When he was finished, Johnny returned to the highway, drove another twenty miles to Wellton and found a drive-in restaurant. He killed an hour with a burger, fries and milk shake, watching squad cars rocket past, westbound for Yuma. When Bolan was halfway through his meal, a motorcycle officer pulled in behind him, eyed him hard for several seconds, then revved up his Harley and continued on his way.

The younger Bolan felt as if he might have aged a decade in that hour, waiting for a fraction of the heat to dissipate.

He would be forced to watch his speed from here on, avoiding further contact with the state patrol. He had already used his quota of luck for one day, borrowing against tomorrow, and he didn't need another run-in with the law to make that point. He still had miles to go before he reached the killing ground in Santa Rosa, and he had already wasted too much time.

Grant Vickers returned the microphone to its hook, frowning as he leaned back in his swivel chair and cocked his boots up on a corner of his desk. The sheriff's deputy had been properly solicitous, reminding Vickers that there wasn't much for them to do without at least a general description of the suspects or their vehicle. It was a not-so-subtle way of telling Vickers he was wasting everybody's time, and they would doubtless share a laugh at his expense in Tucson, but he had been left with no alternatives. Emergency receiving would report Bud Stancell's injuries, and it would be peculiar if the local law did nothing in a matter of felonious assault. His contact with the sheriff was routine, and he would let the matter rest right there unless somebody on the home front started asking questions. If it came to that, he knew that he could always stall them, falling back on lack of evidence, descriptions, and the like to camouflage his own deliberate inaction on the case.

He had gone looking for Camacho after leaving Becky at the clinic, and had been relieved to find the bastard gone. There was no sign of Hector, his companions, or the souped-up Chevy they had driven into Santa Rosa. Maybe they had gotten lucky, Vickers told himself; they might have found their pigeon, wrapped him up and hauled him back across the border to Rivera. Maybe.

But he didn't think so.

It would take a sheer, remarkable coincidence to put the stranger in their hands. Bud Stancell hadn't seen him, Vickers would have bet his life on that. Camacho had been angry and frustrated when he turned the jackals loose on Stancell; if their quarry had been hiding out at the garage, they would have simply murdered Bud, to silence him, before they stuck their excess baggage in the Chevy's trunk. The beating, Bud's survival, were a testament to Hector's failure in the hunt, and while he might have been recalled, Camacho's absence did not mean his boss was giving up, by any means. There would be other hunters, other crews, and that meant Becky Kent was still in jeopardy.

The lawman sat up straight and eased his gun from its swivel holster. Neither he nor the weapon had seen combat, but he knew the gun would do its job, provided that he had the nerve to use it. Opening the cylinder, he checked the load. He kept an empty chamber underneath the hammer, force of habit, even though he knew it wasn't really necessary. Now, considering the fact that he might actually have to fire the weapon, Vickers dug a box of ammunition from his top desk drawer and slipped another hollowpoint into the vacancy. That made it six potential deaths instead of five. Vickers thought it should have added more weight to the pistol, but he felt no change.

Six dead men in his hand. But would he have the guts to stand against Rivera? He had been on the bastard's payroll longer than he cared to think about, and there was every chance that he would be committing suicide by opposing Rivera's army. But if it came down to killing, and if he could get in close enough...

It all hinged on Rebecca Kent. If push came to shove, Vickers didn't give a damn about the town; a year or two at this rate, Santa Rosa would dry up and blow away. But Vickers held the woman in high regard. It would have been too much, perhaps, to say he loved her, but it could have come to that, in time. Unfortunately, time was something he did not have a surplus of just now.

It would be easier for all concerned if he could simply find the man Rivera's goons were looking for. He could arrest the stranger on some trumped-up charge, pretend that he was driving Mr. X to Tucson for safe keeping, and deliver him to Hector or whomever on the highway outside town. Unfortunately, Vickers had no more idea of where the stranger might be hiding than he had of where Camacho and his troops had gone. The bastard might be anywhere, assuming that he ever got to Santa Rosa in the first place.

Wounded, walking in from somewhere to the south, it would have been so easy for the pigeon to collapse and die before he reached the city limits. Hector might be wasting everybody's time and raising hell for no good reason, but the lawman knew Camacho and his boss would never understand that point of view. It would require a vast expenditure of time to search the desert thoroughly, and in the meantime, if the hunch was wrong, their quarry might be miles away and singing to the state police.

If only Vickers had some rough idea of who Rivera's men were looking for. A "gringo," sure, but what the hell did that mean in the States? It ruled out Mexicans and Indians, for openers, but Vickers knew that even blacks might be considered gringos, based upon the attitude of those applying labels at the moment. As a positive description, it was worse than useless, fitting four-fifths of the country's populace. He could go out in search of tramps, pick one at random, shoot him before he turned him over to the drug lord. But if Rivera had some means of identifying the man he wanted, it would be a wasted effort. And he knew that an effort to deceive Rivera, if discovered, just might get him killed.

There would be time enough for that, and if he had to risk his life, Grant Vickers did not plan to waste it on a goddamned tramp. He checked his watch, saw it was time to make another drive-by on the clinic, just to satisfy himself that none of Hector's goons had doubled back to play the answer game with Becky. If they touched her, tried to harm her... well, he would be forced to make a choice when that occurred. But in the meantime, there was time to kill, and he would kill it on the road.

Before he reached the sidewalk, Vickers turned and went back to his office. He opened the top drawer of his desk, withdrew the box of hollowpoints, another box of shotgun shells that lay half-hidden under rumpled correspondence. He would not be needing them, of course, but it was better to be cautious when tomorrow started looking shaky and you couldn't count on waking up to see the sun. The constable was not declaring war, by any means, but if war came, he meant to have an edge.

All things considered, Vickers thought it was the only way to fly.

"Why did you do it?"

Bolan did not have to ask what "it" was. They had danced around the subject of his occupation once before, and he had watched the lady chewing on it in the meantime, getting nowhere with her own attempts to put herself inside his mental process. Frowning thoughtfully, he cocked a thumb toward Main Street, baking in the noonday heat, and answered with a question of his own. "Why do you stay?"

She came back at him quickly, without hesitation. "People need me here. This is my home, I grew up just a quarter-mile away and went to school here, through eighth grade. Of course, there were more children then." She seemed to lose her thread of concentration for an instant, but she snapped back quickly. "I fulfill a necessary function."