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  He pressed her to the ground beside a prickly shrub, within sight of the car, quietly commanded her to “stay put,” and then he simply vanished. One moment she was watching his circular advance toward a stand of trees lining the driveway; the next moment he just wasn’t there. It was not all that dark a night. She began to fidget with uneasiness as time lengthened and no perceptions of the man crossed her senses. Then she caught a glimpse of a fleeting movement out near the roadway, and she understood what he was doing.

  In the military, they would call it reconnoitering.

  Mack Bolan probably called it surviving.

  Very grim, yes, this man’s business.

  He reappeared beside her a couple of minutes after that, showing her a reassuring flash of eyes and teeth, and she went with him to the stashed vehicle.

  He held the door for her, then went to the rear and opened the luggage compartment.

  She heard heavy items being deposited back there and suddenly realized that the big quiet man had carried a lot of extra weight along that mile’s worth of run. Toby herself was just beginning to breathe normally. She weighed a hundred and ten pounds and enjoyed the superb conditioning of a professional dancer. What fantastic sort of conditioning did this man enjoy?

  A glimpse of bare torso reflected in the car mirror went a long way toward answering that question; telling her, also, that he was changing clothes. She quickly angled the mirror for a few adjustments to her own appearance, which was somewhat the worse for this night’s work, and tried to forget that stolen glimpse of Captain Beautiful. It was a damn silly time to get a rush over a male body, especially that one.

  Don’t be dopey, Toby, she scolded herself. You’re on opposite sides of the fence. Mack Bolan is a hunted fugitive. A tragic, tragic man. Emergency coexistence for mutual survival is one thing, it’s forgivable. But don’t entertain dreamy ideas about Captain Hormone back there. That man is riding a one-way ticket to hell. That man …

  He slid in beside her, destroying that mental lecture. He now wore slacks and a dark shirt, open at the neck. Draped about the shoulders was a towel that he was using to remove that black makeup.

  She told him, “I’ll do that. Let’s go.”

  He tossed the towel to her and started the car moving, easing onto Lake Shore Drive and turning smoothly southward. She came to her knees on the seat and leaned against him as she dabbed the cosmetic away from that granite face.

  “Well … it’s been a lovely evening,” she said. “Where now, Captain Marvelous? Your place or mine?”

  He slid his gaze toward her and replied, “I can drop you wherever you’d like.”

  Toby let the matter hang while she vigorously scrubbed his forehead. It was necessary, of course, to get him in a headlock to hold that stubborn head steady under the assault. And she could not resist planting moist lips in the heart of the clean spot. Then she did his face and hung a couple of swift ones there, also.

  “Call it thanks,” she murmured. “I was in a bad spot. Thanks.”

  “Forget it,” he growled.

  She flung the towel at him and said, “Okay, so I spoiled your timing or something tonight. But I didn’t ask you for a damn thing. Why are you always so surly with me, Mack Bolan?”

  He showed her an obviously forced smile, and the voice was softer as he replied, “Sorry. Nothing personal, Toby.”

  Sure. She understood. Nothing personal. All business, grim, unyielding. Boy, she’d had a hope chest full of that! She experienced a sudden desire to just start screaming and bawling all at once.

  She flounced to the far corner. murmuring, “What a lousy life you lead, Mack Bolan.”

  “We lead,” he reminded her.

  Hell, that was all it took. She let it out, then, not as the screaming fit she desired but as silent tears blinding and humiliating her, followed swiftly by detestably weak damn feminine gulps and gobbles as she fought to shut it off and tuck it all back in.

  Bolan reached for her, and she slapped his hand away. He grabbed her anyway and jerked her over against him, then held her there in an enfolding arm, her head on his chest.

  She cried, “Damn you, Bolan!” then melted into the embrace, allowing herself to be comforted as every woman has a right to be from time to time.

  “It’s okay,” he told her in an incredibly soft voice.

