She winced in pain and let go of his wrist. He used his other hand to grab a thick wedge of her ponytail, fully intending to bust her pretty face all over his wall. He pushed hard and succeeded in shoving himself back when she didn’t budge. She’d no more moved than if he’d been pushing against his own house.
“Asshole.” She hit him. Not a little girly slap, either. She hauled her arm around and clocked him across the face hard enough to leave him seeing constellations.
“Bitch, that’s the last mistake you’re ever going to make.” Tom stood back up and pumped his arm at her face. Screw her looks, she was about to become damaged goods.
She took the blow to the chin and didn’t even blink. “I told you we were finished, Monkey Boy. I meant it.” Her hand blurred and she caught his nose between her thumb and forefinger. “Did I ever tell you how ugly you are?” She yanked back hard, and Tom let loose a shriek as the cartilage in his nose separated.
He backed into the wall, his eyes tearing furiously, and felt the blood flow from his broken proboscis.
Maggie looked at her handiwork and frowned. “I was kind of hoping it would come completely off. Let me try again.”
Tom ran. He forgot all about the gun in its hiding spot and all about the man he’d been torturing and the little girl he’d planned to rape half to death. He ran.
Maggie let him. She stood perfectly still and followed him with her eyes, a little half smile on her face. He knew the look: it was the one she got when she’d heard a joke that was only a little funny. He didn’t like to think that he was the joke, but right now he had bigger matters to deal with, like staying alive.
Tom’s Camaro was right where it should be and he fished into his jeans for the car keys, trying not to freak out about how much of his blood was coating his fingers.
Maggie followed, pausing long enough to pick up her pepper spray, which remained where she had dropped it earlier. He cursed himself for not picking the damned thing up himself; he could have used it about now.
He almost dropped the car keys while he was fumbling for the right one, but managed to keep them. He opened the door and climbed in at a record-breaking pace.
He closed the door just as Maggie was reaching for him and felt an unsettling jolt of relief.
Then she punched through the tempered glass. Her little hand—and she was practically delicate along those lines— shot through the glass and grabbed at the back of his long hair.
“Maggie! Jesus, girl, stop!”
“Not done quitting yet, Tom.”
She slammed his head into the windshield and shattered the safety glass. Maggie let go of his hair and reached around with her other hand. He was still groaning and stunned when she yanked him across the steering wheel and pulled him across the hood of the car. The glass shattered into tiny diamond shapes, and he got a few scrapes, but nothing compared to what she had already done.
Maggie let him hit the ground in front of his car and looked down at him. “Come on, Tom. I was expecting you to put up a fight.”
He started crawling, and she let him. She just walked a few paces behind him and let him do his thing. Crawling was the best he could manage for a while. After about fifty feet of slipping around on the damp asphalt and then the wet front lawn of his place, Tom stood up. It hurt like hell, but he did it.
“That’s my Monkey Boy. I knew you could do it.”
“Maggie, please . . . uh . . . unhhunnhhh . . . stop. Please . . .” Christ, he was crying! He couldn’t stop himself. He was begging and it was humiliating.
“I bet that’s what Liz was trying to say to the boys gang-raping her.” She still looked plenty pissed off, but her voice was calmer. He had hoped that he could talk his way out of this, or maybe get a weapon of some kind; it was a small hope, true, but it was still there.
“Hey, that wasn’t supposed to happen. I told them they had to play nice.”
Maggie nodded and then slammed her right heel into the side of his knee. Muscles pulped under the impact; bones splintered and his leg bent in ways no human limb was ever designed to.
He hit the ground again, gasping for air and wishing that the pain would end.
Maggie crouched next to him, looking at his sweating, agonized face. “Funny thing about that, Monkey; I told myself to play nicely. I guess I can’t take orders, either.”
She reached out and caught one of his hands in hers. He tried to pull away, but her strength was too great.
“I thought about taking a stick and fucking you with it, Tom. All the way over here I thought about it. I was thinking maybe it would be nice to give you a taste of your own medicine. A little payback for every time you forced me to take that little prick of yours.”
She held his hand tightly with her left hand and with the right, she caught his little finger.
