The Death Match Read Online Free PDF Page A

might be…involved with someone I know.”
    “A woman?”
    Matt shook his head. “Someone bad.”
    She nodded, didn’t push for more information. She was amazingly focused, like nothing else mattered. Utterly single-minded.
    “I’m going up to his house tonight. I know he’s taking that girl to his place for a fight. If we can get in, we can see what’s really going on. See if Tanya is there, and if she is, I’m gonna bring her home. Want to come?”
    Matt frowned. “Now?”
    “Now.”
    “That was quite a beating you took,” Matt said. “You sure you don’t need some rest?”
    “I’ll rest when I know Tanya is okay.”
    “I don’t know,” Matt said.
    “What, you’re busy?” Stacy smirked and gestured with her chin at Flame’s big, doughy, leather-clad ass as the older woman bent to take a package of napkins from a lower shelf. “Got something better lined up?”
    Matt downed his own shot and set the glass back on the bar.
    “Okay,” he said. “I’m in.”

CHAPTER FIVE
    It was a quiet drive to Long’s house in the Hollywood Hills, up several seemingly endless freeways and then into steep, twisting canyons. Matt didn’t really know what to say to his hotheaded new companion. He wanted to grill her, to ask her all sorts of questions, but he didn’t know how much he was ready to give away about his own situation.
    Eventually Stacy pulled her aging SUV onto a narrow, dusty turnoff beneath the target house.
    “I know she’s in there,” Stacy said.
    The house, Gregory Long’s house, was one of those ugly ultramodern concrete igloos that had been popular back in the sixties. Surrounded by high walls on three sides and a close-to-sheer cliff on the fourth, it was almost inaccessible by any way other than a long, private road set behind two locked gates.
    Almost.
    “There,” Stacy said, handing Matt a small pair of night-vision binoculars.
    “Where?” He put the binocs to his eyes, scanning the exposed belly of the precariously balanced structure.
    “On the left side of that center column.”
    The night-vision binocs painted the steep, rocky landscape a ghostly green. A white-hot moving shape distracted Matt’s focus for a moment, but it was just a trundling skunk passing through the brush under the house. He turned back to that thick centralcolumn and scanned its length. It was cold, dark, and monochrome in the binocs, and if Matt hadn’t known where to look, he might have missed what he was looking for.
    There was a maintenance hatch covered by a waffled metal grate. Barely wide enough for Stacy, it’d be a real squeeze for Matt. It was a good fifteen feet above the point where the column protruded from the mountain’s rocky flank.
    “I see it,” Matt said. “But I don’t see how you think we can reach it.”
    “Look, the cliff face comes right up under the house on the left side. We can scale it there and then use the steel beams under the house to climb across to reach the hatch.”
    “And if it’s locked?”
    “You leave that to me.” She patted one of her many pockets. “You coming?”
    Matt took one more look at the underside of the house. It was crazy and close to impossible, but she was right. It was their only option.
    He followed her as she barreled into the brush like a tracking hound hot on a fugitive’s scent. It was a ten-minute slog through thick, scratchy brambles before they even reached the base of the rock formation that supported most of the weight of Long’s circular house.
    The climb up the rugged cliff face was actually not all that bad. The rock face was steep, but good and solid, and it held strong under Matt’s hands. There were plenty of grooves and natural hand- and toeholds. If you ignored the whole possibly-plummeting-to-your-death thing, it was beautiful up there. The view was like something out of a movie, the lights of Los Angeles spread out below him, soft-focus and twinkling from the heavy smog in the air. The sky, by contrast, was dull and