  “The hell it is,” she blubbered. “I’m a cop, damn you. How many cops have you ever done this for?”

  “Men cry, Toby,” he said, and there was nothing impersonal, grim, or unyielding in that quiet declaration. It was a confession, a statement of equality, not condescending comfort.

  She saw the man then, the true man, in a blinding flash of understanding. And the tragedy of his life deepened in that understanding. It had to do with personal versus impersonal and a paradox in those terms. A man with genuine human warmth and depth cloaked himself in cold purpose and grim necessity, then went out to kill and destroy in a purely impersonal crusade, yet somehow managing to retain that deeply personal dimension of self that could and probably did often revolt against the grim game.

  But the man on the stage of death was the impersonal one.

  In contrast, a brutal, mad dog of a man, totally lacking in human qualities, could masquerade as a genuine human being to spread misery wherever his strongly personal desires focused, and without once experiencing a revolt of personality.

  Men cry, Toby.

  Yes, sure they did. Real men.

  Mack Bolan was real, this was Toby’s illumination. Her tears ceased almost immediately, and she snuggled into the reality of the man, accepting him, accepting herself, saving the revolt for those who deserved it.

  They drove silently on, the journey ending a few minutes later in a modern apartment complex somewhere on the north side. He put the car in an underground garage, and they shared a silent elevator to the twelfth floor of the highrise, then he led her to a nicely appointed efficiency apartment that overlooked the city.

  “Who’d you have to hit to get this?” she asked him.

  “Sublet, one week,” he told her. “No questions asked, just lots of money.”

  She inspected the place with a personal interest, looking for further clues to the man, realizing almost at once that she would find none. The warrior lived here, not the man.

  Next-to-invisible threads on doors and windows revealed his preoccupation with security against undetected callers.

  He traveled light.

  A single change of clothing was all the closet held. The bathroom boasted toothbrush and toothpaste, razor, comb, bar of soap, and towel.

  He had gone directly to the studio kitchen and was making coffee.

  She watched him for a moment, then asked, “Are you inviting me to stay? Or did I miss something?”

  Without looking up from his task, he told her, “I’m suggesting that you do.”

  “Why?”

  He said, “I goofed. Allowed Charley Fever to walk away with a light hit. He’ll be wondering about you. And me. Might put something together.” He looked up then, fixing her with a sober gaze. “That is, unless you’d rather chuck your cover and put on your badge. Even then, he could decide to put you on contract. These guys are edgy.”

  She bit her lip and thought about that.

  “I’ll stay,” she decided. “Flip you for the first shower.”

  “I was hoping we could have a cooperative venture,” he said, showing her the first genuine smile of the night.

  She edged a hip against a wall and folded her arms across her chest, very soberly. Her eyes studied the floor as she replied, “Just what did you have in mind?”

  “Forget it. I thought we were both pros, that’s all.”

  “Yes?”

  He turned back to the coffee and said, “Sorry. Forget it.”

  “Captain Bluff,” she said, half angrily.

  “Go to hell,” he said.

  “If you’re going to start it, you should finish it.”

  “You’r
e the cop. You finish it.”

  She tossed her head and moved away from the wall, arms remaining folded over the chest. “What kind of pros are we?”

  Bolan lit a cigarette and blew smoke toward the coffeepot. “I said, forget it.”

  She could not. “If that was a cheap shot, Mack, I’m terribly disappointed in you.”

  “No shot at all,” he muttered.

  “Okay. I’m a pro. A whore with a badge. Is that what you meant? I’ve been playing bedsy with Tony the Louse Quaso for the past month. If you expect me to apologize for that, forget it, just you forget it.”

  He told her quietly, “Toby, I’ve killed more men this week than you’ve screwed in a lifetime. And I don’t have a badge. I’m not throwing stones your way.”

  She said, miserably, “Damn it. Just damn it.”

