The Huntress

by Dorothy McFalls

  “Hell no, it’s not.”

  Lionel backed away from the both of them. Vega didn’t blame him. Arguments and guns...the combination had a funny way of turning dangerous.

  “No you don’t, asshole.” Butch cocked the shotgun.

  With surprising grace for such a large man, Lionel hurled a nearby lamp at Butch’s head. Butch ducked, but the heavy lamp still smashed against his skull. A string of vile curses came spitting out his mouth.

  Lionel gave a shout of his own and tossed himself through a diamond-paned window. The glass shattered, and he was gone.

  Butch was bleeding from his forehead and cursing up a storm. He’d live.

  But could this disaster be salvaged? Vega didn’t know.

  She grabbed Lila who was turning purple from screaming so hard, and gave her a little shake to capture her attention. “Don’t worry. I’ll protect your man.”

  Lila finally shut up.

  “I’ll get him.” Butch swung his shotgun over his shoulder and disappeared back down the stairs.

  Vega didn’t waste a moment. She leapt through the gaping hole that had once been a window and landed in a slushy back alleyway ten feet below. Glass shards crunched under her boots.

  The sun was already dipping low on the horizon. In less than an hour, Lionel was going to have the benefit of total darkness.

  Following his trail in the snow, she tracked Lionel down one alley into another. He was snaking his way back to the drug infested streets Vega knew well. Problem was, Lionel knew them, too, and would soon have access to friends willing to fight for him.

  Luckily, speed was something Vega had over those big, lumbering men. She could outrun just about any fugitive. Within a few blocks, she caught her first glimpse of him. His lungs must have been burning by now. His massive feet pounded the ground, his body swinging from side to side. One more block and she’d have him.

  “Lionel,” she yelled when she was almost within reach. “You don’t have to go down like this.”

  He stopped. His arm, thick as a log, swept a quick, deadly arc. She ducked, taking a glancing blow to the top of her head.

  His eyes were like stone, his mouth set in a firm line. There would be no calming him today. Not after Butch had pointed that stupid shotgun at Lionel’s head.

  She’d have to subdue him before he hurt someone, namely her. Getting injured wasn’t an option. She inhaled slowly to steady her breathing and focused all her energy on her attack.

  Her first blow, a swinging kick, struck his knee. He stumbled a step but was far from down. Angrier, he lunged for her. She rolled out of reach. Springing back to her feet, she considered drawing her gun. But he was in a blind rage now. The threat of bullets wouldn’t stop him. And she didn’t want to shoot him.

  Though he had a reputation for breaking people with those meaty hands of his—a real bone crushing kind of guy—lately he was just a money launderer. Been truly trying to lay off the violence. She’d seen the positive changes and, damn it, she didn’t want to risk sending him spiraling back into a life that literally crawled with rats and cheap hookers.

  She ducked another blow. Damn. Why hadn’t she grabbed the Taser from her equipment bag before going in after him? Hell, because picking up Lionel had never been a problem before. They’d built a relationship built on mutual fear and respect.

  Mentally shaking herself, she dodged another wild punch and tossed a series of quick kicks to the side of Lionel’s knee. She followed up with a swift blow to his collarbone, ducking and retreating before his flailing fists could make contact.

  He teetered. His growing rage made his attack unpredictable and inefficient. He swung those trunk-like arms blindly.

  She could use that. She wasn’t about to let Lionel get away. Not with Butch hot on his trail. He’d threaten to kill the guy. If nothing else, she had to protect Lionel. And despite Butch’s taunts, she knew she could handle a giant like Lionel.

  On the street, size didn’t matter. Skill did.

  Only 5’3” and one hundred and twenty-five pounds, she needed to depend on all her skills to get this guy. His freakish height would work to her advantage. Staying low, she charged and tackled his legs with a great big bear hug. Knowing he’d instinctively bend down to pull her off, she held on while twisting a kick straight up, aiming the tip of her boot for his nose.

  It crunched.

  Lionel howled. His hands flew to his face.

