The Malevolent Sister, A Jake Stone Thriller (Book 12): The Jake Stone Thrillers, #12

By T.L. Peters

Snowflake once again asserts her stern leadership over the unruly Stone clan as she battles the lethal forces of her long lost sister with the help of an odd but congenial crew of bodybuilders and karate queens.

"Peters brings back the old Snowflake with plenty of action and loads of fun."

"Snowflake Rules!!"

• Language: English
• Publisher: T.L. Peters
• Release date: Jul 3, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476436326

T.L. Peters

"There's no question that Peters is a master wordsmith." Gerry B's Book Reviews About the author: T.L. Peters is an ex-lawyer who enjoys playing the violin and giving his dog long walks in the woods. In between, he writes novels.

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The Malevolent Sister, A Jake Stone Thriller (Book 12)

By T.L. Peters

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012, T.L. Peters

License Notes

This e book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

To read more about the author and his other books, go to http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/tlpeters.

I grabbed the first volume of The Jake Stone Thrillers for $0.99 and started reading out of curiosity—after a few pages I couldn’t put it down. Mr. Peters writes in a very fresh, authentic style, and the characters have a real charm. The plot is well developed and keeps the pages turning. I’m already buying the next few books in the series. Do yourself a favor and check it out. Tiger03.

Chapter 1

Jake learns a hard lesson about not butting in, but he recovers nicely.

Jake Stone was taking his usual morning stroll around the quiet lake in front of his rustic rural dwelling deep within the green mountains of Pennsylvania, the home he had shared with his lovely and ferocious wife, Snowflake, ever since they had left the Outer Banks of North Carolina many years before. His Golden Retriever, Samson, was trotting happily behind him, pausing at various aromatic patches of flowering weeds and high grasses to have a good sniff.

Unlike his typical meandering, where pointless daydreaming was the rule of the day, Jake was pondering a subject that had stirred up inside his normally serene consciousness a surprising amount of unease. The topic was his long time friend and computer geek associate, Dietrich, or more precisely, Dietrich's apparent infatuation with the German hellion, Marta Baumvoll. Marta, along with the green-haired giantess, Ilsa Schmetterling, and the three hefty Valkyries, Helga, Birgit and Angela, had, at Snowflake's vigorous prompting, relocated to the United States following the conquest of Zagle, June Wee and their hordes of female warriors deep within the Black Forest of Germany.

Snowflake had wanted to enlist the women as part of her new team of female firebrands, not only to supply muscle for whatever adventures might await them, but also to help her start a new chain of martial arts and fitness centers. Snowflake, as always, or nearly always, was prescient in her analysis of the coming tastes and styles in women's fitness, which she believed would tend toward the development and maintenance of a brawny sort of shapeliness, not exactly masculine, but not traditionally feminine either. A sturdy sort of beauty was what Snowflake liked to call it.

Women today want to feel strong and in control by projecting an aura of physical dynamism brimming with a forceful and powerful allure, Snowflake was fond of observing.

Jake had no idea what his volatile wife was talking about, but whatever it was, her ideas seemed to have gained resonance, at least with enough women to fill five separate fitness centers throughout central Pennsylvania, with seven more in the planning stages. Snowflake wanted to take her ground breaking franchise up and down the east coast before eventually branching out into the Great Plains, California and finally the deep south, where she claimed that traditional male prejudices against muscularly voluptuous women who could kick any man's butt still ran strong.

Snowflake could not have recruited a more robust and effective group of women to help her get her new business off the ground than the brawny Ilsa and her bevy of female bodybuilders. Each of them could not only lift outrageous amounts of weight, but also, under Snowflake's careful tutelage, they could fight. Indeed, they could fight with the best of them, as they often displayed in show matches with male boxers and cage fighters, whom they would summarily dispatch with a well timed karate kick to the head, or a devastating upper cut to the belly. And they were willing to do it all wearing a set of black vinyl tights that made the most puritanical male heads turn to get a better look.