  He watched her through a moment of silence, then dropped his cigarette in the sink and ran water on it. “Look,” he said, finally, “I felt a sudden desire to scrub your back. Okay? Person to person, man to woman, and to hell with everything else for a little while. What I said about professionals had nothing to do with whoring and killing. I simply meant that people like you and me lead a special sort of existence. There’s no time or opportunity for all the cute romancing, for waltzing around the floor ’til dawn, gazing deeply into each other’s eyes. We live on an entirely different level. We have to love on that level, or not at all. That’s what I meant, and that’s all I meant.”

  “Did you say love?”

  “Yeah,” he growled. “Remember what that is?”

  “I do,” she replied solemnly. “Do you love me?”

  “Tonight, Toby, I could love Dracula’s mother. No, uh, comparison intended.”

  She giggled. “Okay, Captain Pro. Flip you for the first back scrub.”

  “You’re on,” he said.

  And then she was being lifted off her feet, clasped in strong arms, carried to the doorway of a very special reality.

  Emergency coexistence, that was it … for mutual survival. And personal … wow, was it personal!

  Captain Virile could and would wash away the revolting stage stains of Tony the Louse.

  Mack Bolan was for real.

  9: DIVERTED

  He awoke with the dawn, knowing that it could be his last, aware and thankful that he was here for this one.

  The woman beside him was now a very special leaf in his growing book of life. He had known her in various guises, liked and respected her in each. Now he knew her in her essences, having gained that knowledge in the only way possible.

  Do you love me?

  Of course, he loved her. He’d loved all of them, each of them being unique in her own special way, yet all of them one and the same in that larger identity: essential woman. The story of Adam and Eve could be pure fable, but the guy who thought it up must have lived the story first.

  It is not good that the man should be alone.

  I will make him a helpmeet for him.

  “Helpmeet.” That meant partner. Sure, the guy had known what it was to be alone. And he’d known, surely, that very special quality of woman that truly was a helpmeet for all those challenged devils on whom had been placed the onus of life and survival on a hostile planet.

  Bolan knew—survival meant more than a quick gun and fast reflexes. Every man alive faced the same challenge that was Bolan’s—faced it according to the dictates and the needs of each of life’s situations.

  Life was no accident, hell. Much bigger than that, life was some sort of special cosmic magic that gave meaning to that infinity of non-life filling the blackness of space.

  Doctor, lawyer, Indian chief …

  Sure, all of them, each of them, every man had his challenge, his own unique road to survival, his own special … what? Special what?

  Cosmic magic, maybe. What were we surviving? Every man died sooner or later. So … surviving what?

  Surviving the onus, maybe—those special conditions that fell into a man’s bag of life to bedevil him, goad him, stir him up, move him out onto the road to somewhere.

  That was it. The guy had to survive the challenge. Which simply meant that he had to meet it. Yeah, with every damn thing he had. No ducking allowed, no dodging. Head on, eye to eye and toe toe, fight like hell and end up there if that’s what it takes—but beat the damn challenge.

  And, yeah, for that, a man needed a partner.

  But Bolan had learned that women had need of “helpmeets” also. Not just the Toby Rangers, but all of the desperately challenged creatures everywhere. Women had special challenges.

  A man needs a woman, and a woman needs her man.

  Sure. Guys wrote songs about it. Other guys had written entire psychiatric journals on the subject. What it all boiled down to was person to person—and beyond, man to woman.

  No man could stand truly alone. Once in a while there had to be another human being to whom he could turn, and with whom hopefully he could merge for a while, to recharge the belief that survival was worthwhile, to see beyond himself into that cosmic sprawl of uncommon magic. Nowhere else had Bolan observed the magic of the cosmos in such clear and striking reference as in the eyes of a good woman in honest passion. All of it was there, all of the magic, and Bolan knew that it was good. In that glimpse he knew that life was worthwhile, that the challenge was necessary, and that survival was the whole goal.

