Vigilante Run

Camillus, New York The hollow-core wooden door cracked and fell inward as Mack Bolan kicked it off its hinges. He stepped over the shattered particleboard, the barrel of his Beretta 93-R machine pistol leading the way. He swept left and right, his support hand gripping a small but powerful combat light and tracking with the pistol. The white beam illuminated the debris within the ramshackle trailer. The place was a mess and smelled worse than it looked. It stank of decay and reeked heavily of ammonia. The Executioner's eyes watered as he stepped forward into the darkness. The mobile home was a dump in more ways than one. The "lawn" outside was little more than mud dotted with weeds. Behind and on both sides of the moldy trailer, piles of garbage told the soldier exactly what he was about to find. Empty cans of paint thinner were stacked four and five high together with jugs of industrial chemicals, mostly hydrochloric and muriatic acid. There were other drums and barrels that he could not identify, and several broken wooden shipping pallets. The refuse outside, piled ten feet high in some places, had smelled bad enough exposed to the open air; in the close quarters of the mobile home it was suffocating. A card table toppled as Bolan brushed past it. Dozens of empty cardboard boxes of generic dollarstore sinus and cold medicine fell to the floor. Wading through the shin-high rubbish strewed on the floor--empty mason jars, spent bottles of camp-stove fuel, cigarette butts, fast-food wrappers and more bulging bags of rotting garbage--Bolan tore away one of the black plastic trash bags taped over the nearest window. The glass was filthy and cracked, but through it he could see waning twilight. The stars above the snow-covered field would have been pretty if seen anywhere else. Here, they were only a backdrop against which to contrast man's viciousness.The dead man was dressed in filthy denims under a leather biker jacket. He was covered in blood. The top of his head was gone and Bolan could not determine through the gore how old he might have been. Toeing the corpse over with the edge of his combat boot, the soldier got a good look at the logo on the back of the jacket: CNY Purists. He hadn't heard of that one before. Slipping a tiny digital camera from a slit pocket of his blacksuit, Bolan snapped a couple of shots of the symbol, a stylized and fairly typical skull and snake surrounded by the letters of the gang's name. The team at Stony Man Farm would be able to turn up intel on the group. In the debris, Bolan almost missed the gun. The Colt Python was sticky with congealing blood. He left it there. The owner wouldn't be needing it and evidence gathering was best left to the local police. Bolan was no cop, and he wasn't there to tag and bag the obvious. The floor creaked as the man in black made his way down the narrow hallway joining the trailer's living room to what he presumed was once a bedroom. There was less garbage. The space was full of camp stoves, bottles of drain cleaner and a mess of tangled plastic tubing, metal drums and broken glass. The ammonia fumes were so intense that Bolan had to back out of the room. As he did so, the beam of his flashlight played across the bullet holes pocking the bare, water-damaged drywall. There was a second bedroom at the end of the hall. It was a wreck like the rest of the trailer, but with more domestic debris. The litter was mostly dirty clothes and empty liquor bottles. A sawed-off pump shotgun, jacked open and empty, was lying on the floor amid a pile of fired plastic shells. Bolan's light showed buckshot peppering the walls and even the floor in the bedroom and hallway. There were several more bullet holes here, too, large enough to be .44 or .45 slugs. Two more bodies were sprawled on the floor. One was a long-haired, shirtless male wearing leather pants and engineer's boots. The other was a half-naked woman. ShePendleton, Don is the author of 'Vigilante Run ', published 2007 under ISBN 9780373643462 and ISBN 0373643462.