Ava McCarthy - Hide Me

Ava McCarthy

Hide Me

Dedication

To my children, Mark and Megan, who are the reason for everything

Contents

Cover

Title Page Ava McCarthy Hide Me

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By the Same Author

Copyright

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Prologue

Harry pitched head-first over the cliff.

For an instant, she floated. Gunfire ripped the air behind her. Below her, hulking waves exploded, hungry, ready to swallow. Then the cliff rushed skywards and the ocean slammed into her face.

Don’t scream, don’t scream!

Water plunged into her sinuses, packed into her ears. She clamped her mouth shut, choking back the scrap of air she had left in her lungs. Then the current sucked her down into a deep, black tornado.

Her brain clamoured. Growling water thrummed in her ears, funnelling her down.

Don’t breathe, don’t breathe!

The rip tide snatched her. Hurled her in circles. It pitched her upside down and tore at her limbs till her lungs felt ready to burst.

She forced her eyes open. Saw an arrow of white tunnelling past her face. A silent jet-trail.

A bullet?

Jesus! He was going to kill her.

Harry’s diaphragm heaved, fighting for the chance to breathe. Panic screeched through her, and she thrashed her legs, bucked her body. Then the ocean whirled her into another violent twister.

Suffocation crushed her chest. She had to open her mouth, had to inhale!

Don’t breathe!

Her brain lurched, and she felt her eyes roll. Hunter’s face floated before her. Maybe she’d see his body. Was he down here with her somewhere? Had Franco had him killed too?

No more oxygen. Just vapours to fuel her brain.

The undertow grabbed her and whiplashed her into a spiral. She tumbled. Drifted.

Her mother’s face. Always so relieved by Harry’s absences. What would she think when Harry was dead?

Now you don’t have to talk to me, Mom.

Harry glided. Floated in freefall. She felt light. Euphoric, almost. And the reflex to breathe became slowly irresistible.

She couldn’t help it. She opened her mouth. Inhaled.

Cold seawater sluiced down deep into her lungs.

Chapter 1

Twelve days earlier

Cheating the casinos was a dangerous game. A game that could get you killed, if the stakes were high enough.

Harry eyed the roulette wheel, and edged alongside the other punters. Spying on the cheaters out in the open was risky, but she had to get close. She had to know how Franco Chavez was doing it.

‘Coloque sus apuestas.’ Place your bets.

The ivory ball swirled. The fat guy in front of Harry clacked his chips, like a set of castanets, and she stepped around his bulk to get a better view. A tangle of arms reached across the table, and she scanned the faces, wishing she knew what to look for.

She flexed her shoulders and felt them crunch. She’d been in the Gran Casino de San Sebastián for hours, patrolling the high-limit rooms till her feet ached. At this point, she wasn’t sure which bothered her more: the nagging sense that she was wasting her client’s money, or her growing unease that Chavez knew she was watching.

Harry frowned, and drifted away from the table. It didn’t help that no one knew what bloody Chavez looked like.

She slipped into the poker parlour. Roped off from the main floor, it was quieter here. No roulette-rattles, no social chit-chat. Just the tense snick-snick of cards against the baize. She wandered between the tables.

‘Watch their hands,’ her father had said. ‘That’s where the cheating begins.’

Harry started with the dealers. Given enough practice, a crooked dealer could stack the deck, cull cards, fake a riffle, deal seconds, peek at the top, and all with a deftness that was near-impossible to spot. Harry knew because she could do it herself.

‘A good false shuffle is like a monkey tapping away at a typewriter,’ her father used to say. ‘There’s a whole lot of activity, but no end result.’

Harry scoured the dealers’ hands for telltale signs, but saw nothing out of place.

She paused to watch the players at one of the busier tables. Four men and a blonde, none of them speaking. The only sound was the chinkle and clatter of chips. Harry sifted through the players’ moves, filtering their gestures, looking for patterns, the way her father had taught her. It didn’t take long. Her eyes came to rest on the single chip that was placed a shade too carefully on one of the players’ cards.

Harry shot him a look. Mid-sixties, thin and morose-looking. She glanced at his hole cards, lying face down on the table, one on top of the other. And at the single red chip that tagged their bottom corner.

The back of Harry’s neck tingled. A lot of players protected their hole cards with chips, but to a cheater the exact placement was key. It signalled the value of his hand to an accomplice at the table.

Collusion-cheating. Effective, and tough to prove.

Harry guessed the guy was using the simplest set of signals: top-left corner for a pair of aces; top-middle for kings; top-right corner for queens, and so on. His cohort was probably the blonde seated two places to his left. Between them, they could raise and re-raise the stakes if one of them had a good hand, forcing bigger bets out of the other players.

Harry stared at the man with the gloomy mortician’s face and felt her insides droop. Force-out teams could bleed you dry, but this guy wasn’t Chavez.

She wheeled away. What the hell was she thinking? Casinos didn’t care about poker cheats. Why should they? The money they hustled belonged to the other players, not the casino. This wasn’t the scale of cheating her client had in mind, and she knew it.

Harry headed back out towards the main floor, not caring to admit that the poker room had been some kind of refuge. She reminded herself that Chavez couldn’t know she was watching, then strode back to the roulette table she’d left a few minutes before. The fat guy was still there, clacking his chips.