Avenger

At David City he filled the tank again and set off down the Pan American for the 310-mile run to the capital. Darkness came. He ate at a wayside stop with truck drivers, tanked up again, and rolled on. He crossed the toll bridge to Panama City, paid in pesos, and cruised into the suburb of Balboa as the sun rose. Then he found a park bench, chained the bike, and slept for three hours.

The afternoon was for the extended survey. The huge-scale city map he had purchased in New York gave him the layout of the city and the tough slum of Chorillo where Noriega and Madero had grown up a few blocks from each other.

But successful lowlifes prefer the high life, if they can get it, and Madero's reported watering holes were two he part owned in upscale Paitilla, across the bay from the slums of Old Town.

It was two in the morning when the repatriated thug decided he was tired of the Papagayo Bar and Disco and wished to leave. The anonymous black door with discreet brass plaque, grille, and eyehole opened and two men came out first-heavily built bodyguards, his personal gorillas.

One entered the Lincoln limousine by the curb and started the engine. The other sca

The man hawked, spat on the pavement, withdrew his own hand empty from beneath his jacket, relaxed, and turned away. Apart from the wino, the pavement was empty and safe. He tapped on the black door. Emilio, who had recruited Dexter's daughter, was the first out, followed by his boss. Dexter waited till the door closed and self-locked before he rose. The hand that came out of the paper bag a second time held a shortened-barrel.44 magnum Smith amp; Wesson.

The gorilla who had spat never knew what hit him. The fired slug broke into four flying parts; all four penetrated at the tenfoot range and performed considerable mischief inside his torso.

Drop-dead handsome Emilio did exactly that, mouth open to scream, when the second discharge took him in the face and neck, one shoulder, and one lung simultaneously.

The second gorilla was halfway out of the car when he met his Maker in an unforeseen rendezvous with four spi

Benyamin Madero was back at the black door, screaming for admission when the fourth and fifth shots were fired. Some bold spirit inside had the door two inches open when a splinter went through his marcelled hair and the door shut in a hurry.

Madero fell, still hammering for admittance, sliding down the highgloss panel work, leaving long red smears from his soaked Guayabara tropical shirt.

The tramp walked over to him, showing no panic or particular hurry, stooped, turned him on his back, and looked into his face. He was still alive but fading.

"Amanda Jane, *mia hija*," said the gunman and used the sixth shot to shred the entrails.

Madero's last ninety seconds of life were no fun at all.

A housewife in an upper window across the street later told the police she saw the tramp jog away around a corner and heard the put-put of a scooter engine moving away. That was all.

Before sunrise the trail bike was propped against a wall two boroughs away, unchained, ignition key in place. It would survive no more than an hour before entering the food chain.

The wig, the prosthetic teeth, and the raincoat were bundled into a trashcan in a public park. The haversack, relieved of its remaining clothes, was folded and tossed into a builder's Dumpster.

At 7:00 an American business executive in loafers, chinos, Polo shirt, and lightweight sports jacket, clutching a soft Abercrombie and Fitch travel bag, hailed a cab outside the Miramar Hotel and asked for the airport.

Three hours later the same American lifted off in Club Class on the regular Continental Airlines flight for Newark, New Jersey.

And the gun, the Smith amp; Wesson adapted to fire slugs that split in four lethal fragments for close-quarter work; that was down a storm drain somewhere in the city now dropping beneath the wingtip.

It might not have been allowed in the tu

Dexter knew there was something wrong when he entered his latchkey in his own door in the Bronx. It opened to reveal the face of his motherinlaw, Mrs. Marozzi, her cheeks streaked with tears.

Along with the grief, it was the guilt. Angela Dexter had approved of Emilio as a suitor for her daughter; she had agreed to the "vacation" by the sea that the young Panamanian had proposed. When her husband said he had to leave for a week to take care of unfinished business, she assumed he meant some legal work.

He should have stayed. He should have told her. He should have understood what was in her mind. Leaving her parents' house where she had stayed since her daughter's funeral, Angela Dexter had returned to the apartment with an oversupply of barbiturates and ended her own life.

The ex-hard hat, soldier, student, lawyer, and father went into a deep depression. Finally he came to two conclusions. The first was that he had no further life in the Office of the Public Defender, scurrying from court to remand centre and back again. He handed in his papers, sold the apartment, bid a tearful farewell to the Marozzi family, who had been good to him, and went back to New Jersey.

He found the small town of Pe

His second decision was that Madero had died too easily. His just deserts should have been to stand in a U. S. court and hear a judge sentence him to life without parole; to wake up each day and never see the sky; to know that he would pay until the end of his days for what he had done.

Calvin Dexter knew that the U. S. Army and two tours in the stinking hell under the jungle floor of Cu Chi had given him dangerous talents. Silence, patience, nearinvisibility, the skill of a hunter, the relentlessness of a born tracker.

He heard via the media of a man who had lost his child to a murderer who had vanished abroad. He made covert contact, obtained the details, went out beyond the borders of his native land and brought the killer back. Then he vanished, becoming the genial and harmless lawyer of Pe

But each time it landed on his mat, he checked the small want ads section of *Vintage * the only way the tiny few who knew of his existence could make contact.

He did it again that su