Long Road to Mercy (Atlee Pine, #1)(25)

Defeated.

Six-pack and Knee Rehab had long since gone.

But Kenny Kuni was still there.

“You good?” he called out in a casual tone as he did some paperwork at the front counter.

She nodded and gave him a thumbs-up.

Not the first time this had happened.

He went back to his paperwork.

“Shit,” she muttered. She was not good. Despite her excellence in the first half of the lift, her form had sucked in the final stage, which was all that mattered. Her mental mechanics had completely broken down. She had been intimidated. Afraid.

Shit.

She finally rose and performed the Yoga and Pilates regimen that constituted her cooldown. Her muscles felt good stretching out, the tendons, ligaments, and cartilage all thanking her for the relief after the merciless pounding of iron.

She hit the shower, changed into her work clothes, and walked out, hair still wet.

This had been her time. Now the FBI owned her for the rest of the day.





Chapter

13



P?INE DROVE TO HER OFFICE and entered the underground parking garage. There was a guy on duty there, and after hours the overhead door would come down, requiring key card access.

This level of security was not because of Pine’s presence.

It was because of the other law enforcement agency located here.

ICE. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Today, it was more known for immigration enforcement. And they were very active in Arizona, rounding up and deporting masses of people. It had become a political football, really.

Because of that there had been threats made. And the building might be a target. Hence the security guy and the overhead door with key card access.

Pine routinely saw some of the ICE guys in and around the building. She knew all the agents there, but didn’t really hang with them very often, because they kept to themselves. She was FBI, under the Justice Department. ICE was under the Department of Homeland Security. There was a bit of a federal rivalry there, but their work almost never overlapped. But they were fellow feds and she would always have their backs if they needed it.

The underground garage kept the sun off the cars during the day. It was actually a necessity here, especially during the summer. Otherwise, she would have let her truck run without her in it for a few minutes with the AC cranked to max. And she’d still sweat when she got in.

She parked next to a vehicle with a cover over it.

This car had once belonged to a veteran FBI agent named Frank Stark, who had been a mentor of hers during Pine’s second field assignment. Every FBI agent got their creds, badge, and first assignment upon graduating from Quantico. The first-year assignment was done as a probationary agent, to see if you could cut it in the field. After a year’s time, you were no longer a probie and were transferred to your next assignment.

Pine’s had been Cleveland, sometimes referred to in FBI circles as the “mistake on the lake.”

It was there that she had met Stark.

She lifted the cover off and stared down at the 1967 Ford Mustang convertible, with parchment interior and matching top, and an iconic frost turquoise exterior. It had been meticulously restored by Stark, with the aid of the junior fibbie Pine.

The car restoration had been a project conducted in Stark’s workshop/garage behind his 1950s-era house set in a neighborhood of homes that looked identical to each other running as far as the eye could see.

When Stark had asked if she wanted to help, Pine’s first inclination was to say no. This was Stark’s last posting, everyone knew that. He was biding his time to collect his pension. And he had this hobby of restoring old cars. But something in the man’s request struck a chord in Pine, and she volunteered to help. At least for a bit.

They had started out disassembling the car fore to aft, keeping a record of all parts and putting them in labeled boxes. Some they had reused, others they had discarded. They had taken a lot of photos of the process to refer back to. Stripping the car down to its metal bones, they’d used walnut shell and glass beads media blasting to remove all the paint, because those materials wouldn’t peen the metal. There were special tools you needed to strip the car, although they had improvised some, even using a bottle opener to remove the drip-rail molding. They’d done a rear floor pan reinforcement, so they could convert the single exhaust to a dual output.

The chassis had been fully refinished and painted with a specialized silver undercoating. The exterior had been reinstalled after having been sanded down and repaired, or, where restoration was impossible, new metal panels had been precisely tooled to the car’s original specs by a local company that Stark had found. Then the exterior had been painted the exact same shade of frost turquoise as the original. They’d also reworked all the electrical, and either purchased new screws and bolts or restored what they had.

After all the painting was complete they’d installed Dynamat, which kept the noise and exhaust heat under the car, where it should remain. The original engine had been the 289 V-8, of which only a few hundred were put in this model. But 1967 also had brought the first major redesign of the Mustang and had offered a larger engine option. So they’d dropped in a big block 390, which had been in the vast majority of the Mustangs built that year. That had necessitated the dual exhaust, since the 390 couldn’t efficiently run off the single pipe. The 390 V-8 mustered 320 horsepower, plenty of muscle for a car that size.