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“Fuck,” he hisses.
I’m suddenly not in his hold anymore, struggling to stand on my own two feet.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck.” He stalks away, and I stagger a pace or two, catching myself, as I watch him throw down his cigarette and yell his frustration.
Regret.
There it is.
11
DANNY
* * *
I gaze around the racking system in the bunker. Guns, grenades, harpoons, every weapon known to man, is stored, stacked high to the ceiling, on the table in the middle of the room, and in crates on the floor. “What the fuck are we going to do with them all?” I ask as I lift an AK47 and blow across the top of the hand guard. They are literally collecting dust.
“Use them.” James tidies a box of bullets on the back shelf, gazing along the line of handguns next to it. “It sounds like that peace you begged for isn’t going to be around for much longer.”
“You wanted it too,” I remind him. “Ready to hit the water?”
“Yeah,” he says slowly, looking toward the stairs that lead up to the container. “You heard from Brad?”
“No, why?”
“Beau said he had a guest in his room this morning.”
He’s taken my advice? “Good.” Hopefully whoever it was rode his bad mood away. And the temptation. Wandering towards the stairs, I pull my wetsuit up my chest, tripping up a box as I go. “Fuck it.”
James laughs—the wanker—pulling out his phone when it chimes. “Otto’s calling us up to the café.”
I pause with one arm in a sleeve. “Did he say what for?”
“That cop you asked him to look into.” James passes me, taking the stairs out of the bunker, his bare, scarred back pulsing. “He’s talking about things he shouldn’t be talking about.” He disappears, leaving me behind with a frown.
“Like what?” I ask, pulling my arm back out of the sleeve and going after him.
“You.”
I make it into the container that hides the entrance into the bunker and dip to help James lift the iron hatch into place. “I already know he’s talking about me. That’s why Daniel’s now excluded from school.” And also why this Bean cop’s going to lose the use of his legs very soon.
We push the table into place. “It’s who he’s talking to.” James opens the door of the container and light streams in, blinding me.
I step outside to the roar of jet skis flying across the water. Our jet skis are on the shore, waiting for us to give them a run. I’ve been on the water more in the past six months than in the past six years. Something tells me that’s going to change. I nod to Leon and collect my Marlboros off a nearby wall, lighting up as James heads toward the café. “Who’s he talking to?”
“Nolan.”
“The fuck?” I blurt, going after him. He has a bad habit of doing that. Dropping bombs and fucking off to avoid the flying shrapnel. “Nolan?” Fuck, this isn’t good.
James looks over his shoulder, eyebrows high. “Yeah, Nolan.”
I feel what I see on James. Dread. We’ve all grown fond of the dipshit, Brad more than most of us. I pick up my feet and get my arse up the steps to the café, spotting Otto on the decked veranda nearest the water, his face in his laptop, his fingers twisting a tuft of his beard as he concentrates. What the fuck does my mother see in him? If I didn’t appreciate him, and—for my sins—actually like the hairy brute, I might kill him. He’s clever. Loyal. That’s been proven beyond doubt in the light of the connection with Bernard King.
I narrow my eyes as I collect a bottle of water, holding it up to the server as I pass. “I’ll put it on your tab,” she says, tapping at the cash register.
“Thanks.”
I make it to the table and drop to a chair opposite Otto, James next to him. Otto looks up and turns his screen toward me. “I’m not going to see any lovey-dovey messages pop up from my mum, am I?” I ask before I look at the screen. It wouldn’t be the first time.
