A nerve ticked in Bolan's cheek and a chill raced down his spine. Woodenly he muttered, "Who was the turkey, Sam?"

Chianti shook his head. "I really don't know and I didn't ask, because I didn't want to know. But one of the boys called me a couple of hours ago, and he said they had a turkey down at the weenie house, and wouldn't I like to come down? I told him hell no and I hung up. But that's why I was kinda surprised to see you walk up. I figured they'd got to you by now."

"Where is this weenie house?" Bolan asked tightly. Something was shrieking up and down his nervous system and he knew now why that Thang-Duc restlessness had driven him out into the gray dawn to seek something nameless and unimagined.

"If you're thinking of going, it's too late," Chianti was telling him. "This was a couple hours ago, and it was turkey already."

"Where's the weenie house?" Bolan growled ominously.

Chianti sighed and took the notebook back, printed another oversize address, and returned it to the tall man who was suddenly wearing the death mask again. Those eyes had cemetery markers blazing out from the cold depths… Sam shivered inwardly and wondered if he'd said the wrong thing.

"Listen, wait a minute, Bolan. If you go to hit Freddie, use the side entrance on 155th Street. Pull up to the gate and stop with your front wheels on the little metal cleats, then give three quick flashes of your headlights. The gate will open automatically and that driveway will take you right into the carport. And Jesus — lookout. Freddie has a big palace guard."

Bolan jerked his head and said, "Thanks, Sam. Good luck getting to Washington."

Then he was out of there and running for the VW. His blood was ice, his head was a spinning web of anguish and self-recrimination, and he was praying over and over to a nameless God that it would all turn out to be a nightmare, or that he was dead and in hell. There just could not be another turkey on Mack Bolan's soul.

He parked the micro-bus at the big sliding door marked RECEIVING — and stepped to the rear for weapons. The chattergun, an efficient little folding-stock burper handling .25 calibre exploders, went around his neck and he stuffed extra clips into the pockets of the fatigues. Next he strapped on the web belt with the grenades still clipped to it, then added an army .45 in a flap-holster.

The door slid back easily and he walked in with the chattergun ready. Two cars were parked inside, one of them a big limousine with jumpseats, but there was nobody around. The working day had not yet begun — apparently the work of the night had not ended, either.

He followed his instincts and went through a long hall-like room with refrigerated beef-quarters dangling from automated meat-hooks, and came into a large room with cutting tables and a variety of machinery. Two guys were dragging a weighted bag across the floor toward a doorway at the far end, guffawing over something very funny.

They looked up together, saw Bolan and froze, and he zipped them with a blazing criss-cross from the chattergun that flung them spinning through the open doorway. He followed through with a running charge that sent him hurtling over their sprawling bodies at about the same moment that six other guys in the next room were coming unglued and reacting to the gunfire.

Someone shouted, "Bolanl"— and people were flinging themselves every which way clawing at gunleather. He caught a big ape of a guy with a face like Godzilla in a climbing burst from the guts up, that laid the guy wide and split the ugly face open at the eyes, then everything the ape had inside seemed to be exploding out of him.

Another two were scrambling away from a cutting table and running for a walk-in freezer. Bolan let them go for the moment and swung on to another pair who were diving for the cover of a metal cabinet. He helped them get there with a sustained burst from the chattergun that sent them tumbling and mutilated in a grotesquely flopping sprawl. One of them was still alive enough to be mouthing screams, but Bolan's attention was being demanded by the sixth man, a youngish guy with a long-barreled hogleg throwing fire everywhere except at Bolan.

The burper put out a floor-level string that cut the guy's ankles away from him, then climbed in a figure-eight that kept him from going down right there and flung him in a heap a couple of bodylengths back.

Then Bolan released the chopper and let it dangle by the shoulder cord, circled quickly to the walk-in box and pulled on the heavy door. It cracked open and a hail of slugs in rapidfire from two pistols thwacked harmlessly into the thick wood. Bolan pulled the pin on a grenade, held it for a moment, tossed it in through the crack in the doorway, then stepped quickly aside.

A panicky voice within screeched, "Lookout ifs — "

Then the wall rumbled and the floor moved slightly beneath Bolan's feet. The massive door swung open with a rush and a body was ejected in a flight that deposited it in a smoking heap several yards into the room. Bolan took a look inside and saw that the other guy had been blown in the opposite direction and impaled on a meat hook.

The dying screams down by the metal cabinet were becoming more frantic, but again Bolan's attention was diverted from that agony by a blood-freezing sight on a nearby cutting table. He had passed that table a moment earlier, but with his attention directed into the firefight he'd thought the hunk of meat lying there was a beef quarter or something. But beef quarters did not grow long golden hair, and Bolan knew now that it was not beef. It was turkey, and something was shrinking Bolan's guts and clawing at him from the inside.

He stepped jerkily to the table and gazed down upon What was left of Evie Clifford. The dead eyes stared back at him. They had to. The eyelids had been sliced away. And even through the coagulated blood that was brimming those horrified sockets Bolan could see the agony and the accusation and the mirror of his own guilt and neglect.

They had battered out her front teeth and committed awful atrocities upon the once lovely torso, and what they had done below that point sent Bolan's usually steady mind into a spin through insanity.

His chin dropped to his chest, his eyes closed on the terrible scene, and he groaned, "Oh… Godl"

Then he went down to the screeching man and shoved the hot muzzle of the chattergun into the wide open mouth and he pulled the trigger and let the gun burp until the clip was empty, and somewhere in there the screaming stopped. He dropped a marksman's medal into the gaping well of blood, and reloaded, and went deliberately from body to body and repeated the routine.

Somewhere along that bloody trail his mind began to clear, and when he had completed the senseless and futile acts of revenge upon the dead, he found a bolt of cheesecloth, and he carefully wrapped Evie Clifford's pitiful remains, and tenderly carried her out of hell and gently placed her in the rear of the micro-bus.

His cheeks were twitching and the eyes were brimming with a salty discharge of emotion as he climbed in behind the wheel and sat there a moment willing his mind to find its place. A city bus pulled up at the corner of the building and began disgorging workers in white uniforms. Bolan watched them go into the packing plant, and he found himself wondering idly what they would think about their latest consignment of meat.

Then he swiped away the moisture of his eyes with brutal knuckles, put the VW into gear and headed back into the jungle of his rage.

He knew that a part of him had died with Evie Clifford. There was not much left, at the moment, but icy hatred and a blazing fury.

They should not have done this to Evie.

He was going to tell them so.

He was going to tell it to Freddie Gambella.