  Vega sprang to her feet and with one fluid move, locked a handcuff to his wrist and hooked the other side to a nearby dumpster.

  “Sorry about the nose, Lionel,” she said, while struggling to catch her breath.

  Blood trickled down his chin. He kept his free hand over his face and moaned pitifully. She carefully patted him down, searching for any concealed weapons or illegal drugs. Not that she’d turn him in for the drugs. It was just that he didn’t need anymore trouble than he already had.

  She found nothing on him but a scrap of paper in his pocket with the name “Finn” scribbled on one side along with a phone number. She pushed the paper back into his pants and plucked a phone from her own pocket to arrange for a Skip Tracers van to pick them up.

  “Get out of the way!” Butch charged toward her, his face beet red.

  She dropped the phone.

  “I’ve got him!” she shouted.

  Butch didn’t seem to hear. He aimed his shotgun at Lionel’s head and cocked it. “Bastard.”

  He’d said the word in a deadly calm that froze her blood. Butch was planning to fire whether she got out of the way or not. Moving fast, she kicked the shotgun’s barrel, sending its wide spray of bullets into the air.

  “Have you lost your freaking mind?” she ripped the shotgun out of Butch’s hands and tossed it to the ground.

  He didn’t answer right away. His gaze was locked on Lionel. An expression, soiled with hatred, wrinkled his nose and tightened his mouth into a set sneer. “Filthy scum. Scum like that doesn’t deserve to live.”

  Chapter Two

  “I thought Butch was going kill Lionel last night.”

  Vega ducked a flying kick and then somersaulted into a crouch prepared to spring back into an attack.

  “He’s a hothead,” Fiona said. She landed with a kitten’s grace. Her brown hair flowed about her face as she easily deflected Vega’s forward attack. “I’ve never liked him.”

  A short hand-to-hand sparring followed. Fiona was the one to retreat to the edge of the mat.

  Vega gave her sister a moment to catch her breath. “I like Butch. He’s a challenge, not some namby-pamby momma’s boy like your man.”

  Fiona erupted with a little roar and charged back into action. Vega was impressed. Her little sister was beginning to improve. Her moves were fast, consistent and focused.

  At the dojo where Vega trained for at least an hour each day, they were taught a mixture of the highly disciplined Tang Soo Do mixed with no holds barred street fighting. She trained hard, but with Fiona, she always pulled her punches.

  Vega parried and blocked without committing herself to a full counter-attack. The quick sidekick was easy to deflect. Fiona always followed the move with a slicing right hook. Vega raised her arm in anticipation when from out of nowhere a thunderbolt struck the left side of her face, hurling her to the mat.

  Pain coursed through her cheek. She closed her eyes and imagined that last move, mentally taking apart her action, Fiona’s surprise thrust, and her own sloppy reaction.

  “Off your game today?”

  She grimaced and opened her eyes to find Jack’s lovely mug. He offered her a hand up while Fiona danced around the mat with her arms in the air acting like the spoiled brat she could be.

  “Lucky shot,” Vega grumbled, rubbing her stinging cheek.

  Jack tossed her a towel. A wide grin brightened his gently aging face. That grin always made her edgy. And she didn’t need help feeling edgy today, not after she nearly blew her pickup yesterday. Her lack of preparation had almost gotten L
ionel killed. Maybe she was off her game—losing her edge.

  She wiped her face on the towel and tossed it aside. “Don’t let one win get you cocky, Fiona,” she warned.

  Fiona wasn’t listening. She’d pulled Mike, one of the instructors, aside and was showing him her new moves, her slender body replaying the lucky strike. Vega could only shake her head. Fiona had inherited the Brookes’ family curse: a swaggering conceit. It was their father’s legacy, of course.

  Their father, Detroit’s Police Chief David Brookes, had longed to train a son to be a tough-as-nails SOB. But his wife had given him nothing better than two daughters.

  “About yesterday,” Jack said, running a hand through his full head of gray hair. He followed her into the dojo’s small, unisex locker room. “I promise it won’t happen again. I’ve been on the phone all morning giving everyone a headache that can’t be ignored.”

