by Jake Cross
He felt a heavy weight brush past, and heard the thud of body hitting body. He turned in time to see the newcomer and Mick hit the ground, roll, and vanish into the grave.
And that was when his brain, delayed and confused, made the connection between the face he had seen and a man in his memory banks. A man he’d hoped never to see again.
Brad.
Two men were in the grave with her, but their focus on each other allowed her to scramble to her feet.
‘You gotta help me,’ she screamed: the first thing she’d ever said to him. As before, he reached, and grabbed, and pulled. He slid her torso free and she kicked like a drowning woman to get her legs clear, and then she rolled across the grass, crying.
Their chance to flee. But Karl stood tall and stared down, now no longer terrified into inaction. Mick had dropped the spade as Brad thundered into him. There it lay beside the grave. He picked it up and felt a tide turning.
In the grave, Mick was atop Brad, dropping blows hard. Mick rose to his feet and raised a leg to stomp on Brad, and finish this business.
Karl felt the spade suddenly snatched from his hand.
‘Has your son returned?’
The question was spoken without anger, as if Liz genuinely wondered. And Karl saw it slashing through Mick’s world of rage and cruelty like a rainbow in Hades. He turned, unable not to, his killing blow upon Brad forgotten. Liz’s question, the mention of his beloved son, had caused a blip in his bloodlust. He looked up at her. And Karl got the feeling it was exactly what she’d wanted.
In days to come Karl would agree that, after all Mick had done to her, it was perhaps the only way she could find absolute peace.
Her strike landed hard on Mick’s shoulder, instantly dislocating it. Mick screamed in pain. And shock.
‘Has my Ron returned?’ she said, louder, through gritted teeth.
Mick scrambled for the edge of the grave, but the spade fell again and smashed his hand into the dirt. He staggered back with a scream, stumbling over Brad’s body. Clutching his shoulder, he stared up.
‘Not in front of Tim, you fucking bitch,’ he spat.
But even as he was speaking, she prepared to strike again.
‘Have you changed a thing with all this blood?’ she shouted as she lifted the weapon high in the air and Mick put up his bad arm to block the attack. ‘Did Ron’s blood bring your son back? Will your blood bring my Ron back?’
She dragged the spade downwards, slicing through the air. The blade landed flat and hard on his bald head with a heavy crack. He staggered, but his momentous willpower, or his unstoppable bloodlust, kept him standing. Blood was pouring down his face. He wiped it away, and stared at it on his hands.
‘None of this is changing anything, is it?’ she screamed. ‘All the spilled blood, it’s not enough, is it? It’ll never be enough, will it?’
‘You’d do this to my son?’ he moaned, staring up again, his voice groggy, and loaded with genuine surprise. And fear, Karl understood. Not fear of pain, or even death, but of a son watching a father suffer.
But there was rage, too. It seemed to overcome him in an instant. With an animalistic sneer, Mick scrambled for the grave edge, trying to claw his way out.
She lifted the spade.
‘Liz, stop!’ Karl shouted. He tried to grab the spade, but too late.
‘No matter how much blood we drown our pain in, they won’t come back, will they?’
The impact was mammoth, and this time Mick dropped. Liz collapsed to her knees. Karl was kneeling behind her. Brad hauled himself out of the grave and lay panting on the grass. The moment was frozen for a second.
Then Liz uttered a cry and burst into movement. Cursing, crying, she started to sweep soil into the grave. The earth splattered across Mick, but he didn’t move.
Karl lunged forward, grabbing her arms. ‘Liz, stop.’
She dropped the spade and dropped to her knees. Karl knelt and held her. There was a commotion now: people appearing at the top of the hill, drawn, finally, by the noise. Some started to rush over.
Brad rose to his feet, grabbed the spade from her hands and held it tightly.
Then he turned to face the oncoming people running their way, and stood before them with the spade held like a baseball bat. The crowd quickly stopped advancing. Some backed away, even ran. But some of the bigger men pressed on. Brad stood there in a pose of defiance, ready to fight. But that was not his intention, Karl knew. He was giving the crowd a sight to behold, a lasting image. A tale to tell. Nobody had seen Liz with the spade. The police would find a dead man in the grave and learn of a lunatic who brandished a spade like a weapon, and they would have their story.
Brad let them get close enough to make damned sure nobody got the wrong idea. To make sure they saw his face. Then he dropped the spade, turned, and ran.
His departing shout back, for all to hear, was: ‘I’m sorry.’
They would report that, too. A dozen witnesses would claim that the killer had shouted his regret at what he’d done. It would be considered further proof that Brad Smithfield had murdered Mick McDevitt, former cop, former friend, fellow death-dealer.
Karl’s statement would say the very same thing. But it would be a lie.
Brad’s words, he knew, had been for Liz.
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A Letter from Jake
Dear Reader,
I want to say a huge thank you for choosing to read The Choice. If you did enjoy it, and want to keep up-to-date with all my latest releases, just sign up here. Your email address will never be shared, and you can unsubscribe at any time.
Would you stop on a dark road to help someone in trouble?
With The Choice, I wanted to create a high-concept thriller that had a simple but compelling premise. Thrillers work most powerfully when the reader can imagine the same thing happening to them, especially if it’s because of one, spur-of-the-moment choice. A choice you know you’d make the same way if you were in Karl’s position.
I wanted to create tension from simple scenes, without the need for fireworks, and I hope I achieved this. I hope you read this with a shaking hand, laughed at all the right times, and felt for Karl throughout. I hope you wondered if Liz was hiding something but always sided with her. I even hope that you felt a measure of sympathy for Mick McDevitt, enough so that you became eager for his next scene. Maybe some of you even hoped he’d win in the end.
Mostly, though, I hope you have asked yourself the question at the centre of this novel: would you stop on a dark road to help someone in distress?
If in doubt, just remember that, thankfully, creatures like Mick McDevitt are rare.
I hope you loved The Choice and if you did I would be very grateful if you could write a review. I’d love to hear what you think, and it makes such a difference helping new readers to discover one of my books for the first time.
I love hearing from my readers – you can get in touch on my Facebook page, through Twitter, Goodreads or my website.
Thanks,
Jake
Acknowledgements
Thanks go to the entire Bookouture team for basically being fab. Kim, for good advice. Abi, for some choices made and good counsel. Christina, for taking a couch potato of a novel into surgery and delivering the Five-and-a-half Million Dollar Man (bit too arrogant of me to call it the full ‘six’). I’m sure none of the above will mind if I give a special shout out to Natalie who remembered some guy’s novel she read two years before, took a chance, and made all this possible.
My partner, Jennifer, and the three little ones, who had to put up with a guy sometimes giving more attention to gangsters and crooked cops who didn’t exist.
Published by Bookouture
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An imprint of StoryFire Ltd.
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London
EC4Y 0DZ
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www.bookouture.com
Copyright © Jake Cross 2018
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Jake Cross has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work.
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers.
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events other than those clearly in the public domain, are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-1-78681-415-9
