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Hurley stopped to take another drink and then in a falsetto voice designed to mimic Rapp said, “Let’s speed things up, and find out if I have what it takes to do this.”
    “My recruit did that to you?” asked Kennedy, still not entirely sure what the man was talking about.
    Hurley slammed his glass down again. This time brown liquid sloshed over the lip of the glass. “Yes, God dammit! And don’t stand there and act like this is a surprise to you.” He pointed an accusatory finger at her. “You planned it. You set me up.”
    “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Kennedy shook her head and asked, “Are you trying to say my recruit bested you?”
    “Damn close.” Hurley turned his attention to his drink and mumbled to himself.
    “Your boy had him beat,” Tschida interjected with a smile, “but Stan here broke the rules and put the kid’s balls in a vise.”
    “You think this shit is funny?” Hurley barked.
    Tschida smiled and nodded.
    Hurley looked like he was going to launch his glass across the room at him, and then at the last minute decided to use the bag of ice.
    Tschida stuck out his right hand and caught the bag with ease. “Don’t be a baby. After all the asses you’ve kicked around here, it’s about time you got a little taste.”
    “My problem,” Hurley shot back, “Is getting ambushed by this young woman here. Someone I helped raise, by the way.” Hurley turned his one good eye back on Kennedy. “No military experience, my ass. Where did you find this kid?”
    Kennedy was still in a bit of shock. She herself had seen Hurley tie NFL-sized linebackers into pretzels. Nowhere in her research had she found anything that would lead her to believe Rapp was capable of going toe to toe with Stan Hurley. “Stan, you need to trust me. I had no idea he could best you.”
    “He didn’t best me! He almost did.”
    “Yeah, but you cheated,” Tschida said, taking perverse pleasure in the torment he was causing Hurley. “So, technically, he beat you.”
    It took every last bit of restraint to not throw his glass at the gloating Tschida. Hurley turned his attention back to Kennedy and asked, “What are you up to? Why in hell would you try to sucker me like this?”
    “Just calm down for a minute, Stan. I am telling you right now, we found nothing in our research that said he was capable of this.” Kennedy gestured at Hurley’s battered face. “It was my sincere hope that someday he would be able to do this … but not this soon.”
    “Then your research sucks. You don’t learn how to fight like this in your basement. Someone has to teach you.”
    Kennedy admitted, “He’s been going to a martial arts studio for the past year.”
    “That would have been nice to know,” Hurley fired back.
    “Stan, you have been bitching up a storm that this guy is a waste of time because he hasn’t had Special Forces training. You think a year of training in a strip mall is equal to what the army puts guys through?”
    “That depends on the instructor.”
    “And the student,” Tschida added.
    Kennedy folded her arms and thought long and hard before she spoke. “There is one other possibility.”
    “What’s that?”
    “I know you don’t like to talk about your age, but is it possible that you’ve lost a step.”
    Tschida started laughing so hard his big barrel chest was rising and falling with each chuckle.
    Hurley was seething. “I’m going to put your ass in the ring with him, first thing in the morning. We’ll see how funny you think this is then.”
    Tschida stopped laughing.
    Kennedy pulled up a chair and sat at the table across from Hurley. “Please tell me what happened.”
    “You’re not jerking my chain?”
    Kennedy shook her head.
    “You weren’t trying to pull a fast one on me? Set me up?”
    She shook her head again and said, “No. In fact I was worried that he would be on the receiving end of a beating. Not the other way around.”
    Even through his anger- and