Justice Run

“Good,” Bolan said. “Let’s get you out of here.”

Bolan ushered her into the elevator, then followed her inside and they returned to the first floor. When the doors opened, Bolan gestured for her to remain inside and he left the car.

A ragged line of hardmen was scrambling to head Bolan off. The soldier scythed them down with a barrage of 9 mm rounds just as the MP-5 clicked dry. Ejecting the magazine, he slipped his last fresh one into the weapon and called for Rodriguez to come out of the elevator.

They made a beeline for the front door with Bolan still in the lead. As they stepped into the warm evening, the soldier heard sirens screaming. Keying the throat mike, he called for Turrin.

“Yeah?”

“Meet me at the Jag,” Bolan said.

“Roger that,” the retired Fed replied.

“Jag?” Rodriguez asked. “You have a Jaguar? What department are you with again?”

“It’s complicated,” Bolan said.

When they reached the car, Turrin was already there, tossing some of his gear into the trunk.

The Stony Man warriors claimed the front seats, with Bolan behind the wheel. Rodriguez slipped into the backseat as Bolan stomped on the Jaguar’s accelerator. The car’s engine responded with a growl and the vehicle lurched ahead, barreling toward the gates of Dumond’s estate. Rodriguez twisted at the waist and stared through the rear window.

Bolan looked into the rearview mirror and saw a couple of muzzle-flashes wink in the darkness. A bullet struck the trunk lid, sparked against the steel and angled off into the darkness.

As the Jaguar neared the gate, another of Dumond’s shooters ran into the vehicle’s path, a machine pistol tucked in close to his body.

Turrin stuck an arm through his side window to fire on the guy. Even over the roar of the engine, Bolan heard the dry crackle of autofire and saw jagged flames lash out from the shooter’s weapon. The bullet went low. The Executioner heard something thunk against the vehicle and he guessed the round had hammered into the vehicle’s engine block.

Turrin’s Beretta roared twice, just as the Jaguar rolled over a speed bump. The car shuddered. Bolan clenched his teeth and fought to keep control of the steering wheel, which wanted to jerk to the right.

The bullets from Turrin’s weapon went wild, leaving the guard untouched.

Headlights bathed the hardman in their white glow, making his face look deathly pale.

His mouth dropped open and he threw up an arm to protect himself. The vehicle’s right front fender smacked into the shooter, the force spinning his body and heaving it into the air all at once.

“Bull’s-eye,” Turrin muttered.

* * *

THEY’D DRIVEN LESS than a half mile when Bolan caught a whiff of the distinctive odor from a busted radiator. The needle on the temperature gauge was rising to the red quickly. The vehicle probably would overheat in a matter of minutes. Bolan knew they needed to do something.

He glanced at Turrin. “We’re going to have to ditch,” he said.

Turrin nodded.

“Ditch?” the woman said. “If Dumond sends his people after us, we can’t outrun them on foot.”

Bolan looked up into the rearview mirror and saw a reflection of her staring at him.

“We also can’t outrun them in a dead car,” he said. “Trust me. We’ll get you out of here.”

She opened her mouth to reply, but hesitated, seeming to consider his words. “Okay,” she said with a nod.

“Up there,” Turrin said, pointing at something beyond the windshield. Bolan followed where he was pointing and saw the mouth of an alley up ahead. The smell of antifreeze intermingled with overheated plastic, metal and oil had grown stronger. The soldier acknowledged Turrin with a nod.

A couple of seconds later when they reached their destination, he cut the wheel to the right and guided the car into the narrow alley. He killed the engine but left the headlights burning. “Wait here,” he growled.

Popping open the door, he stepped from the vehicle and walked up to the front end and checked the damage. Bullet holes pockmarked the grille in a ragged line.

Another slug had taken out one of the running lights. White plumes of steam curled up from around the edges of the hood. The car definitely was damaged goods.

Moving back to the driver’s door, Bolan leaned inside, pulled up on a floor switch that opened the trunk and switched off the headlights.

“Let’s go,” he said.

Turrin nodded and exited the car. The woman climbed from the backseat and, eyeing the two men cautiously, approached them. She stopped several feet away from them.

“We need another car,” she said.

“We’ll get one,” Bolan replied.

“What, are you going to steal one?” she asked, her voice incredulous.

“Yeah.”

“Wait! What?”

Turrin looked at her. “Don’t worry,” he said. “The big guy does this shit all the time.”

“He’s a federal agent!”

“Not exactly.”

“What do you mean ‘not exactly’?”

“No time,” Bolan said.

The Executioner glided past her and moved to the trunk. He slid his fingertips into the seam between the edge of the trunk lid and the car and pulled. The lid sprang open. He tossed the MP-5 into the trunk. When Turrin saw what Bolan was doing, he reached into the car, pulled out his shotgun and tossed it into the compartment. Bolan slammed the lid.

