And then she had signed the letter with her real name, Amanda, as opposed to Julia.
The tears that had fallen from Pine’s eyes had stained the pages in several places. She read it through three more times, clinging to different words and phrases with each pass. She finally folded the pages and set them next to her as she watched night fall over the lighted Atlanta skyline.
Her family was out there somewhere, but the reality was all three of them could be dead now. If so, would finding their graves, if there even were graves, be enough for her?
I don’t know the answer to that. I can’t possibly.
Her phone dinged. She looked at the screen. It was a text from John Puller.
She sat up straighter. Leonard Atkins was receiving aid from the VA. And it was going to an address in Huntsville, Alabama, that Puller had also provided in the text. Pine Googled the location. It was about three and a half hours by car from Atlanta.
She went back inside and climbed into bed.
Her last thought before she fell asleep was, Just keep plugging, Atlee. Every day. And you’ll eventually get there. You’ll find them, one way or another.
Chapter 6
When the woman rose from the chipped wooden stool, she stood a statuesque six foot one in her long, bare feet. She flexed her right hand and then her left. The fingers were callused and strong, just like all the rest of her. She felt pops, twinges, and creaks as bones and cartilage resettled into appropriate grooves; more cantankerous elements refused to fully reset, but grudgingly moved a bit closer to normal. She stretched her long, muscled neck, rolling it one way and then the other. She pushed her sculpted shoulders away from her neck, and her ripped traps and delts thanked her as the release of tension was both palpable and immediate.
She wore a frayed black sports top with a faded Nike swoosh, and a chest protector under that along with a pair of faded black Lycra athletic shorts. Both pieces of compression clothing sharply defined her long, muscular, and scarred physique.
The short, trim man standing next to her helped the woman slip on her gloves, and then he commenced rapidly massaging her long, ropy arms.
“You ready?” he asked, looking up at her.
She glanced down at him with a frown. “I’m here, Jerry. So what the hell do you think?”
He put in her mouthguard and then made the sign of the cross. He always did that, and it always irritated the crap out of her.
“Who you trying to signal, dude, your bookie?” she muttered through the mouthguard.
“See you on the other side, El,” said Jerry as he hurriedly left the ring.
Eloise “El” Cain was getting a bit long in the tooth for what she was about to do, though she did it only when she really needed the money. Her opponent tonight was four inches shorter, but a real stud; at 190 pounds she outweighed the taller Cain by ten pounds. And, like Cain, almost all of it was bone, gristle, and muscle displayed across her broad shoulders, sinewy core, abs like rows of stacked bricks, barrel-thick thighs, muscled glutes, and diamond-hard calves. She could destroy 99 percent of the guys out there and give the other 1 percent a run for their money. Her technique was rock-solid: She could fight all day, could absorb terrific punishment, and had crushing power in all four limbs. She was over a dozen years younger than Cain, and many thought she had a shot at the big time. The only question marks were her fighting smarts and mental toughness. And the fact that the women’s UFC world topped out at featherweight, or a 145-pound limit.
Cain had always thought that was sexist bullshit. There were some women out there who could fight with the best of them. The men had heavier weight divisions in the UFC, so why were the bigger women ruled out? Maybe they would just have to start their own league, or the larger women would have to make the jump to boxing, with its far heavier weight divisions. But ultimately it wasn’t fair, and, like always, the women got the short end of the athletic stick, Cain believed.
Her opponent had more tats than unmarked skin, Cain observed. The general theme of the skin art seemed to be violent death, with sadomasochistic torture running a close second.
Cain knew she was here just for the woman to notch a win on her career belt as she moved up in the land of mixed martial arts.
Well, maybe I have different plans.
This was decidedly not the big time. No cage match televised on pay-per-view happening here. No Ronda Rousey, Holly Holm, or Cris Cyborg within a thousand miles of this dive. No million-dollar payoffs or eye-popping commercial endorsements. This was small-time, local stuff. But the rowdy, hard-drinking crowd numbered well over two hundred, and the excitement of what they were about to witness was palpable. The site was an old factory where stuff used to be made by the locals until the world changed and the country stopped making any stuff at all. Now it was a tinpot relic that was used for myriad purposes, none of them authorized and some of them patently illegal. But who was going to deny folks a little fun and a way to make some money on the side?
And I can earn my little pot of gold tonight.
The official purse was five grand. If she won, Cain would get only a thousand of it. The loser got three hundred bucks flat for getting her brains scrambled. Just how it was at this level. What Cain called it was kicking the shit out of someone while they kicked the shit out of you, while the crowd guzzled beer and sucked in weed, cheering and jeering. The rest of the cash would go to assorted males on the food chain who added no value and took no risks and raised not one finger. But they had power and influence behind them, so they got their pound of flesh.
Yet the possibility of a thousand bucks for one night’s work was more than enough incentive for Cain to be standing where she was, mouthpiece in, fists gloved, strategy mapped out, adrenaline spiking.
The women met in the middle of an improvised ring, where fence posts had been cemented into huge tractor trailer rims to hold them upright. The chain-link fence around the ladies was eight feet high with a padlocked gate. Unlike a UFC octagon ring, the chain link was not coated with soft vinyl and the metal posts had no safety coverings. You got rammed into that, it was not going to feel good. The floor was not springy canvas, just concrete, so ditto for sudden collisions there. But Cain didn’t mind. This was a piece of cake compared to other things she’d endured in life, although the locked cage door always bothered her. But if need be, she could climb the fence.
She glanced at her opponent, who was giving Cain her version of the intimidating dead-eye stare, which differed from the way that men did it. While testosterone-spiked guys always overplayed their hand and abilities in mental confrontations like this, women usually understated how badly they were going to mess you up.
“In your dreams, buttercup,” Cain said. She tacked on a broad smile at the dead-eye, which really seemed to piss the gal off.
If I get in your head, all the better.
The setup was three five-minute rounds, unless one fighter was knocked out or otherwise was no longer able to defend herself. Cain had never been knocked out, but there was always the chance. The lower number of rounds meant that the fight would be high intensity pretty much from the get-go. There was no cruising in this ring of human mayhem. The crowd wanted punishment and blood and lots of it. Like watching the NFL, it was far more American than baseball and apple pie ever would be. The tough and vicious won, and everybody else was a loser.