The Death Match Read Online Free PDF

starless, giving him the strangefeeling that the sky and ground had switched places. Above him, Long’s house seemed to hover like a sinister UFO.
    Stacy had already reached the underside of the house and was currently traveling monkeylike along one of the steel beams toward the central column.
    Once Matt reached the beam, he carefully transferred his weight from the cliff, gripping the beam and then wrapping his legs around its rough circumference. Once he pulled himself up onto the beam, he realized that the underside of the house was so close above him that he couldn’t raise his head and was forced to inch slowly forward on his belly. Watching Stacy’s dim silhouette ahead of him, he was in awe of her speed and agility. She moved along the length of the beam with casual grace, utterly fearless.
    Matt was even more amazed as she wrapped her legs around the beam and hung upside down to pick the padlock and remove the grate from its frame.
    “Come on,” she whispered before disappearing into the hatch.
    Matt squeezed through right behind her and found himself inside a dimly lit elevator shaft. He could see the roof of the unmoving elevator several floors below. That was a good thing. If the elevator came up beneath them, they could always hop onto the roof, but if it came down on top of them, they’d be squashed.
    There was a kind of ladder composed of thin steel rungs protruding from the concrete, each one barely wide enough for both feet. Stacy was already more than halfway down when the elevator shuddered to life, rising swiftly in the shaft.
    Stacy leapt from the ladder to the roof of the rising elevator and Matt followed suit, glancing upward to see how much headroom they would have once they reached the top. It didn’t look like much, so Matt flattened himself out, belly down, and pulled Stacydown beside him. She turned her face toward him, her eyes wide as the elevator climbed, whirring and clanking beneath them. The top of the shaft was packed with gears and greasy hydraulic equipment, with lots of sharp edges and moving parts. If they wound up squashed between the gears and the roof of the elevator, they would be ground into hamburger.
    Matt sucked in his breath and squeezed his eyes shut as the elevator ground to a halt with less than an inch between his head and a large, cagelike structure of rusted struts and humming machinery.
    The cab of the elevator dipped slightly as two heavy passengers entered, their thudding footsteps muffled by carpet and the sound of low-pitched male voices. They went quiet for a moment, and then the elevator started descending.
    Matt was silently weighing their options when Stacy kicked open the hatch and dove headfirst into the cab.
    That woman was the poster child for poor impulse control. Up until that point, he had been content to simply follow her single-minded lead, more interested in information gathering than ass kicking, but now he was starting to wonder if he’d made a mistake in trusting her judgment. He bit back on a string of frustrated swearing and unslung his ax, poking his head cautiously down into the open hatch.
    Stacy had her arms and legs wrapped around the same ginger-haired thug who’d tased her back at the pier. He was bright red and flailing, one arm trapped and sticking straight up next to his ear as Stacy used her thickly muscled arm to choke him out, legs simultaneously scissoring the breath from his body.
    The thug’s companion was someone Matt didn’t recognize, a thoroughly corrupted black guy with rank, greasy dreadlocks and strips of dead gray skin hanging from his face like a fleshy beard. He just stood there staring, his jaw hanging slack and open like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. When he looked up and saw Matt’s head peering upside down from the open hatch, his eyes went wide and he began to fumble at a shoulder holster. Too late. Matt had the handle of the ax under the guy’s chin, lifting his dusty boots up off the floor of