Long Road to Mercy (Atlee Pine, #1)(58)

She rose, wiped the blood from her mouth, and set her hands and feet in a defensive posture.

“You are quite stubborn,” said the man.

Pine said nothing. She was conserving her breath. She’d never battled anyone as quick as this guy, not even her MMA instructors. He was five inches shorter and thirty pounds lighter than she was, and yet his blows were about the hardest she’d ever felt.

She kicked out with a feinting roundhouse, which he easily blocked. Her momentum had carried her into a crouch, which was intentional. She exploded out of this position with an elbow strike aimed at his throat. It was a clever move, yet he simply edged away, and kicked her in the backside, sending her sprawling into the wet street.

Pine slowly rose and brushed off her pants and blew on her scraped palms.

The man said, “I think we can agree that this situation is becoming a trifle ridiculous.”

Pine could see only one way out of this.

She launched herself forward and took a vicious kick to the head, followed by one to her oblique.

Both blows were staggering, but Pine’s skull was pretty damn hard, and a lifetime of lifting phenomenally heavy weights had made her core iron.

She started to stumble, as though she was going down.

At the last moment she lunged forward, wrapped her legs around the man’s torso and left arm, ripped his right limb straight up, and locked it down in an arm bar.

The momentum of her charge and their comingled weights caused them to topple into the middle of the street. The man’s hat fell off.

Pine squeezed her muscular legs around his torso, even as she levered his right arm over his head, trying her best to rip it from its socket.

She could hear him breathing heavily. She locked down on his torso even more, her goal to stop his diaphragm from moving up and down. Without that mobility, one could not remain conscious or alive.

She thought she could feel him weakening.

She was wrong.

With the index finger of his pinned left hand he jabbed hard into Pine’s inner thigh. As he dug into it, applying an immense amount of pressure, Pine lost all feeling in her leg, and then a jolt of pain shot through her muscle and joints and rocketed up her entire side.

She cried out, helpless, as he forced her useless left leg off him.

An instant later his elbow smashed against the side of her jaw with such force that her leg lock was completely broken. Another elbow strike and her arm bar also fell away, allowing him to roll to his left, get to his feet, crouch, and deliver a crushing stomp kick to her belly.

She threw up what little was in her stomach.

She lay on the street, so dazed that she could barely see the little man rise above her.

“I misjudged you,” he said. He balled up his fist. “You are not quite so intelligent as I first believed.”

The siren cut through the silence of the night. The sound seemed to be heading toward them at speed.

The man looked toward the sound, which gave Pine the only opening she needed.

Though he’d outmaneuvered her at every junction and was by far the better fighter, the man had made one mistake: He’d misjudged the length of her legs.

She shot her right leg straight up and kicked him hard in the balls with the toe of her boot.

He cried out, bent over, and staggered back.

Pine watched from street level as, still hunched over, he snatched up his hat and moved haltingly into the darkness as the sound of the siren headed for them.

Pine slowly stood and, dragging her still-numb left leg behind her, recovered both her guns, unlocked the Kia, collapsed inside, and then slouched down in her seat a few seconds before the police car turned onto the street and sped past her.

Someone must have heard the fight and called the cops.

Pine rolled down the window, spit blood along with part of a tooth out of her mouth, started the car, put it in gear, and slowly drove off.

The fucking flash drive better be worth it.





Chapter

31



DO YOU NEED any more ice, Agent Pine?”

Blum was at the door to the bathroom.

Inside, Pine was sitting naked in the bathtub, which she had partially filled with ice from the under-the-counter icemaker as well as the fridge’s icemaker.

“No, I’m good,” Pine called out.

“You still didn’t tell me what happened.”

Pine moved her arms and legs gingerly in the ice bath. “I will. Just give me a little time.”

The feeling had come back to her left leg, but it still throbbed like hell.

“Can I get you something to eat or drink?”

“I’ll take a beer.”

“It’s seven in the morning.”

“Make it two beers then. Thanks.”

Pine heard Blum walk away, and she slumped back into the ice.

She could sit in here for only a few minutes more. She’d been in and out of the ice several times for the better part of three hours. While she needed the ice to take the pain and swelling away, any person’s tolerance for this was limited.

By the time Blum came back and knocked on the door, Pine was slowly lifting herself out of the ice bed. She wrapped a towel around herself, opened the door, and accepted one of the beers from Blum.

“You look like hell,” said Blum. “Your jaw is swollen, your lip is cracked, and your left eye is puffy. And you’re moving like you’re a hundred years old. Were you in a fight or did you fall off a building?”