over her back, slamming him hard against the concrete.
Of the remaining four lads, only two were on her tail and both were losing ground. As Gabrielle neared the gates, she noticed the Runts’ bikes resting against the wall between the men’s and women’s changing rooms. The guys would catch her easily on bikes, giving her no choice but to grab one herself.
Gabrielle pulled up and grabbed a Muddy Fox mountain bike leaning against the wall. As she swung her leg over the saddle, one of the guys chasing kicked the back wheel. It almost knocked her off balance, but she just about kept in the saddle and started powering away.
The two boys were mounting their own bikes as she shot through the gates and out into the side street. There were now more than a dozen people standing in the road, surrounding the bloody knife and the spotty lad she’d knocked out beside the Fiat.
If she’d had time to think, Gabrielle would have turned the other way, but she couldn’t do a one-eighty with two boys on her tail, so she had to cut between two parked cars and mount the pavement to get through the crowd. As she did this her back wheel slipped, knocking her into a line of wooden fruit trays on the pavement outside a greengrocer’s shop.
Oranges and limes bobbling across the pavement caused an angry shout from the shopkeeper, who dashed out to gather the fruit and blocked the path of the two Runts. They slowed right down to avoid the woman and the lead rider kicked her out of the way as Gabrielle reached the junction with the main road.
As she slowed down, she could see more bikes on both sides of the road heading towards the Green Pepper. Then, as she noticed Aaron Reid lying with a serious head injury just a few metres away, she heard the unmistakable sound of a shotgun blast.
Gabrielle was worried about Michael, but with Runts coming from every direction, Major Dee’s henchmen on the scene and the police sure to be arriving any second, she reckoned it best to head away and made the best of a small break in the traffic.
A car braked to let her in, but the time she’d taken to make her decision had allowed the two pursuing Runts to catch up. Gabrielle worked through the gears on the mountain bike until the parked cars were going by in a blur. But the two bikes following her were keeping up and she’d noticed two more – the bikes that had been behind Michael before the first shotgun blast – heading along the pavement.
Four against one wasn’t ideal, but Gabrielle hoped her high level of fitness would soon start to count. The lights at the top of the road were red and a queue of vehicles was building up. With a narrow pavement and cement mixer blocking the channel between the parked cars, she had to cut dangerously through the oncoming traffic and mount the wider pavement on the opposite side of the road.
As she got nearer to the traffic lights, she glanced back over her shoulder and was delighted to see that one of the riders had made a mess of mounting the pavement, forcing his mate to dismount and lift his bike over him.
Two police cars with sirens blaring turned into the top of the road as Gabrielle took a right on to the bottom of a steep hill. The cops either didn’t realise the significance of the chase, or didn’t see it and they sped on towards the Green Pepper.
Gabrielle was getting short of breath as she stood up in her seat and powered her bike up the steep hill. Another rider had given up the chase after a couple of hundred metres and when she looked back there was only one rider after her: a stocky Asian teenager, his fingers blinged up with gold rings and a hoodie shielding his face.
One on one didn’t seem too bad, but as she continued to pedal Gabrielle’s mobile phone started doing the Macarena. She took one hand off the handlebars and squeezed down her jeans to retrieve her phone. But concentrating on the phone caused her to miss a car rolling out of a narrow driveway between two houses.
She pulled the brakes and turned to swerve around the bonnet, but she overdid it and found herself going head first over the handlebars. Her skull thumped against the front wing of the car and