Goddamned sorry.

Now the telex out of Justice had arrived, on top of all the other problems he was looking at. It said the Executioner was still alive and kicking ass. No word on where the hell he had been hiding for so long, just a curt advisory to keep the eyes peeled. Bolan might resurface anywhere, at any time, and bagging him was suddenly the number-one priority again.

The Feds thought he was heading west, but then again.

Reese did not want to think about the consequences of a second Bolan visitation. Not with all the crap he was facing on the job. He had a psycho killer on the loose who liked to butcher joggers and another with a taste for little girls. He had a rising murder rate among the Cubans, with a drug war in the offing. Kuwahara's Japanese were squaring off against the Brotherhood and now he had LaMancha and his goddamned strike force horning in. They would be breathing down his neck at every turn and muddying the waters in their efforts to be "helpful" — if he let them. "Your town is set to blow wide open." Great.

He was not losing any sleep about Minotte or his soldiers at the stud farm. Vegas was a better place without them, and the means of their abrupt departure did not faze him in the least. Old Benny Siegel used to say, "We only kill each other," and for Reese's money, none of last night's crop were likely to be missed.

Minotte's "family" would lay him out in style down south, and Kuwahara might be burning incense for his hitters. But to Captain Reese the lot of them were so much garbage, ready to be carted off for landfill somewhere.

He was troubled, though, by what had gone down after Bob Minotte and his men were wasted at the hacienda.

There was solid evidence of someone crashing through Minotte's gate, but they were outbound, and the chase crews all had come to heavy grief a few miles down the highway from the stud farm. No sign there of Kuwahara's samurai, and Reese was wondering if Seiji's action was the only violent game in town. If not.