Amilcar roared behind them. “Prick! I’ll—” Bolan glanced back. The drug dealer had bounced up and the ex-boxer had taken a swing at Dominico. The ex-wrestler held Amilcar’s arm out straight with his elbow and wrist locked. His adversary howled as Dominico held him in a standing arm bar. “I’ll kill you! I’ll kill everyone who ever worked for you! I’ll shank Najelli’s little—” Amilcar gasped as Dominico scissored his arms savagely and Amilcar’s elbow and wrist snapped. Dominico let go of his foe’s arm and the man sagged to his knees, mewling and cradling his shattered limb. Dominico gave him a thunderous slap to the back of the head that pitched him forward. “What did you say?”
Bolan looked at his ally warningly. “Memo…”
“He can still talk!” Dominico spit.
Bolan sighed inwardly. This was what happened when you took amateurs for allies. With a broken arm there was no way to get Amilcar down from the balcony except to throw him. Renewed shouting was echoing up the stairs. This was a nice neighborhood and private security would be responding soon and the federales wouldn’t be far behind them. “You cripple him, you carry him. I still need him and we’re out of here!”
“Don’t wait on me!” Dominico reached down and Amilcar screamed as he was yanked to his feet. Dominico chicken-winged Amilcar’s remaining arm into a come-along grip and pushed the muzzle of his Uzi into the back of his head. “Ándale!” Dominico marched him toward the shattered door. Bolan moved down the hallway. Someone had trained Busto right. She stayed back on Bolan’s six with her pistol held in both hands. Bolan moved to the banister and the twin detonations of a double-barrel shotgun printed a moonscape of craters across his shadow on the wall. Bolan leaned out over the landing and his pistols rolled in his hands. The killer took a .50-caliber slug and a 9 mm triburst simultaneously and the chest of his tracksuit exploded in red. Bolan leaned back out of the line of fire as an automatic rifle cracked and tore splinters from the top of the railing. Bolan rolled down three stairs and shoved his machine pistol out between two of the railing spindles. His triburst tore off the top of the rifleman’s head. The man behind him screamed as he was sprayed with brains and blood. Bolan rose and the big fifty ended the man’s hysterics with a single boom.
The house was suddenly very quiet.
Bolan spoke low. “That’s five. How many more do you have, Varjo?”
The man blubbered something unintelligible and then squealed as Dominico cranked the chicken-wing. “Two! Gal and H!”
Gal and H were conspicuously absent. No one downstairs was shooting or screaming. If they had run outside, the motion sensors would have come on and it was still dark outside. Bolan suddenly had a very unpleasant suspicion. “Who owns the houses on either side of you?”
Amilcar’s voice went from terrified squeak to suicide-run ugly. “I do, motherfucker, and they’re full of my men. So is the house across the street.”
“Shit,” Busto cursed.
Despite having a broken arm and no pants Amilcar laughed. “Shit is right, and I own the cops around here. You better rethink your situation. You better think about your family. I’ll make you a deal. Memo? Kill the yanqui. You can take Najelli and disappear again.”
The hallway got even quieter.
Busto’s gun wasn’t quite pointed at Bolan, but she was looking back at Dominico.
Amilcar’s voice was sick with twisted triumph. “I got at least five guys who want to take over the operation. We go outside? You can’t use me as a shield. They’ll cut us all down. So I tell you what. You call me King Amilcar and kill the yanqui? You can fuck off, Memo, and take the bitch with you. But you better decide real quick.”
Bolan considered the shot. Dominico had cover behind Amilcar. He’d have to cross pistols and blast through Amilcar with the fifty and burn down Busto with the Beretta.
Amilcar’s smile was sickening. “You don’t love me, Memo, but you know I never break my word. You know I’ll—”
Dominico squeezed his Uzi’s trigger.
Varjo Amilcar’s cranium came apart like a water balloon under the onslaught.
Dominico dropped the half-decapitated drug dealer and reloaded with a shrug. “Fuck him. I never liked him anyway.”
Busto sagged against the wall with visible relief. “So what now?”
Bolan had really wanted to ask Amilcar a few more questions, but there was no point in crying over split skulls. “The river. We take his speedboat and go.”
Busto nodded. “Nice.”
Bolan advanced down the stairs. No bullets came. Gal and H had drawn back into either side of the house. They probably had the bottom of the stairs in a cross fire and were prudently waiting for reinforcements. Bolan took the second flight of stairs four at a time and threw himself into a diving roll across the foyer. Pistols barked in his wake and Gal and H shouted back and forth at each other. Bolan came up and saw muzzle-flash at shoulder height in the next room. Gal or H quickly jumped back around the corner. Bolan leveled the big .50 at the interior wall and it jumped three times in his hand as he let loose the thunder. Three silver-dollar-sized craters impacted and behind the wall a man screamed. A track-shoed foot suddenly slid out from cover as the man fell.
“Gal!” The man on the other side of the foyer was screaming. “Gal!”
Bolan used the foot as an index. He lowered his aim, tracked sideways and fired three more times where he thought Gal’s head and upper torso should be. The foot jumped with all three shots and flopped twitching to the tiles.
“Gal!”
Bolan fired his last shot the other way to keep H down and reloaded. “Najelli! Covering fire.”
Busto swung just enough of her body around the landing to aim and began to fire, her Ruger discharging rounds methodically. Bolan marched across the foyer and down the short hall as the woman’s shots made little sonic booms in passing. She stopped as Bolan stepped into the line of fire. He took up the slack and touched off tribursts from the Beretta as he entered the vaultlike living room.
The best cover that had line of sight on the stairs was the wet bar. Bolan shot out the mirror behind it and was rewarded as H screamed. H’s pistol snaked over the top of the bar and popped off several blind shots. The Executioner took a heartbeat to steady his aim and squeezed off a burst that sent the pistol and several fingers spinning away across the bar. H shrieked and what remained of his hand disappeared. Bolan fired off two more bursts at the top of the bar, and his Beretta racked open on a smoking empty chamber with a conspicuous clack!
“I heard that!” H lurched up. He was big and bald and had a machete in his good hand. “You’re dead, motherfucker! You’re…” H’s rant tapered off as he stared down the loaded .50 in Bolan’s other hand.
Bolan idly wondered what kind of people kept machetes behind the bar, but the obvious answer was that drug dealers did. A smart drug dealer would have stocked his bar with shotguns. “Yo, H.” Bolan motioned with the Beretta while he kept the Desert Eagle on the man. “Come on out. We need to talk.”
H stumbled out from behind the bar.
“Leave the machete,” Bolan advised.
The machete clanged to the tiles.
“You want to live?” Bolan asked.
“Yes.”
“Where are the keys to the speedboat?”
“What?”
“The speedboat, at the dock. Where are the keys?”
Fists began pounding on the front door. Busto whispered, “We have company!”
Bolan put the front sight between H’s eyes. “Keys.”
“In the kitchen!