Chapter 7
1016 Words
Chapter 7
Frank: 1988
The car door caught Frank sharply on the knees and he tumbled back. It was a ratty 1967 Ford Fairlane, peeling white paint, Alabama plate number four-three-seven-five-something, hard to see in the moonlit semi-darkness.
It hadn’t looked like any trouble. Just a driver. Another Secret Service trainee, Jake Hellman, had him covered.
Frank had gone to the back door of the beater car and someone lying on the floor had kicked the door open, hard, just as he’d looked in. He’d fallen on his a*s just like Hale at the carjacking. He fell on the red Georgia dirt of the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center.
Then his shins stung like hell as the lower edge of the door scraped across them.
He shot out a palm strike and rammed it full force against the car door before its edge could scrape off his kneecaps. That at least stopped the excruciating progress of the swinging steel along his shins. With his other hand he managed to shove off the ground, into a roll, and slam his shoulder against the door, snapping it shut.
Whoever was playing the perpetrator in the car hadn’t expected that. A woman’s squeak sounded through the front window that the driver had rolled down when Frank and Jake stopped the Fairlane for inspection.
Agent Beatrice Ann Belfour. Had to be.
Hadn’t seen her in weeks, different agents rotated through the FLETC training scenarios. But she was always causing him pain when she was down here.
He yanked out his g*n and rolled up to kneel on the hard-packed, deeply rutted earth. That was a big, damn mistake, his shins screamed.
No live ammo in the g*n, he couldn’t shoot out the window.
Instead, he rapped the glass sharply with the butt of his g*n, right where he’d glued on a bit of shattered spark-plug ceramic.
The safety glass practically dissolved, now instead of hard glass, the ceramic had triggered the safety glass into shattering. It was now a loose, wavering sheet, opaque with tiny c***k lines and barely holding together. Old car-thief trick.
He shifted to his feet, swallowing the hiss of pain, and slapped the friable glass with his elbow.
The window disappeared in a shower of tiny pieces.
Even as he aimed his weapon into the car, Beatrice kicked the door again.
This time he had his hip against it and all her violent kick did was force her to slide the other way and smack her head on the far door. He couldn’t see her clearly in the shadows, but there was no question in his mind.
“You, Agent Belfour, are under arrest for bloodying an agent of the United States Secret Service.” He could feel the hot blood trickling down his shins. The long scrapes were already stinging with the sharp salt he’d been sweating from every pore since the moment he’d landed in Georgia three months before.
In answer she popped open the far door she’d just banged her head on and tumbled out the other side of the car and into the dark.
He dove over the trunk and managed to snag her by the ankle before she could sprint into the night. She was clearly the target of interest, the driver probably just a driver. And not his concern at the moment. There were big-picture moments, and stay-focused moments. Stopping Beatrice was definitely in the second category.
Already moving forward fast, his grip around her ankle and her forward momentum slammed her to the ground.
“Ow! Crap! That hurt.”
“Welcome to my world, Beat—” That’s when she flipped around to get him in a headlock between her knees.
It took three tries, but he managed to find the pressure point on her thigh that had her writhing away before she’d quite choked all the air out of him.
He managed to stand and lean forward to grab her just as she shot to her feet to run again.
The top of her head and his nose intersected.
It was mostly luck that he snagged an arm around her waist and dragged her to the ground with him.
“Damn it!” He groaned and wondered if she’d broken his nose. “Why you got a need to beat on me so goddamn hard?”
She struggled to get free.
He just kept an arm clamped around her waist, let her struggle all she wanted. He’d dropped his weapon when she’d rammed her head into his face, not a good thing for his training score, but when he’d fallen with her, he landed on the g*n, a hard lump under his butt causing yet more pain he could blame on her. At least while he was sitting on it, she couldn’t steal it.
With his other hand he tested his nose. He managed not to scream in pain, so he figured it wasn’t broken. Not even b****y. Just hurting like hell.
“That’s your new name,” he told the woman who aimed an elbow at the charley-horse point on his thigh, the same move he’d just used on her to get free of the headlock.
She missed, thank God. Woman had sharp elbows he knew from experience.
“Agent Beat Belfour.”
Finally realizing that he had her and her only way out would be to shoot him, she relaxed.
Once again he was captivated by the feel and smell of this woman. So much strength and power, but so soft and warm in his arms.
He’d thought of little else since the last time she’d beat the crap out of him up close and personal like this.
With a twist of his arm, he hauled her into his lap and kissed her.
For a long perfect moment, she leaned into the kiss. Hard and strong, just like the rest of her, and soft and warm as well. What was a heady scent on her skin, was a mule kick of flavor on his tongue.
He’d been wrong before. His nightly imagination, for those few moments he’d been awake before crashing into hammered-down sleep each night, had remembered her smelling of midnight and roses. True, her lips tasted of that, but beyond that her mouth was pure fire, lit up inside him so hot he burned.
Then she got him.
Finally landed that right hook square into his solar plexus. Then Beat Belfour was gone into the night.
- Writer
