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nervy bastard shot the tires right off their charter jet, leaving twenty guys laid out like slabs of beef along the runway.
    Joe the Monster lost it all in Bolan's final hours on the Strip, along with half the Talifero team — the other twin got smoked somewhere back East, and the Executioner had left Las Vegas cleaner than he found it.
    For a while.
    It was not a solution, no. But Reese suspected it was never meant to be. Acting on his own initiative against the odds, the man they called the Executioner had made a difference in Las Vegas, and that was all that counted.
    Part of Reese admired the gutsy bastard, though it would not do to say so in mixed company. A part of him was almost sorry when the guy flamed out in Central Park.
    No, scratch the "almost." Reese was sorry when the soldier bought it.
    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.
    There's a wild card in the game. The rules are changing. Shit.
    The homicide detective shrugged. No matter, if he had a single mob war brewing, or a double cross — whatever. Reese had no intention of permitting mayhem in the streets of Vegas. It was his damned town, and he would hold the line no matter what.
    If they could find a quiet way of killing one another off, the captain would not bust his chops to interfere with family business. Laissez faire was SOP in Vegas, even if the vast majority of locals could not quite pronounce it.
    Live and let live, even if it came down to dying. But if the war slopped over from the gutters to endanger innocent civilians, Captain Reese was ready to engage in some constructive carnage of his own. He had a list of names and he was not above some hard harassment, bringing in a few of them across his fender if he had to. Anything to make his point.
    It might not come to that, of course. He might get lucky. But experience had taught him that the odds were always with the house, against the bettor in Las Vegas.
    Captain Reese knew that there was only one sure thing about the present death game. He had not yet seen the last