The guy lost balance, wobbled in midair and touched down hard upon the concrete floor, his silk suit offering no traction. He slid into collision with some standing scenery, which collapsed around him. His partners watched for half a heartbeat, sizing up the situation, then they made their move.

One of them made straight for Bolan and the other turned on Anders, bringing both hands up in the traditional karate stance. There was no time for Bolan to check out the comic's response now, not while he was fighting for his life against a pro who obviously knew the moves. But there is still a difference, right, between rehearsing in a gym and working out on humans who have nothing left to lose except their lives. A punching bag will never sidestep, never slam a rabbit-punch into your kidneys when you least expect it — and the training only takes you so far toward the razor's edge of combat.

Bolan on the other hand had been there many times, and he had always come back from the edge victorious.

Sometimes he was severely wounded, but the Executioner knew that injury in battle could make a tougher, stronger soldier in the end.

He had picked up the moves from experts in the Orient and then refined them on his own through years of combat trial and error. And if the Executioner was no Bruce Lee, his adversary was no goddamned Mack Bolan, either.

Bolan saw the hard hand flashing toward his face and feinted left, going in below it, driving bone and sinew into yielding ribs with all his might. The thin opponent doubled over, retching, gasping for a breath, but the Man from Blood was not through with him yet. No way.

Bolan seized a wrist — the one that had been meant to drive bare knuckles through his face — and twisted, bringing the arm out to full stiff extension. He wrenched it up and back until the socket yielded, and at the same instant drove his full weight down onto the elbow in a power smash.

There was a matchstick cracking sound, a strangled scream, and pain drove Bolan's adversary to his knees. The useless arm hung slack against his side, its outline now reminding Bolan of a cartoon figure's arm, just caught inside a door.

The guy was sobbing, and the Executioner put him under with a swift kick to the head, his heel impacting on the temple of that would be samurai and driving him against the nearest wall where he lay slack and flaccid like a leaky bag of grain. When Bolan looked, the comic already had his man on the ropes, employing moves they never taught in any comedy school. A slashing right cross dropped the hoodlum in his tracks, and Anders stepped over his prostrate form to survey the field, looking for other contestants.

"Want to leave them here?" the comic asked. "We've got a good custodian."

"Why not," the Man from Blood responded.

"Use a drink?"

"I thought you'd never ask. Just let me change."

Bolan followed Tommy Anders through the narrow door into his dressing room. Behind them, three of Tokyo's finest were stretched out on the cold cement, already drawing curious show girls and stagehands. As the door closed behind him, Bolan heard them calling for someone to fetch security, an ambulance.

The numbers, right.

He heard them running now, and he was running out of time in Vegas. This had been a skirmish, but it would be suicidal to hang around and answer questions for police.

Tommy Anders recognized the urgency and kept his quick-change to a minimum, having Bolan in and out of there in something less than one minute flat. They were well along their way in the direction of the parking lot before security arrived to deal with their attackers.

Outside, the desert night was cooling off despite the blood-red fire of glaring neon. By midnight, you could freeze to death beyond the city. But for Vegas this night, Bolan forecast heat enough to burn some houses down. Enough perhaps, to warm the whole damned town.

"We've played this scene before, you know." Mack Bolan smiled and sipped his coffee, making one more scan of the perimeter around the all-night drive-in restaurant. "I thought it looked familiar." And the Executioner could not escape a certain sense of deja vu, right, sitting there with Anders in the rental Ford. A sense that he had seen and done it all, been through it all before with the comic. Their initial meeting had been backstage from a Vegas showroom, all those lives ago, and Anders had been feeling pressure that time, too. The heat was coming from a pair of Mafia sluggers then, and Bolan had pulled him out from under. They had cooperated on that first campaign in Vegas, and later when they met again in Honolulu, Anders had rendered valuable aid to Bolan's hellfire effort on another front.

He was an ally, right, and so much more.

He was a friend.

"You still have that old knack for charming your admirers," Bolan told him wryly.

Anders grinned, shrugged.

"What can I say? It's my magnetic personality."

"You working this officially?"

"Let's call it a fortuitous coincidence. The date was booked, and then it all broke loose between the local Mob and their Eastern competition. Hal figured as long as I'm here, what the hell."

Mention of the big Fed's name made Bolan smile. The man from Justice was another friend, and friends were few and far between in Bolan's world these days.

"How is... everybody?"

"Getting by. You know how it is — win one here and lose it back over there. You're missed, guy, where it counts."

There was a momentary silence and when he resumed the comic's voice was lighter, more upbeat.

"I hear you took a turn with Hal there a while back."

Bolan smiled and nodded at the reference. His "turn" had been with a group called Savannah Swingsaw, four women determined to shake up the Mob in the southern United States.

"Some guy," Bolan said.

"Yeah." Another silence, longer this time, finally broken by the comic in a cautious tone. "You here to meet the man from Tokyo?"

"He's on my list. Were those his soldiers at Minotte's?"

"You were there?" Anders's eyes widened briefly. "Well, that clears up some question marks. And the kamikaze squad was his — or a very nifty frame."

"There was a girl..."

"Oh, yeah?" The comic raised a lone ironic eyebrow. "I wish you'd tell me where you find the time."

Bolan's answering grin was weary, brief.

"You've got to pace yourself," he answered. "But this was strictly business. Bob Minotte had her in the bag before the samurai express rolled in. I got there just in time to take her out."

"The litter on the highway?" Anders spoke with mild awe in his voice, a tone that said he knew the answer before Bolan voiced it.

The Executioner's silent nod was anticlimactic.

"She does some writing for the Daily Beacon here in town. Name's Lucy Bernstein."

A frown creased the ethnician's face. He seemed to be searching for something in the mental data banks and finally found it.

"You don't mean old Abe Bernstein's granddaughter? That the one?"

"Abe Bernstein?" Small alarms were going off in the back of Bolan's mind, insistent but still ill-defined. The name meant something to him, but....

"You have to know him, man," the comic said. "The Father of Las Vegas. Word is, he built everything that Meyer and Bugsy missed."

And it was coming back to Bolan, sure. He had dismissed the name and face, consigned it to the small "inactive" file reserved for mobsters who retired because of age or illness, but he called the reference back now, ran it through the terminals of memory.

Abe Bernstein was originally from Detroit, where he had helped to found the famous Purple Gang around the time America was entering World War I. He got a jump on Prohibition, staking out a territory on the river just across from Canada and turning bootleg liquor into liquid gold, defending his investment with a formidable army.