“Hey! What’s happening?” a young man, just a teenager, called from the neighboring house.
“Go back inside!” Bolan warned. “Justice Department!” The kid slammed the door as if monsters were barking up his walk.
Bolan hit the porch in a combat crouch. His boots scattered brass shell casings, which were thick on the porch floor. The front of the house had been shot to pieces, peppered with so many bullet holes that it looked like Bonnie and Clyde’s last ride. He couldn’t tell, from this vantage, exactly what was producing the black smoke curling from the rear of the building.
He struck the door with a powerful front kick, near the knob, not bothering to try it. Molding flew in three directions as the flimsy, hollow-core door slammed against the interior wall. Bolan ignored that; he was already charging inside, ready to flood the room with 5.7 mm rounds.
The living room was a slaughterhouse.
A smoke alarm was squealing. The fire from the rear of the house was gaining momentum; its crackling was growing louder. Smoke drifted in lazy clouds through the L-shaped living area, escaping through bullet holes spidering the bay window at the front of the home. The plaster walls were pocked with similar holes and sprayed with blood. More blood soaked every visible piece of furniture. There was a dead woman on the couch, two dead men on the floor near a card table and a pair of reclining chairs, and another dead man near a very old and very shattered tube television. The man near the television had almost no head. He had taken what was likely a shotgun blast at close range.
Shells were thicker here than they had been on the porch. Bolan crouched and, using a metal pen he carried in his web gear, fished up first one, then another. He checked half a dozen casings throughout the living room. All were .40 caliber. He pocketed several, careful not to touch them.
Crouched low, he moved from body to body, making sure. There were no signs of life. The house was a tomb. It was worse than that, however.
The dead hadn’t merely been neutralized; they had been mutilated, shot again and again in what could only have been postmortem overkill. Bolan filed that fact for analysis even as his mind worked overtime to make sense of what he was seeing.
Had the skinhead safe house been hit by a rival gang? A conflicting security firm? Counterterrorists, perhaps operating without authority on American soil? The first was possible; the second was unlikely, given the Farm’s contacts and Brognola’s knowledge of domestic security operations. The third was possible but didn’t seem to fit. Bolan had only too recently found himself caught between rival security and black-ops personnel from multiple countries, in playing bodyguard and escort to a Very Important Person whom he had to transport to Wonderland. Even at their most vicious, foreign kill teams wouldn’t have wasted the time and firepower necessary to do this kind of job on poorly trained skinhead combatants. An ops team from a nominally allied nation, like Israel, certainly wouldn’t kill so unprofessionally.
The term caught in Bolan’s mind. That was what bothered him. The position of the bodies indicated that the skinheads had barely had time to process the assault on the safe house. They weren’t arrayed behind cover or braced in fatal funnels such as the hallway from the living room to the kitchen. They were, instead, dead where they’d probably been sitting when the attack came. Bolan paused just long enough to snap pictures of the dead, wondering if he would fine Shane Hyde among them. But the Twelfth Reich leader wasn’t there.
He moved down the corridor to the kitchen, holding the FN P90 before him. Two more dead men waited here, one stripped to the waist, his tattoos proclaiming the supremacy of his race and stretching in blues and blacks across his back. He had been shot as he sat at the kitchen table. He lay in a puddle of his own brains amid the mess of an overturned cereal bowl and an opened can of beer.
The fire licking up from the stove and consuming the ventilator hood was almost out of control. Bolan grabbed the dusty fire extinguisher from its strap on the kitchen wall, pulled the pin and sprayed its contents across the stovetop. The extinguisher was long expired, according to its pull-tag, but it did the job. Whatever had been burning was now a black, frosted mess in the center of a charred frying pan.
Food, still cooking on the stove…and the man lying dead at the table had been shot down in the middle of his skinhead’s breakfast of champions. Something about this was very wrong. Bolan took out his phone and photographed the dead men, noting the flashing icon that indicated transmission to the Farm.
“Sarge,” Grimaldi said in his earbud. “The first of the emergency responders is inbound to you in less than three minutes. A pair of uniforms. You’re about to have company.”
“Understood,” Bolan said.
There was a groan from nearby.
At the back of the kitchen, a door that appeared to have been punched several times—perhaps during some skinhead’s drinking binge, producing several fist-size holes in the cheap pressboard—led to the basement. The sounds of pain and distress became louder. They were coming from behind the door, which stood slightly ajar.
Bolan didn’t wait. He simply ripped the door open the rest of the way, angling the short barrel of the P90 against his body so he could target the space without turning his weapon into a lever to be used against him. The gaunt, shaved-headed man lying on the stairs within had full tattoo “sleeves” up his arms. The mesh muscle shirt he wore was ragged and bloody. He was hugging himself, holding his guts in, trying to staunch the massive wound where he had been shot.
“Don’t move,” Bolan ordered. The man held no weapon that the soldier could see, but that didn’t mean he was unarmed. In his time fighting terror and crime, Bolan had seen every sham I’m-wounded ploy in the book. He wasn’t easily fooled. “Who did this?” he said. “Who hit you?”
“I think I’m dying,” the skinhead said. “Hell…I think I’m dying… .”
“Tell me,” Bolan snapped. “Before it’s too late. Before you’re out of time. You can get even. You can hit back at whoever did this. Tell me who it was.”
“You gotta…” the man said. He tried to draw breath and apparently couldn’t. “You gotta…”
Just what it was Bolan had to do, he would never know. The man stopped gasping. The light left his eyes.
That was that. There would be no intelligence to be had here.
“Sarge,” Grimaldi said in Bolan’s ear, “I’m transmitting to the locals. I’m warning them that there is a Justice Department agent on the premises. They don’t like it. I’m not getting confirmation that they’ll hang back.”
“Understood,” Bolan said again. “Out.”
He placed two fingers against the dead man’s neck, knowing he would feel no pulse. A quick check of the skinhead’s pockets revealed nothing. Up once more, Bolan made his way carefully back through the kitchen, just in time to confront a pair of uniformed Alamogordo Police Department officers with their guns drawn.
“Freeze!” they shouted, almost in unison.
“Matt Cooper,” Bolan said, citing the cover identity that appeared on the credentials issued him by Stony Man Farm. “Justice Department.”
“Drop the weapon!” one of the cops called.
“You were contacted,” Bolan said. “You’re interfering in a federal operation.”
“Drop your weapon!” the police officer repeated. His partner looked at him dubiously, though he didn’t lower his own gun.
“Continue pointing that weapon at me,” Bolan said, “and we’re going to have a problem.”
“Are you threatening to fire on duly appointed