Hot Mercy (Affairs of State Book 2) (2 page)

Instinct took over.

Mercy turned and ran.

                                          2

She didn’t dare even a hasty glance over her shoulder to see if the man was following her. To take her eyes from the cracked slate pavers as she ran would risk tripping. Once down she’d be an easy victim.

Her brain spun out details that hadn’t immediately registered. White guy. Slavic features. Heavy shingle of a single dark eyebrow protruding over mud-colored eyes that sank into Neanderthal sockets. Shaved head. He hadn’t said a word, but the look he’d given her convinced Mercy that he’d been waiting for her. No crime of opportunity this.

Was he still following her? She heard no footsteps behind her, but in the deafening splatter of torrential rain she couldn’t hear her own. The gray wall of water had become so opaque she was barely able to see two feet in front of her. She burst onto Wisconsin expecting to run into the crowd she’d left moments earlier. But not a soul was in sight for blocks.

Where the hell are you, people? Damn rain had chased them all indoors to wait out the storm, dry off.

She became increasingly desperate as she raced past a deserted bakery, a closed PNC bank, a hardware store with its iron grille pulled across display windows.
Cell phone!
she thought.
Call 911.
No. Digging it out of her purse would take too long. Better to run into the first restaurant she came to. Make them call the police for her.

But what would she say? A man had frightened her with a mean look? She hadn’t actually seen a weapon in his hand.

She reduced her pace just enough to safely turn her head and look back. The stranger was less than a hundred feet behind her. Black leather jacket slick with rain, khaki pants drenched. He was huge, barreling toward her like a brakeless eighteen wheeler.

She froze—suddenly incapable of making her feet move, heart slamming in her chest. “What do you want?” she screamed.

If he was after her purse, she’d give it to him. Her watch, her rings? Thank God she’d left Sebastian’s beautiful ruby at home in her jewelry box. So…fine. Take the lot!

He didn’t answer, just plowed forward even as she started backpedaling, spinning on her heels, finding her footing again and launching herself down the deserted sidewalk.

She shook her head in confusion. This was crazy! Maybe he didn’t speak English. Maybe he just wanted to rob her after all. She unlooped her purse strap over her head and threw the little bag at him. His huge arm swept it aside. He kept coming at her.

Not about money then.

One possible explanation suddenly struck her. She’d played a major role in thwarting a Mexican cartel’s lucrative business. Hadn’t she been warned by both the embassy in Mexico City and Sebastian, the man she still hadn't gotten used to thinking of as her lover, that there might be repercussions? Which was one reason she’d come home to DC—to put distance between herself and grudge-holding cartel thugs.

The soles of her pumps skidded on slippery asphalt. She tore off her shoes, tossed them away, broke into a barefooted sprint. Still no one in sight.
Oh, God!
Maybe not involving others was better. If the metallic flash she’d seen was gunmetal, he was armed. If she asked anyone for help, she’d be putting them in harm’s way.

Now his footfalls were like cannon fire. Thud-thud-thud. Moving up closer and closer behind her. Her breath burned in her lungs. Rain lashed her face. She dashed water out of her eyes with the back of one hand. Her vision cleared briefly only to cloud over again, the rain a determined gray veil.

Ahead she saw Degrees. The trendy bar would be clogged with customers sheltering from the storm. So tempting to rush in and shout for help… But a contract killer wouldn’t be deterred by witnesses. Hell, even dignitaries with body guards were attacked in public places. President Reagan—surrounded by Secret Service agents, press, and well-wishers when Hinkley shot him. How many people stood in that hotel kitchen decades ago when Bobby Kennedy was gunned down? U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords was targeted in a crowded mall.

Amateur or trained killer—didn’t matter. Either was capable of pulling a trigger, using a hysterical mob to cover their retreat. The only difference—amateurs usually got caught. This guy didn’t look like an amateur.

“Shit!” she gasped.
No, absolutely not. Can’t risk the lives of others
.

