Chapter 7 - The Hunt Shifts
The Escalade hit the first of Cruz’s parked SUVs at fifty miles an hour.
The sound was like an artillery shell detonating in the quiet cove. Metal screamed, glass showered the wet gravel like diamonds, and the parked vehicle was hurled twenty feet into the scrub pine, its horn blaring a single, continuous, dying wail into the fog.
Beckett was out of the door before the vehicle had stopped rolling.
He was carrying an automatic shotgun—a Benelli M4 with an extended magazine—his black coat flared behind him like the wings of a scavenger bird.
Cruz’s men, caught completely off-guard between the cabin they were trying to breach and the sudden arrival of an armored battering ram, turned with their weapons raised.
Beckett fired three times in three seconds.
The heavy buckshot tore through the pine branches, through the car doors, through flesh and bone. One man went down clutching his leg; another fell backward into the ditch, his rifle spinning out of his hands.
“Beckett Shaw!” a voice screamed from behind the woodshed.
Declan Cruz stepped out into the glare of the high beams, holding a heavy submachine gun, his face white with the shock of a man who had calculated every variable except the speed of an enraged husband.
“You’re too late, Beckett!” Cruz shouted, though his voice cracked with panic. “She’s inside! My boys are already through the back!”
A shot—sharp, distinctive, high-powered—cracked from the roof of Bunkhouse 4.
A bullet struck the dirt six inches from Declan Cruz’s right boot, throwing up a shower of black mud.
Cruz leaped back behind the woodshed, cursing violently.
Beckett didn't look at Cruz. He looked up.
Perched on the cedar-shake roof of the bunkhouse, silhouetted against the gray Atlantic fog, Laurel Shaw stood with the Winchester lever-action pressed against her shoulder. Her hair was whipping wildly in the sea wind, her face was pale and hard as marble, and her rifle was aimed directly down at the clearing.
Beckett dropped the barrel of his shotgun.
For a heartbeat that stretched into eternity, through the rain, through the smoke of spent gunpowder, through the shattered glass and the screams of dying men, their eyes met.
She didn't lower the rifle.
Beckett’s chest heaved. The breath tore in and out of his lungs. He felt no triumph, no relief—only an overwhelming, crushing humility that brought him to his knees in the wet gravel, right there in the open, in the direct line of fire.
“Beckett, get down!” Pierce shouted from behind the cover of the Escalade’s door, returning fire toward the woodshed.
Beckett didn't move. He stayed on one knee, his head bare to the sleet, his hands open at his sides, his shotgun lying in the mud beside him. He looked up at his wife on the roof.
“Laurel!” he screamed. His voice wasn't the command of a mafia boss; it was the raw, broken plea of a man drowning fifty feet from the shore. “I know!”
A bullet from Cruz’s submachine gun sparked off the gravel three feet from Beckett’s hip. He didn't even turn his head.
“I know what she was!” Beckett yelled, his voice tearing at his vocal cords. “I know what you did! I know I’m a fool! If you’re going to shoot me, Laurel, do it yourself! Don't let these dogs do it! You built me—you take me down!”
On the roof, Laurel’s eyes narrowed.
Around them, the gunfire reached a frantic crescendo. Pierce Rowan and four Shaw soldiers moved through the mist with military precision, flanking the woodshed, their weapons chattering in short, disciplined bursts. Cruz’s men, demoralized and outmatched, began breaking toward the cliffs, scrambling down the rocks toward their skiffs.
Declan Cruz broke from the woodshed, lunging toward Beckett with his pistol raised, his face twisted in desperation.
“If I’m going down, you bastard—”
*Crack.*
The Winchester spoke again from the roof.
May you like
The bullet caught Declan Cruz through the right shoulder, spinning him around, his gun flying from his hand and splashing into a puddle of salt water. He crashed onto his back, gasping, staring up into the gray sky.
Silence fell over Seal Cove, broken only by the steady hiss of the rain, the rumble of the idling Escalade, and the rhythmic, mournful smash of the Atlantic surf against the rocks below.