He hated to leave the weapons behind, but he had little choice. They could conceal their sidearms under their jackets. But walking around a foreign city with shotguns and submachine guns would probably attract all the wrong kinds of attention.

For all intents and purposes, John “Cowboy” Kissinger, Stony Man Farm’s armorer, had rendered the weapons untraceable. If someone ran the prints on the weapons, they’d find nothing. Any prints the soldier had left behind as Mack Samuel Bolan or under his aliases Matt Cooper or, before that, Mike Belasko, had been scrubbed. Whenever he had any brushes with the authorities, the Farm’s cyber team hacked into the computers after the fact and erased any mug shots or fingerprints that might have been taken. As far as the world was concerned, Bolan was dead and had been for years. It was a fiction that Stony Man Farm went to great lengths to maintain.

From the corner of his eye he saw Rodriguez standing there, watching them. Bolan raised his right foot, set it on the bumper and pulled up the cuff of his pant leg. A small Glock pistol rode on his ankle in a holster. He drew the pistol. He sensed Rodriguez tensing, saw her back away a step. Turning toward her, he extended his hand and offered the weapon.

“You need a little something,” he said.

Nodding, she took the pistol from him, pulled back the slide and looked to see whether a round was in the chamber. Satisfied, she let the slide snap forward and slipped the pistol into her waistband.

“Thanks,” she said.

Spinning away from the car, the Executioner strode toward the mouth of the alley. When he reached it, he paused for a couple of heartbeats and glanced in both directions to see whether Dumond’s men had followed them. Men and women, tanned and fit, walked up and down the sidewalk, smiling and laughing.

Bolan slid the Beretta into the shoulder holster under his jacket and stepped from the alley, with the others moving behind him. As they moved up the street, he glanced at Rodriguez. The woman had plastered a smile on her face and was walking with a steady, confident gait, all of which took attention from her mussed hair and ripped jacket. In the distance, Bolan could hear sirens. He assumed police and emergency vehicles were speeding to Dumond’s estate. Once they arrived, they’d find the place littered with bodies.

And, if prowl cars weren’t already sweeping the area for Turrin and him, they soon would be. Once the police found the Jaguar, they’d realize whoever had driven the car had moved away on foot. They’d establish a perimeter that would make it harder for Bolan and the others to get away quickly.

They needed to move fast before that happened.

They’d put a couple of blocks between themselves and the Jaguar when Bolan spotted a police car halted at the intersection just ahead of them. The officer driving the car stared at them. Had Dumond or his people given the police a physical description? Bolan doubted it, but he felt himself tense up just the same.

“Is he looking at us?” Turrin asked, his voice low.

“Seems like it,” Bolan replied.

Rodriguez cast a glance at the soldier. “What if he is looking at us?” she asked.

“Let him look,” Bolan replied with a slight shrug.

“We can’t fight him.”

“You’re right. We can’t. And we won’t.”

One of the few rules Bolan had in his War Everlasting was that he never would draw his weapon on a police officer, even if the cop was about to shoot him. A second later, the traffic light changed and the squad car lurched forward and turned onto the street Bolan and the others were walking along. The officer at the wheel gave them one last look as he drove past, but kept going.

“Thank God,” Rodriguez said quietly.

“Yes and no,” Bolan said. “We just gained a couple of minutes. But if the guy’s instincts nag at him enough, he may turn around and want to talk to us. Look at us. We don’t exactly look like rich, carefree tourists.”

“True.”

When they reached the intersection, Bolan veered right down a side street and followed it away from the main drag for three blocks. An older-model blue Citroën parked along the curb caught the warrior’s eye. He walked up to it, peered through a side window, looking for blinking red lights that might signal an alarm, but saw nothing. Pulling his arm back, he shot forward and drove the point of his elbow into the glass. The window shattered on impact, glittering shards falling to the ground and into the car.

Bolan reached through the window, unlocked the door and within seconds was seated inside the vehicle, working to hotwire the starter while Turrin watched their surroundings. Once the engine growled to life, Turrin opened the passenger-side door and gestured for Rodriguez to climb into the backseat. As she settled inside, he stuck one leg into the car before the sound of yelling caught his attention. He turned and saw an elderly man, silver hair contrasting against deeply tanned skin, running down the street, yelling in French and shaking his fist.

Turrin folded himself into the car and slammed the door just as Bolan began wheeling it from its parking space. He gunned the engine. The Citroën gained speed as it hurtled away from its owner who was now standing in the street, shaking a fist at the thieves stealing his car. The soldier navigated the car out of the neighborhood and aimed it toward the safehouse.

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