  She stepped into a changing stall and pulled the curtain closed. “You get Butch fired?” She didn’t want Butch jobless, just pulled back a little until he learned to control his anger.

  “Butch? No, I was talking about that stupid Tyler Bonding secretary. She won’t be sending two different bounty hunters after the same prey again, that’s for damn sure. About Butch, from the sounds of it, he lost his head. He’s got a mercenary mentality I wouldn’t allow at Skip Tracers, but then I demand a higher level of professionalism than most.”

  “He nearly killed Lionel in a blind rage.” She still couldn’t believe how his anger had transformed him. She’d nearly had to attack him just to get him to back down. “I don’t understand what happened.”

  “Push hard enough and,” he snapped his fingers, “can happen to anyone,” Jack said from the other side of the curtain.

  “Not me.” She wiped the sweat from underneath her breasts. “I would never—”

  “Vega,” Jack’s shoes scraped on the concrete floor as he left the locker room. “That’s a dangerous attitude. Everyone has a breaking point. Deny it, and you’ll blind yourself to knowing when you’ve reached yours.”

  Jack was probably right, but she wasn’t ready to face it. For years, she’d honed her physical and mental abilities with one goal in mind: control. She might never match a man’s physical strength, but she could push her own limits by maintaining a steady focus and by always keeping her head.

  She stepped into a nearby shower and stood under the steaming stream of water unable to peel her mind from the unsettling thought Jack had planted. What would happen if she were pushed to the edge? How would she know what the edge even looked like?

  “Meet me at the office in an hour, Vega. I’ve got a new project.” Jack called out from the dojo’s main exercise area, his voice echoing through the empty locker room. Leaving her alone to wash away her sudden encounter with uncertainty.

  * * * *

  It took a little less than an hour to clean up, change, and drive back downtown. The snow had stopped falling the night before and the main roads were clear and easy to drive.

  Fiona had somehow finagled a ride back to the office with Vega. She sat in the passenger seat talking nonstop. That one lucky punch had gone straight to her head.

  “You should take me with you on your next assignment. I’m ready, you know. I have my license. I’m bonded and everything. Didn’t you just love how I surprised you with that left? I was planning…”

  Vega stopped listening somewhere near the Chrysler Expressway. Nothing could convince her to trust Fiona to keep her head in a real-life situation. Fiona was so not ready for bounty hunting. Her bout of bragging only proved it.

  “Oh damn, look. I broke a nail today,” Fiona complained while the elevator rushed them to the sixteenth floor, adding more strength to Vega’s point. Her little sister was fretting over a broken nail, for goodness sake.

  Once on the sixteenth floor, Vega pulled a small pile of messages from the box sitting on the receptionist’s desk at the entrance of Skip Tracers suite of offices. Two were from Butch, no message other than his phone number. The rest were from her mother, wanting to have dinner on Friday.

  “Jack, I hope this next assignment takes me out of town,” she said as she dropped into her desk chair and shoved the messages into a cluttered drawer. “Mom must have found a new bachelor to parade in front me. She’s called three times this morning alone.”

  Jack frowned. “She won’t be happy till her girls are settled, married and following her to all those society events she likes so much. Perhaps you’ll take her seriously one day.” His frown deepened. “I’d hate to lose you, though.”

  “I’d hate to lose me, too.” She kicked back in her chair. “What’cha got for me?”

  “It’s a real challenge. You’re my best, Vega. You’re the only one I’d give this to.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” She dismissed Jack’s compliment. He was just buttering her up, which could only mean this new assignment was a real winner. “Get to the details.”

  “Grayson Walker.” Jack tossed a picture along with a thick file folder on her desk. “Big reward, bail’s set at five million. He was a top executive for Six-Star Enterprises.” Jack paused, as if expecting a reaction.

  He should have known better.

  “Six-Star,” Jack said with a huff. “Based in Atlanta. They’re one of the newest and wealthiest Fortune 500 Companies. They’ve been in the news almost constantly for the past several years with announcements of the small industries they’ve been acquiring...quite hostilely.”

