to be just between you and me,' Bolan told him. 'If I find out you've been talking about it, I'll figure you decided to try to screw me up. Understand?'
'Yes, sir, I understand,' the programmer replied meekly.
Bolan left him on the sidewalk, got into his car, and drove off. He really did not give a damn if the programmer talked or not. But after he was finished with the lists, he'd mail them to Lieutenant Weatherbee. Perhaps they could be of some police value if the secret was maintained until that time. He glanced at his watch. It was just past one o'clock. The night had hardly begun. His face twisted into a wry smile. It was going to be a hellish night.
Bolan walked down a darkened hallway, paused in front of a door and held his ear to it for a moment, then leaned back against the opposite wall and opened the door abruptly with a swift kick. The scene that greeted him through the open doorway could have been a pornographic snapshot. An attractive young woman was holding a nude hands-and-knees stance atop a disarrayed bed, positioned crosswise with her feet and the calves of her legs protruding out over the side. A nude man stood between the protruding calves, thrusting vigorously from the waist, his hands tightly gripping the girl's hips. Both man and woman were staring at Bolan with dumbfounded amazement, though the man's physical activities seemed hardly disturbed by the intrusion. There was a strangely unreal quality to the scene, grotesquely silent and dreamlike. Bolan stepped into the room and delivered a smashing backhand blow to the man's face; he released the girl's hips and stumbled back across the room. Bolan felt bad about that, but he reminded himself that there was no morality in a holy war. The same hand that had disconnected the man swung back in a vicious open-hand slap to the girl's poised buttocks. She yowled and fell forward across the bed, then flipped to her side and lay there screaming obscenities. Her erstwhile companion scooped up a ball of clothes and scampered out of the room. A door was flung open down the hall and a youth of about 25 ran into the room shortly thereafter, a wicked-looking knife in one hand. Bolan took the knife away from him and tossed him across the room and into the wall. The girl stopped screaming and stared stupidly at the crumpled figure of the youth. Bolan turned to her and showed her his teeth. 'Any more girls at work here?' he snarled.
She shook her head emphatically. 'D-downstairs, in the bar,' she gasped.
'We'll see,' Bolan said. He strode from the room and began opening other doors along the hallway. There were six in all, and he scored again on the last one. Two naked women were on the bed, rolled together in a tight knot of arms and legs. Bolan could not see the head of either. 'Didn't anybody hear the ruckus?' he asked loudly, then thrust a hand into the tangle and pulled them onto the floor. The ecstatic expression on the face of a woman of about 45 had quickly converted to one of baffled torment. 'What is-get out of here!' she cried.
'Which of you is the working girl?' Bolan asked, grinning.
A well- proportioned younger woman slowly rose to her feet, giving Bolan a frightened once-over. 'Where's your whip?' she asked sullenly.
'Right here,' Bolan replied calmly. He thwacked her across the bottom with an open hand and shoved her back onto the bed, snared the older woman's clothing from a nearby chair and pushed her out the door, draping the clothing about her neck. 'You'd better leave damn quick,' he said, curling his lips menacingly. 'I'm about to shoot up the joint.'
The woman had started crying. She hurried down the hall and shot out the door, still naked. Bolan grinned and stepped back inside the invaded room. The girl was cringing on the bed, twisted bedcovers hastily pulled across her middle. 'Tell Leo I don't like his Main Street joints,' Bolan said. He tossed a marksman's medal onto the bed. Tell 'im!'
He left then and went silently down the back stairs to the alley, got into his car, and departed. Ten minutes later he pulled up at the back of a townhouse complex, consulted one of the lists from the manila envelope, smiled, and went to the back door. He returned to the car a moment later, took a crowbar from the back floor, and went back to the rear door of the building. A well-placed lever-action and a dull snap later the door was open, and The Executioner was inside. He was in a small service hall; he could see the kitchen through a glass porthole in a door to his right, another door was set into the far wall. Things were swinging on the other side of that door; a hi-fi going full blast and other sounds of merriment told the story quite vividly. He went in through the kitchen door, unholstered the.45, and immediately bumped into a nude girl who was leaning drunkenly across a tiled drainboard, vainly attempting to free ice cubes from a frosted tray.
