Savage Bay Read Online Free PDF

deck. The Alamiranta’s deckhands rushed over and cinched a safety belt around her waist. It was attached to a safety cable that ran along the edge of the helipad.
    Hawkeye signaled to the pilot, giving him a thumbs-up.
    Cruz gave him the finger.
    The pilot returned the gesture and the stealth helicopter lifted away from the deck, rising up into the sky.
    Cruz raised a hand to Hawkeye, gesturing for his assistance to help her rise to her feet. Hawkeye sighed, reached down, gripped Cruz’s left hand, and pulled her up.
    When Cruz had regained her footing, she squinted at Hawkeye. She balled up her right fist. Then she punched him square in the jaw as hard as she could.
    Hawkeye’s head snapped back as the haymaker connected with the side of his face. It was like a frame-by-frame replay of the Zapruder film capturing the shot that killed JFK.
    Back and to the right.
    Back and to the right.
    Hawkeye shuffle-stepped backward, but didn’t lose his footing. He glared at Cruz. Anger boiled in his eyes.
    He took a deep breath.
    “I’m going to give you that one,” he said, holding up a finger. “One.”
    Hawkeye rubbed his jaw.
    “But you do that again, I’ll lay you out. Understand?”
    Cruz grinned at him. She just couldn’t help it.
    “You should have seen the look on your face,” she said.
    Hawkeye tried to maintain a hold on his angry expression, but it quickly crumbled. He smiled in spite of himself. He worked his jaw from side to side.
    “Not a bad shot, actually.” 
    Cruz’s right hand was on fire. She hoped to God she hadn’t broken any bones.
    “How’s the hand?” asked Hawkeye, as if sensing her thoughts.
    “It hurts,” she said. “A lot.”
    Cruz flexed her fingers and grimaced at the resulting pain.
      “Come on, Rocky,” Hawkeye said. “The clock’s ticking. Let’s move.”
    .  .  .
     
    David Denton, known to most everyone by his nickname, Quiz, was fourteen years old when he first realized that his best friend was a dead man. In fact, Quiz’s closest friend had slumbered in a cold grave, six feet beneath the ground, for over six hundred years before Quiz first made his acquaintance.
    As a child, Quiz was often left unattended within the sprawling family estate known as Whittington Manor. His grandmother, Mary Whittington, was the matriarch of the family, and she held firmly with the Victorian view that children should be seen and not heard. And to Grandmother Whittington, even being seen was not a particularly endearing trait for a child.
    Ignored most of the time by the senior members of the Whittington clan and the cadre of servants who attended the family, Quiz was often left alone to derive his own entertainments. His first attempts at self-amusement were spectacularly unsuccessful. Following a series of pranks on the upstairs maid and an unfortunate incident with the family cat, Quiz’s grandmother presented him with a row of angry, reddish-purple welts on his backside courtesy of a thick leather belt. This punishment rendered the act of sitting most unpleasant for the better part of a week.
    Quiz then wisely turned his attention to more solitary pursuits. By the time he was ten, Quiz was well on his way to reading every book on the north wall of his grandfather’s expansive library. It was a dusty, seldom-used study, and Quiz had free reign to enjoy its hidden treasures. From the few intelligible bits of speech Quiz was able pluck from the muffled adult conversations that leaked through his bedroom walls after dark, Quiz discerned that his grandfather apparently suffered from a malady of the mind. Grandmother Whittington kept her husband confined most of the time to a suite of rooms in the east wing of the manor.
    For his own benefit, of course.
    With Quiz’s grandfather absent, Quiz assumed ownership of his library by adverse possession. Having read more works of literature by age ten than most adults read in a lifetime, he had unwittingly given himself a first-rate classical