White Heat Read Free Page A

a 1—”
    The guy exploded up off the floor. Emily screamed. More in warning than fright.
    Max shot out his elbow, striking his opponent’s throat. The guy gagged, but came back with a punch to Max’s solar plexus.
    The party was on.
    “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” Emily said hoarsely, backing up.
    “Go back in the kitchen, shut the door. Lock it if you can,” Max told her evenly as the man landed another solid blow, this time to his sternum. Pissed Max off, because he’d been thinking about Emily, not guarding himself sufficiently to deflect the blows. He threw a rear hand punch that knocked the bastard back a couple of steps, then pulled him in for a head butt. Both men cursed. It hurt like hell.
    There wasn’t enough room for three of them in the narrow hallway, and Max was afraid Emily would try to “help” him with her frying pan. And get hurt for her trouble.
    “Emily—” The other man telegraphed by his body movement that he was going to deliver a punch to the side of Max’s head. Max grabbed his arm high and low, and pulled him in for a knee to the belly. The man grunted, but came up swinging.
    “I have his gun and this . . . thing.”
    Great. A weapon and the clip. “Put them — separately – somewhere out of the way.” He relaxed his muscles, and transferred his weight, rotating his hips and shoulders into the attack, then moved straight forward, forcing the guy to back up with a series of fast punches to the face and chest. His rapid retraction prevented the man from grabbing Max’s hand or arm, and kept him off balance.
    Uppercut. Hook. Rear hand punch. Max kept them coming faster than the other man could deflect them.
    “Kitchen,” Max shouted to Emily, as the intruder tried a horizontal elbow strike. “Close, but no cigar,” he told the other man in Italian, raising his right knee and driving hard, just above his opponent’s knee. The guy’s body sagged, and he grabbed onto Max’s shirt front.
    Max stepped forward and left at a forty-five degree angle, moving into the outside of the other man’s body, then chopped up with both forearms, breaking the hold.
    Damn it. He didn’t want Emily holding the gun, and he sure as it didn’t want his opponent to wrestle it from her. The guy charged in, attempting a hip throw. Max was ready. Shaking off the man’s hand on his right wrist, Max pulled him in close and off balance, then used a leg sweep to bring him to his knees.
    He sensed that Emily was still with them in the hallway. With his forearm across his opponent’s throat, he yelled, “Now.”
    Emily darted back into the kitchen as the two men wrestled in the hallway. This was surreal. The big gun felt ridiculously heavy in her hand as she tried to decide what to do with it. She’d never held a gun before. She didn’t want to hold one now. Nothing good could come from her gripping the bloody thing, and she presumed Max was afraid if the guy got free he might take it from her by force and kill them both. Not a pleasant thought.
    She wasn’t about to grapple with a guy twice her weight for a weapon she had no idea how to use.
    She tossed the bullet holder thingie behind the refrigerator, then opened the odds-and-ends drawer, carefully laid the big black gun inside, and closed the drawer as if it might detonate with the slightest movement.
    For a moment she stood there in the semidarkness of her herb-scented kitchen, bare toes curled on the cold tile floor. Favorite frying pan still clutched in a death grip in her left hand, she stared at the closed door.
    The sounds coming from just outside were enough to make her consider shimmying through the narrow kitchen window and making a break for it down the folding fire escape ladder to the street below. She should get la polizia.
    The sickening crunch of a bone snapping made her hesitate. Hopefully it was the intruder’s bone. As annoyed as she was with Max, she still didn’t want to hear his bones splintering like kindling. Emily