  A message, maybe, through a helpmeet, from the guy who started it all?

  Well, maybe. All Bolan knew for sure was that he felt better for the experience. And it wasn’t just that moment of bliss that made human sex such an ennobling exercise. It went a hell of a lot deeper than that.

  He pulled his woman over atop him and playfully slapped that delightful highrise bottom. “Hey, cop,” he growled.

  “How profane,” she groaned. “And after all we’ve been through together.”

  “Time to rise and shine.”

  She giggled sleepily. “That’s your department.”

  He slapped her again, more briskly.

  She yowled and rolled away, coming to rest slumped upon the edge of the bed, feet on the floor “Give me a push,” she requested in a small voice. “Maybe I can make it.”

  “Make it where?”

  “To the bathroom, Captain Ignorant. Don’t you know anything about girls? We puke every morning after. That’s a reaction to male exploitation.”

  Bolan chuckled.

  She declared, small-voiced, “If I try very hard, I’ll bet I can make it. But then I’ll probably never walk again.”

  He told her, “Nothing visibly wrong from here. You look all systems go.”

  “Went, Captain Ecstasy. Went.”

  He pushed her with his foot. She slid to the floor and sat there, cross-legged, scowling back at him.

  He said, “If it’s all that bad, hell … give it back.”

  She turned away, head drooping toward the floor. Mack …?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “I mean, pardon the cliché, I needed that.”

  He told her, “We both did.”

  “So what now?” she asked, still drooping. “Will you marry me?”

  “Marry a cop? Me?”

  She laughed quietly. “That would be far out, wouldn’t it? Well … I guess I’ve got to marry somebody.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. For the first time in my life, I feel like an ex-virgin.”

  “Is it that bad?”

  “It’s that good,” she said.

  “Well … Toby … Maybe we’ll cross again … somewhere.”

  “Let’s quit. Both of us quit. The business, I mean.”

  “What would that solve?”

  She swiveled that lovely head about to gaze at him over a rose petal shoulder. “For you, I guess, nothing.”

  “And for you?”

  She shrugged daintily. “I don’t know. I get confused, Mack. I don’t know what the hell
it’s all about, even. You ever get that way?”

  He told her, “Yeah. Occupational hazard. But it passes:”

  She sighed. “Mack …”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m not on an assignment. Not officially.”

  “What are you on, then?”

  “I’m looking for Georgette.”

  “For who?”

  “You remember Georgette Chableu. The Canadian—”

  Sure he remembered. The body shop, tall, dark, and juicy, the Canuck member of the Ranger Girls. “What’s happened to her?”

  “That’s what I’ve been hoping to find out. Logic tells me that she’s dead. But I have to know. You understand?”

  Bolan understood. People who lived large also grieved large, and there was no shrugging off the uncertain fate of a comrade in arms.

  He left the bed and pulled the girl to her feet, then hustled her along to the bathroom, where they shared another shower, much briefer and considerably more subdued this time. Later he shaved while she put a breakfast together, and it was not until they were facing each other across the dining table that the conversation was resumed.

  “Tell me about it,” Bolan commanded.

  She nibbled daintily at crisp bacon and said, “Well … where do I start? Some background, I guess. Toronto, let’s start there. It’s Georgette’s home town. They’ve been having this problem for—oh, I guess a couple of years. Small at first, but growing all the time. Now the Canadian authorities are in full alarm. Girls disappearing, see. I mean, vanishing. Never to be seen again. Each of the victims is a kid, still in her teens or barely out of them. All beautiful. All from the edge of show business and—”

  “Which edge?”

  Toby wrinkled her nose. “Mostly legitimate. A few of the victims had been playing around with porno movie makers. But most were just kids looking for a legitimate start somewhere. Beauty contestants, singers, go-go girls, you know the routine. Someplace to showcase beauty, a speck or two of talent, and a dream. A lot of those dreams turned to nightmares, I’d guess.”