"This is no Mexican standoff, Bolan," Lyons said, his voice slightly quivering in the contained excitement. "I'm police officer, and I'm ordering you to drop your weapon."

"I'm not Bolan. Go ahead and shoot. You'll reach hell one sure step ahead of me."

Lyons's blood ran cold as another voice joined the conversation. It was cool and deliberate, and it was saying, Thumb off, Chopper, and walk away." A tall man was standing on the outide of the chain link fence. Lyons suddenly understood the explosion that had focused his attention to the spot. The center post was half-concealed in a cloud of black smoke; it was twisted grotesquely, and torn strands of the chain link were clinging to it. One section of the fence was curling back toward the next supporting post. They had blown the fence.

The tall man with the cold voice was holding an army .45 at arm's length, and he was pointing the gun at the grinning ape.

"I ain't used to walkin' away, Sarge," the ape snarled.

"It's either walk or be carried, Chopper," the cool voice advised.

Lyons experienced a vague sense of mental confusion. The big guy was taking his part. "Just a minute," Lyons said thickly. "No one is walking away."

"Start walking, Chopper," the tall man commanded sternly, ignoring Lyons's protest completely.

The ape was still grinning but without humor. A growl rattled in his throat; then he got slowly to his feet, his eyes remaining hard and unflickering on the lawman.

Lyons felt dazed. His ears roared. The .38 police special seemed to be hanging out there in front of him of its own volition; yet he was very strongly aware of the slowly tightening pressure of his finger upon the trigger. The ape took a slow backward step, then another, carefully placing his feet on the uneven ground. Lyons angled his gaze toward the tall man. "You're Bolan," he said.

The man nodded curtly. "No fight with you, Officer," he said lightly.

"Since when?" Lyons asked. He did not recognize the sound of his own voice.

Bolan was moving softly toward the ape now, getting between the slowly retreating figure and Lyons. "Never have," he intoned soberly. "You're right, and I'm right." His eyes flicked toward the burning warehouse. There's the wrong ones. There's my fight."

The ape was fading fast now. Lyons wondered vaguely why he was just standing there. Bolan's .45 was now moving slowly down and in. He eased it into the flap of the holster. "Now I'm walking," he said softly.

Lyons shoved his pistol to full arm-extension toward the tall, black-clad figure. "You're under arrest, Bolan," he snapped.

"I'm walking," Bolan repeated. He spun on his heel and faded silently into the darkness.

Lyons stared unbelievingly at the spot where The Executioner had stood. He lowered his revolver and poked it angrily into the holster. The sound of running feet advanced from the confused din at his back, and a moment later two uniformed officers drew up alongside him.

"I thought that explosion came from back here," one of the officers exclaimed. He knelt down and laid a hand on the section of fallen fence, then hastily jerked it away. "Damn, it's still hot. You see anything, sir?"

"Must have been a timed explosive," Lyons muttered. "Damn thing practically blew up in my face."

"You didn't see anything, eh?"

"No." Lyons gazed out into the darkness beyond the fence. So—he'd met the clever bastard face to face. And let him simply walk away. "No, I didn't see anything," he said calmly.

It was just a few minutes before 3:00 A.M., and Zeno Varone knew that there was no sleep in the cards for him this night. He had been pacing back and forth across his sumptuous office for fully ten minutes, ever since the investigating police cleared out, his anger building into a great weighted ball right in the middle of his throat, and he knew that ball would not dissolve until he could spray it back out onto the lunatics who had placed it there. He halted in midstride, legs spread far apart, and brought a fist crashing onto the back rest of a leathered chair.

"How the hell did they get onto me?" he yelled. "How did they know?" He whirled about and jabbed a stiff index finger toward the man who calmly perched on the comer of his desk. "You find out! You hear me? That's what you're getting paid for!"

The other man casually took a drag from his cigarette and blew the smoke toward the ceiling. "Don't remind me of my sins, Varone," he replied lightly. "Don't get too shook up, either. We'll have this guy on ice soon enough."

"Soon enough?" Varone was all but frothing at the mouth. "I'm telling you, right now is not soon enough. Those sonsabitches walked out of here with twenty grand—yeah, yeah, not like I told your pals—twenty grand in cool cash that wasn't even mine. That was family money. Not to mention, hell, not to mention what they did downstairs. I don't even know if my insurance will pay off on this stuff. They'll probably call it an act of war or something. Do you realize? I'm out of business. I'm out of business until I can get all that stuff replaced."

The other man nodded his head soberly and leaned across the desk to crush out his cigarette. "I wonder how your distributor, Strecchio, is taking his loss?"

"Hell, he don't have a nickel of his own in Tri-Coast. It's all organization money, every nickel of it. What's he got to cry about? The discs were mine, not his."

The man grunted, then eased onto the floor and stepped over a window, thrust his hands into his pockets, and gazed down onto the street. "You've overlooked the most important item," he said.

"What have I overlooked?"

"Well, we'd managed to keep your name clean all this time. You're not in our files, you're not on the Attorney General's list—but somehow you got yourself onto Bolan's list. So now you're on everybody's list and in everybody's files. Bolan exposed you, Varone. He blew the whistle on you."

"That son of a bitch!"

"Yeah. You hadn't thought of that, eh?"

"Listen! You gotta do your job! You hear? We ain't been giving you two grand a month to just..."

"Cut it!" the man demanded, his voice deepening in anger. "Don't ever tell me what my job is, Zeno. My job is what I make it. And don't ever tell me what you give me. And for God's sake, don't fall apart. Now—we know a lot about the guy already. We know how he operates, we have a ling on some of his vehicles, and pretty soon—pretty soon—well have this Bolan on ice. Don't sweat it."

Tm calling in the family."

"That would be your very worse mistake! Why do you think they left you living, Zeno? Don't you see this is what they want you to do?"

"Don't tell me. Your cops—they're pretty hot stuff, eh? They run a tight city, eh?" Varone began laughing in an almost hysterical outburst. He went over to the liquor cabinet, mixed whiskey and water in a careless blend, and gulped half of it down. The other man was glaring at him with an angry frown. Varone wiped his lips with the back of his hand and said, That's the same thing I told 'Milio, you know. Well, Where's poor 'Milio now? Huh? Let me tell you something, Mr. Hot Stuff. Your cops are dead on their ass. Know that? They're from nowhere. I'm going to bring some" real class into this problem. I'm not going to sit back and let this guy dance lightly around, stealing and killing, slapping me on the ass, terrorizing my broads, tearing up my property. I'm not going to do that. You're outta your mind if you think I am."

"You're making the same panicky mistake 'Milio made," the visitor pointed out. "You're deciding to fight the guy on his terms."

"No, no—not on his terms; my terms, Charlie. We fight on the same terms, see—only I got a hell of a lot more experience. And a lot more class."