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If you’re a fan of Ellie Foreman and PI Georgia Davis, don’t miss Zoë Sharp’s highly acclaimed crime thriller series featuring Charlotte ‘Charlie’ Fox. HARD KNOCKS is out in e-format for the first time.
HARD KNOCKS: Charlie Fox book three
by Zoë Sharp
‘Perhaps if the army had known what was inside me, what I would eventually turn into, they might not have been so keen to let me go.’
Charlie really didn’t care who shot dead her traitorous ex-army comrade Kirk Salter during a bodyguard training course in Germany. But when old flame Sean Meyer asks her to go undercover at Major Gilby’s elite school and find out what happened to Kirk she just can’t bring herself to refuse.
Keeping her nerve isn’t easy when events bring back fears and memories she’s worked so hard to forget. It’s clear there are secrets at Einsbaden Manor that people are willing to kill to conceal. Some of the students on this particular course seem to have more on their minds than simply learning about close protection. Subjects like revenge, and murder. And what’s the connection between the school and the recent spate of vicious kidnappings that have left a trail of bodies halfway across Europe?
To find out what’s going on, Charlie must face up to her past and move quickly before she becomes the next casualty. She expected training to be tough, but can she graduate from this school of hard knocks alive?
‘If you only know Charlie Fox from First Drop, Second Shot, and Third Strike, you don’t know Charlie. What you’ve got in your hands is a rare and special treat. It’s like finding some lost Jack Reacher novel or a couple of non-alphabet Kinsey Millhones that nobody knew existed. Don’t let anyone tear it from your hands without drawing their blood.
‘These early Zoë Sharp books haven’t been a secret, but they’ve been harder-to-get than Charlie Fox in your bed. Think of these as the early years of Charlie Fox − she’s lethal and relentless, but still raw from the military experience that made her the kick-ass, take-no-prisoners bodyguard that she’s become.
‘But there’s more going on in these books than breakneck action and adventure. Charlie has heart, maybe too much for a woman in her profession … and it’s that caring, that humanity, that makes her much more than a killer babe on a motorbike. These books are your chance to discover Charlie Fox as she discovers herself, her strengths and her weaknesses, and sustains the scars to her body and soul that make her such a unique and compelling character’ US crime author and TV producer, Lee Goldberg
‘Ill-tempered, aggressive and borderline psychotic, Fox is also compassionate, introspective and highly principled: arguably one of the most enigmatic − and coolest − heroines in contemporary genre fiction.’ Paul Goat Allen, Chicago Tribune
http://www.ZoeSharp.com
HARD KNOCKS: Charlie Fox book three
excerpt
Part of Chapter Eight
…They started in on us after breakfast the next morning. We were being shown how to check over the cars for booby traps when Major Gilby appeared with a clipboard and took Hofmann away.
Ten minutes later he was back for McKenna, then Craddock, and Declan, all at ten-minute intervals. None of them returned to the group. My nerves screeched under the tension. By the time my name was called, I was so nervous that I had no brain capacity spare to concentrate on warnings of foreign objects shoved up exhaust pipes, or trip wires in the engine bay.
The Major led me into the hallway and motioned me to remain by the foot of the stairs. He disappeared through a side door and for a few moments all I could do was wait apprehensively for something to happen. I had the underlying fear that I was being manipulated, that events were moving beyond my control.
Still, at least I didn’t have to wait long.
A door burst open and one of the instructors, Rebanks, came charging out, shouting like someone possessed. He practically scooped me up as he ran past and hustled me down a corridor so fast that he pushed me out of my stride.
We rounded a corner at the far end, with Rebanks still bellowing in my ear. Another instructor, Blakemore, was standing by a doorway a few metres away, beckoning frantically. He was yelling, too. I skidded to a stop alongside him and looked in, heart thudding from adrenaline as much as exertion.
The clock stopped. I tuned out the shouting around me, had time to take in the whole scene. The room was a study, darkly decorated and dimly lit. The heavily curtained window was opposite the doorway, fronted by a sombre desk. The usual desk furniture was arranged across its surface – in and out trays, an old-fashioned black telephone, a leather-cornered blotter, and a hooded lamp. The lamp was the only thing that offered illumination, casting eerie shadows into the recesses of the room.
In the gloom I could make out the body of a man lying on his back in the middle of the carpet. He was wearing half a dinner suit, dark trousers with a satin inset along the seam, a bow tie and a formal white shirt. He would have looked smart if it hadn’t been for the twisted mass of intestine spilled across his stomach. The front of the shirt was stained a livid scarlet. My heart kicked up another gear.
“Go on! Go on, that’s your principal in there!” Blakemore’s voice was almost a howl. I took a step forwards, innately following his command, then froze. Something was way wrong here, I could feel it.
He urged me on, his hysteria rippling the hairs on the back of my neck. I glanced sideways at him and found eyes wild with blood lust. I stepped back again, and thought he was going to burst a vein.
“It’s not safe,” I said, shaking my head.
“You coward, you fucking coward!” he screamed. “This isn’t about your own safety. That’s your principal in there. He’s down and he’s injured. You get in there and do your fucking job, you bitch!”
