The Wreckage: A Thriller Read Online Free PDF

one just after; a thousand pounds in total. There were two other online purchases. She won’t give him the details.
    “Someone from our fraud department wil cal you, sir.”
    Sunlight makes his head throb. He considers his options. How can he find the girl? The actress. The boyfriend either fol owed them home or Hol y must have cal ed him. Maybe both.
    Ruiz picks up his phone and hits redial. The last number she dialed was a mobile—the boyfriend perhaps.
    A man answers with a grunt.
    “Listen, I don’t know who you are. I don’t care. But you took something of mine last night, something of great sentimental value. You can have the rest of my stuff. I don’t care about that. But I need the jewelry—the rings and the hair-comb—they belonged to my wife. Give them back to me and I won’t come looking for you. You have my word on that. If you don’t give them back, I wil find you and I wil punish you. You have my word on that too.”
    He pauses. Listens to the breathing. The boyfriend clears his throat.
    “Fuck off!”
    Ruiz listens to the dead air.

    “Who was that, babe?”
    “Nobody.”
    Hol y Knight is awake now. She won’t go back to sleep.
    “He sounded angry.”
    “Don’t worry about it.”
    Zac rol s over and squashes a pil ow beneath his head. Within half a minute he’s asleep again, his nostrils barely moving as he breathes.
    Hol y examines his sleeping face, the angular jaw line, darkened with growth, his heavy lids hiding blue-green eyes. There were no nightmares last night. No silent screams or sobs.
    Running her fingers across his exposed back, the scars look like ripples on a dried-up lake bed, pink and grey and dead looking. When she touches them in the dark it feels as though his skin has been eaten away by acid or dissolved by some sort of flesh-eating bug.
    Slipping out of bed, she goes to the bathroom and sits on the toilet, staring at the discolored tiles and the rust stains in the bath. Finishing, she pul s her jeans over her panties, buttoning them on the flatness of her stomach.
    Looking in the mirror, she touches the bruise on her face. Zac hit her too hard last night. Sometimes he forgets his own strength. She wil say something to him when he wakes and is in a good mood.
    The flat has peeling wal s, mismatched furniture and different floor coverings in every room. Poverty in progress. An old armchair sits in the middle of the kitchen floor, because Zac likes to watch Hol y cooking and doesn’t like to be alone.
    Smearing butter on the inside of a frying pan, she cracks two eggs. The smel of breakfast wakes Zac, who comes out of the bedroom in his boxers, scratching the line of dark hair below his navel.
    Self-conscious about his scars, he pul s on a T-shirt, and brushes a finger across Hol y’s cheek.
    “You hit me too hard last night.”
    “Didn’t mean to.”
    “You might break me if you’re not careful.”
    “I’m sorry, babe.”
    Hol y sets his plate on the table.
    “Do we have any… any… you know?”
    “We didn’t have any bacon.”
    “No, do we have any, ah, any…?” He begins shaking his hand up and down. “Brown stuff.”
    “Sauce?”
    “Yeah.”
    Hol y finds the bottle in the fridge. Zac eats with his head low and one arm curled around his plate. Yesterday he forgot the word for petrol. He kept saying he needed to get “stuff” for the bike, “to make it go.” And before that he drove himself into a rage because he couldn’t remember who played left back for Spurs in the League Cup final in 2008. That’s one of the reasons he gets so angry—he can’t remember things.
    According to the doctors there was no sign of brain damage, but something got rewired in Zac’s head when he was in Afghanistan. Now he forgets things. Not the big stuff, but smal details—names and words.
    There was a fire. Seven men were trapped inside a troop carrier, according to the commendation they gave Zac with his gal antry medal. He pul ed three men from inside the carrier