Sharks, Matt Rogers [shoe dog free ebook TXT] 📗

you!’ he roared, pushing the Ford to breaking point. Wind howled in through the shattered back window. ‘You kill me and there’s no one steering the ship, captain!’

He was right.

King calculated speed and trajectory and realised there was a harrowing absence of time. Not nearly enough to shoot Vince, unbuckle his seatbelt, reach over his corpse, open the driver’s door, force his body out, climb over the centre console, sit down, get control of the car and bring it to a stop.

In fact there was no time at all.

The Crown Vic screamed past the first of the outbuildings and King saw bright orange flashes as workers in high-visibility vests dove for cover, fleeing the freight train of destruction.

Then they were through the gate, in the yard.

There was no more road.

Only towering behemoths.

This was the land of giants.

Cranes loomed over the speeding vehicle, flicking shadow, and ahead the shiploader gleamed brilliant blue, a mega-crane that dwarfed all the others.

But they wouldn’t make it to the water.

In their path was an orange shipyard crane, right in the middle of the yard, as if it had grown right out of the sand. It was enormous in comparison to their car, but a whole lot smaller than the other equipment in the lot.

Vince aimed at it and cackled maniacally.

‘You going to kill yourself?!’ King yelled. ‘Is that worth it?!’

Vince spat blood on the steering wheel, which served as his answer.

It was then that King truly noticed the blood. It was all over Vince’s lap, it drenched the footwell, it ran in pumping rivulets out of the gunshot wound in his hand. Two of his fingers were missing.

He was going to die regardless.

At least he could go out with a bang and take his mortal enemy with him.

King went white.

They weren’t doing a hundred anymore — the sand underneath had slowed them a little — but it didn’t make much difference. The impact would be fatal. King saw the foundations of the crane filling the front windshield, expanding steadily from centre mass. Seconds from now they’d cover the whole view, and a moment after that the car would become a metal grinder.

King took one last look at Vince Ricci.

A paunchy, slick-haired, mediocre loan shark who’d nearly killed him and Slater on two separate occasions.

And the guy could have shot them in that hostage situation near the tiki hut. That was the plain honest truth of it. He could have thrust Santa Claus toward them and put one in each of their heads. Instead he’d turned and run into the trees.

King gave something resembling a nod of forced respect.

He thought Vince might have noticed it out of the corner of his eye.

A different look came over his face.

King shimmied across the rear seats, threw the door open, and leapt out of the Crown Vic at a non-survivable speed.

58

It was an M84 stun grenade.

Slater had shown Alexis diagrams, pored over weapons’ information with her as they sat up in bed together on those cosy nights in Las Vegas. She missed his touch, his knowledge, his confidence. She missed everything about him, and she’d never get another moment with him if she didn’t act.

So she acted.

There wasn’t all that much room for thinking, but she could recognise that she would have been frozen in place just two months ago.

Now she shot her foot out and stopped the grenade from skittering along the tiles into the main area. She reached down and snatched it up and shrugged off how damn heavy it was and turned and hooked her arm at a right angle so she could throw it sideways along the porch, putting the plaster wall between her and the grenade.

It was three feet out of her hand when it went off.

If she’d thrown it straight like a fastball she still would have been staring at the blinding flash of light when it erupted, but quick thinking had saved her life.

It sure didn’t feel that way.

The bang was so all-encompassing that she was sure the bungalow had been hit by a missile strike. She twisted away from the door, her eyes squeezed shut in the crook of her elbow, and fell face-forward to the floor. Disorientation made her head spin, the hundred and eighty decibels sent a drilling headache flaring to life, and even though she hadn’t caught a direct look at the flash it still disrupted her vision.

After seconds or minutes or hours she swam out of the haze, crawled to her knees, lurched up to her feet, and staggered out the side door with the Glock raised.

She didn’t know if it was bravery or stupidity.

Probably both.

She pivoted left immediately and saw the guy planted on his rear end, knees tucked up to his chest, back against the wooden slats of the bungalow’s exterior. He had the base of both palms pressed into the respective eye sockets, but it wasn’t helping him one iota. He was in another world. A world of dark and quiet head-spins. All his hearing gone, all his vision gone, his equilibrium maybe permanently crippled. It must have gone off right in his face.

Alexis brought the Glock up in a slow arc.

She aimed it at the side of his skull.

He wasn’t moving an inch.

He wasn’t aware of anything.

It was a clean, clean shot.

An amateur could make it.

This is the part where you stand down, she thought. This is the part where you show mercy, prove you’re better than your enemies, do the right thing.

She pulled the trigger and felt nothing but relief as the bullet exited the other side of his head and his corpse slumped to the porch, bleeding over the wood.

For the first time, Alexis heard faint screams coming from the beach.

Bystanders, tourists, locals, foreigners — all united in their mutual terror at the civil war that had broken out on this beautiful island.

Had to happen sooner or later, Alexis thought. These scumbags were here to rule over the common folk.

About time someone bit back.

Then the monster appeared.

A tall, fat, gargantuan