Revenge (David Shelley #1) - James Patterson Page 0,15

cradled. Shelley saw red-tipped bone poking through torn flesh. She dragged open the rear door of the Peugeot and threw herself inside.

The men in the Peugeot were half in, half out of the car. Shelley saw a sawn-off shotgun, but so did pedestrians. Someone screamed. With that the guys in the Peugeot knew the game was up, the element of surprise lost. They decided to cut their losses, clambered back into the car and sped off.

Susie didn’t make it to Waitrose that day.

CHAPTER 13

A FEW DAYS after the attempted kidnapping Shelley was in his room at the top of the house, stooping in the eaves as he packed his few belongings into an open suitcase on the bed, when there came a small knock at the door.

He stopped, a white T-shirt in his hand, held as though he were about to serve it for dinner, and squeezed his eyes shut. Thinking, Oh no, not this.

“Come in, Emma,” he said, and cleared his throat of a crack that had appeared in his voice.

She entered, owning the room. Its tiny dimensions seemed to suit her. She was so small, but so resilient. While Susie had yet to recover from the attack and had taken to her bed as though physically ill—not that you could blame her, mind you—Emma had relished the extra attention. She’d told her story to anyone who’d listen, even given painfully accurate demonstrations of her great and fearsome biting technique, basking in the adults’ proclamations that she was “so brave, such a little warrior.” Maybe that was all kids. More likely it was Emma being Emma.

She cast her eyes over his folded clothes. “You’re very neat,” she said brightly as she perched on the edge of Shelley’s bed and let her sneakers swing. “Don’t tell me, ‘old habits die hard’?”

It was one of his catchphrases. Apparently.

“Exactly right, sweetheart,” he said, placing the folded T-shirt into the case. “And from what I’ve seen of your playroom it looks like you could do with a spell in the forces yourself.”

She sniffed as though to say Not likely, and then seemed to take stock, leaving a suitably significant pause and watching him expertly fold and pack a shirt before she next spoke. “Daddy says you’re leaving.”

“That’s right,” he said without looking up from the suitcase.

“Were you going to say goodbye?”

“I wouldn’t have left without saying goodbye,” he told her, which wasn’t strictly true, but wasn’t exactly a lie either. The truth was that he hadn’t decided. Neither option appealed.

“Why?” she said.

“What do you mean?” he replied, knowing exactly what she meant, of course. Just wanting to delay talking about it.

“Why are you going?”

“I made a mistake. The kidnappers had been scoping us out for days—they must have been. They got the better of me, Emma, and if they did it once, they can do it again. I got complacent.” That, and the other thing I can’t tell you about.

Funny thing with Emma, he was never sure if she was being a genuinely curious kid, or was in fact a super-intelligent puppetmaster, using advanced psychological techniques to get her way. Whatever the truth—probably somewhere between the two—she was shameless when it came to being cute. She was doing it now.

“But they didn’t get the better of you, Shelley,” she said. “You won. The bad guys went away and Mommy and me are still here. I came home to my own house with you and Mommy and Daddy and my ponies and all my teddies and my messy playroom. And all of that happened because of you, because of what you taught me and what you did. Your job was to be a bodyguard, Shelley, and you did that job.”

He’d been down, no doubt about it. He’d been way harder on himself than he needed to be. But now, even though Emma’s words came from a place of not knowing the whole truth, he felt a kind of relief, a knowledge that although he had not done his job to the best of his ability, he had not failed. And that, at the end of the day, was the most important thing.

“That’s good of you to say, sweetheart,” he said. “It means a lot to me, it really does.”

“Good,” she said with finality. “Then you’ll stay?”

“No.”

“But . . .”

“I’m afraid it doesn’t change anything,” he told her. “I still have to go. I’m going to talk to my contact, Gerald, ask him to employ someone else. That’s what the post needs. A fresh pair of eyes on