Sharks - Matt Rogers (classic books for 11 year olds txt) 📗

Walcott. Give us what we need.’

She took a deep breath. ‘Promise you’ll fix this.’

Slater said, ‘I already did.’

‘You’ve done a stellar job so far.’

‘It’s been twelve hours.’

Another deep breath from the old woman.

Then she said, ‘My friend Róisín is going to pay a man named Vince Ricci in thirty minutes. He’s going to her home. He does it every Thursday at ten a.m.’

King said, ‘Address?’

She told them.

A walk-up apartment building in East Section, south-east of the airport and north of Sunrise Park.

King turned to leave. ‘We’ll be back when this is finished. We’ll get your husband.’

Slater didn’t move.

The logbook burned a hole in his pocket.

Now he wanted to tell her. He wanted to ask her a thousand questions. He wanted answers, a resolution.

But it might destroy her.

If she didn’t know.

So he left it.

He said, ‘We’ll sort this out. Lock your doors and stay in the same room as Caleb until we get back in touch. Here’s our number in case you’re in trouble.’

He handed over a piece of torn notepad with his number scrawled in freehand. She took it with shaky fingers.

King could tell something was off. He stared at Slater. ‘You got something to say?’

Slater looked at him. ‘Not now.’

He walked out first, leaving King to catch up.

51

They left at 9:52a.m.

It took them three minutes to get to East Section.

Despite its name, the suburb was still within the Freeport city limits, so the destruction ravaging the east of Grand Bahama was non-existent here. It wasn’t far above Lyla’s street, closer to the north shore of Grand Bahama than the south. The walk-up was a ramshackle building made of red brick that King doubted had plumbing or heating that worked consistently. Whoever the landlord was, judging by the exterior, he didn’t give a shit about the comfort of his residents. As long as they paid the meagre fees for the one-and-two-bed apartments that lay within the structure, he wouldn’t evict them, but he sure wouldn’t make things better for them either.

Walcott probably owns it, King thought.

Behind the wheel, he let the jeep idle in a parking space facing a T-junction. The apartment building hovered across the opposite stretch, overlooking where the two streets joined.

Vince was early.

The loan shark’s silhouette was unmistakable even through the tinted glass of his Crown Vic. He drove the old Ford into the lot beside the walk-up and sat behind the wheel.

He didn’t get out.

King said, ‘Fast or slow?’

‘Fast,’ Slater said. ‘Look where hesitating got us. Time to ramp this up.’

King hovered his boot an inch off the accelerator, and gripped the wheel, but he didn’t stamp or twist. He said, ‘You want to tell me what you’re hiding from me before this all kicks off?’

‘No,’ Slater said. ‘It might make you do something stupid before we have answers.’

King said, ‘If I don’t know the question, how will I be able to recognise the answer?’

Slater said, ‘Trust me, you will.’

‘Give me something, at least.’

Slater said, ‘I don’t think Teddy was abducted. I think he ran.’

‘Want to expand on that?’

‘Not yet.’

King managed a sly grin, encouraged by simmering adrenaline. ‘Oh, how the tables have turned.’

‘How so?’

‘You’re not telling me something so I don’t do anything brash,’ King said. ‘Remind you of anyone?’

Yeah, Slater thought. Me.

He said, ‘No one’s objective one hundred percent of the time. Drink it in. This is your moment.’

King said, ‘Yes it is.’

The Crown Vic’s driver’s door still hadn’t opened.

King stamped the accelerator, barrelled out of the parking space, crossed the T-junction and ripped into the lot.

He crushed the back of the Ford with the jeep’s bull bar, crumpling Vince’s trunk. The whole sedan shot forward from the momentum, lashing Vince’s head against the wheel, squashing the hood against the brick wall ahead.

Slater leapt out, but before he could run to the driver’s door of the Ford he heard tyres screech behind him.

Sentries, jolted out of their cover.

Vince had been anticipating something.

Which meant he knew more than he was letting on.

He wasn’t just one of Walcott’s dispensable thugs.

He was in deeper than that.

Several things happened at once. The sentries’ car squealed into the lot and two men piled out, fumbling for their weapons. They may as well have been moving through quicksand, so King lifted his Glock with every intention of firing kill shots. He’d about had enough of holding back. But at the same time a man shouted from the second-floor landing of the walk-up. Not just a shout, a scream, like he’d been mortally wounded.

King couldn’t help himself — his attention flew that way for milliseconds. Protecting innocent lives trumped getting the jump on a couple of idiot mobsters, mostly because he’d be shielded from the first wave of gunfire by the body of the jeep.

So he looked up, and saw the guy was simply startled and terrified by the presence of the guns. He was an Afro-Bahamian, wearing loose slacks and a polo shirt over a pencil-thin frame. King registered the guy as a non-factor, and turned his attention back to the sentries, and saw they’d dropped their guns and had their hands in the air.

Quite the development.

He looked over and saw Slater rotating his aim left to right, moving in a horizontal line between their foreheads, ready to shoot whoever got brave first.

The civilian on the landing shouted, ‘I’m calling the cops!’

King nearly retorted, but didn’t.

He thought, Go back inside before you get shot.

Slater said, ‘You got them?’

King already had his Glock locked onto the sentry on the left.

He started to say, ‘Yeah,’ but a flurry of movement behind them cut him off.

Vince’s door flying open, the man himself spilling out, sensing his only opportunity to get away.

Slater whirled.

King saw him in his peripheral vision, sprinting for the Crown Vic, closing in on Vince Ricci like a bull seeing red.

King stared hard at the sentries. ‘Don’t.’

One of them listened.

One of them didn’t.

The guy on the left dropped to the asphalt like that would achieve anything and scrabbled for his gun, clawing along on his belly.

King shot him in the