Pot Luck
Page 26
To be fair, even if the pill is well past its expiration date and so is fuck-all use as an automatic trigger system, it’s really no big deal. So long as the wearer is still conscious when he goes over the side into the freezing, throat-rasping salty sea. It doesn’t matter.
So long as they’re conscious, all they got to do is pull down hard on the red nylon plastic toggle that hangs beneath the trigger mechanism to activate the manual override.
Yank the toggle hard and the pill becomes irrelevant, the cord attached to the toggle trips the firing mechanism and the sharpened steel spike gets shot by the tightly coiled spring, piercing it deep into the CO2 canister.
Just as long as there’s gas in the canister, everything else is peachy keen. Pull toggle. Trigger firing pin. Pierce canister. And the gas inflates the jacket’s flotation bladder. Doesn’t fucking matter if the pill is as old as Joanna Lumley, gas’ll still flow where it’s meant to go.
So when Adrian hit the sea, a mile-and-a-half south by south-west of The Bill, leaping off the gunwale into five knots of ebb tide, roaring towards Devon, he was not in the least surprised as his testicles shrivelled with the cold. Not surprised at all that the automatic mechanism on the life jacket hidden under his thick jumper didn’t immediately explode into buoyant life-saving life.
The pill would be fucked. Of that he had no doubt.
As the roar of the propane explosion savaged his ears, making the frozen top of his sea-soaked head feel suddenly hot with its fiery blast, Adrian twisted his body, thrust his hand up under the jumper, and grabbed the red toggle.
As his steel-toed boots and sodden bait-stained Dickie jeans sucked him downwards, above him the roof of Kitty K’s wheelhouse cartwheeled across the sky, trailing a streak of smoke and flame and fragments of Matty.
Adrian tugged down hard on the toggle.
As he closed his mouth to preserve his air and keep from guzzling a lungful of saltwater, Adrian’s eyes stared up at the disappearing sky.
He yanked on the toggle. Which yanked the cord. Which pulled down the lever on the trigger mechanism. Which shot the steel firing pin, upwards in a perfect clean trajectory…
…into nothing.
The canister of CO2 having long before been unscrewed from the self-inflating life jacket mechanism, to be screwed into the butt of Tim’s Heckler and Koch P30.
The one with the anodized aluminium finish and the Ambrose Dexter grip.
Table of Contents
About the author
Copyright page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96