CHAPTER FIVE

      23:59:59.

      It was T-minus now, and it was all Donald “Brick” Lawhorn could do to keep the smile off his face.

      He was moving for the curtained balcony—hitting a button on the side of his Rolex watch, making the instant readjustment with a quick depression and scrolling reset on the digital secondhand display—when he heard the groan.

      “Where are you going? What time…”

      There was some purred question about why the clock was ticking backward as 50 flashed to 49.

      Pulling an ice-cold Heineken beer from the small fridge, cracking it open, he looked back over his shoulder. She was a perfidious little courtesan, straight out of the Yellow Pages under Sweet Dreams Escorts, self-centered, self-indulgent, as vain as the night had been long. She had served his needs well enough, he supposed. That was when he could get her face out of the coke and shut her mouth long enough for her to stop talking about herself. She was supposedly working her way through some local college, doing porn on the side, telling him with a smirk as wide as Biscayne Bay beyond the balcony she got off thinking how other men would abuse themselves while looking at her naked body, all the legions of perverts and family men out there who could only ever have her in their inflamed imaginations, her spreads stoking their evil fantasies and leaving them suspended in frozen burning desire for her while she, on the other hand, could pick and choose who was worthy enough to even breathe the same air as her. Briefly, he pictured his hands around her throat, staring into eyes that silently begged him to spare her life. Any other time…

      He gave her a look he hoped would send her diving under the covers. Instead, the overpaid trollop reached for the tray of white powder on the bed stand.

      He slipped on the dark sunglasses, rolled his shoulders, enjoying the weight of the shoulder-holstered .45 Para-Ordnance P13. When she finally took a breath to deem him interesting enough to inquire what he did for a living, he had told her was head of security for a major computer-telecommunication company, and the VIPs he protected were in a different arena than the usual stuffed suits, hence the weapon. That either sufficed her phony attempt to be curious or she just didn’t give a damn, beyond, that was, collecting her thousand bucks.

      As he brushed past the curtains and stepped onto the pink coral balcony, harsh sunlight, mirrored off the Bay and the Atlantic Ocean beyond the Art Deco enclaves and hotels of North Beach, glinted off stainless steel. He decided the morning sun felt good, another taste of paradise, in fact, as it beat down on bronzed naked flesh that was chiseled to lean, sinewy muscle. He was scarred around the torso and shoulders from ancient war wounds, and that had, indeed, caught her curious, anxious eye, trophies warning her that she was, indeed, sleeping with a lion.

      The real thing.

      At the balcony, picking up his cigarettes, shaking one free and lighting up, he stared down at the inline skaters, the lovebirds and the early morning breakfast crowd gathering under the thatched-roof cabanas, lounging poolside.

      Oh, how he loved Miami, but it was more of a love-hate relationship now that he thought about it.

      South Florida, he thought, was the East Coast’s answer to the shallow, superficial and spineless PC asylum that was Southern California. They partied, drank, drugged the nights away in South Beach. They drove the newest, hottest cars, looking good and outfitted with the latest fashions at the top of the list of their concerns. At the number-one slot of all things vain—they had to be “seen” in all the right and trendiest clubs, these hyena wanna-bes craving to rub elbows with all the vile film and recording and sports worms that had in recent years oozed down here in their silken, bejeweled, perfumed snakeskin carcasses when careers were usually circling the bowl and they had to find a way to keep their faces out there.

      Beyond his general contempt, outside of New York City, some of the most atrocious, senseless crimes—fueled, in large part, by a drug scourge that had never really gone away—had become so commonplace they were little more than the most fleeting of sound bites on the local news.

      As he took a sudden gust of hot breeze in the face and drank deep, the big man’s words rang through his thoughts.

      “Picture this. Five hundred fall suddenly, mysteriously ill. Two hours or so later another five hundred or so are staggering into emergency rooms in yet another city, burning up with fever, puking and crapping all over themselves. Two or three hundred suddenly die. By the following morning it’s a thousand, two thousand. By noon another American city sees it citizens dropping like the proverbial sprayed flies. One, then two more cities find their citizens croaking, and from clear across the other side of the country as walking contagions board planes, trains, buses, or simply drive to the next town. It’s found in the water supply. It’s killing livestock, it’s infected produce, wheat. It’s in the air, the water, maybe even the ground they walk on.”

      Shivering, as he killed the man’s voice behind the rest of his beer, Lawhorn became aware the sweat was running off his chin in fat, thick drops. Twenty-four hours. And after that? he wondered. Would there be enough time? Say if even one of them became stricken, then what?

      There was international travel to consider. There was the rabble doing the first leg of the dirty work for them. There was the fact that once they left the country…

      He stabbed out his cigarette, but lingered as he still smelled her from where he’d done her for the fifth time, mashing her face into the railing.

      The evil creature disgusted him.

      He found her huffing away, her voice on the petulant side as she informed him it would be another thousand dollars if he wanted her for the day.

      Lawhorn grabbed another beer. “Shut up. Get dressed and get out of here. Take the garbage with you. On second thought.”

      Before she could squawk or even blink, Lawhorn had the mirror in hand. He hurled it across the room, scattering a snowstorm of four to five grams. She became the perfect nude model for shock and horror.

      “Five seconds to beat it, and then I get ugly.”

      FORMER LOS ANGELES Homicide Detective Mitch Kramer was nowhere near the full reprobate package the soldier had expected. After the first round of blunt questions and when Bolan decided he had enough to proceed he’d learned something about the ex-cop’s life, or, rather, lack thereof. The subsequent and toned-down Q and A was more to get a read on the man’s character and motivations than simple idle curiosity, since Bolan was on the verge of launching total war. He was still in the process of deciding what to do with the man.

      With a few possible exceptions, Kramer’s tale of woe was pretty much the same for veteran cops worn out and broken down by the job. They were divorced, friendless with the exception of other cops, more often than not had kids who couldn’t stand being around them. They collapsed into all manner of vices, and more often than was publicly reported they ate their gun. As the years ground by on the job, their world shrank and grew darker by the day, and a once-decent conscience, beaming with good intentions and pointing the way of truth and justice, was blunted and callused to the point where a man became an angry loner, aware in some way he couldn’t quite define or understand that he had become contaminated by the very ills and crimes he used to abhor and fight. Oh, indeed, human nature being what it was—inclined to Self and its own needs and desires—the soldier could well imagine the eroding toll of having to listen to lies and excuses and the flimsiest justifications and even for the most heinous of crimes around-the-clock. Of being feared and held in disrespect and contempt by a society that was rapidly becoming more plagued by crime and corruption and where the bad guys were sometimes better armed than whole SWAT teams. Where even far too many law-abiding citizens couldn’t care less about a policeman, as long as they were front and center when they were faced with mortal danger or loss of money and property.

      Bolan realized he was perhaps painting it with a broad brushstroke of cynicism, but, for damn sure, it took a special brand of man, a unique and iron self-control and discipline and courage to march out there, day after day, shift