Blood Rites

Prologue

Dolphin Mall, Sweetwater, Florida

“He’s late,” René Bertin announced.

“I know he’s late,” François Raimonde replied. “You think I can’t tell time?”

“Just sayin’.”

“Well, stop sayin’, unless you got a way to hurry him.”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

“Then shut up.”

Raimonde had always wondered why the county named its largest shopping mall after a fish, until somebody told him it was named after a football team. That pacified him for a while, until he learned the team had no connection to the mall, which irritated him again.

Screw it.

The only thing he cared about right now was meeting Roger Dessalines and picking up the bag he was supposed to deliver, with twelve kilos of pure cocaine inside. Dessalines was running late, some twenty minutes now, and that was cause for worry, but Raimonde was trying not to let it make him crazy. Bad things happened when he tipped over the edge, as anyone who knew him could attest.

At least, the ones who were still alive.

Bertin muttered something under his breath, and Raimonde felt his cheeks heating up. “What was that?”

“I said why don’t he call, if he’s gonna be late?”

“You can ask him, if he ever shows up.”

“Man, we’ve been sitting here forever. It ain’t good, you know?”

Raimonde knew. Deals like this one were meant to go swiftly and smoothly, no waiting around. Every minute they spent in the mall’s parking lot, baking under the sun in their Lexus, raised their level of risk. Mall security circled the property every half hour or so, and they might call police if they figured Raimonde and Bertin looked suspicious. Police meant questions and possibly a search that would reveal their weapons and the gym bag filled with cash.

Bad news, but that wasn’t the worst.

They were in posse territory. In Raimonde’s opinion this was a stupid place for a handoff, but he hadn’t been consulted. Never was, in fact. Just got his orders and obeyed them like a soldier should. But sitting still for any length of time in posse territory was an invitation to disaster.

“Where is he?” Bertin grumbled, not quite whining.

“I told you—”

“Shit! Look there! You see ’em?”

Raimonde followed Bertin’s pointing finger and went cold inside, despite the midday heat. A jet-black Lincoln MKT was cruising through the lot, its large grille flashing sunlight like a monster’s toothy smile. The blacked-out windows hid most of its passengers, but Raimonde saw the driver and his shotgun rider plain enough, both of them sporting dreads, the wheelman wearing a crocheted Rasta cap.

“What are we gonna do?” Bertin demanded.

“Do our job,” Raimonde informed him, reaching underneath his seat for the machine pistol hidden there. Bertin grunted and reached under his baggy jacket to draw a Glock 18 selective-fire model, digging in a pocket to produce a 33-round magazine and swap it for the pistol’s normal clip.

“They see us, we’re in shit,” Bertin declared.

“More likely if we move.”

“This is Roger’s fault.”

“The boss said wait,” Raimonde said. “We wait.”

And so, they did.

* * *

“CHECK OUT THE LEXUS,” Shabba Maxwell said.

“Where?” Tyson Eccles asked from the driver’s seat.

“Open your eyes.”

Neville Bucknor chimed in, from the backseat. “I know that bastard at the wheel.”

Eccles eyed the Lexus as they passed it, thirty yards away and rolling slowly in the Dolphin Mall’s fire lane. They were Haitians, he was almost sure, even without the word from Bucknor.

“What are we gonna do?” Desmond Salkey asked.

“Same thing we always do,” Maxwell said. “They’ve got no business on our turf.”

“You gonna ask the boss?” Eccles said.

“Ask him what?” Maxwell demanded. “He said deal with any bad boys we find comin’ up in here.”

“Should shoot ’em dead,” Salkey chipped in.

“You wanna ask someone,” Maxwell said, “give me the wheel and split.”

“Ease up, man,” Eccles said. “I’m with you, brother.”

“No more talking, then. Get out your pieces.”

Maxwell’s weapon was a Micro-Uzi SMG. His two men in the backseat carried AK-105 Kalashnikov carbines, and Eccles had a twelve-gauge Ithaca 37 Stakeout model shotgun tucked into the map pocket of his driver’s door, ready to go.

“Okay,” Maxwell told them. “Do this thing!”