With a sinking feeling, Mercy forced herself to keep on running. The bar flashed by in a blur. The soles of her feet burned with every slam down on pavement. Her side ached horridly. She was accustomed to her three-mile daily runs, knew how to press beyond endurance, but not without shoes. And the slick pavement made every footfall treacherous.

She veered into an alley. Drenched to the skin, coat flapping around her calves, she emerged into residential streets she knew intimately. Here she’d have the advantage. Mercy cut through two backyards, vaulted a low anchor-link fence, dove behind a wooden garden shed and came out on a backstreet not far from the old C&O Canal. She was almost certain she’d lost him. As soon as possible, she’d find a phone—her cell now gone with her purse—call the police. She slowed to a more comfortable jog, felt her jagged breathing begin to smooth out, her collegiate training paying off in ways she’d never imagined. She had just begun to enjoy a welcome surge of endorphins when she heard the warning slap of heavy boots on wet pavement. Not behind her—ahead. She looked up.

Impossible! But there he was. The man’s barn door of a body blocked her way.

Mercy stopped, looked around, her throat stone-dry. Now she was literally in the dark—dusk having morphed to night, no street lights here. Still no one else around.

He took three measured steps toward her, moving with dead confidence, as if he knew he’d won. His wide shoulders and thick torso in the scarred black leather seemed to expand the nearer he came.

Her heart crashed in her chest. Body heat trapped within her coat triggered sweat—pooling between her breasts, trickling down her spine. She scanned her surroundings. Rising up high on her right was an ancient, moss-covered brick wall. It had probably existed since Abraham Lincoln’s presidency. Too high to climb quickly, she thought. To her left, a shorter, modern cement retaining wall. On the other side of that, she knew, ran the canal.

The storm, on top of a week of spring rains, had already swollen the flow to near flood level. She could hear water gushing through the narrow cut. She envisioned the stream weaving through the city, beneath streets then reappearing beneath foot bridges.

Water—an element with which she was intimately familiar from years of youth swim meets. Water was her friend, the only one she had at this moment.

Mercy tore off her coat. Her pursuer bolted forward, his expression smug, thinking he’d trapped her. But she was quick, and her strategy unexpected. She clambered over the waist-high wall, jumped and skidded down the steep embankment. She’d intended to go into the water the safest way—feet first. But her leg caught on a gnarled branch growing out of the rocky bank, flipping her. She had the presence of mind to protect her head with one arm. With the other hand she reached forward in the hope of breaking her fall should she hit a cement canal bottom. Breaking her wrist was less of an issue than cracking open her skull or severing her spine.

She hit icy water with a loud splash.

The canal was less than three feet deep, even in flood. But she knew better than to try and stand up, making herself an easy target. Water rushed into her throat and eyes as she struggled to swim to the opposite side. Useless. She stopped fighting the current, allowed the flow to turn her body and carry her away from her pursuer.

The frigid water shocked her system. Her limbs went numb. Still clothed, her body felt heavy, awkward, weighted down by the knit fabric of her dress that sucked up water and clung around her thighs. She tried to swim, using the force of the current to speed her away from danger. But every stroke, every kick required extreme effort.

Mercy lifted her head, blinked stinging droplets out of her eyes and stared straight ahead into the dark. A stone walkway passed directly over the canal, maybe two hundred feet further on. To her right ran the old tow path where mules once trod, dragging barges loaded with tobacco leaves and produce along the canal, toward the Potomac River where merchant sailing ships waited to carry their cargo to foreign ports. When she looked over her shoulder the man was sloshing along the rain-muddied path, fewer than fifty paces behind her, slipping and sliding but managing to stay on his feet. He passed in and out of patches of light from lamps that now lined the embankment. In one pale yellow strobe she caught a clear glimpse of the object in his right hand. It was without doubt a pistol. Her heart sank.

He suddenly plunged forward, catching up but then running past her.
WTF?
She drew a deep breath, submerged and stroked harder. When she came up for air, he was still ahead of her but had stopped running. He planted his feet wide. He lifted the gun with both hands and took aim.

