Rage Against the Dying - By Becky Masterman Page 0,3

the wash, and the wisps of pale hair he had spotted were falling among thick white waves almost to her shoulders. The only sound for a moment in the van was her noisy breathing. Somehow she had kept a hold on the dowel, and pointed it at Gerald, not knowing it was about as threatening as a chopstick. He held out his hand, palm up, kept his eyes on hers.

“Give me the stick. Come on, sweetheart. Give me the stick. I’m not going to hurt you. I just wanted to come in out of the sun. Talk about rocks.” Gerald puffed a laugh and grabbed at the stick, then sucked his breath back again. A sharp sting on the palm of his hand made him release the stick. He gazed in surprise at a gash that ran from the bottom of his index finger to the top of his wrist. As he watched, blood seeped up through the cut. What had caused that? His blood had no connection to what he imagined happening in the van. He struggled to put the blood in context and then saw that it wasn’t just a dowel she held. It was a dowel with a blade attached to the end, a blade that formed a triangle with a razor on one side and a point at the end.

He saw the blood before he felt the real pain, and felt the pain before he felt the rage when the woman ripped the duct tape halfway off her mouth and the exposed side grimaced.

* * *

She was thinking. In the shaved moment while she watched the pain reach his consciousness, watched him process the absurdity of an attack by a woman who two minutes ago had been immobilized with fear, watched the rage flash in anticipation of his own counterattack, she was thinking.

The dried blood on the floor of the van confirmed she wasn’t his first. There were bodies hidden somewhere. She was in a unique position to confirm that without the legal strictures of interrogation and defense counsel. But he was stronger than she had originally judged, and it had been a long while since she had moved in these ways. A little less strong, reaction time a little slower, she was out of practice, and the confines of the van limited her options more than she had foreseen. She should not have let him get her into the van; that was an error in judgment.

Things may have already gone too far, but no time to think about that now. For now she felt her forty years of conditioning kick into fight or …

That was it, fight. There was nowhere to run.

One

Ten days earlier …

I’ve sometimes regretted the women I’ve been.

There have been so many: daughter, sister, cop, tough broad, several kinds of whore, jilted lover, ideal wife, heroine, killer. I’ll provide the truth of them all, inasmuch as I’m capable of telling the truth. Keeping secrets, telling lies, they require the same skill. Both become a habit, almost an addiction, that’s hard to break even with the people closest to you, out of the business. For example, they say never trust a woman who tells you her age; if she can’t keep that secret, she can’t keep yours.

I’m fifty-nine.

When I joined the FBI there weren’t many female special agents and the Bureau took advantage of that. A five-foot-three-inch natural blond with a preteen cheerleader’s body comes in handy for many investigations, so they were willing to waive the height requirement. For a good chunk of my career I worked undercover, mostly acting as bait for human traffickers and sexual predators crossing state or international lines.

I did the undercover work for nine years. That’s about five years longer than usual before agents burn out or lose their families. Because I never married or had children I might have done more time if it hadn’t been for the accident that necessitated fusing several vertebrae. It could have been worse; you should have seen what happened to the horse.

The surgery made problematic many job requirements—leaping across rooftops … dodging knife thrusts … lap dancing. I could have taken disability but couldn’t see what life would look like outside the Bureau, so the second half of my career was spent in Investigations. Then I retired.

No, that’s not the whole truth. Toward the end I was having a little difficulty making decisions. Specifically, a couple of years ago I killed an unarmed perp near Turnerville, Georgia. Contrary to what