Thornton quietly replied, "Yes. Just like the last one."

"I guess I wasn't in on that one," Blancanales declared innocently.

"Just who are you people?" Thornton asked, his voice barely audible.

"We came with the man," Blancanales replied, dropping the street accent.

"What man?" Thornton asked wearily.

"Bolan," Schwarz said, soberly studying their victim.

The guy walked jerkily back to his desk and sat down. He poured several fingers of Haig & Haig into his glass and belted it, then wiped his lips with the back of his hand.

"I've been there and back," he declared quietly.

"But I sure talked myself into this one, didn't I?"

"Keep trying," Blancanales suggested. "Maybe you'll talk your way out of something."

"You're in deep shit, Max," Schwarz said gently.

The guy was trapped, and he knew it. He studied his empty glass for a moment, then raised resigned eyes to Gadgets Schwarz. "I was born in shit," he murmured.

"So now you got a chance to wipe yourself," Schwarz told him. "How about it?"

"Full redemption, huh?"

"We can't promise that."

"All right," the self-made millionaire muttered. "Pass the toilet paper."

Bolan's interrogation of Marsha Thornton was revealing very little in the nature of direct intelligence, but she was filling in quite a bit of background insight into the San Diego situation.

"Max is quite a bit older than I am, you know," she told Bolan in that curious turned-off voice. "I wouldn't mind that. I mean, I guess I love him. He's a perfect husband ... in every way but one. Gives me everything I want. Except himself. He… can't. So I have to go find that somewhere else."

"And Max just turns his head, eh."

"Yes. He understands. He just asks that I be … discreet. I guess I've caused him a lot of embarrassment, just the same."

"It figures," Bolan told her.

"Yes. Well, you'd have to know my husband to understand how gross all this could be for him. I mean, a man like him. Well... I have no apologies to make to anyone, except to Max I guess, and he won't let me. He simply understands. I've had a hunger ever since my boobs started budding, Mr. Bolan. I can't turn it off. Don't get the wrong idea. I'm no nympho. But when I'm hungry, I'm hungry."

Bolan murmured, "I can understand that." He was getting a bit of an itch, himself.

"You probably think I'm a nympho," she said, deadpanning a sidewise gaze in his direction. He got very few direct looks from this one. "It's okay, you may as well think it. Everybody else does. I've been in analysis. My analyst says I am definitely not a nympho."

Bolan said, "Okay."

"I hated those hoods. They just kept hanging around Max. Oh, they never came through the front door ... don't worry. But they were always around, always popping up, always underfoot. We'd go out to dinner, and there they'd be. We'd go to a club, and there they'd be." She sighed, a long painful effort. "I guess I figured they may as well be in the bedroom, too. Instant manpower."

Bolan told her, "You don't have to get into this if you'd rather not. I had the Winters telephone tapped. I heard your conversation with Lisa this morning."

That revelation drew not so much as a blink of the eyes. "Lisa's a good kid. We're about the same age, you know. Body age, not soul age. God, my soul must be a million years old."

Bolan could almost believe it.

"I guess, really, I was trying to punish Max by balling his underworld pals. I guess I was getting back at him."

"Humiliating him," Bolan suggested.

"That's what my analyst says. He calls it soiling myself in my husband's own dirt pile. Oh ... it's humiliated him, all right. But as soon as I realized it, I broke it off. You know, I cut out." The deadened eyes traveled to the dog. "That's when I got Thunder. Those hoods wouldn't take no as an answer, not from me. They'd just walk in and grab me by the ass, throw me a quick one, and walk out laughing. Boy. Talk about humiliation. Well, that was six months ago. Lisa was taking lessons at this kennels out on Cabrillo Highway, learning to handle the dogs. I decided to take the training with her, and I ended up with old Thunder here."

She surprised Bolan with a girlish giggle. "Today was the first time I ever ordered him to attack and wow, did you see him getting with it!"

He growled, "Yeah, I saw it."

"I'm really glad he didn't hurt you. You're a nice man, so far I guess. But I had to have Thunder, see. I found out those hoods were passing me around between them, giggling and snickering about me, and I'm sure it all got back to Max. His nympho wife."

The girl shivered and suddenly stood up. She was still clad only in the micro-bikini, bottom only, nothing else. She crossed her arms over the bare chest and walked out onto the sun deck. Thunder trotted along after her.

Bolan drifted out there, also. He stood behind her and gazed over her head at the impossibly blue Pacific with its foaming leading edges rolling onto the beach just below them.

It all seemed, suddenly, totally unreal.

These human moments stole up on a guy, surprising him in the midst of combat, reminding him of his mortality, his humanness.

At this moment, Mack Bolan felt entirely human.

He'd come to this town to blitz it, to wade through blood if necessary, to shake the rats out of their nests. He had not come here for a human experience.

But here he was in the presence of a lovely young woman, sharing her nakedness of body and soul.

He told her, very gently, "Look, Marsha ... all the perfect people are in heaven."

She tilted the shiny red head over her shoulder and smiled at him. Life was forming somewhere back there behind those glazed eyes.

Perhaps, he thought, she was having a human experience also. She asked him, the smile turning sober, "Do you have to kill my husband?"

He replied honestly. "At this point, I don't know. What can you tell me to help my decision?"

She shrugged, delicately. "I just wish you wouldn't. Maybe it's not too late. What can I tell you about Max? I can tell you how he likes his eggs, that he hates pretension and that he loves me very very much ... even at my worst. Is that enough to get him off?"

Bolan did not reply.

She shivered again and tightened the hold on her chest. "He's not like them, Mr. Bolan. Oh ... in his own way, he may be worse than them. More crooked, I mean. He'll admit that he's a crook, it's how he made his fortune. He's a real wheeler-dealer and he's kind of proud of it. But he's not like them." She shuddered. Her voice became tiny as she added, "He just can't get loose from them."

"What's their hold?" he asked her.

"Me, for one thing. But they already had him hog-tied before I came along."

"You how?"

"Oh, this rotten business. Do you know a man called Tony Danger?"

Bolan nodded.

"I went to a party on his yacht. A cruise to Ensenada. Two other girls. Two of Tony's hoods. We ... partied. While Tony took motion pictures of it. I was so stoned on grass, I...."

Bolan said, "Never mind, I know the routine."

"Yes, well, he showed Max some stills from that film. In my presence. Can you beat that? Max didn't say a word, didn't bat an eyelash. Tony told him the negatives were in New York. That they'd stay there in a special file. Just in case Max felt like busting out his britches, as Tony put it. Well, as rotten as I am, I guess Max would do anything to keep them from circulating something like that. I guess…"

Bolan muttered, "Maybe Max is making pilgrimages to the soiling grounds, himself."

She stared at him for a moment then said, "I hadn't thought of that. You mean maybe he's punishing himself for his inadequacy?"