'You're going to freeze a tit,' he warned her, and brushed on past.
'Fat chance,' she mumbled, hardly noticing him otherwise.
It was a large living room, richly appointed with oriental rugs and tapestries and further decorated with wall- to-wall living flesh. The lights were low and nobody seemed to be moving about; but the conversation from the floor level was animated and unrestrained. Nobody seemed to be aware of Bolan's presence. He went back through the kitchen, paused long enough to flip the ice cubes onto the drainboard for the nude girl, allowed her to kiss him in reward, then stepped onto the service porch and inspected the plumbing fittings of the laundry trays. He'd noticed the garden hose outside, on his way in; he went outside and brought it back in with him, screwed one end onto the fitting at the laundry plumbing, looped the other end over in a closing pinch, and turned on the cold water full force, then went back through the kitchen and to the living room, patting the ice-seeker's derriere on the way through, dragging the hose with him. He found the wall with the light switch and brought the overhead lights into the action. A murmuring arose and someone said loudly, 'What's with the lights?' Bolan guessed that perhaps thirty people were present, all nude, and all bound together somehow in a confusing tangle of limbs and torsos. A girl in the center was beginning to shriek in a calmly controlled fashion; Bolan's roving eye found her and noted that she was the recipient of multiple attentions, any one of which would have no doubt proved sufficient to produce the muffled little shrieks.
Another person shouted an obscenity concerning the bright lights. Bolan shook his head regretfully, and bawled: 'Look alive, everybody. The Executioner's here!' Even then the reaction was limited to two or three startled raisings of heads. He thumbed off the safety of the.45 and crashed a single shot into the hi-fi set. It stopped its noise instantly, even before the thundering roar of the heavy gun had ceased reverberating through the tightly packed room. Everybody was staring at him now in shocked attention. He released the kink at the end of the garden hose and sprayed the cold water liberally over all, hating himself for the bastard he was all the while.
There was a new tenor to the shrieks and mouthings now. Men were cursing and floundering about while women screeched hysterically. Bolan flung the hose into the room, stepped back into the kitchen, grabbed the nude girl and kissed her again, balanced a marksman's medal on the slope of a high breast, and departed.
There was to be one more prelude stop. He selected it carefully and headed the car toward the suburbs. It was just past two-thirty in the morning when he parked in the shrubbery a hundred yards or so down from the secluded pleasure palace on the eastern rim of the city. He rummaged in the back seat of the car and came up with three canisters about the size of a large can of beans. He stuffed them into a pouch at his waist and set off at a cross-country angle toward the house. Lights shone from every window, though dim and muffled by concealing draperies. Judging from the number of automobiles in the parking area, they were having a good night. As he drew closer he could hear music, and every now and then a feminine laugh. He walked upright across the grounds, pausing every ten or twelve yards to stand still and listen. During one of those stops he heard male voices nearby; one man was laughing restrainedly. He moved toward the voices and located the source quickly. Two men stood with their backs to him, about fifty feet from the side of the large house; each of them held a sawed-off shotgun cradled loosely in the crook of an elbow; each seemed entirely relaxed. One was large and beefy, the other of medium height and weight, and the smaller one was speaking.
Those guys are out of their minds,' he said. 'I wouldn't give no two hundred and fifty bucks for no party.'
'Augh, two-fifty to these types is no more than two bits to guys like us,' the other man replied. 'I'd give two bits any time for an orgy like that.'
'I thought Leo was comin' by,' the other said, shifting the shotgun about and digging into a pocket. He produced a cigarette and struck a kitchen match on the stock of the gun. 'I ain't seen 'im, have you?'
The large man chuckled. 'Naw, he won't be around tonight. Bet on that. Blacksuit's got 'em all walking around on eggs.'
'I'd like to shove this fuckin' shotgun up Leo's ass. You know these things get
'Lay it down then,' said a soft voice behind them. 'But do it carefully and very, very quietly. Your first sound will be your last.'
The men exchanged glances. The smaller one thrust his shotgun straight out in front of him, at arm's length,