* * *

“ALL UNITS, CODE 30! We have shots fired at the Dolphin Mall, multiple injuries reported, still in progress.”

“Acknowledge that,” Corporal Tyrus Jackson told his partner. He was driving their patrol car, letting rookie Rick Lopez handle the radio.

Lopez snatched up the microphone and answered, “Unit 31 responding. We’re two minutes out.”

Jackson already had the Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor up to sixty-five, rolling toward Northwest 117th Avenue. He’d make a right turn there, if no one slammed into their cruiser, and they’d arrive at the mall shortly.

“The Dolphin’s massive,” he reminded Lopez. “Call back and find out where the shooting is. With multiples, we got no time to waste.”

“Roger that.”

Lopez raised the dispatcher, and the answer came back with a wisp of static. “Southwest parking lot.”

“Ninety seconds, if we’re lucky,” Lopez said, and cut the link.

Multiple casualties meant a psycho on a rampage, or some kind of gang activity. Jackson was betting on the gangs, but you could never tell. Miami wasn’t just a melting pot, it was a boiling pot, where races and religions clashed, the rich flaunted their money and the poor wanted a piece of it. In any given year, Miami Metro saw it all, from slaughters in the family to drug burns, hate crimes, even human sacrifice.

But multiples, with a shooting still in progress, meant his day had gone to shit, barely an hour after roll call.

“Here we go,” he said, and swung onto the ring road that encircled Dolphin Mall. He heard the gunfire now. Snap, crackle, pop, telling him there were automatic weapons in the mix. Not one, but several, which meant this wasn’t just a random head case run amok.

“What do we do?” Lopez asked, sounding worried.

“Same as always,” Jackson answered. “Whatever we can.”

* * *

“BABYLON IS COMIN’,” Salkey said, pointing at the police car entering the parking lot.

“I’m not deaf,” Maxwell reminded him, reloading as he moved to head off the patrol car.

They’d pinned the Haitians down but hadn’t killed them yet, though Maxwell reckoned one was wounded. He’d seen crimson spatters when they started firing on the Lexus, but their targets both returned fire, peppering the Lincoln MKT before Eccles had swung around behind a bulky pickup truck. They’d have to strip and burn the ride when they were finished here, which pissed him off to no end.

And now, police.

Tracking their progress through the parking lot was easy. The siren was wailing, blue and white lights flashing on the roof rack. As they turned into the nearest lane and started toward the Lexus, Maxwell rose before the cruiser, hosing it with Parabellum slugs.

“Die, Babylon!” he shouted as their windshield imploded, the driver’s face turning red-raw in an instant. The cruiser swerved and crashed into a station wagon, then stalled.

The young Latino passenger bailed out, whipping a sidearm from its holster, but he wasn’t fast enough. Maxwell cut loose on him, the Micro-Uzi’s bullets ripping through his brown uniform, releasing scarlet blooms on impact.

“Shoulda worn your vest,” he jeered, and turned back to the battle going on behind him.

Two pigs down, two Haitians still to go. Then they’d torch the Lincoln and find a way back to the boss, to report.

“Party time,” Maxwell muttered, and moved off to meet his enemies.

1

Norland, Miami Gardens, Florida

Mack Bolan hit the ground running in Miami. He had driven down from Stony Man Farm, in Virginia, breaking up the journey with an overnight stop in Savannah, Georgia. The drive let him carry the gear he’d picked out for this mission without any hassles from airport security, and if something happened to the car—a confiscated narco-smuggler’s Mercury Marauder, whose records had been lost somewhere between its forfeiture and its delivery to Stony Man—there would be no comebacks on Bolan or the Farm.

The warring parties were a tough Jamaican outfit called the Viper Posse, and a Haitian gang whose leaders hadn’t bothered thinking up a catchy name. Both dealt in drugs, illegal weapons, human trafficking and sundry lesser rackets. They’d been stepping on each other’s toes around Miami for the past two years, the body count increasing, but this last flamboyant battle at the crowded Dolphin Mall caused a ripple out of Washington, propelling Bolan to the Sunshine State.

