Free Fourth Day by Zoe Sharp Page A

difference would it have made?’
    I thought about my glib reassurances to Witney that very morning. Not a prisoner, exactly …I’d told him. Not in your best interests to leave us just yet …. Would I have used those words if I’d known what was coming?
    ‘What do you think is going to happen to him, Parker?’ I asked. ‘Do you honestly believe Epps is going to turn him loose when he’s sucked him dry?’
    Parker’s face twitched, and there was just a tinge of the same sadness that had passed through Witney. ‘No,’ he said at last. ‘I don’t.’
    Sean was still glowering. Parker let out a slow breath, looked about to say more, when there was a sudden flurry amid Epps’s people.
    His team were too proud to run, but one approached him at a swift jog, finger jammed against his earpiece. ‘Sir! We have a situation.’
    I saw Epps’s purposeful stride hitch. ‘What kind of a situation?’ he demanded. ‘They can have scarcely cleared the perimeter.’
    ‘Er, that’s just it, sir,’ the man said, paling under that stony gaze. ‘They haven’t reached the perimeter. We can’t raise them.’
    And then everyone was running, and all those guns I’d sensed earlier were out and cocked and ready.
    Two of the Suburbans belonging to Epps’s team set off with a yelp of tyres, jolting down the ramp. I leapt for the driver’s seat of our own vehicle, threw the HK53 to Parker and twisted the key in the ignition.
    We followed Epps’s men downwards with caution, not wanting to get mixed up in a friendly fire scenario. I kept the big Suburban to a walking pace, giving cover. Parker was to my left, the compact assault rifle pulled hard up into his shoulder, forefinger outside the trigger guard. In the driver’s door mirror, I could see Sean with a similar weapon. Both men put their feet down carefully, softly, and their eyes were everywhere.
    We found the Econoline on the ground floor with its nose hard up against the mesh security fencing near the entrance, surrounded by Epps’s people. The engine was still running and the doors were open. The guy who’d been driving was slumped half out of his seat onto the concrete, feet tangled up with the pedals. In that position, the gaping wound to his throat had caused him to bleed out rapidly into the dusty concrete, like a sacrificial goat.
    The other man had managed to get a couple of strides from the passenger door before going down. Epps was bending over him. As we reached the scene, he rose without expression, dusting his hands.
    ‘Neck,’ he said briefly. There was nothing in his voice and even less in his eyes.
    I climbed down from the driver’s seat, walked over and glanced into the rear of the Econoline. The only thing inside the van was a single pair of discarded PlastiCuffs on the scarred metal floor.
    But Thomas Witney had vanished like he’d never existed.

CHAPTER NINE
    At 6:45 that evening we stood by the door of a hangar at Van Nuys Airport, while the sun dropped fast behind the smoky hills towards the Pacific. I watched it bleed a trail of the palest blues and pinks, the colours absorbed by the stumpy control tower. Air traffic in and out of the airport seemed tireless and unending. In the rapid onset of dusk, the lights of the planes showed as fierce bright pinpricks against the darkening sky.
    We’d stayed in Santa Clarita only long enough to carry out a fast but thorough search of the area surrounding the abandoned development. Plenty of time to realise that, if Witney was escaping on foot, he would have qualified as an Olympic-standard sprinter.
    He’d also somehow managed to extricate himself from a set of PlastiCuffs, which had been applied by experts, and had concealed in his simple clothing a blade sharp enough to slash a man’s throat, despite being thoroughly searched before we’d taken him out of the house in Calabasas.
    Either we were all getting very sloppy, or he’d had help.A shiver ran across my back, despite the day’s residual