Don Pendleton: Deep Recon

He didn’t rear-end the Aveo—that was a zero-sum strategy. With two cars of roughly equal size, the rear-ender always got it worse than the rear-endee. In this case, the impact would severely damage the Mustang’s grille and have almost no effect on the Aveo’s bumper.

Instead, Bolan took advantage of the presently nonexistent traffic to get into the northbound lane and pull up alongside the Aveo.

The assassin tried to fire his .38 again. But before he could get a shot off, Bolan swerved right, counting on the more solidly built 1965 car to be able to withstand the impact better than the much lighter and flimsier modern vehicle.

Again the Aveo ground against the concrete railing. Bolan saw the other man struggle to keep the steering wheel under control—and fail miserably. The Aveo was being crushed between the irresistible force of the barricade and the solidly built Mustang.

Headlights then shone in Bolan’s face as a truck came into view going southbound on Route 1. The Mustang was still halfway into the southbound lane, and the only way to avoid a collision was to stop smashing the Aveo against the guardrail.

Swerving left long enough to disentangle the two vehicles from each other—which happened with another screech of metal against plastic—Bolan then put his right foot on the brake, causing the Mustang to decelerate sharply.

The Aveo continued to scrape against the guardrail for several seconds before the assassin also swerved left.

But unlike the Executioner’s maneuver, the assassin went too far. The Aveo spun counterclockwise. Tires squealed against pavement as the car went into an uncontrolled spin.

The truck didn’t slow.

Bolan slammed his foot on the brake, bringing the Mustang to a screeching halt.

The truck did likewise, but had considerably more momentum on its side, and so did not stop immediately.

Bolan watched as the truck smashed into the Aveo.

Lola Maxwell fumed.

It wasn’t bad enough that Johnny McAvoy was dead, but they had to send him to avenge his death?

No—that was the problem. The man they’d sent had no interest in avenging McAvoy’s death. He was just there to finish the job McAvoy had started.

In truth, that was the difference between them. Maxwell honestly couldn’t give a damn about bringing Kevin Lee to justice. If it wasn’t him selling illegal foreign firearms to the soldiers in the drug trade that ran rampant in south Florida, it would be someone else.

But Lee was the reason her lover was dead—and she intended to kill him for that.

Sleeping with McAvoy had never been part of the plan. Maxwell was a professional, and a professional never slept with a partner on an operation.

At least, that was what the rule book said. But the problem with the rule book was that it was hard to find when you were on a long-term deep-cover op.

It wasn’t so bad for Maxwell. She was playing the ex-cop hanging out in her old stomping grounds. The only difference was that she was still on the job, just nobody knew it apart from McAvoy and Faraday.

But McAvoy had been all alone out there except for her. He spent his days and nights living a lie, and the only person he could truly confide in, besides a handler he spoke to once a week or so, was Maxwell.

It was four months into the op when it had happened. One of the guys in Lee’s employ got his girlfriend knocked up, and they decided to get married. “Donald Kincaid” was trying to ingratiate himself into Lee’s world, and going to a bachelor party was definitely a way to endear yourself. So he joined them in barhopping and strip-club attending, working their way up and down Duval Street in a drunken stupor.

Afterward, he stumbled to Maxwell’s bungalow at five in the morning. He banged on her door, apparently too drunk to even operate the doorbell properly. She climbed out of bed, slipped into a silk robe and opened the door to see McAvoy, much drunker than he should have been while undercover, babbling on and on about how horrible these men were, the way they treated the other people in the bars and especially the way they treated the strippers. And when management tried to rein them in, one of them pulled his Beretta and shoved the muzzle right in his face.

The group of men had been left alone after that, but McAvoy—who’d been pretending to go along with the macho bullshit up until then—had a hard time with this incident. So he drank more.

The ironic thing was that it worked. Finley, one of Lee’s top guys, confided in McAvoy as the party was breaking up that he had been suspicious of him, but seeing him three sheets to the wind with the rest of them proved he was an okay guy.

McAvoy had been crying at this point, and Maxwell took him in her arms, the silk of her robe sliding open to reveal her ample cleavage. McAvoy started kissing her neck and working his way down to that cleavage, and Maxwell found herself completely uninterested in stopping him.

Eventually, they made it back to the bedroom, the bathrobe long since discarded, as were his clothes. Because Maxwell looked the way she did, she could have her pick of men, but because of that, she was extraordinarily picky about whom she chose to sleep with outside the confines of the job.

Of course, this was technically within those confines, but it was hard to argue with McAvoy’s hungry need that morning. Or hers, if it came to that, as McAvoy was a most sensitive lover.

Now McAvoy was dead, and she was stuck with this Cooper guy.

For Johnny’s sake, she hoped that the rumors had at least some truth to them.

“You keep pacin’ like that, you’ll wear a hole in the carpet.”

She glowered at Jean-Louis when he said that. “Bite me, Jean-Louis.”

“You ain’t my type,” Jean-Louis said with a big grin.

Maxwell couldn’t help but grin back at that. Jean-Louis liked his women petite. There were many adjectives that could describe the five-foot-ten Maxwell with her perfect hourglass figure, but “petite” was most definitely not one of them.

She and Faraday had been waiting all night for Cooper to come back with her car. She had changed into sweatpants and a white T-shirt, her breasts straining against the cotton. Maxwell knew that her ample breasts were two of her biggest assets—so to speak—and they had proved very handy in allowing her to get the upper hand over men. It was certainly worth trying with Cooper, maybe giving her the opportunity to get back in his good graces.

She was about to ask Faraday what time it was when she heard the distinctive sound of her pride and joy, the ’65 Mustang, pulling into the driveway.

“About goddamn time!” she said as she made a beeline for the front door of her bungalow and all but threw it open. The early-morning sun—it was less than an hour after dawn—blinded her briefly, but she blinked the glare away quickly with the ease of long practice.

She was about to yell at the man for taking so long with her car when her eye caught a few more things to yell at him about. There were skid marks on the passenger-side door, the side-view mirror was missing and one of the headlights was broken. That was just what she could see from the front door.

She couldn’t help but notice that Cooper didn’t look anywhere near as bad off as her car, which was too bad for him. His being badly injured in a manner commensurate with the damage to the Mustang was the only circumstance under which she was willing to even consider the remotest possibility of starting the process of forgiveness.

But no, the bastard was unscathed, apart from his slightly mussed hair.

“What the hell happened to my car?” she shrieked.

“The other guy’s ride is in much worse shape,” was all Bolan would say in reply. He moved past her and went inside.