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into the apartment and closed the door with a bang.
    She was angry, and she was making no effort to conceal the fact.
    Bolan told her, "No disrespect intended. Tell him that, when you see him again."
    He had retrieved the machine-pistol. He snapped in the clip and moved toward the door.
    She cried, "You just hold it right there!"
    Bolan turned to her with a tight grin. A bland product of the inscrutable East she was definitely not. She was a good old American girl, as educated and sassy and assertive as any. Bolan liked her. He said, "I've held too long already. Uh, your girl friends crashed out when I crashed in."
    "What girl friends?"
    "San Francisco's gift to the sexually underprivileged. Panda Bare and Cynthia."
    Her face reflected a sudden worry. "Oh! I didn't know they were here."
    "Yeah, well, take a word from a guy who knows. Move out of this place for a few days. Little girls like to tell big secrets, and you're liable to have a lot of angry visitors before the day is done. I mean it, these guys play very rough games, and I don't think you'd like to be it."
    She bit her lip and said, "I know."
    He had his hand on the doorknob.
    Breathlessly, she said, "Please don't go."
    "Thanks for all," he told her, and opened the door.
    The guy out there was as surprised as Bolan. He'd been tiptoeing along the hall toward Mary Ching's door, and he froze there in the sudden light, balancing on one foot, the eyes flaring in quick consternation.
    Bolan didn't know the guy, but he knew the mold he'd been peeled from, and there was no possibility of a mistaken identification.
    The torpedo went for his gun, the hand blurring in Bolan's vision as it swept inside the flapping coat.
    Bolan's mind sliced into one of those flashing command decisions. He went for the silenced Beretta Belle instead of the burpgun, and there was no unnecessary cloth to get in the way.
    The Belle leapt clear and tracked-on spitting, reflexively sending her first greeting smashing into the gunhand of the opponent and splattering it, then climbing for the heart and the head — and the Mafioso went down gurgling with three Parabellum hi-shock expanders displacing several cubic inches of vital matter.
    Bolan stepped over the crumpled remains and ran to the stairwell, listening with quivering attention for the audible signs of another one. Where there was one of these, there were usually two.
    Mary Ching lurched through the doorway and stood with her hands to her face, staring down at the dead man.
    Bolan made a lunge back along the hall, shoved the girl inside, hissed, "Stay put!" — then quietly closed the door, making his way through the darkness, down the stairs, and across the small vestibule to the street.
    The second man was standing directly across the way, barely visible and leaning nonchalantly against a store front.
    It looked like a routine stake-out — or maybe simply an outside watch for what was supposed to be an easy inside hit.
    Bolan stepped into the open and called over, "Hey!"
    The guy jerked upright and almost turned himself around trying to slap some leather. The Belle sent a single silent sizzler across the pointblank range, and the Mafioso continued turning into a corkscrew to the sidewalk.
    Bolan was there before the corpse could untangle itself. He hefted the dead weight onto a shoulder and carried it along the street to the alleyway, several doors down.
    A convenient trash barrel behind a gift shop made the perfect repository. The Executioner left his mess there, then returned quickly to Mary Ching's.
    She had disregarded his instructions, and had wrapped the bloodied corpse in a heavy" blanket and dragged it inside the apartment.
    Bolan found her kneeling over the dead hood, going through his pockets.
    She looked up with a frown and, in a faint voice, told Bolan, "I think I know this man. He — it's hard to say for sure, with his head all — like that — but I believe I've seen him at the club. He works for Franco Laurentis."
    Bolan