Bill reached for his wallet and pullet out the business card Agent Angela Canfield had given him and looked at the clock. Four forty-eight a.m. He dialed her cell number and hoped she wasn’t a heavy sleeper.
CHAPTER 40
CARLI SPUN ON HER heels and lunged at the kidnapper, swinging the knife with no real skill but plenty of adrenaline-fueled force. She wasn’t sure where to cut him to achieve maximum damage, so rather than take the chance of aiming for something hard to hit and missing, for example, his throat, she went for the center of mass—his belly.
Almost immediately, though, everything went wrong. She swung the steak knife in a wide arc, angling for his stomach, planning to put him down with the first thrust and take him out by any means necessary after that. But he was quicker than she had anticipated, raising an arm to defend against the slashing blade and stepping back, moving on the balls of his feet.
She felt resistance as the knife dug into his outstretched arm, slicing all the way to the bone. Blood spurted, spraying in an impressive arc onto the filthy kitchen floor. “You little bitch,” he grunted, a response seemingly made up more of surprise than pain.
Carli had put everything she had behind her thrust, driving forward with her legs and putting all of her one hundred and five pounds into the parry. The knife ricocheted off the man’s arm and the force of her momentum caused her to lose her balance. She stumbled forward, falling to her knees as the man screeched and clutched his wounded arm reflexively to his chest. She scrambled on the floor, desperate to strike again before he had time to recover.
The blood continued to waterfall from the man’s left arm, draining from the gaping wound, but after his initial cry of surprise and pain, he rallied, dropping the useless arm to his side and advancing on Carli quickly. She regained her footing and struck out at him again, but the angle was all wrong and he was coming at her quickly, and she didn’t have time to wind up and get any kind of torque behind her swing.
Martin easily danced away from the weak thrust, his hard eyes glinting. “You little bitch,” he repeated. Carli’s only advantage was surprise, and it was gone. He grabbed her wrist with his still-strong right hand, squeezing the small bones together until she cried out, first in fear and then in agony. The knife clattered to the floor and she sank to her knees as bright pain flared in her wrist and ran up her arm.
He released his hold and bent down, snatching the knife up off the floor. He was incredibly quick. He spun the weapon expertly in his hand until he gripped the handle, leaving the butt end sticking out below his fist. Then it was his turn to swing the steak knife. He lifted it high in the air as the terrified teen dropped to the floor and shrank away, scuttling like a crab, her hands and feet slipping on the grimy surface.
He thrust the knife down at her. The butt end smashed into the side of her head with the full force of his swing, tearing the skin open, and she crumpled onto her side, her head bouncing off the linoleum with a loud crack! Her blood splattered, mixing on the dirty floor with Martin’s, which continued to gush from his arm in frightening volume.
Carli groaned, and her arms and legs continued swinging for a moment in her reflexive attempt to escape her attacker, but her eyes were closed, and the rest of her body lay motionless. Then her limbs got the message that her brain was shutting down for a while, and they stopped moving, too.
CHAPTER 41
MARTIN STUMBLED TO THE kitchen pantry and grabbed the last clean dishtowel. “Dammit,” he hissed in frustration. How could he have been so stupid? How could he have fallen for that little traitor’s silly song and dance? “Oh, I’ve been sweating and nervous all day. I don’t want our first time to be like this!”
He felt like a world-class idiot, like some stupid, junior high sap played for a fool by the cute girl in class. He glared accusingly at her, motionless on the floor, blood flowing sluggishly out of her head, and the urge to finish her off welled up inside him like lava preparing to blow the top off a volcano. He was humiliated and angry, and she should pay.
But he was also injured, and from the looks of it, quite badly. He lifted the dishtowel gingerly from the arm to examine it more closely and he winced. There was no pain, not exactly, not yet, but he knew that was thanks to the adrenaline rushing through his body in response to the sudden altercation with Little Miss Academy Award over there. Soon enough, the adrenaline would dissipate, and the pain would come rushing in to take its place.
He was lucky that the little bitch wasn’t a fighter. She had swung the knife diagonally, holding it high, starting her swing up in the neighborhood of her shoulder, which had given him the split-second he needed to react. When she struck his arm the knife had sliced into the fleshy outside part.
If she had come at him from down low, swinging upward as she should have, she probably would have sliced his stomach open, and his innards would be scattered all over the kitchen floor, or he would even now be staggering around, dying, fighting a losing battle, trying to hold his guts inside his body.