Free Hit List by Jack Heath Page B

an old friend, and squeezed as
tight as she could, momentarily trapping his gun arm against his side as she reached for the radio on his hip.
    Wright snarled, grabbed her hair with his free hand, and pulled. Ash squealed as her scalp burned and her neck twisted backwards. Her grip weakened, and she heard a snap as the stud keeping
Wright’s revolver in the holster came loose.
    No, she thought. No!
    He probably wouldn’t shoot at her. But he wouldn’t have to – at gunpoint, she would be forced to surrender.
    She grabbed the revolver from underneath with one hand, forcing it up towards the ceiling. Then, even as he fought to bring it back down, she squeezed, pushing the cylinder out of alignment with
the barrel.
    Bullets jingled to the ground beneath her feet. Wright cursed, put his palm on her face, and shoved her backwards.
    She stumbled but didn’t fall. Bad move, detective, she thought. Now I’m out of reach – and you’re unarmed.
    She turned and sprinted for the double doors leading to the ramp. She could hear him giving chase, but he wasn’t going to catch her. She was too fast.
    When she got to the doors, she gave a nearby shelf a mighty tug before running through and pulling them shut. She heard books thudding to the floor and a deafening WHAM as the bookshelf
fell in front of the doors, sealing them.
    Ash didn’t have time to rest. She had to get out of the library before Wright used his radio to warn the other cops about her.
    She dashed up the ramp, slowing to a brisk walk when she got to the top. There was a uniformed cop near the information kiosk by the front entrance. He would see Ash any second now. Nothing she
could do but bluff.
    “Hey, Dad,” Ash called. “Can we go home yet?”
    The policeman turned to face her, a puzzled expression on his face.
    “Oh, sorry,” Ash said. “Thought you were my dad.”
    The cop said, “Who’s your—”
    “Wait, there he is,” Ash said, looking through the glass door. And then she ran out, not giving the cop time to decide whether to stop her or not. She walked down the steps, crossed
the yellow tape.
    A radio exploded into life somewhere behind her. “All units be advised,” Wright’s voice said. “Homicide suspect in the area. Female, hair brown, height one-sixty, age
approximately sixteen. Suspect is unarmed but dangerous.”
    But Ash had already disappeared into the crowd.
    They barely made it back to school in time. As Benjamin squeezed the brakes and Ash let go of his shoulders – she’d been riding behind him, standing on the
footrests they’d installed on either side of the rear wheel – she saw that the social was over and the other students were just starting to wander out into the car park. Some were
laughing, a few were crying, and others were simply dazed by the abruptly halted music and raised lights which had suddenly turned the dance floor back into a school gymnasium.
    She’d told Benjamin everything – the hard drive hidden inside the reference computer, the distress call in the fax machine, and her narrow escape from Detective Wright. Benjamin had
filled her in on the detective’s interrogation of him, and his subsequent escape from the van after Wright left him alone.
    “He knows what we both look like, now,” Ash said. “That’s not good.”
    Benjamin shrugged. “I needed a haircut anyway,” he said. “And besides, we both have alibis – people saw you here at the social, and as far as Mum knows, I’m still
playing computer games in my room.”
    Ash saw her father’s car pull in. “Got to go,” she said.
    “Wait – what are we going to do about the SOS?”
    “Not sure,” Ash said. “We should find out where the coordinates lead before we consider doing anything.”
    “They didn’t look local. So wherever it is, we’d probably need Buckland’s help to get there.”
    “Get there? Hang on – we’re thieves, not a search and rescue team.”
    Benjamin frowned. “So what? We can’t just do