Mafia viper, though hacked to pieces and scattered to the four winds, was still showing grim, reflexive signs of life.

At bottom, the stakes were — and always would be — basically the same for Mack Bolan. Civilized Man vs. Animal Man. The builders vs. the predators of the world.

From youth, Bolan had cast his lot with the civilized, the builders. Not that he had ever had any real choice in the matter. Given his upbringing, his sense of morality and duty, there was, quite simply, no option.

There had been no choice when he went to Vietnam to face Animal Man in the jungles of the delta, or when he reenlisted for a second tour of duty.

And there had been, yeah, no choice at all when the deaths of his parents and sister were laid at the doorstep of the malignant Mafia outpost in Pittsfield, so many lifetimes ago.

No choice, finally, when on the eve of victory in his Mafia wars, Bolan had been called to another front in the same war everlasting, to fight against worldwide terrorism as the reborn Colonel John Phoenix.

When Pol Blancanales called, seeking Bolan's help, there had been, again, no options for the Executioner. He had come to St. Paul because he had to, and if the enemy's number and name had been changed behind the scenes, that didn't alter his duty or devotion one iota. On the contrary.