Maidens in the Vale by Patrick Robinson

Author:Patrick Robinson [Robinson, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-04-24T16:00:00+00:00

*****

Sophia Morosova was an interesting sight, practicing her serves, wearing her jacket, and her thin white leather driving gloves, all by herself on a tennis court in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Virginia. Buck Madden came over to join her and observed that he’d seen a couple of real zingers go well into the service court.

He walked to the other side of the net, and took up a stance close in, ready to return volley her ground strokes. They hit the ball back and forth three times, until Sophia sent him a high, but short lob. Buck went up for it, hitting the overhead shot with casual ease, right over his opponent’s head, and laughing quietly.

However, when he landed, and looked over the net, he stopped laughing very quickly. Because he was staring straight into the muzzle of a short Smith and Wesson P380, clasped in both hands by his opponent. Buck Madden summoned instincts honed over a lifetime on a tennis court, and tried to twist away.

But Sophia had squeezed the trigger hard and the 680mph flex-tip bullet smashed into his left-eye socket on the diagonal, and blew his head almost in half. He catapulted backwards, but before he landed, she fired again, slamming one more of these deadly high-velocity slugs directly into his heart. “That one’s for Sasha,” she gritted. “Just in case you’re wondering, you sonofabitch.”

But even as she turned away, Sophia heard the distant howl of police sirens, as the two patrol cars from Waynesboro came racing up the mountain road. She couldn’t see them, but she could hear them clearly, and guessed they were about four miles out. Maybe eight minutes climbing the slow turns and gradients of the heavily wooded Blue Ridge.

She was trapped now. And she knew it. But she’d done her duty in the eyes of God, of that she was certain. And she walked quietly to the electrical boxes, and switched off the court floodlights. Her options were limited, a life on the run, up in the forest, until she was caught. Or, more probably, a lifetime in jail. She decided on a third option, the one almost everyone has, and, standing alone in the dark, she drew her gun for the second time that night.

She took one final glance at the dead tennis pro, lying in a pool of blood in the darkest shadow of the net. Then she checked the gun’s magazine, decided there was no point calling Sergei, and raised the weapon to her head. “I’m coming, darling Sasha,” she muttered. “Don’t worry, I won’t ever leave you alone again.

The police sirens were still howling, the white Dodge Chargers with their wide blue stripe, roaring around the chicanes of the Blue Ridge. But suddenly there was another sound, a loud throbbing, clattering right towards her, out of the mountains. Sophia momentarily lowered the gun, but could see nothing, and the police sirens were growing closer. So was the deafening night monster screaming over the tree-tops, and unleashing a sudden, outrageous beam of light, which split the darkness over the tennis courts.

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