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Kendra closed her eyes and remembered.
...She was meeting his parents for the first time, and she saw the coldness in their eyes, felt the weight of their judgement, and she realised right there and then that she was an outsider – the wrong skin colour, the wrong social status – and her knees went weak, and her heart pounded, but he was brave, so brave, clutching her hand tight, standing tall, telling them that she was his girlfriend...
Kendra opened her eyes. She blinked hard and sagged against the steering wheel. She felt as if a fat cat was sitting on her, overpowering her ability to think, to rationalise.
Shaking her head, she straightened. It would have been all too easy to key the ignition and get going, but she decided not to.
Sure, the Holden didn’t appear to be booby-trapped. But that didn’t mean that a tracker hadn’t been hardwired into the car’s electronics. And even if there was no tracker, stealing the car was still a bad idea. Traffic in the immediate area was bogged down. She wouldn’t be going anywhere in a hurry.
So Kendra placed the GPS unit back into the glove compartment and stepped out of the Holden and locked it with a chup-chup.
She didn’t have to worry about leaving any prints behind. The pads of her fingers had been chemically scrubbed years ago. One of the many procedures done to turn her into a ghost while operating in foreign countries.
Irony of ironies. What works abroad works just as well on home soil. Who would have thought?
Kendra felt a stab of bitterness for what she had become; for how much things had changed.
She turned and started to walk away from the Holden, making for the stairs. And that’s when she heard the telltale clap of a suppressed pistol, and she felt a sharp hiss just above her right shoulder, like a bumblebee had just zapped past, parting her hair.
Kendra flinched, and her heart seized up.
Fucking hell...
Someone had just taken a shot at her.