Hot Mercy (Affairs of State Book 2) Read Free Page A

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.

 
     
     
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    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.