Fifty Fifty (Detective Harriet Blue #2)(79)

By sheer automation, my limbs working at a will of their own, I pushed the button again. And again. The people around me were realising what was happening, but I wasn’t. All I knew was that I should have been dead and was not. No further thoughts would come. My thumb kept plunging down and the phone kept beeping, even as everyone in the room leapt into action.

The people rose to their feet all at once, as though spurred by a starter’s gun, making for the doors. Kash threw himself at Bella, who was staggering backwards, knowing he was coming, lifting her phone, the one connected to a bomb somewhere nearby. Her thumb coming down.

Kash grabbed her ankle with one hand and yanked her off her feet. The phone crashed and slid on the boards of the stage away from me. I dropped onto the floor, trying to shift forwards on my knees towards it. I had to get it before she did.

I heard Kash and Bella struggling on the ground before the stage, her squeal of rage.

‘Get off me!’ she roared. ‘Get off me!’

I lost my balance. Fell on my chest. The duct tape around my wrists seemed impossibly tighter. My phone had failed. There was no way we would be so lucky with Bella’s. If she got a hold of it, she would detonate the bomb hidden in the town. I was only an arm’s length away from the device lying on its side near the back of the stage. I heard Kash cry out. He’d lost his grip on her. The stage shuddered as Bella ran over the top of me, her hands reaching for the phone.

I saw, as if in slow motion, her fingers lifting it from the ground.

I squeezed my eyes shut as the sound of the blast rang through my skull.





Chapter 126


THE GUN SLID out of Whitt’s hands as he hit the floor of the boatshed, the weight of the kayak that had been slung across the ceiling knocking him into the ground like a nail bent beneath an enormous hammer. The gunshot took Regan in the shoulder, spinning him backwards. Whitt looked up in time to see the man fall, his boots slipping on the wet pier.

Whitt shook off the temptation of unconsciousness and scrambled forwards, ignoring the dark shadows at the corners of his vision. He threw himself through the doorway and off the pier, into the cold, rushing water.

Regan was there, an impossibly heavy, impossibly strong monster, reaching up and encircling him in an embrace. They struggled in the thigh-high waves, Whitt’s arms and hands seeming sluggish, the blow to the head making him an easy opponent.

Regan’s hands came around his throat, and before he could utter a cry Whitt was under the water. The muddy, salty taste of it was at the back of his throat, in his lungs. He bucked and twisted, but in seconds the man had him pinned against the silty bottom. He scratched at the iron hands that held him, grabbed desperately for a rock, a branch, anything to hit him with. Whitt reached for the gunshot wound in the man’s shoulder just as the darkness began to close in again.

‘Fuck!’ Regan cried. Whitt had stuck his thumb into the hole, pushed upwards. Whitt rose out of the waves, vomited water. There were lights on the sand. He hadn’t realised how far into the water they’d been dragged. The river was sucking at them both, the water waist-high now, pulling on his tired limbs.

‘Put your hands up!’ someone screamed from the shore. ‘Put your hands up!’

‘No!’ Whitt turned, heard Regan’s gasp of surprise beside him. He put his arms out. ‘Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!’

The shore lit up with white flashes as they fired. Regan’s body jolted once, twice. He sank into the water.





Chapter 127


I LAY AS still as possible, my cheek against the floorboards, my whole body aching. Bella’s foot was by my face, her heel out of the glittery strap, the ankle tendons relaxed. I looked up and saw the phone lying in her limp hand, her thumb on the button. She hadn’t pushed it. The blast I’d heard had come from above. Higher, higher, I lifted my eyes to the second-floor railing where Officer Victoria Snale was standing with her arms hanging over the polished wooden banister. The rifle in her arms was still smoking from where it had dispensed a single shot straight down into Bella’s head.

I shifted up onto my knees, still trying to orient myself. The floor felt like it was tilting beneath me. Kash was there, taking the phone from Bella’s dead fingers and setting it aside. He turned to me, plucking at the tape around my wrists.

‘Get it off me,’ I begged. ‘Get it off.’

Someone handed him a pair of scissors and he slipped them between my sweat-soaked neck and the rolls of duct tape beneath my ear. He peeled the bomb from my throat and handed it off to someone. I could hear Vicky crying. I looked up in time to see a young police officer taking the rifle from her hands.

‘I killed her.’ Snale took in a hitching breath that came out of her in sobs. ‘I’ve never killed anyone before.’

‘It’s OK,’ the officer was saying, taking her hand as he led her down the stairs. ‘It’s all OK now.’

I sat numbly on the stage by Bella’s body and looked at the people around me slowly, uncertainly moving out of the pub, arms around shoulders, some stopping to hug just outside the doorway. In the movies, this would have been the moment for triumphant cheering. For half-humorous one-liners cracked with relief that would lead gently into the credits, the camera panning away from the town and into the night. But the dread wouldn’t lift from my shoulders. I couldn’t find the strength to move. Kash seemed to sense it and crouched beside me, putting a careful hand on the back of my neck.