Dead Men's s Boots

There were no other cars in sight, but I took a broad bend way too fast and skidded to a halt in the middle of the road with a handbrake turn that would have been elegant and accomp«ganin lished if I hadn’t blown out both of the driver-side tyres in the process.

It had all happened so fast that the echoes of the van’s crashing fall were still dying away as I leaped out of the car. The trees hid it from my sight for a couple of seconds, though, and by the time I rounded the bend the action had moved on a little.

Juliet was down in the road, and the surviving occupants of the van were crawling out as best they could through doors and windows. One of them – judging by the gun in his hand, he must have been the guy who’d been blazing away at Juliet from inside the van – raised his arm to shoot her at point-blank range. She ducked under the bullet and pirouetted so fast she was a blur: the roundhouse kick that caught him high up in the chest must have staved in half his ribs.

That left three: two men and a woman, who I saw now for the first time. She was a petite, washed-out little thing dressed in shades of beige, streaked with vivid red here and there because she’d just struggled through a shattered window and hauled herself to her feet in time to watch Juliet dispatching her colleague only a few feet away. Incongruously, she was barefoot: maybe that should have tipped me off, but it didn’t.

The two guys were dressed in finest mafioso chic, but the black suits and wraparound shades looked less menacing given how the situation had spun out of their control. One of them was down on hands and knees, crawling away from the van towards the undergrowth in desperate, indefatigable slo-mo. The other stood facing Juliet irresolutely, fists clenched but not knowing what to do. She took a step towards him, opening her arms as if to embrace him. He staggered back, groping belatedly at his waist for some weapon he carried there.

That was when the woman struck. She was only waiting for Juliet to be broadside on to her: now she moved in a staccato blur, slamming the heel of one hand into Juliet’s left temple and then, as Juliet turned to acknowledge her, following up with a raking slash from the other hand. Juliet’s head snapped to the side, and blood sprayed up into the still, sun-speckled air.