I staked him with a short, vicious glare, but stepped across the threshold, staying close to the wall. Everything smelt of a trap, I just knew it. I waited half a beat, straining to hear anything over the breathing of the men behind me. Oh shit …
I moved towards the man on the floor, squatted beside him. Through all the gore I recognised Ronnie, one of the cooks, and hoped that it wasn’t part of our lunch he was wearing. I’d got as far as pulling back his shirt cuff to check for a pulse when I sensed movement in the shadows, closing fast.
I barely had time to glance up, to take in a big man dressed in black, saw him moving out from behind the open door. There was a balaclava concealing his face, leaving only his eyes exposed, but the jolt it sent through me was like an electric shock.
His hands were clasped together, stretched out in front of him. The silenced automatic let out a sharp, distinctive flup of sound that sent my reactions screaming.
The fear came down like a falling blade, slashing into me. My choices came down to fight or flight. I went for the latter.
By the time the second round was fired I’d hurled myself sideways. I rolled over the top of the desk, scattering half the contents, and dived under the lee of the big mahogany structure.
My breath was coming in gasps, horribly loud to my own ears. In the light from the doorway I could see his shadow moving silently round towards the side of the desk. He knew he had me pinned down, knew I didn’t have a weapon. He knew he could take his time to finish me off.
I had nowhere to run and my hiding place was about to become useless. My options were running down like a tape machine with dying batteries.
They like to play mind games with you, Sean had told me. Like to see how you react …
I shut my eyes for a moment, forced my breathing back into a regular rhythm.
This isn’t real.
I almost had to whisper t
he words out loud in order to believe them. Whatever test of our reactions Gilby and his men hoped to achieve from this exercise, it would not involve any real danger. I had to cling to that thought.
The barrel of the gun, extended by its silencer, edged into view at eye level round the corner of the desk, followed by the man who was holding it. Without speaking, he flicked his head to indicate that I should rise, and he stepped back while I did so.
But as I moved to pass him heading back for the doorway, he came in close, jamming the gun into my back to shove me down onto the surface of the desk. I landed face down, hard enough to bruise, hard enough to frighten, rammed into the smooth wooden surface.
Afterwards, I told myself I could have coped with that, with the rough pat-down search they decided to subject me to. I didn’t like it, didn’t see the need for it, but I could have stood for it, even so.
And then the man grabbed me at the back of my neck, and held me down.
I panicked totally. I couldn’t help it.
Terror exploded into rage, expanding instantaneously out of nothing like a chemical chain reaction. Unstoppable and toxic. My emotions were banded by colours. White heat. Red mist. Black.
The heavy old-fashioned telephone was close to my right hand on the desktop. I closed my fingers around it, feeling the coldness and the weight. I heaved and bucked at the man pinning me, twisting under him as I brought my arm round at full stretch, like a pro golfer unwinding his best drive.
I’d selected target by instinct. At the last moment, the last fraction before I hit, I managed to connect with sanity long enough to shift my aim by a few millimetres. It was enough.
The phone smacked up under the side of the man’s masked jawbone, snapping his head back with a nauseating crunch. The phone’s internal bell reverberated as it hit and seemed to carry on vibrating for a long time afterwards.
The man shot backwards and sprawled across the leather Chesterfield sofa on the far side of the room, limbs flopping. I jacked my body upright away from the desk and went forwards automatically, ready to go again. He didn’t move.
My ‘principal’, Ronnie, had scuttled himself into a corner at the first sign of violence. He was now cursing with great fluidity and vigour for a man who only moments earlier had been pretending to be at death’s door.
Rebanks and Blakemore had come charging through the doorway in sync by this time, flicking on the overhead lights. Blakemore went and pulled the balaclava off the inert figure on the sofa, bending over him to take the pulse at his throat. I recognised one of the other instructors, Todd. Strangely detached, I registered the blood around his nose and mouth.
“Get a medic in here,” Blakemore told Ronnie. The cook clambered to his feet, dropping the offal that had been standing in for his guts into the waste bin as he went out.
Blakemore stared at me and his eyes were still very bright. I saw a feral excitement in them, and it sickened me. I looked away, ashamed. The smell of violence hung in the air dull and bitter, like burnt plastic.
Rebanks put his hand on my shoulder. “Are you OK?”
I swallowed, nodded, not trusting myself to speech. He carefully prised the telephone out of my clenched fingers and inspected it. Blood was smeared up one side.
He murmured, “Now what was that all about, hmm?”
I let out a shaky breath, shrugged his hand away. I was beginning to come round, to snap out of it. “Well,” I said, aiming for a relaxed tone, almost bringing it off, “you know what they say – it’s good to talk.”
He nearly made it to a smile, twisted into mocking. “In that case,” he said, “remind me not to have a conversation with you …”
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Table of Contents
Title page
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-three
Chapter Forty-four
Chapter Forty-five
Chapter Forty-six
Chapter Forty-seven
Chapter Forty-eight
Chapter Forty-nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-one
Chapter Fifty-two
Chapter Fifty-three
Chapter Fifty-four
Chapter Fifty-five
Chapter Fifty-six
MORE ABOUT LIBBY
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