He drove around the block and parked his rental in an alleyway behind a liquor store just down the street. Another moment to select and stow his arms, and then he hiked back, taking about thirty seconds to reach the service entrance off Fremont Street.

And they were waiting for him, naturally. He saw them from a half block away, two men in sky-blue uniforms proclaiming them to be Gold Rush security. The mismatched weapons in their holsters told him they were private — still professional, but lacking care for detail and appearances. As he approached the soldier kept one hand inside the wide slit pocket of his topcoat, wrapped around the Beretta's grip. His finger curled around the trigger in anticipation, and the full weight of the silent weapon in his grasp was reassuring, almost comforting.

A warrior came to trust his weapons, to rely upon them as he might upon a trusted friend. Right now, the lethal 93-R was in good hands — and so was the Executioner.

The guards had noted his approach and they moved out to head him off. Some brief exchange was whispered softly between them, lost to Bolan's ears.

No matter, he did not need to hear them. He was deep inside their minds, anticipating any move they might make. He knew they would block him, standing shoulder to shoulder across the narrow service entrance when he tried to step around them. On the left, one of them raised a hand, palm outward, with the other resting ominously on his holstered sidearm, like a warning.

"Sorry, sir. We're closed."

"Try back next week," the other one chimed in. "Right now we got some union trouble."

Bolan's smile was icy, but the men were busy looking elsewhere and they never saw it, concentrating as they both were on the hand that poked out of his open topcoat, rising into view and bringing with it silent death. They saw the weapon simultaneously, each man peeling off in opposite directions with a single practiced motion, going for their weapons, maybe knowing they could never hope to make it.

He took the tall one first, a single measured squeeze dispatching silent death to close the gap between them, a parabellum mangler opening his cheek beneath one eye and boring through to find the brain. The guy kept going through his paces, traveling without a conscious object now, colliding with the wall and then rebounding in a boneless mass across the doorway.

By the time he hit cement, the sentry's partner was a fading memory, wet pieces of himself adhering to the window and the wall behind him where Bolan's single round had exited behind one ear. He sat down hard, no longer reaching for the pistol that was still secure inside his holster. Bolan checked the alley once again in each direction, taking time to drag the bodies ten feet from the doorway and depositing them together in a waiting dumpster.

They would be there when the trucks from Silver State Disposal came to get them with the other garbage in the morning.

Two down, and how many left to go?

The Executioner had no way of determining the answer in advance, and even if he had been able to predict the odds against him it would not have made a qualitative difference in his actions. He was here to fight, to spread the cleansing fire among his enemies, and he would carry out that mission whether five guns or five hundred waited for him in the Gold Rush, right.

The Executioner was not a gambler, normally. He much preferred to make his moves on the basis of reconnaissance and hard intelligence, but sometimes there was only time for action.

Like now.

He would be gambling this time, with the highest stakes that any man possessed — his life. But more than that, if he should lose, it would be victory for the cannibals and a defeat for everything that Bolan cherished.

He was up against the house odds, but there were ways around those odds. A skillful player with the guts to stand up and defy the house could sometimes break the bankroll and come out a winner. Someone with the guts of a warrior. An Executioner, perhaps. H e slipped inside the service entrance, shedding his topcoat to reveal the armament he wore beneath it, moving boldly toward the main casino now.

Mack Bolan's life was riding on the line, and he was playing out the only hand available. It was a death hand, right, and for the moment he was dealing.

Spinoza faced the woman across his desk, reading the fear in her eyes and knowing he could use that fear against her, given time. She would say anything, do anything he asked her to when he was finished with her.

Given time.

But time was one commodity that he was running short of, and the others with him in the room — Liguori, Johnny Cats, and Tommy Dioguardi, from Minotte's family — were taking every opportunity to let him know of their impatience.

They were chafing at the bit, unsettled by the news from Kuwahara's. Paulie and the gunners from New York had run into a storm out there, and from all reports the few of them who walked away from it were looking at six-figure bail, for openers. It would take time to get them out — the ones who were not hospitalized already — and meantime the chieftains who were gathered at the Gold Rush had begun to feel exposed, unprotected. Spinoza was not worried.

There were still some forty guns at the hotel, and even if that bastard Kuwahara was alive, he would be tied up with the cops until they sorted out the shooting down in Paradise. If he was still alive, Spinoza meant to find it out and have a hot reception waiting for him when he made his bail, damn right. A welcome-home party that the little Nip would long remember.

As for the woman.

It was disturbing, Dioguardi's story of her showing up at Bob Minotte's just before the raid that took the Southern capo's life. She did not have the lethal look about her, but Spinoza had learned never to take anything for granted when it came to life and death. He put no faith at all in blind coincidence, and that meant she had a reason for her presence at Minotte's, and now here, in the Gold Rush.

Whatever that purpose might be, he meant to find it out within the hour. By any means necessary.

"All right, let's try it one more time," he said. "I want your name, the reason that you're here... and after this is settled, we can all relax. You can go home."

"Like hell..." Liguori started to intrude, but Frank Spinoza raised a hand and cut him off.

"Excuse my friends," he said, forcing a smile. "They're just a bit excited — and they don't take kindly to trespassers, eavesdroppers... that kind of thing."

The woman sat mute, just staring back at him, and underneath the fear, there was something else — a kind of grim determination, maybe, that told Spinoza to expect resistance.

Fine.

He had encountered stubborn types before, and where persuasion failed, the application of strategic force was often more effective. Spinoza reached inside his top desk drawer, drew out the Browning automatic and set it on the desk between them with its muzzle pointed in the woman's direction.

"Now. I understand you're scared," he told her. "And you've got good reason. If I don't get answers from you pretty quick... well, I can't be responsible for what might happen to you."

"I've got nothing to say," she informed him, her voice small and quaking. "You're holding me against my will. That's kidnapping. I'll stack that against a trespass charge any day, so go ahead and call the police."

"When I'm ready." Spinoza felt his smile going, but could not retrieve it in time. "First thing, I'm going to have those answers."

Silence once again and another toss of the head that set her hair in dancing motion all around her face.

"Goddamn it, Frank..."

"Shut up, Larry. Leave this to me."

And he could feel the others staring at him in amazement, wondering where he found the guts to talk that way to other capos, but Spinoza was no longer worried about their reactions. He raised the pistol, circling the desk to stand before the woman, and bent down, his face mere inches from her own.