"You want to leave with me?" Bolan asked her.

"Where to?" she replied, smiling woodenly.

Bolan shrugged. "Does it matter?" he asked.

She shook her head and placed a hand in his. He led her to the new Mercedes, put her inside, then climbed in and cranked the motor. They spun across to the gate. The man whom Bolan had tagged "Andrew Hardy" glanced at her and showed Bolan a smug grin. A bloodstained handkerchief was wound tightly about one of his hands. He leaned against the Mercedes with his good hand and said, "Quite a show, Franky."

"Yeah," Bolan said. "Tell Benny Peaceful I'm taking care of the kid. Tell 'im I said to watch things until I get back."

"Don't you worry none about Benny," Andrew Hardy reassured him.

Bolan nodded curtly and released the clutch. They cleared the gate with a screech of tires and powered down the lane to the main road. Benny Peaceful did not know it yet, Bolan was thinking, but he needed everyone's worry. A family reckoning was coming for this day's work. Bolan knew a momentary twinge of sympathy for the insurgents, but clamped it back, seeing the hired guns in their true light: as budding Lou Penas. The world could get along without them.

Andrea looked back briefly as they swung out of the lane. She shuddered, then straightened and moved closer to Bolan. "Whoever you are," she said quietly, "you've just delivered me from purgatory."

Bolan smiled. "There are two ways out of purgatory, you know," he reminded her.

"Which way are we taking?" Andrea murmured.

Bolan could not answer the girl, but he had a pretty good idea of his own route. It would be a familiar one. A shadow life in a shadow world, taking on three dimensions only when someone's blood flowed. Bolan knew his route. He squared his shoulders, encircled her with an arm, and drew her closer. "Just keep looking at that horizon up there," he told her.

"What will that do?" she quiety inquired.

"It will remind you that you're still alive, that the world is still turning, and that just about anything could happen next."

The girl sighed and moved her head onto his shoulder. They had reached the junction of the main east-west highway. Bolan looked to the west and into the blood-red of a desert sunset. "Oh no," he muttered, swinging east, "I'm not heading into that."

But the Executioner did not need a symbolically red sky to overshadow his future. The red of blood was etched into his very shadow, and all compass points would lead inevitably to the same horizon. If there had been reason for the Mafia to hate and fear Mack Bolan in the past, the time was fast approaching when they would rise up with all their wrath and power to crush this greatest of all threats to their continued existence. Pat and Mike lay just across the Executioner's next horizon. In Bolan's shadow world of the immediate future, all skies were bloody red.

For the moment, however, there was another victory which was not quite a victory, a good car under him, a straight road ahead, and a warm woman in his arms. Andrea sighed, "Wherever you're heading, just take me with you."

"No hard feelings?" Bolan asked her.

"My Poppa died before I was born, Mack," she said.

"What'd you call me?"

"I'll call you anything you'd like," she whispered.

Bolan sighed through his battle mask. "Just don't call me Lucky," he said, and kissed her, and realized that the mask did not have to be all battle.