Miss No One - Mark Ayre (top 10 most read books in the world txt) 📗

the trigger, fought the gun's kick, felt the bullet explode from the muzzle, firing towards the oncoming vehicle's windscreen.

Smoker drew nearer.

Abbie pulled the trigger again, and again, and again, and again.

The windshield cracked, then shattered, pouring glass fragments over the driver, causing him to veer one way, then the other. Abbie dived aside as Smoker span the wheel, lost control.

The car spun, smashed into Davesh’s European imports, carried on sliding through the gravel.

Abbie had once again escaped between two cars. Rising, she ignored the moans of her ankle and twirled towards Smoker.

His car had spun 360. Stopped.

Abbie stepped back into the aisle, pointed at the already shattered back windscreen.

Fired.

Fired.

Fired.

The car roared into life. Jerked forward. Abbie expected Smoker to spin, to face her. She assumed he would fire at her like a rocket while pointing his gun through the windscreen and pumping her full of lead.

If she didn't riddle him with bullets first.

Maybe they’d both go down.

But no shots came. Reloading would have been more difficult for Smoker than Abbie. Probably he was empty.

The car didn't spin but kept going. Smoker curved away from the dealership onto the path that led between the rings towards the gate he had earlier left open.

Despite the pain in her ankle, Abbie jogged onto that same path. Aimed her gun at the back of the car, slid her finger into the guard, touched the trigger.

She lowered her shooting arm.

The car was already through the gate when she arrived. Rubber squealed against concrete as Smoker span the wheel, turning onto the road which ran parallel to the dealership.

Abbie twisted, watching Smoker go, picking up speed every second before disappearing altogether.

Leaving Abbie alone.

Or alone but for the dead and one man with a shattered jaw.

Six

A mile from the dealership were several acres of public park. Leaving the scene of her latest battle, Abbie made her way there, stopping part way at her car. Unlocking the vehicle, she opened the front passenger door and shoved the guns she’d stolen beneath the seat. There was no reason anyone should want to search her car. Even if they did, they wouldn’t know it was hers. Abbie locked the vehicle and walked away.

Minutes later, Abbie arrived at the public park and hopped a fence splitting pavement and grass. Beyond the boundary she found an empty playground, a water feature, plenty of space to play catch with a dog, and several wooden benches.

The fence was low, barely rising past Abbie's belly button. Because of her ankle, she had more trouble scaling it than she had the far taller chain-link fence, and when she landed, she did so with a yell.

Hobbling was no fun, so Abbie stopped at the first bench to which she came. Didn't read the silver plaque affixed to the seat. It would commemorate some passed away father or brother or lover or mother. It would be depressing. Abbie was in the mood for something uplifting.

Not that she had any chance of finding that.

Falling into the seat, Abbie felt for her side as though expecting to find her bag.

Why not? She had carried it over her shoulder everywhere she went for years. The heft of that Stephen King epic, The Stand, wrapped in a pillowcase, surrounded by a spare change of clothes, was comforting.

She felt strange without it. Lost. She had always told herself, promised herself, she only insisted on dragging the book around because she was afraid to leave it at home or in a car. In case the vehicle was stolen and joy ridden off a cliff or the house burned down in a sudden and probably intentional blaze.

Turned out this wasn't true.

She should have known it wasn't. A little bit of self-reflection would have told her as much. But self-reflection is scary and can reveal things about yourself you don't want to know. Abbie went through long periods of trying to avoid it altogether. Something that had become far easier since Bobby had come around and distracted what had previously been a lonely, frequently bored mind.

She'd not been dating Bobby long but felt an inherent trust for him. So she felt safe leaving the bag in her home so long as he agreed to stay until she returned.

Are you sure you don't want to take it?

That was what he'd said. Are you sure you don't want to take it? Abbie had smiled and told Bobby she trusted him, but she had misunderstood. In fact, it seemed he got her far more than she got him. Perhaps, in this instance, more than she got herself.

He hadn't been asking if she wanted to take the bag because he didn't trust himself to look after it or feared she was only offering because she felt she should. He was offering her the chance to rethink. If she had, she might have realised what he had already seen.

It was possible she needed the bag to get through her mission. Even if keeping it by her side entailed plenty of worry about its safety.

The battle at the dealership had left Abbie shaken. It wasn't so much her near escape that got her. It was the lives she'd taken.

It was always the lives.

The Stand was the last possession Abbie owned which had belonged to her little sister, Violet. During Abbie's missions to save the lives of people she did not know, following difficult moments in which she had been given no choice but to kill, she liked to remove the pillowcase from her bag.

Abbie's hands felt rough on the smooth grip of a gun. Felt rough when she used them to smash an adversary's face into a table or throttle the life from them. When she removed her sister's book, Abbie's hands were delicate, gentle, her skin soft as silk.

She liked to extract the pillowcase and, with utmost case, unwrap it and free The Stand from within.

Despite its length, Violet had read the epic what seemed like a thousand times between the day Paul, their big brother, had given it her and the night she died. And always in secret.