Rebecca Kent picked up the telephone receiver, hesitated, listened to the dial tone for a moment, then replaced it gently in its cradle. If her patient had been truthful with her, if his story was not lies, half-truths and fantasy, she might touch off a bloodbath by alerting the authorities. If desperate criminals were hunting Bolan — if her patient even was Mack Bolan — his predictions followed a repulsive kind of logic. Violence fed upon itself, and men who made their living with the gun would not be shy about eliminating women, children, any witnesses.

She thought about Grant Vickers, wondering how he would cope with a full-blown shoot-out in the streets of Santa Rosa. He was big and strong enough, of course, but he was not a "kick-ass kind of guy." Despite a term of military service, he was no more of a match for armed professionals than she was. If she called him, if he recognized her patient, he would have to call the county sheriff, possibly the state police. Meantime, although he might be placed in custody, Mack Bolan would remain there, in her clinic, while his would-be killers searched the streets, eliminating his potential sanctuaries, one after another. If they knew that he was wounded...

She broke the train of thought before it reached its logical conclusion, looking at the problem from another angle. What if her persuasive patient was not Bolan? Or if he was the Executioner, suppose that he was running from police instead of criminals. What then? If she ignored her duty, she would automatically become the man's accomplice. She could lose her license, everything that she had worked for, suffered for, these past fifteen years. If she was so damned gullible that she believed the first lame story she was handed by a liar desperate for time, she might be sacrificing everything upon the altar of stupidity.

She reached for the telephone again, but hesitated. Something in the patient's eyes, his voice, had struck her as sincere. Rebecca Kent believed she was a decent judge of human nature — one appalling, hideous exception notwithstanding — and her instincts told her that the man had not been lying to her. There was danger close at hand, but having come that far, what could she ever hope to do about it?

If she could not hand off the problem to Grant without endangering his life, the lives of everyone in town, what could she do? She pictured Vickers in his uniform, the little half smile on his sunburned face, a pistol firmly planted on his hip. He tried so hard to be the classic Western lawman, but a town like Santa Rosa offered nothing in the way of challenges, no opportunities to deal with violence in a practical capacity. From dating Grant, she knew he was a gentle man, albeit rough around the edges. When he had tried to make a pass at her and she had shied away, he took the cold rebuff without a macho show of angry disappointment. There had been no bluster, no reminder of the money he had spent on dinner, nothing whatsoever in the way of force. She had respected him for that, and had been grateful at the time, but now she weighed the constable's potential as a rugged fighting man and found him wanting.

Rebecca Kent was not an expert, but she thought it must require a certain kind of man to kill professionally, in cold blood. Most men — most women, when it came to that — could take another life in self-defense, or in defense of those they loved. A smaller number found it in themselves to murder for revenge, an exorcism of their private demons. But the true professionals — assassins, mercenaries, and those of their ilk — were something else entirely. There was something in their makeup, or deleted from it, that permitted them to kill and kill again. For money, for the sport of it, or from commitment to a cause.

From her observation of the patient, Rebecca Kent believed he had that "something else" about him. She could not begin to understand his motivating cause, although, if she remembered rightly, stories in the press had mentioned something of a family tragedy behind his one-man war. In any case he did not strike her as the kind of mad-dog killer who preoccupied the media these days. Unless she had been absolutely taken in, he was a thoughtful man, concerned about the consequences of his chance intrusion in her life.

What was it he had said when she informed him that she hated his vocation, all the violence with which he surrounded himself?

"So do I."

And she believed him, foolish though she might have been. There had been no trace of deception in his voice, no cunning smirk behind his eyes. If he was Bolan — and she saw no reason, at the moment, why he should have lied — then he was certainly a killer. But Rebecca Kent would bet her life, her reputation, on the fact that he had never killed for pleasure, out of sport or spite. When he had killed, there must have been a reason that, at least to Bolan's mind, had been sufficiently persuasive to compel his actions.

She had pondered murder, briefly, years ago, before her thoughts of death had turned upon herself, and she had known that it was time to leave L.A. for good. She had been hiding out in Santa Rosa ever since, away from memories of all she had endured, all that she had contemplated, for revenge and out of self-disgust. She hardly ever thought of homicide in concrete terms these days, and on those rare occasions when she did, Rebecca Kent was filled with shame of such intensity that tears welled unbidden, in her eyes. A few more years, perhaps, and she might finally be able to forget.

But she could not forget her patient, lying in the other room, or the conflicting signals flashed by instinct and by common sense.

Instinctively she knew that Bolan had been truthful with her, that his secret presence in her clinic somehow posed a lesser threat than if his presence there was advertised. Meanwhile her common sense demanded that she carry out the letter of the law, inform Grant Vickers of her wounded patient, and divorce herself from any subsequent events.

Except that it would never be that easy. If she gave the wounded man to Vickers, she would be responsible for everything that followed, personally and directly linked to each and every act of violence that resulted from her phone call. By her silence she might save Grant's life, the lives of other neighbors.

And herself?

If Bolan was pursued, his enemies might well suspect that he was wounded. If they traced him there, to Santa Rosa, they would finally, inevitably, come to see her, asking questions, threatening, demanding. What could she accomplish if, as Bolan said, he had been followed by an army?

Nothing.

But the mere inevitability of failure did not release her from an obligation to try. Her Hippocratic oath had pledged Rebecca Kent to help the suffering, preserve all life wherever possible. To her, that meant not only Bolan's life, but any others that might be endangered by a revelation of his presence in her care. If she delivered him to Vickers, thereby saving herself but bringing a massacre upon the town, she would obtain no consolation from the knowledge that her actions had been legal. On the other hand, if she ignored the law and thereby saved an untold number of imperiled lives, had she in fact committed any crime?

Her head was spinning, and she fought to make her mind a perfect blank, erasing all the hypothetical for either side. The choice and risk were ultimately hers, but she had time.

How much?

Enough.

Enough to watch her patient, gauge his progress and decide if he was well enough to travel. Time enough to weigh his story carefully, compute the risks and hazards either way, before she rushed to a decision she might eternally regret.

If she decided that a call was necessary, it would simply be delayed. Grant would not argue with her judgment that a patient's treatment should take precedence above the legal niceties. If she decided not to call, then she would live or die with that decision in the long run.