LITMIR.BIZ

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Favor’s driveway, Bolan covering the Uzi with his windbreaker. No traffic passed them on the quiet street, but he imagined neighbors peering from their windows, wondering about the sudden flurry of activity at Señor Favor’s place.

      They wouldn’t call for the police right now, but at the sound of gunfire…

      Bolan scanned the sweeping driveway and the house beyond, saw no one standing near the cars that had pulled in a moment earlier. Eight men had either gone inside the house or fanned out to surround it, vanishing from Bolan’s field of view.

      “What now?” Herrera asked. “Do we knock on Favor’s door?”

      “Not quite,” he said. Spotting the motion sensors ranged along the driveway, Bolan added, “Follow me. Stay off the pavement.”

      She followed without asking questions. Bolan took advantage of the property’s strategically located trees as he approached the mansion, moving at an urgent pace. He had discounted booby traps upon discovering that Favor had no gate to keep stray dogs or children from the occacional intrusion. Blowing them to smithereens or crushing tiny ankles in a leghold trap would certainly have caused his stock to plummet with the neighbors.

      “Don’t you think—”

      He shushed her with a hiss and kept moving toward the house. They’d closed the gap to twenty yards or so when muffled gunfire echoed from inside the house. A shotgun, by the sound of it, one blast immediately followed by the pop-pop-pop of pistol fire.

      Bolan made for the front door, thinking it would be the quickest way to get inside the house. He didn’t care if it was locked, already thinking past the first obstruction, wondering if he had come too late and Favor was already dead.

      Vengeance was one thing he could definitely handle, but it would mean mission failure and freedom for another predator three thousand miles away.

      He reached the porch and found the front door levered open, then pushed shut again by someone who had come before him. Bolan shouldered through it, smelling gunsmoke as he crossed the threshold.

      LUIS RODRIGUEZ CLUTCHED his Ingram MAC-10 SMG and waited for a target to present itself. Nearby, not quite within arm’s reach, his point man lay facedown on white shag carpeting.

      The gringo had surprised them with a shotgun blast from nowhere that had toppled Paco Obregon before they even glimpsed the man they’d come to kill. It was supposed to be an easy job, and now Rodriguez thought maybe he wasn’t being paid enough.

      Their target was holed up inside a room no more than twenty feet from where Rodriguez crouched behind a sofa, painfully aware that springs and stuffing would not save him if the gringo kept on shooting. A glimpse had shown Rodriguez books inside the room, perhaps some kind of library. They’d have to rush the gringo soon, behind a wall of lead, and—

      What was this?

      Madre de díos!

      Right before his eyes, Obregon was struggling to his feet, gasping and coughing, one hand pressed against his stomach while the other fumbled for his pistol on the carpet.

      White shag carpet, without any stain of blood.

      Rodriguez watched as Obregon brushed the rock-salt pellets from his shirt, wincing at contact with the bruised flesh underneath.

      It was a trick! The damned gringo had tried to scare them off, as if Rodriguez and his men were children. The warning shot would cost the gringo his life.

      Rodriguez was about to order the attack, when Paco Obregon retrieved his pistol, snarled a curse and rushed the door alone. A second, louder shotgun blast rang out, and this time there was blood aplenty, spilling everywhere as Paco vaulted over backward, crumpling in an awkward attitude of death.

      Rodriguez crouched lower behind the sofa, all thoughts of rushing the door banished from his mind. Yet he couldn’t simply wait there and allow the gringo to terrorize him into immobility.

      He had six more handpicked killers left, against one man who was accustomed to the soft life, swaddled by his money. Not so soft that he’d forgotten how to pull a trigger, obviously, but it would be shameful to retreat.

      Worse yet, it would be fatal.

      If Rodriguez failed, it wouldn’t be enough to simply return the money. He couldn’t just apologize and take a scolding.

      No.

      The man who had employed him wanted blood.

      Rodriguez flashed hand signals at the two men he could see. The other four had entered through the back door of the mansion and were doubtless waiting for his signal somewhere on the far side of the library.

      Frontal assault was the only option that he could think of, and if that meant losing men, so be it. He would be behind them all the way.

      Rodriguez flashed another hand sign, and his soldiers nodded in response, both edging forward, clutching weapons tightly. They didn’t look at Obregon, leaking blood on the carpet, but rather focused on their target. Like professionals.

      Rodriguez nodded, and they rose together, shoulders hunched into the charge—then started jerking, twisting, lurching through the half steps of some crazy, spastic dance Rodriguez didn’t recognize. It took a heartbeat for his mind to grasp what he was seeing, then he heard the whisper-stutter of an automatic weapon with a silencer attached.

      His soldiers fell together, nearly sprawling over Obregon’s limp corpse. Rodriguez spun to face the new and unexpected source of peril, squeezing off a burst with his Ingram before he had a target in his sights.

      Diving and rolling, wishing that the parlor’s furniture were made from steel and concrete rather than mere wood and fabric, Rodriquez glimpsed another gringo firing at him with some kind of submachine gun.

      Bullets ripped through the upholstery of the stout recliner where he’d come to rest. Rodriguez raised his hand into the gringo’s line of fire, emptied the Ingram’s magazine and hastened to reload.

      The target was supposed to be alone, goddamn it! He’d been told that there would be no bodyguards. It was a promise. In and out, with nothing to detain him at his task.

      Bastards! Rodriguez vowed that if he made it out of this alive, there would be hell to pay.

      Near panic, sweating through his rumpled shirt despite the mansion’s air-conditioning, Rodriguez started barking orders to the four surviving members of his crew. He didn’t know if either of his gringo enemies spoke Spanish, and he didn’t care. It was still five men against two, and Rodriguez could live with those odds.

      One of the other soldiers answered him, a grim affirmative. It was enough.

      Rodriguez broke from cover, bellowing his rage and firing from the hip with his MAC-10.

      A BURST FROM BOLAN’S muffled Uzi dropped the shouting gunman in his tracks. That made four down, and he could hear the other four men of the home-invasion team before he saw them, coming down the hall in a stampede, all firing on the run.

      Bolan saw nothing to be gained by waiting until they were visible. The hallway was a killing pen. He held down the Uzi’s trigger, sweeping its muzzle back and forth, vaguely aware of bright spent brass cascading from the SMG’s ejection port.

      An instant later, Bolan’s targets stumbled into view, three of the four still firing, but without a focus to their aim. They peppered walls, floor and ceiling as their feet got tangled up and brought them crashing down. Except for all the blood and screaming, it resembled something from a slapstick comedy.

      Bolan reloaded, watched the dying shooters long enough to satisfy himself that none of them presented any threat. Gil Favor hadn’t joined the turkey shoot, apparently preferring to remain invisible and bide his time. Bolan edged forward now, conscious of his female companion moving on his flank, her pistol leveled in a fair two-handed grip.

      “Favor!” Bolan called out. “We need to talk.”

      “So talk,” a strained

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