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He gurgled, and his fist shot up, trying to catch her hand. She caught him in the junk with a kick. And then brought her knee into his solar plexus.
Neck, balls, and gut. Not exactly a fair fight, but he was built like an ape, and she had learned to fight dirty to survive.
Groaning, he toppled. But she struck him on the neck as he fell.
By the time he hit the cement, one leg still dangling on the dirt road, he was unconscious.
She breathed heavily, her brow prickled with sweat. She glanced from side to side. No vehicles. No witnesses.
Then, with a grim nod to herself, she bent double, and began to pick him up. This was going to be the harder part. Lifting two hundred pounds of farm boy into his own truck was not easy, but she managed to do it—slowly and with much grunting, dragging, and breaks in between. By the time she had finished, she had been forced to pull him along the ground in front of the truck and into the passenger seat. Then she sprinted around the truck, hopped in the front, and began to drive away. She shot a quick look towards where she had hidden her motorbike. It was out of sight, concealed in the cornfield. She would come back for it later. Not that it was actually registered in her name.
For all she knew, it would rot there until the farmers found it.
But most of her attention, after a moment, turned to the man unconscious in the seat next to her. His stupid hat had fallen off, and she tossed it into the backseat. Now, as she drove away, she reached into her pocket, pulling out something that looked like a pillowcase at first, but smaller. She had asked her mother to knit it for her.
She had told her mother it was for a small throw pillow.
If her mother had known it was going to be used as a hood for a hostage, Cora couldn’t imagine what she would think.
Cora placed the hood over the man’s head and tightened the drawstrings, leaving only enough room to breathe.
She tied his hands in front of him. It wasn’t particularly difficult to slowly guide the truck while binding his hands. For one, she had practiced tying knots in storms and underwater during combat. For another, the straight path, leading away from the switchback and cutting through the field, gave her few things in the way of challenges to overcome.
She picked up the pace, driving steadily away.
Every now and then, she would glance in the mirror to make sure no one was following. Nothing ahead or to the side. He was still unconscious.
The first leg of the mission had gone without a hitch.
It was the second part that could get far messier.
CHAPTER TWO
Her hostage woke gasping and desperately shifting his head about.
Cora watched him with her arms crossed and holding a knife in one hand, which rested against her forearm.
The figure with the hood over his head continued to shift about. “Hello?” came a muffled, panicked voice.
The large, broad-shouldered man still looked like a linebacker. But with his hands tied behind his back, his legs tied to the chair, and the hood over his head, he had lost some of his intimidation factor.
Cora didn’t speak first. She just watched. One could learn a lot about their victims by watching. One could learn just as much about victimizers by watching. Predators weren’t the only thing that could hide in the brush.
She didn’t say anything. She was standing in an old, abandoned wooden shed. It smelled faintly of mold. A hunter’s lodge she had known about. Not far from where her sister had said she was going to meet her boyfriend.
Said boyfriend was now trying to plead his case through the hood.
“Whatever this is, trust me, I don’t have money. I’m not the guy. Just let me go. I haven’t seen anything.”
“Shut up,” she said.
He paused, hesitant for an uncomfortable moment. “Are you a woman?” He said slowly. “I got beat up by agirl?”
Cora frowned. Typical. She slapped him across the head.
“Agh! Sorry! I didn’t mean it as an insult. What do you want?”
Cora paced around him, moving slowly, wanting him to hear the sound of her footsteps against creaking wood. Pain was hardly a useful tool without its cousin: fear. Fear was the real ally in these sorts of interrogations.