Muscle is beautiful, was another of Snowflake's favorite advertising slogans, and it seemed to be catching on with many women, who enjoyed the thrill of being able to put their husband or boyfriend down for the count at the slightest provocation, while at the same time getting into the best shape of their lives.

Of all Snowflake's new recruits, however, Marta Baumvoll was perhaps the feistiest and clearly the most brutal. As soon as she caught her first glimpse of Snowflake's downstairs gym, Marta became a power lifting fiend, adding some forty pounds of curvy muscle to her already burly frame. Not only did she get stronger, but she became far more flexible and supple as well, taking intensive acrobatic and gymnastics lessons from the always helpful Fierce.

Armed with this far more powerful and nimble physique, Marta made astonishing headway in the boxing ring and steel cage, undergoing thorough instruction from Snowflake in at least twelve different fighting styles, most of which had a decidedly Asian flavor. Marta's favorites, however, were old fashioned American boxing and wrestling, which she developed to a fine art, sometimes triumphing in sparring matches against Fierce and even the fabled Snowflake, though Jake was of the opinion that his wife and daughter had let the aggressive German win in order to boost her spirits and confidence.

Marta was a real killer though. There was no doubt of that, which was why Jake looked on with some concern as Marta and Dietrich seemingly formed an ever closer and more romantic bond. At first Jake tried to stay out of it, believing that the normally level-headed Dietrich would sooner or later come to his senses and seek female companionship in less dangerous precincts. But the bigger and stronger and more muscular and violent Marta got, the better the young German blogger and computer whiz seemed to like her, even accompanying her on her rounds of the various fitness centers, where Marta was building up quite a following in her aerobics and kick boxing classes.

One might have thought that Jake, having been married for so many years to the monstrously powerful and ferocious Snowflake, would have displayed a more tolerant attitude to other men hooking up with women who were not only clearly stronger than they were, but who were not at all shy about exercising their powers to quash any feeble dissent that the poor male might give humble voice to from time to time. Indeed, Jake probably should have been more understanding, especially in light of the amazing physical prowess of his daughter, Fierce, which far exceeded that of any man Jake knew or had ever heard of, whether through personal observation or news reports. Jake nonetheless envisioned a blissful married life for Fierce some time in the not too distant future, so why not treat Marta's longings for Dietrich in the same generous way?

The answer to this thorny question, at least in Jake's often tremulous mind, was two fold. First, Marta, as with all of Ilsa's girls, was an avid user of steroids and other performance enhancing drugs. The effects of this heavy diet of pills and injections could be seen on Marta's acne scarred cheeks, her squarish jaw, her increasingly sparse brownish mane, and in the dense patches of hair continually sprouting under her arm pits and down along her wide back and voluminous hips.

There was a day when Snowflake would never have tolerated the open use of such artificial stimulants by any of her charges, but Snowflake had relaxed her attitudes over the years to take into account the likes and tastes of a new generation of bodybuilders and fitness women. But Jake remained adamantly opposed to all such gimmicks, as he called them, fearing that they could lead to emotional instability later on and perhaps even violent and erratic outbursts.

The other reason Jake was less than enthusiastic about Marta's amorous leanings toward his old friend was that he simply didn't trust her. There was something about her bluntness in dealings with colleagues and her occasional rowdiness and even savagery in the octagon against her often hapless male challengers which struck him the wrong way. This second objection, Jake understood, was really not rational, since his beloved Snowflake had demonstrated far more brutality on countless occasions, beginning with the very moment decades before when she had come to his rescue in the dark alleyway in Pittsburgh as he was being pummeled at the hands of the notorious Gerald Fish. But Marta seemed somehow sinister, a quality that Snowflake had never exhibited. With Snowflake, what you saw was what you got. There was no pretence about her. Jake wasn't so sure that this purity of heart was much in evidence when it came to Marta Baumvoll.

