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

noise out front. He couldn’t feasibly keep his eyes fixed in every direction. He should have already taken Lyla inside, gone with her into a windowless room, held her in front of him with the barrel to her temple so he couldn’t be sprung from behind.

He’d done none of that.

Slater hovered a few feet from the rear steps, ever-patient. He waited for the guard’s barrel to stray an inch to the right as a particularly vicious burst of gunfire from the front of the house seized the man’s attention entirely.

Then Slater shot him in the side of the head.

He spun nearly a hundred and eighty degrees from the momentum of the bullet whipping his chin around, then collapsed to the patio floor.

Lyla opened her eyes.

They went wide.

She took a moment to assess whether she was feeling any pain. Slater could see her ticking off the mental checklist. Arms, legs, chest, throat. All clear.

Then she looked over.

‘Hi,’ Slater said.

‘Hi, Will,’ she said. ‘How’d you get here?’

He strode up the steps, stayed low as he swept across the patio, and muttered in her ear as he went past, ‘I held my breath. Once upon a time I was a sailor in the Navy.’

He stepped inside.

One of Walcott’s guys stood in the centre of the open-plan living area.

He had better foresight.

He’d had a smorgasbord of hostages to choose from, and he’d gone for the human shield who carried the least chance of anyone risking a shot.

Caleb Barrow had a pistol pressed to his small temple. His hair was ruffled over his forehead, his lips were pale, and his cheeks were white with fear. The only reason he wasn’t crying was because he was deep in shock.

Violetta and Alexis sat at the kitchen table, their wrists and ankles bound with cable ties, duct tape over their mouths.

Walcott’s man was facing the wall so he could keep both the front and back entrances in his peripheral vision, and now he whirled to Slater.

He didn’t say anything.

He didn’t need to.

The situation was obvious enough.

But Slater didn’t budge, so after five eternal seconds of silence the thug’s mouth went into overdrive.

‘Gun on the floor right now or the kid gets it,’ he said, spit flecking through clenched teeth.

Slater looked deep into his eyes.

The guy was just a hired gun, but he meant business.

So Slater had been half-right. They hadn’t killed Lyla or Caleb immediately, but they sure as hell would if the situation demanded it.

‘It’s just you,’ Slater said. ‘There’s nobody else. They’re all dead.’

‘Bullshit. You came in through the back.’

‘It’s not only me.’

‘I’ll believe it when I see it.’

A hulking silhouette loomed out of a side passage, right behind the thug.

Jason King attacked like a viper.

Slater had never seen the man move so fast. He pounced as if he were inhuman, every muscle and joint flooded with adrenaline. There was simply no way in hell Caleb Barrow was getting on the wrong end of a gun, so King managed to rip the Ruger out of the thug’s hand in a tenth of a second. He clearly broke a couple of fingers in the process, because the thug’s jaw slackened as he spun, letting Caleb out of his grasp, falling to his knees out of a mixture of pain and shock.

King’s knuckles went white from how hard he gripped the back of the guy’s collar.

He dragged him into the side passage. ‘The kid doesn’t need to see this. Slater, go get the two out front. They’re in the bushes.’

86

Kane Walcott had never seen a firefight.

The insidious thought struck him as he tried to focus on the resort’s entranceway. The shots that killed the sentries had come from somewhere in that direction, but for the life of him he couldn’t figure out where. His heart rate was so high that it was tearing his attention away from his surroundings, making him worry about whether the vital organ would explode from the stress of live combat. He wasn’t accustomed to anything like this … but that’s why you pay people who know what they’re doing, right?

Right.

And four of those people were lying dead in bushes along the tree line.

It began to dawn on him that he might be in over his head. That there was a reason Dylan Walcott conducted business the way he did, never relied on all-out warfare, always made sure he’d paid off the right people so he could exist peacefully below the realm of public presence. A private titan in the boardroom, with more vices than anyone could count.

Your father is dead, Kane reminded himself.

It might have been the stress wearing him down, or the realisation that he wouldn’t make it out of this alive, but a guttural sob exploded in his chest.

‘Dad,’ he whispered under his breath.

If only Dylan was here now.

Hands seized the backs of his legs and dragged him gracelessly out from under the sculpted bushes. He shrieked and spun and tried to raise his sub-machine gun to meet the threat. A dark-skinned man in dripping wet clothes ripped the weapon out of his hands and hurled it aside. Kane threw an upkick, searching for the man’s face with the sole of his boot, but he missed.

The man stomped down.

Kane’s chest cracked.

He wheezed and clawed for breath and rolled to his side, physically submitting.

At least there’s backup.

But the guy he’d stationed in the other set of hedges wasn’t able to back him up.

He was splayed out on the lawn, a chunk of his skull missing.

The attacker had shot him with a suppressed pistol.

It was then he realised he had no business in this world.

No business at all.

If only you could take things back…

‘Wait,’ Kane said as the man loomed over him. ‘Just wait. I know who you are. You don’t know who I am.’

‘Is that right?’

‘You’re Will Slater.’

‘Congratulations.’

‘I’m Kane Walcott. Dylan’s son. I was responsible for collecting information about the four of you with the bugs we had placed around the bungalow you were staying in. Okay? You following? I didn’t