The Death Match by Christa Faust Read Free Book Online

The doctor’s small, triangular face was as flyblown and putrid as Tanya’s.
    “You can’t be in here,” she said in a chilly tone.
    Stacy’s reply was to knock her out of her sensible white clogs with one surgically perfect punch, right on the button. The doctor staggered in a wobbly arc and then went down in a clatter of sterile instruments, leaving a curved needle and a flapping tail of black thread sticking out of Tanya’s half-closed wound.
    Stacy rushed to Tanya, gripping both of her friend’s scabbed and swollen hands.
    “Baby,” she said. “Oh my fucking God, what have they done to you?”
    Matt hung back while the two women spoke in intense whispers, foreheads pressed together and still holding hands. Even though he couldn’t hear everything theywere saying, it was painfully obvious from their body language that they were much more than just friends. If this situation had been sure to get ugly before, it was even worse now. It was hard enough to explain to someone that a close friend was no longer the person she knew and loved. Now things had become infinitely more delicate and complicated.
    Not to mention the fact that Matt was dying to grill Tanya, to ask her about the tattoo, the face paint, the fights. And if she was reluctant to talk, he’d have no qualms about using the ax to encourage the conversation.
    But with all this raw, volatile emotion factored into the mix, Matt would have to tread much more carefully. He had assumed that after witnessing what amounted to cold-blooded murder in the pit, Stacy would see that Tanya was beyond saving. Clearly that wasn’t the case. At this point all he could do was hang back and be ready for hell to break loose.
    Which, if experience had taught him anything, would be any minute now.
    “I’m fine,” Tanya was saying, her Brazilian accent making her hushed voice even more difficult for Matt to understand. “Better than fine.”
    Stacy said something else Matt couldn’t catch. All he could hear was the tone, desperate and pleading.
    “You don’t know what it’s like,” Tanya said, sliding a hand up under Stacy’s T-shirt. “No speed limit. No rules. No morals. It’s better than sex.”
    “You’re sick,” Stacy said, raising her voice as she pulled away from Tanya’s touch. “You need help. Please, let us help you. This isn’t you. Don’t you see that? This isn’t you!”
    “This is more me than I have ever been,” Tanya said.
    “Tell her, Matt,” Stacy said, desperately including him with a supplicating gesture. “Tell her we want to help her.”
    Until that point, Matt had been listening with only half an ear, busy looking through the window into the room that was visible on the other side of the one-way glass. Looking for a way out.
    In the next room were a group of about a dozen female fighters and half that many armed male heavies standing around, keeping watch. The fighters were stretching and sparring, hitting focus mitts and heavy bags and shadowboxing. Some of them were fresh and unscarred, except for the pustulant ravages of their own spiritual corruption. Others were so severely battered they looked like they’d gone ten rounds with a Mack truck and been stitched together by Dr. Frankenstein’s less talented brother. But in the very back of the dim training room, half hidden in shadow, there were two or three fighters so wretched, so grievously wounded and profoundly decomposed, that it didn’t seem possible that they were still standing. At first Matt thought they were wearing trendy silver belts, but when he looked closer, he saw that the belts were really heavy-gauge chains that had been padlocked to thick iron rings in the stone floor.
    When Stacy said his name, Matt turned back to her and frowned.
    “Tell her, Matt,” Stacy said again.
    He shook his head.
    “She’s made her choice,” Matt said.
    “Bullshit,” Stacy said, gripping Tanya’s bruised hand. “No, that’s bullshit. There’s always a choice. If you