Perfect Sins by Jo Bannister

Author:Jo Bannister
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466857223
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

CHAPTER 16

IT’S EASY GETTING INTO and out of cars. Most of us do it every day, and think so little of it that we can chat to our companions, talk on the phone, or finish our homework—or at least hone an excuse for not finishing our homework—at the same time. But that’s because everything is designed to make it easy. The car doors hang perpendicular. The seats are at the right height. Everything is familiar.

Now try turning everything eighty degrees. The doors are no longer perpendicular, their weight carried by strong columns: One can hardly open before it runs into the ground; the other is almost too heavy to lift. The occupants are lying half suspended, possibly half strangled, in their seat belts, certainly stunned, probably concussed or injured. Even the car’s instruments are now in the wrong places, the hand brake and gearshift where you’re accustomed to finding the floor, the door and window buttons up around your right ear somewhere. Add to that the sudden ingress of cold, muddy water and it’s little wonder that people who survive an impact can find it impossible to escape their vehicle afterward and drown in half a meter of ditch water.

Given time—to extricate himself from his seat belt, to drag his feet out from among the pedals and brace them against the dashboard, to make sure he wasn’t doing this while standing on Hazel’s face—Ash could probably have opened the driver’s door. He wasn’t, physically, the man he’d been four years ago, but he was well built, and in an emergency he could probably have found the strength necessary. But there was no time. He couldn’t see much except a long view up a ditch, brilliantly lit by his own headlights, but he heard the bang of the other car’s door as someone got out and the beat of urgent footsteps. People who’ve deliberately pushed you into a ditch don’t come to see if you’re all right: they come to finish you off. When a shadow crossed the side window above his head, and a bit of that shadow was long, thin, and straight, Ash wasn’t a bit surprised.

He must have been afraid. He must have been. But all he was conscious of was anger. Not for himself—he hadn’t that much to live for, hadn’t had for a while—but for Hazel Best, who was twenty-six years old and had people who loved her and should live long enough to be a good police officer, a loving mother, and a doting grandma.

It made no difference to the weight of the door. It was too great to throw up with one hand and scramble out faster than Saul Sperrin could fire a shotgun. About all Ash could do in the time he had left was fumble for the button to open the windows. In a parade-ground roar quite unlike his normal speaking voice, he rapped, “Turn around. Now. Before either of us sees your face.”

There was a gasp beside him. “Gabriel…”

Hazel wasn’t worrying about the shotgun.

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