Nine dead and thirteen wounded in the latest firefight, which was probably a record, even for South Florida. The body count included three known Viper Posse members, two illegal Haitian immigrants, two Miami-Dade police officers, and two shoppers caught in the crossfire. The wounded were bystanders, more cops and a couple of mall security officers. Local law and the feds were all over it, turning Miami’s Haitian and Jamaican enclaves upside-down, but cries of racial profiling had touched off protests in the streets, and when you got down to it, no police force in the States could chase the Viper Posse’s leaders once they split for home.

That was where Bolan came in.

He didn’t need warrants, indictments, subpoenas, or writs of extradition. He wasn’t logging evidence for use in court, and didn’t have to read a perp his rights before he brought the hammer down. He’d been hunting human predators of one kind or another from his youth until his staged death in Manhattan some years back, with nothing changed except his face and name.

His war was still the same. The opposition’s ranks were inexhaustible.

Most of the residents of Kendall, southwest of Coral Gables, were law-abiding people. However, those who stood outside the law had earned a reputation for ferocious violence.

While most posse members were nominal Rastafarians, purportedly worshiping late Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie I as a god and smoking ganja as a sacrament, the island-spawned gang also swam in a current of Obeah, a West Indian belief system with African roots, akin to Voodoo or Santeria. The practice of Obeah involved blood sacrifice. Animals were ostensibly preferred, but some practitioners were rumored to spill human blood for important rituals, or when they sent a special message to their enemies.

Murder was all the same to Bolan, whether carried out with automatic weapons or machetes, and he normally repaid the predators in kind. He had no fear of “magick,” black or white, but recognized that many people felt its draw and thereby left themselves open to victimization. When superstition crossed the line into mayhem and became a tool for terrorists, the Executioner was ready to step in and shut the circus down.

Beginning now.

* * *

GARCELLE BROUARD KNEW she was staring in the face of death as Winston Channer stood before her, showing a ghastly smile. A fall of dusty-looking dreadlocks framed his oval face, eyebrows replaced by rows of small, deliberately inflicted scars, more of them on his cheeks in tight spiral designs. His teeth were either capped or filed to points, so that his smile displayed a double row of fangs.

“You’re as good as dead,” he told her.

Garcelle kept her face impassive and replied, “So, get it over with.”

“Not so fast, child. I’ve got a message for your family.”

“You think that will change the way they deal with you?” She laughed, enjoying the expression on his feral face. “You’ll only make things worse.”

“Be worse for you, no doubt. Think Daddy will like it if I send ya back in pieces?” Channer narrowed his eyes and asked, “Why are you smiling?”

She kept the mocking smile in place while answering his question. “I’m imagining the things he’ll do to you. How long he’ll keep you tied up on his table, screaming.”

“You like the screams, eh? When I start on you, scream plenty for me, will ya? No one’s coming to help you.”

That was true, she realized. The Viper Posse occupied this whole apartment complex. She sat in unit 227, bound to a straight-backed wooden chair with plastic zip ties. She could scream until her lungs bled, and the other yardies wouldn’t interfere with Channer’s fun. Nor would the neighbors, who’d been terrorized into submission when the Viper Posse routed tenants from the Palm Glades complex and converted it into their headquarters.

Police? Forget about them. They patrolled Kendall’s white neighborhoods routinely, but required an urgent call to trespass on Jamaican turf around Three Lakes. The last time they’d visited Palm Glades, it sparked a confrontation that sent nine yardies to jail, and seven coppers to the hospital. The gang was not evicted, though, because it kept a battery of top-end lawyers on retainer and possessed a bill of sale for the suburban property.

No. She was on her own, and that was bad.

Fatally bad.

She couldn’t bargain with the Viper Posse’s local honcho, couldn’t bribe her way out of the trap. Channer was bent on capturing her father’s territory, taking everything he had, and would not settle for a consolation prize.

She was a pawn to him—or worse, a living sacrifice.

“I don’t want to cut your head off first,” Channer said. “That spoils my game and tells your daddy he’s got nothing left to hope for. Mebbe I should start down on the other end, eh?”

Garcelle tried to imagine what it would feel like, having her feet cut off. Would she bleed out? Not likely, if her captors wanted her alive and suffering. A propane torch would cauterize the wounds, but searing would not stop infection. Not that it would help. Channer would no doubt dismember her completely, long before gangrene could end her misery.

