Fifty Fifty (Detective Harriet Blue #2)(78)

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.

‘Do you think you can stand?’ he asked.

‘I have to,’ I said, gripping on to his shoulder. He slipped an arm around me and brought me to my feet. ‘I need to get out of here.’

‘What?’ Kash said. ‘Right now?’

I nodded, let him help me to the door. Something deep inside me was telling me that all was far from OK.





Chapter 128


I IGNORED THE instinct still as the sun rose and I pulled the borrowed police cruiser over at the edge of the hillside topped by Jed Chatt’s ramshackle house. I shut off the engine. I hadn’t turned the radio on. I couldn’t bear to hear reports about what had happened in Last Chance only hours before. Neither Whitt nor Tox were answering their phones. As I’d left the town, a couple of people were hounding Vicky as she sat on the edge of an ambulance, drinking water someone had brought her and trying to get over the shock of her first kill. I’d wanted to say something to her, something reassuring about taking a life to save another. That although the memories never leave you, and sometimes late at night the faces of your victims still come, the pain of it dies away in time. I’d killed. It wasn’t the worst thing I lived with every day. But instead I’d left Vicky sitting there in the care of a paramedic. She would be alright. She was stronger than me.

I hadn’t said goodbye to Kash either. He’d run off almost immediately to evacuate anyone in the town who was still in their house, to see if he could locate the device Bella had hidden out there. Her plan hadn’t worked. Zac Taby had been her last victim. As I was loading the car with my belongings, one of Snale’s neighbours got word to me that Kash and the other officers had indeed found an explosive device under a house on the edge of town. The bomb had been located right beneath their youngest child’s bed, under the floorboards. I knew Kash would deal with it. I had one errand left to run, and then I was going home.