Cold Fire by Dustin Stevens

Author:Dustin Stevens [Stevens, Dustin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Published: 2015-05-26T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Seven

“How’s the hand?” Diaz asked, glancing over from the road to my right fist, lightly balled atop my thigh. I glanced down at it without looking over at her, flexing my fingers into a tight bunch before spreading them wide, leaving the hand flat.

“It’s fine,” I replied, looking out the front windshield. “I’m not made of glass.”

Until she asked, I hadn’t once thought about my hand. The combination of avoiding his jawbone and the concentrated adrenaline coursing through me had kept there from being even a slight hint of soreness. My skin, leathered from five years of exposure to the elements, had held firm as well.

It was the first punch I’d thrown in a very long time, though my body didn’t seem to realize it.

“I could say the same for Manny Juarez,” Diaz said. “Hard as you hit him, I thought he’d be unconscious for hours.”

An inch up or down, inch and a half to the left, and he would have been. I don’t say that to be boastful, but as a statement of fact. Most people have never thrown a meaningful punch in their lives. They curl their thumbs beneath their overlying fingers, angle their hand away from their forearm, don’t know how to balance their weight.

On the second day of DEA training, they began teaching us hand-to-hand combat. Not how to box, not some twisted version of the hottest MMA style, but how to fight. Even a few years out of practice, those skills never leave a man.

If I’d wanted him unconscious, he would have been. Simple fact was, he was of absolutely no use to us lying on the floor, unable to open his eyes. So I did what I had to to make my point, to get his attention.

Two minutes later he told us exactly what we wanted to know.

“Tell me,” I asked, switching the topic of conversation, making no attempt to be covert about it. “How did you guys close the net on him anyway?”

A long moment passed as Diaz pushed the speedometer above seventy. The setting sun shone in our faces. I reached out and flipped the visor down in front of me as the front dash piped chilled air into my face.

“You never heard?” she asked, the top half of her face covered in plastic black sunglasses. Their mirrored lenses reflected both the sun and the road ahead.

“No,” I said, shaking my head less than an inch to either side. “Once I was out, I was out.”

“Damn,” Diaz muttered, just audible above the air-conditioning fan in front of us.

She left the comment open-ended, pausing for a moment, allowing me to fill in the blanks if I wanted to. There was plenty I could have inserted for her, ranging from the need to get as far away from the desert as I could, to the knowing if I was around it even a little bit there was no way I would be able to control the torrent of emotion within me.

My actions a

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.