Tell them no more than you have to, she thought grimly. Everybody breaks, but hold on as long as you can. Make the bastards work for it.

“Ten toes it is,” Channer declared, and moved off toward the doorway. He opened it and called to someone on the Other Side, “Gimme the little saw, brother. And one of those blue tarps.”

* * *

BOLAN HAD GONE all out, picking his tools for the Miami mission. Riding with him on the southbound highway was a Steyr AUG assault rifle, a Benelli M4 Super 90 semiautomatic shotgun, a Desert Eagle .44 Magnum pistol, and his favorite Beretta 93R selective-fire sidearm. For long-range work, he’d picked a Barrett M98B sniper rifle. The Barrett is a bolt-action weapon, feeding .338 Lapua Magnum rounds from a ten-round detachable box magazine. Top off that ensemble with spare magazines all around, plus two dozen M68 fragmentation grenades, and the Executioner was ready to rumble.

His first target was a so-called social club, the Kingston House, located on Southwest 80th Street near Snapper Creek Park. Intel from Stony Man identified it as a hangout for the Viper Posse’s goons and part-time headquarters for Winston Channer, honcho of the posse in South Florida. Bolan could not predict if Channer would be in when he came calling, but he pegged the odds at fifty-fifty. Either way, demolishing the joint and taking out the posse soldiers he found on-site would send a message to the man in charge, and ultimately back home to Jamaica.

Bolan parked his Mercury a half block north of Kingston House, secured it and set the ear-splitting alarm. If all went well, he wouldn’t be gone long, and he’d return to find his rolling arsenal where he had left it. Otherwise, he’d have to improvise.

Leaving his ride, he took the Steyr AUG with an AAC M4-2000 suppressor attached, both handguns and a couple of grenades. It was supposed to be a hit-and-git, not a protracted battle, but he prepped for any snags he could imagine, and a few that didn’t come to mind immediately. Bolan’s protracted war had taught him that preparedness counted for more than luck.

The place looked dead as he approached it. Never meant to draw outsiders, the exterior was relatively drab: two stories, with beige stucco on the outside, a flat roof, no neon flashing in the night. Unless you were a Viper Posse member or associate, you had no reason to stop at Kingston House, and any trespassers would be discouraged in a most emphatic way.

He scouted the approach and found no guards watching the street. Given the state of modern CCTV cameras, lookouts might well be watching him from inside, but Bolan wasn’t bothered by that possibility. He was expecting opposition.

Counting on it.

He walked behind the club, bringing the Steyr out from underneath his lightweight raincoat. It had drizzled off and on all day, reason enough to wear the coat that hid his hardware, but the time had come to let it rip.

Bolan tried the back door, found it locked and fired a muffled 3-round burst into its dead bolt, shattering the lock. He followed through without a second’s hesitation and found himself inside a corridor that passed a kitchen on the left and restrooms on the right. Apparently no one was using either of the two facilities just now. Ahead of him, Bolan heard voices coming from some kind of rec room, half a dozen by the sound of it, engaged in a friendly argument. Above his head, the sound of footsteps told him there were other posse members on the second floor. There was a heady scent of ganja in the air.

“That girl’s hot,” one of the possemen was saying, “know what I mean?”

“You’re speaking true,” another said.

“I wouldn’t lie to ya,” the first voice said.

Bolan crashed the party, counting seven heads around a pool table. He was quiet till one of them spotted him and squawked a warning to the others. Then he began to take them down with nearly silent 5.56 mm NATO rounds. They scrambled, seeking cover, groping for their weapons.

First to draw his pistol was a porky soldier with a rainbow-colored Rasta cap atop his head. Before he had a chance to aim, Bolan’s next burst sheared off the left side of his face, but the soldier still managed one wild shot as he was falling, wasted on the ceiling. A shout up there told Bolan that the club’s other inhabitants were on alert and pounding toward the stairs.

* * *

“WHAT’S THAT?” WINSTON CHANNER demanded, standing over his captive with a hacksaw in his hand.