  Vega raised her head from the photo on her desk and stared blankly at Jack.

  “You really need to break down and buy a television,” he muttered.

  “What did he do?” She didn’t care to listen to the details about the company Grayson worked for. At least not until after she agreed to track the guy down.

  “Murdered a partner in the company. Gruesome killing. Nothing is as simple as a gunshot in the head anymore. These damned crazies have to get creative.”

  “A shame,” she said with a deep sigh. She stared at the photo of her quarry again. The men she pursued could rarely be called even passably good-looking. But the man who stared into the camera for this picture was unquestionably handsome. His hair was dark, short and a little tousled. His bronze skin gave his chiseled features a healthy glow. The photo certainly wasn’t from the police file. The tailored dark business suit did wonders for his full frame, for one thing. He was smiling, for another. This man, this Grayson Walker, could melt a woman’s heart with a smile like that. It was a crying shame that someone with those kinds of looks going for him could turn out twisted.

  And unfortunate, for Vega’s task at least, the brown eyes she saw staring up at her were sharp and dangerously intelligent.

  “How long has he been loose?” she asked.

  “Six months.”

  She flew to her feet. “Six months? He’s been missing for six months and the bonding company is only now getting around to looking for him?”

  Jack murmured something under his breath.

  “What?”

  “You won’t be the first bounty hunter to go after him,” he said louder this time. “Three others have already failed to bring him back. He killed the last one. But, I know you. You could get this guy without even trying.”

  “He’s had plenty of time to bury himself into a damn deep hole, Jack. I don’t know.”

  “Houdini couldn’t hide from you.” He waved his hand at the high-tech computer taking up half her desk and most of the adjacent computer table. “Work your magic. It’ll be an easy five hundred thousand if he’s still in Georgia, a million if he’s fled the state.”

  Though the money was enticing, the challenge of succeeding where three other top bounty hunters had failed was what really snared her.

  The photo of her father sitting high on a nearby shelf caught her eye. He was dressed in his everyday police uniform and wearing his usual stern expression. He’d died only a week after the picture was taken. Maybe if she succeeded where three
others had failed, she’d finally be able to imagine him with a look of pride for her.

  “Okay Jack,” she said with a deep sigh. “I’ll find him.”

  * * * *

  Early the next morning Vega pinned the photo of Grayson Walker to her bulletin board. “Where would a twisted mind like yours go?” She flipped open the police file and began the long process of digging into a fugitive’s head.

  Days passed without much progress. The file was thick, but it didn’t have much in the way of useful information. His childhood was a mystery. No birth records could be found. Vega decided to work backwards, beginning with his arrest.

  “This guy is sick.” Vega nearly lost her lunch when she finally got a copy of the crime scene photos. There wasn’t much left of the man Grayson was accused of killing. This crime really drove home the term ‘hack job’.

  His best friend? That was always a good place to start. Unfortunately, the man Grayson allegedly killed, Greg Harper, was also the only man Vega might consider calling Grayson’s close friend.

  Girlfriends were usually great sources of information. She spent days on the phone trying to track down a steady girlfriend, a one-night stand, or a whore.

  Nothing. The guy must have been celibate.

  Or really good at covering his tracks.

  He’d helped build the lucrative Atlanta based Six-Star Enterprises with two other men, Joshua Whitfield and Greg Harper. Joshua Whitfield was the money behind the company, a titan in the investment-banking world who appeared to have very little involvement in the day-to-day operations of Six-Star.

  The dead Greg Harper and Grayson were the brains behind the corporation. She couldn’t figure out exactly what Six-Star did besides acquire smaller corporations. But whatever it was, Greg and Grayson worked closely together. She traced their friendship all the way back to when they were roommates at the University of Georgia through their college years.

  Something between the two must have gone sour in those last few days. Something that pushed Grayson so far over the edge, he saw nothing wrong with hacking his best friend into tiny bits. But Vega wasn’t interested in motive; she just needed a clue to Grayson’s whereabouts. Any crumb would do.