Bullets buzzed through the water around her like furious bees. But the canal swept her past him. Not hit. Not yet. She was sure she’d know it, even in the numbing cold water, if she had been wounded.

Mercy dove again, scraping the silty bottom with her belly, stroking harder, faster. Again, she came up for air. The Slav was no longer in sight on the tow path.
Good!
But when she glanced up at the stone footbridge toward which the current was carrying her, he stood at the apex, gun braced between two beefy hands, waiting for her to come to him. Waiting for his next shot. The bastard was grinning.

“No!” she screamed, gulping down water, hacking it up.

She was helpless to stop herself in the swift current. As the canal narrowed, it flowed faster, far too powerful for her to fight.

Mercy ducked beneath the surface again, wincing at the terrifying splat-splat-splat of bullets smacking water. When she came up for air on the other side of the bridge she was facing the sluice gates.
Fuck!
She’d forgotten about them. The level of the canal would drop by three or four feet on the other side. If she made it through the narrow passage.

Mercy braced herself for the fall, felt her already battered body scrape past an iron grille. She plunged with the little waterfall. Hit the bottom of a cement trough. The bottoms of her feet, mercifully, struck first. Pushing off she floated to the surface and allowed the canal to sweep her away beneath the Georgetown streets where her pursuer couldn’t follow.

Nearly half a mile downstream from where she’d started, Mercy pulled herself out of the icy flow. Though shivering and bruised after repeatedly smacking into rocks and floating debris, she was still alive.

Best of all—the man with the gun was nowhere in sight.

                                          3

The woman had stopped her car and waved Mercy inside after she’d seen her climb out of the canal. She said she worked at the Library of Congress. Mercy would forever love librarians.

Now she huddled inside a scratchy wool cocoon. Someone had wrapped the blanket around her moments after she’d staggered through the door of a Metro Police station. Then a female officer brought her a pair of sweats from someone’s locker or a lost-and-found bin—Mercy didn’t ask. The cotton fleece smelled musty and vaguely of BO, but the clothes were dry and blissfully warm.

She clutched the Dr. Who ceramic mug one of the officers handed her, the blue Tardis fading as the coffee inside started to cool. Warming her hands along the sides of the mug, she sipped as she stared at photographs that flashed from the screen of a battered laptop sitting on the table in front of her. By now she’d told her story at least three times to revolving sets of cops. All but one detective had by now left the interview room.

“No,” she said, again, “not him either. None of these are the man who chased me.”

Something over an hour had passed since the nice librarian had offered to take her to a hospital and only reluctantly agreed to the police instead. Oddly, there was no clock in the room, and time seemed as fluid and unstoppable as the canal. She still couldn’t stop shivering, despite dry clothing, hot drinks, and the stiflingly overheated room.

“Tell me again what he looked like,” the detective said.

“Average height. Big body, muscular, shaved head, pale skin, dark brown or black hair. Bushy eyebrows that came together over a bulbous, hawk-beak of a nose. Like it had been broken more than once.” She sighed. The image was so sharp in her mind, but how to convey that awful menace in his eyes? “He looked like a villain out of a Bourne movie.”

The cop smiled. “His voice?”

“He never said a word.”

The officer had introduced himself, but her head hurt so badly it wasn’t retaining much of anything. She checked the name stitched over his breast pocket.  A.C. Kramer. He was frowning at her now. “You’re sure you didn’t overreact, ma’am? Maybe you were out clubbing with friends. Had a few too many and fell in the canal?”

“It wasn’t even eight o’clock,” she muttered. Clubbing indeed.  “And I wasn’t drinking. Listen, I know gunfire when I hear it.” Her voice sounded dulled to her, fatigue and pain muffling it. Like the hushed pop of her attacker’s gun when he’d shot at her. “The gun had a silencer. That must be why no one reported hearing gunfire.”