Foreign and Domestic: A Get Reacher Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

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    Chapter 7
    NICOLE THOUGHT SHARK! And she accepted her fate.
    After a minute and seventeen seconds of the shark thrashing and pulling her under, it bit off her hand and a significant portion of her wrist and swam away.
    The first lifeguard to reach her leaped into the water without thinking of himself and grabbed her by the leg. He cut the rope to her surfboard and let it go.
    She reached out to feel the remains of her hand. Nothing was left but bone and skin.
    She clenched onto her exposed appendage and felt the lifeguard drag her through the surf back to the wave runner. She sucked up saltwater through her nose. He pushed her body over the hump in the back, and then he climbed up onto the machine and sat in the front.
    She huffed and spit out the salt water. He turned to face her and examined her wound—quickly. He turned back to the front and started to search through a saddlebag for emergency bandages. He found the necessary equipment and wrapped her arm up as tightly as possible so that she wouldn’t lose any more blood, and then he cranked the throttle and took off back to shore.
    Nicole’s eyes were open. She felt as though she were on the back of a horse as the wave runner galloped through the waves. She gazed back to the sea and watched her surfboard as it drifted away, and she saw the dorsal fin of the shark one last time as it swam off and was lost to sight.
    Later, the doctors patched her back together—without her arm. Her friends visited her and brought her gifts and Get Well cards. She drifted in and out of sleep and awakened each time to a room filled with flowers and different family members. Sometimes she saw her mom and sometimes her dad. Sometimes they were together. Other times, it was just her uncle.
    After she had recovered, her mother insisted that she never surf again, which wasn’t a possibility because the call of the ocean was a far stronger attachment than the attachment she’d had to her one arm. She fought her mother’s decision by attending surfing competitions as a spectator, but this was only so she could be closer to the sport.
    Her friends who witnessed the whole thing told her that she was most likely attacked by a shark breed known as the Ragged Tooth Shark, which was the ugliest thing in the ocean and generally nocturnal, but still known to attack in all hours of the day. They were big sharks with a mouth full of so many crooked and ragged teeth that there was far more bone visible in their mouth than gums. This breed was common in the waters surrounding Durban’s beaches.
    After a long time, the horror of the incident started to wear off, and Nicole started to recover. She began by leaving her room and venturing slowly into the rest of their rented house. She spent only a couple more weeks indoors with her mother, and that was enough to push her back out into public. She called her friends and met them out. Slowly, she started to stay out longer and longer, and before too long, she was involved again in their social gatherings.
    Her friends renamed her Raggie, slang for the type of shark that attacked her.
    Her father relocated and went back to the US the following year, taking on a more high-profile role in the Secret Service, and he brought with him some agents that were also his personal friends. Therefore, she had to relocate as well.
    Raggie had to leave surfing and her friends in South Africa behind, but she took with her a love of the sport as well as her new name.
    Chapter 8
    A YEAR HAD PASSED, AND RAGGIE STILL kept in touch with her friends in South Africa. Her dad was busier than ever protecting the president, which she never really thought too much about—to her, it was everyday life. It was his job. No big deal.
    Raggie sat in a café on the east side of DC. She wore stonewashed blue jeans with large slits cut into the knees. A gray skull cap was pulled down over her head, making her look slightly like a cancer patient, and her hair was stuffed underneath it.