Page 180 of Slack Tide Kill

"It's a police car," Glory said. "Stop, Jack. We have to see what they want."

"Your father was just like them," he said, pushing the gas down harder. He was so close now.

"My father?"

He turned and looked into her eyes. "He kept on pushing. Always asking questions. It made him a brilliant detective. And an easy target."

He watched the shift as her eyes went round and big. 30 years, this moment had been coming.

"What are you saying?"

It was time.

"I watched over you, that night. Afterward. Asleep in your bed. I thought even then, some part of you knew I was there. Some part of you understood."

The silence carried, then she spoke again, her voice quavering like a child on the verge of tears. "What are you saying, Uncle Jack?"

Mercer savored it. Family broke everybody in the end. The belief. The failure.

"I think you know, Glory. I think you've always known."

She leaned forward. The lights grew brighter behind them, the siren louder.

"You can't," she muttered. Her arms came up slowly, reaching toward the wheel as if through mud. "Jack, you can't mean–"

"Your father was like a father to me, too," Mercer said, then looked at her one last time. "But he wasn't my father, was he?"

She lurched into motion, grabbing for the wheel.

He lashed out harder. The point of his elbow hammered little Glory Hallelujah in the cheek and smashed her back into her seat.

The shock reverberated up his elbow. It felt so good. 30 years in the making, since he'd stood over DCI Stewart on the floor of his own garage, the noose around his neck, gazing mutely as Mercer started hoisting him up.

People would do anything for family.

The siren screamed. The lights flared. Then the impact came.

74 CHAOS

Liam pulled level with the van's rear and dragged the squad car sideways. The front smashed into the van's side panel, buckling metal and kicking it sideways. Its rear end swung out across the waterlogged road, and for one hanging second Sally saw Mercer through the side window. Then they were spinning too.

The van struck the shingle bank and slewed up over the peak. The squad car went the other way, dropping off the road nose-first into black water. The airbag burst in her face, she saw black and red, Liam's shoulder, a spray of glass turning slowly in the blue light, then dark.

There was no storm anymore. No rain, no wind, no pain, no loss. Only a ticking sound.

Then a creak.

Then the fast, greedy rushing of water coming in.

Sally opened her eyes to darkness and blue flashes. The car was tilted sharply, nose-down, half in a drainage ditch or flooded field, she couldn't tell. Rain hammered through the broken window. The air smelled of cordite from the airbags, spilled gas and saltwater. A horn was howling somewhere, not theirs, a long animal scream bleeding into the gale.

She was hanging against the cradle of her seatbelt, chest slashed by the cold floodwater. Everything hurt. She tried to move and a hot bar of pain ran from her shoulder into her teeth, forcing out a cry.

"Liam?" she croaked.

Nothing.

She freed an arm from the belt and wiped her stinging eyes. Liam was slumped over the wheel, airbag deflating against his chest, head tipped sideways. There was blood on his mouth, one arm hanging strangely. The light bar above kept turning, painting him blue, red, blue, red.