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. She hadn’t time to. It was taking all her energy to keep her face out of the muddy water pouring through her open window.
Ash hadn’t thought of that. He threw off his seat belt and screwed his body around, holding her head with one hand, groping under the water for the catch that would free her with the other. But maybe that was wrong; maybe he should concentrate on getting the window shut. The water was still flooding in. If he couldn’t free her soon, she was going to drown in his arms.
“Help me!” he yelled, his voice running up shrill, so distraught that he failed to see the inherent improbability of the man who’d run them into this ditch, who was pointing a shotgun at them, now abandoning his murderous agenda in order to help Ash save his friend. “You have to help me. She’s going to die!”
“Yes.” It was all that Sperrin said. The only word Ash heard him speak from beginning to end, shocking in its very conciseness. He paused a fraction in his desperate fumbling, as if his brain couldn’t quite process what it had heard. Then, knowing with absolute certainty that he would get no help from that source, Ash turned his back on the gun, wiped it from his mind, and turned all his attention to Hazel and her plight.
She’d been stunned by the impact, confused to find herself suddenly hanging sideways, with dark water pouring in around her, but she’d never lost consciousness and she, too, was trying desperately to free herself. Her hands slapping frantically for the seat belt release obstructed Ash’s attempts to thumb it. He needed her to sit still and do nothing for five seconds; that was all, but it was a lot to ask when those five seconds must have seemed to her like all the rest of her life that she could count on. He toyed briefly—very briefly—with the idea of decking her, decided that she’d probably deck him back and if she knocked him out, they’d both die. Instead he hissed, “Constable—freeze!”
And the authority in his voice was such that even in her current predicament she couldn’t fail to understand and obey. Her whole body went rigid. Ash’s right hand found the seat belt catch and his left hand pulled her out of the rising water and onto his hip. Where a more cynical soul than either of them might have noticed that she formed a pretty effective shield.
But she didn’t stay there long. The driver’s side window was wide open in front of her nose. With the access of energy only the urge to survive can supply, she clawed and grappled her way across him and up through the window frame. A flash of white in the corner of her right eye told her the third occupant of the car was also jumping ship.
Halfway out she met the business end of the shotgun coming in.
The situation was too far gone for panic. Even so, the steadiness of her voice amazed her. “Saul, you have no idea how bad things are going to get for you if you pull that trigger.”
Seconds, sliced into tenths and then into hundredths, crawled past. She knew her heart was racing, but the individual beats pounded a slow march in her ear like a funeral drum. And every beat was precious because any one of them could be her last.
And the gun didn’t fire. And the gun didn’t fire. And then the gap between the muzzle and the end of her nose began to widen as Saul Sperrin backed cautiously up the muddy bank. And still the gun didn’t fire.
And then it did.
* * *
At first Hazel couldn’t work out if she’d somehow escaped injury or been so devastatingly blasted that her ability to process pain had shut down. She opened her eyes again, but the muzzle flare had been so close and the surrounding night so dark that all she could see was the afterglow impressed on her retina.
Then she thought that in adjusting the angle of his shot to include Ash, who was still half buried beneath her, he’d contrived to miss her altogether. Or nearly—she was beginning to feel the sting of individual pellets in outlying areas. Ash was lying fearfully still beneath her. If that was what had happened, any moment now Sperrin would reload and rectify his error. He was probably doing it already. If you know how, it’s a matter of seconds to reload a shotgun. There wasn’t a chance in the world she could finish scrambling out of this car and make a run for it before he could shoot again.
But you don’t just wait. Even when living is no longer an option, there may be some choice about how you die. Hazel didn’t want to die stuck in this window like a rat up a drainpipe, like an unfortunate lover surprised by the untimely return of the husband. She kicked and wriggled hard and—like a baby struggling to be born—got first her shoulders and then her hips through the narrow gap, and then there was nothing to stop her. She rolled across the verge, kept rolling across the gritty road, and flung herself into the deep shadow of the opposite hedge. The tangled overgrowth wouldn’t stop a blast from a shotgun, but it might prevent the gunman from seeing her clearly enough to shoot.
She got her knees underneath her—everything seemed to be in working order—and turned back toward the car to meet the next assault. But there was no more gunfire, and after a moment she realized why. The footsteps were retreating. Silhouetted by the headlights of his own car, the man was dad-dancing and swinging his weapon like a club. Hazel heard him yelping.
A shotgun is useful for many things. Defending yourself against a close-quarters attack isn’t one of them. The lurcher was too close and too fast; the best he could do was swing the stock at her, and she had no difficulty diving under the blows, fangs-first. Another moment and the car door slammed shut; then the engine roared and Saul Sperrin was fleeing the scene, unsure how much he’d achieved but unwilling to hang around any longer to find out.
Hazel staggered to her feet and just stood in the road, panting, for a moment. But he wasn’t coming back—she heard the car accelerate until the distance swallowed its voice. She’d survived—not quite unhurt but substantially uninjured. The dog, too, up on her back legs against Hazel’s car, seemed to have given better than she got.
Which left Ash. Hazel hurried to the car, already groping in her pocket for her phone. People do survive shotgun wounds. If she could get an ambulance here quickly enough …
He was sitting sideways, with his feet in the water, by the time she got there. “Are you all right?” he asked anxiously.
“Yes,” she said. “You?”
“I think so.”
Hazel reached for the interior light, but it seemed to be true. Like her, he’d collected a few stray pellets but nothing that couldn’t be dealt with by means of tweezers and a bit of local anesthetic.
“Patience?”
“She’s fine, Gabriel. I don’t think he touched her. She drove him off.” She barked a sudden laugh that was more than half hysteria. “We owe our lives to a dog!”
Ash smiled and reached through the open window to fondle Patience’s ears. Happy now, the dog responded with a wave of her long white tail. “Why do you think I brought her?”