Everything Bolan needed was in readiness, except a handle on the Yakuza, and what exactly they wanted in this desert town so many thousand miles from home.
Not what, precisely; that was obvious in Vegas, the town that skimming built. In actuality the question was more how they planned to go about achieving what they sought.
And whether Bolan could move fast enough to stop them short of resolution. If he could not, then Las Vegas was in for a bloody season of suffering. If he could — well, there would still be blood enough to go around.
The warrior did not care for the alternatives, but he was used to playing by the rules that others had established for him. It was how you bent the rules that made the game your own. And Bolan was playing to win in Las Vegas. All the way.
5
Sam Reese slumped down into the vinyl-covered swivel chair and cocked his feet up on a corner of the cluttered desk. His narrowed eyes were focused on the door, but he was seeing Frank LaMancha, hearing him as if the Fed was still in the office.
"You've got a gang war on your hands." There had been something out of place about LaMancha, something cold and almost deadly in his eyes, his voice.
As if he knew exactly how it felt to drop the hammer, and did not mind the feeling one damned bit.
Sam Reese had pulled the trigger twice in his career with metro, and he knew it took a special kind of man to pop those caps dispassionately. A killer, for sure.
That was the reading that he got from Frank LaMancha. The guy was a killer.
The federal agents Reese was used to dealing with were usually clinical, detached, like CPA's examining a ledger full of dry dead figures. They knew their jobs all right, but they were used to working at a distance from the crimes they were investigating, and they generally lacked the took, the feel, of troopers long accustomed to the trenches. But that LaMancha had the bearing of a man who did his fighting one on one. A soldier's bearing. There was a trace of military ramrod in his stance, the posture that a CPA could never emulate regardless of the guns and badges handed to him back in Washington.