So Jake, cautiously at first, had begun to express his misgivings about Marta to his friend, Dietrich, who took them all with great seriousness and gratitude, since Dietrich had immense respect for Jake's insights and advice. A few more weeks of his calm badgering and perhaps, Jake hoped, Dietrich could be persuaded to steer his relationship with Marta onto more of a professional rather than romantic course.

All of this was reeling through Jake's mind on his morning stroll as his chin suddenly collided with a hard and bulky fist. His backside immediately slammed into the crusty, sun baked ground, with Samson quickly jumping all around his prostrate form as though this were a new and delightful kind of game. It took about half a minute or so for the tiny stars to clear from Jake's foggy field of vision, but when they finally faded away he noticed the awesome form of Marta Baumvoll standing defiantly before him. When she was sure that Jake knew what was going on, she grabbed him by the shirt collar and yanked him to his feet.

What's the big idea? she screamed into his face with such a violent spray of saliva that Jake began to suspect that he had just wandered into a raging thunder storm. Messing with my man's head.

He's not your man, Jake replied groggily, eyeing her huge breasts pouring out of the deeply cut neckline of her bright red sweater. Not yet anyway.

Wise guy, huh? she shot back. Who died and made you king?

Jake, who had suffered through many years of dealing with volatile amazons, knew from hard won experience that the worst thing he could do was back down or show even the slightest hint of weakness. If he did, Marta would devour him as though he were a tasty snack. As it turned out, that was about what she had in mind anyway. But at least Jake figured that if he were going down, he would go down like a man. He had one thing in his favor, however, his ace in the hole. Jake doubted that Marta would dare kill or even seriously injure him, not with the dreaded Snowflake always lurking behind the scenes. And Snowflake still loved her puny husband. Everybody knew that.

I pull my weight around here, Jake snorted as the cobwebs began to weave out of his head. I've taken down tougher women than you.

We'll see about that, little man, she bleated, wrapping her thick hand around his throat and lifting him high into the air.

Jake was prepared for her tactic, however. He had been similarly abused by many pulchritudinous amazons over the years, and he had a ready answer for it, namely, a quick kick to the belly. With Snowflake it had never worked. Her abs were far too tough and shredded to be stung by such a puny assault. But even though Marta was in good shape, prime shape if you will, she wasn't yet a match for Snowflake's extreme conditioning. As a result Jake's blow bent her over, and in the process she loosened her grip around Jake's scrawny neck enough that he was able to wriggle free. He unfortunately lost his balance and stumbled backward onto the ground. He was just about to get up when Marta, who was much quicker than he had expected, jumped high into the air and landed with her elbow against his chest. She had been aiming for his throat in an apparent kill maneuver, but fortunately for Jake she just missed.

Now that Jake knew her true intentions, there was no holding him back. He went into full fighting mode and proceeded to employ all the stratagems, ruses, kicks, punches, holds and downright dirty tricks that Snowflake had taught him over the years. At first, however, his frenzied assault fell short. Marta was equally adept at fighting dirty, and she met his barrage blow for blow, kick for kick, eye gouge for eye gouge, hair pulling for hair pulling, and judo toss for judo toss.

In minutes the two combatants were lying in a sweaty and smelling heap on the hard ground as Samson hopped playfully around them. Not only was it difficult to tell who was winning and who was losing, it was hard to even distinguish where one fighter's exhausted limbs ended and the other's began, so brutalized and weary were the two rivals. Then Marta pulled a nasty move that ironically turned the battle decisively against her. In a fit of spite and dander, she took a back handed swipe at Samson's snout, catching the good natured pooch on the moist black tip of his nose. The dog squealed and backed away but was otherwise injured. This, however, did not dissuade Jake from coming to the rescue of his beloved pup.

In a furious rage the like of which, aside from his wife's fits of anger, Jake had never witnessed before from man or beast, he went after Marta with a flurry of crosses and jabs and kicks and elbow jams that sent the thick bodied woman reeling backward, slamming off one tree after another, before finally ending up being knocked about seven feet into the shallow end of the lake. It